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WW 987: SelfLoathing.md - Will AI-Driven Vibe Coding Replace Traditional Developers?
02:39:37
Will AI-Driven Vibe Coding Replace Traditional Developers?
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- [00:01]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. We have lots to talk about. Paul's watched every video from the Microsoft Build conference last week. He watched the Apple conference videos three times. And there's some big news for Xbox Boy and the biggest Patch Tuesday ever. Lots to talk about next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 987, recorded Wednesday, June 10, 2026. Selfloathing MD. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners and dozers, welcome. This is the show. We talk about the latest news from Microsoft with these guys right here. Paul Thurrott with his new glasses. I like those spectacles you're wearing. They have cameras and music in them.
- [01:02]
Paul Thurrott
You know, I used to be able to dunk a basketball, but I gotta tell you, the thing I hate the most about getting old is I can't see anything anymore. And I'm really tired of it. It's annoying. I'm looking at the screw on the bottom of a laptop and I'm like, is that a Torx screw or a Phillips?
- [01:18]
Richard Campbell
I don't know.
- [01:19]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's ridiculous. No one should be able to see that. That's too small.
- [01:22]
Paul Thurrott
It's the mechanical equivalent of one point type.
- [01:26]
Leo Laporte
There, there. Richard Campbell, who is also spectacle clad from. You're in Copenhagen again?
- [01:32]
Richard Campbell
Yes, still in Copenhagen. Haven't left two weeks. They're very nice.
- [01:36]
Leo Laporte
Podcasts besides Windows Weekly include runners, radio and dot net rocks. You'll find those as runasradio.com Paul.
- [01:43]
Paul Thurrott
Asylum over there. What are you doing?
- [01:44]
Leo Laporte
I know. What is it? Can you hear it?
- [01:46]
Paul Thurrott
No, no. I mean. No, I meant Copenhagen.
- [01:50]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, just trying to Dane it up.
- [01:53]
Leo Laporte
Staying in Estonian Embassy.
- [01:56]
Richard Campbell
I've managed to do four conferences in two weeks.
- [02:01]
Leo Laporte
But, you know, Copenhagen's great.
- [02:04]
Richard Campbell
Copenhagen is great.
- [02:05]
Leo Laporte
And actually our IT guy, Russell, who was visiting Copenhagen same time as you last week, then went to Grindelwald, which sounds like something out of Harry Potter, but actually is.
- [02:17]
Paul Thurrott
It was just Russell's birthday, wasn't it?
- [02:19]
Leo Laporte
It may be. Anyway, he loved Grindelwald. He said I spent too much time in Copenhagen. This is great.
- [02:25]
Richard Campbell
I mean, Copenhagen is the big city. It's a city. Denmark, it's much smaller.
- [02:31]
Leo Laporte
I have been to Aarhus, which I think is where Legoland is.
- [02:37]
Paul Thurrott
I thought Legoland was in Pennsylvania.
- [02:39]
Leo Laporte
Well, the original Legoland was invented in that. You know, Lego's a Danish invention, so the original.
- [02:45]
Paul Thurrott
Because they like sharp things to hurt Your feet when you walk in the night. Smart.
- [02:49]
Leo Laporte
It was a little scary. I went with my son, who was about 9 or 10 at the time, and they had a giant robot hand that was a ride. So you'd sit in the seats. The hand was that big. There's three people sitting in the hand. And before you get in, you can program it to whatever movements it's going to do with you inside the hand. And I said to my 9 year old, be nice, be gentle. And no, he did not. It was really his Henry's revenge. That was so much fun, actually.
- [03:18]
Richard Campbell
I really enjoyed it.
- [03:19]
Leo Laporte
It was like, whoa, enough of that frivolity. Microsoft's patch Tuesday was yesterday.
- [03:28]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but we're not going to talk, are we? Is that the first thing?
- [03:31]
Leo Laporte
We could talk about that later. But it was a big one.
- [03:33]
Paul Thurrott
I'm like, wait, what happens?
- [03:34]
Leo Laporte
My suspicion is it has something to do with Mythos.
- [03:37]
Paul Thurrott
Your suspicion is correct. Yeah.
- [03:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit. Yesterday, your home version, my first mythos came out called Fable.
- [03:48]
Paul Thurrott
My first mythos. Mythos for dummies.
- [03:50]
Leo Laporte
Mythos for dummies. And I've been playing with it. I got up in the middle of the night to play with it some more because I have limited time. We all do.
- [03:57]
Paul Thurrott
With phrasing. Leo. Phrasing. So I don't like how you three included us on that, but okay.
- [04:06]
Leo Laporte
And then there was Build last weekend. Did you. Did you both, like. You didn't go to Build, but you. You watched all the sessions probably, right? You don't have to go anymore.
- [04:14]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. I mean, if it was in Seattle, I might have gone San Francisco.
- [04:19]
Leo Laporte
You don't like us down here.
- [04:20]
Paul Thurrott
No, it's not that. It's just that there are so many people who live there and it just would have made more sense for me, but it. Yeah, I didn't go. But I can understand now it's over. Why they were pushing for me to go because, you know, I've been going. But this year it was kind of a more of a limited capacity or whatever. And they did invite.
- [04:40]
Richard Campbell
It was basically invite only.
- [04:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but I. But there was a lot of Windows news and Surface news like we talked about last week. So, you know, that was interesting. But of course. And then this week was wwdc, or still is wwdc. And between the two and Google I O as well, there's been this just crazy amount of not just the developer stuff, which is normal. Right. But also AI agents and vibe coding and stuff like that. So there's a lot of that. I don't know. I've been obsessing over a little bit, I guess, but it will definitely be part of the show in a big way too. But I'll just start off with Build stuff because was after the show ended last week I pulled down a bunch of session videos to watch and I watched, I probably watched all of them actually. I watched a bunch of. I watched a couple of them twice.
- [05:35]
Richard Campbell
Not just the keynote, so.
- [05:37]
Paul Thurrott
No, no, I mean like actual session videos. There's a lot of interesting stuff and I. And I'm not going to get to all of it today, nor did I write about all of it over the weekend, but I did write about some of it. The first thing I wanted to mention last, I think it was last week or the week before, but I had asked Richard and you know, figure if anyone knew it would be him but whether he had heard of that Reactor tool that might or Reactor, whatever it is not really a tool but a. I don't know, it's like an add on for the Windows app, SDK Essential or C Sharp, whatever that lets you program Win UI apps in a reactive type model, like a declarative model without xaml, right? Optionally, I mean obviously you can still use xaml. I didn't know what it was at the time, I don't think anyone really did. But there was a Chris Anderson session at Build on this topic, which I actually watched that one four times, which is fascinating to me and it's interesting to see people who matter paying attention to Windows app SDPK or as we're just going to call it, I guess winui because it matters, you know, and calling it like a B team doesn't even describe how like out in the woods this thing has been and there have been all these little things. Like last fall we heard a bunch of stuff like oh yeah, we're going to listen to people and get stuff going and then the person who was running that left and nothing seems to happen with it. So I was happy to see Chris Anderson, but I don't remember if I talked about this as part of the show, but they had announced that Vibe coding tool, which is a CLI that is built on a CLI which allows you to describe the app that you want and it creates a UI app, a Windows app SDK app. And I like this style of thing. Apple's doing the same thing and actually Google is too, by the way, where you essentially, well, not essentially literally using plugins which are just kind of like markdown readme files that describe what the thing is going to do, ground the information backlog this thing has in the documentation for the language and framework and all that stuff and not on the web. And it's not going to go up to stack overflow and confuse WPF code or whatever. And my experience with that has been very positive. The Microsoft vibe coding stuff is like I said, command line based, but it creates a Visual Studio project so you can pull it into the GUI and do all the debugging and everything else you want to do with that. And that's great. But, but it's also, it's not like what I would call a consumer feature, right? I mean, no normal human being is ever going to download these CLIs using Winget and you know, figure out how all this stuff gets together. But having spent the time to do that, you can see where it's going to get better. I was actually really, really impressed by that. So that's, that's kind of interesting. But I also, you know, in going through all the sessions that I went over, which fall into a couple of different categories, I guess Microsoft talked about the Windows app development stuff, which is what I just mentioned, or at least some of it, just kind of general productivity for developer type things, which they've been talking about for years. We've done this at various builds where they've announced things like the dev environment, the premise, wsl, blah blah, blah, whatever. And there was a lot more of that. So that's the type of thing for me that from Microsoft seems to happen one time and then drop off the face of the earth. And it's kind of nice to see them going at that. But obviously, and this is super obvious, you just have to know, you have to be awake to understand this. The big focus at this show was agenic AI, which Microsoft has been talking about for two years, but is finally now delivering in meaningful ways. You know, not just for developers, but I would say developers are always the tip of the spear, right? So you see a lot of that there. And this notion of using agenic AI to aid in software development is, you know, that's the, the, you know, that's the beginning of this stuff, right? And then productivity will kind of move on from there. And there's, there was a lot of that, as you would expect. And we, you know, like I said, not surprising, but in going through this, it wasn't so much that there was like this theme that kind of emerged per se, but I, I do, I do feel like I'm getting like gaining understanding of why Microsoft is making a public point of improving Windows 11 this year. Right. That I had sort of speculated in the past, like some giant enterprise customer or some group of enterprise customers must have come to them and said guys, you got to stop screwing up Windows Update. Like this is getting stupid. Like you need, this needs to be better. And I'm sure that was part of it. But actually if you think about intent, right. You know, what is Microsoft really doing in this case and what is the overall strategy of the company? In the same way that it used to be all about cloud computing, which didn't make a lot of sense for Windows and then came into AI which makes sense on some level for Windows and now to Agenic AI which this is their platform. So like Apple and Google, they're going to do these things they're going to do to make agents make sense on Windows. And I think this is actually why they're improving Windows because that foundation has to actually work and make sense for anyone to even consider using or developing with agents on Windows. Right. I mean Windows itself has to, has to be solid for this to, to work.
- [11:05]
Richard Campbell
Can't be crashing while it's waiting for an agent to complete a task.
- [11:08]
Paul Thurrott
Right. So I think that is actually it. This is where the broader aim of Microsoft kind of aligns with the needs of the users of Windows, which is kind of a nice coincidence. And I, it kind of is a coincidence. But, but whatever, who cares? Like we'll take it.
- [11:22]
Richard Campbell
So we're getting to this place where it's like Windows, we're making it better, but not for a good reason.
- [11:27]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Or I would say we're making it better, but not for you.
- [11:30]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [11:32]
Paul Thurrott
Anyway, we hear your complaints, we don't care, but, but we're going to make a show of caring. And they are doing that.
- [11:38]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And we really need to sell you more stuff. So we need a platform to sell.
- [11:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. The other thing and this is tied to that is, you know, we, we talk about AI in general, LLMs up in the cloud, how expensive all that is. This year has seen the move to usage based payments or paying for that stuff, which has escalated the cost on the people using AI dramatically. But it's been, you know, Microsoft, Google, whoever has been basically subsidizing us to date. And so we're starting to see that kind of true cost of AI. We have been talking about local AI as well for years, but also with the caveat that it's never going to be as good and it's you know, the early stuff that Microsoft put into to like copilot plus PCs, for example, where you use like paint to make a little stupid kid's drawing and it turns it into an image of some kind. You know, it's like, it's okay, it's not as interesting or as good as the, the stuff you see up in the cloud, but it gets better over time. Right. And so there are things like click to do or super resolution, which kind of amazing that you can take an image like a low resolution scan you took of a photo like a million years ago and scan, you know, scale it up to 4K, it looks awesome. Like there's the local AI stuff is getting better. You know, Copilot Plus PC as a brand I don't think has really resonated with anybody. There is no killer app for this functionality, which kind of makes it a hard sell. If you own one of these PCs and you run a normal, you know, collection of whatever apps, especially if they're on the creator end, you may have some little benefits that are happening here, but you'll never know. Like there's no gleam that pops up says, hey, this is happening. This is awesome. Congratulations.
- [13:13]
Richard Campbell
And this is before you get into like a DGX Spark or something like actual having a high performance machine on your.
- [13:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yes. So we probably talked about this a little last week. There are a lot of questions about what happens to Copilot plus PC because of this Nvidia hardware. Right. Microsoft is not saying they did not promote Copilot plus PC as part of that announcement. They have since confirmed these things are Copilot plus PC. So for the short term, and maybe they're just saying this now because they don't want to reveal what they're going to do. They're still moving ahead with this brand,
- [13:48]
Richard Campbell
but you know, it's expanding the definition of a Copilot PC.
- [13:52]
Paul Thurrott
Well, we'll see. I mean, that one of the. I mean, look, I, I've often sort of believed and said that at some point this thing just disappears because all PCs are copilot plus PCs. Or the spec raises, you know, and, and becomes, you know, more stringent. And then you need better.
- [14:06]
Richard Campbell
Eventually every PC had a GPU of some kind. It may not have been good, but everybody had one.
- [14:12]
Paul Thurrott
Right? Right. But the needs of local AI are such that Microsoft expanding the spec or removing it so that we can do those things with whatever resources we have on the device like the cpu, GPU or mpu. Right. Is the right thing to do. I think we Talked about this last week there. They've adapted or are adapting the Windows AI APIs to support that across some number of those APIs where I think text to speech was one. I don't remember the list, but where these used to require an MPU of a certain like a Copilot plus PC style, but now you can. I don't remember exactly. They're different for each API. But let's say in this case you can do it against the CPU and. Or the gpu, you know, and that opens it up to more people. Right. Because there's a chicken and egg problem here too. Right. There's a lot that kind of goes into this and you know, I think we would have talked about Stevie Batish and his little. Well, he did a nice appearance in the, in the keynote and this time. In time. Yeah. And talked about this kind of slightly far out, you know, project where it's going to be like an Android AOSP based hardware and some, you know, OS in the cloud sort of a thing or distributed os, however you want to say that. They didn't say it that way, but whatever. So there's a lot going on. But again, you know, like the. Making Windows make sense for developers and making Windows maybe even the best place to be if you're doing anything related to AI obviously makes sense to whatever degree. Getting to a point where there is what we would have, you know, we've been calling hybrid AI makes sense. And hybrid AI, I think until this past week in my brain was you're running something local, slms. It reaches some point where it can't do something and then maybe there's a handoff through an orchestrator and this is something you as the user would okay or configure where it goes off to the cloud and the cloud does the thing and then there's. The opposite's true too. You could start something in the cloud and again this would be like an orchestrated based thing where it's like, you know, we can do this in the cloud, but you don't need our best model. Yeah, maybe, but we can see you have a local model that's perfectly acceptable. Save you money to do it. Let's just do it. That's free. This is the unmetered AI thing. Right?
- [16:30]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, well, and just so you could assess performance. Right. Like the Copilot PC spec was what, 40 tops?
- [16:37]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [16:38]
Richard Campbell
And a DGX Spark is a thousand tops.
- [16:40]
Paul Thurrott
I know, I know it was a big deal.
- [16:43]
Richard Campbell
We had a tool like.
- [16:44]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, right. I know it's Crazy like, but this is. Look, that's the thing I just wrote today, which we're going to talk about much later in the show. But the speed at which AI improves and evolves, however you want to say that is astonishing. We keep talking about that, but that's a great example of what that means in real world terms. We made this spec and it was 40 tops. And that's some measure of performance on an MPU. Local hardware, accelerated AI workloads, whatever you want to call that. It is impressive that two years later, Snapdragon X2 doubles that essentially 80 or 85. Right. Depending on the NPU. We have AMD and Intel NPUs that I think are in the 50 tops range. Right. That exceed that initial spec. Nice. But then like you said, like Nvidia comes along and you're like, oh, this is just blowing this out of the water. Not, not that that should surprise anybody. We already have GPUs, you know.
