TWiT 1090: Flock of SQLs - Apple & Microsoft Grapple With Soaring Hardware Prices

Summary

This Week in Tech – Episode 1090: "Flock of SQLs"

Date: June 29, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Panelists:

• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (The Verge, smart home expert)
• Dan Patterson (Blackbird AI, disinformation & AI expert)
• Daniel Rubino (Editor-in-Chief, Windows Central)

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Episode Overview

This week’s TWiT is a lively, far-reaching tech roundtable focused on two major themes: the surge in hardware prices—particularly at Apple and Microsoft—and the broader disruption across the tech sector, fueled by AI’s ravenous demands. The conversation branches into the politics of AI regulation (triggered by recent government interference with leading AI models), disinformation trends, controversial surveillance tech in neighborhoods, shifting smart home standards, and usability frustrations from Windows to robot teddy bears.

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Panel Introduction & Recent Headlines (00:00–04:00)

• Leo welcomes experts from Windows Central, The Verge, and Blackbird AI.
• Immediate mention of Apple and Microsoft hardware price hikes, largely attributed to AI-related memory shortages.
• Light banter about adorable (and creepy) home robots, including the fluffy $700 Kata Friend robot that “wanders around and takes pictures”—raising privacy questions even for kids.
  • Memorable moment:
    • Jennifer on Kata Friend: “It’s fuzzy and it’s furry and it’s cute, but it’s really annoying [...] It’ll just wander around and take pictures.” (02:29)

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Segment 1: Hardware Prices Soar — Is AI to Blame? (04:00–17:50)

The Great Memory Shortage

• Apple (and others) Raise Prices:
  • Apple increases device prices by as much as $200, citing the unprecedented global demand for DRAM and storage caused by the AI data center boom. The hikes hit MacBooks, Apple TV, HomePods, etc., but (for now) not iPhones, Watch, or AirPods.
  • Jennifer: “The most egregious thing here, though, from my angle, is that they’ve increased prices of the Apple TV and HomePods for no good reason. Really old devices.” (11:33)
• Rush on Old Stock:
  • When the price hikes leaked, savvy buyers (and Jennifer’s parent-friends) rushed online to snag remaining stock at pre-hike prices on Prime Day.
• Memory Manufacturing Bottlenecks:
  • AI’s growth means SK, Micron, Samsung, and others are locking in multiyear supply deals—squeezing everyone else.
  • Dan Patterson: “Micron just pushed 16 different companies into five year deals. SK is pushing for five year deals for almost all their providers. Samsung has three year deals...” (06:07)

Why Not Build More Fabs?

• Panel: It takes years, massive capital, and there’s little incentive for memory giants to boost supply and let prices fall.
  • Daniel: “There’s almost no incentive.” (08:16)
• Valve’s Steam Machine also caught in pricing turbulence, echoing the struggles at Microsoft and smaller hardware manufacturers: “Either you took that price or they wouldn’t talk to us again.” (09:10)

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Segment 2: Gaming Hardware Evolution & the Chip Wars (13:24–20:58)

• Handheld Gaming Renaissance:
  • MSI Claw, Steam Machine, and similar devices are cutting-edge but now $500–$600 more expensive than intended thanks to the memory crunch.
  • Daniel: “You can play Cyberpunk 2077 around 90 frames per second on this thing.” (15:21)
• Intel Strikes Back:
  • Intel’s new Core Ultra mobile chips outperform AMD for the first time in ages; chip competition heats up between x86 (Intel/AMD) and ARM (Qualcomm, Nvidia).
  • “It’s the handheld device we’ve been waiting for [...] But because of RAM and storage costs, it’s about $500 more than it should be.” (16:17)
• AI in Gaming:
  • Upscaling/frame generation features are all AI-driven, blending the lines between gaming and AI hardware needs.

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Segment 3: The AI Backlash, Model Regulation, and "Rug Pulls" (20:58–54:46)

The 'Rug Pull' of Anthropic's Fable Model

• Baffling U.S. Model Ban:
  • The Biden administration abruptly blocks access to Anthropic’s powerful Fable AI model citing “supply chain risk,” despite it being a domestic product.
  • Leo: "The federal government blocked an American product from its users." (29:21)
  • Dario Amodei of Anthropic meets G7 leaders; the block is partly walked back, but uncertainty remains. China, France, and others seize the opportunity to push their own models.

AI Regulation Headaches

• Debate: Should AI be regulated like nuclear tech? If it’s delayed a month, does that kill its market value due to the relentless pace?
  • Daniel: “Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work.” (36:18)
• Top-Down vs. Organic Tech:
  • AI adoption feels forced ("top-down techlash") rather than organic like past tech revolutions.
    • “This feels very much like it’s being forced upon us from other people [...] There’s a reason for these frontier models: requires huge amounts of capital.” (24:40)
  • Dan Patterson on disinformation: “There is a significant amount of Russian and Chinese inauthentication...amplified by a number of inauthentic voices...” (22:21)

AI’s Uneven Benefits & Public Perception

• Consumer skepticism:
  • Daniel: “Your average consumer has not seen any improvement from this, right?”
  • Jennifer: “It’s very different from how it’s being unleashed in the regular world... there needs to be a distinction here…” (44:41)
• Hype vs. Reality:
  • AI is often oversold as transformative/terrifying, but right now “it can replace some tasks and make them a little more efficient, but it’s not going to cure cancer. At least not yet. [...] If you look at it realistically, it’s Photoshop.” (48:09)

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Segment 4: Smart Home Standards, the "Matter" Conference & Security (63:18–80:59)

Matter to the Rescue?

• Standards Still in Flux:
  • Jennifer reports from the Matter "Unify" conference: major rivals (Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung) are actually trying to unify smart home device standards after years of chaos.
    • “It's designed to make all of your smart home devices work with each other... rather than being siloed.” (65:54)
  • Matter 1.6 promises a “Joint Fabric”: finally, one home network that all platforms can control.
• Cloud vs. Local Debate:
  • Cloud wrecks legacy devices when companies fail, but Matter means future devices can (possibly) work even if vendors disappear.

Smart Lock Company Turmoil

• Level Lock layoffs spur fears for customers: If device control is cloud-dependent, your expensive lock could be bricked if support dies.
  • Jennifer: “Level lock is staying in business, not to worry... Don’t look behind the curtain that there’s no one left at the company.” (80:20)
• Robot Lawnmowers:
  • Home automation can actually be dangerous—just ask Jennifer’s family!
    • Jennifer: “You don’t get injured in home automation, but my robot lawnmowers beg to differ.” (153:08)

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Segment 5: Surveillance Tech & Civil Liberties (110:49–123:45)

Ring, Flock & the Suburban Panopticon

• Massive expansion of license plate readers and doorbell cameras (now with Bluetooth sensors) causes local backlash.
  • Jennifer: “Their pet finding feature... just said surveillance state.” (112:48)
• Centralized databases are being used by law enforcement, sometimes with minimal oversight.
• Dan: “We’ve been conditioned for 20 years that China as a surveillance state… and now we’re doing it, but it’s private corporations.” (118:11)

Democracy & Regulation

• Public protests arise not just from the tech, but the governance model: communities often have no real say in how surveillance is rolled out.
  • Dan: “There are two themes emerging in this episode: technology, top-down. And regulation.” (123:03)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI Hype:

  • Dan: “What we’ve really done is build Adobe Creative Cloud. It can replace some tasks... it’s not going to cure cancer, at least not yet.” (48:09)

• On Regulatory Futility:

  • Daniel: “Government is really, really bad when it comes to technology… it’s going to be even worse with this [AI].” (54:04)

• On Smart Home Complexity:

  • Jennifer: “What you just said is not a sentence most normal people would understand…” (64:02)

• On Surveillance:

  • Jennifer: “The technology isn't bad, it’s how you use it that is, you know, it’s got to be well implemented and there’s got to be a very valid reason.” (119:47)

• On Disinformation:

  • Dan: “Disinformation is intentionally misleading content...not just one deep fake, but the story around it.” (87:46)

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Lightning Round: Other Tech News & Final Thoughts

• Starlink to Offer Mobile Service & Musk's Rumored Phone (100:05)
• Windows 10 Deadline Extended due to hardware cost constraints; Microsoft makes it easier to keep Windows 10 going a bit longer. (102:44)
• BBC Radio 4 long wave ends—end of an era, due to obsolete hardware parts. (136:03)
• Jaguar Land Rover hack linked to Russian attackers, UK government bailout.
• Major AI Oops: Ford had to rehire engineers they replaced with AI, as the machines made too many mistakes. (140:28)
• Content Ownership Reminder: PlayStation deletes hundreds of purchased movies: you never really "own" digital content. (143:06)
• Remembering Om Malik: Tech journalism legend and founder of Gigaom, passed at 59, deeply mourned by the tech community. (149:14)
  • Leo: “He once called me the Yoda of tech, and I said, ‘No, no, YOU’RE the Yoda of tech. I’m the Jar Jar of tech!’” (150:29)

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Timestamped Summary Table

| Time | Section / Quote / Highlight | |--------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–04:00 | Introduction; panel banter; price hikes; home robots and privacy | | 04:00–08:16 | Apple, Microsoft, Valve: hardware price surges; memory shortage | | 08:16–11:33 | Memory companies’ multi-year deals and slow capacity expansion | | 13:24–19:38 | Handheld gaming boom; Intel’s chip comeback; x86 vs ARM | | 20:58–54:46 | AI model ban, regulation debate, techlash, pros and cons, possible “AI bust” | | 63:18–80:59 | Matter Project, smart home standards, disruption at Level Lock, robot lawnmowers’ hazards | | 110:49–123:45| Surveillance: Flock, Ring, neighborhood databases; privacy vs. safety | | 149:14–151:58| Remembering Om Malik |

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Key Themes & Takeaways

• AI is transforming—and disrupting—every facet of tech: costs, hardware, security, jobs, and public trust.
• Hardware prices aren’t just about inflation—they’re a symptom of massive supply chain reorientation around AI and data.
• Regulation is reactive and messy, whether in AI, surveillance, or content ownership.
• The consequence of top-down technology is backlash and distrust—even as some of these advances offer genuine value (or, for now, just irritate with their price and complexity).
• The consumer experience is lagging: much tech evolution feels imposed, confusing, or outright hostile, with little recourse for those burnt.

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Closing Thoughts

The episode ends with tributes, practical advice ("Don’t buy a smart lock that depends on the cloud!"), gripes about $10,000 World Cup tickets, and candid, insightful exchanges between some of the best minds in the tech press. If you want a deep, nuanced understanding of how AI’s rise is shaking every corner of tech and society—for better and worse—this episode is for you.

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[A]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is here from the Verge, Dan Patterson of Blackbird AI and Daniel Rubino, editor in chief of Windows Central. Microsoft's extending the deadline for Windows 10 yet another year. The Apple prices are going up. And it's not just Apple. Are people going to blame AI for this? And it looks like Mythos is out of jail. All that coming up next on Twitter. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is TWiT this Week in Tech, episode 1090, recorded Sunday, June 28, 2026. Flock of sequels. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. Hello, everybody. Great to have you here. Great to have our panel here. Stone with Dan Patterson, AI guru at Blackbird AI. He's senior director of content at Blackbird AI, which is dedicated to ferreting out disinformation wherever it lies.

[B]

Your.

[A]

Your job's getting busier by the moment.

[C]

Yeah, it's. It's been an interesting year, to say the least.

[A]

It certainly has.

[C]

I've got an allergy frog stuck in my throat, so forgive me.

[A]

Oh, hello, allergy frog.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Also here, Jennifer Patterson Tuohy. You see her every month, of course, on Tech News Weekly, and you see her probably every day on the Verge, where she's a senior viewer specializing in smart homes. Hello, jpt.

[D]

Hello, Leo.

[B]

Love you.

[A]

To see any robots fall on you lately?

[D]

Yeah, I've got these little sort of fluffy ones in my house at the moment. And yeah, they're very annoying.

[A]

Are those the ones that purr and gurgle like that?

[D]

So at CES this year, there was. It was Ecovacs, the robot company, and Switchbot, the smart home company. Both released, like, robot companions that are like. They're like teddy bears, and one's like a teddy bear, and one is like a little puppy. Puppy dog. And yeah, they. The. Well, actually, I. It didn't fall on me, but it keeps falling over, but it's not 180 pounds, which is what happened with the last one. So it's.

[A]

And it's fine.

[D]

It's fuzzy and it's furry and it's cute, but it's really annoying.

[A]

Is that the Kata Friend?

[D]

Yes, Kata friend.

[A]

700 bucks. Does it wash your dishes?

[D]

No, it just wanders around and it actually, you can turn this off, but one of its features is it'll just wander around and take pictures.

[A]

Oh, so it's like a little spy in your house?

[D]

Pretty much. Pretty much. It's cute though. It's a cute spot. I still have not figured out what these, who these are for. I've been trying. That's sort of been my mission because it's definitely not for me. I had like the neighborhood kids come over. Nope.

[A]

Nope.

[D]

So, yeah, I haven't figured it out.

[A]

Kids are smart now about AI. They're not. They're fooled. Also with us from Windows Central, it's great to see Daniel Rubino, editor in chief there. Hello, Daniel.

[B]

Hello. Thanks for having me.

[A]

You're going to buy the new Steam machine?

[B]

No, it's a little too expensive. I appreciate Valve and it is price. They are in a pickle these days, but they'll survive this.

[A]

They're not alone. The pickle is everywhere. Apple this week announced that they were gonna have to. They of all people were gonna have to raise prices due to memory shortages. Tim Cook kind of telegraphed it a day or so earlier in the Wall Street Journal, which Mark Gurman from Bloomberg said, well, that means you're gonna do it right away. And he was right. They did it a couple of days later and tanked ankles. Tanked Apple stock, which is not quite to my ankles, but it is down a little bit. Price is up as much as 200 bucks on all the Apple devices. Jennifer, you said you were lucky you bought your kids college laptop before the price hikes.

[D]

Yes. I was very excited when Neo was announced because my son is just about to start his first year and I was like, this is going to be perfect. This is what I will get him. But I obviously deleted and dallied. I couldn't decide whether to get the touch ID or not. That was. I was going back and forth. And then when the rumors started, you know, I guess he started about a month ago that this was going to happen. I was like, I'm just going to bite the bullet. I can always return it now. I can always return it and make a profit.

[A]

Oh, I don't think it works that way, but that's a nice idea. It would be good. It is now 699, which, you know, I mean that was the whole thing about the Neo. It was, oh, it's only 5.99 for a Mac and Yeah, but it's only coming, yeah, 100 bucks off for the students. So yeah, it's. You were lucky. You got it for 500 bucks. It's now 700 bucks.

[D]

I texted my friends, yes, the day it was announced and Prime Day was on Whose Kids are about to go. I was like, just go on Amazon now and buy it. I said don't worry about whether you actually need it or not because you can always sell it. But you're going to, if you, if you decide this is what you want, you're going to be spending $100 more very soon. So yeah, yeah. And like you said before we started recording, I think that Amazon prime day was still going on and they had all, they had discounts very, I think it was like $10 off. But as soon as the price hike happened it was now $110 off. So that was the day to buy 210.

[A]

In some cases it's right. So yeah, I mean people were rushing over to Amazon to get remnant inventory. I imagine the same thing that Costco and Target and all the other places that had Apple hardware and the prices hadn't gone up yet, but they're up now. Tim Cook said the price increases were unavoidable. This is Apple's statement. The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory. Oh, and storage by the way.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Actually you, Dan, you were saying that the memory companies have announced that they are booked solid not just for this year but for years to come.

[C]

Yeah. You know, just before the show I looked up the major suppliers for Apple and you know, including talking about the Steam machine, a number of the gaming consoles, but a lot of the consumer electronic devices are powered by just three companies. Right. SK, Micron and Samsung. Micron just pushed 16 different companies into five year deals. SK is pushing for five year deals for almost all of their providers and Samsung has three year deals for all of their providers. This is just for RAM and SSDs are the same type of deals.

[A]

Apple said that the hikes are global but do not include the iPhone, the apple watch or AirPods. And that's because I think they've, you know, they bought up everything and made them and. But they hinted there'll be more price adjustments in the future and I would expect come September when the new iPhones are announced, we'll see expensive devices. Microsoft's been bit by this too, right? The Xbox went up quite a bit again.

