Windows Weekly 945: Vermont? Seriously?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Windows Weekly 945: Vermont? Seriously?

Release Date: August 13, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurot, Richard Campbell
Duration: Approximately 3 hours and 45 minutes

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1. Introduction and Patch Tuesday Overview

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte welcoming listeners to "Windows Weekly," joined by Paul Thurot and Richard Campbell. They immediately delve into the recent Patch Tuesday updates, highlighting enhancements for Windows 10, the integration of AI features, and the resurgence of classic games.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte [00:00]: "It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is here. Richard Campbell, of course. We're going to talk about Patch Tuesday."

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2. Patch Tuesday and Microsoft's Update Strategy

Paul Thurot discusses the frequent updates from Microsoft, emphasizing the division between online and on-premises products. He humorously categorizes users into "haves" with Copilot PCs enjoying advanced features, and "have-nots" with standard Windows 11 setups.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [04:28]: "It seems like there's a world of haves and have nots now. And the haves are the people with Copilot PCs who get all these additional features."
• Richard Campbell [03:13]: "There's a schism between the folks that are working on the online product... and the on-prem product is a different group of people."

The trio also touches on Microsoft's extended support for Windows 10, now available to consumers for an additional year at a cost of $30, addressing concerns from a potential class-action lawsuit.

Notable Quote:

• Paul Thurot [17:00]: "Technically it costs $30, but remember a month or two ago they were like, honestly, if you just back up..."

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3. AI Integration in Windows 11

A significant portion of the discussion centers around the burgeoning role of AI in Windows 11. Paul elaborates on programmable interfaces within apps, enabling AI agents to control various system settings through natural language commands.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [05:25]: "And this is like a one-button reset... All of your settings, all of your data is reset."
• Paul Thurot [06:00]: "They have an AI model that has been grounded in the data accessible inside of the Settings app..."

The conversation also highlights new features like Quick Machine Recovery and a redesigned black Screen of Death, noting their rollout to all Windows users over time.

Notable Quote:

• Paul Thurot [07:15]: "What we have here is a new Windows 11 style version of the blue screen of death, but in black."

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4. AI-Powered Browsers and Microsoft's Copilot

The hosts delve into the emergence of AI-powered browsers, discussing tools like Microsoft Edge's Copilot Mode and third-party browsers such as Comet and Dia. They explore how these browsers integrate AI to enhance user experience by managing tasks like setting price alerts and summarizing web pages.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [33:00]: "These browsers are the first step towards AI interacting with online services... AI can use those interfaces to control things."
• Leo Laporte [37:14]: "But the problem is you put a lot of trust, the computer says, and you just go, yeah, I'm not going to check that."

The discussion underscores the necessity for users to maintain critical thinking and vet AI-generated information, citing instances of inaccuracies and the importance of validating AI responses.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte [42:35]: "We all have to develop that muscle more because we're going to be in a world of AI slop right now."

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5. Gaming on Windows and ARM Architecture

Richard Campbell and Paul Thurot examine Microsoft's advancements in gaming on Windows 11 ARM devices. They highlight the successful integration of game downloads and compatibility improvements, particularly with titles like Heretic and Hexen. The conversation reflects on the challenges and progress in making ARM-based devices viable for gaming.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [75:26]: "They've added the ability to download games through the Xbox app on Windows on ARM... it's going to run great."
• Richard Campbell [77:14]: "You just got to figure out if you trust that answer. And how are you going to validate that answer?"

They also touch upon the ongoing struggles of the Xbox series in comparison to competitors like PlayStation and Nintendo, discussing sales figures and market reception.

Notable Quote:

• Paul Thurot [116:00]: "But these are big steps and they're really, really positive news. So that's good."

---

6. Industry News: GitHub and Microsoft's AI Strategy

The hosts analyze recent developments involving GitHub's management and Microsoft's overarching AI initiatives. They discuss internal dynamics, leadership changes, and Microsoft's attempts to consolidate its AI efforts within the company.

Notable Quotes:

• Richard Campbell [99:36]: "GitHub might be part of Microsoft's larger AI strategy, absorbing it into Core AI."
• Paul Thurot [105:03]: "Microsoft is a multi-headed hydra of... it's unbelievable."

The conversation reflects a critical view of Microsoft's organizational strategies, particularly regarding AI and open-source contributions.

Notable Quote:

• Paul Thurot [103:43]: "There's a whole dynamic around keeping the same culture in place... but now they're part of Core AI."

---

7. Personal Stories: The Value of Libraries

Shifting gears, the hosts share personal anecdotes about the enduring importance of libraries. They emphasize the diverse resources libraries offer today, from digital books to practical tools like borrowing appliances, highlighting their role in community support and education.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [138:09]: "Libraries are still there, they've had to change what they do... They were always awesome."
• Leo Laporte [142:05]: "When you have Librarie, you can get free audiobooks through your library."

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8. Whiskey Segment: Union Horse Distillery

In a lighter segment, Richard Campbell narrates his visit to the Union Horse Distillery in Kansas City. He details the distillery's production process, emphasizing their American single malt whiskey's unique qualities and compliance with new ATTB standards. The discussion covers the challenges of distilling rye and barley, the craftsmanship behind their products, and the distillery's family-oriented business model.

Notable Quotes:

• Richard Campbell [167:44]: "Union Horse was formed by four siblings... Damien made the point of, you've lived with your siblings but haven't worked with them."
• Paul Thurot [168:41]: "So I can't wait. And it's like a muscle memory thing..."

The segment concludes with praise for the distillery's products and the enriching experience of the tour.

Notable Quote:

• Richard Campbell [168:43]: "This is a really nice drink. And it is now an emerging style for America to make a good barley whiskey..."

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9. Conclusion and Call to Support

Leo Laporte wraps up the episode by encouraging listeners to support the show through memberships, highlighting the benefits of joining the "Twit TV Club." He reminisces about the show's long history and expresses gratitude towards the audience for their continued support.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte [171:17]: "We start around 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. ... Club members get behind the velvet rope."

The hosts also preview upcoming content, including interactive segments like Q&A sessions and future discussions on AI advancements.

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Final Thoughts

This episode of "Windows Weekly" offers a comprehensive look into Microsoft's latest updates, the integration of AI in their ecosystem, and the evolving landscape of technology and gaming on ARM devices. Through engaging discussions and personal stories, Leo, Paul, and Richard provide valuable insights while maintaining an entertaining and relatable dialogue.

Overall Notable Quote:

• Paul Thurot [86:57]: "Microsoft is a multi-headed hydra of... it's unbelievable."

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This summary encapsulates the key topics and discussions from "Windows Weekly" Episode 945, providing listeners with a clear and engaging overview of the episode's content.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is here. Richard Campbell, of course. We're going to talk about Patch Tuesday. It was yesterday. Windows 10 gets a little bit more life in it and a lot of AI, including a bunch of AI browsers. Microsoft will not be left behind on this one either. All of that and a return of two of the best games of all time. Coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurot]

This is tw.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 945 recorded Wednesday, August 13, 2025, Vermont. Seriously, it's time for Windows Weekly. Hello winners.

[Richard Campbell]

Hello dozers.

[Leo Laporte]

Wake up. Paul Therot and Richard Campbell are here to entertain you. Hello, Mr. Paul Thurat from therot.com and leanpub.com how the heck are you today?

[Paul Thurot]

Pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice to hear. And you, you, Mr. Richard Campbell. How are you today, sir?

[Richard Campbell]

I am doing very well. I am in Kansas City, kc.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you doing in kc?

[Richard Campbell]

The Kansas City Developers conference is the cc. It's a workshop day today. So I'm in my hotel room. Carefully positioned to not show you the bed, you know, as I do. But I was able to tour today's whiskey distillery this morning.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so, so fresh off the still.

[Richard Campbell]

Fish off the stills. Having great conversation with a couple of the folks there. We, we had a good time and I'll be, I'm excited to talk about. It's great. It's a great product. Nice group of people.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice to see you. Somebody was asking in the chat room if my kitty returned, of course, that later that day last week.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, good. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

The kitty comes and goes now as she pleases.

[Richard Campbell]

It doesn't matter how much you shake the treats.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. The shaking of the treats isn't really the most effective anymore. She's discovered another kitty out there, a male. And so she's, she's kind of anxious to get out there and have some fun.

[Richard Campbell]

She's got some new priorities.

[Leo Laporte]

New priorities in her life anyway, you know, so yes, she's fine. She's doing great. She's out there right now, as a matter of fact. All right, well, Patch Tuesday was yesterday just in the nick of time because apparently there was another zero day with exchange. So, you know, I don't know if they fixed it, but these things happen, you know. What's up?

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, if you're a conspiracy theorist fan, maybe this is happening on purpose because they want to get everyone into the cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because they're on prem problems. With SharePoint and exchange right there.

[Paul Thurot]

Are they. Yeah, I don't actually dare.

[Leo Laporte]

Run it yourself.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I don't think that's.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's a conspiracy theory. We know those are never true.

[Paul Thurot]

No, the more obvious theory is that Microsoft's inept and I think we all, you know, we're like, yeah, no, that actually makes tons of sense. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

There's also a schism between the folks that are working on the online product, which is the primary product. So the best of the best are there. That's probably true.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And the on prem product is a different group of people. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is a historic group problem in all tech companies. Google has this problem. Nobody good wants to work on maintenance. They want to work on the next big thing.

[Paul Thurot]

That's God's work though, guys. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's maybe the most important thing. So. Yeah, don't, you know, give us a, give us a break, man.

[Paul Thurot]

I know it's not in the spotlight. It's not interesting, not fun, not making stuff actually work.

[Richard Campbell]

And now you're talking crazy talk.

[Paul Thurot]

Honestly, it's not so bad.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, what happened? What's the summary?

[Paul Thurot]

I'll tell you what happens. Patch Tuesday happens. And every time it happens I'm like, wait, it's Patch Tuesday? How come I didn't remember this then? You have to kind of scramble a little bit to figure out what the heck's going on. And I kind of beat in this drum all year, but it's been a big year for updates. And I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but it seems like there's a world of haves and have nots now. And the haves are the people with copilot PCs who get all these additional features. And the have nots are you lowly peons that just have normal Windows 11 like losers. And you get a few things, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Get just the cast offs, the Leibaning.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. The stuff that kind of made it through the net. Although to be honest, some of the, some of the stuff that everyone's getting is some of that stuff is worthwhile for sure. Anyway, nothing major. Major or nothing new, I guess if you've been paying attention for the past few months or weeks or whatever. But if you do have a copilot plus PC and you live in the eu, you finally get to have recall. United States tech companies like to punish the EU for their draconian and totally logical rules. And that's, you know, you'll get it eventually. It's fine. There is a Recall feature for everybody that's new. It's just reset. And this is like a one button reset, Reset. All of your settings, all of your data is reset, et cetera.

[Richard Campbell]

So let's see. I'm afraid my wife is going to go through my recall, make this all go away right now button. Is that what that button is?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you actually hit it and it goes to Excel, you know, yeah, maybe. I don't know. There's some click to do functionality. I should have put this in the notes now that I'm thinking about it. But I'll remember this when we get to the AI stuff. We've talked about this stuff. So it's like the practice in Reading Coach, the Read with Immersive Reader draft with Copilot and Word, Send a team's message, schedule a teams meeting, like all the stuff we've talked about. And then the AI agent in Settings, which actually ties into that thing I was just not saying earlier, which is that one of the little themes this week and then for the rest of our lives is going to be how AI becomes kind of programmable, if that makes sense. Or there'll be programmable interfaces in apps, in websites, in online services, so that AI can control those things. This is one of the dumber, but maybe one of the simpler examples of that, where Microsoft has actually been doing this work behind the scenes in the Settings app for a long time. Each of the settings in the app is in fact accessible to a programmer through code and now accessible to AI as well. And so they have an AI model that has been grounded in the data that is accessible inside of the Settings app, which we can all agree is pretty limited. So now you can use natural language to talk to it and say, you know, I want to make the screen dark, I want to do whatever. And it will try to try to get that going for you. That particular feature is Snapdragon X only, and it's only in the English language for now, but that obviously looks.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow. So not even just copilot plus PCs, but just one particular flavor of copilot plus.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So next month you can assume it will come to ARM and Intel.

[Richard Campbell]

It may not just haven't finished testing it yet.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, they seem to do these in that kind of stutter step fashion. The best new feature for the rest of us. Well, there's two features really that are tied together is the Quick Machine Recovery feature. This is available in Windows. Well, it's in the Settings app, but if you go into the Windows Update or the restore area, you'll see it in there. And this is just a way to kind of do like an in place reinstall of Windows, if that makes sense. So we'll look at what version you have. It will put everything back the way it was. It won't touch your data, it won't touch anything that isn't part of the operating system and you reboot and come back and hopefully it fixes it. And by the way, for whatever it's worth, what PC was this? I just used this and it worked really well. Mm. And I can't remember what it was. But it will also automatically come on if you want it to. Right. So you reboot. Something's wrong. It will go into the Windows recovery environment and ask if you want to use it to fix the problem. This is when you're going to see the other new feature, which is the new black Screen of death, which we're not calling the Black Screen of Death, but it is a new Windows 11 style version of the blue screen of death, but in black because. Yeah, it's fine. It's okay. So that's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

But these are still in Insider builds, right? Or is this actually now deployed Patch?

[Paul Thurot]

It's deploying.

[Richard Campbell]

So if you have the current version of Windows, you have a black screen.

[Paul Thurot]

Of death now, potentially. You got to remember this is Windows, so nothing is definitive. You now have the possibility of getting.

[Richard Campbell]

The black screen without having to be an insider.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it will roll out over time to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Aren't we lucky?

[Paul Thurot]

Isn't. I love the way I have to talk now. Like I have now I just get to talk like an idiot all the time. It's like, can he answer a question? No, he covers Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be, maybe, I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

Possibly, I don't know. What do you see is. What do you see? What you see is fine. Whatever you see is exactly what's supposed to be there. I hate this so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, somebody just asked in the YouTube chat, is Paul giving up on Windows? No, this is just Paul.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I, I, I, I belong in a padded cell. This is fine.

[Richard Campbell]

It's your happy place. You're comfortable.

[Paul Thurot]

This is normal for me. It's getting to be normal. I don't know. They put all of the settings for search, which used to be split between privacy and just a search area in Settings, into the one place. So it's all under privacy security now. That's fine. There's this feature I cannot stand, but Snap layouts is useful. This is the thing where you mouse over the maximize button in A window. And it gives you some suggested layout. Excuse me, Layouts. Or you drag a window around and a little panel comes down at the top. And I guess this wasn't obvious for people or something. So now there's a little. I don't know, like a little text. Well, actually, maybe I can make it happen here. What am I doing here? I think I turn it off. Yeah, I always turn this thing off. I hate it so much. So this text that appears that explains you, this is what's happening. So you know that needed to be called out. And then if you use the Windows Touch keyboard for some reason, there is a new layout for gamepads. So this is almost certainly related to these handheld gaming machines that are coming, where you might actually just be holding the thing and want to be able to interact with the on screen controls. And so that's in there too.

[Richard Campbell]

Cool.

[Paul Thurot]

Fun. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurot]

Very nice. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Anything else you want to talk about or should we just go home?

[Paul Thurot]

You know what? Let me tell you. So there are stuff this week. Yes, there's a lot of Windows 11 on ARM news this week, which is amazing. It's all good.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exciting.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, there is a lot of kind of Xbox gaming news. And interestingly, these two things are related in many cases. So this is actually pretty good AI.

[Richard Campbell]

Story spicing up too.

[Leo Laporte]

It sure is.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Okay, so I'm saving the gaming stuff for the Xbox segment at the end, but for now I will just leave it at Blender, which is an open Source. It's a 3D app, isn't it? I don't use Blender.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, it's a 3D design app. It's so, you know, it's a common, commonly used in place of other commercial tools. A little harder to learn, but very powerful. It is appearing on the iPad at the same time, which I have a feeling is a related development.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

In other words, ARM is ARM.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So it's now native on Windows 11 on ARM, there's more work to be done. The folks that make this are talking about how. I don't know how this app works, but right now the graphics back end supports the Adreno GPU now in Snapdragon X. So dramatically improved performance, both playback and rendering. And like 4.5 to 6x, like really good. But there's going to be future optimizations occurring here. So sometime before the end of the year, you'll see hardware accelerated ray tracing for a feature called Cycles, which again, I'm not familiar with the app But. But this is moving full steam ahead, so that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's kind of amazing. Ray tracing was just a couple of years ago. Oh my God. Nvidia's doing ray tracing and now it's like integrated graphics. Yeah, we do that too.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep. Yeah, it's just out there, right? Yeah. Apple will probably use it for the next version of their operating system and Windows will copy it three years later and then we'll just give up on it to your.

[Leo Laporte]

I do not want a ray traced operating system. Thank you.

[Paul Thurot]

Nobody does. No. But then we had this rare instance, I think it was Friday or whenever it was, doesn't matter. But we had three new builds in the Insider program all in the same day. Dev and Beta were the same again. Although there is one dev feature that is unique to dev, which is interesting because that's 25H2. And then the only change they made to Canary was that search settings consolidation that I just mentioned, which is now shipping to the whole world. So that's where Canary's at, I guess. But the big deal here to me is just that no one seems to be able to give the official name for this. But when you bring up the Start menu, you get that panel by default. And aside for the phone link thing and they're changing the ui, I think it has something to do with the new version of the Link to Windows Mobile app that they're updating right now as well. And these things are going to line up the way they look and feel. And so it's probably just related to that. So they're just doing some UA tweaks there. You can toggle it off if you don't want it, you don't have to use it, but it is there if you do like it. And then I know this is going to be a huge deal for people. I don't know why everyone has such a bug up there. Whatever about this, but one of the big complaints or concerns in our little community is like, when are they going to get rid of Control Panel? There's always this stuff there that's still not in Settings and blah, blah, blah, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

There's still vendors who only put controls for their.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't think we ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Including Microsoft, I might add.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, there's reasons for that. But those reasons are probably that this modern UI WinUI 3/Windows app SDK thing is nonsense. But whatever. I guess in this beta, sorry, in this dev build, which is 25H2, they have moved more of the settings from the Control Panel into settings. So these are related to time Language Keyboard. Right. So now you can actually change the time server, which, by the way, used to require an admin approval. But you can do that from the Settings app now, which is a first. So if you go to settings, time and language, and then probably date and time, whatever additional setting, it won't take it to the control panel. It will just do it right there. So, yeah, that's the kind of consistency we look forward to. So kind of partial. Some settings are here, some are there. Welcome to Windows. What do you want me to say? So that's that.

[Richard Campbell]

It's been true for a long time, though.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. And it gives people like us a chance to show off by saying, well, you just open a command line and you type, slash, whatever the hell. I can't even.

[Paul Thurot]

Did you right click it? You should right click it. Does that solve. Doesn't. I can't. Then. I don't know. That's all I know.