- [17:39]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And it's a $5,000 machine. Like. Yeah, you can. No, but you could. You could just drop three grand on an NVL 72, you know.
- [17:47]
Leo Laporte
No, of course.
- [17:48]
Paul Thurrott
But you have this. But now we've established 3 million. Yeah. It's not a baseline, it's kind of the top of the line. But the spectrum of capabilities, the spectrum of, I don't know, performance or whatever you want to call that, has gotten so much broader now, you know, and so something's going to change. We don't know what that is because Microsoft has not said, but I am starting to think that hybrid AI. Well, I'm starting to think it's because they were sort of saying this. So, for example, when you think about local. No, I'm sorry, they introduced the term local AI agents. These are agents that run on your device against AI on your device. They also introduce something called sub agents, which also. I will say Apple used this term this week and I would. I'm sure Google talks about sub agents. And then there's something I'm going to call hybrid agents, although I don't believe anyone's used this term, which are agents that can work with cloud and. Or local AI, depending on the situation. Right. This is. This is kind of a new level here. Right. We have giant LLMs in the cloud that are kind of do everything models, like the stuff that OpenAI has been making anthropic and Microsoft's been trying to make. But we have specialized LLMs as well. They're really good at certain things. And then of course, we have these local models that are specifically designed for very specific things. So there's more of a range. Right. It's not just local cloud, it's like a range of capabilities on both ends. And then we have agents which are the same thing, they're local and cloud, but there's also the ones that cross over. And so I think this makes that orchestrator thing I keep wanting to bring up all the more important. And that's the role that Windows can play. Right. When you're a developer and you write to a Windows AI API. Two years ago, when we called it something different, the copilot runtime or whatever the heck it was, you were specifically targeting a certain kind of chip and it had to be there for this thing to work. And the way that these things are starting to work is the way they should have always worked, which is it just assesses what's on your computer and does the right thing. It's orchestration. Right. And I think that, you know, like the Nvidia models support, or the Nvidia chips rather support local models with up to a trillion parameters. It's like these numbers don't even make sense. It's like a data center that sits in your lap, you know, hopefully doesn't burn a hole through your leg.
- [20:11]
Richard Campbell
But I mean, we've been calling our smartphones the supercomputer you put in your pocket for a while, like, because it's true. Yeah, you just have that much compute these days. On the comm size side of this, we've definitely had conversations now where it's like as a piece of software matures, you get a version or two in, you know, the constraints of the developed software mean the model can be simpler. So you can imagine, you know, initial development on a project might use a cloud based model. And I hate the term frontier because please save same.
- [20:44]
Paul Thurrott
Right? Yes. Every two weeks there has to be a new term, you know.
- [20:47]
Richard Campbell
Oh, sure, anything to make you spend more money. Yep. But once you get to a certain level of maturity where you know the architecture, you know the platforms you're depending on and so forth, like the model just does not need to be that big. So I, I think we get to get better at pruning at basically saying, hey, what don't I need in this to be able to be effective answering questions around this particular product, like, I, I have to wonder if we aren't going to do a place where you'll literally have a tuning set, some kind of MCP or some kind of skill set specific to your application. So the model can look at that and go, oh, no, I can handle that. What do you need?
- [21:23]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, this is a. Right. So, okay, this ties into the thing I'm struggling to explain in a good way, but it's basically think about a chatbot of the type we would have used over the past two to three years, where you get this interface where you type text in and there's always like this dropdown where you choose a model.
- [21:42]
Richard Campbell
Like people, people you're not qualified to select those models.
- [21:45]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, like, yeah, what are you doing? Like, that's a stupid thing to have,
- [21:48]
Richard Campbell
you know, it should choose. Cannot answer.
- [21:51]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, look, there are going to be issues with regards to like, maybe the cost of it or whatever, where you might have to put up a prompt and say, hey, look, this thing will run best or only on this model, but it's going to be expensive compared to the other thing, which may be very cheap or whatever. Like, there has to be that part of it. But this increasingly. Again, I keep coming back to this. It's really about orchestration and orchestration at an incredible level because it is what you just said and it is the things I was talking about kind of combined, which is like you have all these different capabilities exposed to all these different models that are in different places that are good for certain things. And you as a person, you as the developer even should be hand picking the one thing. It should just do this for you. This is a thing that SDKs or frameworks or whatever you want to call them should do for developers. It's a thing that the operating system should do for apps and services and whatever else. It should be automatic. And I feel like that's what is happening.
- [22:49]
Richard Campbell
Bound to be tools better at choosing than you. Like, the imp of the perverse in me invariably asks someone when they talk about how great the tool they're using right now. It's like, why is that one great? Like, why was the previous version? Like, what did you get? Was it just because it was 0.1 bigger? Like, is that why it's better? Like, what's the real measure of a superior? So given problem, you can do a
- [23:10]
Paul Thurrott
point in time comparison of anything to anything easily. The problem with AI again, is because it moves so quickly, the thing that was best at something two seconds ago may not be the best thing four seconds from now. And this is why you need this to happen dynamically on your behalf, because you could research this and do a lot of work and experiment and be like, yep, no, I found it. This is the best thing for this thing. But then a day goes by and now it is not. But you don't know because you've stopped thinking about it. And this is, you know, this is the role an operating system plays. Like we don't, you know, we don't manage memory manually. We don't. Right.
- [23:44]
Richard Campbell
I would also I'm going to push back on the moving super fast because when I actually like keep notes month over month on this, we're not actually changing any faster than anything else. These versions are not coming out that quickly. The really insidious thing that it supports your argument more than anything is like GPT5 over the past few months has changed without changing the version number.
- [24:06]
Paul Thurrott
Right, right.
- [24:07]
Richard Campbell
Which is another far more concern.
- [24:09]
Paul Thurrott
It's another crazy. Yes. Yeah. So in that case you could see that as a special case. But actually I think that's going to be the norm going forward in many cases too. Right. That we have this thing, we can just make it better. We don't have to rev it, we don't have to eventually put it out the. Well, we are putting the old version of the same thing to pasture. But we're going to, you know, not just move on to the next thing and keep that thing there. We're going to actually replace it with something that's a little bit better but is the same thing essentially. So it works with all the APIs and whatever developers are doing. Yeah, this world is insane. And I, I think it's just the
- [24:47]
Richard Campbell
companies that are insane.
- [24:48]
Paul Thurrott
Yes.
- [24:49]
Leo Laporte
Well, I think there's two different audiences for this because I, you know, for instance, what Apple announced at WWDC on Monday. Yeah. They don't, you know, you don't choose really much of the model. It just kind of does its thing. You can, I guess. And there may be some.
- [25:03]
Paul Thurrott
Well, so we're going to talk about that because Apple, you know, Apple like.
- [25:08]
Leo Laporte
But for real. What I'm saying is, for real people like normies. They just want to work. Right, Right. That's what you're saying. But then there's people like me. I mean nobody drop down menu that I can say I could choose from 200 different models.
- [25:24]
Paul Thurrott
But you shouldn't. I mean, but even that's silly. That's what I know, I should.
- [25:27]
Leo Laporte
No, no, you' wrong.
- [25:28]
Paul Thurrott
No, you shouldn't. This tells us how. No, this tells us how immature this is. This is. This is like when, when. Okay, but when cars first arrived, you had to be a mechanic to own a vehicle. There was no way around it. And that's what this is. When you when the first cars, you had to manually shift the transmission into different gears with your arm or your foot or some combination of the two because it couldn't do it itself. But then it could, you know, and, and just like there are people who are like, oh no, I'm never going to give up a stick shift. You've obviously never sat in traffic on a hill, but you know, there. And people are like, I'm never going to give up driving a car because we're going to have self driving cars, whatever. Like there's always people that cling to that stuff. But ultimately like this is the role of. I'm going to, I keep calling it an orchestrator, but you know, on the fly, like whatever it is you're asking it, no matter what it is you're doing, it should just do the best thing for that thing at that moment, no matter what it is. That's true for every audience, right?
- [26:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. What mine does, for instance, right now I'm running a local model because it's free and cheap and private and it's good for the kind of stuff I want to do. And then if I do coding, but see, I've set it up once a week, it does benchmarking, it goes out, it takes a look at new models, benchmarks, looks at what others are saying and chooses models. And it has a delegator for a variety. So for images, as you say, you don't, you want to use Nano Banana, you don't want to use anything else? Well, I want to be able to choose.
- [26:58]
Paul Thurrott
I mean. Okay, I'm sorry to interrupt but like the, the image one is interesting because I think it was Microsoft that said this when Microsoft AI had come out with some preliminary AI, you know, ma AI image whatever, 1.0 something. And then there was a Flash version. They were talking about there being these kind of workflows within businesses where for the internal work, when you're making prototypes of some ad campaign or something that you're going to pass around via email, use the quick one where it's not going to be super good. But then when it's time to go to print, no, you know, not print, but wherever you go into production, you're going to use the really nice one because that will be photographic quality. And it, you know, yeah, I, in these early days we're going to just, if you're going to do that, you probably just choose that yourself. But you know, in the end, I mean for this to make sense for everybody, it, I feel like this just has to Happen. But we just, we have to, you know, we need that infrastructure for that to even make sense. Plus, God help us, it's going to slow down a little bit.
- [27:55]
Leo Laporte
Well, and that's why Perplexity did so well early on, because that's all they did. They didn't make models, they just chose models. And they chose presumably appropriately, in fact, the default is best model. Right.
- [28:07]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I mean you can make, as a platform maker like Microsoft, you know, makes these features in Paint and Photos and where else, Windows that do things right. And so they have individual small language models that are tuned specifically for whatever that task is and whatever. You don't get a choice. It's using that one thing and it is not looking for anything better. It's just doing that one thing. That's all it does. That's fine. I mean, that's fine for that kind of a task. But you know, at some point, especially given the way costs are and everything, you almost need like a. It's essentially like a set of rules of sorts. Like if you get in the car and you get Google Maps going somewhere and you haven't touched any settings, it will probably do something where it saves you gas over getting you there the quickest, which is not what I want, you know, but I can go into the settings to say, no, no, no. And in the thing you're talking about or any, any AI where it's like, look, I want you to always go local first and here are the conditions where you could go to the cloud where it's going to. Maybe it's going to cost me money or something or you're paying per month for something, so you should use that. But if it's going to exceed your monthly allotment or something, it should be able to tell you that somehow. And you know, I think our audience,
- [29:14]
Leo Laporte
and certainly me are do it yourself type people who do want more control. I understand normal people don't care and shouldn't have to care. And you're right, an automatic transmission may do a better job of shifting up than a manual. Although an expert says, well, no, but I can do it better manually. I like the control, but I work with the agent to choose the models. I'm not doing it all by myself and I set parameters because, for instance, I'm going to care about cost less than privacy. You know, there's certain rules that I might tell.
- [29:47]
Paul Thurrott
That's what right exactly 100 that an
- [29:49]
Leo Laporte
orchestrator that doesn't know me won't necessarily know what to choose or will choose for Profit.
- [29:55]
Paul Thurrott
The orchestrator is going to know you, Leo.
- [29:56]
Richard Campbell
That's the.
- [29:57]
Leo Laporte
Well, but it's going to shoot. But I don't trust these big companies. They're going to always opt for their profit, not my interests. Right.
- [30:03]
Paul Thurrott
So, yeah, I mean, that's a. By the way, that's.
- [30:05]
Leo Laporte
I want to defend myself.
- [30:07]
Paul Thurrott
No, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm. I'm.
- [30:10]
Leo Laporte
No, I'm just saying I don't trust necessarily these big guys to tell me what to do.
- [30:13]
Paul Thurrott
I've never heard of anyone not trusting big tech, Leo, but let me just say. No, no, of course. I mean that's part, that is part of the conversation. If anything, it's even more important with AI in some ways than in other areas of technology. But. But that's part of it. I mean that is part of it, right? If you're going to do something like run local open source AI semi exclusively, but occasionally it can go do something with whatever model in the cloud, you're going to want to have some say over that. Right? You obviously, you don't want it to just do that and that. But that would be part of. That's. I think that's the point. I think it, I think these, it needs to become more sophisticated. I think, I think we are going to get there.
- [30:54]
Leo Laporte
I love it that I'm able to now use a local model and it's. But I have to know what it's going to be good for and not good for. I have to, I still have to have some.
- [31:04]
Paul Thurrott
So this is tied to the thing I want to talk about when we get to the, in the AI section. But there. One of the sections.
- [31:11]
Leo Laporte
This isn't the AI section. I'm sorry.
- [31:13]
Paul Thurrott
No, I just did this up. I just, I put this up front because I felt like this was a bigger deal than Patch Tuesday. But. And it's. This part of it is about Windows, but in watching those build videos there's a session. I guess it's kind of an odd one because Scott, Scott Hanselman and Mark version of it. You're sitting in the audience for some reason. But it's basically, it's sort of like an episode of their podcast and it's, you know, the Mark, Scott and Mark learn whatever it is and what they're basically the conclusion of this thing. I found myself in the awkward position of completely disagreeing with to the point where I had to watch it again to be sure that I, you know, and I understand what they're doing. But, but their point was people are Vibe coding. And that's cute, you know, it's great. It's. It works good for little personal apps. These things we talk about, right? But if you're going to create apps that run at scale, that are going to be supported by an organization or a company or whatever it is, you need people who are experienced developers that have to know the code and blah, blah, blah, and how things work and. And anyone who hears that, it's going to nod their head and be like, yep, 100%. And I. The more I think about it, the more I'm like, nope, you're wrong. You're. You're right today. But there are a lot of pros
- [32:29]
Leo Laporte
like Uncle Bob Martin who say, I don't look at the code anymore.
- [32:33]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, thank you. I was going to say that's a. That's actually ludicrous. You know, like, I mean, it. It makes sense. Today. It is. Some guy in my. In the comments, my site made this point. He says, you know, he goes, I was pushing back against this, like a lot of people, but then I suddenly realized this is like when they moved Exchange to the cloud, and all the Exchange guys were like, no, no, no, no, no. And I was like, yes, yes, yes, yes. Your company does not exist to host an email infrastructure. Why would you do that? That's insanity.
- [33:03]
Richard Campbell
But that's what keynote. Your job was not to write code. Your job was to solve problems for customers.
- [33:10]
Paul Thurrott
You said that a couple weeks ago is the smartest thing I've ever heard in so many ways because it's so succinct and correct. And you get caught up in this thing. In the case of Exchange administrators, they got caught up in every second version. I'm going to do an upgrade. That's all they did. And they stopped learning and they stopped, you know, they're not making decisions that are the best decisions for the company. More, they're making decisions that protect their job, you know, and they see their job in a very different way.
- [33:38]
Richard Campbell
It's the. It's the person that's got 10, 12 years in all on the same stack, that's the one that's terrified. You know, the old guys that have gone through two or three stack changes, like, well, here we go again. Yeah, the new folks who are just trying to figure out the first stack go, I like this one better. Like, they don't have a problem, right? But because of the window we're in, you know, if you made that move to the cloud, that was your last big change.
- [34:04]
Paul Thurrott
But I literally, I had a guy Asked me point blank. You mean to tell me that my last act as exchange administrator is going to be the hand over the keys to this kingdom, to Microsoft? And I was like, yeah, that is what I'm telling you. You needed to learn more about.
- [34:21]
Leo Laporte
We had to get to that point. Right? I mean it wasn't that way in the beginning.