[B]

Yeah, again, that was the second time. And Apple, this was the second time Apple raised prices. They raised prices in March too. They went up by 100 bucks. And yeah, the Xbox went from, from 499 and then went up to I think it was 629. Now it's going up to I think 799 or 750 around there. And same thing, we expect that there could be another price hike in 2027. So this is not ending. The earliest we could expect any relief would be 2028. And that's just maybe, you know, that's like, you might start to see prices start to come down a little bit, but this is going to go on for a long time. And it's really unfortunate because as we tech evolves quickly and we're actually in a really exciting period for technology with amazing power chips and everything coming out and no one can afford them now. So it's really kind of unfortunate.

[A]

Why aren't these RAM companies and storage companies increasing capacity? Why aren't they just building plants? This is a chance for them to make even more money.

[C]

Well, I think it takes, I mean, in the reading I did just before the show and we talked about this, we've been talking about it for a year, but in January, you know, we anticipated an increase in the foundries, but I think it takes a significant amount of time for them to increase capacity. And with the amount of money that they're making, there's almost no incentive.

[A]

They don't want prices to go down.

[C]

Right. You know, interestingly, you know, to the, to the Valve Steam Machine. High prices. Valve issued a statement. You know, they're not a massive buyer, but they're not small either and they have some, some clout. They issued a statement saying that we either the, the RAM companies quoted us a price and it was take it or leave it. Either you took that price or they wouldn't talk to us again.

[B]

Wow. Yeah. And the smaller the company, the worse off is.

[A]

Yeah, that's like, that's like a Mafioso. Take this price or we're not going to ever talk to you again. Yeah, that.

[B]

It's a, it's really bad. And yeah, the fabs take years to put together. This is the world.

[A]

And by the way, they're not making any move to do it either. It's not like they're breaking ground on new fabs.

[B]

Well, they, I mean, yeah, intel is in the US and stuff and there are a few coming online, but.

[A]

But they're not for ram or are they?

[B]

I. I don't know.

[A]

For ram, Intel's making processors.

[B]

Yeah, but like, I know like Intel's fab took cost $10 billion.

[A]

Right. They're very expensive. Yeah.

[B]

And it took like five years to put together. You're talking the world's most advanced technology lithography which is some of these machines. There's only one or two that exist on the planet, and it's really incredible. I've been to the Intel Fab in Israel and got a tour of it, and it's just. I mean, it's absolutely incredible. But there's very few companies on a planet that make this technology. And so that's why it's just. And to ramp up will take many, many years. And then, yeah, there is sort of less incentive, but at the same time, you know, between AI gaming and computers and phones, there is demand out there and consumers won't be able to buy it at these prices. And so I think there is incentive for them to build out, but it's just not something that they can do overnight.

[A]

So Apple told Bloomberg, we know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find sol. What, like, oh, there's some RAM in Tim Cook's cushions. What does that mean? I feel like they are asking the federal government to lift restrictions on a Chinese chip maker. They actually. Because you can't buy chips from this Chinese company. They tried to do this a couple years ago. Congress thwarted them. But I guess they're saying, well, if only, Mr. President, you would allow this, we could bring prices down. Of course, it only would only benefit Apple. And it's not ram. It's. I don't think. I think it's like processors. Yeah. Yeah.

[D]

So I find the, the most egregious thing here, though, from my angle, is that they've increased the prices of the Apple TV and the HomePods for no good reason. Really old devices. These have been updated in years and they're very expensive. Expensive already. So you're now paying so that. Well, the mini, the HomePod mini's gone up $30. The HomePod has gone up $50. And then the Apple TVs like, have just gone through the roof, which I guess because I know they have more memory in them. I mean, the minis, the HomePods don't really have much at all. The Apple TVs you can buy different levels. But yeah, it's crazy because these are really old and they say, well, that. They don't say, sorry. The rumor is there was about to be new ones, like in the next four, three or four months anyway. So it seems like, why do this now? Yeah, and it's just when you're buying, like if you're buying a new MacBook Neo or a new MacBook Air, that's like a modern, recently updated device. Okay. You kind of. I Mean, it's miserable, but you stomach it. But for something that is very old and really not actually, I wouldn't say worth that money. It's really, it's a real trick in the pants.

[A]

$139 to $200. It really, I think it really, I think it's a good thing, but I'm not sure I'd want to spend that much.

[D]

No, they're great devices. Yeah. I mean they do work, especially when it's coming out. Don't mean to imply they're bad devices. They're just old and there's a new one coming soon. Yeah, that's, that's the kind of push and pull here. It's like I just would have thought you just leave these ones. I mean, but who knows what's going on in Cupertino because apparently these have been, according to Bloomberg, these have actually, the new models have been ready to go for a while now. They're just waiting on the new Siri AI to sort of catch up and then. But that will come to the home because to date none of the new Siri has come to the place.

[A]

And that puts more pressure on Apple because the Siri AI requires more ram.

[D]

Right.

[A]

You did a review in on Windows Central of the msi. I love the name Claw. This is a handheld or should I say a claw held gaming device, which you loved.

[B]

Yes. But handheld gaming is one of the fastest growing areas right now in gaming that we see there's a lot of interest. And it all started with Nintendo Switch and then Steam Deck really set the bar. And now we're seeing these Windows handhelds and intel has a brand new chip for this called the G3.

[A]

Isn't that ironic because intel, which struggled with mobile, made the scale processor which was a huge flop and basically lost the mobile market.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Now they're back in. I guess you'd call this a mobile market. I mean, yeah, it's smaller than a laptop. It's priced like a laptop. Eighteen hundred dollars.

[B]

It was probably at least $500 more than it was supposed to cost.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, because we see these things usually topping out at 12.99, which isn't cheap. But this is the top tier handheld

[A]

on the market based on processors, screen size. What makes this so good?

[B]

The processor is so AMD really set the bar here. They were the ones that are making all the chips. They make them for Nintendo, they make them for the Steam Deck and they were making for Windows devices and only MSI stuck with intel and they were just using laptop chips. And now they came out with a custom chip for handhelds. Yeah. And it's between 35 and probably 45% faster than AMD's top chip right now. I mean it's like night and day difference. And so for the first time with handheld gaming, you can play like, you can play steampunk, Cyberpunk 2077, around 90 frames per second on this thing like it is.

[A]

I can play that on my Nintendo Switch too. Not.

[B]

Yeah, probably not at this resolution. At this frame rate, my eyes are

[A]

only 28 frames a second. So it's okay.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And that, you know, the claw is really. I mean it's almost a PC.

[A]

It is.

[C]

People I know who've taken it home have really. They plugged it in and it's been a functional PC.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Yep. Yeah, you can dock it and act as a mini PC. It's got Thunderbolt 4 on it. It runs Windows. Right. So it's a. It's the handheld device we've been waiting for. Or at least I've been waiting for because like I said, you can play true AAA top tier games at least 60 frames per second. But now we're hitting over 100 frames per second. Part of that's because of intel frame gen, the XCSS, their upscaling technology. It's really just amazing technology that we have in this thing. But because of RAM and the storage costs, like I said, it's about $500 more than what it should. 1299 already wasn't cheap, but 1799 isn't, you know, that said, if you go to Best Buy, at least when I checked yesterday, they were already sold out. Now how many do they have in stock? I don't know. But at least on the subreddit, a lot of people are buying it.

[A]

So, boy, there's a market for these things that's really interesting. Is this replacing the console market?

[B]

It's definitely impacting it because you can just, with a Thunderbolt 4 dock, connect this up to your TV and just do. That's like an important switch. Yeah. You do 4K gaming and all that kind of stuff. You can connect an EGPU to it. Like it's really endless what you can do with this thing.

[A]

Connect an eGpu.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Wow. And it's. This is the Arc graphics that intel has been. It's interesting. Intel, we really like a year ago counted them out, down and out.

[B]

Yeah. Their new chips are the Core Ultra series, which is this. This is based off of with the B390 GPU, they're in the game. They're, they're pulling ahead of AMD, who I think is a little bit more focused on server and desktop right now. They're still doing well there, but when it comes to handhelds, they just lost the CR and it came to laptops. Intel still crushing it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I would not.

[A]

So you say get an Intel Ultra processor over any of the other.

[B]

Yeah, the Ultra 3 is like finally found the middle ground where the first generation was a lot of performance. The second generation was concentrating on efficiency and now the third one combines both into a really stable platform that's just really efficient and fast.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Boy, the worm has turned. That is really amazing.

[B]

I mean, Intel's chips were always did do well when it came to their quarterly earnings. It was the other stuff that they were losing money on.

[A]

So, you know, is it Lithuan, their new CEO, that's that's turned this around?

[B]

Yeah, they're really focused on gaming right now and their integrated graphics is the big story because AMD used to beat them left and right when it came to integrated graphics, but now you can buy one of their, you know, Ultrabook laptops and still do 60 frames per second on AAA games. Just through integrated graphics. No Nvidia. So it's, they've come a long way, but it's just so inappropriate, you know, for timing because you have the MSI Claw, you have the Steam machine and they're both extraordinary devices, but they're just priced out of people's, you know, it doesn't make sense anymore for most people.

[A]

Isn't Microsoft though, moving away from intel towards ARM processors? The Snapdragon?

[B]

And I wouldn't say they're moving away from, they're definitely embracing, but they've always said that they were going to welcome all but not treat anyone specifically better. Apple of course, clapped their hands and said, we're done with x86 arm, that's the end of it. And Microsoft can't do that because of legacy enterprise hospitals, government. But now that Nvidia is on board with the RTX Spark, it actually helps Qualcomm because it's just going to make the ecosystem that strong, much more strong. So it's really again fascinating to watch. Nvidia and Qualcomm are kind of on the same side now. And then you have intel and AMD on x86 on the other side and they're all honestly doing some crazy, really good technology.

[A]

It's just not what suddenly chips got so good, is it euv? What is the technology that changed all

[B]

this, I think that definitely plays a part on it. They keep going down to the nanometer. I think Apple, you know, honestly caught a lot of people off guard with it.

[A]

Kicked them in the butt. It's.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like, you know, when I would talk to intel about this, they're like, there's Nothing inherent about x86 that makes it inefficient compared to ARM, like they said. It's, it's not that, it's not risk versus cisc. No, I mean, it's, it's just that they come from different pedigrees. Right. X86 came from desktop and so it was always optimized for desktop and then they had to back it down for laptop, where they built the M series for mobile smartphones and built it up to desktop. Right. So they came from different points. But there's nothing inherent about x86 that supposedly it can't compete with ARM. And we're starting to see that. I would still say Qualcomm is still more efficient than Intel's x86, but I can't deny there's a, there's a point of diminishing returns. Right. If your x86 laptop is getting 10 hours a day of real world life, you know, usage, does it really matter?

[A]

Right.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. You know, so it's like, okay, you know, how many people aren't going to not charge the laptop when they get home?

[A]

So you know, what's really changed though? And, and this is what's driving the component shortage too is AI and people wanting to. Or maybe they don't. Actually. Microsoft has kind of learned its lesson. They're backing down a little bit on putting copilot everywhere. Do people, Are they looking. When they're looking at laptops now, it sounds like they're looking at gaming. Are they looking at AI also?

[B]

No, but you know, for gaming it's interesting because when you have like Intel X. Yes. Their frame gen and upscaling technology, that's AI, Right. That's using.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That kind of technology.

[A]

And well, there's a definite kind of correlation between. That's why you can use GPUs for both gaming and AI. Right. It's, it's, it's, it's matrix transforms, it's massive movement of data and transformation of data. So the GPU can do it for games, it could also do it for AI.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So there's some similarity. But now we also see these, what Microsoft calls NPUs, which are a different part of the processor. It's all very confusing. Should we. Are people reasonably blaming AI for this chip shortage? Is this one of the components creating this AI kind of mass AI hatred among the general populace? Dan,

[C]

you know, we actually, in fact, I was just loading our research on this. We just did a ton of research on the AI backlash and the data center backlash, and there are a few components at play here. Yes, the primary backlash is organic, but look, there is a significant amount of Russian and Chinese inauthentication. Yeah, well, you know, it's challenging that the differences between disinformation and misinformation are nuanced, but there's certainly a large amount of activity in the anti data center market. So where a conversation might hit, let's say X velocity, it is then amplified by a number of inauthentic voices and it hits more communities faster and it seems louder than it actually is.

[A]

So that's very interesting to me because as an AI fan, I was starting to worry. We just had a big rug pull from the federal government on Anthropic's most capable model, the best model. I think most of us agree, we've ever seen Fable and Mythos. And it concerned me that maybe the federal government, government, the Trump administration was putting its finger to the wind and saying, oh, you know what? People hate AI so we can do this with impunity. There's definitely that feeling. Polls say people, you know, 71% of people say they don't want a data center near them. 18% of people, only 18% of people trust the AI search results they're getting. And I can go on and on. There's a real fear of AI out there. But you're saying this is being amplified somewhat by bad actors.

[B]

Yeah, sorry, I was just going to say that the technology is coming top down.

[A]

Yeah. There's also a tech lash going on.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. Because we're all old enough, like smartphones that came from a couple nerds with BlackBerries Pocket PCs, and it developed kind of organically and then like Apple came and sort of really set that category off. But a lot of technology starts off with a few early adopters and then integrating it, becoming enthusiasts, and then eventually gets pushed to the mainstream.

[A]

The garage model.

[B]

Yeah. And this feels very much like we're. It's being forced upon us from other people and. Yeah, like. But there was a reason for these

[A]

frontier models require huge amounts of capital.

[B]

Right. Sure.

[A]

You have to be able to afford thousands of Nvidia GPUs. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. All right. I Need to take this. Go ahead, Jennifer.

[D]

Go ahead and say, I think there's the fear of the unknown to like absolutely the difference from, you know, ground up technology that's tried and trued and tested and this AI that the companies that are developing even themselves don't seem to know what it's capable of. And that is sort of we're going to get to that fear, something I think people are rightly concerned about.

[A]

But I can your son's going to college. Is he nervous about the, his job prospects in the AI era four years from now?

[D]

No, but that's because he's not really focused on four years from now. But he wants to be a pilot, which I'm like, well, I did the research and it's going to be a while until we have planes that, I mean, I know planes can fly themselves, but it's going to be a really long time until people are comfortable being in planes without pilots.

[A]

So yeah, they often do land themselves. But you still want to see a good looking fella in a uniform up front.

[D]

Exactly.

[B]

Or gal.

[A]

All right, we're going to take a little break and come back. Let's talk about this. The, the AI rug pull and what it's spawned, which is I think very interesting in the tech world. We've got a great panel. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is here from the Verge. We have some home automation stuff to talk about with you as well. Daniel Rubino from Windows Central, he's the editor in chief there. And Dan Patterson from Blackbird AI where he's the senior director of content. And you, you were listening a couple of weeks ago. Larry Maggot was on when we had the little wake for the end of CBS Radio News. What a sad moment that was, Dan.

[C]

It has been a moment.

[A]

Well, it's part of a, you know, the world is changing and it's, what's interesting is it's changing faster and faster and faster. And I think that's upsetting to some. And then there's some of us. And I think a lot of the people who got into technology got into technology because we were change junkies because we liked, we like to have a vision of home. Look, it's all changing. It's like sci fi. And so some of us embrace it. I think the vast majority go, oh no. Our show today, brought to you by Simply cx. We've reached the point where having AI is no longer a competitive advantage. The advantage comes from what you build with it. That's the focus of Simply CX, a podcast from Microsoft. Hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experience leader, the show explores how organizations are applying emerging technologies in ways that are creating real business impact today. If you're looking for a place to start, check out their recent episode featuring Jess Lauren, founder and CEO of Global Objects. It provides a fascinating look at a technology you may be hearing a lot more about in the coming years. Photo Real Digital twins Nicole and Jess discuss how these highly realistic digital replicas are being used across industries from entertainment and education to energy and cultural preservation, and why trust, accuracy, and emotional connection are becoming just as important as the technology itself. It's the kind of conversation that helps you see beyond today's AI headlines and get a glimpse of where digital experiences may be headed next. New episodes drop every other Tuesday. Find Simply CX wherever you get your podcasts and tell them this week in Tech Sent you. Thank you. Simply CX so how long ago has it been now? 3 weeks? 4 weeks? The White House abruptly pulled Anthropic's Fable model so abruptly that many of us were in the middle. It happened to me. I was in the middle of a big, big job. I was rewriting software we've been using for 11 years. It's the core of our operation. I thought, here's this chance. I finally got a model that can handle this giant complex, and all of a sudden it said, this model no longer available. And I thought, crap, did I forget to pay my anthropic bill? But no, it was true for all of us. I was more upset, I think, than a lot of people, maybe technologists in general, AI users were more upset than the general public. I don't know if the general public was even that aware of it. They were so much more concerned about the green reflecting pool than they were about this. But I saw this as a really scary precedent where without consultation with Congress, without really any research, as far as I can tell, the federal government blocked an American product. This wasn't even foreign. Blocked an American product from its users.