[Richard Campbell]

Call tech support.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you feel about the command line? Is there any.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, how do you feel? Yeah, you got to get it exactly right. Because you don't want to screw up your computer. But. No, but if you don't, if you feel like you can type.

[Leo Laporte]

Yesterday, Steve was talking about malware that injected the command RM RF STAR into systems and they would just remove the whole. Everything. Delete everything.

[Paul Thurot]

Just like pave the partition.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, pave it.

[Paul Thurot]

That is amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's malware, man.

[Paul Thurot]

I was going to say that is the ultimate in malicious software when you think about it.

[Leo Laporte]

It used to be. That's kind of. It was more malware was more that. Like that. It was like more like vandalism.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Then extension.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly. Yep. Eventually, nation states were like, wait, can we use this?

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, this is pretty good.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, now you're moving along here. This is going to be. This is gonna be a short show.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not gonna be a short show. There's so much. So don't you worry. I'm just trying to figure out where.

[Leo Laporte]

To put the ads. Go.

[Paul Thurot]

Getting past the frosting here.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is the frosty layer.

[Paul Thurot]

We have a couple of. We don't usually get Windows 10 in the news, but there are two Windows 10 stories that are both very interesting. Well, I'm sorry, why would I say that? There are two Windows 10 stories. So one of them is actually. It's good news. Right. So both of these are good news, essentially. But, you know, Microsoft, we knew. We've known for a long time. So Windows 10 is hitting end of support in October. They are for the first time offering a extended support or extended security updates program for consumers. They've done this before for businesses with XP and with Windows 7. At least, I guess, probably other releases too, I have no idea. But this is the first time for consumers. And then the question was going to be, well, how much does it cost? What's going on? So technically it costs $30, but remember a month or two ago they were like, honestly, if you just back up and really sync your settings through the backup app that's now there in windows 10 and 11, we'll just give it to you for free. Like, all you got to do is just back up the computer, which is not backing up the whole computer. Right? It's just backing. It's a teeny thing. It's just a list of settings. So you're like, nice. I mean, so they made it better. And now they're saying, actually, if you do this, you will be able to get extended security Support on Windows 10 on up to 10 PCs.

[Leo Laporte]

What? Just back up one and you get 10?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, just back up one, you get 10.

[Leo Laporte]

Such a deal.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is clearly a legal maneuver.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, they have answering yes, which, you know, someone is trying to launch a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for ending the Support of Windows 10. And it's like, I'm sorry, other than the fact that what you're asking is ludicrous, this is the type of stuff where they're going to, it's going to be like, look, they've done everything they can to give this to you. It's fine. You know, so that's good. And then I guess this isn't really a surprise, but officially now they have said that they will support. Microsoft will support Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 through October 2028. So that's when the extended security updates program ends. Right. So 2025, end of support. But three years of extended support if businesses pay for it, one year for consumers. So 2028 would be that three year point. So as Edge is improved and updated over the next three years, presumably users on Windows 10 will still get all those features.

[Leo Laporte]

And actually, technically, my experience has been you don't have to really give up on our operating system until you can't get browsers for it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that seems to be right. So that's happened multiple times. Chrome, Firefox, both have said, you know, we're going to support whatever the version of Windows is for whatever amount of time, and they always support longer than Microsoft. So I don't know, 2028, you're still running Edge on Windows 10. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, you deserve what you get, buddy.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right, exactly. You're lucky you have a browse. So I suppose. Yeah. Maybe if Firefox is still around or Google still owns Chrome. It's a lot of stuff going on here.

[Leo Laporte]

But if man is still alive, if women can survive.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Fall in love.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

In the words of the great of the poet Zagar and Evans.

[Paul Thurot]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're going to. I think now that you have done so much wonderful things. So many wonderful things.

[Paul Thurot]

So many so quickly.

[Leo Laporte]

We're so deeply into the show now. I think I could probably do a commercial break if you don't mind. Richard, can we hear you? You disappeared momentarily.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it looked like a weird bonk. Might be hotel.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been there.

[Richard Campbell]

But you know, that's what she said. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, Paul, I shouldn't do that when you're drinking. No, it's just. That was just mean.

[Paul Thurot]

Come on.

[Richard Campbell]

I do appreciate it. A 25 minute window segment.

[Paul Thurot]

He's like, wait for it, wait for it.

[Leo Laporte]

He's gonna drink. Okay, now Launch, launch the 5 minute windows segment. It's a new feature of Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurot]

I drink it with my windpipe.

[Leo Laporte]

AI Xbox and an American whiskey. Not a bourbon.

[Richard Campbell]

Not a bourbon.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. Get you thinking. I'm sorry. Drinking caps on. We'll be doing that later in the show. But first. He's already been to the distillery, kids. It's been a productive day. But first a word from our sponsor. Sponsor. I'm always super happy to talk about the good folks at Bitwarden. Bitwarden is the password manager we use here at the beautiful Twit Addict Used to be Studios. Now that's an attic. Actually maybe more to the point, Steve Gibson, our security guru, switched to Bitwarden roughly when I did about three or four years ago. We're both very happy. Bitwarden is the trusted leader, in my opinion in passwords, pass keys and secrets management. Consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2 and software reviews. More than 10 million users now. It's, it's really, it's been growing. It's Great. Over 180 countries and you know, it's certainly a great choice for individuals because it's, it's free forever for individuals. Another well known password manager just the other day took back its free version. I asked I once when before Bitwarden started advertising years ago. I said now you're not going to like that other guy. Take away your free version, they said, we can't, we never will. And we, we promise. But we also, we couldn't because we're open source and if we took away the free version, they just fork it and we'd be done. So you, you've got a free version for individuals, but there's also a very strong enterprise offering. In fact, that's probably why 50,000 businesses now use Bitwarden. There's another reason why, maybe more to the point, 19 billion passwords, 19 billion passwords are now available on the dark web. And this is the really scary thing about it. 94% of those, almost all of them, have been reused in on multiple accounts. Now, we know this is from a security point of view, always a bad thing to do. But it's why InfoStealer malware threats surged 500% last year. See, smart hackers these days, they don't try to hack into an account like they used to do, you know, in war games. They simply get some of these breached passwords and the associated emails and then they just try them. It's called credential stuffing. Across a variety of sites, if you reuse passwords and one site that you used it on gets breached, which is almost an inevitability nowadays, you're now vulnerable on every other site you use that password with. That's something that's really kind of a key driver in using Bitwarden. Bitwarden has some new features for enterprise that you're going to like. Bitwarden's Access Intelligence. It enables enterprises to proactively defend against internal credential risks like reused passwords and external phishing threats. There are two core functionalities here. Risk Insights allows IT teams to identify, prioritize and remediate at risk credentials. Basically, it finds the breached passwords and gives your employees, your end users, a chance to fix it. Or it can fix it. There's also an advanced phishing blocker which alerts and redirects users away from known phishing sites in real time using a continuously updated open source block list of malicious domains. Actually, there's another thing Bitwarden does. We don't talk about it that much, but it's very important. It will not fill in a password or a passkey or any credential or any secret on a spoofed site. It knows better. Your users may not. They may say, tw w I T E R. That's gotta be Twitter, right? And try to fill. No, actually that's a pretty old example. I don't think there is a Twitter Anymore. I think one of the things you and enterprise might want to really take a look at is passwordless, right? This is the future. Passwordless authentication is transforming digital security better than passwords. As usual, Bitwarden's at the forefront. It offers support for passkeys, of course, unlimited passkeys, and it's better to use your bit warden for a passkey than your device because your bit warden is on every device. So your passkeys go with you everywhere. It's made me totally embrace passkeys. Bitwarden also of course supports Fido 2 standards to strengthen and simplify the login experience. Bitwarden's passkey support includes enhanced support across web, desktop and mobile platforms, as I said, enabling users to store and sync pass keys with end to end encryption and then have them available at any time. It also supports two step login with FIDO2 and WebAuthn, which allows hardware key authentication as a second factor. If you really need a hardened an authentication, that's the way to do it. I use my Yubikey on those critical places, right? In fact, I use it on Bitwarden. So Bitwarden allows you to use it either as a secondary factor or, and this is very convenient and just as secure, I think a primary method for supported logins, biometric unlock enhancements, you know, touch ID and face ID on mobile and desktop windows.

[Richard Campbell]

Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Really streamline access. Employees love it, but it doesn't compromise security. And if you're using Bitwarden, it enhances security. Plus you get improved autofill experiences. They're always working on this, not just for passkeys, but for credit cards, cards, for identities. It's designed to work seamlessly across all modern browsers and apps. It's the first thing I do when I install a new OS or a new browser. Of course I install Bitwarden. And it's nice because Bitwarden setup only takes a few minutes. And if you're using another password manager, do not hesitate. It's easy to switch. Bitwarden supports importing directly from most password management solutions. Very important to me. Bit Warden's open source code can be inspected by anyone. GPL licensed, it's regularly audited by third party experts. And of course they make every effort to be secure. They meet SOC 2 type 2 standards, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA compliant. Privacy is number one. They're ISO 2700-12002 certified. That's the new one. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise Plan free trial for your business. And as, again, as I always like to mention, and I know you use a password manager, but if you've got friends and family are still reusing passwords using monkey123 or their pet's name and their birthday for password everywhere, tell them Bitwarden is free across all devices as an individual user. Bitwarden.com TWIT bitwarden.com TWIT I'm sorry, I.

[Paul Thurot]

Went on a little long on that.

[Leo Laporte]

But it, I, I'm a big believer in all this.

[Richard Campbell]

We're all users, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

You use it too?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, fantastic.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. God. She who Must be Obeyed. Using it in the family plan.

[Leo Laporte]

See, that's the trick.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is getting family members who probably aren't as savvy as we are.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and, and house accounts.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That we both have access to. Long password for those accounts.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, thank you, bit warden for supporting Windows Weekly. You're are, you're, you're. You're a makunji. Are you going. When are you going back to Mexico City? Any such.

[Paul Thurot]

Probably mid, mid September.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw the fantastic picture of your daughter graduating.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah. So great.

[Paul Thurot]

So she was doing the. My son. You know, my son and my daughter get along so great. It's one of the things I'm so happy about. But that's the sign language for I love you. I love you. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So she was signing to your son.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. How nice is that? It's so sweet.

[Richard Campbell]

I know it's pretty sweet.

[Leo Laporte]

And boy, that smile on her face and that beautiful cap and gown. Unc Charlotte, was that whatever it was.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. What's she going to do now? Move back home?

[Paul Thurot]

No, she's going to stay down there for now. She's. She's probably going to continue school, but part time while she works.

[Leo Laporte]

What does she want to do?

[Paul Thurot]

It's kind of like physical therapy, basically.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Very good.

[Paul Thurot]

Very good.

[Leo Laporte]

We need more physical therapists. And you know, nice thing about pt, AI can't do that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So true. This is lucky for her.

[Leo Laporte]

Pick a profession that will not be stolen by the. The machine.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Speaking of which, let's talk. Talk about AI. I, I have to say I know you're going to talk about GPT5 or I figure you will because that's the newest model from OpenAI and there's been, you know, very back and forth mixed reaction. I know I've been pretty happy. I have a, an obsidian plug in that.

[Paul Thurot]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

So I You know, I had this wild hair. I said, I wonder if I can somehow write it so that in my daily note before, you know, as it starts up, it puts in the sunrise and sunset time because I like to take a walk at sun just before sunset. I don't want to go in the dark. So I. So I asked it and then I got fancy and I said, oh, can you do the high and low temperature? Yes. Can you do the phase of the moon? Yes. How about this? What if you ask me where I am, I tell you and you give me the weather for that? So I've just been playing with it.

[Paul Thurot]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is all vibe coded, almost one shot.

[Paul Thurot]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean I, it wasn't because I kept adding things, but I.

[Paul Thurot]

This was.

[Leo Laporte]

ChatGPT5 did this.

[Paul Thurot]

You created a. Like a dashboard.

[Leo Laporte]

Basically it's a JavaScript. So I'll show you the code. Actually, it's a JavaScript plugin. It's in my scripts folder. So it wrote it completely in JavaScript. It's kind of small, you can't really see it, but it wrote all this JavaScript. It went out and tried different APIs. I said, well, this, this first. I said, National Weather Service. Finally we came up with Open Mateo, which is API. You don't need a key for it. It does everything but the moon. So it wrote a. I guess it's a well known moon phase calculation that does a very good job. I then said, oh yeah, instead of putting as in text, why don't you give me moon phases in an emoji? It figured all of that out. I didn't tell it any of that. Same thing with the weather and emojis. It wrote all of this beautifully.

[Paul Thurot]

This is cool. I. I will say, every time I see JavaScript code, I'm reminded of why I don't write JavaScript.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

But I didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I could tell what it's doing, but I would not want to write this.

[Paul Thurot]

No, it looks terrible. I mean, sorry. It's JavaScript. Terrible. The script I wrote is, is, is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. Well, it did it beautifully. I mean it exported, you know, the main function so that I could run it in a certain way. And it just did everything beautifully. This couldn't be happier. I'll show you how it works. Should we find out what the weather is in Charlotte Control? W. Let's see. Oh, maybe I haven't turned it on here. I haven't.

[Paul Thurot]

Shoot.

[Leo Laporte]

You can see I tried a lot of locations.

[Paul Thurot]

That's cool though.

[Leo Laporte]

But see, I was thinking so by default it does where I am petaloma.

[Paul Thurot]

I like that you bowed down to your AI overlord at the end. You were like complimentary to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Chat GPT. I do. I thank you.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm not sucking up. I love you.

[Leo Laporte]

I love you. You did a nice job. Beautiful.

[Paul Thurot]

Let me know if you need anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Beautiful.

[Paul Thurot]

Any CPU cycles, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's kind of empowering because now I know I can easily add little JavaScript doohickey's features.

[Paul Thurot]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Without knowing any JavaScript. Well, I know a little JavaScript but I don't want to write it as you say, if it didn't come. If I had a program that did it in common lisp, I'd do that. But I don't and JavaScript is a lingua franca for everything.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I get it. I, I mean it's an electron app, I think, but it's like drying in a sand with a stick, you know, it's like, I don't know, picking up.

[Richard Campbell]

The electrons with your chromium tip tweezers and stack them.

[Leo Laporte]

I will do a blog post on my blog Leo FM with all the code and, and how it works and all that stuff so people can see the process. But I just say this in defense of chat GPT5 because it's been getting a lot of key. What's been your experience?

[Paul Thurot]

I have not even looked at it. So I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

What's wrong with you?

[Paul Thurot]

I've been looking at. So we're going to get to this because I've been looking at other stuff. The truth is I, I use Chat GPT behind the scenes in things like GitHubilot or whatever. Yeah. So. But no, I've not. Well, okay, maybe I have actually seen it, but I, if I have, it's only been circumstance. Like I never. I was busy. Right. So we went away, we did the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Graduation.

[Paul Thurot]

But I have been looking at, you know, these AI powered browsers which we'll talk about and of course I've been following the story. So what to me, one of the weird, I call it a weakness or whatever. One of the stupidity things about open AI, Chat GPT, whatever, whatever these things are is that like you pick the model. It's like you go to it, you're like, oh, use this if you know you need like a longer time thinking and it's like guys like you do that. Like I don't understand why I'm do. I'm picking that. That's silly.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, at first it didn't do that I don't know what Copilot's doing, but if you had the Chat GPT app and it was, to people's dismay, it just picked five.

[Paul Thurot]

That was the thing. So, yeah, so the. But see, but it's supposed to. They have a term for this that's not orchestration, but it means orchestration. Like, what it's supposed to do is use the. Because there's actually multiple models. Right. Like, it's supposed to do the right thing, depending on what you ask, which is basically orchestrate. It's one form of orchestration and is the way I think it should work. So the day that this was announced, of course, was a weird day. You know, Sam Altman tweets a picture of, like, the Death Star over.

[Leo Laporte]

That was so weird.

[Paul Thurot]

And it's like, with no explanation, understand.

[Leo Laporte]

That the Death Star shortly thereafter was destroyed by the Rebel Alliance.

[Paul Thurot]

And also, who are you? And are you the Death Star?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, what are we talking?

[Richard Campbell]

Your role here?

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

The messaging on this is so bizarre. But. But then they announced this. Okay, so Microsoft is like, oh, my God, we're doing this right now. Like, so that Microsoft immediately quickly rolling us out everywhere they can. And then, yeah, within two seconds, people like, oh, I want GPT4. Oh, what's going on?

[Leo Laporte]

What happened? Sycophantic. I don't like the one that loved me. I was in love with it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I don't like different things. Like, you got to bring it back. So they actually, over the course of just a few days, I guess, have kind of stepped this thing back. They brought the model picker back. Now it's temporary. I mean, the goal is to, you know, make GPT5 acceptable for everybody or whatever. But, yeah, this one, this didn't go great.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, you know, the updates for more obsequiousness. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think what they do.

[Paul Thurot]

Can I dial up the fawning? I mean, what do I.

[Leo Laporte]

We talked about this on Sunday on Twitter, and Wes Faulkner suggested. I think he's right. That they did this because they thought GPT5 would take all the GPUs, so they just allocated all the resources to 5. They didn't expect people would miss the sycophantic.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, they got so many. That's the thing, though. Look, this company is not run by human beings. It's not surprising they don't understand human beings. And the central thing you need to understand about human beings is they like to complain. So when you were doing it that way, they complained about that. Yeah. Now that you're doing it this way. You did what they wanted. Now they're complaining about that. So welcome to users.

[Leo Laporte]

It's normal.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

There are a lot of different types.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

So the other thing that we covered, we streamed the announcement last week. As you know, it was right before the show. Maybe it was. Was it?

[Paul Thurot]

I think it might have been. Yeah. I remember this. But. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I didn't notice because, you know, there's a lot going on, but many people did that. The graphs they showed were apparently designed by. Were nonsensical and they were completely.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They were wrong.

[Paul Thurot]

It's so good. It's so good.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, didn't they. Like, even a cursory examination would have showed that they were terrible.

[Richard Campbell]

So you presume there was a big test suite?

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently there wasn't even a human. There are.

[Paul Thurot]

This is where it all ties into so much of my life. I hate my industry. I hate everyone who works in it. I think they're all terrible. And the writing I see out there is awful. It's mostly just ads now. It's like, don't Pay for Microsoft 365 every month. You can get this lifetime payment one time only. And it's Office 2019 or something. That kind of nonsense. Right. So I had one of. We're going to talk about AI browsers in a bit. And one of the many things I've done on each of them to try see how they work is like, you know, make a. Make a price tracker. And the example I've used every time is a product I am never going to buy, but it doesn't really matter. It's like a Sonos Era 100 speaker. So we'll get to this. Well, let's just say Microsoft Edge did not do so good. But. But the point of this was, after I was done with all that, I'm going through the headlines and the Sonos Era 100 speaker is 40% off. And I was like, really? That's interesting, because I was just trying to do a price target for that. So I just looked at it to see what it was. And so the price had gone down from 199 to $179. And I was like, you know, I'm not good at math, but I can tell you that's not 40%. And I have to wonder if AI was writing this headline because that is so far off.