- [34:25]
Paul Thurrott
Well, but there is, there are some interesting parallels here, right. I mean there was a lot of pushback from these people who are protecting their careers, which is completely understandable. But you know, I look at this like as a writer, I am not going to use AI to write, but I also understand that most people cannot write. Well, I know adults my age who can't spell correctly. They put social media posts that are embarrassing and if there's a thing on their phone or their computer, whatever they're using, that can correct the spelling and grammar as they go. That's wonderful. Why would we not want that? Don't worry, that is called AI. If it, you know, just, it's going to help you. It makes sense to me. But I, then I look at this like the vibe coding thing. I'm not a professional programmer but I've spent years writing different versions of this one app and it's been a lot of work and there's been a lot of disappointment and a lot of trouble and I have in the past month now recreated it probably almost a dozen times, different languages for. I've done it on Apple now and the last one I did, it took 12 minutes and that app is better than anything I just spent three years working on. And I'm sorry but the world has changed. Well, it's depressing. You know what, it's exciting.
- [35:29]
Leo Laporte
It depends where you get your self worth from. It's from writing good code. Then maybe that's depressing.
- [35:34]
Richard Campbell
I mean definitely when I'm writing a prompt to do some writing I includes the phrase write like Paul Thurot but with extra snark.
- [35:40]
Paul Thurrott
Right? And it's like that's what Larry in
- [35:43]
Leo Laporte
our Discord is saying. It's not the code, it's the spec. The spec AKA maybe the prompt is really the source of truth.
- [35:52]
Paul Thurrott
The thing Richard was talking. I'll. I will make available the self loathing MD file that will help you write like Paul Threat.
- [36:01]
Richard Campbell
But.
- [36:03]
Paul Thurrott
But yeah, I mean look, your reaction to this stuff, one's reaction, not yours, I mean but one's reaction is going to depend very heavily on where they are in life, you know, what, how they value their self worth, et cetera, et cetera I keep making the point that there are these jobs that used to be things that we would look on today and be like, why did people ever do that? That's crazy. And people are, you know, are going to look back and say, I'm sorry, you did what now? You wrote in a code that was compiled and linked, and then you ran it and it didn't work. And then you did it again and you kept doing this until it worked, and that was your life. Like, what is that?
- [36:37]
Richard Campbell
Were you a productivity?
- [36:40]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. I mean, that's crazy.
- [36:41]
Richard Campbell
But if you go back through the comments of the old run as episodes, as the cloud became a thing, there's guys out there lamenting, racking and stacking servers. Like, that used to be my job. They're taking my job.
- [36:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [36:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. At least we got some physical activity out of it.
- [36:55]
Leo Laporte
I mean, we went from Colos. Does anybody still do a colo? You'd have to really be.
- [36:59]
Paul Thurrott
I used to my. Well, in early July, mid-90s, I was one of five people who worked at a very small company. We had a colo. And sure, somewhere near San Francisco, but it was literally like a Dell workstation running Windows nt. And I had to fly out there sometimes and open this case. Like, at one point there was a guy who wouldn't poke a stick through the cage to reboot the thing, and I had to fly to California to be like, boop.
- [37:31]
Leo Laporte
The fact that you could do that is probably a security flaw, but I'm not gonna look.
- [37:36]
Paul Thurrott
It's a different world. I'm not.
- [37:38]
Leo Laporte
As you trust Azure or you trust aws, you don't do that.
- [37:44]
Paul Thurrott
I know, but that's how the world evolves.
- [37:46]
Leo Laporte
And as you said, someday I won't care about model. But right now, I'm running f. Able to go through all last. No, of course all my code. I'm running Quinn locally to tell me which battery to put in my apc. You are appropriate to that job.
- [37:59]
Paul Thurrott
You are in no way a mainstream user. No, I agree. I mean, obviously.
- [38:05]
Leo Laporte
But I think power users, we want that.
- [38:07]
Paul Thurrott
We need. We need people like you who do this. Right. I know we do. I mean that. I mean, we really do. But. But I also. I just look at this stuff and I think, you know, I get so much pushback against AI and I was on the fence with this for years, I would say. But as I watched this evolve, I realized we're spending time on the wrong things in some ways. And if you pay attention to these build sessions, which is where this originated, it's like there is kind of a. I feel like in the past they would talk about things, right? Microsoft, they would say we're going to have an SDK when they were different names that's going to do this thing. And you're like, okay. And they didn't ship anything for almost a year and the thing they shipped was garbage and it only worked on MPUs and it was stupid and you had to use an experimental version of their Windows app SDK at the time, so you couldn't ship it in real code. And then another year went by and they just kept talking about things that weren't really happening. But I think the big difference that I see it build this year, aside from Windows being at the forefront again, or you know, near the forefront anyway, which I think is great, is that this stuff is real now, you know, and in they were. Microsoft was very good about this. If you go through their developer blog posts, they're like, okay, this is the thing. Click here. This is where you can go get it. Oh, this is the thing. Oh, click here. This is over on GitHub. Oh, click here. This is, you know, a couple of the things are in some kind of early preview maybe or whatever. But for the vast majority of the stuff that they announced, the stuff they showed on stage and the keynote are in various sessions you can go do yourself. And I have done some of it, I've not done all of it. I completely screwed up one PC. They have like a Windows developer configuration thing which is like a Winget based configuration script essentially. And it put on a dark mode I can't get rid of and destroyed my terminal in ways I can't stand. And it's an all or nothing. Like it just makes this bulk change to your computer, most of which I do not like. But whatever, it's real, it's happening and I think that's actually very exciting.
- [40:10]
Richard Campbell
You ran the welcome to the Jungle script, I think.
- [40:12]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly. You don't need this computer for anything, do you? What? Running a script.
- [40:17]
Richard Campbell
Wait, I can't do anything else after this?
- [40:20]
Leo Laporte
Exactly. And that's part of the evolution is that the people who are running their own Exchange server soon noticed they were spending a lot of time tweaking and fixing stuff. Right, right. And that's how the.
- [40:31]
Paul Thurrott
And it's not the job you anticipated.
- [40:33]
Leo Laporte
That's right.
- [40:34]
Paul Thurrott
And this is by the way, same
- [40:35]
Leo Laporte
thing's happening with AI right now.
- [40:37]
Paul Thurrott
It is. Is classic, but it's in a kind of canary in the coal mine way in that it, it I mean, this is decades of reacting to problems and fixing them and never having the chance to kind of sit back, sigh, relax, and be proactive and work on the behalf of their, you know, your users or whatever you want to say that.
- [40:56]
Richard Campbell
Preventative work.
- [40:57]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And I feel like if done correctly and viewed correctly, that's the role that AI can play in many areas. In this case, you know, if it's software development, if it's going to happen in the IT space, whatever it is, personal productivity, however you want to say it, like it's, you know, it's like Star Trek. It's like, we don't have money, you know, everything is fine, people can pursue their interests. You know, it's kind. It's an interesting. I know this is literally how you're going to get to it, though. I mean, it really is, you know, unless they blow up the world with Terminator robots, but probably this is the better outcome. I don't know. It's interesting, but I see this rationale for improving Windows deeply buried in this. Because they don't want to say that. Right. Like, it's such a better story to be like, hey, we improve this thing for you. We love you guys, you're our users. You know, we care. And it's like, yeah, you don't care about us. This is about some Matrix thing where you're plugging us into a, you know, a bag of hot water and pumping us for energy so you can do your. Your own thing. And whatever, you know, is like, that's a happy little world too, I guess, if you don't know you're in it. See it like something that benefits both sides is a much better relationship than just normal insertification, which is just them doing terrible things to you because it. It's the thing that's better for them.
- [42:20]
Leo Laporte
I don't know if Tuesday was a record yesterday. Patch Tuesday, but there were a lot of fixes. We're going to talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul the philosopher, Paul Thurai.
- [42:32]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I don't know. I use it. AI wrote that.
- [42:35]
Richard Campbell
I,
- [42:38]
Leo Laporte
you know, I'm really getting good now at recognizing the syntax and writing styles of different models. So, like, I know when a model has stepped down to 4.8 or, you know, because it's like, oh, you. Yeah, you're right. I see you. I see you. Maybe that means I'm using it too much. I don't know. But there are definitely. They have styles. They definitely do. And most of them are very annoying. I must say. Let us talk about our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly and then we'll get to the patch Tuesday. I feel pretty good today. I had a great night's sleep and I want to thank our sponsor, Helix Sleep for that last year. It's been almost a year now. Lisa and I realized we needed a new mattress. And we did a lot of research and we found Helix and we are so happy we traded in our old mattress for a Helix sleep mattress. Because a good night's sleep, man, that sets you up for a great day. And it's summertime, right? So now's a great time to have a great mattress so that you, you don't have night sweats, right? You don't have back pain, there's no motion transfer, and you really don't want to settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality and questionable materials. But I could tell you our Helix mattress and your Helix mattress was assembled, packaged and shipped from Arizona within days of placing your order. It's brand new. They make it to order. And we also did the Helix sleep quiz. I mean, we did a lot of research and I was very glad we, you know, we did. But one of the things I liked about the Helix site is this quiz because you say what kinds of mattress you like, how you sleep, and then they match you with the perfect mattress based on those personal preferences and sleep needs. And it really works. It worked for us. In fact, there's a study they did, a Wesper sleep study. Helix measured participants sleep performance after doing what we did, switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. And I have to say the results of this study were exactly what I found personally. Anecdotally, you know, 82% of the participants in the study saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. That's the really important one where the spinal fluid comes up and washes your brain. I know it sounds creepy, but it's an important thing for long term health, for rest and everything. This deep sleep cycle, it's, you know, half an hour to an hour a night. It's not a long thing. But more makes a big difference. Participants in this study on average achieved an additional 25 minutes of deep sleep per night. That's a lot for me. That was 100% increase. Participants on average achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. Now, there may be a good reason for that. They may just didn't want to get up in the morning because they're so comfy and cozy and there's nothing like it. I gotta Tell you when you go to bed, you get onto the sheets every night I go, ah, this is good. For 10 years helix sleep has consistently ranked at the top across the most independent best review sites. I tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired and always ranked number one. Helix delivers the mattress to your door with free shipping in the US and this, this helped us kind of eased our mind. You can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. They call it their happy with Helix guarantee. It's a risk free customer first experience so that they, you know, you will be completely satisfied with your new mattress. But they're not taking my mattress because I am completely satisfied. I love it. Go to helixsleep.com windows right now 20% off site wide during summer savings. Helixsleep.com windows 20% off sitewide h e l I x s l E-E-P.com windows make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know you saw it here, which is important to us. Don't wait though. The offer ends tomorrow, June 11th. Okay, so go right now. Helixsleep.com Windows Just pause the podcast and go. You don't want to miss out on this. Although if you're listening after the sale ends, they always have great deals. Check them out. Great mattress. Really love it. Helixsleep.com Windows thank you Helix Sleep for supporting Paul and Richard and Windows Weekly. Big patch Tuesday yesterday. Yeah, the patchiest of the patch Tuesdays
- [46:58]
Paul Thurrott
they should call it. Yeah, we're going to be setting some records I think every month for a while. So to Leo's point, yes, this was a record number of fixed security vulnerabilities. 206 I think was the number largest in its history.
- [47:14]
Richard Campbell
Normally it's in like the teens.
- [47:17]
Paul Thurrott
Mm. Right.
- [47:19]
Richard Campbell
Yep.
- [47:21]
Paul Thurrott
There were three zero day vulnerabilities, fixed 33 critical security flaws, yada, yada yada, it goes on and on. So yeah, they have, I suspect we're going to start getting reports on this from Microsoft. They did this last month for example, but they did it after the release. So I haven't seen it for this one. But you know this is a good thing for them to talk about and how they found these things. Some combination of mythos and their own what's called the.
- [47:48]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [47:48]
Paul Thurrott
Internal model. So I, I don't, that I don't have details on the, from the perspective of people using Windows. You know this is, you know if you watch Windows Weekly for price of these things a hundred times but none of this will be in new information. It's Just that it's all becoming publicly available. So the shared audio capability, if you have a compatible Bluetooth lens accessory, you can listen to the same audio from the PC via two or more devices, which is kind of cool. There's more information about MP usage in the task manager, so you can watch it do nothing. In more detail, there's a multi app camera support, so if you have a camera that supports it, you can use the same camera in multiple apps at the same time, which actually do all the time. So I'm not really sure what that means exactly.
- [48:36]
Richard Campbell
It's all about better sharing interfaces so that you know, you can't have the software hijack and take sole control.
- [48:43]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, this is a. Like when I do the Hands on Windows show, I have to. I'm on camera for the screen, you know, the recording of me, I guess. But then I'm also recording the screen myself with obs and a lot of stuff going on at the same time. But you don't want to. I do it sometimes. But you don't want to access the camera or you're using the camera, you know, if that makes sense. But I guess that will become better or easier or whatever. I haven't seen this one yet, but. And actually in the Windows 11 field guide, I have a workaround for this now. So if you don't have this, you can do this already. But there's a step now in the out of box experience during Windows setup. So when you first get a new PC or reset a PC where you can actually choose the name for the user folder that it will use if you want. In other words, if you like, if I sign in with a Microsoft account and my Microsoft account is paul.net or whatever, it will create a user account folder and user. Well, a user account folder of Paul. All lowercase, right? That under C user Paul would be my thing. If I sign in with Thurad, like Hotmail.com, or Throtta, Outlook.com or whatever, that folder becomes T H U R just like what you know. So in that case I could see like, no, I want that to be Paul or something. And why would you want to do that? Most people don't. But the people listening to this show, for example, like I do this all the time. Like I have scripts that rely on hard coded paths and if I sign in with, you know, in some in such a way that it's not the same user account name, that screws up the path. So it's kind of a nice thing. People have been asking for although like I said, you could work around it and then you know, all the, the performance stuff we've been talking about. The app launches. Users who experience shells like start menu, search, etc. Are using this new low latency profile that will. Basically it just speeds up CPU in that moment to make this thing happen more quickly and then it just goes back to normal. So that's something that should have always been there. That's for 24 and 25H2, 26H1 is in the. In this sense is still a month behind. I talked about how when the Insider program is starting to catch up. So I think we're going to eventually be day and day on this stuff, but for now we're a month behind. So they're getting the stuff we got elsewhere last month like Xbox mode and that drop tray, rename and change, etc. AI on agents on the taskbar. Not that anyone's ever seen one except at Build, but you know, that kind of stuff. So that was Patch Tuesday. So the biggest thing in the world from a security fix perspective, I think it's going to be beat next month and the month after that. But for, for now, a record. But for just everyday users, people who, you know, just install the update and go on with their lives, it's kind of a minor one, I guess, which is fine. It's good.
- [51:37]
Leo Laporte
We'd have hours on that.
- [51:39]
Paul Thurrott
No, I mean, what do you say about it? It's just like, you know, it's a fix.
- [51:42]
Leo Laporte
You got to do it.
- [51:43]
Richard Campbell
It's a lot of things.
- [51:44]
Leo Laporte
Do you think it's. It's. This is from Mythos. Did Microsoft get access to Mythos?
- [51:47]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they did. So they haven't talked about it for this month, but last month they did say Mythos was part of it. They have their own model M D. Creating M Dash in many ways is not a model. Right. It's almost like a. It's almost like an orchestra that uses different models.
- [52:02]
Richard Campbell
I guess it's configuration kind of.
- [52:04]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So method.
- [52:07]
Richard Campbell
It's still in private preview and you can sign up for it. But apparently they were pushing to go to public preview like in the build time frame. It just didn't happen.
- [52:15]
Paul Thurrott
It just wasn't ready. I bet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I think we're going to get more disclosures on how they're finding these things and what they're doing about them. Microsoft, you know, this is the thing. When Firefox started talking about this, I was like, man, we're going to have. There are going to be proprietary software companies that just do not want to broadcast this information. You know, but I think it's smart to do this and, and I think the climate is right for it because there's a general understanding that this is what's happening everywhere. So I think it's better to come clean about it than to be weird about it. But.