[D]

Now, what was the reasoning here? Was it like, this is too powerful, wasn't it? This is too powerful. It could, like, cause just chaos.

[A]

And I think Anthropic kind of hurt itself because they did promote that heavily.

[D]

That does feel like something a government should be concerned about, honestly. I mean, I get your point. Like if the US Government stopped Apple selling its iPhones, okay for no.

[A]

And you could make the same case that all the iPhones made in China. So it's a huge security threat, right?

[C]

We don't know what China.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Sorry to interrupt. No, no, it's a unilateral, top down mandatory. Right, right. Whether, whether the public knows or cares is almost irrelevant. It's an American made product where an executive branch issues in order and can shut down a product. I think that's what scared a number of technologists and if not the public, a number in the business of people in the business community.

[A]

Yeah, well, there was, and there was an interesting impact which we'll talk about in a little bit. But I should mention that the following. Well, Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, flew to the G7 summit in France, met with the President, and in an Axios interview shortly thereafter, the President said, you know, I like these guys, Anthropic, they're okay. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, tweeted, aha. You see what happens? You see what happens? He's the one who called Anthropic a supply chain risk. Again, a designation usually reserved for foreign actors, not American companies. Well, apparently the United States has now lifted the ban a little bit. Semaphore had the scoop. Reeb, Al Bagati and Ben Smith. US Releases powerful anthropic model Mythos, which is Mythos, is basically the same as Fable. It's just an unrestricted Fable, as far as we can tell, has allowed Anthropic to release it to more than 100 US institutions. Remember, originally that's what Anthropic did with 50 companies. It said, okay, this thing is so powerful, we're going to give it to you, Microsoft, for example, to fix any flaws before it gets out to the public and bad guys use it to attack you. So now this was called Project Glasswing. Apparently it's still on. The Trump administration on Friday, just two days ago said Anthropic could release Mythos to more than 100 institutions. Friday afternoon didn't say anything about Fable and it didn't say anything about Open to the public either. Nor did it mention the original restriction was that no foreign nationals should be able to use these models. That was the pretext the Commerce Department used. But of course, since Anthropic doesn't know the citizenship status of anybody using its software, they had to block it for everybody. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, said that they had had significant progress in the intense daily talks between Anthropic and the government. Anthropic is committed to work with the US Government on protocols and standards and releases. The other shoe that dropped same day is that OpenAI had decided to release its latest Model which also has a cyber security component to a short list of government approved partners. What has essentially happened is the Trump administration has done a complete about face. When Trump came into office, he decried President Biden's AI regulations, said we're going to have no regulation. This is how we succeed. The United States is, you know, just compete, make the best models you can. We're not going to regulate AI completely reverse that with the fable block and now is saying we want to prove every model before it's released to the public. So Jennifer, you make an interesting point. If this is so dangerous, I mean, shouldn't the government protect us from it?

[D]

I mean the government's protecting our kids from social media. Right. Like there is so many. There's such a fine line between what we think the government should protect us from and what it shouldn't. And it also depends on who you are, whether you think they should or shouldn't. But this does, you know. Yeah. To my point about the fear, there is a fear amongst regular people about AI whether it's founded or not. There is a concern that this technology is, is going to go somewhere scary. I mean we've all seen the movies and we've seen that these, that the tech companies, I mean just from in my space, when I talk to tech companies about LLM powered smart voice assistants and I'll ask them questions like would it be capable of doing this or this? And they're like that's a good question. Why don't you try and we'll see. So you don't know, like you don't know what this is going to do in my hand else. Yeah, you know, I get that this is a powerful and exciting technology, but before we unleash it on people, it need, we need to know as, as the technology companies need to know what it's going to do and what it's capable of and be able to control it. And it feels like we're in a moment and Dan, I mean you're much better, you know, positioned to speak to this than I am. But I would love to know like is that a moment that we need this ever going to change or is this technology always, is always going to be a step ahead of us that, that concern.

[C]

Yeah. I think to your point, and I'm sorry to interrupt you Jennifer, but I just want to agree especially with something you said earlier, that there is a top down and a tech clash. We saw this with untested technology just like you've experienced with consumer products in the home. We saw this with consumer products like social media, where they began as fairly simple news feeds. We saw this algorithmic testing on the general public and the expansion of social media into ways that the public is generally or appears to be generally uncomfortable with. And now perhaps we are seeing a very similar effect happen with the advancement of artificial intelligence, where these products are incredibly powerful and the effect that they have are very similar to what you said about smart home devices. Where will this be good? Will this help? I don't know.

[A]

Here's my issue with this for one is who? So let's assume that like, I don't know, atomic bombs, that AI has all this potential for danger and so that it's not unreasonable for any government to put some restraints on it. The question, unlike an atomic bomb, AI is very amorphous, you know, and the question is, well, who is going to judge it and how are they going to judge it? There's also the issue, this is raised by Dean Ball, who teaches AI policy at Yale Law School as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Society. He, in his hyperdimensional substack, says there's also the issue that there's a side effect when you do this. For one thing, if you take a month to approve an AI, this is moving so fast, you may have actually killed that AI. You know, they need to get to market fast and build an audience because the next AI is coming about a month later. So you're throwing a monkey wrench into a very fast moving machine. There's also a much larger issue, which is that that you might do this in the US But China and other countries are not holding back. One of the results of the fable, rug pull, and I'm going to call it a rug pull, is that France with its mistral, China with Deep Seek and Zai's GLM model released better models. GLM is very, very good. GLM 5.2. All of a sudden people are saying, oh well, you know what? If the American government can just stop any model, I guess I better not use American made models. There's plenty of other choices. It's also taught companies to not count on American AI. Like, well, just like many other things in the United States, we don't know what's going to happen next. So there's a real risk. This, it's a very difficult thing to answer because I agree with you, Jennifer. You know, maybe these things are dangerous. I just don't know how we can count on a government, especially this government, which doesn't really seem to think much of science. To determine what's dangerous or not. It almost feels as if it's an economic restriction as opposed to a technical restriction. I don't know. What do you think? This is a hard one to solve. Ball writes, frontier models are trained at enormous cost and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the first few post released months that they're broadly available. After that period elapses, the models become sub frontier. Competition emerges and margins compress. Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work. So that's problem number one. You're undermining this entire industry. Now maybe if you think, and as many do AI, it's bs. We don't need AI. We'll be better off without it. That's. You don't see that as a problem? I would submit that AI is a very significant technology and its advance is very important to us and we don't want to let others do what we could do better.

[C]

Leo, are you making. I, I hear this argument frequently and I don't know where I come down on this argument, but are you, are you aligning with the argument that if we don't allow our models to be the frontier models and the cutting edge models, then we cede that to China and other competitors?

[A]

Yes. Yeah, okay, that's exactly. You're basically undermining an American industry.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's kind of the opposite of what they're doing with the auto industry. They're protecting the auto industry by banning Chinese cars. Well, what would happen if you banned American cars? You would have a lot of Chinese cars in the United States. That's what we're doing. We're banning American models. There's also a larger question of can you even prove a model's safety? No one has yet made a model that's not jailbreakable.

[C]

So let me ask you know something else. Much of our conversation is centered around consumer AI or at least B2B in the way that when we talk about AI right now we think of, you know, it evokes companies like Anthropic OpenAI and others. But, but earlier in this conversation we also talked about another use of AI in frame gen in gaming. Right. And AI has machine learning applications. We use artificial intelligence at Blackbird in a number of ways that are not consumer focused at all. So is this conversation about AI simply around these somewhat consumer facing and business facing frontier models, or is there a broader conversation to be had? Had?

[A]

Well, there is, absolutely. I mean, this is a very intractable problem. To go back to the garage model of technological advance unlike anything we've seen before, AI requires huge capital investment. And you've got to, you know, make all these GPUs and you've got to build all these data centers. There's nobody develop. Well, maybe there is, but so far there's nobody in the garage creating the latest frontier model.

[C]

It's not like biz and EV coding, Twitter using Ruby on Rails.

[A]

Right. It takes billions, some might even say trillions. The Fable model, we don't know how much it cost or how big it was. It's estimated it might be 10 trillion parameters, which means it probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars to create. And they don't stop, by the way. It's like you don't just make it and now it's done. You got to make the next one.

[B]

That's the weird issue with all this, which is fundamentally, is the architecture even the correct approach? Because all this is is large language models, and you just keep throwing more and more power at it. And it's this idea that, like, somehow if we keep doing this, we'll reach AGI, but we haven't defined AGI yet. We don't understand consciousness, we don't understand intelligence at that level. And so there's a lot of questions about, you know, is this even the right approach? Right. There's different views of AI, including more semantic analysis, there's visual analysis, there's all these other components. Yeah, because,

[A]

oh, no, you've got to do, you know, you got to do physical world stuff. And all of that should happen. I'm not saying that shouldn't happen, all that. And some of that may end up in somebody in a garage coming up with this great new way of doing it.

[C]

It.

[A]

But we haven't reached the end of what, by the way, you don't have to stipulate that we're going to achieve AGI or anything. It's just that as we have continued to make these models bigger, they've gotten better and better and more and more capable. And I think they've changed a lot of things. They've changed how chips are made. Nvidia's, who is it, just announced that they're releasing a chip that's designed by AI and that as that gets better and better, it will get better and better. As it develops better chips. Business processes are changing. People saying the SaaS Marketplace for Business tools is going to die because all of a sudden everybody's writing their own. Every business I know of is implementing an AI Strategy of some kind. Rightly or wrongly, this is fairly important to the economy. And this is another thing Ball points out. You might actually be bringing on this AI bust that everybody's so worried about. Simply by undermining you might be creating a market panic.

[C]

Land prices will go down at least.

[A]

Hey, here's the good news.

[D]

I think that consumer B2B business and like conflict is very real though. And I think that, I mean my generation, my children's generation is the sort of loudest voice right now are against AI. Like we saw all of the college commencement speeches with people booing the tech CEOs and my daughter is like violently opposed to anything AI, mainly because she's very creative and she's very opposed to the sort of artist the way it's potentially stealing artistic jobs. And, and she, you know, there is, I think there needs to be a distinction here and, and I don't know how to this comes about, but it's important to, I think what's happening in business and technology in terms of how this is helping with processes and helping us develop and create more powerful, more useful tools for technology and business is very different from how it's being unleashed in the regular world, how it's affecting people's regular jobs and what they're doing on a daily basis and how they're interacting on a daily basis. Like use these LLM chatbots that people are now relying on for all their information and you know, some becoming like friends and this is like their main connection to, to, to society is, is those types of things are different. That consumer focus, focus that consumer facing implementations of this AI is, feels very not well thought out yet.

[A]

Right?

[D]

And that's, and we're unleashing it on people who don't understand it and who are like, wow, suddenly I can do all of this stuff stuff. And where is it going to, where is that going to lead us versus companies and businesses that are, you know, implementing this as tools for creating a better workflow. Those are two very different use cases of this technology.

[A]

I can hear people, some of our listeners, I get emails every week. Enough with the AI, who cares? I can hear people saying, good, yeah.

[B]

I mean your average consumer has not seen any improvement from this, right? They see, see AI slop on Twitter, right? They see a lot of fake news kind of stuff happening like when, when AI solves cancer. And of course that's a, you know, broadly speaking isn't going to happen of course once it starts solving diseases, right, which is what's the promise then? People I think will start to come around to it when it starts to actually make your life easier and solves problems for your regular consumer versus oh by the way, everybody's gonna lose all their jobs in like five, 10 years. We don't know what we're gonna do. Like that's what you know it from your average consumer standpoint. This is happening to them, not with them. Yeah, they haven't seen any benefits and all they hear is, you know, oh my God, these models are so strong they're gonna completely undermine everybody's jobs. And you know, we, we don't need radiologists anymore. Right, that famous example which didn't happen by the way.

[A]

We need radiologists.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, but I think that's the concern. It's like why are we supposed to be believing these people? Right. Or should we not believe them? We, no one knows how to react. So there's a lot, there's a lot

[A]

of confusion, isn't there? Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And, and these companies benefit from hyping up their models like it is, it's so powerful. It's too dangerous. We, we, we need the government to

[D]

like regulate like a movie trailer.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, exactly.

[C]

That's the superintelligence AGI hype. Right. That we are going to achieve some sort like. No, what we've really done is build Adobe Creative Cloud. Like it can replace some tasks and make them a little more efficient but like it's not going to cure cancer, at least not yet. It's not going to do a lot of the things that it was to your point, Daniel, and yours too, Jennifer. It is simply happening to people and there is some utility but the height of certainly exceeds the capabilities right now. And if you look at it realistically, it's Photoshop.

[A]

I would say we've seen a lot of evidence that some really amazing things could happen which we may never get now because of this fear and that we may never know because we're just going to end up shutting this whole thing down.

[D]

Do you really think we will? I don't know. I think your point, Daniel, about how, how it's a peak and trough like people are scared because it's happening to them is very true. Like, I mean this is very. A big tangent, but it's interesting. Like what would you say is one of the most hated companies in this country right now? I would say drug companies have often been at the top list of like, we don't like drug companies.

[A]

Interesting you say that because that's a similar situation where it takes huge amounts of capital to create new drugs.

[D]

So there was a really interesting article and I want to say it was in the Wall Street Journal and it was about the history of Eli Lilly, which is the company behind Zip, found one of the GLP drugs, GLP1 drugs,

[A]

which I am on, I should say so I will shut up.

[D]

Well, and the interesting thing was the CEO is saying, you know, we have gone from being, from getting hate mail because there was a big issue around diabetes, around insulin at one point where they had a really low short, they had a shortage and it was hard for people to get this life saving medicine and so they were getting hate mail from people. And now he says we get literal love letters from our customers who are like what you have done has saved you.

[A]

Hate Big Pharma until it, until it

[D]

does something that really works. Yes. And I feel like that's where we will probably go with AI on an individual basis, like as individual people find real value from it, you know, that will slowly there'll be a groundswell if, if that happens. A groundswell and of more popular opinion and then on a broader scale.

[A]

That's been my experience. I've used it as part of my job. I've gone heavily into using AI in a lot of ways and it's found it incredibly useful and it constantly impresses me by doing things I never would have thought a computer could do. And I'm not saying it's alive or conscious or intelligent. I'm just saying it's very, very effective. It's the same. Big Pharma is a really good example because it does take. You know, you could invent a new drug in your garage, it happens all the time. But you could never release it because you have to test it, you have to manufacture it at the scale. There's all it is a capital intensive industry. There's negatives to that. Salt, which turns out to be a really good disinfectant, isn't widely promoted because nobody makes any money on it. That's a simple example, but there are many examples of that, you know, so. But at the same time, I don't think we want to shut down pharma pharmacological research. We might be scared of it, but we don't want to shut it down. Maybe the solution is to, is to regulate it in some way, but I don't know how.

[D]

Right. Which brings us back to our point. What we started here is the government was trying to stop AI but in a ham fisted way, which is very difficult really. Helping? Yeah.

[A]

Oh, well, we haven't solved anything, but we had a good conversation and that's, that's what I, I hope for. And we'll watch with interest. I mean, it's, it's all complicated because we have an administration that really is anti intellectual, very anti science. And so it's complicated by all of that as well, so. And also it seems to be that, that any company that kisses up to the presidency sufficiently is going to be favored. And the big mistake that Anthropic made was saying, no, the military can't use our models for autonomous killing machines or spying on Americans. And that pissed off the administration so much that now we are six months later, basically shut down.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

So is this political or is this techno? Is this a smart technological move?

[D]

I mean, it's political, right.

[A]

But it sure looks that way.

[D]

It doesn't mean that there doesn't need to be some.

[A]

It might be the right thing to do. They might have done the right thing for the wrong reason. I don't think so.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

I want my Fable. I want my Fable back. We've had, in fact, I interviewed Alex Stamos last week, very highly respected security guy. Guy who says Fable is, wasn't and isn't doing anything that almost any other model couldn't do, that this particular horse has already left the barn. We already have models that can find security flaws.