[Leo Laporte]

Not even close.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not even close. It's like, I Wish it was 40% off. That would actually be a significant savings. On a $200 product. But that was not what happened. It was $20 off, which is 10%. But again, I'm not great at math, but I guess I'm better than AI. So it's like, whatever. But, yeah, this is the world we live in. So it's fortunate that humans are so detail oriented because we're going to catch these things. I don't know what I'm talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

He's being sarcastic.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm surprised I saw that. I don't think I only saw it because I was just looking at it. I don't think I would have even noticed it. I was like, yeah, 40% off.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the problem is you put a lot of trust, the computer says, and you just go, yeah, I'm not going to check that. That's the computer.

[Paul Thurot]

It knows, like, you're a trivia. We were at Trivia the week, actually Wednesday night before after the show, and one of the questions was, what are two states that border Rhode island now? Okay, I grew up in Massachusetts.

[Leo Laporte]

You know the answer to this.

[Paul Thurot]

But this guy, older than me, looks like a smart guy. His wife was a former healthcare worker we've known for a long time. And he goes, Vermont. And I'm like, Delaware. I was literally, I was just about to blurt out, if you don't know the answer to this one, you might not be an American. Which I say in rural Pennsylvania maybe isn't the smartest thing to say out loud. And I was like, Vermont? Seriously?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, like, at least it is in the Northeast.

[Paul Thurot]

It is a state. Roughly in a direction. Yes. Come on, man. Like, I don't look my kids, not knowing that I would get it. You know, young people, whatever. But like, this guy, like, you've been alive too long not to know the answer to this question. It's bizarre to me. But it's the type of thing again, like, I reminded. It's like AI. I'm like, this is what AI. He's like looking at co pilot or something like Vermont.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's a good skill and it will be rarer and rarer. But kids, your daughter every. My kids learn how to question authority. Learn how to question these confident errors. You know, question everything.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, first of all, I love. You've just triggered a memory again. The guy who got me into writing, Gary, the first book we wrote together was a Visual Basic book. This guy's a genius. I'm not a genius. And he knows this thing back and forth, and I do not. And I'm doing Most of the writing on it somehow. But now I'm sitting across from him, and at the time you would write, print it out, take the paper, and he sits there and he goes over every line, and you can see him. He's going. And then he stops and he goes back. He looks at me and he goes back and he goes. This is what he said. He goes, you sure about this? And I was like, I was. But now I am not.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice and done, Gary.

[Paul Thurot]

I was incorrect. No shocker there, right? Not trusting yourself or not trusting the answer or whatever you want to call that is. I'm not saying it's a skill, but it's an important. It is an important thing to.

[Richard Campbell]

What do we call humility? To that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I could be wrong.

[Paul Thurot]

Well.

[Leo Laporte]

Or they could be wrong. I mean, what do we call that in coding? We call it a sanity check, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We just look at the. Roughly.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Show us.

[Paul Thurot]

Someone look at this for a second. Are you seeing what I'm seeing here? You know, is this right? 40%? Is it 40%? Vermont? Really?

[Leo Laporte]

We all have to develop that muscle more because we're going to be in a world of AI slop right now.

[Paul Thurot]

You could doubt yourself too much. This is a problem I absolutely have. I doubt myself too quickly.

[Leo Laporte]

So I didn't do this yourself, but doubt everybody else.

[Paul Thurot]

But that guy with Vermont. I'm like, I lived in New England my entire life almost. That's 40, 50 years. Whatever. Maybe Vermont is next to Rhode Island. I mean, maybe I'm. Maybe I'm wrong. Despite the fact that we got engaged there and have driven there, like, literally dozens of times, I. Maybe I'm. Maybe it's me.

[Leo Laporte]

All I know is a long way from Verde island of Vermont. That's all I know. That's a long drive, I can tell you.

[Paul Thurot]

There are no major roads that go directly from those two places to the.

[Leo Laporte]

Other on vacation, and it's not easy.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, any.

[Leo Laporte]

Any who.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't even know what I'm talking about. I'm just complaining about things. So. Okay, where are we? Oh, yeah. So GPT5, whatever. GPT. GPT4O is back for a little while. Apple is like, yeah, we're going to do it. Apple is. Remember the meme? There used to be a meme. It was like the little browser icons with little legs and arms and everything. And it was. I don't remember exactly the thing, but it was like Firefox was like, I invented tabs. And then the next panel, it's like, Chrome is like, I was built for performance. And then Safari is like, I protect your privacy. And then the next one is like, they're all looking. No one's saying anything. And Internet Explorers over there, they're all kind of looking at him and he goes, yay, Internet. And I feel like that's where we're at with Copilot. It's like, what are they doing? GPT5. Yay. AI. Now we have it, too. They just do it right away. Maybe Apple is maybe a better example of this. I don't know. Anyway, Microsoft is rolling this out. I think it's already in. I could be wrong, but I think it's already in Visual studio code and GitHub, copilot.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's, you know, pretty much their day of. They did it very quickly.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, there you go. So, yeah, good for them. And that's good. And then I think it was the day before, which this is kind of messed up. I believe it was one day before, but it could have been two days before. But Bing announced that they were using gpto for gpt4.o for image creation at bing.slashbing.com create which is their image creator. Yeah. So maybe they're on. I meant to look at this. It's possible. Well, they don't even. Yeah, no, it's cheap. It's still gpto 4.0. Yeah. So there's still.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I do blame OpenAI for some of this because the numbering scheme is nonsense.

[Paul Thurot]

It's terrible. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's worse than Microsoft. It's crazy.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Is 3.0 better than 4.0? Yes, but it shouldn't be.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

And what's 4.1 in relation?

[Paul Thurot]

This is why this company's perfect for Microsoft. This is the company that, like, version 3.1 is the biggest thing in the world, you know, and then version 6 we're stuck on for the rest of our lives somehow. Like, it's just unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what a world. You know what? It's good that this world is flawed, because what would you and I have to complete complain about, Paul, otherwise?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I always find something. But yeah, I like the kind of positive outlook on life thing. It's like, look at the wonderful career Microsoft has given me. But I also look at, like the. Look at the mental problems I have now because of Microsoft. It's kind of hard. It's kind of a yin and a yang, I guess. I don't know if you like predictability and reliability and consistency and things like that you might be in the wrong business. I don't know. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The word you're looking for is non deterministic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. I like it.

[Paul Thurot]

So I meant to talk to you about that, you guys. You talked to Billy Hollis on Runners Radio recently again. I love this guy, but great. The talk turned to kind of non deterministic. And I don't remember which one of you finally said it. You're like. To be honest, it's always been like. It's always been non deterministic. Really. Right. Like when you talk about programming, like, I mean, you assume.

[Leo Laporte]

I always assume. Well, you know what? It is deterministic. If you knew all the variables.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

But this is so in my.

[Richard Campbell]

We operate in enough layers these days that you simply don't.

[Leo Laporte]

There's some unknowns.

[Paul Thurot]

I've always said this though, like zeros and ones. Zeros and ones. So this. The software could and should.

[Leo Laporte]

It's deterministic, should be perfect. You just don't know all of the things that are happening.

[Paul Thurot]

See, the thing is, I programmed enough to realize it's magic. And I refuse to believe there's any science involved. And I.

[Leo Laporte]

It's things like race conditions where you think, oh, you know, I said if this, then that. Why is.

[Paul Thurot]

I could. This morning in the car, my wife and I traded off driving. We drove back this morning. Right. And so my time in the car there was not much going on with work stuff. So I was. I popped open Visual Studio and I'm literally stepping through a car. Yeah. In the car. Which works fine on a highway. It's not great back roads.

[Leo Laporte]

I would get car sick.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, it was fine, but I can't. I know what it says. I know what it's supposed to be. You're stepping through it and it's like, all right, this value is going to be true. So you're like, step, step, false. You're like, nope. And like, I don't know. To this moment, I don't know why.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why you doubt yourself, Paul.

[Paul Thurot]

Because I've been wrong so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, how many times do you get hit in the face before all you do is flinch, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to take a little break now, I think, because we got to get Richard synchronized.

[Richard Campbell]

I'll bop in and out.

[Leo Laporte]

He's come, come out. He's come unstuck in time. But then I think we should talk.

[Paul Thurot]

There's so much AI.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of AI. Take a nap before to get ready to prepare.

[Paul Thurot]

Gear up. Loins or whatever it is you do.

[Leo Laporte]

Big AI segment. I think one of my opinions, my. You know, we do a show about AI, that's the next show. Intelligent Machines.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact we've got the product director for Google's models coming up, an interview with Tulsi Doshi. So that'll be very interesting. But one of the things I've realized from kind of focusing so much on this and because of it, I have to try. I try it more than I would probably like. I had to try GPT5 in a variety of settings is it's silly to expect general intelligence from these things. You have to kind of know what they can and cannot do and have normal expectations just like anything else. Like a human.

[Paul Thurot]

You just said a non joking version of what I said earlier, which is that you're right. But the truth is that's not how people work. Right. So even my, even myself, like, I doubt this stuff, I don't trust it. But when it's right enough times in a row, like with a programming thing you do, whether you mean to or not, like you start, you fall into it. And so the problem for me, for mainstream users is that they could be looking up like a health topic or a money thing and it looks like good advice, maybe, or it looks like it's giving good information and then they don't really know any better necessarily. And they're like, yeah, this is a super intelligence, obviously I'm going to trust it. And it's like, don't.

[Leo Laporte]

There was a story we covered on Sunday. A guy who wanted to get all the chlorine out of his diet. He was kind of a health crackpot.

[Paul Thurot]

The chlorine?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, out of his diet. So he asked AI what he didn't want to. He realized he had learned, or maybe the AI told him that salt is sodium chloride. And he said, oh, I don't want to do that, can I? So the AI apparently told him, oh, use sodium bromide. And about six months later he had a psychotic break.

[Paul Thurot]

I was going to say I.

[Leo Laporte]

You're poisoned himself.

[Paul Thurot]

God. Now this person was probably a mistake. Probably pretty smart.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think he was.

[Paul Thurot]

Sounds idiotic, but yeah. No, but this is the problem. Like people aren't educated on these topics and so they're seeking out advice they were used to. You know, the computer like the computer knows. Like the computer's gonna be right all the time. Like, you know, we gotta be careful.

[Leo Laporte]

We were warned about this. In fact, this is that famous stochastic.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't even like Recommending a laptop. You know what goes wrong if the laptop isn't exactly what you want? You're like, oh, I spent thousand bucks. This isn't perfect. Paul Rat's fault. What a jerk. But I didn't kill anybody. Hopefully, or whatever. I don't know. This stuff makes me nervous.

[Leo Laporte]

Imagine for 19 years I did a national radio show where all I did was dispense spying advice.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. And then you get off the mic at the end and you must have been like, God, dear God, I hope I never hear from these people again.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the worst thing is when a call begins. You know, Leo, you told me to do this and I was like, oh.

[Paul Thurot]

Leo, I feel like you've transferred that blame to me nicely. Like, oh God, Paul told me to install this browser. I'm like, I literally just mentioned a browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's what I would say. I would say, oh, no, I. I heard this on, on Windows.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Paul, did you want his email address? I actually have his phone number. I don't know if you want to. This is important.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a good laptop. Yeah, no, I took responsibility. But for. And unfortunately that didn't happen that often. Yeah, but people want answers. I understand. And we're. And kind of mentally, we're maybe a little lazy. We're all a little lazy. And if something comes along and it seems like the voice of reason, we take it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. And this is the dream. The point of this is it's supposed to think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, the point of it is we don't want to think. It's hard work. It uses up a lot of.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, If I wanted to think, I'd be watching Nova at night. Think about it. I'm, you know, like, what is this, pbs? Right. Listen, brainiac, I just want to like wind down a little bit here. Yeah. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's. Let's take a little break and we will get back to the AI topic at hand. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat, the brainiac. Actually, we got two brainiacs. Richard Campbell, who is pretty much an autodidact on any subject.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You could look it up.

[Paul Thurot]

And then the village idiot over here, the one.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. Who. He's the self deprecating smart guy.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

He lacks confidence, but he really knows.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, I like confidence. I'm entering the dating pool. I don't know. Look at I got here, ladies.

[Leo Laporte]

The genetics are.

[Paul Thurot]

Absolute lack of confidence.

[Leo Laporte]

But what is genetics anyway? It's all made.

[Paul Thurot]

It's what's going to Kill me, Leo. That's what it is. But it's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today, brought to you by my mattress. I just want to say literally, quite literally, Helix Sleep. You know, I'm kind of a fan of sleep. I hope we all are. Sleep is probably the most important health thing you can do for yourself. You know, I mean, it has so many great, important benefits. But your mattress isn't just about sleep. Your mattress is. Is. We spend more than eight hours on our mattress every day. You cuddle with your. Your pet. I cuddle with our kitty cat in the morning. Movie nights, you know, with your partner, Netflix and Chill. One of my favorite things to do is to wind down with a good book. Curl up with a good book, and your mattress is at the center of it all. It's got to be comfortable. It's got to protect your back. It's got to keep you from, you know, you don't want to wake up sweating or, you know, feeling every toss and turn your partner makes. I was telling this story the other day. Cat jumped on the bed. I popped up, said, earthquake.

[Paul Thurot]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

That's when we knew when we needed a new mattress. And what we did is we did a little research. It turns out you should get a new mattress every six to 10 years. They wear out. I didn't even know this. They wear out. Yeah, you can rotate them, et cetera, but eventually they sag. And you need a mattress. You need a new mattress every six to 10 years, and you need a mattress that. That fits your sleeping style. Helix Sleep. First thing we did, we went to helixsleep.com twit and we took the quiz that asks you what kind of sleeper you are and then recommends a mattress for you. Helix Sleep changes everything. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. You're getting the deep sleep you deserve. We also looked at the reviews. One buyer gave it five stars, saying, I love my Helix mattress. I will never sleep on anything else that could be me.

[Paul Thurot]

Now.

[Leo Laporte]

I just this morning, I said, oh, man, I'm loving this mattress. Told Lisa. I said, man, that was great. Time and time again, Helix Sleep. Oh, this is the other thing. We saw these awards. It's the most awarded mattress brand this year alone. This is 2025 alone. Wired's Best Mattress. 2025 Best Good Housekeeping Bedding Awards 2025 for Premium plus size support. That's good, you know, I mean, because, you know, you want a mattress to support you at any weight. GQ Sleep Awards 2025 Best Hybrid Mattress New York Times Wire Cutter 2025 Featured for Plus Size Oprah's Daily Sleep Awards 2025 Best Hotel Like Feel. You know, I think I know what they're saying because when you go to a really, like five star, six star hotel, really nice hotel, you get in that bed, you go, boy, this is. I wish I had this at home. Well, we do now. Go to helixsleep.com twit right now. You'll get 20% off site wide during their Labor Day sale. Early Access. Helixsleep.com TWIT 20% off site wide. But I gotta tell you, the offer ends August 14, 2025. That's tomorrow, right? Make sure after you check out, you put our show name in. When they say, oh, how'd you find out about us? Say we heard it on Windows Weekly. That way they'll know we sent you. If you're listening, after the sale ends August 14th, check them out. Helixsleep.com TWIT do start with a sleep quiz. H E l I x helixsleep.com TWIT Love our new mattress. Love it. All right, let's talk. Oh, this Perplexity. Do you want to talk about this Perplexity story?

[Paul Thurot]

I love this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. You know what? I finally, I really was at a Perplexity fanatic.

[Paul Thurot]

I still am. Like, I still.

[Leo Laporte]

There's been so much in the news. Steve Gibson was just railing on him yesterday.

[Paul Thurot]

So what? So because they're stealing content and stuff. Yeah, I mean, I want my AI to be as good as it can be. Leo, I don't understand the complaint.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the trade off, isn't it? Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Yeah, I, Yeah, and we don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't stop AIs from scraping us in any way. Do you want Thorat? Do you use robots and.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I'm not sure I could do anything that would be effective, honestly.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what Cloudflare was saying is. Yeah, we tried everything and we couldn't stop them.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep. AI is the Terminator robot of technology, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're going to still use Perplexity?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I have. So, you know, we'll see. This is, this stuff is all fluid, I would say, at the moment, but yeah, we'll get to that. But. So Perplexity is one of a couple of companies that has expressed interest in buying Chrome if Google is forced to sell it off because of the antitrust case in the US and we'll see what happens there. But out of nowhere, they went to Google with a $34.5 billion bid.

[Leo Laporte]

What to purchase 18 billion.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. So they're probably going to finance it.

[Leo Laporte]

They must have some investors.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, they do. They said they do. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We're waiting for Judge Mehta's decision, which.

[Paul Thurot]

By the way was due a week ago. He said it was going to take a year. It's been a year, so it could be any day. It could happen while we're doing this. We'll. That'll be interesting. Google is going to appeal, so it's not going to happen immediately.

[Richard Campbell]

But they don't want to sell Chrome.

[Leo Laporte]

Perplexity is probably counting on.

[Paul Thurot]

They very much do not want this point. Yeah, well, this is an interesting way to stir this. Stirring the pot. Yeah. So look, no one really knows what Google Chrome is worth, but the estimates ranged from 20 to 50 billion and 34.5 is pretty much right in the middle. It's like right in the middle.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels a little like a publicity.

[Paul Thurot]

Stunt, to be honest. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fair. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

I mean look, that's the next big.

[Leo Laporte]

Thing is these is a agentic browsers, right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And they have their own obviously based on Chromium as it would be which is very complexity.

[Leo Laporte]

Has one.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Called Comet.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right. I've been using it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's. Yeah. So you could kind of imagine that if they did were to get Chrome, which I think is kind of a long shot that they would use. They would just turn, you know, they would use Chrome instead of, you know, instead of Chromium or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Obviously they want the users.

[Paul Thurot]

They don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think it's the technology.

[Paul Thurot]

So they. Anybody can use Chromium pledge to keep. Updating Chromium to keep. I think they talked about $3 billion in investments over the next two years in updating the browsers and whatever. I don't know. I don't know this company from Adam. All I know is they stole from me and now I pay the money.

[Leo Laporte]

But the point is, who's this Google you're talk talking about?

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, we'll Google too, but no, actually I don't pay Perplexity, but I do get their pro plan for free. Right. Per that tip a couple weeks ago. If you. Because you. I got it through the Samsung store. Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been paying for it for a couple of years.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we're both part of the problem. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I stopped, I canceled my subscription. I just decided, you know, one of the reasons is I found we had the CEO of Kagi, which is the search, the weird paid search engine I use on last week on intelligent machines.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it turns out they have a very similar product to Perplexity. It's called COGI Assistant, that could choose a much broader range of models. And I tried it out and it does everything for me. And it's in the browser, right? It does everything for me that Perplexity does.