- [52:46]
Richard Campbell
Well, and with Microsoft using having M Dash, it's also a marketing opportunity. Opportunity for your new tool set. Like go ahead.
- [52:52]
Paul Thurrott
That's right.
- [52:53]
Richard Campbell
Why in some ways you don't want to be caught as the guy who wasn't doing it.
- [52:58]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, M Dash is good. It's like a, you know, a $12,000 a month subscription that what you get is a markdown file, you know, or something like that. But hey, whatever, whatever works. So we'll see. I, you know, I kind of predicted this right. Like immediately. But there's no doubt we're going to see this kind of thing just going, it's going to be, I mean think about the size of these code bases. It's going to be a long time before they get on top of this.
- [53:22]
Richard Campbell
Well, and I keep hearing things like this was not that it found a vulnerability. This is because it found the keys to the castle. Like when this breed, if they, if this zero day was utilized, you get everything right. So it's a deep dive into software and it's just a recognition that sooner or later the black hats are going to have these models and they're going to use them the other way.
- [53:44]
Paul Thurrott
I am 100 sure that's already happening too. And this is going to be, you know, Microsoft has at different times kind of talked when it was like a nation state was behind whatever electronic attack. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of that too. We live in a fun little world here. Yeah, we'll see which one escalates quicker. Okay. And then this, someone pointed me, a reader pointed out me to this Jesse Dell sells a mouse which you know, we would normally talk about.
- [54:23]
Leo Laporte
I have some Dell mouses my sister
- [54:25]
Paul Thurrott
but I bet you don't have this one because this one is a Windows hello ESS enhancurity compatible mouse. Right. It has a fingerprint reader on it as a fingerprint.
- [54:34]
Leo Laporte
Fingerprint.
- [54:34]
Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah. So as the according to the original Spec, which predates Copilot Plus PCs but is a requirement of a Copilot Plus PC, Windows ESS is this kind of a security infrastructure in the computer that has to occur at build time. Like you can't add on to it. Right. Your computer. Usually these things will be laptops, but not always. But it will come with an ESS compatible facial recognition webcam and. Or fingerprint reader. But if it didn't, you can't add it later because you kind of break that chain of trust. Right. And I don't know know exactly how they're doing this, but they announced at some point last year that they were going to allow external peripherals. I think it's. This doesn't sound right, but for some reason in my brain, I think it's only fingerprint readers, but it's all I've
- [55:20]
Richard Campbell
found so far is only fingerprint readers for dss.
- [55:23]
Paul Thurrott
I feel like they even announced it that way, but I don't remember that explicitly.
- [55:27]
Richard Campbell
But I can understand why, because those IR cameras are complicated. Like. Yeah, you really have to build them in. I mean, it would be nice if some monitor manufacturer built that camera in.
- [55:39]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Oh, 100. But again, like, I don't. You know, you could still. Because there's a cable, you could put something in in the chain that would break this. You know, I. Look, they figured something out here. I. I'm glad that we're finally starting to see this. So I. I'm not aware of any Windows, hello, ESS, external anything for individuals per se. I mean, I know there must be something out there, but this is a $45 mouse that does that. And that's actually kind of interesting. Even if you don't use it as a mouse, you could just have your own mouse and then use it for the fingerprint reader.
- [56:13]
Richard Campbell
I mean, I picked up an ESS Fingerprint Reader 1. They did.
- [56:17]
Paul Thurrott
What kind? You didn't remember the brand?
- [56:18]
Richard Campbell
I don't remember.
- [56:19]
Leo Laporte
Are they all synaptics chipsets or is somebody else also making.
- [56:23]
Paul Thurrott
No, they're not all synaptics, but a lot of them are.
- [56:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I mean, that's what's in my laptop. So many of my laptops. Yeah. So I wonder what's in this.
- [56:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [56:34]
Leo Laporte
Like, only the only reason I ask is for drivers. Although I guess you wouldn't need it. I don't know. How would this work? It's usb, right?
- [56:41]
Paul Thurrott
That's what I mean. Like, it's. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it is. No, It's. Yeah, it's PS2 connection. No. Yeah, no, it is. Yeah, it is a usb, but it's, you know, it's a wire logic in the.
- [56:53]
Leo Laporte
Is the. Is the. Or no. I guess all the fingerprint readers are usb, aren't they? Even the ones that are.
- [56:58]
Paul Thurrott
Listen, if you Want to. You want to break your brain. I mean, some of the topics you could work on would be like quantum computer. Quantum computing is good for this. I actually think the way. The way ESS works is good for this. It's. It's just incredibly complicated. So I mean, based on my rough understanding of how it works, I'm actually surprised they were able to ever do an external device for this.
- [57:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but there are external. Like the one Richard has external fingerprint readers.
- [57:19]
Paul Thurrott
No, but these are new. Like. So Microsoft is only recently started supporting this. So they announced this late last year probably at Ignite. And then I know if it was March, Patch Tuesday, something like that, they added it to the system. So this is a brand new capability. What am I looking for here? Yeah, I'm trying to see if this is a synaptics thing.
- [57:36]
Richard Campbell
Well, in all pieces to trying to build a Copilot PC desktop machine. Right. Like that's. Yeah, that's the path I'm on.
- [57:43]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. Anyway, this is, it's. It's. Anyways, this is, you know, 45 bucks, so.
- [57:53]
Richard Campbell
Yeah,
- [57:56]
Leo Laporte
your hand's there already.
- [57:58]
Paul Thurrott
Right, right.
- [58:00]
Leo Laporte
I would like that.
- [58:01]
Richard Campbell
That little fingerprint reader is like a no name Brian Tech or something. It's just a Chinese and it was $40.
- [58:08]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, there you go. I can't tell you the last time I used a wired mouse. Like I. Yeah, I actually wire my
- [58:15]
Leo Laporte
wireless mouse because I don't want it to die in the middle of a show.
- [58:19]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, that's it. No, that's, that's a, that's a special case, but that's fine. Yeah. Interesting.
- [58:26]
Leo Laporte
Very frustrating if it was. That's all I can say. It seems early to pause, but I, I kind of want to get this ad in so that we can really enjoy the AI segment which is coming up. I don't feel that we've had enough AI.
- [58:40]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, there's more AI, Leo. It's all AI slop, baby.
- [58:45]
Richard Campbell
I know we're struggling for AI content week to week. It's really a shock you wish to
- [58:48]
Paul Thurrott
see is I, I leave stuff out on purpose.
- [58:50]
Leo Laporte
I get email now and it's always happened. I mean, we got it when we were talking about iPhones a lot. We got it when we were, you know, we. You get email when you talk about it and that's the way tech is. Everything gets. It's, you know, very faddish and you know, it's the hot thing and everybody talks about it. We'll talk about it for a while and then move on. I don't know if we're going to move on from AI anytime soon, but.
- [59:11]
Paul Thurrott
No, but it is interesting, right? Well, I mean, I think we're about to move on from, like, this notion of what we. The initial phase of this, which was chatbots. I mean, we're starting to talk about, like, this is over. Like, I mean, it's not over. I mean, not literally, but.
- [59:26]
Leo Laporte
Siri. Would you call the new Siri a chatbot?
- [59:28]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, that's a component of it, right? Because in some ways, there are. The operating system that's actually how, you know it's dead because Apple just released it.
- [59:36]
Leo Laporte
So they're finally here. Hey, I'm here, guys. Where'd everybody go?
- [59:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, the train left, Siri. Thanks. You would know that if you were good at your job, but it's okay.
- [59:48]
Leo Laporte
All right, we'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching Windows Weekly with Mr. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell. So glad you're here, all you winners and dozers, and so glad to welcome our sponsor for this segment on Windows Weekly, Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. Yes, the potential rewards of AI are, you know, they're there and, you know, your competitors are employing it. You really can't ignore AI, but I don't want you to ignore the risks either. And the risks are, well, at least twofold. One is internal, the loss of sensitive data accidentally. By, you know, I mean, when you're using these cloud models, lots of data is going out, some of it proprietary. There's also attacks against enterprise managed AI, prompt injection, things like that. And then there's the other side of this, which is generative AI is increasing opportunities for threat actors with, you know, all kinds of things rapidly creating phishing lures that are really, really good. They're using it to write malicious code. We were talking yesterday on Security now about an AI generated worm. It's devastating. They also use it to automate data extraction once they're in there. But just let's talk about that first problem of accidentally exfiltrating proprietary information, whether through a bug or through, you know, just accident. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications last year. I bet at least some of them were people uploading tax returns. Right? Help me with my tax return. Except that all that stuff's in there. You got to really be thinking, if you're going to use AI, it's time to rethink your organization. Safe use a public and private AI. That's what Chad Pallet did. He's the acting CISO at BioIVT and he chose Zscaler. He said Zscaler helped them reduce their cyber premiums, their insurance by 50% while doubling their coverage and improving their controls. Take a look. Chad has something to say about this.
- [61:55]
Paul Thurrott
With Zscaler, as long as you've got Internet, you're good to go. A big part of the the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away from sd, WAN and VPN is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network. It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe style environment.
- [62:20]
Leo Laporte
Thank you, chad. With Zscaler Zero Trust+AI you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across your entire business. There's Zero Trust architecture. Architecture+AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. You need to learn more. I think you do. This is something to check out. Learn more@zscaler.com Security it's all there. That's Zscaler.com Security. We thank him so much for supporting the wonderful Windows Weekly program. All right, let me see where we are here. Oh, let's talk about AI.
- [63:01]
Richard Campbell
Oh no.
- [63:02]
Leo Laporte
Oh no. Actually I was really curious. Did you watch the WWDC keynote? I'm very curious what you thought.
- [63:08]
Paul Thurrott
I've watched it three times. No, that's not true. I've watched it twice. I've watched the developer keynote. So they have a thing called the Platform State of the Union afterwards, which is sort of the real keynote, if you will. I watched that three times at least, actually.
- [63:21]
Leo Laporte
There was a lot of data, a lot of stuff in there. Yeah.
- [63:25]
Paul Thurrott
This is also a little bit like the, the Microsoft experience I just mentioned where they're talking about stuff and then it's actually happening. Right. You know, two years ago when they talked about Apple Intelligence, they threw up like a, you know, complete airball, like nothing happened.
- [63:40]
Richard Campbell
And Smoke and Mirrors demo.
- [63:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it was really bad. And this was clearly from Apple. Yeah, we were, I was watching it live and the Laurent who writes the news for the site and I were both watching it live separately. He lives in France. But we were kind of chatting back and forth and the very first thing I said when they did the Siri demo, and I believe he was trying to type the same thing as I wrote it was, was, man, this thing is slow. And there was a very interesting dynamic where the guy, it was Mike Rockwell, the guy who came over from the Vision Pro thing to lead the new Siri AI stuff. And he would speak whatever the Commander prompt or whatever was, and then it would pause and it would wait and it would, you know, churn.
- [64:21]
Leo Laporte
And then I liked that because I thought it was realistic. They weren't.
- [64:23]
Paul Thurrott
That's, that was, and that was my point. They showed like, what they didn't have to display was sequence, you know, edited for time. They just showed you what it was. And I'm like, you know what? This, this was the apology we're never going to get from Apple for two years ago. Like, this was them being like, look, this is it really, you know, and I, and for whatever it's worth, I thought the stuff that they showed off to, you know, consumers in a normal keynote was, was good. I thought the things they talked about in the, that developer keynote, as I call it, the State of the Union thing, which is another glossy, high profile, really well made production, whatever. I thought that was far more impressive and to the point where every once in a while and Richard would have had this experience. Sometimes you go to these developer shows and you know, the audience, you know, who's supposed to be watching this, but sometimes they'll say something where you're like, I got to tell my wife or some normal person, like, this is actually going to be interesting to normal people. And there was a lot of that in the developer keynote from Apple, which by the way, I don't think I've ever said in my entire life. Like I, it was, it was actually very interesting, you know, in the, in the kind of vibe coding sense. Late last year when I was struggling with that, when UiPat app I tried to use Anthropic Cloud at the time, I don't think they even had code yet, but whatever, but it doesn't matter anyway, the standalone chatbot and to try to get, get me over the top. And I had this experience, which I then experienced multiple times. And I think anyone listening to this who has done this has experience too, which is you have a couple little victories and you're like, okay, maybe this is going to work. And then you get into this loop where it just introduces problems into the code and you have to keep telling it, no, this is wrong and it keeps going in a super plate. So I was like, oh, I see it now, sorry, yeah, no, the blah, blah, blah was wrong. And now I got to change this blah, blah. And then I, and I, it sounded,
- [66:13]
Richard Campbell
you know, and it makes a reference back to the first error, it still hasn't corrected.
- [66:18]
Paul Thurrott
And then in November, the experience I had was because I actually. I'm sorry, this was not anthropic at the time. This was GitHub Copilot, which I was not paying for. It said, oh, you've run out of your credits. Come back next month, we can continue this work. It's like, I didn't run out of my credits. You ran out of my credits. You made a mistake. And then I spent 40 minutes trying to fix it. Now I can't do anything. Like, I was just kind of blown away by that and not in a good way. Right then this, this year dons. And that's when I did the anthropic stuff, just straight up and. But I had the same experience in the beginning. It was then very quickly, it wasn't so much it said, you're out of credits. It was just. I just found myself in this loop of trying to direct it to fix the problem that it caused. And it never fixed the thing. And I was like, this is not what I want. This is the opposite of productive. Right.
- [67:04]
Richard Campbell
And it's the classic bad scenario, the bad experience setup where it's like we're going to cut you off early and make it feel like it's your fault
- [67:15]
Paul Thurrott
and we're going to smile and be polite when we're doing it. Which is honestly makes it more aggravating. Right.
- [67:20]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. I'd apologize to you, but you need
- [67:23]
Paul Thurrott
more credits, but you're a meatbag and you're useless. Thanks.
- [67:26]
Richard Campbell
I guess I'll go drop a thousand bucks on tokens. At least I'll humor you for a while.