[D]

That's the biggest problem with government and technology is they're always two years behind what's actually happening. So it's impossible really for them to. For government to regulate it. It sounds very Star Trekky, but ultimately I think this has to become a global solution. This has to be something that needs to be managed by all of the countries, not individual countries. Because it is like you say, if one country regulates it, it's not going to stop another country. I mean, someone was mentioning this in the chat, comparing it to, like the atomic bomb. If it's really that dangerous, you know, this needs to be something that has to, has, has a global answer. Not in, not each country, really.

[B]

Yeah, I agree. It needs to go through the U.N. but then to, you know, just. Yeah, Leo's point, like, it's going to kill. It's going to slow down everything because government is really, really bad when it comes to technology in general. And it's going to be even worse with this. Right. Because it's so complicated and so technological. And then you have things like, would China, you know, we're so skeptical of China. Right. Would they really develop this and abide by Any agreements, you know, how do you enforce that? Right. At least with nuclear it's like you can. There's centrifuges, right? There's uranium, there's like there we have

[A]

peaceful uses of atomic energy and non peaceful and we've attempted to, not very successfully. We've attempted to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the same time as we've encouraged the proliferation of atomic energy. That might be a good, that might be a good analogy for this, that there are safe uses of AI and unsafe uses of AI. I think it's a little clearer what the unsafe use of atomic, of fusion and fission is. That seems a little clearer. AI, it's a little bit more, a little bit more muddy. I don't know. You know, it puts me in an awkward position because I agree a lot of technology is dangerous. Technology, I would say itself is agnostic, but it can be used by humans in a dangerous way. I would hate to see the American government decide which chips American companies could make in which they couldn't. That would be a mistake.

[B]

Do you guys think that there's going to be some sort of AI catastrophe? Like the AI does something or something happens because of AI and cause AI

[A]

will never do anything bad by itself. There will always be a human actor who either said, hey, maybe we should let AI control atomic weapons.

[D]

I don't know. I mean the whole thing with the terrible situation with the young man who killed himself because his chatbot basically told him how to do it.

[C]

The anthropomorphization.

[D]

Yeah, that felt pretty awful. Like, felt like that was.

[A]

Well, it's a terrible outcome.

[D]

Yeah, but it was.

[A]

Could have done a Google search too.

[D]

No, but this, but it was. I mean you really was focusing. I know we've talked about it on the show, but it was, it was escalating the situation and that was AI doing that. Not there was no human behind that doing that.

[C]

But you know, Daniel, it might be like frog in a pot, much like climate change, where a number of smaller, seemingly innocuous components stack up and we find ourselves in a challenging situation. But you know, Jennifer, to your point that that is a tragic occurrence and we can maybe find analogs in the social media world. In fact, some of the recent rulings about social media and the obligation that social media companies might have in terms of regulating access to it. And.

[A]

Here's the question. Do you regulate technology because of the edge cases?

[C]

Yeah, right.

[A]

To protect the edge cases and by doing so, defang it for everybody else. It's like, okay, let's Eliminate children's playgrounds because some people hurt themselves on them. You can try to make them safer. That would be a reasonable thing. But you don't. It's a dangerous precedent to regulate based on the edge case. We wouldn't have cars if that were the case. Right. We wouldn't have.

[D]

A lot of the problem here was that it wasn't. There were no guardrails. There was no safety in place. And I don't think that this is.

[A]

You can create safe. This is funny.

[D]

Which to my point is like they don't even. The people creating this don't know how powerful it is. And that is a reason to be scared of this.

[A]

For every zipper, there's gonna be some guy who gets his penis stuck in it. But it doesn't. We shouldn't have zippers is all I'm saying. Right.

[B]

The title of the podcast.

[A]

No, it's definitely not the title of the podcast. Let me take a break before I get myself in any more trouble. I'm not saying it necessarily ever happened to me. I'm just saying it could. Okay, but we shouldn't ban zippers because of.

[B]

Does feel like everything about AI is inevitable. Like we just have no choice.

[A]

Technology's always like that, hasn't it? Like, even weapons development, things like that. As soon as we could figure out how to do it, we're going to do it. We can't stop it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I don't know if that's true. Yeah. It does feel that way, though. Like, if it's. If we. If man can invent it, woman can't prevent it. I'm sorry, Jennifer. Let's take a break.

[B]

That's okay.

[D]

I will be the lone female voice of reason.

[A]

That's what I'm saying. That's boys and their toys. That's all I'm saying.

[B]

Actually, along that.

[C]

Along those lines.

[B]

Along those lines, Leo, I think a better analog here would be guns, because, like, guns are readily available, easy to make. But, you know, around the. Around the world, around the rest of the rest of the world, it's harder to buy than it is in America.

[A]

Right. Right. Yeah. Let's take a little break. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, senior reviewer for the Verge. We're gonna talk home home automation. Something a little safer you cannot hurt yourself with in just a little bit. Well, maybe you can. We'll find out.

[D]

Make any promises. Leo,

[A]

Daniel Rubino from editor in chief from Windows Central. Great to have you. And of course, Dan Patterson of Blackbird AI. Our show today brought to you By Box, this is really talking about AI. This is a really interesting technology. If you're an enterprise trying to transform your organization with AI, you are probably facing a very common challenge. Most AI tools are great at public knowledge, right? When can I get tickets to see Taylor Swift? But they don't know your business well, unless you're selling tickets to Taylor Swift. But if you're not, they don't actually know your business, they don't know your product roadmaps, they don't know your sales materials, they don't know your HR policies or financial models. They don't know about the stuff that actually makes your company run. But AI could be so much better if it did, right? That's where Box comes in. Box is building the intelligent content management platform for the AI era. Box serves as a secure essential context layer for Box's AI agents to access the unique institutional knowledge that makes your company run. And that's the key idea, and I love it. It's so brilliant. The power of AI isn't the model. It doesn't come from the model. It comes from giving the brain access to the right content. Your content. Box's recent State of the AI in the enterprise report found that 96% of organizations, almost all of them say agents need access to company specific content. But even though they know that only 36% of connected agents to trusted content across many use cases, Box goes beyond file storage. It's not that, it's, it's connecting your content to the people, apps and AI agents so that your teams can turn information into action. And they're doing it with great tools. Box Agent, Box Extract, Box hubs and more. Organizations can use Box to accelerate knowledge work, pull intelligence from unstructured content to automate workflows. I'll give you, I'll kind of explain what some of these do. Box Agent, for instance, is a unified AI experience across all your files. It can understand your natural language prompts, it can pull the right content and help you work through the tasks. For agents both inside and outside Box, that includes tools like, like, you know, all the frontier models, chat, gbt, Copilot, Gemini, Agent Force, even custom agents. Box becomes the Trusted Content and file layer via its platform, APIs, MCP and CLI. So it has complete interfaces that your agents can use. And for enterprises, that trust layer is so important. Box is built with security, compliance, governance and threat protection in mind so that only employees and agents can access the information, and they can only access the information they're exactly authorized to use. You keep control now, if you're thinking seriously about your company's AI transformation journey, I want you to think beyond the model. It's not just the brain. Because your business lives in your content, box helps bring that content securely into the AI era. This is perfectly timed. Visit box.comai to learn more. That's box.comai we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech.

[B]

Heck.

[A]

Box.comai okay, we're going to move on from AI. Enough AI. Let's talk about the smart home. Now, I have to say my little AI buddy Quicksilver is. Connects to my home assistant green server and I can tell it to open shades, turn on the lights. I can have it, you know, when I get home, do things. It's very nice to have an AI connected to your home.

[D]

Yeah. And actually, you know, to your point earlier about the different use cases here, as this is so true with technology. It's. It's not that AI bad, it's that some elements of AI could have concern, but some elements of AI have great use cases. And actually the smart home is one of them where I think we already seen some really interesting innovations.

[B]

Yes.

[D]

That help run your smart home. Because the most. The key one is cutting through complexity because the smart home is complicated. What you just said is not a sentence that most normal people would understand in terms of running on my ha. Green and. Yeah.

[A]

Well, you did though, right? You speak it. You speak home assistant.

[D]

I do speak home assistant, yes. And I've used my. I used Claude to help me exactly code my home assistant instance. And that was super helpful. Incredibly helpful. Yes. Because yeah, home assistance.

[A]

It actually might be the missing link because all this time we've had this home assistant, it's like the Tower of Babel. Nobody can talk to it. One thing doesn't talk to another. Maybe AI is the solution or maybe matter is the solution.

[D]

Matter. Yes. Love that segue. Thank you, Leo.

[A]

Well, I will say this. I've been lobbying. Everything I use should have an AI interface. We were just talking about box, how it has MCP servers and SDKs and CLI.

[C]

It's.

[A]

Home Assistant has an interface that an agent can use and understand. Everything should have that maybe matter is that layer. I don't know. There's a big matter conference.

[D]

Yeah. So a couple of weeks ago, a week ago, I was at this conference. It's called Unify. And actually to our. Our previous conversation about how maybe technology companies need to work together to figure out this. How to control and responsibly deploy AI in the World Matter is actually a great example of how competitors are coming together and working together to make a better solution. There is no risk of the end of the world through home automation, but it's definitely been interesting to watch. And this was what this conference.

[A]

That's because home animation isn't as powerful as it ought to be. Be good enough to end the world if necessary.

[D]

But it is a good example of like a technology that has so much value but has been so hard for people to use because of competing standards, competing protocols, confusion, complicated setups, having to have little boxes running, AI in your house to get anything to work. And Matter is the, is a newish interoperability standard that's basically designed to make all of your smart home devices work with each other rather than being in like siloed ecosystems or walled gardens. And what this conference was, was put on by the Connectivity Standards alliance who runs Matter and Zigbee and Olyro and a few other open standards.

[A]

But the, there's, by the way, there's the problem right there. There wasn't enough just to have one. We had to.

[D]

So you hear this all the time and it's, it's not so it's, it's a misnomer, but I get the joke. Like it's the, the xcd. XKCD comment. Am I saying that right? Sorry, XKCD the comic. You know, there's 14 standards and none of them work with each other. We need one standard to make them all work together, protocol to let them all work together and then that protocol comes along and now, yay, we have 15 protocols.

[A]

So we've been talking about matter for it feels like years. How many? A couple of years now.

[D]

So it launched four years ago. Four years. Three and three and six months. And it's. And, but it had been announced in 2018 by Apple, Google, Amazon and then quite quickly after Samsung. So all of these companies have been working together. They all had their own walled garden standard.

[A]

Yes, they all had their own standards

[D]

and everyone used different protocols, different ways of connecting devices, different radios, different hubs. It was, it was confusing, it was complicated and this. But it has. Matter launched, but it has had a bumpy road. And what this conference was all about was really sort of bringing everyone together. I mean they all talk with each other apparently. This is what they say, they have these meetings but you know, three or four times a year where all the companies come together. But this was their first public facing event where they were like, look at what we've achieved. Here's where Matter is now it's still not where they promised it would be day one, which was you just buy a smart home device, you plug it in, set it up, and it will just work with any smart home platform you want. We're not there yet, but what I saw at this conference was really quite inspiring. Not to be too sort of twee, but that these companies actually have been working really hard to make this standard better and to fit, fix the problems that we've seen. And most of those problems are that just, it's still complicated and it's still confusing. But what, what came out of this is the launch of battle 1.6. So we're getting, I mean, and standards, you guys, you know, you've been in this industry for a long time. Standards are very hard. They're not. It's not easy to move an industry. It's not easy to get rivals to agree on anything. It's not easy to get them to implement something that could potentially mean that their product and their service could be superseded by their competitors. But I think that what has, what has transpired over the last few years is that it's really clear that the smart home is at an impasse because of how complicated it is. And sorry to bring this back to AI, but AI coming to the smart home has suddenly opened the monetization strategy for these companies, which wasn't there before. We are now. You know, we heard about Amazon losing, losing billions on its Echo smart home division over the years and Apple has been very slow in this space. Google has also had kind of a bumpy ride with its Nest and Google home speaker division. They just launched their newest speaker, which is all focused on Gemini AI.

[A]

Oh, interesting.

[D]

Yeah, so it's, it's built for, so Gemini for the home is there. AI model for home automation and the smart home and the. An AI. What does AI need? What does AI need more than anything else? It needs good data. And what are you going to get good data with? Well, interoperability. If everything can talk to everything else, then you can use and build a more reliable smart home system that, that's potentially going to start doing the sort of the holy grail of the smart home, which is being able to actually manage your home for you. So you're not the one with the Raspberry PI on the shelf trying to fiddle and all the different apps and trying to, you know, Home Assistant's very great and powerful, but you can spend a whole month, you can, you know, diving into it.

[A]

So I still haven't connected everything to it. I've had had it for a couple of years now.

[D]

So I mean and the idea. And so one of the other things that the matter 1.6 came came up with this which should have been there at the beginning, something called joint fabric. And basically what this means is when you buy a device from a smart home company and you add it to your smart home platform of choice, say Apple Home or Amazon Alexa Prior, each ecosystem would set up their own network in your home called Fabric Fabric. So you'd have your Apple home fabric and you'd have your Amazon a fabric. Now with joint fabric you're just going to have your own smart home network that every ecosystem you would like to control it. So if you want two or three because say you use a Google Pixel and your spouse uses an iPhone, they will now talk to that fabric, but they won't own that fabric. And that sounds like a sort of small change, but it's a, it's a significant shift for the standard because it means that these companies have all agreed to give up control so they don't own.

[A]

Have they really though?

[D]

Well, that's that this is the. So everyone says they are on board with this but the other problem with standards is you get a new spec and then when, when does the spec actually appear in the product? So this is, it's wait and see, but it is, it's. It was an exciting sort of. There was a lot of momentum. I guess that was what I saw at this conference. I mean I was talking to the engineers, I was talking to the people developing this rather than, you know, the, the PR and the management people. But if, if, if engineers rule the world, this will work. Yes, but that's a big if.

[A]

That's right, because engineers want it to work. They're the ones using.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

So what's the takeaway for a consumer? Is there should you not buy anything that isn't matter certified at this point?

[D]

So it's a hard one to say because there are not enough matter certified devices I would say to be able to do that at this stage. But yes, if you're looking at a device that. If you're looking at buying smart home devices, I would highly recommend exploring the Matter versions over all other things being

[A]

equal, look for the one that has

[D]

matters matter on because and this is the point of my next story that I wanted to touch on, one of the great things about matter is it is a local protocol or it's a local standard and it uses local connectivity protocols. So thread and wi fi and if you buy a cloud dependent device and that company goes out of business, your cloud dependent device no longer works. And we have seen. You mean like the level lock time again? Well, yes. So the level lock lock. To be clear, the level level lock has not gone out of business but it has been had a significant restructuring which causes some concern about the long term business model of the company. And also level lock is they recently did an upgrade to matter. So if you have a level lock that has a matter upgrade if in the future something happened to level servers your device would still work. And this is where matter becomes a very important. Excuse me.

[A]

It's okay.

[D]

This is where matter becomes a key part of the smart home experience is that it is local and you control it. If your company goes out of business that

[A]

if you weren't watching the video, Jennifer's son just walked through and unplugged the router.

[D]

It looks like I just froze. Sorry about that. She froze.

[A]

Posed in horror.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Wasn't quite like the BBC presenter whose kids rolled in but it was a moment but yeah.

[D]

So the level lock isn't. Is. Is so level lock freak out.

[A]

Did asset Abloy buy them or did they. Was it their product to begin with

[D]

so Asset Abloy bought them. Level lock was actually made by a couple of iPhone of Apple engineers originally. Yeah startup and I don't know if anyone if you're familiar with it but it's a really cool piece of technology. They basically if you've ever seen a smart lock or if you've used a smart lock they're normally big kind of techy looking giant batteries on the back of your door. They're a little cumbersome. Smart locks are great in general. Like I love them as a concept they're really good but they don't look great. The level lock goes basically puts all the technology in the. The battery goes in the little deadbolt there and all of the smarts are built into the deadbolt bolt mechanism.

[A]

So it looks like totally normal dead

[D]

bolt, completely normal lock. But it has. It's such a neat.

[A]

I'm glad I didn't know about it or I would have bought it.