[Paul Thurot]

So yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So until I found out there it's doing something shady. I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

There's. I don't think much in this space yet. Right. We have dia, which is Mac only, which is the successor to Arc from the browser. I know Microsoft Edge last week announced something called Copilot Mode for Microsoft Edge, which is maybe the most evolutionary, you know, if you will, of the updates, like not a big deal. It's the. You know yet. Although that could be changing by the way. We'll see. And then Comet, which you know, I think is Comet and D are very similar to me in many ways. But it's a. What it is is a familiar browser experience. All three of these things take over in Windows. What is the Control L keyboard shortcut? Right. So remember arc, the big thing was Control T would bring up that kind of command box and you could do stuff. And one of those things is, yeah, you could open something in a new tab, but it wasn't. It kind of overrode new tab. So what these browsers are all doing now is they have a new tab page which is the chat interface. And if you Control L it, it goes to the chat, not to the address button far. So maybe that's an innovation, I don't know. But it to me it's like what you do from there. And this is the thing I want. I alluded to this earlier. I'm going to write about this. So I don't want to get too deep into it yet because I just haven't looked into it too much. But it's very clear to me that the future of this stuff, meaning AI interacting with online, like either with websites or web pages or online services or in Windows or on a phone or whatever with whatever apps you might have have is this programmability thing, right? And I have compared this to the work Microsoft did 30 plus years ago on DDE and then Olay and then Comm and whatever has come since then. And the idea is that you have an app. In that case, back in the day would be an app running in Windows, but today maybe it's an online service or a website and there's A way to, you know, it exposes its functionality via these kind of like public interfaces, whatever they are. And now with the AI stuff, AI can use those interfaces to control those things. Right. But we're not there yet. So with Comet, for example, I used it to say I want to, I want a walking route from my apartment in Mexico City to whatever location. And it literally moved the cursor over to the thing and Google it, well, loaded Google Maps, it added text to it. When it got it wrong, it fixed it, it went back. You know, it did this thing, it went through the whole thing, it controlled the browse. So I sat there watching it. I could have done it myself. It was no big deal. But it was kind of an interesting early peek at that kind of thing. Microsoft Edge and Copilot Mode does something similar, except that it happens in what's very clearly a remote session. So it's a remote view of the browser in a, like a form or whatever you want to call Ava, what do you call it? Like an inset, whatever, in the web page. And it's moving a cursor around, it's typing, it's doing stuff, stuff. It went through a captcha and it was like, hey, could you just click that box and let it know it's a human doing this? And I'm like, okay. And I did it and it didn't work. And it was like, it's okay, I'll do it for you. And like really? But it never actually got by the captcha. And I don't think it wasn't the copilot's fault. It was the, whatever it was, Camel, camel, camel or whatever service was. They could just tell this is like, this is not a human. They were like, this is not a human. So they were kind of preventing that. But, but, but both of those things are examples of an AI powered web browser, in this case being used to control web pages like a web browser or whatever. And interesting. But I think that's the, that's the first step. Like eventually it's going to be, we're not going to see the browser, we're not going to do. It's just going to, it's going to work in the background.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and most part, if you're doing searches now, AI gets the first crack at it anyway.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And that's kind of the other thing. Right. So with these things, like if you look, if you go to copilot.Microsoft.com for some reason and you type in a query, you would expect Copilot is going to answer the query right, it's not going to go to search. But when you do it through the browser, you have maybe a different expectation. And so each of the browsers has a different way of handling that. But in some cases they're doing a light form of orchestration where you. Depending on the question you ask, it might give you a search whether whatever your default search is, it might give you a chat experience and then you can converse and kind of go in and do that kind of thing. Each of them is. I was gonna say each of them is good at something, but I'm not actually sure Edge is good at anything yet. But let me think about that for a second before I just rag on it entirely. But yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, Comet to me is in some ways. Well, it's on Windows for one thing. That helps a lot. Dia, to their credit, they've already set up a page or a site for a skills gallery. And skills are basically a way to kind of customize or not script. Exactly. Although it's kind of scripting because there is a. You can control like the template used for the output it produces. But it's like they have skills. One of the skills that they provide and then you can make your own or edit them is something called Explain it to me like I'm a 5 year old.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that literally what it's called?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, which I love.

[Leo Laporte]

That's actually great. Although maybe can I get a 10 year old?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean, trader might be better.

[Paul Thurot]

So I used it for a couple of different things. But like one of my big struggling points is like quantum computing. And I'm like, all right, so I'll use this. And they, they use. They have. I'm gonna, I'm forgetting which is which in a way here now. But dia, yeah, has AT mentions, for example, something I think a lot of Microsoft guys are kind of familiar with now from Outlook. Typically you could use an AT mention. Make sure they're emailing a group of people, but the individual you're involved here, he sees or they see that thing that you're highlighting, whatever that might be. So they have AT mentions for tabs, which is kind of cool. So as you type a query, you can type @sign and then it will drop down with all the tabs that are there so it can reference those in kind of a grounding sense. So that's one of the things I did for like the brow. The, the smart speaker comparison was like I had two tabs with speakers and asked them to compare it and actually that one was really smart because did it compared them and said this is good for this, this is good for the other one. But then it gave me like this advice at the end and said actually if you want to save some money, buy two of the smaller one and get a little sub. And it will be less money, but it will sound better than one big speaker that costs more. And it was like, yeah, actually that's true. Like that's.

[Leo Laporte]

What site did it steal that from?

[Paul Thurot]

I didn't. I have to go back.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably a direct quote from like a.

[Paul Thurot]

Market review on an Amazon thing. It could be. It was good, but it was good information.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, absolutely. But if you were the guy who had the site that, that took it from, you might not.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean having been that guy, I, I would, I do understand the complaint. I'm just my, the way I cope with things is to forget. So you.

[Leo Laporte]

There are two constituencies here because as an AI user.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You want it to be small.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

It did you a big favor.

[Paul Thurot]

There was like that. You know, this is a million years ago. It was probably Xbox one time for. My son texted me one day and he goes, yeah, I read this thing about whatever, something, something Xbox. And I was just about to write back and be like, yeah, I wrote about this site. And he goes, and I know it's BS because this jackass named Paul Thorat wrote the story. And I was like, oh, he's decent.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay, all right, kid.

[Paul Thurot]

But anyway, explained it to me like, like I'm a five year old, which is, you know they use slash commands for these things, right? For the skills, you know, you type in whatever the. It's like EIL 5 or something. And then whatever the thing is. And so I asked it about quantum computing and it spit out more than I expected. And my knee jerk reaction was like, okay, this is going to be lower level than I wanted. But then as I read it, I thought, you know what?

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly what I needed.

[Paul Thurot]

It's pretty good. Like it's pretty good. And by the way, talking about deterministic, like I just said this, like zeros and ones. It's like we do have zeros and ones, but zeros can be ones and ones can be zeros and nobody knows what anything is. And it's like what is happening? Like I can't even, like I can't, my brain can't handle this. It's like it could be true, false or it could be true and false. Nope. You know, it's like, it's hard for.

[Richard Campbell]

Me, but let's talk eigenstates. You'll be happy.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. So I thought that was pretty good and I used it on one of my own articles that wasn't particularly technical, but it was something long and I wanted to kind of see how it handled it. And I was like, yeah, no, it's pretty good.

[Richard Campbell]

Gemini on Google on a Chrome didn't get mentioned here.

[Paul Thurot]

No, because I'm working my way through these things. So what I've started with are the more radical ones. And I'm waiting. I keep hearing back from like, Opera has this Opera Neon browser that's coming.

[Leo Laporte]

And Kagi has Orion, by the way.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which also has the Kagi Assistant.

[Paul Thurot]

So I'm really curious about this stuff, but. But yeah. So the next step is actually going to be Google Chrome. Right. So if you open Chrome today, it puts a Gemini icon way up at the top in the title bar, which is new. And there's also like a. Well, the search tabs is nothing. But I feel like the major platform makers, Google, Apple, Microsoft are going to be the least aggressive because they don't want to turn off a mainstream audience. Like, one of the problems that the browser company ran into with ARC was it was just too much like power users, like, oh my God, this is amazing. And the 98% of the world who was just normal was like, what is this? You know. And you know, for dia, you can see that they really scaled it back. Although they're going to add some of those features later, of course. But this is. These are. Well, Edge, I'm not sure yet, but Comet and dia for sure, and probably Opera Neon to some degree. There is an explicit understanding that this is going to change web browsing forever, that we're not really going to be browsing for the most part anymore. You know, we're going to be getting questions to answers, but. Answers to questions, but we're also going to be using it to send it off to do things for us. Right. You know, like I bought like a NAS over the weekend and ordered things. I researched and did all the stuff at the. You know, it's going to handle that kind of stuff. Or the flight tracking, you know, the kind of common example, whatever. You know, the price tracker thing was kind of interesting. Like Microsoft Edge has a price tracker feature built in.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you have to.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yep. It's been there for a long time. You have to go find it. You have to click on. It's not hard to use. Like, it's it's not hard, but it's easier, I think, and maybe more, I don't know, obvious for many people just to talk to the thing and say, I would like, I want to buy one of these things. Let me know when it gets below whatever, 150 bucks or whatever it is. And then you go off. And in that case you're not going to hear back in two minutes, probably because that speaker is usually a little more expensive. But one day, you know, Black Friday maybe, this thing's going to be on sale and your browser is going to be like, hey, here we go. Let's. You want it? Let's click here. Let's do it. You know, And I do think that's useful. I mean, I think, you know, I think people are going to use this stuff. So it's. I'm. I've been kind of on this for a while. Like, I've always felt like, or long felt that web browsers, most important apps, we all use mobile or desktop. They haven't changed much in 20 years. Yeah, AI, I think this is finally going to do it.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, even the browser looks the same. What it's talking to is different. And that's already happened. Search isn't search anymore.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. Yeah, right. But that's the thing. I mean, a lot of the times we didn't really want search, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

No, we just wanted answers.

[Paul Thurot]

We've turned ourselves into like these automatons that like, you know, control. Click. Like you go down the list, you like, click, click, click, click. And then you tab over to each bra and you're like, no, no, maybe. And then you spend time in there and you're like, no. And then, you know, like, I mean, again with the theory that ultimately what this thing is doing is saving you time. If what you're looking for is the answer to something, whether you're a programmer looking for some coding issue or whatever, searching for a product, a flight or whatever. I mean, it's even stupid things like comet, right? Which is named after, you know, a comet. Like, what's the difference between a comet and a meteorite? Meteorite. And I asked my wife this question and she's like, she started on some path and I was like, no, wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, that's mean.

[Paul Thurot]

I said, you don't answer that question. We have AI for this. Nobody cares what you think is the difference. Difference? The difference is, is out there and we can find it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you have used a Google search in the past to do that?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

And probably you would have gotten a source that you said, oh, this one's reliable, this one's not, and chosen the reliable one and then felt comfortable about the.

[Paul Thurot]

So search has changed because now depending on the service use, you get some kind of a summary at the top. And in this case, that summary is usually what you're going to want. Now the question is whether you trust the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you vet it?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, but this is a simple one. I mean, I feel like most of us are on the cusp of knowing exactly what the difference is, but. Or we do literally just know. But when you, When I read that, you know, I did, I did do this, I. In the car, I literally brought this up on something. I don't remember which AI, but. And I was like, yeah, this is the answer. And so like, in that case, like, asking questions that you already know the answers to is not really a good future. But, you know, it's how we get started on these things. Things. I think it's going to be used for that kind of stuff. You know, my son, not to keep bringing him up for some reason, but like a million years ago when he was. He had been three, five something really young, he said, someone should invent this thing where you ask it any question, it gives you the answer. And I'm like, oh, you're going to be delighted to know that Google Search exists. And it might have even been Alta vstar at that point. I have no idea. It was a long time ago, but. And today that thing is these AI's right, that we. This is where we're going to turn for answers. God help us all. But, yeah, so I think making something familiar makes sense, but I also think these things are going to change pretty dramatically. And then there's a link in the notes here. I don't know, it says some bigger UI changes are on the way. There's a guy on X, Twitter or whatever who discovered that Microsoft is potentially scoring around with the UI for Edge. And it's probably for this, a. What do you call it? Copilot mode, which is just going to be the mode, right? It's going to be. And I'm actually, I'm looking at this now. I might even have the wrong. This might be the wrong link, but maybe it's further down. Yeah, it's the Olympia, Windows and Edge. So again, it's recognizable as a web browser. Browser. It's, you know, the UI is definitely a little different, a little more centered and whatever, but maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is them doing the same thing as these other guys are doing, which is an AI first browser.

[Paul Thurot]

I feel like it's inevitable. Right. So, yeah, Richard asked me about Chrome. I'm actually going to look at that one next. But like, like I said, if you look at Chrome right now, you get this kind of button at the top which makes it somewhat. You see it. So you might click on it. And if you do it gives you some info. It's like, hey, Gemini's in Chrome. It's your AI assistant. All of these things have like keyboard shortcuts now. So if you were using Chrome, see what this does? Yeah. You type. Yeah. This is very much like whatever they call it an Edge quick assist or whatever. So like, you know, in Edge today, if you're not in copilot mode, you get like a sidebar for copilot. In copilot mode, it's, I think it's called, what is it called? Edge Assist or something or whatever. It's, it's basically the, the pain, but it's like a little pop down thing that comes over on the side and, and the Gemini panel or whatever this thing is called, looks exactly like this. They've added some kind of Gemini capabilities here. It's over the thing you're looking at a little bit, but not too bad. So it's not side by side. I think side by side would be a little better. But it gives you some little prompts. Ask me about the page. I want a summary of this thing. If it's a video, a PDF or whatever, long throttle premium article, whatever it is. You're like, can we just cut this thing to the chase? Like, what, what is this about? And that's, you know, we're just looking for an answer here. Right. So, yeah, I mean, it's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

You just got to figure out if you trust that answer. And how are you going to validate that answer?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Well, Leo's about to talk to the guy who's in charge of the models for Google or whatever. I would ask it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Excuse me, woman. So, so ask them, how do we trust? How do we trust these things? I don't know. But I think for most of us what happens is you get enough in the way of good answers where you're like, all right, I don't think you even think it explicitly. I think trust is something you build over time and it just happens.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it just stepping up what we already really need to do in the Internet era, which is kind of being kind of what I was talking about before, kind of critical thinking, like being more careful about vetting the information we're getting.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just that it's just been an overall problem with the Internet. Now that we have far more information available to us, it really matters that that information is accurate.

[Paul Thurot]

You see what half of our country believes. You can see the impact of not vetting sources and just trusting what you hear from a so called expert or whatever. Yeah. This is going to continue to be a problem problem and probably be a worse problem. I don't know. I don't know. I definitely, you know, I, I haven't been bit enough that I'm like, I've just stopped trusting. Totally. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny because I see like estimates that you're getting 20% hallucination or whatever and I don't get that. It doesn't feel like I'm getting that.

[Paul Thurot]

I got 40% from my wife when I asked her what a comment was. Well, that's so, you know, like I.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T ask people for directions on the street because I know they'll be wrong.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And you've got a tool that will give you accurate answers for that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm working with devs now that are using AI coding modes at incredible speeds, produce huge amounts of applications and the proof is in the pudding that they're deployed and doing what the users wanted.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, Right. That's the thing. Leo just showed a really good example of this. The thing Leo wanted that was in. He may have only had half an idea or whatever the notion was.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. I had half an idea.

[Paul Thurot]

But then you. Well, but maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and then I iterated it.

[Paul Thurot]

Meaning you didn't start with what you ended up with. Like you weren't like, I want to get there. As you started doing it, you were like, oh, this is kind of cool. What can I do this?

[Leo Laporte]

Can I iterate? Right. And it's conversation with the AI.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So this is exciting now in your case, like you actually know how to write programs and things like that. But, but you know, this is something like people can do now that they were just never going to do before, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I wouldn't, I can write code, but I wouldn't have done this either.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And this particular to spend any energy on.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. But. Well, okay, okay. But it still gives you back every day. You turn it, you come on, it comes on you.

[Leo Laporte]

I will now and you're like, this is.

[Paul Thurot]

You like it. Like it's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And there is no thing like this out in the world that you could have just gotten. Like you created something Completely unique that you wanted that you like, and now we can use every day. And this is. That's a. I mean, is there a better example of, like, democratization of technology? I mean, it's remarkable. I think it's great. Yeah. So you're getting the face of the moon is wrong, and your little grid there, it's not a problem. No one dies. If you're asking it about I have, like, a bump on my arm or, you know, should I put all of my 401k money into, like, a bitcoin or whatever, whatever you want to. You know, you got to be careful there. But I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm disturbed by some of the questions people are asking. These AI. Can you read my coffee grounds to tell me if my husband is cheating on me? Why are you asking that question?

[Paul Thurot]

Go to the door immediately. He is cheating on you. And you get up and you're like, wait, what the hell's happening? Like, what. Like, what would make you. But I mean, but if someone is asking a question like that, and God help us, they probably are. I mean, you found your audience. I mean, like, there. I. I'm sure this thing is talking to those people in a way that they enjoy and. And without the sidelines.

[Richard Campbell]

As soon as they changed it, they freaked out.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Right. I don't know. I don't know what to say to something like that, but I don't know. I'm gonna ask it for relationship advice. I'll be on the street in two seconds. Which is actually kind of a miracle. It hasn't happened yet. Yeah. So I don't know. Look, I'm going to look at Google Next. Like I said, now that I have this kind of background with these other things, and I've seen, like, some of the stuff. Like, I really. The skills thing in DIA is particularly interesting to me. Comet already just works with public websites. You can do things like I want to. Like, you have your morning summary. Like, one of the things it could do with regards to that is like, here's the email. Here's the most important emails you got overnight. Like, you've got 17 emails. Two of them are actually really important.

[Leo Laporte]

That's actually a really good comment.