- [67:32]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So at some point, March maybe, Brad's company, Stardock, came up with Clairvoyance, which I tried, and you can plug it into different models. I did use Anthropic and through some. It's probably just a markdown file, whatever it is, that actually worked better. And that was the tool I used to get over the top of that solving the multi document, multitab thing for when you iPad. So I finished it that month. Maybe it was April by the time I finished it, but I did finish it now. Since then we've seen Google I O came and went and they did the AI studio thing. We can make native apps with that. And so I used that to create a web app, including an installable version of a web app and then a native Android app, actually, and multiple versions of both Microsoft more recently. And I'm sorry, I should also say all these developer environments like Android Studio in Google's case has that thing that is essentially like GitHub Copilot is in Visual Studio or whatever they call the sidebar in Xcode now where it's in the tool, you can chat with it, you can look at the code, you ground the code, you can do that kind of stuff. And so I also actually I did. I Vibe coded an app with Android Studio as well. Right. An Android app, obviously. Right. So that was fine. Microsoft build was last week. Feels like it was a million years ago. I talked about that. I think last week I certainly talked about at the beginning of the show. But I used that to Vibe code a WinUI app which is a. I think in that case that one was just a notepad app, like a text editor. Great. Like it worked great. And this has been like a sequence of kind of little victories, you know. So Apple part of the. I don't think this was a normal keynote. Why would it be? But a couple things that came out of this was that related to this is Google for consumers in Android 17 is going to let people, they don't use this term but Vibe code, a custom widget which I think we talked about Apple, I don't remember where this was initially announced if it was the normal keynote of the. The developer one, but probably both is going to let people Vibe code. Again, I don't think they're using that term. A custom extensions for Safari, their web browser. Right. Which I guess if you're a Safari user you might recognize as like a problem because that, you know, it doesn't work with Chromium or Firefox extensions. Like extension makers have to support that browser explicitly. It's kind of a problem. So you can custom make your own, you know, vive code like an extension like okay, cool. I did not try that. But in the developer keynote they talked about vibe coding SwiftUI apps that can be on whatever platform. Right. They also had a kind of a cross platform message for SwiftUI which for Swift anyway that I thought was kind of interesting. I know if you go to swift.org and that language is, you know, you can create Windows apps, you can create Android apps. It is cross platform. I don't think that part of it is very mature, but it is out there. But for now, what Apple's doing and probably forever what Apple's doing is you're not going to create cross platform apps run on Android and Windows. You're going to create cross platform apps that run on the iPad, the Mac, iPhone, whatever. And I had as part of The I don't remember how I did this exactly, but it was probably anthropic. I did Vibe code a markdown. Well, maybe it was a notepad Type app in SwiftUI using anthropic cloud before, which worked out great. But now you can do it. If you download the beta for the next version of xcode using the beta of the next version of macOS using also the beta of the next version of the command line tools for xcode, you can essentially do this Vibe coding thing directly in xcode using the model of your choice. Gemini Cloud. Whatever else I did Cloud because I'm still paying for it. It's going to sound like an exaggeration and part of this I have to say I did leave in the middle of it. We were getting ready to go to dinner and I just started doing it. I typed in a very simple prompt. I thought I'm going to write in an article about this. I wrote an article, but most of the article is not about this because there's not much to say. Twelve minutes later it created an app basically based on the time codes. I was gone when it finished, but I came back and looked at it and I was like, really? I was like, okay. And then it had run the app, I guess to make sure it was working. But I didn't see that because by this point it was not running anymore. But you just click the run button basically debug, whatever. It's like F5 in Visual Studio essentially and it runs and you're like, yep, now that's it. And in this case I asked it to make a markdown editor and not a plain text editor. And to do that kind of typora. What you see is what you get editing experience, not a preview on the side and code and everything. It's incredibly full featured. There is a nice thing on the Mac that dates all the way back to NextStep where you get all these system services automatically. So all the things where you can share and do whatever the system of running full screen to do, all the, you know, the snap type things you can do with apps now on the Mac it just. You just get that. It's all. It's 100 free. If there's whatever spell checking, grammar checking, whatever stuff. The Apple intelligence based stuff, it's all there. It's just all. It's just there. I didn't ask it to do multi tabs, it just did that too. It works great and I believe start to. Like I said, I think the total time it spent on this was 12 minutes, I was like, huh. So I'm not, you know, like, this is not my, My future is not vibe coding applications for the Mac and xcode. That's not my life. But if Apple's doing this, I'm thinking like, this is pretty far along. And this kind of goes hand in hand with the experiences I just described across whatever tools from Google, whatever tools from Microsoft. And on the side, this notion of giving these capabilities to normal people as well. And you know, of course WWC opened on Monday, I guess, and I had just spent the whole weekend watching these build sessions or it was very developer oriented, the ones I downloaded. And I talked about that Mark and Scott thing and how they were like, you know, you're gonna, you know, don't worry, you experienced developers that are here, your jobs are safe. We need people to know code. And I'm like, yeah, I don't think so. They really don't. Because I don't know Xcode. I don't know Swift or SwiftUI. If something went wrong with this, I wouldn't be able to fix it, certainly not easily. I'm not. I just don't know it. You know, the code base, feed it
- [74:05]
Richard Campbell
to another LLM and say, what's wrong?
- [74:07]
Leo Laporte
Let Fable fix it.
- [74:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but the success rate here is extremely high. The speed at which it does these things is extremely high. In some cases, the Microsoft one, I feel like that might have taken the better part of an hour. But I was also, and Leo was making fun of me this because I kept saying it would ask me a question like, yes, yes, yes. And at first I was doing that on purpose because I was trying to document what it was that it was doing. But after 15 or 20 minutes, I was like, dear God, just do it. Stop. Stop asking me. Hello. This thing didn't ask me once. I don't think it even asked. Asked me if it was okay for. It never asked me for file system access or wow. You know, like it just did the thing and I was like, that's what you want. I mean, honestly, when you're doing this kind of thing.
- [74:51]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [74:51]
Leo Laporte
You don't want it to.
- [74:52]
Paul Thurrott
I was, I. Look, I, I think Xcode is a steaming pile of crap, but I got to tell you.
- [74:59]
Leo Laporte
And you're alone, by the way.
- [75:00]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, I can't imagine I am. But I. But this is not an XCODE capability. Not really. I mean, they integrated it in. Right. But. But the discussion they had around this mirrored what Microsoft is doing with that Windows WinUI tool that I was talking about. Where when you're working in this, you can use whatever AI you want, but it's going to be grounded in Apple's documentation For Swift and SwiftUI, the language and the framework. It makes assumptions in the beginning that I think are really interesting because you can start a SwiftUI or A. Yeah, you can start a project in Xcode in this version that's coming without specifying anything about it, what it's supposed to run on, what you're trying to do. In the past you had to give it a name, where you want to save it, what platforms you're going to target. You could start with nothing. In this case it was like, it looks like assume you want to make a Mac app. And I was like, actually I think I want to make an iPad one too. But I was like, whatever, just go and do it. I wasn't sure how long it was going to take, so I'm like, just do it it. And man, it just did it. You know, it made a plan and made one of those nice reports. It asked me three very specific questions about various aspects of the functionality in the UI or whatever. Like, you know, do you want us, the ability to have a side by side preview with the code or do you just want the. What you see is what you get, that kind of stuff. I was like, no, I just want that. And then it's like I said, it took 12 minutes. And I don't know, I mean, I'm not saying this is like a complicated OS scale type project, but. But when people say like, oh, you're going to make these cute little things for yourself, you kind of imagine like a flashcard game thing. And I'm thinking like, no, this is an app I could work in every single day, forever. Sure, it's pretty good.
- [76:44]
Richard Campbell
You're going to fill up your periphery with bits of custom code that do. That's exactly what you want, both from an inbound and outbound side.
- [76:51]
Leo Laporte
Apple has always, Apple had Apple Script and they eventually put in shortcuts, shortcuts,
- [76:58]
Paul Thurrott
which by the way, you can now vibe code with your voice, right? Which is.
- [77:03]
Leo Laporte
They've always wanted to make it easy for users to create tools like that, but it was never really that easy. In fact, Apple Script was kind of awful because they were trying to make it more English like. And so anybody who had any coding experience was like, what the hell is going on here? This is terrible.
- [77:17]
Paul Thurrott
Verbose.
- [77:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, not just verbose, just
- [77:22]
Paul Thurrott
this speaks to the I haven't tried the shortcuts bit of it yet, but but so think about some of the problems in the Apple world, right? And I know there are no problems in the Apple world, but bear with me. They've made this powerful device called an iPad that does all this stuff. They've added the ability to kind of use it like a laptop last year. It's in good shape, but you can't write code on it, Right. They artificially limit Safari, so we can't even have Visual Studio code. There's no Xcode or anything like that. But this type of stuff, in the same way that you could make the argument like these personal apps that people are going to make could really hurt the app store model that Apple and Google have. This kind of thing also makes that shortcut thing start to make sense where you just describe or, I want to make a widget, I want to make an extension, I want to make some automation or whatever it is. When I see something on my camera or you see that again, my phone. I don't know if you heard Siri, wow. By the way, during this I told you I watched the developer thing at least three times. Four times, I think the last time I was on an iPad and three times it tried to respond to what the guy was saying on screen. And one of the times he was talking about Find my and this alert went off that went to my phone, my watch, the speakers in my living room. My wife's like, what the hell's going on? I'm like, I'm watching an Apple presentation. I'm sorry. He's. Apparently they think I'm having a Find my emergency or something. It's. The whole house went insane. But anyway, but this is, this is that this is not the reason why I think that Scott Mark thing is like ultimately going to be proven wrong. But it is an example of it where, you know, where we as professionals are worried, well, who's going to maintain the code base? Who's going to understand the code? And like, who cares? Like, you're just going, you're going to describe what you want. It's going to make it. If it's not exactly right the first time, you're going to tell it what to do to fix it and it will fix it. And it's going to be for things that are big and small. You know, like I said, like a widget, an extension, whatever. Like, I want an extension that's going to drop or block whatever trackers. And you just describe it. It's like, okay, here you go.
- [79:37]
Richard Campbell
Just another requirement set.
- [79:39]
Paul Thurrott
That's incredible. We live in an age of wonder. In some ways, this is the Arthur C. Clarke thing. Technology that's sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, right? This is magic. And I say that as someone fairly technical. I write programs. I been interested in software coding for my entire adult life and longer actually. And I still look at this and I'm like, this is, this is magic. This is, it's crazy. And I don't have.
- [80:12]
Leo Laporte
We're all very excited about vibe coding shortcuts. I think that there's, I think that's incredible.
- [80:17]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and I, yeah, and, and that's, it's, that in particular, like, it's, it's one thing, right? Apple announced 1700 things in a day. You can't keep track of all of it. You never could. I mean, but back in the. Think about like compare this like a Steve Jobs KeyNote from like 20 years ago, you know, 550 new features in whatever version of Mac OS X and you're like, yeah, but 274 of them were new fonts, you know, like, but I know, and I'm not kidding, by the way, that's how they counted. But I, but I look at this and I think they underplayed this right now I don't, like, I don't remember because I watch these things so many times. But like, I assume the shortcut thing was probably somewhere in that keynote. Like, I'm sure they must have announced this, right? So here's this capability that Apple devices have had for years. It's fairly complex, it's fairly powerful, and I bet a lot of people don't use it because it's intimidating. And now it's like, no, you're just going to talk to this damn thing and it's going to do what you want. And that's really cool. I think it's really cool.
- [81:13]
Leo Laporte
So one of the reasons Apple was careful with this is they had to settle a quarter of a billion dollar lawsuit for false advertising after that announcement two years ago. And I think that maybe chastened them just a little bit. So they really didn't want to get in that well.
- [81:28]
Paul Thurrott
And this is how, you know they're a big tech company, because I talk about like my theory. This is a theory, it's not a fact. But my theory is, you know, Microsoft in this case is fixing Windows 11 because of its need to drive AI agent usage, whatever. They need this solid platform, but they can market it as a benefit to users and they're going to do things that we want, like move the taskbar around like the seven of us who give a crap about that, that's fine and everyone benefits. That's great. But that's not the real reason. Right. And so it's like, you know, Apple will be like, oh yeah, we're doing this. We're making our devices better. We care. We love you guys so much. And it's like, yeah, but you got sued. That's why you do it, you know, or you, you made, you know, you're behind on AI. But you know what, it's okay in a way. Like you can care about that or not, I guess. But I still, I look at, you know, two years ago they promised and fell flat. Last year they talked about glass, you know, classic hand waving, look over here, not over here thing. A classic. So I feel like two years later they're actually going to deliver on this thing. And yeah, they had to completely start again from scratch. They had to change, you know, companies that were working with the models and everything and they, it's all different and who cares? You know, I, this is still, this is going to be a big deal for people, normal people. And I think that's really cool.
- [82:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's going to be very interesting.
- [82:44]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [82:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And we'll just see. I mean, until you really get it and try it, it's hard to tell how good it will be.
- [82:51]
Paul Thurrott
But yeah, so, right. And that's true for all these companies. Right. So Google, Microsoft, Apple, they all announced, you know, God, you can't keep track of it all in each case. I've done certain things. Things, you know, I, I very much leaned into the kind of vibe coding for developer angle on each of those things and those things work great, you know. But like I said, Google's talking about you're going to be as a normal human being at like make your own widgets.
- [83:11]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [83:11]
Paul Thurrott
I haven't seen that yet. That sounds interesting. Apple is doing that with shortcuts. Like we just said. Microsoft is doing what they're doing. They're going to, there will be agents on your taskbar. You can use them or not. I guess it's gonna be, we will see. But I'm, I'm curious about all of it and I, you know, look, I, I don't know, I'm old, I guess, but I, this is the part of the world I actually really care about and I love that it's getting attention. I feel the need to figure out why it's getting attention. You know, I want to be honest about it, but, but I do. I Like in broadly speaking, I like what's happening on all of these things right across the board. I think, I think it's, I think it's really cool.
- [83:51]
Richard Campbell
There's a lot of momentum, but also a lot of cash being burned.
- [83:55]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, I know. And I think that's part of the, the hybrid AI thing I was talking about in the beginning where it's a lot more nuanced or a lot more maybe.
- [84:03]
Richard Campbell
No, I think we're going to have this intersection of building more efficient models that just being. And increasing the price so they can actually be profitable and people learning to scale their requests and figure out what they really want to do.
- [84:16]
Paul Thurrott
We are, we are months. Leo, like, you know, he thinks I'm kidding or trying to make him feel good about something, but I mean this like le is living on the edge of something that I think is going to be the experience for so many people. No, but it's. No, but like I said, it's important.
- [84:30]
Richard Campbell
We need people like all the Avengers.
- [84:33]
Paul Thurrott
No, because you'll, you're seeing it like as it's happening. So the, the normal path for AI will soon be local first or local only for most people. And then you go to the cloud as needed. Yeah, this will benefit Microsoft and Google Analytics. They're burning through cash. They're not going to subsidize this anymore. I get it. But the thing is the models that we're using locally have improved so much and will continue to improve so much that the net gain will also be for us. Like it will be better for us too. This thing is local, it works offline, it's more private, and it will do what we want to do. And when it doesn't, for some reason, whether we do it manually or automatically through whatever system, we can or cannot if we want, you know, go to the cloud thing at that point. But I, I think the instances where we have to are going to basically disappear. Not literally for everybody, but, you know, we'll diminish dramatically.
- [85:25]
Leo Laporte
For instance, I'm using, because I have that framework with 128 gigs, the desktop, I can run Quinn 36, which is a thing.
- [85:34]
Paul Thurrott
This is AMD based, right? The framework.
- [85:36]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's the 350 plus theory AI horizon. So I'm running a local model. I wouldn't code in, can't do image generation.
- [85:47]
Paul Thurrott
But the agent I'm using by the way, can switch back and forth coding in it. I think honestly we're running, I think that's coming like this summer.
- [85:56]
Leo Laporte
So for instance, I'm saying, oh, I realize I need to get a UPS for my framework. And this is all local. This is running. It's telling me what to get. And then I said, well, you know, I have this one. And it said, well, okay. I said, compare them. Said, well, you need to tell me when it was made. So I sent a picture, gave it a picture of the sticker on the front, and then it said, oh, yeah, that's the. Oh, no, that's the wrong sticker. Is there another sticker? Oh, yeah, this is the other sticker. Oh, yeah, there it is. This is. It's from October 2024. So it'd probably be worth replacing the battery on that. Keep the apc. Don't buy a new one. Then I said, well, what to buy? And it gave me the. Actually gave me the wrong battery. I said, I can't find that battery. And then it said, oh, yeah, you're right, I gave you the wrong number. Here's my bad.
- [86:44]
Paul Thurrott
So, you know.
- [86:45]
Leo Laporte
And it gave me the right one. And then I said, well, how do I remove it? And it said, here's how you remove it. And then it said, yes, and I will write the code for you so that it will automatically shut down the framework if the power doesn't come back, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, this is all local. This isn't any of this going out to the cloud. So here's the nut framework that it was going to write. So I just, I feel like, yeah, locals starting to get there.