[D]

It's very expensive. That's the other downside like $350 for that lock that we were looking at there. So and so this. There was a startup similar to like August, the August lock you might be familiar with and both of those companies were bought by Assa Abloy at different, different times in their process. If you're familiar with Assa Abloy it's one of the largest multinational access control companies on the planet. Like they own.

[A]

They were famous for their excellent deadbolts though, right? They're not a cheesy company.

[D]

No, no. I mean it's, it's a very well established Swedish company. And so they also bought, they bought Yale and they bought August and then they wanted to buy by quickset which is the other large lock maker and the government said that's too many, that's too many locks. And so then they sold their stake in Yale in August and then bought Level. So this company's been kind of on a lock buying spree. But what happened this last week sadly is they basically laid off the majority of the staff at Level. And so the concern amongst the staff and for customers of the lock manufacturer of the lock is that without any engineering, an engineering team there anymore, this is a high, this is a very technical, very technically advanced lock. And will, will the lock continue to be made? Hopefully it'll continue to be supported but there is a concern that it may just go away which would be very sad because it's a great piece of technology and they were just, they were working on ultra wideband version and I think I've talked about this on the show before but this is the next innovation that's coming to Smart locks is complete hands free unlocking. So you use, using UWB radios that your phone will, will transmit to your lock as you walk up that you've come home and it will unlock the door for you.

[A]

I love this by the way. I don't have one because I bought a Schlage just before they came out

[D]

but so Schlage just launched its newest.

[A]

I'm sorry but I love that idea that you guys just walk up door and it's unlocked. I mean my car. It's a really nice.

[D]

It's the same technology. Yeah, same technology so knows if you're

[A]

coming or going, like if you're walking towards it or walking away. So it doesn't unlock as you're walking away. I mean just really kind of cool.

[D]

It's, it's a great technology and it's much better than the current that. So if you have a smart lock you may already have this experience and there's some like Bluetooth GPS sort of magic that some use but that's not very reliable because you're using a number of different radios and there can obviously be a number of failure points. Whereas this is a local direct radio to phone technology and really I've used, I'VE tried it and I've been very impressed with it. I have the new Schlage lock actually somewhere right here that I'm going to be testing hopefully this weekend on your teenage boy. Yeah. I think I've talked about how he doesn't, he's never used a key. I don't know how he's going to do.

[A]

I don't have, I don't carry keys anymore. The only thing I carry a key for is my post office box. Because of course you U.S. postal Service,

[D]

they're never going away, never stop using keys.

[A]

But, but I don't, I used to have a key ring. I don't have a key ring anymore. It's just a weird experience. But I'm going to make a bet here. We got two other high tech guys on the show. Daniel, you have a smart lock. Yeah. Do you have one, Daniel? A smart lock?

[B]

Yeah, I have a ufi.

[A]

He has a ufi. Okay. How about you Dan? Do you have a smart lock?

[C]

So I live in Brooklyn and we have less choice about this.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And, and Right. There's a number of security concerns with that. However, the, the, the apartment complex I live in. Yes, we have a smart locks. We have that option but I think almost everyone opts to use a key. And I, for my apartment, I use a key. However, excuse me, were I to not live here. Yeah. I almost certainly would have a smart lock.

[A]

Sure. All right. Well then I came back.

[D]

They make life. It's one. It's like the video doorbell. It's one of those things that a

[A]

lot of people, everybody gets. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[D]

But I should just mention on the ass, on the ass level thing. Asset Abloy has said level lock is staying in business and not no worries. Don't, don't be concerned. Don't look behind the curtain. The fact that there's no one left at the company. So we'll see, we'll see what happens. But it was a great, a really great piece of tech and I really do hope that the innovations that Level developed and brought to the market will continue because I for one do not like ugly big smart locks. I want sleek, nice looking smart locks that don't, don't look like a smart lock but still will automatically open my door for me as I approach.

[A]

Well, with any luck they'll fold it into quickset and it will be in every hardware store and it'll be everywhere and it'll be lower cost. And, and that technology, I mean they must have bought it because they like the technology.

[D]

You Hope you hope. I mean one of the concerns is that Assad always been having is North North American residential sales have, have taken a big dive because no one's spending any money in this country anymore. It seems no one's buying houses because the interest rates are still so high. So yeah, I think they're having some financial problems. So that could have been related to why this had happened. But yeah, they haven't. We don't know for sure. So it's all speculation at this point, but fingers crossed the technology continues. But it is really sad that the startups, basically all 80 employees and the founders were laid off. So we will see what happens in the future here and watch this space. But they did the same to some extent to August. I mean, I think most of your listeners and viewers will be familiar with the August Smart lock, which was one of the early smart home sort of babies darlings and that was bought by Asset Abloy. And there hasn't been a new August lock in six, seven years. I don't think we're going to ever see another August Lock.

[A]

Say it's not the first company. There have been quite a few companies, former Apple engineers. That seems to be a common thing. The Apple engineer gets some design skills, some engineering skills and then starts their own company. Tony Fadell, very famous, honestly, was one of the designers on the iPhone who went off to start Nest. You speaking of Nest, have a very good podcast.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

That you are part of.

[D]

If anyone's not gotten bored to tears by my smart home chats. There's lots more where this came from. We have a new podcast at the Verge called Version History. Well, new that we're in our fourth season, but this season is all smart home. And we have a episode that went out today all about the history of the Nest. Oh, what a great story it was. It's a very fun story. A lot of you probably would be surprised by, by a lot of the. The background there. And then we also last week we did the Roomba, which was a fun one. And then we've got Philips Hue light bulbs coming up and of course the Clapper.

[A]

Everyone's Clapper Clap, the original home automation device.

[D]

And we did the Logitech Harmony a couple weeks ago too, which another there. So lots of fun stuff.

[A]

I'm gonna have to listen to this.

[D]

If you want, if you want some more smart home lore, please can I

[A]

ask you an inside baseball question?

[B]

Sure.

[A]

So Vox is being split up into little tiny pieces. The Vox podcast company got sold is but the Verge got It's very confusing. I like your new owner, by the way. I think the Verge is owned by Penske. No. Now, are they going to keep version history? Who gets version history?

[D]

So it's a bit of a misnomer and understandably confusing. But the Vox Media Podcast network doesn't actually, as far as I understand it, make the podcasts. Oh, they are. They are like a platform to help market and advertise.

[A]

See, I couldn't understand because Vergecast without the Verge isn't cast.

[D]

Right. So like I know famously Kara Swisher and her podcast is part of the hugely valuable. But she owns her own podcast as far as I understand it. And like. But they have like a partnership with

[A]

Fox Media Podcast for sales primarily. Right?

[D]

Primarily sales, I think infrastructure, that kind of stuff. So our. Our Verge cast and version history and decoder, which is the other podcast from Verge. Yeah, that is all staying with Verge and no longer part of V. Fox Media Podcast Network, which is going to a Murdoch. Which one? I can't remember.

[A]

Is it Lachlan? I think it's going to.

[D]

I think. No. Is it? I think it's the other one.

[A]

It's locked.

[C]

I think so.

[A]

Yeah. It's not the other one.

[D]

I get confused by. By the murder.

[A]

Definitely not Rupert.

[D]

Yeah, but yes. So. And we're going to Penske, which that was. This was just announced last week, Weekend,

[A]

which owns all the Hollywood magazines plus

[D]

and the Golden Globe. So I'm like, if I get tickets, you get tickets.

[A]

It's going to be very exciting time.

[C]

Jennifer, I have a quick question. What happens to subscriptions? Maybe you don't know, but yeah, I'm a subscriber.

[A]

I care about that. I subscribe everything.

[D]

As far as our fearless leader, Nilai has explained to us, it's Everything will stay exactly the way. Way it is. Like we are. Our company is the Verge as a company which the Verge founded with Fox Media originally, like, it was the Verge and Verge was like, oh, we need a company. So they created Vox Media. Right. So. And that now that Verge, which has always been its own business within Vox Media, is just staying its own business with a different owner.

[A]

Josh and everybody were regulars on Twitter at the time. And I remember when they started my. What was it called? My next. My next thing.

[D]

This is my next.

[A]

This is my next. That's what it was.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And I remember when they. They left. Was it in Gadget? I can't even.

[D]

I think it was in gadget. Yes.

[A]

And they started that and. And they've had great success. And I'm really glad. And as a result, we don't get them on the show anymore because they're far too big.

[D]

I'm sure. I'm sure, Neil, I would love to.

[A]

I would love to get Nilay on, but.

[B]

All right.

[A]

I don't even, you know, I. I act like they're saying no to me. I'm too embarrassed to ask.

[D]

I'm sure he would love to come on.

[A]

It's like, oh, you're big shot now. Same thing with Kara. Kara used to be on the show all the time.

[D]

Now you just get me.

[A]

I'd rather have you. If you give me the three people on right now. The people who are on the show are the people I want to have on the show. But I do admit that sometimes, you know, people get, you know, big time and we don't, you know, we don't get to have them on anymore. They're just too big for us. This little program, we're glad to have you.

[D]

Don't worry about your subscriptions and keep subscribing.

[A]

Yes, I will. I love the Verge. We quote the Verge constantly, and especially Jennifer Pattison Tuohy and her Smart Home coverage. We also quote Windows Central all the time. Daniel Rubino, editor in chief there. Great Windows coverage. Microsoft coverage. Really. And of course, Dan Papa Patterson of Blackbird AI doing his best to stop the Ruskies in there. So you have to at some point explain the difference between disinformation and misinformation.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

What is. Misinformation is wrong.

[C]

It's. Disinformation is intentionally misleading content or narratives. We call it a narrative because it's not just. Just one deep fake content.

[A]

It's the story around it.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. Right. So. But it. It is intentional misinformation could be like, well, my neighbor said it's going to rain tomorrow, and everybody's saying it's going to rain tomorrow. Right. Gossip. Or, you know, one great example, we've been spending a lot of time looking at the World cup because at least in Brooklyn, everybody's looking at the world like, it's huge. It's fantastic. It's a great event. But there have been some narratives around. Around, let's say, empty stadiums. Right? Right. Nobody's going to these games. It's not true at all.

[A]

They're all sold out.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[D]

I would like to complain vociferously about the World Cup. Can I do that now?

[A]

England won. What are you worried about? They're going on.

[D]

So I dropped this in the notes right down the bottom, I tweeted this. I went. I was like, yay, England won. Yay. They playing in Atlanta. I'm just gonna see because I. Yeah,

[A]

it's just up the road a piece.

[D]

Maybe I could go watch.

[A]

Yeah, England. Congo.

[D]

10. $10,000 for two tickets?

[A]

Well, that was.

[D]

Who is responsible for that? I'm sorry, but $500 for a ticket was ridiculous. $10,000 is insane.

[A]

Jason went to a game. He went to like the dumb game or whatever he said a game nobody wanted. It was still 500, but you're looking at the real resale price.

[D]

But that's why. And this. Who do I. But no, this is all through, like, the formal channels. Like, this is the. This country is the only one in the world that does this. And is it technology's fault? Who do we blame? I know we blame Ticketmaster, but is it because of tech? I feel like this.

[A]

So here's what happens. It is scalpers, by the way.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Somebody buys it at face value and then goes to the same scale site. Sometimes they go to a third party site and says, yeah, I'm not going to make it, so sell it for me. But by the way, it's going to be $4,000 more than I paid for it. That's. I think that's still scalping, isn't it? Maybe they. Maybe they're. Maybe their aunt got sick and they can't go. Maybe.

[D]

Why are there no laws against this? I went to a Taylor Swift concert in London and I paid £60.

[A]

Yeah. I should point out Taylor hates the whole thing, too.

[D]

I know.

[A]

Point out.

[D]

Ridiculous.

[A]

On your Blue sky post, the price is 9,000. There is then a $1,350 fee on top of it.

[D]

I know, that's. I mean, it's insane. Why. Why?

[B]

The. The answer is we don't.

[A]

We don't.

[B]

Antitrust here is the answer.

[D]

We need regulation here because this isn't. This is ridiculous. Who's going to. Is someone actually going to pay that much for a ticket?

[A]

I bet it was an eye opener for. A lot of people come to this country to see their country play in the World cup and then not only do they have to pay that for tickets, but they have to tip the waiter. This is insane. How does this country survive?

[D]

Have you seen the memes online? It's been wonderful.

[A]

It is really fun.

[D]

How much? And people sort of discovering that America is actually really cool.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

That guy who's been flying around, I can't remember his name, something or other. He's wonderful.

[D]

He's like, yeah.

[A]

His eyes wide open. Wow.

[D]

And I love every four years this happens, but normally not in America. The whole world comes together.

[B]

I agree.

[D]

And it's just a great example of how we really can all come together. There's something, you know, it's not the people that are the problem. Perhaps it's the politicians that are the problem. I don't know. But as a. As a. As, you know, a global society, we exist in. We exist in.

[A]

The people are fine.

[D]

And the World cup is a great example.

[A]

Example.

[D]

And now that America finally woken up.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

America's finally paying attention. Because you finally agree. Only because, may I point out, you have an English striker.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[D]

Who is here. Is only playing with you because of birthright citizenship. So. Do you know that story? It's fantastic.

[A]

So he's. He's. He's English. His parents were English, but they were living in the United States when he was born. Born?

[D]

No, no. His mother is Ghanaian, I believe, or Nigerian. And she was visiting family or friends in New York and she tried to get on the plane to go home to England, where she lived. So she's Nigerian, but lives in England. And she was. And this is, this is something that does happen if you're too pregnant. They won't let you get on the plane.

[A]

Sure. They don't want you.

[D]

Don't want you to go in labor on the flight. So she had to stay in Brooklyn a bit long longer. And so she had her baby before she went back home. So he was born in New York, went back home with her when he. When they let her fly back. Grew up in England, went through all the English soccer training. Football training. Played for one of the big, like, development teams for. I don't know if it was Arsenal. My football law is a little fuzzy because I'm living here now. But yeah, he played. He was like. And he played for England under 21s. He was a big star. And then he could also have played for his. I think it's Nigeria that he was. His family's from one of the African countries. And then he was going to play for England because. Why wouldn't you play for England? We're the best soccer nation in the world. Football nation.

[A]

I'll be rooting for the Democratic Republic of the Congo in that match.

[D]

But apparently the American fans got, like, in his DMs and on social media and were like, we want you. We want you. And he was like, okay. And he decided, I want to wear a stripey shirt, America. And now you finally have a good soccer team. So you're welcome.

[A]

By the way, if you are born on a flight, birthright citizenship to American Airlines. What. What is your.

[D]

I think it depends where the plane is. When you were born.

[C]

Do they still.

[A]

There was one.

[B]

Do they still do the thing where if you're born on a plane, you get free flights on that airline forever?

[A]

I doubt it. Very, very.

[D]

That's probably why they don't let you go on the plane.

[A]

That's right.

[D]

Very heavily pregnant.

[A]

My favorite response to your blue sky skeet about the ticket prices is wonkish. Who said matter fixes this.

[D]

So he knew me.

[A]

He knew.

[D]

He knows my thing.

[A]

He knows. He knows it's all going to be fixed by matter.

[D]

All right, well, sorry for the diversion there.

[A]

No, it's a good diversion. No, no. And. And I. I don't know, though, if I'll be rooting for England. I might be rooting for Congo. They've had such a rough time. This is something that gives them.

[D]

I hate to say it, and I shouldn't because it'll just wish it into existence, but this is exactly the type of game that we're going to lose. I mean, you just know it. The underdog. I know. I know. I shouldn't have said it. I'm sorry.

[A]

Don't put that out in the space. We'll have more with our fabulous panel in just a bit. I did see. I have to say, I was watching the F1 last week. Or no, I guess it was the qualifiers this week and there were Norwegian fans doing the row in the F1 stands, which cracked me up. That's my favorite new move. They row in unison in the stands. That's. That beats the Wave by a lot. I just love that.

[D]

Everything beats the Vuva Zas from five World Cups ago. Do you remember those?

[A]

I happen to have.

[D]

Those were terrible. America needs to come up with something, though.

[A]

Signature South African World Cup.

[D]

You have one.