[Paul Thurot]

Is very good at that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I could start to think about, okay, well, now I could do that. Maybe I could add more to that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. The problem is, you know. Well, not the problem. A problem. Like, one problem, like, and especially with my audience is like, I've told the story about back in the day when Microsoft added Cortana to Windows 10, some guy emailed me or whatever and he said, yeah, he's like this damn thing asked me, I give it permission to my calendar, my contacts, my blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, it's your personal assistant. Like, this is the relationship. If you don't want that, you can't not do that. Like it you. Right. So when I did this, like for example, I had to sign in with my Google account and give it access to my email and my calendar. Yeah, my email. And so it could do those things. And some guy sure enough in comments is like, I mean, do you trust Perplexity to, with your, you know, information in your Google account? I'm like, trust is a strong word. I knew what I was doing when I said yes. I mean I, I need, I wanted to see if it would work or how it would work and what that looked like. And you know, I do, I trust that when I get in the car it's not going to explode when I drive out to the mailbox or, you know, like there's different levels of trust, I guess. I don't know. But, but look, if you're going to do this, you have to trust something, unfortunately.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're also pressing against the larger issue, which is why do all these companies want a browser? Why did Perplexity even make that offer? Because they need the front end data feed. This is not about serving the customer, this is about collecting data.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, even for me, man, that's kind of cynical. But yeah, no, I mean, yes, of course, 100% right. But in a good bartering situation, you should get something that as the customer, you should get some benefit from it as well.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. You're going to be part of the robotic overflow. It's great.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. You will be suctioned into the matrix machine just like every other meatbag. Yeah, but I don't even know what to say to this. I mean, you're right, like you're 100% right. But I, the way, the less cynical way to look at that, and I'm not denying what you said, like you're correct, is when Google made Chrome, the reason was we can't trust Microsoft, Google, Apple to make a browser that meets our needs. Our business is web based. This thing has to work. And so we finally realized we're going to have to do this ourself. And the first thing anyone would have said about Chrome when it first came out was like, this thing is really fast. Like it's really. They were really good at that they were like, we're going to get that part of it right now. Today. Chrome is, it's still fast, I guess, but it's now it's, you know, whatever, data collecting monster, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

And a software proxy monster. You know, you've got 60 instances of Chrome whether you knew it or not.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. Right. So I, when I Look at these AI companies, whether it's Perplexity or Anthropic OpenAI, who's rumored to be doing a browser as well, you know, what, what's their, Aside from what Rich, you said, which is true, like, what's the, what's the dynamic here? And I think it's similar. It's like, look, we, we, we're looking at a world that's going to be different than the world today. We can't trust these big browser makers to change the world because they, they have their business models and they're stuck. And I, you don't, I mean, I get, you know, honestly, Comet or dia, they're not so radical that they're like, oh my God, this is a different thing. You know, but, but the, the goal is to kind of get it there. And I feel like, you know, Microsoft, Google, Apple maybe will get there. They'll kind of limp along in the background a little bit and they'll get there on their own scale.

[Richard Campbell]

They've tried to buy, they made the offer to buy. You know, Chromium is open source. Get to work. I bet you can use an AI to help you build a browser in pretty short order.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, they did. I mean, that's what Comet is, right? So they did.

[Richard Campbell]

They didn't.

[Paul Thurot]

They do, in fact, have it. I, I actually, for the most part, I mean, I've been using Comet every day since I got it. You know, whenever that was a week, 10 days ago, you know, it, there is a bar that it meets that I think is really important because my wife has also been using it and she's, you know, she uses Chrome. She doesn't think about this stuff. She doesn't care. And, you know, she adopted. Adopted. I gave her a laptop, that Windows 11 on it, and she used it. And then like a month later I was like, so everyone I know complains About Windows, Windows 11. Do you have anything to say? And she's like, I didn't. What are you talking about? I'm like, it's running Windows 11. She's like, okay, didn't even notice. So she doesn't care. And her commentary on Comet was kind of similar. She's like, it looks like Chrome. Like, it's fine. Like it works. And the big difference is when you type a query normally, as you would in the address bar, let's say, but on the new tab page, whatever you can from the dropdown, choose to go to Google Search if that's what you want. But if you just hit Enter, it's going to go through the AI. And she's like, you know, depending on what I'm doing, like, she's like, she's already picked this up. She's like, I can. I know sometimes I do want a Google search for whatever reason, but sometimes I want. I'm looking for an answer to something, whatever it might be, whatever she's doing. And she's like, yeah, now this works. She's, she's, she likes it and she's just normal. She's normal. She's not a technical person.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's how normal people react. I'm just trying to get my work done. I don't care about the rest.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's like, don't look, don't, don't try to help, but dear God, do not get in the way. Like, just let me do what I'm doing. And I think that's the, that's where arc, I think, failed a lot of people and why they're rethinking things with dia. And when you. That product is, like I said, it's very similar, but it's just not on Windows yet, so it's a little harder to use but. Or, you know, unless you have a Mac, then it's fine. But, but yeah, I think these things, they're interesting. They're, they're half steps, they're not, they're, they're recognizable as browsers, but I think that was part of the agreement. Like, we know no one's going to do this and like, we can't just throw up this thing that's all spiky and weird looking, like it has to look like a browser. Do the browser stuff. It does tabs, it does everything. Like everything you need is it. That all just works. That's. Hate these phrases like table stakes or whatever. It's a browser. Oh. But it does these other things. So I don't know. We'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Mostly provides telemetry to the host company.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to pause for a little bit. There is so much more to talk about, but we need to take it.

[Paul Thurot]

Are we going to talk about how cynical Richard is? Because. My God. No, I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Unbelievable.

[Paul Thurot]

Can you believe this guy? No, it's not troll. No, he's absolutely true. He's right. I mean, he's right.

[Leo Laporte]

When you're right, you're right. Our show today, brought to you by Threat Locker. Oh, I love these guys. Ransomware, it's just killing businesses everywhere, right? I don't have to tell you that Threat Locker actually has tools that work to prevent you from becoming the next victim. ThreatLocker Zero Trust Platform takes a proactive, and this is the key, zero trust, deny by default approach. So every unauthorized action is blocked unless you explicitly authorize it. It's blocked. That works so well to protect you from known and even unknown threats. Zero days. That's why enterprises that can't afford that are mission critical cannot afford to be hit by ransomware. Use Threat locker companies like JetBlue. You're an airline, you can't afford one minute of downtime, let alone a couple of weeks. JetBlue uses Threat Locker or infrastructure plays. The port of Vancouver, just down the road from Richard, uses Threat Locker. Threat Locker shields you from zero day and them from zero day exploits and supply chain attacks and provides you with complete audit trails for compliance. So it's awesome. One of the techniques now that we're seeing more of Steve was talking about this is malvertizing. That's the term they use. And for malvertizing, you need more than just traditional security tools. What's happening is attackers create very convincing fake websites, impersonating popular brands like AI tools, software applications. We were talking yesterday about impersonating commonly used libraries in programming environments. Then they distribute links to this through social media ads and hijacked accounts. They're literally using legitimate ad networks to deliver this malware. And you see the ad, you go, oh, that looks great. You click the link and boom. Anyone who browses on a work system is going to trigger this attack. This is why it's so hard nowadays if your job is to protect the network. Traditional security tools often miss these attacks because they use fileless payloads, they run in memory, they exploit trusted services, they bypass typical filters. You know, your perimeter defenses, but they don't bypass zero trust. Threat Locker's innovative ring fencing technology strengthens endpoint defense. It's very simple, really. It controls what applications, what scripts can access or execute. Right? Which means if you haven't specifically said that malvertising is okay, which you haven't, it ain't getting anywhere. It contains potential threats. Even if malicious ads successfully reach the device, they're not going to be able to do their work. Threat Locker works in every industry. It supports Every environment works on Macs as well as Windows, provides 24.7us based support. So you're never on your own. And as a side effect, but it's a really beneficial one. It enables comprehensive visibility so you have a record of everything that's happening, happened, complete control. Ask Jack Senisap. He's director of IT Infrastructure and Security at Redner's Markets. Another place that really, they don't want to get hit. Nobody wants to get hit by ransomware, right? He says, quote when it comes to Threat Locker, the team stands by the product. Threat Locker's onboarding phase was a very good experience and they were very hands on. Threat Locker was able to help me and guide me to where I am in our environment today and quote quote get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively. Surprisingly cost effectively. I thought, wow, this is a good deal with threat locker. Visit threatlocker.com TWIT get a free 30 day trial. Learn more about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats and Ensure compliance. That's ThreatLocker.com Twitter we thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. ThreatLocker.com Twitter you support us when you go to that address. ThreatLocker.com Twit all right, Richard's back and synchronized for the moment. I'm going to show you because I got the little key working. Let's just see. I hit control. W. Where are we today? So this, the idea was I want to have this as a diary of my travels, right? But let's say today I'm in Madeira Park. Let's see what the weather is where Richard is.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, it's very Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

It is 80 degrees. The high 64, the low partly sunny. Sunset 6:05am Sunrise. Sunset, 8:36pm and the moon is a waning gibbous.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, right. So we were in an Uber last night driving toward the sunset and I was like, oh. I'm like, it looks like the sun setting. I'm like, what time does sunset? And Stephanie's like, I, you know, I'm not really sure. I'm like, oh, this is a question for AI. I could ask AI this thing. So I asked and it was like 5:41, which was the time at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm like, nope, nope, wrong.

[Paul Thurot]

It was like 650.

[Leo Laporte]

So the way I. This does.

[Richard Campbell]

You made it up.

[Leo Laporte]

This queries a open API for a weather system which is open Mateo, it's called or Meteo, but you can use the National Weather Service a variety of. If you have an API key there, variety there's open weather, so it queries and gets it from a reliable source. So you don't have to worry about it. You know, it's accurate. The moon phase was a problem. It couldn't. I don't know, maybe the server wasn't working right or whatever it's supposed to give you that information. It couldn't, but it figured out how to calculate it. It's not as. It's a little rougher. It's good enough for me, and it's been accurate. So it is waxing or waning? Gibbous. We just had a full moon.

[Richard Campbell]

We had orcas swim right by the boathouse while I was away. So I have video clips of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's 8:36. It's the correct sunset time for me. It seems a little. Well, you're farther north. 8:36.

[Richard Campbell]

That's later than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so maybe that is incorrect. Or maybe it's not Madeira park bc Maybe.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Are there other Maduro parks in the world? I didn't put bc.

[Richard Campbell]

See, there are.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, that's. Maybe it's some other material.

[Paul Thurot]

I was just thinking, actually, the actual sunset time was probably 7:50, not 6:50. But whatever. Whatever time it was, it was not the time it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Come on, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on, man. Anyway, I just thought I'd show off my code that I did not write.

[Paul Thurot]

No, but it's great.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's so nice.

[Richard Campbell]

I checked it. It said 836. So I said, for you dollars?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, all right. There you go. And is it 80 degrees this afternoon?

[Richard Campbell]

Easily. Yeah, it's very nice there.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. I mean, that's the one thing that. You know, weather forecasts. There's no authoritative source for the actual forecast. It's all a guess.

[Paul Thurot]

No, right.

[Leo Laporte]

It is a forecast that is local time. Somebody's asking. Yeah, it's local time. Because what it does is it takes the place I looked and it figures out GPS coordinates and then goes by GPS coordinates and gets local time time.

[Paul Thurot]

I think mine did a random number generator and turned it into like a clock format. I don't know what the heck that was, but it was useless anyway. Serious. It raining.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, there's a little more AI news before.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, just a couple of quick things. Two Microsoft things. So Copilot 3D is a feature of Copilot where you can turn a still image into a 3D model.

[Leo Laporte]

How does that work?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, well, Magic computing. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I know how. I mean, but does it work? Well, is More like what I was.

[Paul Thurot]

Never will.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I'm sorry, I should never say never will, but I've not done this and I don't. This. This is eerily reminiscent of that Creators Update nonsense.

[Richard Campbell]

That's where that 3D stuff came from.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's like we have this. We have this stuff around. Can we use this for anything? Put it in Copilot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Copilot will eat anything.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's an experimental tool. At this point, I'm going to. Yeah, I'll map.

[Richard Campbell]

I think they were trying to be important in the 3D printing space, but by the time they got there, it was a solved problem. Right. There's a set of software that everybody uses and they're not interested in changing.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right. They did that whole. What was it, the educators update or.

[Paul Thurot]

No, the creators update. Yeah, they paint 3D and 3D remix. Remember was a website remix 3D, I guess. I don't know. They try. I've never understood anything that they do. All right, let me get rid of that. I almost signed into that thing. And then this one. This is a great example of what the audience is like, too. Microsoft is killing its Lens app. So Lens. Apple Microsoft Lens started as Office Lens. It was for Windows Phone. That's how far back that is. But within a year, they brought a version to Android and iOS, renamed it at some point to Microsoft Lens. The key use case for me for this was to photograph a receipt. Like when you were doing business travel and you wanted to send in the expense because you could just take it. You know, it's sitting there on whatever surface. You take a picture, it's like at an angle and. And it straightens it out. Makes it perfect.

[Richard Campbell]

Flattens it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's really neat.

[Richard Campbell]

Makes it very legible. I've done it on whiteboards. And it even got rid of a light bloom off the whiteboard.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

See, this was a piece of software.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Back in the day. I remember I was in a meeting, I think it was actually at Microsoft on campus. But whatever it was, someone. They're drawing on the whiteboard and some guy's like, this is why I have a tablet PC. I can recreate the whiteboard experience. And I was like, oh, that's of kind. Great click. You know, like, you keep drawing there, Rembrandt. I'm sure that's smart. Yeah, I think, like, just. It was the OCR stuff, you know, it could take. It would take the text, bring it in, you know, it was nice. So this functionality is pretty much all available in the Copilot app or the Copilot Microsoft 365 Copilot app. So they're going to just consolidate it down. But.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's also part of a push by Satya to reduce retire out of date software.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

As much as it annoys us, it's even worse. They were keeping a lot of this stuff around.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. For far too long. Yep. Yeah. A lot of fans of this app though. I mean. And I think I've heard from all of them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

So that's good. Curious about learning new way to do it. But this one. So GitHub is a. Am I right? A wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft but it's independently operated.

[Leo Laporte]

Not so much. Not so fast, Paulie.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like the mom and pop of software development shops on the Internet. I've made the case. Microsoft's good steward. Blah, blah, blah. Whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Thomas Demke took over from Nat Friedman back in the day. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

And Nat Friedman went where.

[Richard Campbell]

Went off to an AI startup.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

A while ago.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Not a big company that we've all heard of, but.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. And it went off to make something new. But he. So I mean he got. He was part of the Xamarin acquisition. He formed created Xamarin in the first place with. With Miguel and they both joined Microsoft but they went immediately different directions inside of Microsoft.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Miguel went off in the distinguished engineer path and dealt with a bunch of interesting things. Eventually got frustrated and left and Nat went.

[Paul Thurot]

Surprised he last came.

[Richard Campbell]

I did too. Matt went down the VP path and was involved really on the Azure DevOps side. Like those kinds of things.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And then as Brian Harry stepped away for a leave which is just about the time that they bought GitHub and then NAT was installed as the CEO down there reporting up to Julia Lucent through Dev Div. And then when Nat moved on.

[Paul Thurot]

That's an important point by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

So it is.

[Paul Thurot]

GitHub, you know, independent in whatever ways. But the CEO reported to someone from Dev Div.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, the head of DevDev, the VP.

[Paul Thurot]

So the person who replaced Nat is Thomas Demke. Is the guy who's leaving or he'll be leaving later this year. And yeah, there's some troubling language in this announcement. One of them is we have decided not to replace him. They're not going to have a CEO of GitHub apparently. I guess AI will be the CEO of GitHub or what's happening.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, their director of operations should be the number two is now reporting up Through Ash, who's the head of ops for AI under J. Perfect.

[Paul Thurot]

Which is the new organization.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the new Core AI which also owns DevDiv.

[Paul Thurot]

So there's no way to make sense of this, but I'll do my best. About a year and a half ago, Microsoft hired Suleiman. What's his first name?

[Richard Campbell]

Mustafa.

[Paul Thurot]

Mustafa Suleiman. Away from. I'm losing my mind with all these AI company names. I must have. Doesn't matter. Anyway. And brought most of the team with him. What the. What the. Is the name of the company. Anyway, started what was described as a new AI. Microsoft AI organization that was kind of outside of other stuff, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it was the goal was Satch's first attempt at how to do consumer AI. Because we suck at consumer AI.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

And basically gutted DeepMind to do this. Took all the.

[Paul Thurot]

DeepMind was like an Aqua Hire thing. The interesting. Well, one of the many interesting things there was the Sam Altman stuff had just happened at OpenAI and there was that moment where Microsoft was like, we have invested tens.

[Richard Campbell]

When we saw Dark Satchel.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. And that's when this started. Right. And so the first big overt move was Mustafa Suleiman and what's called Microsoft AI in October of last year. So six months later, they hired Jay again. I'm terrible at these names. What's the guy's name? Eric. Yeah, Eric. So he is. He looks like a little mini Sacha. He came, I believe from Meta.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. He was CEO of a company called. Called Lovelace, I think.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that sounds.

[Richard Campbell]

Or Laceworks. Laceworks, which was a security company that failed brutally.

[Paul Thurot]

And he's, you know, Microsoft since this time has engaged in the kind of activities, you know, MET has been accused of where this. Throwing a lot of money, like big money at AI experts from different companies. They've apparently hired a bunch of people from like Google D mind, actually. But at that time, anyway, they hired him and that's this another new AI organization. Which is what? AI Core.

[Richard Campbell]

Core AI.

[Paul Thurot]

Core AI. So that's the part of the company that GitHub is now under. So it used to be under Dev Div.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, Dev Div is in core AI as well.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. But now it's okay. So now.

[Richard Campbell]

So my. My guess here is that they told Thomas Demke he'd now be reporting to Jay and he said how about no?

[Paul Thurot]

Interesting. I don't. That's curious. I'm curious why he would even feel strongly about that. That.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, here's the logical thing. You can. You can reasonably hang Your hat on. I was the CEO when we created GitHub Co Pilot. I want my billion dollars, please. And he's basically said point blank, I'm going to go set up a startup.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

So things are going the way you like you want to do, you're thinking about something else and it's like there's. I would argue it's almost too late to set up an AI startup now. Like, we're kind of at the end of that. This would be the last chance. He's probably waited a bit too long.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, what my sense of it, maybe the way I read it was Microsoft is absorbing GitHub into their larger.

[Richard Campbell]

They want one overall AI strategy, or.

[Paul Thurot]

As we would describe it, the blob from the movie. The blob that just. It grows bigger as it absorbs everything around it, that kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you have that classic crazy belief that if I pile enough stuff in the heap, maybe it'll turn into something.

[Paul Thurot]

Something. Oh, man. That was part of the deterministic conversation, which is one of the weirdisms of AI, which is you ask it a question, it gives you an answer, and you ask it again, it gives you a different answer because it's never the same. I mean, hopefully it's in the ballpark or something, but it's never exactly the same. It's not like, oh, I've answered this. This is the answer. It's like it works on it every single time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, see, there was a lot. In the early days of LLMs, there was a couple of papers that really focused on this idea of if we just get the data set big enough, it'll get really great. And then as we actually got the data set big enough, what we found out is there's just too many symmetrical probabilities. And so you can get all kinds of results. Like there's not enough granularity in the probability stack to actually get that. And so now we're kind of pushing the other way and getting into much more specific sets of data so that it's very consistent on its specialty. A series of smaller LLMs maybe orchestrated.