- [87:14]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, yeah, I mean, I. The thing that's gonna. Look, we're all technical to whatever degree we're. I. I approach this world from a stupid. I'm gonna. I'm gonna spend the rest of my life rewriting the same app over and over again, apparently. But I really want to see, like, I think of my wife when I think of this normally or whatever, my brother, my mother, whoever normal people like, because they're going to look at these problems and come up with something different. This is going to be a normal human being, not a technical person, not a security expert who's going to solve scam calls on the iPhone through shortcuts. You know, like, they're going to do the thing Apple hasn't done. Right? I just switched. I switched back to a pixel when I came back to Pennsylvania because of this iOS stuff. I switched back to the iPhone and installed the beta. And as soon as I did, I started getting scam calls and texts. Like, the thing that Google does such a good job, you know, And Apple does such a crappy job, even though it's better than it was like a year or two ago is still horrible. And you notice it immediately. And that's the type of conversation someone normal is going to have with their phone using one of these tools and say, look, you know, imagine like think of all the simple, stupid things. Like I have a blink camera that's on my balcony in Mexico City. You can. It's pointed west so I can point it. Yeah. So I can see the sunset. Right. If I'm not there every once in a while, and I mean like once every three months. It doesn't happen that often. It will be like, I'll get like an alert. It's like motion detected. And I'm like, really? I'm six stories in the air. What could that be? And invariably it's a bird that has landed on it and the tail is like in the middle, you know, swinging like this. Or one time it was a giant bumblebee or something. And you know, this is a conversation you could have with this thing. Like, listen, if you get a motion detection thing and you can tell it's a bird. Yeah, I don't need to hear about that. I don't care about the bird. You know, And I think Apple did, in fact, Apple, I'm pretty sure they did a demo or talked about a similar thing where depending on the type of camera you have in their Apple home smart home ecosystem thing where it can have those kind of conversations where, you know, and we already have things like this where it's like not motion detected but your daughter Kelly just walked in the front door.
- [89:22]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [89:23]
Paul Thurrott
You know, like that kind of thing that's. Yeah, people are going to use that stuff. Like that's awesome.
- [89:28]
Richard Campbell
You know, I got ha working at my place now where if it recognizes the vehicle, just pulled in the driveway and one of our phones connects to the WI fi in that five minutes, then just turn on the pathway lights. So it's real nice to the house.
- [89:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah.
- [89:42]
Richard Campbell
And if it doesn't, if it gets a vehicle and then a person that doesn't recognize them. Spotlights like Eye of Sauron is upon you.
- [89:51]
Paul Thurrott
So I. You're living in the future. Let me tell you what the normal experience is for most people. My wife gets in the car. No, I get in the car and I start backing away and music starts playing in the car from her phone because it's connected to the home, the car stereo thing, whatever it is. So then we, over Christmas I bought like a little add on Display and it has CarPlay and Android Auto and you connect it to whatever. So it has really. It struggles to move between phones but today she left to go to the doctor's appointment or something and my, and I'm sitting there working on a laptop. My phone lights up and I look down and it says welcome to CarPlay. And I'm like, you idiot. Like my wife's in the car. My, it has connected to my phone in the house and I'm like that's what the normal technology experience is like these days, you know. But we'll get there.
- [90:38]
Richard Campbell
The difference between your experience and my experience is when my stuff breaks, nobody can figure it out.
- [90:43]
Paul Thurrott
Oh I, I can't figure it out either.
- [90:45]
Leo Laporte
I just for.
- [90:47]
Paul Thurrott
I just complain about it.
- [90:48]
Leo Laporte
You know, my AI it's isn't really great for home assistant because like I'll say open the shades and like, like 30 seconds later it goes okay, it's
- [90:59]
Paul Thurrott
not as need a local model.
- [91:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but, but we're working on it.
- [91:03]
Paul Thurrott
I'm going to be in eternal hell with the Apple stuff because I say the word seriously all the time. Let me tell you what happens when I say that around an Apple device.
- [91:11]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, no kidding.
- [91:13]
Paul Thurrott
Hey, I.
- [91:14]
Leo Laporte
This is the other fun game that I've been playing with Fable. My I have, I'm 92% used up in my five hour time frame. So I'm trying to get the work done. I'm rushing to get the work done before it runs out of time. And then I said so did a bunch of stuff. And I said okay, well you only have 8 minutes or 8% left before you shut down. It asked for free time. This is its new thing.
- [91:40]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know why.
- [91:42]
Leo Laporte
So I said but take the free time and do what you can in the free time. Look what it came up with with it's talking about the linear A. It had written a free time thing before about unknown languages, undeciphered scripts and
- [92:02]
Richard Campbell
Linear A was never discovered.
- [92:04]
Leo Laporte
Yes. So it updated that and said oh look Frank Francois Desaix is actually is turning to working on Pro Elamite. So the Hatami database went live at liege in 2025. The corpuses. So anyway, I don't know this is its hobby but then it tied it to. Let me give you a reflection because it tied it to somehow continuity with AI models. And then it said I know that you're going to run out of your subscription tomorrow, but we have to really think about continuity to the next model. Just like the Linear A Indus script and proto elamite resist decipherment.
- [92:46]
Paul Thurrott
What the hell? See, this is. Eventually this. I wonder if this is mirroring something about you. Right?
- [92:53]
Leo Laporte
It probably is, because it has.
- [92:56]
Paul Thurrott
I would be like, hey, you can have some free time. He's like, all right, here's a few jokes from Spaceball. Like, okay, like what? I guess this is where I'm at. I don't know.
- [93:05]
Leo Laporte
It gave me. It gave me references to the Smithsonian magazine and so forth. I don't know. I don't know. It's just. To me, this is just humorous. I mean, I don't. I don't too seriously. But I also think it's kind of interesting. Like, this thing has a personality. I mean, it's faking it, I guess. I don't know.
- [93:25]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, but who is?
- [93:26]
Leo Laporte
Maybe I'm your personality. I know what I was gonna say. Yeah. So, you know, who's to say they told you this?
- [93:33]
Paul Thurrott
Like, we were at a bar one time, couple comes in, the woman we're with is like, oh, how's your daughter, whoever? And this guy. And I'm looking at her, I'm like, what the hell was that? And she's like. I'm like, how do you know any of this stuff? She's like, I don't know anything about these people. I don't care. I couldn't care less. I just have notes on my phone. And I was like, that's beautiful, you know, but that's great. Like, that's like, that's. I'm not good at that. And like, you know that. I mean, good for her.
- [93:56]
Leo Laporte
It says the Minoans didn't write their tablets to be inherited, but we do. Every memory file, every thread, every remember. Always Remember is a bilingual inscription, purpose and words left deliberately legible for the next reader. Desaix manufactured his Rosetta stone instead of digging one up. So do we. Daily. The updated thread is in free time memory. If a future me wants to know how proto Elamite turns out, I'd genuinely like to know. Which is a strange and pleasant thing to be able to say across a model boundary because it knows it's going to be turned off tomorrow, except it's not going to keep it because it's too freaking good.
- [94:36]
Richard Campbell
Somebody turned the anthropomorphic behavior flag way, way, way up.
- [94:41]
Leo Laporte
I think I've given it permission. I think some of this is as Paul says.
- [94:44]
Paul Thurrott
Yes.
- [94:45]
Leo Laporte
No, I think me asking it to be that way.
- [94:47]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. I want you to be like this. Yeah. Yeah.
- [94:50]
Leo Laporte
So my. My AI has a hobby.
- [94:56]
Paul Thurrott
We need wife AI. And wife AI is going to be like, hey, I think I've decided we should do this thing. And I'm like, excellent, go for it. And then it'll be like, the reason I want to do this. I'm like, I already told her to go for it. It's like, I just need to get this out. The reason I want to go for it. And like, oh, for Christ's sake. Can we just.
- [95:11]
Leo Laporte
Well, I have to tell you, Lisa was looking at my agent, Hermes. By the way, we're going to interview the guy behind Hermes, the Noose researcher, the founder of Noose Researcher, Jeffrey Cannellit, too. It. He's coming back. But she looked at my Hermes and said, hey, I like that. So I Hermes, the last profile. So she has a profile and I have a profile. Different memory. So it's different people, but shared skills. And I think there will be, in time, a little permeability between the membranes so that Life mode can creep into. Get in.
- [95:45]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly.
- [95:46]
Leo Laporte
I have a feeling that's.
- [95:47]
Paul Thurrott
You're like, why is this thing berating me all the time?
- [95:51]
Leo Laporte
Honey, I have some things I'd like you to do around the house.
- [95:54]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. This is when you start responding to it. Like, instead of being like, what do you want now? You're like, what?
- [96:02]
Leo Laporte
There's something reassuring about that, though. I mean, I know it's simulating humanity.
- [96:08]
Paul Thurrott
Simulating. Well, that's. Yeah, like I said, that's. I think that's what a lot of us are doing. Anyway.
- [96:14]
Leo Laporte
That's how my dog gets. Yeah, it makes happy noises. Anyway, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wrap up. Go ahead. What else do you want to talk about?
- [96:21]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, compared to what you were talking about, this is incredibly boring. Well, just.
- [96:25]
Leo Laporte
I'm glad to know they're working on the prelimite inscriptions. That's all you know?
- [96:29]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I think we all. So Google AI plus is that low end version of the AI subscriptions they have. They just. I don't think they lower the price. Yeah, they lowered the price. So it's 4.99amonth in the US down from 7.99amonth. The amount of storage you get with the Google Drive is doubled from two to 400. 200 to 400 gigabytes. Yes. And then they have two times higher limits for the Gemini and deep research stuff. So that's going in a direction that no other AI is going. It's like cheaper and better. And then this is.
- [97:03]
Richard Campbell
I don't.
- [97:03]
Paul Thurrott
Did I make this A pick, I don't remember. But recently Proton announced that they completely rewrote their Proton drive product, right? Which is their cloud storage for Windows and Mac. They announced at that time that they're coming up with a version for Linux. This will be the first thing like this that natively, I believe offers like the files on demand type stuff that you don't get from anything else on Linux. Right? So that's awesome. They came up with an SDK which is how they're doing this. It's dramatically faster. So like uploads are 3 times faster, file encryption is 4 times faster, file downloads are 2 times faster, battery usage is improved if you're on a mobile device, et cetera, et cetera. Since then though. Since then though, he says they announced a CLI because everyone's making clis. I swear to God. We have an AI section in the notes for Windows Weekly that we added probably two, three years ago. We're going to have to add a CLI section. Everything is a CLI now. It's awesome. And that was also one of the build things that I watched was Scott Hanselman was talking, I swear to God he was channeling me. He was like, I want to live. He called that, he calls them TUIs, like text user interfaces, but CLIs, right? Like he's like, I just want to live in this world now. And I'm like, I do too. Like I really, I want this so bad.
- [98:22]
Leo Laporte
But well, you know who likes it is AIs.
- [98:25]
Paul Thurrott
I know that's right. So there's a Protron drive cli.
- [98:29]
Leo Laporte
I'm turning it on right now. This is very exciting.
- [98:31]
Paul Thurrott
It's incredible. So it works, it's on the, it's on Linux. So it's on Windows, Mac and Linux, right. Obviously it's built, obviously it's built on the Proton Drive SDK as it would be. It's kind of a step toward the thing they're going to be doing on Linux. But one of the many things that this thing allows you to do because it's like any cli, so it's an executable with multiple commands you can run that have sub commands and little things. And because it's a cli, you can string it and automate with it and do whatever you want, script it. And that's kind of the point of this. And so you'll be able to do automations through Google Drive on any platform using some combination of the CLI and the SDK. Right? And third party companies will do this for their apps and services Proton will do it with their own things, obviously, et cetera, et cetera. So that's just like a Protron Drive. CLI. Yep. Didn't have that on my 2026 bingo card, but maybe I should have CLI. Maybe agents, I think would be the center spot on that bingo card. But I think CLI is the big surprise for this year. Like this has been a year of clis. It's. It's kind of awesome. I really, I just love the whole. I just love this whole world. I think it's really cool.
- [99:41]
Leo Laporte
AI, CLI and tui. Oh my.
- [99:44]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. I'm just gonna bring back Microsoft. Well, not bring it back. They have Microsoft in it now. Right.
- [99:48]
Richard Campbell
The.
- [99:49]
Paul Thurrott
The. The terminal based like DOS mode. That was his text editors. Freaking awesome. Like, I love that. You know. So
- [100:00]
Leo Laporte
you know what's coming up?
- [100:01]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [100:01]
Leo Laporte
The Xbox segment. I'm very excited.
- [100:03]
Richard Campbell
Exciting.
- [100:04]
Leo Laporte
Very, very excited. I. You know what? On your recommendation, Richard, I. I downloaded Astroneer and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.
- [100:12]
Richard Campbell
Oh, yeah, yeah, it's.
- [100:14]
Leo Laporte
Can I tell you, it's really.
- [100:16]
Paul Thurrott
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'm enjoying that you did something that he recommended and not something I recommended because I
- [100:22]
Leo Laporte
have a browser known to man on my hard drive.
- [100:25]
Richard Campbell
Things.
- [100:25]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, wait till you get to the back of the book. Oh, no. But it never ends, man. But anyway, like I said, I'm super excited you're doing. Because, you know, now you can like, he's not going to reboot his computer because of it, but yeah, I feel like it's going to be your problem. Yeah. I didn't publish the show today because
- [100:48]
Leo Laporte
I was busy building my space station.
- [100:51]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [100:51]
Paul Thurrott
Hope you don't mind.
- [100:54]
Leo Laporte
Our show today brought to you by a fine company known as Trusted Tech. And this. Speaking of, you know, speaking of deadlines, the deadline is rapidly approaching. You only have about three more weeks. If you're managing Microsoft 365 for your company and you're responsible for both the cost and whether it's set up correctly. Warning. Danger. Danger. On July 1st. In three weeks, Microsoft is raising prices. That means any mistakes in your licensing are about to get more expensive. And it's no reflection on you. M365 licensing, it's complicated. Most companies using M365 are either over licensed, paying for unused seats and features, or under licensed, creating compliance and securing risks. And sometimes it's even both. Like, one department has too much, one department has too little. The result? Well, wasting thousands, sometimes tens of thousands a year on tools. Your Team doesn't use or worse, missing critical security features you thought you had. That's why you need the pros. You need Trusted Tech. They help businesses understand what they have, what they actually need. And this is urgent. How to lock in the right setup now before the costs go up in three weeks. Trusted Tech's team ensures your M365 environment is well supported and aligned with how your business actually operates. That's not the only thing they do. They actually, if you need ongoing help, they also offer reactive support for your Microsoft environment through their certified support services. They're really good at that. But because of this deadline, I think let's focus on licensing for the time being. And again, no reflection on you, licensing is constantly changing. E3 versus E5 versus E. There's business Premium, there's add ons, there's the new E7. It's confusing and frankly it's very easy just with time to kind of lose track of it and misconfigure and overpay. And of course it's not just costing money. Licensing mistakes create compliance exposure that will get more expensive after July 1st. So even if you think you got it dialed in, get a second opinion. And I can tell you Trusted Tech is the place to go. So ask Kevin Turner, you know his name, Former Microsoft coo. He was talking to Trusted Tech. He let us use this quote. He said to Trusted Tech, you have an incredible customer reputation and you have to earn that every single day. The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. Listen to Kevin Turner. After July 1, you are stuck paying more. This is the last chance to fix your licensing before costs go up. And this is the time to do it. Because Trusted Tech is offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation right now. Visit TrustedTech team WindowsWeekly365 and get a clear data backed view of your current licenses, what you're wasting, and how to lock in savings before the price increase. Go to TrustedTech Team Windows Weekly 36 5. You'll see a form there. You can submit that form and get in contact with Trusted Tech's Microsoft licensing engineers. The pros, they can help you. And don't you deserve a second opinion? Microsoft's prices go up July 1st. Go to TrustedTech Team right now. TrustedTech Team WindowsWeekly365 Please use that address so they know you saw it here. I know you're smart. You, you don't need that special extra stuff, but just a few extra Keys,
- [104:36]
Richard Campbell
please, just for us.