[A]

I hate to do this to you, but, bro. All right, we'll have more. Oh, my. We'll have more this weekend. Tech. I'm sorry, I shouldn't do that. But, you know, I don't get to play the vuvuzela very often, so when I get a chance, it's like Beetlejuice. You mentioned it. Now it has to happen. Our show today, brought to you by Meter, the company building better networks. Company founded by two network engineers who know who feel your pain if you're a network engineer. Oh, you have my deepest sympathies. You know all the problems and legacy providers with inflexible pricing. Everybody's got this IT resource constraints stretching you thin. Then you've got these complicated deployments across fragmented tools. You're mission critical to the business, but you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands. That's why you need to know about Meter. That's why businesses love Meter Meter because Meter was designed to solve your problems. Meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure and that's wired, wireless and cellular. That's built for performance and scalability. The these guys realized, you know what, if we're going to make this work, we've got to, we've got to own the whole stack. We've got to design the hardware, write the firmware, we've got to build the software, we've got to manage the deployments, provide after sales support port. Meter does everything. They'll even do ISP procurement. They'll help you with security, routing, switching, wireless firewall. They can do cellular, yes, power, that's really important, right? DNS, security, VPNs, they'll help you with SD WANs, they'll help you with multi site workflows all in a single solution. I was talking to them, they said we love it when we the company comes to us. It happens so often. They acquire another company, they acquire that other company's giant 400,000 square foot warehouse which has very spotty wireless in there and then they have to get it into so that it can connect to the home office. It's just, it's a nightmare. But Meter can come in and solve it. Meter's single integrated networking stack scales. It is in some of the most hostile environment major hospitals. If you ever try to use WI fi in the hospital that is a challenging environment. It works in branch offices and warehouses, large campuses, even data centers. We Reddit uses Meter. Ask the assistant director of technology for the Web School of Knoxville. He said we had more than 20 games. This is a direct quote. We had more than 20 games on campus. It's between our two facilities. Each game was streamed via wired and wireless connections, every one of them. And the event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this before Meter redesigned our network. With Meter you get a single. This is why the, this owning the stack makes such a difference. You get a single partner, one phone number to call for all your connectivity needs from first site survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple providers. Juggling tools. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team. And give you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. Meters built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. We thank them so much for supporting Twit and we invite you you to go to meter.com twit and book a demo now. M E T E R.com twit to book a demo. So here's some interesting news about Elon Musk's brand new, very successful on the stock market Anyway, company Starlink SpaceX plans to launch Starlink mobile service in the United States. Would you buy a Starlink based cell phone? I don't think it would be just satellite. Obviously it couldn't be because if you're inside, it wouldn't work. So they'd also have to have terrestrial. I think they'd have to have terrestrial wireless as well. Gwen Shotwell told investors during a recent IPO roadshow the group was considered launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial US mobile network. The move would require Starlink. This is from Ars Technica. To build a new retail offering by selling mobile contracts to individual customers. Now I use Starlink. It's my backup Internet for these shows and I think Starlink's great. It's not cheap. I don't know if it would be better cell service or not. Analysts caution. Go ahead.

[B]

Wasn't he also supposed to be doing his own phone at some point? It was a couple years ago, right?

[A]

Yeah, that sounds familiar.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I wonder if it would be tied to that, but seems an odd move to launch a smartphone unless it's like an Android based phone, of course. But if it's not, I don't know how long.

[A]

I think the analysts say the biggest sticking point is going to be terrestrial industrial radio because you can't just like in here. I, I can't see this guy. I couldn't use a sat phone. So this will be, this will be interesting. Of course, remember a lot of what Elon has been saying is just to, you know, become a trillionaire to get a good stock price, which it worked.

[C]

Won't iPhone customers become satellite and Starlink customers at some point? Point?

[A]

Well, sort of. So right now most modern iPhones can get satellite connectivity if they lose cellular connectivity through Global Star. But Global Star.

[C]

Global Star, right.

[A]

But Global Star just got sold and Apple's stock, its stake in Global Star went along with it. So there has been some noise that maybe they'll switch to Star Link, I don't know.

[B]

And what does T mobile use? Because you can add satellite service.

[A]

It uses Global Star right now. I'm using Global Star right now. Yeah, yeah. So who did Global Star was bought by? Who bought them? I forgot. No. Boy, it's funny.

[D]

Wasn't that long ago, wasn't it?

[A]

Oh, Amazon. That's right. So Amazon. I don't know. I don't know. I have a feeling that this Apple's not going to do an Amazon deal since they lost their 20% stake in it. So, yeah, it makes sense. I've heard rumors that they were going to use Starlink for the future, but that doesn't replace your cell service. We're talking about full cell service from Starlink, which presumably you could use on any phone if it's like a regular cell service. Let's talk about Windirs, because Benito wins his bet. He said, oh no, I'm going to hang on, I'm playing chicken. I'm going to hold on to my Windows 10. Microsoft had said last November, okay, one more year. Actually, it was October, wasn't it? October 14, 2025, when they ended support for Windows 10. You better explain this to me, Daniel. So are they extending it another year?

[B]

Here they are. And part of it, honestly is the RAM stuff again, as it might be

[A]

different if you could buy a new computer with Windows 11 on it, I guess.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, the part of the, I guess you could say problem with Windows 11 is that there are hardware requirements with it based around security. And so a lot of companies would need to buy new laptops or desktops that meet the security standards. And this, of course, has angered people. But you can't have both ways because if they don't have this security built in and people upgrade and all this kind of stuff and they get attacked, you know, it's a whole issue. So. But obviously buying laptops now and PCs has become very cost prohibitive.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so they're extending it by another year, although I don't know how much. That just gives companies an extra year to save money, I guess, to buy new computers because we don't expect those prices to necessarily drop. But that seems to be a part of this as well. As, you know, they are involved in the K2 project right now, which is this effort to address a lot of concerns and complaints that people have with Windows 11.

[A]

So what do I need to do if, like, Bonito, I'm still running Windows 10 come October? Do I. What do I need to do? Do I have to do anything to keep it alive? Am I just going to get updates without doing Anything.

[B]

Yeah. Actually, I'm not too sure about that. Previously, you had to just register and just make.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

You had to pay. Sort of pay for it with Bing points.

[B]

Right, right. That's right.

[A]

Yeah. Or cop, or had to use OneDrive. There were some weird little things. I'm looking at your article. Not your article, but I'm looking at the article on Windows Central Insider by Kevin Okemwa, who says all you have to do is be signed in with a Microsoft account.

[B]

Yeah. So it looks like it's just a basic extension without any loopholes to jump through, which is good because Microsoft gets a lot of flack for that, obviously.

[A]

Yeah. You know, we knew that they had technical requirements, but we also knew you could still. You didn't have to have TPM2, for instance.

[B]

No. You could bypass it. There were definitely. It's Windows. At the end of the day, there's always going to be a workaround some way.

[A]

Right, Right. Well, good news. If you're a Windows 10 user, the clock keeps on ticking.

[B]

I guess this is where Apple differs from Microsoft. Right. Because Apple could just snap their fingers and make everybody jump. Microsoft tries to do it and everybody loses their mind. So it's.

[A]

Well, Apple makes its money in hardware and so they can give you a free operating system because. Because you bought their computer to do it. Microsoft. You didn't necessarily buy a computer from Microsoft to be using Windows. In fact, most people don't. We were talking earlier about Mythos. Microsoft has its own model, M Dash. And last, I guess it was this month, Patch Tuesday had the largest number of fixes ever. Microsoft said at least 10 of them were generated by mdash, its own security model. And I would suspect that Mythos, which it also had access to, had some of those patches also could be attributed to it. That's a huge. More than 200 fixes.

[B]

That is probably one of the more interesting aspects of AI in terms of software. Right. It's his ability to find weaknesses in systems, find bugs, and actually do advance work. And I think that's. But conversely, of course, it could be just as dangerous if it's in the wrong hands, because it can also be used in probe networks.

[A]

Finding the bugs is the first step to exploiting the bugs.

[D]

Right.

[A]

That's the risk. Right. And that was what people were complaining about with Mythos, is it would write. It would find the bug, patch the bug, and then write a proof of concept to test the patch. But any proof of concept that tests to see if the bug is still there can also be used to exploit the bug. It's the, you know, you're getting the code that for exploitation and the fact that it could do that in a single prompt reasonably is a little bit scary. I don't, I don't think anthropic overhyped that. I think it really is dangerous. But on the other hand, if you can do it with other tools now existent.

[B]

Right.

[A]

What's the point in stopping it? There's going to be a big update. We were talking about this on Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat on Wednesday day coming July 14th. Huge number of updates coming to Windows 11. So you might want to upgrade. Is this to celebrate America's 250th no, it's not.

[B]

But yeah, this is part of that K2 project I was talking about with, you know, introducing features. The ability to move the taskbar. Right.

[A]

Whoa, wait a minute.

[B]

Yeah, it seems trivial and you know, I think, I think only 1% of users probably do this.

[A]

Microsoft took that feature out in Windows 11.

[B]

So it, they didn't really take it out. It's, it's a little more complicated than that. They rewrote the taskbar for Windows 11. It uses a different technology now. It's written differently and so they recreated it and so it, to the end user it feels like the same start system almost from Windows 11.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But they completely rewrote it and they didn't write into that the feature to move it because very few people actually do move it. Most people do keep it on the bottom. Probably less than 1% actually want to move it to the sides or the top.

[A]

But those 1% are loud.

[B]

They're very loud. And you know, you can make a good argument that okay, they didn't have it on launch, but you know, maybe they'll do it later. But they never said they were going to do it at all and they were sticking to their guns for a long time time. But now new team is in place and they're addressing and, you know, delivering a lot of fixes and improvements. For instance, you'll be able to pause Windows updates basically indefinitely.

[A]

What? Yay.

[B]

Yeah. So that's been another thing that people have, you know, have talked about because it, it is annoying to get that pop up saying you need to restart your computer now because it's, there's never a good time for it. Right. But people will be able to pause it now. There's other also the point of time restore, basically this is almost like an older system where it does a snapshot and so if something goes Wrong with your system. You can roll it back to the previous.

[A]

Oh, we used to have that. That's right. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

System restore. Yeah.

[B]

Yep.

[D]

They need to take some tips from the smart home here because now when you get a smart home device, when you set it up it says would you like to have automatic updates? And you say yes, because you do. It's slightly different with smart home than your computer.

[A]

You do, do you? Absolutely do.

[D]

You absolutely do. And then it'll do it. And then it sets the update time and it'll say, okay, I will update between 3am and 5am every. Whenever this happens.

[B]

Oh, you could do that.

[D]

I know you can kind of do that. But yeah, I don't think most people

[B]

are heading to it.

[D]

Yeah, it's always at the wrong time. Like it pops up at the wrong time. Do you want me to do it tonight? Well, I do, but then I'll. But yes. Just stop, ignore. Just don't tell me and just do it. Just do it. Just do it.

[A]

Just do it. Do it when I'm not using the computer.

[D]

And speaking of. And it's also the AI models like the chat GPT and the Claude desktop apps. Constantly wants to update every day it seems like.

[A]

Yeah. You know why?

[B]

For those curious. Sorry. We have hands on window, we have a hands on Windows episode to show

[A]

you how to do all of this

[B]

if you want to do it yourself.

[A]

And, and also all the new features. I believe if they haven't done it already, that's coming. That actually is get ready. Going to be the new normal. Because AI AI is so fast. And the reason these AI is updated every day is because they're using AI to develop it. And as more and more software is developed by AI and maintained by AI, the updates are going to come fast and furious. Sorry.

[D]

And I can't get away from AI.

[A]

AI is with us. Well, you could try. There is a huge backlash now against these flock cameras.

[B]

Oh yeah,

[A]

every community, community has people saying no flock cameras. I understand why the police want them. So this, I think it all started with red light cameras where people were running red lights so they'd have a camera take pictures after the red light came on and people went through it and it stopped that. But then they thought, well, you know what we could do is put these automated license plate readers in and we could catch all kinds of malefactors. Well, the problem is these databases are getting bigger and bigger and it's essentially a way of tracking. And now there's new companies coming along that can be attached to your Flock camera, which. The Flock camera is an automated license plate reader. It just keeps track of all the license plates going by. You're using public thoroughfares. You know, I mean, you know, I guess that's part of the deal. But now they're also putting Bluetooth sensors on there so that they can capture, you know, as you drive by, they capture your phone's name, your car's name, they capture all the Bluetooth. Because our Bluetooth devices are always broadcasting their names. They're getting more and more sophisticated. And there's this issue of Flock having a nationwide database of license plates and of law enforcement from time to time, using it to stalk people, people to track people down who've broken a law in their state as they go to other states. So there's a big backlash. There's a big Ring cameras, too.

[D]

Ring cameras, yeah. That was. I mean, so Ring had announced a partnership with Flock, and then they. Then they had their super bowl ad, which caused an awful lot of consternation, which was.

[A]

It was just to find little lost doggies.

[D]

Their pet finding feature, which actually showed this. This still image of Holmes with sort of radar, like, searching rings coming out from. From Ring cameras. And that one look just said that one shot just said surveillance state. And they just stand in front of everyone.

[A]

If you can find Fluffy, you can also find me, right?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Then, like, an email leak that basically said that that was her next step was.

[D]

So he's always. Jamie Simonov has always said that his. His goal with Ring pretty much since its inception, is to, you know, prevent crime, safer neighborhoods, create safer neighborhoods by. And he has. He is passionate about this, and he really does feel like the more. More cameras equal more security. There are lots of evidence that more cameras does not necessarily equal more security, but. But does equal more surveillance. More of what people knowing what everyone is doing. And then the biggest concern with this was it was. So before Flock, they had a partnership with another. They have a partnership with Axon as well, which is the company that does all the body cameras. Yeah, but what happened with the Flock issue was because during this instance, so before, just before the super bowl, this was when all the DA dhs, the deportations were happening. There was all the unrest throughout the country. And the reporting was. And I think it was 404 Media that broke the story, was that the DHS was using Flock cameras, was tapping into Flock cameras to find potential illegal immigrants. And Flock Safety was saying, no, they're not. We only have partnerships with individuals, your jurisdictions, local police. We do not have, we do not have partnerships with ice. But, but ICE could come and there, there was actually recent reporting about this where it was shown that ICE did actually access some Flock Safety cameras through a local authority. So you know, ICE comes to your local sheriff's department and says show me your cameras. They, they do it.

[C]

There's a subpoena.

[D]

Yeah, I don't know that there was even a subpoena. I think it's more like partnerships between police and, and so people aren't stupid.

[A]

They know if the cameras are there they will be used.

[D]

And so whilst Flock and Ring and Axon say, you know, we had no partnerships with the federal, with federal agencies that, that the concern is you have partnerships with the local police and local agencies and then what about the partnerships that they have? Or, or what are they willing to, what are they, they going to do with the data that they receive? So Flock and to Ring and Flock and Axon, their partnerships were not about these cameras. Their partnerships were more about back end integrations. But the fear of course is, and it comes back to AI. You know, if you can identify something in with a camera, you can identify a dog, you can identify a person. And at the same time Ring launched facial recognition permission for its cameras. What is the next step? And while Ring may be very clear in all its messaging that we do not use, we do not access your cameras without your permission. This one feature did allow the cloud to process your camera data to look for this missing pet with your permission. But that tool now exists and we, you know, know, can it be, could it be misused in the way that the ICE apparently allegedly was misusing it, the access to, to cameras like Flock Safety. So you can connect all those dots. Even though everyone was saying we're working by the books, it, it, it rightly caused a lot of concern.

[A]

Can I show you what my Ring camera told me earlier today?

[D]

It says, oh, you've got the AI

[A]

descriptions heavy that one, this one, it says a cat is walking on the wall. A cat is standing on the wall. A person is walking on the porch. A cat is walking on the porch. A cat is sitting on the wall and looking around. A cat is walking on the porch, A cat is walking on the wall. This is all today? Yeah, two people are bending and moving at the entrance.

[B]

It needs, it needs AI to sort,

[D]

you need to turn on. They do actually have a really good new feature called oh, off my head. I've forgotten the exact same phrase for it. But it, it is only urgent alert. So it uses AI to to determine whether you actually Unusual events is what it's called. So that would get rid of all the cats.

[A]

An Amazon delivery person is delivering a package at the entrance. Sometimes it'll say a guy in brown short pants is delivering a package. It's really funny.

[D]

I love the problem with quite useful this stuff. This is where AI is actually useful in the smart home. But better than Motion Alert which is what you got before.

[A]

Right, Right, yeah. All it said. Yeah. We just go somebody, something's going on out there. So do show this bonito. You showed this article earlier. Peter Diamandis, who is a former Google guy, he was the founder of X Price, you know, widely considered a genius, says humans behave better when they're being watched.