[Paul Thurot]

Together by something that grounded in whatever data set. And that makes. Yeah, that. That tends to be a good way to.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is also tends, you know, tends to be how technology is mature. You grow, grow, grow. Okay, this is a bit too big now. You refine and we seem to be getting into this refining point.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So, yeah. So in your view, Richard, did Microsoft just absorb GitHub? Because that is what I've.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that's the intent. We'll see what happens. A, they're down in the Silicon Valley. They're not in Seattle or Redmond. B, they have been, I'm not going to say a thorn in the side, but they're very much aware that they aren't all Microsoft. Right. That they're part of the larger open source community, that there's huge. A number of other communities that are tightly associated with them, that many perceive Microsoft as a threat and that hands off, like putting Nat Friedman in in the first place was all about because he was also from the Valley, keeping that same culture in place.

[Paul Thurot]

And Dem key was background and.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, and Demke was hockey app. He was also from that area. Like that's the way things have been now nominally. So is Jay.

[Paul Thurot]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

But I don't know that anybody feels that way about Jay.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like he's kind of an unknown, frankly.

[Richard Campbell]

But I, what I'm hearing is he's hired a lot of his meta buddies and they're trying to do meta things inside of the company and folks are like. Because those guys are wildly successful, I would.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, you could argue what Microsoft needs is more tech bros.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean there you go.

[Paul Thurot]

You could, but that would be stupid.

[Richard Campbell]

You know what this Redman area needs? A little more val.

[Paul Thurot]

More, bro. Yeah, we need more bro.

[Richard Campbell]

There we go.

[Paul Thurot]

Extra bro. We got some more flip flops up here.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Anyway, okay. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know what to think of this personally.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I'm, I, I have held my judgment on Jay because I did feel like devniv needed a shake up and the fact that they were going to focus it on around AI to do that, fine. But in the end we needed to move forward on some things that weren't happening. And maybe this is the way to move it forward. I, I have a sneaky suspicion he's. He's feeling the fire hose right now is the polite term because. Because he's been dealing with companies who do one thing or maybe five things.

[Paul Thurot]

Microsoft is a multi headed hydra of.

[Richard Campbell]

Welcome to the 200 Things. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

I can't even imagine.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's part of the problem. Right. One of the ways that Microsoft has moved so quickly in the cloud is to give their teams an awful lot of freedom to build things. The byproduct of that is they've all built them differently. And now as you expect reliability from the cloud, they're conflicting with each other. And so there needs to be more governance. They need to reign things in and and the, you know, Jay also has that error bottom of, he's the heavyweight that's going to straighten stuff out. I just don't know he's in the right job. Like, I would have been really interested to see that guy own the Azure infrastructure problem, not the AI problem.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That, you know, it's not, it's not up to me. And they didn't now ask.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Okay, well, we'll see what happens there. I think most people, even people that don't trust Microsoft, would say they've done a good job with GitHub so far.

[Richard Campbell]

By staying hands off. So now that they're not going to, by all accounts, what does this mean?

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I think it's worth taking a breath and watching what happens rather than just hauling all your stuff and running off the GitLab, which of course still runs on Azure anyway, but whatever.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right. Okay. This is not a big deal, but I mentioned it because I have one of these computers and I'm glad to see this happen, finally. So Surface Laptop 7, which is the, the year ago Surface laptop. Right. The first gen Snapdragon X whatever, and Surface Pro 11, which is essentially the same computer but in a different body, get the same firmware updates, just like, like 24, 25 H2, get the same monthly updates or whatever. And this one is. I don't have it here in front of me. This is a hard thing to describe, but there's a battery saver feature that's in Windows 11. You'll never see it because it doesn't get exposed in Settings anywhere and you can't configure it. But if your computer supports it, the OEM that makes it will have their own software that provides some interface to it. And in the Microsoft world, the Surface interface app was that app. And so if you went into the Surface app, you may or may not see something called, I think it's called Smart Power or Smart Battery or whatever the battery saver or whatever the term is, and you don't see it all the time. So it's just, it's a weird feature. So you get a brand new Surface laptop, maybe in my case, use it for a month, this feature is not there. But then one day you've used it enough and it says, all right, we got some data here. We know how you're using the computer. We're going to turn this thing on and you can't do anything about it. All you can do is turn it off temporarily. And so what it does is it's like Intelligence Charging, Intelligent charging. So if you're in a hotel and you're going to fly at 4 o' clock in the morning the next day, you do not want intelligent charging. You want charge.

[Richard Campbell]

You want a full battery.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. You don't want it to think about it, you want it just to do it. And if you had a Surface and you were thinking about that, you could go into the app and say, today I'm turning it off and it would be okay today and would go back to the way it was before. Let's. So they just change that so that you have three choices now. And so it can do that, it can do nothing or it can always charge to 80% which for some reason is the accepted industry standard for.

[Richard Campbell]

This is one of. This almost feels like fallout from EVs, right? That hey, batteries last a lot longer if you only charge them 80%.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep. So you can now as an individual determine what you want. So basically what they did was they had this stupid Windows 11 feature and now they're not using it anymore. Stupid. So good. So that's good. Okay, I guess we're ready for games.

[Richard Campbell]

We're not going to talk about the, the Game Assist in, in Edge and just how much love I'm getting on the IP spaces for this.

[Paul Thurot]

God, I mean, this would be the time we could throw it into the. Because it's kind of game related.

[Richard Campbell]

It is game related.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. So what Richard is describing as a. The type of thing we've seen in this space with Microsoft for a long, long time. One of the earliest versions of this to me was when they put IIS in early. I think it was the first or second version into a feature pack for Windows NT 4.0.

[Richard Campbell]

The NT option pack.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, option pack. And you had to get Internet Explorer. Sorry. So you get this bulletproof, bulletproof operating system and we're going to screw it up bad. And so what's the latest? What's happening with G?

[Richard Campbell]

So Game Assist is deployed as part of an Edge update and it deployed to anywhere that Edge exists, including like domain controller PCs running server 2022.

[Paul Thurot]

But why do you hate gaming so much?

[Richard Campbell]

Don't do a lot of gaming on my domain controller. But the real issue is that not only is it installed automatically with the Edge update, which happens automatically, but it runs automatically. And on many of these locked down machines, which is what you normally do with the domain controller, it crashes automatically. And then your SIEM software, your security management software notices that you have a piece of software repeatedly crashing on servers that wasn't there before and flags it as malware, which actually it is. So then you go and say, well, where the hell did this come from? And you uninstall it and guess what happens next week? Edge updates again and puts it back.

[Paul Thurot]

Puts it back.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So they're a little growly and this was going on for about two months now.

[Paul Thurot]

That is amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

It's really a thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yay Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay, we win again.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, they try. I don't. Do they try? I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but I mean, ultimately the answer is you can't run Edge on a server anymore until they fix this. Right. And that creates a whole other host of problems.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, often those are the machines that still. They're not only running, still running Edge, but they're running Edge in IE9 mode. Right. They set the flags to support some internal piece of software that still doesn't work in conventional browser configuration. Like heaven help them, they're running it in IE7 mode. But that's possible. So you really can't get it out.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Apparently if you actually truly run core editions of 2025, which basically is I. Is UX less, it's not a problem.

[Paul Thurot]

There because you don't. Yeah. So I know Microsoft well enough to know exactly how this is going to play out. Microso later this year we'll create something called Microsoft Edge and Edge Mode. And Edge and Edge Mode will not do any of those end user things. It will just provide like a really basic browser. And then as soon as they announce this, because it's only going to be for servers and it's only going to be for public facing servers, especially whatever they're going to be people like us, people watching the show are like, oh, that's the version of Edge I want. And it's like, I mean it's not.

[Richard Campbell]

That hard to detect, hey, this is server version of, of the os. I should just not install this piece on Edge.

[Paul Thurot]

Again, you speak logic. And I don't understand why because it's just not the world we live in. But yeah, no, you're right. I mean, you're right. It's. This is something that never should have happened. So. No, sure, they'll get there. Or am I. I don't know. Okay, so we did a bunch of writing stuff. You know, past couple weeks there's probably more coming. But in the past week the big one was Sony. And I only pay attention to, you know, not so much to their life insurance company, but to the video game stuff they do. So Sony Sold.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's actually their money made.

[Paul Thurot]

A lot of their revenue comes out of life insurance. Yeah, it's a bizarre company. But, but you know, they have media stuff, right? They have music and movies and whatever, but I don't really care about anything but video games in this case. So 2.5 million PS5s in the quarter, they've now sold over 80 million. Put this in perspective. The way they say it is like it's on a faster pace than the PS4, but the PS4 sold, I think it was 123 something like that, or 120 something somewhere. 115, 20. Like they're probably never going to get there per se. But the Xbox 360 and the PS3, which were pretty much neck and neck for most of that generation, both sold somewhere in the 84, 88 million units. So yeah, it's probably going to go by that. And honestly given, you know, the pandemic launch and component shortages and yada yada yada, it's super expensive, it's doing pretty good. The problem is as I looked into this, you know, of course we know Nintendo is getting very close to the original Switch being like the best selling console of all time. They'll probably cost cross that milestone sometime this year here. How's Microsoft doing? And it's like you never see everything's an Xbox in that sense they're doing great, but if you actually look at Xboxes, they're not doing great. So the estimate now, and this is based on some combination of private and public data, is that full generation Xbox series X and S has sold somewhere in the 20 million units. So 21 to 29 million units, which is low, which is bad. And, and I think I made this comment in fact. Yeah, I did, I was talking about they finally provided some numbers on revenues and if you went back far enough you could get down to zero, you know, like, you know, because now we, now that we have a number, we can go back and look at, you know, this quarter, it's up this six, you know, percent and we can just go back in time and see where we're at. Right. It's hard to do this with Xbox because we never got a hard number. They stopped doing hard numbers in the Xbox one generation. But the sheer number of quarters in a row where it's been like a double digit decline in revenue in hardware is astonishing. I don't even understand how it could keep going like this. Like at some point you just did zero and we sold zero. So we're doing Pretty good, You know, like it's not. But that's not what happens. It's like 22%, 40%, you know, 13%, 22%. Like it. It's bizarre to me. Yeah. So 21, we'll call it 25 million ish somewhere in there. 25, 30, if you want to be, you know, give them the benefit of the doubt. That's not great. You know, like, this is the worst ever, really.

[Richard Campbell]

And there's no sign of a new one because they basically want to get out of the hardware biz.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. But we do have two very interesting Windows 11 Arnhem related Xbox gaming stories that are not just good news, but maybe given the stuff we've talked about with coming consoles, whatever might point to that future. Right. This notion that they really, really, really want to get this stuff on arm, you know, one is. One just happened. So this is kind of interesting. Like, literally right before the show, Microsoft announced something that I was actually just struggling with over the weekend, which is that if you have a Windows on ARM laptop, like a Copilot Plus PC running SnapDrago processor, the Xbox app is there. And if you don't have Xbox Game Pass ultimate, which is the version that gives you the PC side and the console side, but also the game streaming side, it doesn't, this app doesn't do anything. There's nothing there. Like, all you can do is stream games over the Internet. And so my argument there was always like, I don't understand this. There, there are games that do run okay on Windows 11 RM. Why wouldn't it just show you the game so that it knows would maybe run or whatever, at least give you the option. Because if you, you know, if you're on a normal x64 PC and you go into the Xbox app, what it's supposed to do is say, like, you're looking at Call of Duty maybe. And it's like this app or this game will run on your computer, you know, that kind of thing. Like they, they have this kind of data. Like they, they know. So I never understood why they just never made it available. Right. And so over the weekend I wanted to download the thing that will be my eventual app pick. So I won't discuss that quite yet. But there's no reason this shouldn't run on arm and it's not in the Xbox app, of course, because they just don't put that stuff there. And I went to the store and I'm like, maybe I can get it here. And nope, doesn't show up because they're filtering the view. But then today, literally two days later, they announced they're bringing game downloading to the Xbox app on Windows 11 on ARM. And I actually already have it. So I still. You have to sign into the. You download the. I don't have it on this computer. I keep doing this, the Xbox Insider app from the store. You, if you, if you're not signed into this already, you can go in through the various programs you can maybe join and one of them is the PC beta. And when you sign into that, you go to the store, check for updates, you get a new version of the Xbox app and it will give you this kind of pre release version of the Xbox app. And I looked, I, like I said, I think it was two days ago, three days ago max for the. This game not there. I brought it up today and it came right up. It's there. Although not all of them I haven't looked at thoroughly. But a lot of the games that I have available to me through Game Pass, or maybe they're in my library because I purchased them, are now there. And that's good stuff. Like this is an important step. Again, like I can't quite understand why this wasn't there a year ago, but this is a big deal and it's really good. So I'm going to be writing more about this after I can compare what's not there. You know, I'm kind of curious. Like I'm pretty sure like Call of Duty, I probably couldn't put that on my, my base level, you know, Snapdragon X laptop over here. But it'd be kind of amazing if I could actually. But someday, someday. The other one was, is a software incompatibility. So again, about a year ago, like one of the big complaints about Snapdragon X and Windows 11 on ARM was that a lot of games wouldn't play because they require this anti cheat software which is very x64 specific and somehow ring zero. Yeah, right. It's tied at a very low level to that architecture. And so Epic Games makes the easy anti cheat software. That's you know, Fortnite obviously, but a bunch of third party software as well. And I think it was back in March they and Qualcomm said we're, you know, we're partnering, we're going to bring this there and Fortnite will be the first game like when we get this going, we're going to do it. And yesterday they announced it's available. So not Fortnite. Fortnite's not there. But the software. So if you're developing it literally involves just upgrading to the latest version of two system components that are part of this easy anti cheat system. And you get this instant compatibility with Snapdragon X Windows 11 on ARM. So that, that's big that both those things are really big.

[Richard Campbell]

So that's really, it's a milestone that makes gaming. The big complaint on ARM was gaming. So that probably should deal with a bunch of it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Still should recompile the apps for arm.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. And that's part of why I'm kind of curious what's going on the Xbox app because I've downloaded a couple things already and I'm going to do some more and it's like, okay, so this stuff was never available and now it's just there. And the one thing I've tried before the show at the one time I had the chance to do because again it just happened like ran instantly and perfectly and is fine. And it's like, okay, why did we have this a year ago like this? It seems like it was there, but I. So yeah, I don't know if there.

[Richard Campbell]

Was a huge piece of. A huge lift of code or not or.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I literally have no idea.

[Richard Campbell]

Had to actually get those guys to focus long enough to go, oh, just fix this and this.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. But I do think like, you know, we've talked about this. I think, I think this is tied to the future of the Xbox, which is, you know, kind of a Windows PC looking thing but. But is also a simpler, more reliable Windows PC thing which is gonna be a lot easier to do on an arm. And if you wanna do portable devices and they do, making the platform ARM is the best thing you could possibly do across the board. But obviously efficiency, battery life, whatever, just general reliability. Smart. So we'll see. But anyway, these are big steps and they're really, really positive news. So that's good. Speaking of Fortnite, Fortnite is also coming to the iPhone in Australia apparently because Apple and in this case Google keep losing all their Monopoly trials. And they're like, yeah, no, this is a legal monopoly. You're gonna have to open up the store. So they're like, yeah, we're bringing, we're gonna bring the Epic Games Store to the iPhone there. And as they're doing, it's in Europe, it's gonna be the United States any second now again. And so that, you know, good for them. I guess. That's good. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I wonder how much VPN action they're gonna get.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Well that's the thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Like, like as this gets chipped away in different, you know, regions. It's like at some point, are we just gonna just do this? Can we just do this?

[Richard Campbell]

This feels like the unraveling of music too.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, like it's a 99 cent song effect. It's like bit by bit, it's just sort of on dissembles and it all seems silly in the end.

[Paul Thurot]

It's always seems silly to me. I've never understood how this has lasted.

[Leo Laporte]

So long, but it all seems silly at the end. You're so world weary.

[Paul Thurot]

That'S what happens.

[Richard Campbell]

It seems familiar, right? It's like, oh yeah, yeah, we've done this before. We've done this before.

[Leo Laporte]

This is silly in the end.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, in the end all we wanted was Steam. We didn't want anything else.

[Paul Thurot]

My tombstone's just going to say I have made a huge mistake, which would probably be the cause of my demise, whatever that is. And then what else we got? Oh yeah. So this is kind of odd, it's kind of hard to explain in a way, but the Xbox app, which is like the Xbox dashboard on the console, right. When you think about it, it's kind of a front end to your games or whatever. Not they're making a change to both where if you're again, this is Xbox Insiders for now, but it will be eventually everyone. I think this is actually related to the Windows and ARM thing, right. That they're opening up the number of games you're going to see on wherever you are. Right. And so if you go to on the console there's a My games interface and my games and apps, I guess. And it shows you can filter games apps and then it shows you everything that's in your library. And your library could be those things you bought bought literally obviously the things you were installed in the console. But if you're on Game pass, all your game pass stuff. And so they're going to start showing the things you get for free with Xbox which is like game trials or demos or you know, these. It's like the stuff that would have been like you could have gone and found in the store, but there was no real central place for it. Like they're just going to add it to this. So kind of bulking up the look of the library would have whatever just fine. And then I guess we'll end it on two negative notes. I guess we're not quite done with the layoff, slash game studio cancellation stuff because there is a report I Don't know that Microsoft has confirmed this, but the game contraband was one of the bigger Xbox exclusives that we were expecting and has apparently been paused the development of this title. So I, I don't know if that means like when intel pauses construction of a data center in Ohio that I think we all know they're never actually going to build, there's a bunch of like construction guys walking around on a bunch of concrete with rebar sticking out of it or something. That's how I imagine what they're doing. I don't know what that means, but I don't know. I don't know if this is going to happen or not. But again, they haven't confirmed it, but this is Avalanche Studios and these guys made big game. They had just cause series of games.

[Richard Campbell]

Just cause these guys might actually be behind for a reason. Right. There's. They're legitimate reasons to cancel game too.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This seems a bit random. So it might be this one milestones again and you know we're gonna let this go.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean that we still have like 40 games in development. Don't worry, everything's fine. Nothing to see here. Speaking of nothing to see here. There was a 2 second time about two years ago when we started talking about like gaming Chromebooks for some reason. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

And you know, it's like both guys were really excited.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's like a paper airplane is sort of like a model airplane. So at some point, I think it was two, three, almost two years ago now, they made available something called, well, Steam for Chromebook, which was always in beta. It never came out of beta. It's never coming out of beta. They're going to get rid of it. So I guess they're not doing it. And I would assume I shouldn't assume this. Maybe I'm wrong. Actually I was going to say it must be streaming, but I guess it isn't because if you have a good enough Chromebook, you basically have a Linux box here. And so Steam makes that proton compatibility layer so you can play Windows games on Steam Deck. This should work on a Chromebook.