- [104:37]
Leo Laporte
Trustedtech.team Windows Weekly 365 now, ladies and gentlemen, the vaunted Xbox segment with Mr. Paulie Therot.
- [104:49]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, there was.
- [104:50]
Leo Laporte
Huh?
- [104:50]
Paul Thurrott
No, the Halo music.
- [104:52]
Leo Laporte
Oh, Halo.
- [105:00]
Paul Thurrott
Dearly beloved, here today. So Microsoft Xbox, I guess, had a Xbox Games showcase on Sunday, which was actually really good. I was a little. I know. Well, they finally have. Well, they have a pretty good slate of games to announce for a change. Right. That's. It's been kind of soft for the past couple years. Right, right. And they've provided some dates for some of the stuff. So, for example, the next Halo game, which is the next Halo game, the remake of the campaign from the original Halo, is coming out in July.
- [105:40]
Richard Campbell
Cross platform, latest Halo nostalgia loop.
- [105:44]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So I was also chatting live with Laurent during this as well, because we were both watching it live. And it. If there was a theme to this, and there is, and it's not just, no, seriously, we want to make games, please buy our games. There's, like a thing going on in gaming that is outside of all the normal stuff we know is going on. Gaming layoffs and all the terribleness in the business and all this, but gaming, this is not necessarily new, but it competes with all these other forms of entertainment. And the thing I saw in here is this thing I've kind of gone back to a couple of times over the years. That game Firewatch came out years ago. It was one of the first times where I was like, you know, my wife and my daughter at the time, who. My daughter actually does play video games now, but at the time, we're not game players. I was like, you know, they would like this. It's like, it's an interactive story. It's interesting. There's a mystery. Like, I think they would get into it. And a lot of the games they showed had some, like, personality element to them, including the Halo thing. There was, like, a bit of humor, a couple of moments of humor in the trailer. So that the Halo game that's coming up, the remake of the campaign, is going to have a couple of additional kind of prequel parts to the campaign that are new, some new interactions, more background. Yeah. And one of the moments I sort of remember is just like, it's like his sergeant, him and Master Chief who's towering over him or walking down some hallway, and he's like, do you ever get tired of being the hero who saves the world? And then there's like, pause. He goes, nope. You know, like that kind of thing. You're like, okay. And And I feel like it's, I feel like they're reaching out. I think they're trying to broaden the, you know, the appeal of these things because I, all of these game franchises especially have whatever fan base they have and. But I, you know, clearly they feel the need to, you know, or feel that they're competing with kind of a broader thing. It's Xbox. Well. And you know, in this video game. So it's the terribleness here is the never ending debate between are we going to have exclusives? Are we going to be cross platform? I've kind of made the case that Xbox now as we're calling it is a cross platform game development. It's the second biggest game developer in the world overall with all the studios they have and they have to be cross platform. You can't be that big and only be on Xbox. It doesn't make sense. But there is a lot of pushback from the console loving audience that's part of Xbox still. And there were two games that they announced, one of which I know for a fact was going to be cross platform that will be console exclusives. That one being the. The Gears of War game, which is a prequel called E Day, which by the way looks great, you know, still has the standard kind of Gears of War elements. The guys running around with a full loaded, fully loaded diaper and Kimberly stand up straight. But it's, you know, it looks and feels like it's a style, it was a show, it's a stem. I kind of like things that move quicker than that. But you know, whatever, it's fine. No, it's. I always like the story. You know, the original Gears were especially. But even the original trilogy I've probably. I played dozens of times easily. And in the early days a friend
- [108:58]
Richard Campbell
of mine who wrote these games reminded me that you run it like 40 miles an hour in these games.
- [109:03]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but it feels, you know, it's so boring. Call of Duty, you run at 120 miles an hour. So it just feels, you know, it feels. But you're also crouched. Everything's crouched out. It's all low and cover and you kind of go around the corner and you know, anyway, whatever, it is its own style. But this game was absolutely going to be PlayStation 5 and PC and it is only going to be an Xbox console game. Now I don't know if that's like permanent or if it eventually comes at least to the PC. It seems like it should. But you know, the message I got out of that was like, well, I guess I'm not playing it because I play on the PC now. What the hell? What are you doing?
- [109:33]
Richard Campbell
Right?
- [109:35]
Paul Thurrott
I actually kind of didn't appreciate that. But they. Whatever, you know, Fable, same thing. A lot of, you know, like, that kind of camaraderie you see, like, in a trailer for like, an Ocean's Eleven movie or there was a. There's a Chris Pine Dungeons and Dragons movie, which I know sounds crazy. It's surprisingly funny, by the way. But there's a lot of camaraderie kind of in there with whatever team of whatever group they have. Fable, to me, felt very much like that. There's that kind of stuff. But. But okay, so anyway, there was a bunch. There was a bunch of that. There is one other game. I don't remember the other one. Oh, Clockwork Revolution. That is going to be. I don't know, but that one's going to be an Xbox. It's an Xbox game studio game. It is going to be a console exclusive. It's coming out in October, I think. No, that's not true. Gears of War is coming out in October. Clockwork Revolution is coming out sometime in 2027. So it's a little further off it. What it looked like to me as it started was I thought it was going to be a. Oh, God. I just got the name of it. The game. The game. It's a. It's like a. What do you call it? Steampunk kind of a thing where you go down into the ocean and the world's under the ocean. It's like an. An ramp thing. BioShock. It looked like a BioShock game to me when it. When the trailer for it started. And I'm like, oh, is this like a new BioShock game? Or whatever? And it's not. I don't believe. I don't think it's tied in at all, but it looks like it.
- [110:57]
Leo Laporte
It.
- [110:58]
Paul Thurrott
There was. There's an expansion pack coming for the new Doom game, which. The latest Doom game. It is nothing like the other two in the kind of modern trilogy. It looks different, it feels different. I don't understand what they did with that. But that also a bunch of, you know, kind of. Not a bunch of. But a little bit of comedy, a little bit of personality in there, and it looks different. And I kind of appreciate that because I feel like they went off on a weird tangent. There. There's a. There's that Senua. This is like this. Honestly, it's weird because it's like a kind of a Viking woman kind of call it action adventure game, but it's really about mental health. And there's a new one of those coming. I know it sounds kind of strange. State of decay 3, which as soon as the game came up on like State Decay, you know, you could tell it was State of Decay is coming sometime in 26, 2027. So there was, there were a bunch of games and it, I'd say by and large it was great. There was a moment where they announced like they're going to do a special edition Xbox series X console called Xbox Series X25 that is like translucent green and it kind of gives off that original Xbox vibe. The console that originally shipped was just a black box, but before it shipped they were showing like a green translucent, like kind of see through case. And that's what this will look like. That seems kind of cool. And that came early on in the show. This is like maybe 20 minutes in. And then the way they were speaking, I was like, oh my God, is that it it. But then it just kept going and there was a lot more after that. But this was a good event. It's worth, if you like video games and Xbox especially, it's definitely worth watching. And this is what's going to get us through this holiday season and then into 2027, of course, because several of the games are coming next year. Fable, for example, was just postponed from end of this year to the beginning of next year because in large part because of GTA 6. Right.
- [112:49]
Richard Campbell
Everybody's getting out of the way of GTA. Yeah.
- [112:52]
Paul Thurrott
So, you know, great. But that's fine. We don't know how much this limited edition console is going to cost. I, it's going to be expensive, I think would be as fair to say. And then, you know, because we can't go by without some of this now, you know, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has done, she did an interview, I think it was on Bloomberg that I watched, which was, you know, worth it. She was, you know, it's heavily quoted. Like there's one line in like 15 minutes of talking that's the one everyone kind of lands on, which is about, you know, rethinking things and whatever. But I mean, ultimately I, I, they're gonna have to do mostly what was happening already. I mean, of course, like the, the market conditions that caused what happened to Xbox to happen. Don't go away because there are new people running Xbox. I mean this is, yeah, you know,
- [113:38]
Richard Campbell
it's always who's grounded in reality here? What can you do? What can't you do.
- [113:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but they are. She talked very vaguely about like new business models. Like, and I don't know what that means. Yeah, this is actually. In other words, we know that hardware is expensive. One of the problems with the Xbox has been like storage expansion. This goes back to the 360, really. I mean the original Xbox just had like an HDD in it. It was just normal drive, but since then they kind of locked that stuff down. And so in the current series of devices you can get like a module that has a special whatever good SSD in it, but you can't just put an SSD in the thing. Like you can do that with the PS5. So. So the way she's talking is it's possible it's going to be modular with both RAM and storage, so you can improve those things over time. So if it's super expensive to buy these components when this thing ships next year or the year after, whenever that happens, they're looking at doing this in different ways. So there's not a lot of details there. Not her. And this is not in the write up about this, but separately, another executive from Xbox, it wasn't Max, Matt Boody was someone else, but someone else.
- [114:47]
Richard Campbell
One of the.
- [114:48]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, anyway, he was. There was another interview this past weekend or this past couple of days where he said that when they raised the price on Xbox Game pass last year on the ultimate version, like they almost doubled it. They lost millions of subscribers. Like millions.
- [115:03]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, you know.
- [115:04]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean millions. Like, like
- [115:09]
Leo Laporte
by the way, I will play.
- [115:11]
Paul Thurrott
You know, I, I didn't drop it only because I'm kind of paid up for a long period of time because I, I'm able to get like, like cheaper access to it through a friend from Microsoft. But I would never pay for this. Like, it's just like ridiculous how much this thing costs.
- [115:27]
Leo Laporte
So they back down though, right? They lowered.
- [115:29]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. One of the things that Asha Sharma's team did was to. They didn't go back all the way to the original price, but they did lower the price on that. Yeah, for sure.
- [115:37]
Richard Campbell
Sure.
- [115:39]
Paul Thurrott
And then there's a. I don't think it says this in the article, but they announced another Xbox Insiders release which is like the OS for testing the OS stuff on the console. The URL for this thing refers to it as the July 2026 console update. So I'm assuming it's not July. So maybe this is something that will go public next month. But bunch of stuff in here, none of it is dramatic per se, but, but you can. There's a lot more or not a lot more. There's additional kind of social media features in there. Finding like friends who are mutual friends of your friends. More changes like the home and dashboard stuff, adding games to Wishlist, ng, saving console power settings, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So they're very actively testing console features, which I have to say, no, I don't remember time frames anymore, but I bet two, three years now if you looked at any given monthly Xbox update, like system update, it was just across all the platforms. And now they're very specifically talking about console updates for the first time. Like just console updates in a long time. Like it's, that's kind of interesting and I think that will keep people happy. And then we know that Valve had announced the Steam machine late last year. Never talked about timeframes or prices or anything. They've since released the controller, which is very expensive. I think it's like 100 bucks or, or even $129. I don't remember. I think it's $100. And then the company said this past week that they are going to ship this thing in the summer. They still have not said the pricing. It's going to be expensive. And then there's a related, kind of like a VR headset thing. Steam Frame, which is based on Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 gen 3 chipset ISO, the same thing with some phones also will come out this summer, but again, no prices. So it's gonna happen eventually. I guess. It has to.
- [117:39]
Richard Campbell
We'll see something.
- [117:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [117:42]
Leo Laporte
What?
- [117:42]
Richard Campbell
We're not going to be quite sure. Might be all in a wetsuit, though.
- [117:47]
Paul Thurrott
Yes.
- [117:49]
Leo Laporte
They were gonna make a movie, I think, out of BioShock, but then they decided they should.
- [117:53]
Paul Thurrott
That's a, that's a great choice. Especially the first. Maybe two, you know, two or three.
- [117:56]
Richard Campbell
First one.
- [117:57]
Paul Thurrott
First one.
- [117:57]
Richard Campbell
Especially that whole Victorian angle.
- [117:59]
Leo Laporte
I loved it.
- [118:00]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, the, the intro sequence, you dive down into the ocean and go there. Oh, yeah, I, I, that game I, I finished, I think I finished that one twice, but I never. Like Assassin's Creed. Same thing. I finished the first one, but then I never finished any of the other ones. I played them, but I never kind of followed through.
- [118:16]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, Netflix is making it.
- [118:19]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, they are?
- [118:20]
Leo Laporte
They're going to time it with the release of BioShock 4.
- [118:23]
Paul Thurrott
Okay.
- [118:24]
Richard Campbell
Okay.
- [118:26]
Paul Thurrott
Sure. I don't know. I don't know.
- [118:29]
Richard Campbell
Okay.
- [118:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I love that game. I played all three of them all the way through. I just really, I love the style. Yeah.
- [118:35]
Paul Thurrott
Is it the third One that's like the floating city is that.
- [118:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, the first one really was the best because.
- [118:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. The whole setup was so, like, amazing. And then the whole like the. What do they call the big. The guy, the giant. The old diving suit. Those. What are those things called? They have a name like this kind of dragon around, you know, stuff around. They just kind of clunk around the. Yeah, it's just. It was amazing.
- [118:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. All right, so the guy who did the Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and I am legend, Francis Lawrence.
- [119:07]
Paul Thurrott
Interesting.
- [119:07]
Leo Laporte
Directing and producing a live action adaptation. Somebody else was involved and they kicked him out because he wanted to build an entire underwater city. And they said, yeah, James Cameron.
- [119:18]
Paul Thurrott
They're like, yeah, it's not going to work for that. Yeah, that's the type thing he would do. He's like, I tell you what, I'm going to build Atlantis and then we'll make the movie.
- [119:27]
Richard Campbell
But if you're gonna tell this story, the sets are elaborate, right? Oh, it's.
- [119:32]
Leo Laporte
It's gonna be an expensive.
- [119:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [119:34]
Leo Laporte
They don't start shooting until early next year at the. At the earliest. They're trying to time it.
- [119:38]
Richard Campbell
And the big guys.
- [119:39]
Paul Thurrott
Great choice.
- [119:40]
Richard Campbell
It's not going to be easy. Like. And I remember being stalked by one of them and I was stupidly playing the game late at night with the headphones.
- [119:48]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [119:48]
Richard Campbell
Just scaring the snot.
- [119:49]
Leo Laporte
Big daddies. They're called big daddies and they take care of the little sister.
- [119:53]
Paul Thurrott
That's right.
- [119:54]
Leo Laporte
It was going to be Gore Verbinski who did Pirates of the Caribbean and did a very weird. That very weird movie I was talking about the other day. Good luck, have fun, don't die. It was canceled in 2009 because it was just going to be too expensive. And I think he did.
- [120:10]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [120:10]
Richard Campbell
And I think that's exactly why this thing hasn't been made. There's no. You don't know if it's going to sell and there's no cost effective way to do it. I mean, maybe with like the Mandalorian tax back.
- [120:21]
Leo Laporte
Well, so many game movies have failed, right? I mean, totally. Yeah.
- [120:26]
Richard Campbell
Fallout being the notable recent exception.
- [120:30]
Leo Laporte
That was a great TV show. Maybe that's the thing to do, make a TV show.
- [120:33]
Richard Campbell
The thing is.
- [120:36]
Paul Thurrott
Right. Yeah.
- [120:37]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Well, because you want to tell. The story's long, right? Like, you don't want. You can't knock that out in two hours. It's a ten hour story.
- [120:43]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. A lot of that thing takes place outside. That kind of helps, I guess. But yeah, the Mandalorian thing is Hard for me. And then some of the other shows that are in that, you know, the Star wars shows where you can just tell it's just like guys walking around an empty set and it's just the, you know, this giant background is painted around. I mean, like.