[B]

I think we all know that the problem is is is is we've been conditioned for the last 20 years that China as a surveillance state. And when you walk around there and anyone who's been in China, I've been there before, you know, as soon as you go through security and you check in like they take your photo and it's just cameras everywhere and we're told that's bad, they're bad people over there doing that. And now we're doing it. But it's like well it's not the government, it's just private corporations who end up making deals in the back too. And the thing is the whole history going back to the Patriot act is about private companies colluding with the government behind people's backs and giving them information. And oh, we didn't know about the subpoenas and oh, we just let people, you know, the government tap into people's phones and data and all this kind of stuff. So there's just no trust here. And sure these companies may have good intentions and you can self fear but that's what this is, it's selling fear to people. But of course it can be quickly turned into some of the, you know, most draconian Panopticon.

[A]

Well it's the Panopticon.

[D]

I grew up in London where we are surveilled every minute of the day. But to be fair and I hate to be the sort of the there's

[A]

no crime in London. Right. It's.

[D]

Well no, but I, so I grew up, I grew up during that Irish IRA war and we had you know, a lot. I mean there was, that was why we got the mass surveillance in London was because they were putting bombs in garbage cans and it was, you know

[A]

that's always the reason.

[D]

Yeah. You know fear is the Reason. And that is what we've got. We've got to go back to the. The love that the world cup brings. Let's all be happy and kind to each other. But, you know, there is. The surveillance state is. Is a terrifying concept. We don't want the government watch. We do, but the fact that, you know, cameras and recording devices can help when there are may, you know, significant concerns or incidences, like someone planting bombs, you know, you can track them and you can find them. Things like, you know, there is. It's like all technology. It's how you use it. The technology isn't bad. It's how you use it that is. Is, you know, it's got to be well implemented, and there's got to be a very valid reason. I'm, you know, searching for people in neighborhoods is probably not a valid reason. It's not a dragnet. There shouldn't be technology used to surveil us just in case. But when there are issues, when there's something happening, being able to tap into the technology is a good thing. I mean, unfortunately, it didn't pan out well. But this is what we saw at the same time as the whole ring flock safety case was the Nancy Guthrie case and the Savannah Guthrie's mother, who was. Who went missing. And they were able to use doorbell camera footage to try and, you know, to get some idea of what happened.

[A]

They never caught the guy, though.

[D]

They never caught the guy? No. So it didn't work out, but it could. It was better than nothing at that point. So, yeah, there's always this need more cameras.

[B]

Should have had more.

[A]

That's why we need more cameras. Peter Diamantis, I would point out, is a wealthy man and probably. Probably can figure out how to hide. But he says in his ex post of trillion sensors in space, in the air, on the ground will allow us to know anything anywhere at any time. There will be no hiding. Humans behave better when they're being watched. He says it's a good thing. I won't disagree with anything he said there, except that it's a good thing. I don't think it's a good thing.

[B]

So, again, it comes back to, you know, especially with the flock camera. This is why a lot of jurisdictions and people are of kind. Kind of fighting back. It's. It's not something people agreed to, right? It's something that's, again, happening to people. If these things are just going up, towns are deciding to do it, and then it's only after the fact that people are like, wait, where Are these things coming from. And it's just covered under that. Well, it's security. It's normal stuff that we do with our, your tax money. But I think again, that's why there's that pushback is that people don't feel like, you know, it's like, all right, if we want to have that conversation in our town about putting up cameras everywhere, let's, you know, have that discussion.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's always weird that we live, you know, people like, oh, we live in a democracy, unless you get the constitutional republic nerds. But like, we do have democratic mechanisms in this country and it's like we can put stuff like this to vote. Right. We do can do referendums. That's all possible. But, but we don't have that discussion. A lot of times these things just happen to us.

[D]

Yes.

[B]

And so that's why I think people, you know, it's a double edged sword. You can be like, well, but people are safer. But at the same time, you're going to foment this idea of, you know, being against technology and fighting back against this stuff, even though you could make reasonable arguments about having these cameras in certain places.

[C]

So there are two themes emerging in this episode. Episode. And one is technology, top down. And the other is regulation. I mean, everything that you just said, Daniel, is correct. And we could have discussions. We have democratic mechanisms and we can easily implement regulation that allows technology to flourish while protecting civil liberties. The same thing with artificial intelligence and, and the same challenges exist with top

[A]

down tech, but we don't use those mechanisms.

[C]

We choose not to deploy those mechanisms.

[A]

We're going to take a break. Very smart panel. Love having you on. Dan Patterson, Blackbird. AI Jennifer Pattison Tuohy from the Verge.

[D]

We're not related.

[C]

We're not.

[A]

Oh, Patterson Pattison. Are you related though to that guy from the Hunger Games? No, the, the, the vampire.

[D]

Oh, that's Patinson.

[A]

Oh, another variant. They only probably came from the same people though, right? It's the same name, probably.

[D]

I think it's something to do with baking.

[A]

He's patting his cake.

[D]

Pat. Patty cake.

[A]

Patty, patty cake.

[D]

I don't know, I just made that up.

[A]

I think you're right. He's the son of a baker. At some point he's a Niedenson. And Tanya Rabies of Windows Central. Great to have all three of you here. Our show today, brought to you by ZipRecruiter. According to CNBC, nearly half of hiring managers say a candidate's enthusiasm about the job is the most important factor when considering him for a role. I mean of course you don't want to hire somebody who doesn't want the job, right? Well, if you need to hire for your business, how can you separate the candidates, candidates who are really excited about your opportunity from the ones that are just eh. ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that quickly lets you see the most interested qualified candidates first so you meet the right people faster. And now you can try it for [e-mail] TWIT ZipRecruiter smart matching technology connects you with qualified candidates instantly. ZipRecruiter's new feature puts the most interested qualified candidates at the top of your list. In fact, it gives candidates a chance to tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site. This is based on G2. Use ZipRecruiter. Find that enthusiastic talent fast. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for [e-mail] TWIT that's ziprecruiter.com TWIT meet your match on ZipRecruiter. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. Oh, I have so many more stories and only a little bit more time. Let's see, I'm going to have to do some story triage here. We didn't mention that Samsung is going to start charging for API access to smart, smart things. We should mention that earlier. Yeah, so it was. See this is what I'm talking about. Your AI needs to have access to that API, but to charge me, I'm not, I don't know if I want to do that.

[D]

Yeah, this is, this was. People are not happy about this. It is a. They've sort of dressed it up and like we're going to, we're making vast improvements to our API. It'll be so much better. But yeah, it's 4.99amonth for developers to access the API now. Now. But this Samsung goes, SmartThings goes way back in the smart home. It was one of the original smart home hubs and it's always been a real tinkerer device. Like great for setting up. It was all mainly based Z Wave, ZigBee, used a lot of local radios and then when SmartThings was bought by Samsung they slowly kind of transitioned it away. And in fact the most recent SmartThings Hub does not have Z Wave radio in anymore but they do. It does support matter but Samsung stopped actually making the hardware itself and it has a third party that, that makes their hubs now. And Samsung has put radios into all of its TVs and appliances and such. So Thread Radios and Matter Controller radios are in most of its hardware. And it's moving much more towards AI driven features, much less sort of focus on zigbee, Z Wave. Those local protocols does support Thread. Anyway for some reason this API is now going to cost you $5 a month to access. And if you use Home Assistant to access to connect your SmartThings connected devices, if you have a SmartThings Hub that's connected to Z Wave or Zigbee that will now cost you $5 a month, which is not going to go down well with Community. And Paulus shouts and from Home Assistant actually messaged me actually just today and he was saying they have an estimated of 50000 smartthing users that use Home Assistant and that's over. So he says we, we always estimate at least four times the number of actual users. So it's more like 200000 people that will be affected by this. Individuals that are just running their smart home, not developers. So yeah, that's conversation to be a lot of very, that is a lot of very annoyed smart home.

[A]

And it doesn't just have to be Samsung products. I mean one of the points of Smart Things was it was you connect for everything.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if you've had a hub for many years and you use it to run lots of different devices like zigbee, Z Wave, now Thread and Matter. Yeah that it will, I, I predict that this will push a lot of people off of the hub platform which to be fair it might have been their whole purpose.

[A]

Maybe they don't want to.

[D]

Yeah, they have been dragging the legacy SmartThings community into very slowly over the decade or so since that. When did they buy SmartThings? SmartThing's been around about 15 years I think so and I think they bought it maybe six or seven years ago. So during that time they've slowly been been sort of pushing out the old legacy style of Smart things and moving it towards their new. You know it's, it's the platform when you buy a Samsung Fridge that you now you download the SmartThings app. It's completely unrecognizable from what SmartThings was when it first started. And I think they've it would, it would behoove them in many ways to sort of slowly lose that part of their audience and really just focus on, on their main smart home goals which are very AI powered. And it's a huge user base. I mean SmartThings probably has one of the largest user bases of the smart home platforms to date because you buy a Samsung appliance, you get the SmartThings app. So which is, you know, much, I think much larger chunk of the smart home pie. But those people aren't necessarily doing what people who had a SmartThings Things Hub are doing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It seems like there's two categories of smart home users. The ones that want to have it all local.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And the ones that want to connect to the cloud. And the advantage of the cloud is that you can keep the hardware on its own network and isolated, which is for security reasons a good thing to do.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

If you have a local hub you have to have it on the same network because, or local devices because you have to be able to talk, talk to it. But that's an insecure thing. So I don't, I don't know.

[C]

I don't know.

[A]

I like the idea of having an ha green server here and everything's local. But it's a security issue for me because I can't, I shouldn't really have it on the same network segment as the rest of my stuff.

[D]

So I don't know. And there's, there's a, I mean the most people who are really into the smart home will tell you you just want everything local, but you do. And this is again just to get back to the matter point. That's what matter does. It does make everything gives you the potential for everything to be local. Not every platform uses it locally, but the potential is there. You do need the cloud for the smart home. There's a lot of benefit of the cloud. You just do not want to be dependent on the cloud. That's where things can go wrong. And SmartThings now has hubs in all of its hardware as it mentioned. So your tv, your soundbar bar, your fridge, a couple of other. Oh they've got the, the audio frame thing like the frame tv, lots of everything that smart things Samsung now manufactures has hubs in it. Not your washing machine and dryer. The TVs do the TVs, the sound bars, they are the, the SmartThings Hub. But though SmartThings is very cloud dependent, even though it uses matter, it's very cloud dependent dependent. So if that the SmartThings Hub was the original, was the the original SmartThings Hub, which is now in Gen 3 or 4, was the main way you could use smart things locally. And now, you know, using your Z Wave and your zigbee devices and thread, now you don't have, you're not. Well, you have that option, but you're going to have to pay $5 a month for it. So I think it, it will push people away from that hub and I think ultimately they're going to get out of the that space entirely and just want you to be using your fridge as your smart home hub, which just seems silly, but that's the way the smart home. If you're going to move the smart home mainstream. The hub has always felt like a roadblock. People are like, why do I need to buy this little white box that costs $150 and stick it in my house? But when you, for tinkerers and for people that really understand the technology, because the reason you do that is because you own that device and you've got that over these local devices, local connectivity protocols. So but for this, for the standard regular Samsung customer who's buying a appliance and they're like, oh, cool, I can get a notification on my phone that my washing machine is done. I can get notification on my Samsung TV that my dryer is done or my fridge door was left open. That's all they're really, they're like, oh, that's cool. They're not really thinking about the larger sort of implications there.

[A]

Okay, I'm sorry I asked. Every time. It's just so frustrating.

[D]

It's so complicated and frustrating.

[A]

It shouldn't be so complicated. Maybe AI will solve this. I can just talk to my AI and say, you figure it, you figure it out. We did figure out who was responsible for the Jaguar Land Rover hack. Turns out Russian hackers. This is the one that the damage is so severe that Jaguar had to shut down for a month, more than a month. It was so severe that the UK government had to bail out the company with a $2 billion loan. Cost the British economy $2.5 billion. Russia's at it again, Dan. I tell ya. Australia has of course passed and now many other countries are considering passing a ban on social media for under 16. Studies say it's not working. Four out of five, 80% of under 16s in Australia are still using social media.

[D]

Shocking that.

[A]

What a shock. This is an observational study by the University of Newcastle. The legislation has resulted in, quote, limited implementation and incomplete compliance and substantial circumvent prevention of Social media restrictions. You're just teaching. This is what Harper Reed told us when the law was passed. You're just going to teach these kids to be hackers. Australia is going to have the best hackers in the world now. Norway's going to do the same thing. The UK just announced it, right? And then immediately Keir Starmer resigned. I don't think they were related, but the UK is going to implement that later in the year, early next year.

[D]

It's just another example back to our very first topic of how hard it is to resolve, regulate these technologies.

[A]

Like, well, banning YouTube seems like a really dumb thing to do. I can understand maybe Instagram or Facebook, but YouTube, that's like saying you can't watch TV to people under 16, right? That's how they, that's.

[B]

They're.

[A]

That's what they watch.

[D]

But TV was very regulated for a very long time in the uk.

[A]

It was.

[D]

Yeah. Speaking of which, three channels. When I was growing up, that was all.

[A]

Did you, did you, did your family pay the license fee?

[D]

Yeah, you had to. They would come and like knock on your door if you didn't.

[A]

They were very little trucks.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Did you see?

[D]

Yeah. The, the, the long wave radio BBC is going silent. Oh, so sad. This makes me sad.

[A]

The BBC stopped broadcasting Radio 4 on the 198khz long wave frequency after a century of transmission. We don't do long rave wave here in the United States, but in the, in the UK it did.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

BBC4. What was that? Was it music? Was it?

[D]

No, it was information. It was. The long wave radio was like part of my childhood. My dad used to just listen to the cricket scores on it all the time. It was like lulling me to sleep. It's like my lullaby. But yeah, it was. The great thing about it was, you know, I mean, it's like smart home protocols. The Long way radio. Radio had such reach that you could cat. You, you could get BBC Radio 4 anywhere in the world, I think almost because, wow, wherever you were you could listen to it. And it was a very powerful tool. In fact, it was used during like the French Resistance during World War II. Used long wave radio used this transmission to help to communicate. Like it, it has, it's got such a fascinating history, this radio band, but. But it's basically fallen foul to technology and I think the reason they're actually shutting it down is because they can no longer make the tubes. No one makes the tubes that keeps the antenna going. Something like that.

[A]

Oh, so it wasn't. They Wanted to shut it down. They just didn't have a choice and

[D]

it wasn't financially viable to keep running it like. And because you couldn't manufacture the tubes that were needed anymore and no one uses it. Everyone's moved to digital radio and. Or FM is still. I mean radio and England is still a very.

[A]

Did you listen to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on BBC?

[D]

Yeah, they used to that. I wasn't that old but I'm not that old. But yes, they originally the original. It was one of the first sort of radio books.

[A]

Douglas Adams people know the Hitchhiker's Guide. They think maybe it was a book or a movie but it started as a. Jones is the book with BBC Radio Play on BBC4.4.

[D]

I know Radio 4.

[A]

Listen to it around the war. So you'll still. But it'll be what an Internet or will it be. Will they do broadcast?

[D]

Radio 4 is a station like.

[A]

It's just a long wave.

[D]

It was broadcast on the long wave so you could listen to it anywhere and it was a special feed. I think it wasn't the main Radio 4. I could be wrong. But yeah, Radio 4 is all. All talking, no music. So it was always. It was very low bandwidth.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

So you could. You could get it anywhere. I like it. But it's definitely an end of an era. It was an incredibly important piece of technology for. For a very long time.

[A]

This may not look like an ancient book. It sure doesn't look like an ancient book to me. But that is the Herculaneum Scrolls that were ancient scrolls from the Roman library of Herculaneum carbonized by a volcanic eruption. This is all that was left. But believe it or not, thanks to AI we've actually been able to read it using high resolution 3D scans of the scroll you obviously can't unroll. It would fall apart. So they X rayed it and they've been able to use AI to read the. I don't know if they got anything good. I don't know if it was a good read but they've been able to scan it and read it. These were leftover from the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

[C]

They're trying to keep kids off books back then.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. The volcano. Here's a big oopsie. Ford fired a bunch of engineers to replace them with automated systems. Oops. They had to hire them back because the automated systems made so many mistakes. So mistakenly says Charles Poon, VP of this sounds like it's Made up VP of Vehicle Hardware Engineering. Mistakenly, we thought that just by introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had that would produce a high quality product.