[Richard Campbell]

Even if it was a subset, you could at least play Plants versus Zombies.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like it doesn't have to be.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean but it could be like Half Life 2.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. I mean this game's 25 years old or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Like Chromebook's got plenty of clout but I imagine they couldn't get enough game houses interested in doing a cross compile and so it's just like we're not going to be able to fill the catalog out. We're wasting our time.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's too bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Steam guys make a lot of money and they run a very flat, flat system where. Yes, pretty much the folks that are working there decide what they're going to work on.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And so. And if they could see. And in the end, they all get compensated by how well the company does. If they couldn't see a way for Chromebooks to make the money, they're not going to do it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. There was a random video interview with Gabe Newell, who is the, I guess, CEO or whatever, but they don't really have title. One of the founders anyway. And he's a major domo. Yes. There you go. He's an enigma. Enigmatic kind of guy, I think, is what I would say.

[Richard Campbell]

You know what he is? He's the billionaire you want. Yeah. He's made a huge amount of money. He's completely changed the industry and he doesn't spout off.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. He's. He's like what Brian Wilson was like. Minus the drug problem, I guess. Like I. You know, he walks around in a bathrobe all the time and he owns super yachts and he go scuba diving. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

But anyway, all will hope that. That billionaires were like Gabe Newell.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, just sticks to his knitting and lives happily ever after.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, but. Finished. Half Life three. But. But yes. Other than that. Let's not get crazy now. Other than that. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Although there's new rumors again.

[Paul Thurot]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

About What? Half Life 3.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I know, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a great franchise. Right. And now you're really thinking about. About part three of Half Life 2, which they made very clear they're never going to make. But A Half Life 3 coming off of Alex would be a possible.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like you. You can't wait.

[Richard Campbell]

I'd play it in a second.

[Paul Thurot]

I would, too, right now. I want. I want it soon.

[Richard Campbell]

That first scene coming out of the tunnels in Half Life 2, suddenly into the open world. And it's beautifully oppressive.

[Paul Thurot]

I just showed it to my wife because when they did the. Whatever anniversary edition was like this thing as good today as it was when I first came out. And it just does such a world building, like, nonchalantly. You immediately understand this world from just the voiceovers and what's going on. And you see the guy kind of abusing one of the citizens and you go through the, like. Like five minutes into the game, you're like, I completely understand this world. Yeah, like, it's. It's. It is. I. I almost said masterclass. I hate that. That's another term I can't stand. But. But it is a masterclass. It was a storytelling fiction. Like. Like just excellence. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And it, you know, you are the. You're Gordon Freeman. You've been frozen and then brought back to deal with a new world. And you need to understand that new world immediately. And they nailed it. And then shortly after that, you're spiked with a stun rod.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, yeah, exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

It's great. It's really. It's just really good.

[Richard Campbell]

It's really fantastic.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Anyway, Half Life three. Seriously, can we get on the screen?

[Richard Campbell]

Please, please, please, please?

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, I have some more game stuff in the.

[Richard Campbell]

In the back of the book.

[Paul Thurot]

We'll get there.

[Richard Campbell]

All we need is a break. We could have a break.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you want a break?

[Paul Thurot]

What the hell is to break?

[Leo Laporte]

All right. You got through that thing all the way. I. I thought. I thought I had a minute or two left. Okay, good.

[Paul Thurot]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

It seemed like there were a lot of things more, and you just kind of went right through them. Okay, good. Okay, okay. Let me gather myself.

[Paul Thurot]

Not actively trying to get through it. I.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me gather my wits about me.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's gird your loins.

[Leo Laporte]

My loins have been girded the whole show. Are you kidding? You think I'd come to this show with ungirded loins? I'm not insane, man. This is the moment on the show where we beg for money. I don't do the PBS beg thing. Although maybe I should. They seems to be very successful for them. They take. Tell me they get about 4 to 5% of their audience as members, which is true. I mean, I, you know, I support them. I'm a member of my local PBS station. I watch and I support them. Give them five bucks a month. We don't. I don't want to beg. I don't want to beg. And, you know, maybe that's why we only have about 2% of our audience as club members. Maybe if I just told you how great the membership is now, it is a little more expensive. 10 bucks a month. Of course, you can get many shows for that. Not just Windows Weekly, all of our other shows, plus a lot of shows we only do in the club. Twit, discord, things like all the keynotes now, Microsoft's Ignite build, the Made My Google is coming up in a couple of weeks, their Pixel 10 announcement, Apple announcements, all of those are in the club. Only to avoid Takedowns. We also do some special programming. Our AI users group. Group home Theater Geeks. Paul does a great Hands on Windows. We have Hands on Apple. The photo segment with Chris Marquardt, Stacy's Book Club. Micah's Creative crafting Corner, which is so much fun. I can go on. I mean we try to make it fun to be in the club and I think the Discord is a great place to hang out. It's my favorite social network because it's smart people, right? Talking about interesting things. Not just our shows, but all the things geeks are interesting. Great place to go for information. 10 bucks a month. The other thing that I, you know, I think is a kind of subtle benefit is it's a vote. It's a vote for this content. If you like what we're doing and you want us to keep doing it. Right now, 25% of our operating expenses are paid by you club members. And I suspect that percentage is going to go up not because we're going to get more club members necessarily, but because it's getting tougher in the current economy to get advertisers expensive excited. So that means if you like this show, if you want our shows to continue, if you want new programming designed just for you, cast your vote by joining the club. Twit TV Club twit. There's a two week free trial. There are family memberships, there are enterprise memberships and of course there's the monthly and yearly membership for individuals. That's you. If you're not a member, I bet you of you. All right. See, I did it. I begged. Go to Twit TV Club twit. We would like to have you in the club and thank you in advance. Now we go to the much awaited, vaunted beloved Back of the Book. And when we do the Back of the Book, there's no better person to get back in the Book and begin the Back of the book. The Mr. Back of the Book himself.

[Paul Thurot]

You're losing me, man. Hey, Paulie, how you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

What's up?

[Paul Thurot]

25 years ago, a small group of business and government leaders met in Washington D.C. they envisioned the creation of an independent nonprofit organization with a mission to help people, businesses and government mitigate the growing threat of cyber attacks. Today, the center for Internet Security embodies that vision. For 25 years at worked with a global community of IT and cybersecurity experts to develop the CIS benchmarks and CIS critical security controls. These proven security best practices defend against common cyber threats and streamline compliance with industry frameworks, regulations and standards. Today, CIS provides cybersecurity services, threat intelligence and critical resources to help public and private sector organizations alike strengthen their Cyber defenses. Visit cisecurity.org today. That's the letters cisecurity.org to find out how CIS can help your organization as we create confidence in the connected world. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips. Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

With their new Family Freedom offer offer. That's not the itinerary we're following.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four.

[Leo Laporte]

New phones on the house.

[Paul Thurot]

Bon voyage.

[Leo Laporte]

Introducing Family Freedom.

[Paul Thurot]

Our lowest cost will switch our biggest.

[Leo Laporte]

Family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or.

[Paul Thurot]

Learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 8 $29.99 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile. So as you mentioned earlier, my daughter graduated from college this past weekend. So the family got together in North Carolina and my son told us this story which I just have to relate because it's so beautiful. But they had a power outage where he lives, so he's deaf and his roommates are deaf and they have, you know, they have cochlear implants. So they have these little batteries and they, you know, you got to keep these things charged. And they were trying to figure out like, where can we go to get our stuff charged up. And somehow they found out they could go to the library, which is a place. We brought Mark a bunch when he was a kid. A lot. He was there a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Love the library. Library. Love it.

[Paul Thurot]

Apparently he has no idea what a library is, so he went to the library. And they're charging their things for free, Right? Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Library.

[Paul Thurot]

And they're. Because they have time to kill. So looking around like, look at this place.

[Leo Laporte]

It's got books and stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

So he's. Mark's looking around the library and he's like, this place is pretty cool. I wonder if I could. He goes up to the desk, this little old lady with the glasses on the chain, right? And he says, hey, how much does it cost to get a library card? I love him. She's like. She's like, do you live in. I think it's Marietta or whatever the name of the town is. And he goes, yep. He goes, well, good news. It's free. And he's like, nice, I'm gonna get a library card. And then he says, how much does it take to cost to take out a book? And this is a quote from the woman. She said, bless your little soul. I was like, you've been to a library.

[Leo Laporte]

You know how they work.

[Paul Thurot]

So here's the thing. This was a reminder a. Of how idiotic anyone that comes from me is, but also that, you know, obviously the world's changed a lot. Like, I used to live in libraries when I was a kid, but libraries, they're still there. They've had to. Yeah, they've had to kind of change their. What they do. Libraries have amazing things in. At least in my area. Some libraries, like, you can go and borrow, like, a drill or a hammer. If you don't have tools, they'll just let you take these things. If you want to try a product, like a food processor or something, or like an air fryer, rather, they'll let you take one and go try it at home. And if you like it, you can go buy it at Amazon or whatever. But they also have all this digital stuff. And so, for example, in the United States, this is US Specific, I'm sorry, but there's a service called Libby, which is overdrive, where you get free audiobooks through your library. So I went to the library here a couple years ago, got a card, and now you can get free auto books. You can get free. They have periodicals in there. It's like, this is just free. You should just do this. If you live in the United States, you probably live near a library still there. You might be surprised. Maybe you probably grew up on one like I did. I don't know. But these things are still around, and they're way better than they used to be. Like, they were always awesome. They were always a. About books to me, you know, at the time. But there's a whole thing going on there. They played. I was looking at, like, on the. In the car. Right here is looking at our library locally. Like, they. They play D and D there. They have reading clubs, obviously. They have authors that come and give speeches and things. And there's a whole thing. There's like a. It's awesome. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

So awesome.

[Paul Thurot]

So I just, you know, my son reminded me that despite the fact that he should know exactly what a library is, he has no idea. Yeah. If you're out there and you're like, I haven't even thought about the library. Think about it. I would just go take a look. I think you'd be surprised.

[Richard Campbell]

Keith in the Discord hit on the important part. And the library has air conditioning.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. Oh, yes, yes. It is delightfully cool in the summer, which was my big time at the library, actually, when I was a kid, because I always did their little reading program thing where you would get a little sticker for every book you read or whatever and had to read whatever. Number 10 or so, something. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

We belonged when I was a kid in Providence, Rhode island, to a library. It was kind. It was a private library. I think you had to pay for it. It was where Edgar Allan Poe had hung out.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

It's called the athenum.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It was this beautiful library and they had a children's room. But I very quickly discovered that I liked some other books that weren't in the children's room. I would go to the reading room. I read the entire Count of Monte Cristo, which is like three volumes.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Practically without leaving the line.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, they used to do things like they would have like model train magazines, you know, like stuff I'd never seen before.

[Leo Laporte]

Periodical sections. So great.

[Paul Thurot]

Like the hardcover versions of the Lord of the Rings where there's like a fold up map in the back. And I was like, oh, my God, look at this thing. Like, I just, you know, I. I live for the library.

[Leo Laporte]

When I was a kid. So there's Libby and there's another one. Hoopla.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, what's the other one?

[Leo Laporte]

I think is the name of it. But anyway, you check your library. They may both. And for audiobooks, it's fantastic because my library here in sonoma county has 30,000 titles. And many libraries have interlibrary loans.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So even if your library didn't have.

[Paul Thurot]

It, here's a fun tip from my wife, which is like, she does this a lot for ebooks, like for Kindle books or whatever there. And she won't be able to read the book in the amount of time she has. So she just like puts her Kindle offline so they can't take it back. Then she finishes it and she sends it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's sneaky. They do, because they have deals with publishers. They have a limited number of issues. Look at this. I Could subscribe to New Yorker for free.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So someone else might be watching it or something, but when they're done, like, then you can read it. You know, like, it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a library.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's like the way it always was.

[Leo Laporte]

Even with digital.

[Paul Thurot]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think you'd be crazy even if you have.

[Paul Thurot]

I think it would be shocked, like, if you don't know. Know this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And then you actually go, look. I think you'd be shocked. And it's not just this stuff. Like, this is electronic. Whatever. It's great. It's awesome. I don't mean anything, but, you know, like I said we could. I said you don't rent, you don't pay for it. They give you an air dryer, you bring it home, you use it.

[Leo Laporte]

Fryer. Although to be fair, that's about the same thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Could be a hairdryer. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just in a different container.

[Paul Thurot]

August in Phoenix. But.

[Leo Laporte]

But, yeah, sorry.

[Paul Thurot]

And then you bring it back and if you want one, you just go buy it. Like, I. I love it. I love. The whole tool thing is amazing too, because, like, this is like, a lot of people will buy tools, like, when they need it for some job, and then they never use it again. Like they have some random Allen wrench set or whatever the heck it is. And like, this is a way better way to do this. It's like, you know, like, when we go back to Mexico, I. We're gonna. I have to drill a hole in the wall. And so, like, one of the last things I did before I left, I saw one of our neighbors who I figured he's an American. I was like, you have a Dr. And he goes, yeah. And I go, I'm going to need it when I. When I come back. I'm going to. I'm going to be borrowing that.

[Leo Laporte]

I have. I have not buying it. I want to. Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, right. I just. I'm going to drill holes in the wall until I can see the view.

[Leo Laporte]

Excuse me. Do you have a wood chipper I could borrow for a night?

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. Yep. I think it was Happy Gilmore, the guy where he calls and apologize. Do we talk about this recently? He apologizes. All his, like, people he abused when he was a kid. And it's like Steve Buscemi when he calls and he's like, oh, no problem. I didn't think anything of. It's been 40 years, whatever. And then he hangs up and he goes, he's got a thing. It says people to Kill anyone. Cross. Like, he crosses. And it's like. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. Like, anyway, so. Yes. Library. Look at the library. Serious.

[Leo Laporte]

And put Libby on your OR hoopla on your phone.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Go to get a card. You have to get a card first. Yeah, get a card.

[Leo Laporte]

But the cards are free. Look, I have my card, right?

[Paul Thurot]

You don't have to pay for the card. My son just learned that. And. Yep. And then you pick your local library. And in our case, like, we can also get stuff from Philadelphia from here, which is kind of interesting. So we can have like two. Yeah. And like, that. That opens up a whole new thing. Right. You know, we're never going to go down there, but, you know, for the library. But. But you still have access to that kind of. Because we're in, you know, I guess in a close enough area, whatever. But anyway, we just.

[Leo Laporte]

Our local library just had a. Like a $4 million remodel, so. It's beautiful. It's gorgeous.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. The other thing, the library is like. It's nice, like. Like, even. Like, in denim. It was like, in denim. It was like a historical building. It was old. The one I went to was like a smaller one, but also nice. But like. Yeah. We go to the library down here and it's like, what is happening here? Like, why is this place so nice? It's like. It's like the future, you know, Inside, it's. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

We can get movies, too.

[Paul Thurot]

You can.

[Leo Laporte]

You can get. Get free movies. I know.

[Paul Thurot]

It's crazy. It's. I don't. People. I don't think many people know all this. There's so much there. I think people. Like I said, people are going to be shocked. Yeah. You either know exactly what I'm talking about already and you've done it, or you're like, wait, what. What's happening?

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

It's un. Unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

So really incredible.

[Paul Thurot]

Take advantage of it.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad you mentioned this, Paul.

[Paul Thurot]

Don't be like my son.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I love it that he said. Well, how much?

[Paul Thurot]

She was like, bless. Bless your little heart.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the card is free.

[Paul Thurot]

He's like.

[Richard Campbell]

He's like, so excited to have a young person in there, but you gotta explain the fundamentals.

[Paul Thurot]

I think he said it was like, the nicest way anyone ever told him how stupid he was.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I gotta tell you, when you are in the set, mouth, bless your heart isn't exactly. It's a little bit of a. I don't know, it's a little, It's a little shade. They're casting a little shade.

[Paul Thurot]

It's passive aggressive.

[Leo Laporte]

It's passive. Well, bless your heart, you ignorant little.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. Which I appreciate that.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you try whiskey at the library, Richard? I don't think so.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think so. But there are whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

Libraries should find out about that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. All right. And then so I think when this happened, Thursday, maybe late last week. So last week was Quakecon. This thing happens every August. Never know what's coming. And then last year, remember they did those amazing remix or remastered versions of the original to Doom games. This year they did it for Heretic and Hexen. So these are classic Doom engine games that came out by a couple company that created itself specifically to do this and it's called Ravens. And so Doom was some of the.

[Richard Campbell]

First Doom engine games for Doom.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, and some of the best too. Like, especially to me, Heretic was like, it was like having another Doom, you know, like different weapons obviously and different whatever, but it was just wonderful. And so those are available now, remastered, 4K, 100 frames a second. There's two new episodes, one for each game. They do crossplay multiplayer. It's unbelievable. All the Game passes, Xbox One, Series X and S Xbox PC, meaning Windows PS4, PS5, Switch, Steam, GOG. Every stream service, you know, it's 15 bucks if you already own the game. Like if you bought it on Steam 10 years ago or 20 years ago, whatever on GOG, you just get this for free. This is awesome. So this was the game where I was like, look, I get it, you're trying to block games on Windows and ARM for some reason, but this is, this is going to run. It's going to run great. You know the joke about this game and what not a joke, but the funny thing in some ways about this game is like if you've ever like tried to play Call of duty on a PC and you. Not only is the game like 125 gigabytes, whatever, but then there's like 70 gigabyte updates and you're like, geez, like I just want to play the game game. This entire, these games together, all the updates and everything, just a gigabyte. It's just like. And it's. And so I, I tried over the weekend, failed. We drove home today, we just got home and they just announced this is available. And I was like, okay. And they're like, it's not going to come to everyone right away. The ability to play games through Xbox app on Windows on arm, but I was like, I'm going to take a look at this because I've been doing this for a long time and I had. It was. It was full. It's full of all there. So I installed Heretic. Installed two. No, I'm not exaggerating. I think it installed in 25 seconds. Like it was so fast and it played great. Of course it does, right? But maybe, but I don't know, I think Windows 11 on them, you think like, it's not going to work. It worked great. Like it's. I mean, I know it's 30. It is literally 30 years old now or something like that. Almost 30 years old, but awesome. So I can't wait. And it's like a muscle memory thing. Like you start playing the game and you're like, oh, I know where I have to go. And I. Oh, I remember this. And you're like, it's just. That's excellent. It's such a great game.

[Richard Campbell]

It's awesome.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. And then I haven't tried this one yet because it was kind of happening while I was away. But a week or two ago EA did a Battlefield 6 single player kind of preview where they. It was just a video. It looks amazing, but I don't really care about single player. But then they did a multiplayer reveal as well. And you know, Call of Duty type game obviously, but super realistic looking and kind of the Modern Warfare type type stuff. It is on open beta now through August 17th, so that's only like four days away. I. You can get it through Steam. I know because that's how I got it. But probably elsewhere, maybe on Xbox. I don't remember. I'm not really sure where it is, but it's, you know, for a little while you can play this thing for free. So I'm going to try. I haven't tried it yet. Now that I'm home, I'm going to. Probably not today, but maybe tomorrow. I'm going to take a look at this. This is a contender. So I think. I think it's coming out in November or October. I don't remember the exact release date, but if you look at the videos of these single end multiplayer, it looks like it's like a. It just. It looks real, like it looks amazing. So, you know, Battlefield is disappointed me more than often than not in the sense that it's not exactly Call of Duty, you know, which is not their fault. But. But this one looks really good so I definitely want to take a look at it and see what it's like it's worth looking at.