[C]

How do you make that phone call? Like, who drew the short straw to like, look, you got a job and fire them back?

[A]

I know we fired the you, but no, I bet you a lot of those engineers said yeah, yeah, told you so.

[C]

Haha.

[B]

And the people who made that decision probably still have a job, right?

[A]

Oh yeah. They're going to stay. Yeah. Notion had created a Gmail client, but they're going to cancel it because so many people use bots to handle their email that mail wasn't getting through. True AI powered Gmail client on Notion Mail will shut down on September 22nd. Notion said. As Notion agents have gotten more capable, we've seen more users hand off email flows to agents. Today more than half of Notion mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox. So I guess you didn't really need us after after all so that we're going to shut it down.

[D]

How do you do that? I want to learn that.

[A]

Oh I do. That's what I do. I have my. Read my email for me if you ever get an email from me. That sounds a little mechanical. No, I actually don't have it. Write my email. I really wouldn't want to do that, I don't think. Meta, you may remember, was tracking its employees mouse movements for AI training.

[C]

Training.

[A]

Now they've stopped it. Not because it was immoral or wrong or bad, but just because they're afraid of data that the data is going to be exfiltrated. The Model Capability initiative, which they rolled out in April, captures the mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes of US based employees with occasional screenshots feeds them into the meta models for training. But Meta Real, that sensitive employee data was inadvertently accessible to everyone else. All meta staff, including private conversations, performance data and transcriptions. Well yeah, you harvest everybody's keystrokes, put it in a database. Shocking. Just a reminder, you don't own anything you don't actually physically hold. PlayStation is deleting 551Movies from your account. I never bought any movies in the PlayStation Store. But if you bought Rambo First Blood, you know what, you're not gonna miss it. Bridget Jones Diary. Oh, the Deer Hunter. Now that's a good movie.

[B]

How far away are they from removing games though? And I'm sure they've already done that.

[A]

Yeah, as of September 1st, due to our content licensing arrangements, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Studio Canal content content. And it will be removed from your video library. So just a reminder, you don't really own anything you buy.

[B]

The best part is there you don't get any money back. It's just.

[A]

Oh, no.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And if you look at the license agreement, you never really owned it. It was just there. We'll take one quick break and then some final words, including a farewell to one of our favorite people who passed away this week. Before we do that, let me tell you about our sponsor, Superhuman Go. A lot of us were promised that AI would make work easier. But somewhere along the way, maybe you've experienced this. It just started to feel like another thing to manage another tab, open another app to check another place to copy and paste information just to get a simple answer. That's why more people are turning to Superhuman Go. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it. Already aware of what you're doing. You don't have to start from zero. Instead of forcing people into another app or another workflow, it works where you already work. Goes AI chat, sits on the side of the browser and is always ready to help draft emails and messages. Maybe I will use this. Summarize long threads and documents and search across apps without leaving the page you're on. No new tab, no switching apps, no losing your place. It's designed to help people stay focused and work like the best version of themselves, without friction, content switching and busy work that can drain time and attention throughout the day. Now, I'll tell you how I know about this, because we are very happy users of Grammarly. We've been using Grammarly for years now. Part of the Superhuman family. Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly Works across the tool tools and sites. You're already using your browser, your inbox, your docs, your project tools. Just like Grammarly, it fits naturally into the way work already happens. It handles the repetitive tasks so people can focus on the work only they can do. Check it out. Find out [e-mail] that's superhuman.com we're so glad they decided to support this show. Superhuman.com we love Grammarly. We use it all the time. Time. I'm. I think I'm going to have to install. Go see. See what I can do with it. Few final thoughts before we wrap things up on the show today. Let me see. We had a whole oops segment planned. All the things AI did wrong this this week. Let me see. I have a few more here. U.S. auto now. I Don't know if this is a good idea. US auto regulators want to eliminate the brake pedal in your Robo Taxi.

[D]

Why?

[A]

That's a good question. They say that requiring manually operated methods of stopping driverless vehicles is a barrier to innovation.

[D]

Didn't want to just go into someone's. Oh, no, that had a person in it. I'm sorry. There was that Tesla crash. Crash, right.

[A]

Yeah, there was a huge. Now your test. But the Robo Taxi or. Or the Waymo or whatever. Yeah. Actually there's always a big red stop button, isn't there? Like get me out of here button

[D]

one?

[A]

Yeah, me neither. So I don't know. NHTSA is that. They have them in Atlanta, don't they? Oh, yeah, I'm in South Carolina.

[D]

Yeah, I'm in Charleston. I don't. We have horses.

[A]

Never have them in charge. Charleston. Never.

[D]

I doubt it.

[A]

Nhtsa, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, published a notice of rulemaking on Friday to modify federal brake safety standards. I have to think Elon had something to do with this for light vehicles by eliminating the requirement for vehicles equipped with automated driving systems and no manual controls to have foot operated service brakes or manually operated parking.

[D]

So there would still be. Still be a. Some kind of stop, though. It just wouldn't be a break. I get. I think I see that. Like they're saying this is a completely different type of vehicle.

[A]

If you don't have a steering wheel,

[D]

there's no one sitting there with their feet on the pedals. So as long as there's some way of stopping it.

[B]

Please, yeah, go into your app.

[A]

Open your app.

[D]

Yes, stop, please.

[C]

Another technology regulation metaphor.

[A]

Yeah. One million passports have leaked online. A database of a million passports, not just US Passports. People were using. Guess why People were using passports for age verification. This is the problem, one of the problems, one of the many problems with age verification. The person who wrote the book Careless People, which was an example. Excellent book. Sarah Wynn Williams. It was an expose on her years working at Meta and it was.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Meta is now going after her. She says they're punishing me even though I'm a whistleblower. They're punishing her for disclosing its illegal and indefensible workplace conditions and corporate misconduct to federal regulators. She did write book, a book and probably made some money on it. She says Meta is doing this to strike fear into the heart of anyone else who dares to consider speaking the truth about Meta's unlawful and abusive practices in the public interest. Meta, of course, went after her in court and Is suing her finally. We are so sad to have learned of the passing of Om Malik. I don't know Jenny. Any of you know.

[C]

Yeah, it was impossible to work. I mean I did not know him well, but you couldn't work in technology immediately. Amazing in the arts and 2010s without knowing ohm.

[A]

Yeah, he was on our Show I think 14 or 15 times. I. I was a huge fan. He was a deep philosopher, a great artist. He a master with a Leica camera. He loved his Leica and took amazing pictures. Started the tech blog GigaOM. Many of the people you know who've been on this show, show besides Ohm worked at gigaom. Stacey Higginbotham, Kevin Toffel, Janko Records. A lot of the best journalists in tech started at Gigaom. He started that in 2001, semi retired I think 2014 to become a venture capitalist. Had investments in a lot of the companies, you know, um, let's see. 2015, Gigaom shut down with 6.4 million monthly readers. Was really one of the. One of the great places to get tech information. He was always a welcome visitor to the show. He once called me the Yoda of tech. And I said, no, no, you're the Yoda of tech.

[B]

I'm the.

[A]

I'm the Jar Jar of tech.

[B]

He.

[A]

He had this deep understanding and you know what's really sad is that his blog, which is OM Co, some of the best articles he'd ever written were just came out this month. For instance, June 7, his article about Mythos just, just, just brilliant writing. His writing was better than ever. He'd had heart trouble for years. Passed away this week, Wednesday at the age of 59. Nine. Very, very young. But we are very happy to have known him and we will miss the man. If you go to our site, Twit TV and search for O Malik O M M A I L I K you'll find many shows that he appeared on. I think his last appearance here was around 2015 when his health problems began. I brought up this article, I think a few weeks ago ago that I would recommend everybody read if you want to get a sense of who OH Malek is. We are living in Pinocchio's world in which he writes about one of his favorite pens, a Mont Blanc that commemorates Pinocchio. But the article takes a little bit of a turn when he talks about the true meaning of Pinocchio and the fact that we are all living in Pinocchio's world today.

[D]

One of the greats really, really.

[A]

One of the greats. And we will very much miss him. That is it for this week in tech. For this week, I want to thank you, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. Your wonderful. I will say nice things about you when you pass away. Senior reviewer. No, I'm much older than you. Senior reviewer, TheVerge.com she writes about all kinds of things, but especially home automation. Automation. What do you. What do you. What? Tell me some of the doohickeys you've got around the house today.

[D]

Oh, well, next week I have lots of reviews coming out. I've been reviewing the new Google home speaker and the new Schlage Sense Pro smart lock that you should have waited to buy.

[A]

I should have waited. Yes.

[D]

And then those weird robot things that I can't wait to get rid of and like the Switchbot.

[A]

I can't. I'm. I'm kidding. I can't wait to read review of that.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Because I'm normally quite nice, but even

[A]

the kids didn't like this thing.

[D]

Not really.

[A]

That's what surprises me. I mean, isn't it supposed to be all cute and cuddly?

[D]

That's the thing. It's not cuddly. You want to pick it up, but it's.

[A]

It's hard plastic and it's on wheels and it's taking pictures of your house and the two.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

There's so many things I love Switchbot. Switchbot is a great company. They come up with all sorts of crazy and wonderful ideas, but this is one I'm. I'm not sold on. And then the robot lawnmowers in my backyard. You were talking about not getting injured. Well, getting in. You don't get injured in home automation, but my robot lawnmowers beg to differ.

[A]

Do not lie in front of your robot lawnmower. It hasn't. It hasn't hurt you, has it?

[D]

No, well, it hurt my husband, but it was technically. It was technically his fault, so.

[A]

But just not badly, I hope.

[D]

No, no, just. Just, you know, permanent scarring, but.

[A]

Oh my God, no,

[D]

it was again, his own fault. But there are day. It's a dangerous job. I'm just telling you.

[A]

Oh, my gosh. Which. Which one do you have right now?

[D]

I'm testing one from Dreamy, one from Husqvarna, and one from Motion.

[A]

Oh, so you have the best mode lawn in your neighborhood.

[D]

You'd think. You'd think.

[A]

Is this because you're the only virgin viewer who has a lawn?

[D]

Has a lawn. Yes.

[A]

This is the real reason it's so nice to see you. Jennifer also pops up every month with Micah Sargent on Tech News Weekly. And we always love having you on the shows. Thank you.

[D]

Hi bubby.

[A]

Dan Patterson's in Brooklyn. So he neither has a lock nor a lawn, but he is.

[D]

He has a lock.

[C]

I have a lock. Old fashioned key lock.

[A]

Yeah, he probably has many locks actually. Senior director of Content Blackbird AI. Tell me what's going on at Blackbird. Last time you were on, you made an offer people could sign up for your disinformation detector. Is that still out there?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. We have a number of tools. Most of them are not consumer facing, but we do have one called Compass. That's Compass Blackbird AI which it is made for journalists and I mean everyone else. It will detect deepfakes or claim. Like if you see a post on the social web and you wonder is this BS or real? Just paste it into Compass and it will tell you not just true or false, but it will tell you the context. We call it a context checker, not a fact checker. And far more than you know, just generative AI links. It'll give you real deep context and let you find and read more about what you're finding. Oh, of course. Deep and others.

[A]

I get bit all the time now, especially on X. Yeah, the recent searches that.

[D]

That just sums up the world right now.

[A]

Social media bans and Nepal. Yeah, right.

[D]

Is Taylor Swift breaking with Travis?

[A]

No, they're getting married. I found out they're getting married.

[D]

Donald Trump won the election. Like those are the two most important things.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Type of claiming. But. But I saw the. This video. I'll have to find it and I can feed it into the. Because I. You do vision which is fantastic.

[D]

That's great.

[A]

I can feed it in was a picture of a cat and a tube and the cat would jump down the tube and slide down it and just form to. I thought, oh, that gotta get one of those. And then Lisa said, you dummy, that's AI. There's. You can't. Cats don't slide down tubes. What are you nuts? So I guess I have in a way. I have Compass. It's my. My wife. But there are times even, even Lisa might be fooled. I could use Compass Blackbird AI and it's really nice to have that. Thank you for doing well.

[C]

Thanks. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Sorry about the frog voice.

[A]

No, you sound fine. Our Discord chat, our club chat says Leo, you're such a boomer. I saw it. It was A video. The cat went down the tube and it.

[D]

I saw it. I didn't believe it.

[B]

Yeah. You remember that?

[A]

Were you even for a moment, fooled by that?

[D]

I am fooled by the stairs, though. They're showing in the chat. I can imagine a cat doing that.

[A]

Oh, well, let me see now. Okay, this is the slime. This is a test for everybody to see the slime. Oh, yeah, that looks real. Sure, that's AI. No, that's real.

[D]

That looks quite real to me. But who knows? These days you can't believe your eyes.

[A]

Exactly. If you're smart, you make it kind of like low quality, quality fuzzy. Yeah. Well, anyway,

[D]

we've got Dan to save us.

[A]

Here's what happens when a cat jumps down a tube. I think that one's real. Cats do get up to the darnest things, don't they? And then there's Daniel Rubino. He is the editor in chief of the wonderful Windows Central. It's always a pleasure to see you, Daniel. I am sorry that you're not into FIFA, soccer, or F1 sports, but I'm glad you're into Microsoft and Windows. Thank God somebody is.

[B]

They were playing here at Foxborough, so I could.

[A]

I know you're just up the road a piece and everything. Could you hear the cheers?

[B]

No, no. But they got the signs on the highway, so.

[A]

I love it how they say. What did they say, like New York, New Jersey Stadium or something? I mean, like, it's. It's not even in New York. It's where the Giants play, but it's.

[B]

Oh, right. Yeah. They did give it in Massachusetts.

[A]

It's the same thing with this. So the. They're using the old. The 49ers stadium down in Santa Clara. But they say San Francisco. It's not Sanford. It's 50 miles away. It's like Foxborough.

[B]

It's like every place in Boston. It's like. I mean, Massachusetts is basically just Boston, right? Right. Nascar.

[D]

Scotland. It's now Scotland, officially. Right?

[B]

Right. Oh, yeah, right.

[A]

Was it true that the Scots drank all the beer in Boston? Is that true?

[B]

South Boston? That's the rumor, but I think it was just from one pub.

[D]

But it was a good story, though.

[A]

So you're telling me that a cat. A cat couldn't.

[D]

Cat videos.

[B]

Okay?

[D]

That is what AI is for.

[A]

This is the tube. And I swear to God, I think that's real. I think that's real. Don't you think a cat could do that? No, I don't.

[C]

We built a data center next to my house for this yeah, right, exactly.

[A]

Do you live next door to a data center?

[C]

No, I live in Brooklyn.

[A]

No, you live in Brooklyn. No locks. Okay, let me get this straight. No lawns, no data centers, but the best pizza. Thank you all of you for joining us. Thanks especially to our Club Twit members who make this show possible. We really appreciate your support. If you're not yet a member, please Twit TV Club Twit for ad free versions of all the shows. Shows in Club Twit now have chapter markers so you can jump past all the cat videos. That's very handy. We also have a wonderful Club Twit Discord special programming. On Friday we did our second episode of off by One with Jeff Atwood has so much fun. All of that because you support this podcast. It's I think so important to support independent journalism of any stripe. You should support all the ones you use. And we appreciate your support here at Twitt TV Club Twit. We do this week in tech every Sunday afternoon two to six. Two to. I'll make it two to five Pacific. That would be five to 8pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch the show live as we do it at well in our club. Twitter, discord but also YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik after the fact on demand versions of show available at the website. That's Twit TV. There's also a YouTube channel with the video video and you can subscribe to audio or video versions of the show in your favorite podcast client. I hope you will do that. We thank you so much for stopping by. As I've said for now 21 years at the end of every show. Thanks for being here. Another Twit is in the can. See you next week.

[C]

This is amazing.

[D]

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[A]

Chosen foods Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium

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Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms. @mintmobile.com Spotify, it's Jay Shetty.

[B]

Are you one of those media strategies,

[A]

people scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an

[B]

audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social?

[D]

Let me introduce you to fans.

[A]

And they're here with me on Spotify.

[B]

Trust me, I know fans.

[A]

They don't skip.

[B]

They stay for hours. They don't move on.

[A]

They manifest. They're not a demographic group.

[D]

They're fans.

[A]

Spotify advertising, you're among fans.