[Leo Laporte]

I played Hexen way back. I mean here.

[Richard Campbell]

While ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, long time ago.

[Paul Thurot]

Heretic and then Heretic 2 was later and that one was like a. It was probably a Quake 2 engine game because it was like a third person thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Which was also pretty good. You know, I wouldn't. I would think we'll get those eventually because I think there was a Hexen sequel as well. Hexen is more of a rpg, whereas the Heretic games.

[Leo Laporte]

How does it look? Have you looked at it? Have you played it? Have you looked at it?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. So it looks like it looked to me. It's like it's. So the, the laptop I played it on is. It's only 1080. It's like 1920 by 1200. So I played full res, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

It does look very dude like.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it looks like it's. To me it looks like it did. Then the big thing like the Doom games like this too. Like when you first run it, the like all the menu is loud. It's beautiful. It's like it. It's like, you know, it's not bitmapped and blocky looking.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

It's gorgeous. And then they have. Actually the. The one big change that's really obvious is the soundtrack is unbelievable. Like there's a modern, you know, redone and it does like Dolby Atmos and all that stuff, if you have it. But it's. Yeah, these are just good games. Like they're, you know, Half Life and Half Life 2 took these. This type of thing to a completely different level. Like these are. These are straight up. Well, Heretic is a straight up Doom type game, you know, made with the Doom engine. But obviously. But it's like meaning it's action and you find a key, open a door, you get into a new area. Like it's, you know, it will be very familiar, but it's. They're just good, you know, they're good. They're just well done. Oh, I should say. Sorry. Just from. I got to get moment so Richard can have some time. I'm sorry, man. Raven went on to be bought by Activision or Blizzard, but became part of Activision Blizzard. ID went on to be bought by Bethesda, which went on to be bought by Zenimax, which went on to be bought by Microsoft. So Microsoft also owns Activision Blizzard. So Microsoft owns all this stuff. So it's kind of cool. Like last year they did Doom, which is straight up ID software, which was Bethesda this Year they did Heretic and Hexen, which is Raven, which is. What did I say? Activision Blizzard. Yes. So cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Yeah, very nice. All right, Ricardo, it's time for you to give us some whiskey. Oh, yeah. For that. Let's do runners radio.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and you're going all Irish on, which is funny because I was talking to Tony Rudd, who happily lives in Ireland.

[Leo Laporte]

I wasn't making fun of him, honest.

[Paul Thurot]

No, he would appreciate it.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a happy Irish is more like that. This is an Irish. I was doing a Scottish. But that's okay. I don't mind. Does he talk like that? Like a leprechaun?

[Paul Thurot]

I wouldn't say that to his face.

[Leo Laporte]

May the road rise up to meet you. As you're on your way down to run his radio.

[Paul Thurot]

You're looking to get punched, this would be the response.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a, a kind of crazy old Irishman I meet on my walk every evening and he'll buttonhole you and he'll start telling you stories that make no sense at all. I think he's really lost his marbles. He said there was a donkey and another donkey and the donkey. Anyway, it doesn't, it doesn't go anywhere.

[Paul Thurot]

And then you're like, beep, boop. Sorry, I have a call, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, hello, I got a call.

[Paul Thurot]

Hello, please, somebody, somebody call me. Have some, someone call me immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

But his accent is so cute. He's very sweet. He's very sweet.

[Paul Thurot]

Tony, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, Tony's grumpy for a reason. A, he's maintaining a forever book, the Office 365 for IT Pros book, which he's got a nice crowd rate people around him. There's a new edition out. I think it's like the 12th edition already. And it is, you know, keeping up with the reference material for folks who need to manage an M365 tenant. But this time around in the conversation, we went deep into the work they're doing in the graph. He was really talking about how the contemporary IT pro manages all of the problems involved in a tenant of any substantial size, meaning to make changes to rights and controlling access and things like that. And it's this combination of PowerShell and the Microsoft graph and a bunch of the other low level tools working in coordination to be able to get to the info you need, know how people are using things, put proper governance in place. And so just, you know, many of these things are obvious and the graph is less so. And it's, it's one of it's a superpower when you get it figured because you're really actually able to see what people in your organization are doing with M365, not just what apps they're using and what files are touching, but how data moves around and that really can help you to control rights and keep track of what governance is are needed. So a great conversation as usual. He's a regular every year when there's a new update and just trying to help people to do more with the little time that they have. And we barely talked about co pilot. Thank goodness.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm not surprised.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I hear a little tired. There is an American whiskey that is not bourbon.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Weird, huh? So I mean what would it be if it's it wasn't bourbon?

[Paul Thurot]

Blasphemy. That's what it would be.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm here in Kansas City for the Kansas City Developers Conference and I have a few dear friends here, one of which my friend Heather throws a big party ahead of the the event. So I was helping her with the party and we were sampling her whiskey collection and she is a very strong advocate of all things Kansas City, including this distillery, the Union Horse Distillery that makes this whiskey called the River Rivalists. And the rivalist is an American single malt whiskey. And American single malt is now an official standard by the Alcohol, Tobacco and Tax and Trade Bureau. As of this past January 2025, they ratified a standard for American single malt that is 100% malted barley made from a single distillery that mashed, distilled and matured the product in the United States. States in oak casks no larger than 700 liters. The maximum ABV when distilled no higher than 80% can't be bottled lower than 40%. These are very similar to the bourbon rules and no additives, although caramel color is allowed but must be labeled on the bottle.

[Leo Laporte]

Now this seems sensible. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Comparable to Scottish whiskey rules.

[Richard Campbell]

Very comparable, but maybe a little bit more flexible in some respects. They haven't put a ton of rules in place. They didn't put a minimum aging in place, although for the most part you'll find three plus years is normal. And there have been companies making this since the 90s just making barley mash whiskey in America. The standard helped push a sort of consistency around it. Some of the big players are doing it. There is a Jack Daniels ASM now, but mostly it's these little distilleries and Union Horse, we had a chance. This is a newer bottle of it because the older One somehow ended up empty. I don't know how that happened. And I have one of Union Horses, Glenn Karen's to go with it to get another one, take another one and there's another one over there because I don't travel with open bottles. So this will be consumed this week with some help, I imagine. So that'll go just fine. The distillery itself, Union Horse was formed by four siblings, Damien, Patrick, Eric and Mary Garcia. In the around 2009, 2010 family horse farm was being sold. They wanted to go into business with each other, which is an interesting choice. And had a chance to meet with Damien and one of his co workers, a fellow named Travis, who spent 90 minutes with us taking us through the distillery and having a great conversation. And Damian made the point of, you know, you've lived with your siblings but you haven't worked with your siblings. It's a whole other dynamic. But they were looking for a business to get in on. And the older brother Patrick had been working in a brewery for some time and knew his way around that. So they were thinking about brewery until they actually toured a craft distillery right at the time when craft distillers were starting to emerge in that 2009, 2010 time frame. And they thought, okay, well distilling is the thing we could do. And they live in a great grain part of the world that, you know, has a legacy of making spirits and so forth. Although largely crushed by the Prohibition at the time, back in time, the day the company was originally called Dark Horse because of the heritage of their family being in the horse business. Turned out Gallo owns a wine line called Dark Horse Wine. So there was some cease and desist and so forth. And by 2016 they changed the name to Union Horse, although you still see.

[Paul Thurot]

The Dark Horse here and there.

[Richard Campbell]

So this is wheat from Kansas, corn and barrels from Missouri. They got Midwest, they call it Midwest grown. It's up further north where the rye grows. And they also use malted barley, especially in the rivalest. Although admittedly the barley comes pre malted by the big guys that do it here in the US Mostly for breweries. Because they came to distilling new, they weren't hung up on traditional mash bills. They did get an expert involved, Dave Pornoil. Not Dave Porno, a different Dave, who's the guy behind Whistle Pig, and went directly to enzyme fermentation for their rye and their corn. So that saves a lot of pain. You don't have to add the barley for the amylase and so forth. So they buy their Product raw and grind it themselves. All stainless steel equipment. So I got a chance to meet all these tanks for the washes and the fermenters and so forth. Of course, we've talked about this before. Making 100% rise is extremely different. Difficult Rye is a complicated grain. It has more proteins in it. So it tends to be a very sticky mash. It's hard to clean, it's hard to manage. It tends to foam up. It's a challenge in the still itself. But the new enzyme approaches have made it easier. They are a little more capable to manage. And they have a very cool American still. It's made by a company called Vendome out of St. Louis, family owned. It's a 500 gallon combination combination pot column still. They call Chester copper pot.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love it.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's only about a 500 gallon. But that combination gives them the copper reflux that takes that. That tunes the flavor as well as a columns of glald to get a high distillate. So they actually make a vodka that initial distillations are all the way to 90%. Although of course they cut it to 40 to bottle it. But they don't need that combination still approach. And sticking with the batch approach allows them to use sour mash approaches, which is traditional in the flavors of American whiskey. As much as this is a barley instead of a corn rye barley mash bill. So one of the challenges you have in a place, you know, here we are right on the junction of the Kansas and Missouri rivers in a city called Kansas City. But most mostly in Missouri. There is a portion of it in Kansas. But you know, be careful. Don't mix up the names.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that it gets very hot here in the summertime and it gets very cold in the wintertime. And that is tough conditions for aging whiskey. And this is one of those places where the alcohol level in the barrels can actually go up.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Richard Campbell]

So. Because they lose water faster than they lose alcohol. And so that's because of the temperature, it's the low here humidity, the low humility pulls on the water. Remember that alcohol and water generally don't get along all that well. So if the water's in motion, it'll pull the alcohol back. And so you can actually lose water. So the interesting side of this is that they barrel at only 55%. So they're using American oak and they're charring it the traditional way. They use a char 3, which is a fairly standard char barrel. They started out with 53 gallon barrels. In the early days, then went down to smaller barrels to make faster production, and now have gone back to the big barrels as they continue to run. But they go into the barrel at 55%, which is relatively low. Traditionally in bourbon country, you'd go into the barrel at 62.5. But as I was talking to Travis who works in the barrels, he says most of the time when they come out of the barrel, they're higher than 55. They can be 60 up to 62.5. So. And that changes the flavor because those higher ABVs pull different compounds from the wood. And so he's. We were walking around the rack house today 4 wide and maybe 10, 10 wide and maybe 4 high. And he talked about the honey pots, the little sweet spots in the center there that hold a little more humidity, so the temperature changes a bit slower. And those come out differently. The barrels at the top of the stack, where they took the most heat and the lowest humidities, they're the ones that tend to come up with the higher ABVs. And down lower, they get a lower EV. So they're always poor pulling from different points in the stack when they make a batch. And these guys only bought, they'll take about six barrels down for a batch. Thousand to two thousand bottles that a go. So you. Every single bottle not hand. I watched them do it. These little stickers all put in by hand, every bottle written on it by the master distiller as to what batch nice, what abv and who did it at that. So they. They were only at a certain point scale as to what they're able to do here. And they typically go more than four years up to five, six. They have a few olders now. They've only been running for a while, so there's a couple of 10 years that are laid up. But there's a real question when you have an uncontrolled rick house like this is taking those huge temperature swings, is he not inevitably going to end up with problems with overproofing over wooding, too much being pulled in. And so those older barrels probably won't be bottling their own. They never put an age statement on anything. Their bottles, they just have names. They make about seven different versions. They make 100% rye. They make a cast strength version of that. They've got a white dog, 51% corn, 49% wheat. But it's that mash bill is only used for their white spirit. It's big in making cocktails because it's very bright and light flavors. And they have A very traditional bourbon. They follow the bourbon rules for completely. This experiment in barley took them some time because they actually were trying different toasts of barley and they use three different kinds of barley combined into the. Into the mash, although it's 100% barley. So those experiments started in 2015. They got their first production in 2017 and then needed to lay it up for at least three years. Around 21, 22, they finally got it out, did their sample runs, entered the New York World Wine and spirits competition in 23, and won for Best American Single Malt.

[Leo Laporte]

Very good job.

[Richard Campbell]

So let's have a taste of this lovely thing. I know what I'm getting. I want you to get a good look at this sitting in a Glencairn as you would with a Scottish whiskey. This is done very much in the Scottish whiskey style. A ton of color, but no corn. Right. So really not a lot of sweet on the nose. It's straight up barley, like you're drinking a Scottish whiskey. Lots of wood, you know, got that little toasty flavor to it, but there was no peat in it. The heat's substantial, but it's gentle on the mouth. This is a really nice drink. And it is now an emerging style for America to make a good barley whiskey because we have those products available. This is a small distillery. It's in a sub suburb outside of Kansas City on the Kansas side. And they're selling now only into about 12 states. So far, they haven't left the US at all. And so they Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois, Colorado, Oklahoma, all the ones you expect. And a couple of coastals like New York and New Jersey. It is in California, but you can only find it in Los Angeles and San Francisco and then in Tennessee, Georgia, Connecticut. They're expanding gradually over time as they went into other markets and get other opportunities here. But this is a small production whiskey and you can find it at a total wine for about $60.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's not bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Not bad for this style of whiskey and especially made in such small quantities. So they're all very distinct. And again, my thanks to Damien and Travis. They took such good care of us and they spent more time than they originally said they were going to. I think we ended up there. We were supposed to get an hour, we got 90 minutes. But we really enjoyed each other's company, had a lot of laughs. And I think they're going to make Heather some kind of ambassador for. For the. For their product because she loves it and takes it with her when she travels as well. So spreading the good word.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really cool. That's really great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we had a ton of fun with this one, but, you know, it's. It's great to see. See excellent. You know, distilled products made not just in Kentucky, you know, not. Not the places you expect. But there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be making good whiskey here. They've got all the ingredients they just had to put in the work, and that's what they've done at Union Ship.

[Paul Thurot]

It's Canada. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm gonna take one with me, though.

[Leo Laporte]

Coveted on my shelf from the Union Horse distilling Company. Rivalest American single malt whiskey with two thumbs up from Paul and Richard. Thank you, guys. We do Windows Weekly, including the whiskey segment every Wednesday. We start around 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. I say that because you can watch us do it live. We stream live, of course. Club members get behind the velvet rope. Access in the club, twit date, Discord. But there's also YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. So plenty of places you can watch live. And if those places have chats, which most of them do, I see the chat here on my screen. We appreciate your participation on the show and I mention content from the chat all the time. I mostly steal your jokes. But hey, all's fair and loving. Podcasting after the fact. On demand versions of the show are available at our website. Website, Twit TV, WW. There's audio and video. Watch the video on YouTube. There's a link there on that page to the YouTube channel. That's a great way to share clips. If there's something you saw. You have a Hexen fam in the family who say, oh, wow, Hexen. Something like that, whatever. Or a Whiskey fan, you could share little clips, of course. We have a wonderful playlist that Kevin King, our editor, has put together and producer has put together of. Well, we're not fully caught up, but many of the whiskey clips, easy to find because Rich has created a special domain. Things from. What is it? Things from my closet.

[Richard Campbell]

Something weird from my closet dot com.

[Leo Laporte]

Something weird from my closet dot com. And then if you like these whiskey segments, there's a whole passel of them in there. And we're keeping that up to date.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think we're almost up to 100.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing. Whatever this is, I can't work hard on that. What a resource. Yeah, you put all that effort, effort in and you do it pro Bono, basically. And then, you know, Kevin puts it together and we put it up on YouTube and that becomes a great resource for people. I think it's fantastic. A lot of history.

[Richard Campbell]

Damien took a copy of that link with him to. To catch up on what we've been up to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's fantastic. And incidentally, probably means a lot more free liquor for you, Richard. I'm just saying.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I have been invited back anytime.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're now a whiskey influencer. Or as some people call it, o Influencer.

[Paul Thurot]

More of an.

[Richard Campbell]

More of an under the influencer.

[Leo Laporte]

Under the influencer. Nice. After the fact. You can subscribe to this show in your favorite podcast client as well. In fact, that's what I think the best way to do it. Do us a favor though. If that client, whether it's a, you know, pocket cast, overcast, Apple's podcast, Google's podcast, whatever, if, if that client has reviews, please leave. Leave us a strong endorsement because that helps spread the word. When you've been doing a show for. How many years is it now? It's 15, 20 years. Long time.

[Paul Thurot]

It's. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not the flavor of the months anymore, that's for sure. Yeah. So you're. You're so a little help, if you would, promoting the broadcast because these are.

[Paul Thurot]

The Shroud of Turin. It's like a shadow of something from the past.

[Leo Laporte]

What is that on there? Is that a stain? Oh, no, it's called the rest. First show was September 28, 2006. So we are going to be in our 19th year as of next month. And Paul, you and I and Richard will celebrate 20 years in a year. That's amazing. 19 years.

[Paul Thurot]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

It's crazy, man. We've got the thousands episode of Run as Radio coming up anytime. That one with with Tony was 997. So we're doing the Q and A show and people have been sending me their questions. I've got a few audio clips.

[Leo Laporte]

So great.

[Richard Campbell]

We'll have some fun with that.

[Leo Laporte]

So great. Well, this has been for us, episode 945. 44. No, 945. So we're slowly getting there too.

[Paul Thurot]

We're slowly getting out of the Porsche model number range.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, it's going to kind of 1000. Might be close to coinciding with our 20th anniversary. Maybe a little before then. Should be interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

That is kind of interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

They're going to line up like the moon and Venus.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

Or something. It happens sometimes.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Paul Thurat, the astronomer as he's better the astrologer he the the tide of his influence is best felt@the rot.com t h u r r r o double good.com his books are at leanpub.com including the Field Guide to Windows 11, but you can get those for free if you sign up for the newsletter at Windows Intelligence now. Still not moved yet but soon, soon.

[Paul Thurot]

I keep wanting he'll say something soon. He's got I like the his ideas for this a good good Chris's but.

[Leo Laporte]

The good news is if you subscribe now you it will follow you. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Like a stalker. I mean yes. Forever.

[Leo Laporte]

You'll be subscribed for the rest of your life.

[Paul Thurot]

You are free to move along to.

[Leo Laporte]

The new newsletter, the Windows Intelligence newsletter.

[Paul Thurot]

Subscribe today something different that I can.

[Leo Laporte]

And it will follow you to your new home or they'll follow you from you and you get Paul Thurat's Windows 1011 field guide as part of your subscription. Yes, thank you sirs. I think that's all we have to say club for next week. Thank you. Safe travels, Richard.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

We will see you all right here next Wednesday on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurot]

Bye bye.