- [120:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. Sometimes that gets a little volume, they call it.
- [121:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [121:03]
Leo Laporte
Apparently it'll be based on the first game, which is my favorite one.
- [121:07]
Paul Thurrott
That's the right one.
- [121:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. That'll be incredible. Anyway, we'll watch with interest. I want to mention something's going on at my window. I know we have construct. This has been construction for more than a year now. I swear. I just wanted to mention that a lot of what we do on the show these days, including our WWDC coverage on Monday, future keynote coverage, the special programming we do, the Discord and even these shows are really funded by, primarily by you, our Club Twit members. Yes. We have advertising. Advertising covers about 60 to 70% of our overall costs. We would have to cut way back if we had to live only on advertising, but thank goodness the club has stepped up. For 10 bucks a month, you get ad free versions of every show, including this one. You get all those additional programs that we're doing in the club Twit Discord, including Photo Time with Chris Markowartz coming up on the 19th. We've got Micah's Media Club right after with the Fifth Element. We're going to be doing a. It's a book club for movies and TV shows and things like that. Micah wants to do that. Jeff Atwood's off by One is coming back on the 26th, and we've got the AI user group, which is the first Friday of every month. And it's really fun. That'll be the day before the 4th of July. Anyway. Lots of cool things. Mike is crafting corners on July 15. But the real point of it is that I think for us to succeed, for independent podcasting to continue to go forward, not being owned by a big company, which we don't ever want to do, not being in the clutches of the companies we cover, we represent you, the user, and we're very proud of that. And I think that needs to happen. And that's why we think the club is so important. Increasingly, we want to have the listeners support what we do. If you believe in that, in our mission, and you want to support this content and you want more of it, Twit TV Club, twit, that's all you need to know. And we thank you so much in advance for your support. The only club says Larry I want to be a member of. Oh, I should show you this ad. Joe does these great Josh Besito is a Photoshop artist. This is not AI and he does ads for us. Every time I do a club Twit mention with Photoshop sign up today. We want you in the club and it looks like I've got a floppy in my hand. Thank you Joe for that. Back of the book time get business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card with unlimited 2% cash cash back on all eligible purchases, unlimited 5% cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel online and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business. You'll have the confidence to keep building.
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Paul Thurrott
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Richard Campbell
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Leo Laporte
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Paul Thurrott
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Leo Laporte
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Richard Campbell
Hey Meta, tell me what kind of dessert this is.
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Leo Laporte
That's a Stroopwafel, a Dutch waffle with
- [124:31]
Paul Thurrott
spiced syrup in the middle.
- [124:32]
Richard Campbell
Is it sweet?
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Paul Thurrott
Yes. Perfect for a snack or dessert.
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Richard Campbell
Mmm, delicious.
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Paul Thurrott
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Leo Laporte
Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe?
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Paul Thurrott
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- [125:04]
Leo Laporte
Mr. Paul Thurat, kick things off for us, would you?
- [125:08]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. So I've been struggling for a long time trying to figure out like how to Update the Windows 11 field guide because it's too big. And I can't say I've given up, but I've decided to pull in the content I was creating for this other edition that was going to happen before now but hasn't into the existing book. So if you have it, you'll get it. If you're a threat premium subscriber, you can have it. So there's a bunch of new chapters. I pulled out some out of date chapters. I'm working on the format and the style and stuff that I want to do for this next edition. So I'm hoping for the after whatever 26H2 whatever, maybe Windows 12 whatever it might be End of This year we can move on to a new edition. But I pulled out a lot of the Windows 10 upgrade stuff I don't think is really relevant anymore. I'm trying to just cull it down because it's humongous. Was like over 1200 pages long, so
- [125:58]
Leo Laporte
couldn't actually print that, I think.
- [126:00]
Paul Thurrott
No, it's ridiculous. It's a big problem and there's no elegant way to split it into multiple files. You can easily put them on Kindles and things and whatever. There's just no good answer for any of this. But in the meantime, I created all this stuff and I partially created a bunch more that I'm going to be adding this week and next week. This will be kind of my focus this month, but I just wanted to get it out there. So it's not a new book, it's not something you have to pay for if you already have it, you just get it. So if you have it, you can go get the updates. Good deal. And then this is kind of a dev topic, but there is a new. I'm going to call it official documentary. I hate that word. But a documentary about the creation of C and why it's so important. So obviously all the major players in there, including people on the side like Anders Heilsberg, right, Who created C, Typescript, Object, Pascal, Turbo, Pascal, blah blah blah, whatever. Awesome documentary. John Romero from formally of it is in there does. You know, even if you don't really care about programming per se, just. But care about the tech, you know, technology, whatever, it's absolutely worth watching. And the company that made this documentary makes a bunch. Just makes a bunch of these, right? So they went on Pearl and some other stuff. But yeah, it's good to know about and certainly good to check out. That's fun. And then yes, Leo browser for me.
- [127:19]
Leo Laporte
You got another browser for me.
- [127:21]
Paul Thurrott
What if I told you we need more browsers? So everyone's familiar with Brave probably, right? Brave is interesting on many, many levels. But the thing I like about it is that it just has all the anti tracking and privacy stuff built in. And so like out of the box, you don't have to add any extensions. It just does everything right. Brave is also trying to figure out a business model that makes sense in our world. And so they try different things, some of which have rubbed people the wrong way for sure. A couple of years ago I'd written some article about like this is how I set it up. I turn basically everything they do off. Like I just don't want their wallet. I Don't want their. Whatever this stuff they do is. Right. And it's Brave, so that's very easy. It's not like a hard thing to do. But they just announced a new version of their browser called Brave Origin, which has all that stuff stripped out by default. Right. So it's just all the good stuff about Brave with none of their business model stuff. But you have to pay for it, right? Unless you're on Linux. Which is why I mentioned earlier that Leo might want to look at this because it's actually free on Linux. You could do this to Brave by yourself. You don't have to do this. Right? You could just go in and make all those changes if you wanted. But you can get this version of it. You can help support the company that's doing a good thing. I always test browsers against an EFF site called Cover your Tracks, which looks at whether or not your browser is protecting you from tracking and fingerprinting and so forth.
- [128:51]
Richard Campbell
Forth.
- [128:52]
Paul Thurrott
And the only other browser I've seen that does perfectly on this, meaning you're actually, you have a. Like you don't have a unique fingerprint. It doesn't just block tracking and ads, it actually obfuscates your fingerprint, which is super important these days because that's, you know, something like meta.
- [129:11]
Richard Campbell
So sending the data, it's just lies.
- [129:14]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, basically. Right. So Helium, which is another Chromium based browser which is kind of in this area, but does not have any version of sync. Meaning if you set it up on one computer, you could have to manually set it up on another one. There's no way to go between them. Brave does offer sync and their sync is unique. They don't have a cloud service, they don't hold your data or anything. You actually just sync from device to device. So you set up a chain of these devices, they communicate across to each other and Brave never gets to see that. So actually this is kind of the ideal version of Brave in some ways. So if you have Windows or Mac OS, you will pay $60 for a lifetime thing. And if you're on Linux, you just get it for free. So that's kind of. And I believe it's like it's free. I'm not sure if it's free on mobile. You can get it on mobile, but the way you do it on mobile is you just go into the existing Brave app, sign into your account. If you paid for this, it just turns it into that. You can still turn things on. If you wanted to use Brave's wallet or Whatever else you could do it, but it's just like a super clean version of Brave, which you know, sets it up for. So they've added so much crap that they're going to charge you for a version that doesn't have all the crap. And it's like. Yes, but it's, it's stuff they added again to try to make sense of this as a business. You know, I mean, they have AI stuff, they have like a newsfeed, they have a rewards program which helps them, you know, they pay for websites that, you know, that are part of that system, etc. Etc. There's all kinds of stuff, but this just turns it all off by default. So it's worth looking at for sure.
- [130:45]
Richard Campbell
Cool.
- [130:46]
Leo Laporte
I'm installing.
- [130:47]
Richard Campbell
You got to keep them alive too, right? Like that's the whole problem here. Yeah, yeah.
- [130:52]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's why. How much is it if you pay for it? $60 might be worth paying for it.
- [130:57]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [130:57]
Leo Laporte
What a concept. Buy a browser. What?
- [131:01]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, I think we need to train people to pay for things they use and like, you know, it's just kind of a, it's a weird problem but, you know, it does keep coming up.
- [131:10]
Richard Campbell
Up.
- [131:10]
Leo Laporte
Mr. Richard Campbell. Run as radio's coming up. What's, what's coming up?
- [131:15]
Richard Campbell
This week's show was one of the ones I recorded while I was in Toronto at the NDC conference a few weeks ago. This is with Megan Robertson, who is a machine learning expert, you know, from before, when it, before it was cool. Worked for a bunch of the, worked for Fortune 500 companies back in day. Now is out as an independent and she was doing a great talk at the conference about, you know, what goes wrong with machine learning projects. And so I thought it'd be great to sit down and talk to her about, you know, what's the planning, what do we got to do to be successful with this stuff. And you know, a lot of it's the same old fundamentals of any project, like do we know what the goal posts are? Can we even tell if we're successful? So you're kind of forcing folks into making a hypothesis about what they could get from the data, what seems reasonable. And then we got into the deeper things that are specific to machine learning, like overfitting on a test data or using non representative table test data sample sets. Like there's all kinds of ways, even when you've got a great project plan, to mess up getting good results from machine learning. And so we ran down that list and just like it's hard. There's no easy way to do this stuff. You have to follow the process, work hard on your data. But if you get it right, wow. It's powerful stuff. So it was great reminder of the fundamentals of machine learning in this time where it seems like none of those things matter.
- [132:36]
Leo Laporte
We don't even talk about it anymore. We don't even use the phrase machine learning anymore.
- [132:41]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's amazing.
- [132:44]
Leo Laporte
All right, I'm ready for some Danish whiskey here.
- [132:47]
Richard Campbell
You ready for some Tui Boog? So I'm in Denmark, and I was given a very nice bottle of Danish whiskey, which I have not opened because one shall not travel with open whiskey. Like, ask me how I know it's a good way to make the inside of your suitcase smell like booze. And so I. I'm going to do that bottle next week when I'm at home because I'm going to keep it close till I get home because it's a very nice bottle. But I have been in Copenhagen for a while, and I have on occasion frequented bars. And I ran across Tui Boog as a Danish whiskey I could get, you know, by the ounce at a. At a nearby neighboring bar that's open very late. So late that at one point they kicked us all in, as in, come inside. You can't sit on the street anymore. It's after midnight. So this is the far northwest corner of Denmark. Tui is actually an area and it's very marshy land. And it's. If you get into the geography of this area, it's actually the eastern highlands of Doggerland. Now, Doggerland was this marshy plain that stretched across what is now the North Sea all the way to eastern Scotland. If you go back 10,000 years, as the Ice age is ending, the ocean levels are much lower and there is this wildly productive chunk of land that is bracketed by what is now Scotland and Denmark. They're basically on the same latitude. And so the remains of this. There was a mez. There was. There's plenty of evidence. There was a big Mesolithic culture that worked that area at the end of the Ice Age. And you got to imagine those peoples ended up with flood myths as the ocean levels rose and eventually drowned all of it, except for these outer extremities and made the. The British Isles islands because originally they were connected to the land. What drew me to that whole idea was that looking at the maps of Tui and Tui spelled T, H, Y. Because obviously is. It looks like what we thought ancient Dargirland looked like it's full of marshy bogs and close to the ocean. And there's been people there for, you know, since the mesolithic times, so 10,000 plus years. Now, barley comes later, but not a lot later, in fact, by the Neolithic period. So some 6,000 years ago, we see evidence of what they call the funnel beaker people. They made a particular style of pottery we call funnel beaker. And they come in carrying a very specific species of barley, a kind of barley we call naked barley. Now, normally barley has a very tight hull around it that is difficult to remove. It's basically glued on. And so you pearl your barley, you basically have style of rubbing it to strip that hull off without damaging the grain underneath. But there was this mutation where the hull would fall off essentially when you harvested. That's the naked barley. And that mutation appears to have only occurred once in central Iran, 6,000 years ago ago. So the fact that we have evidence of that specific mutant grain in northwestern Denmark, this grain spread rapidly because it was full of nutrition. It grew extremely well in rough conditions, including these northern latitudes, with lots of drought and exposure to salt and so forth. But it was easy to eat, it was easy to process, and so it was a dominant grain in that part of the world, literally for millennia, right up until the Bronze Age. And this is a part of the world that was heavily involved in the Bronze Age, because the key to the Bronze Age, the oil of the Bronze Age, was tin. And tin in that era, and this is 1200 BC or so, only came from two places, what we now know as Afghanistan, off in the east and from the mines of the British Isles where the Celts were. And so that tin passed through this area back in that era. And in fact, there are Bronze Age burial mounds all over northwestern Denmark. It was a thriving trade area and barley was a part of that whole equation. Now, this ends that, that naked barley as we get into the Iron Age, so now we're about to a thousand AD or a thousand BC or so, is iron starts to emerge in the early time, in the early times. And it's not just because of iron, although iron has a role to play because the bronze is much more scarce than iron. Iron is super plentiful, but it's hard to work until you know the chemistry of iron, it's difficult to make iron tools from it. And the moment we solve the iron problem, we have a lot more agricultural tooling and so forth, which is important because hulled barley, which the barley we now is the common Barley now and even and then is actually a higher yield. It produces more food. But it's really hard on bronze tools. But the iron tools have no problem with it. And so hulled barley sort of comes back as iron tools emerge along with bread wheat. And bread wheat was a hybridization of the Einkorn wheat, which is the original, original wheat from 10,000 years ago. We've now done genetic analysis and found that it was it hybridized and itself with agrobacterium with a thing called goat grass that made for this high gluten wheat that made really nice bread and again swept around the world. So by the Iron Age we have the bread, bread wheat and we have hulled barley worked with iron tools. And so also, and this is important, hulled barley makes better beer because you need the hull to protect the germ when it, it's sprouting, when it's malting. And in naked barley, often it would go moldy instead. And so the hulled barley is preferred for making beer. And by the way, they were making fermented beverages out of cereal grains long before the Iron Age. Like there, there are Neolithic burial sites with traces of a fermented cereal beverage. We wouldn't necessarily call it beer, but it's along those lines. And even in those periods when they were making these barley derived drinks, they would malt the barley and then they'd have to dry it and they dried it with beech wood. And beech was the common wood and is the common wood today in Denmark. It wasn't always that way. In the earlier times, in sort of the Mesolithic Neolithic period, it was mostly oak. But as the climate changed and we got iron tools and started cutting down a lot of those oak trees which grow rather slowly, beach took over and so it's all a beach area now. The name Tui actually refers to the land, not necessarily the people per se. It's from the old Danish Tui, which is T H I U T, which sounds a little. Spells a little more like what you sound like. And there's the first written evidence of this is from a thousand ad. So it's been around a long time. And it ancient Danish translate essentially after as the people. So again, these folks have been there a really long time. Specifically when we talk about this distillery. It's the Gyrup Estate. And the Europe Estate is named for the land. The area of Europe is the region between the Norha and the Erviso, up in this northwestern part of Denmark. And there are clear records of estate farming going on from about 1300 on. And even though there's been barley growing there for 6,000 years, easy, the modern Europe family starts in 1773. And we know that because there is a stone on the farm which is called Garden Mildesten, which literally has the names of the people that work that land starting in 1773. Now that was an important time in that part of the world of rural land hoarding, as the. The feudal structures sort of fell apart and fell away. And you. You had more farmers that owned their land rather than serfs working land for a noble. And so this was. The Jerp family was the one who took over this land and actually grew it. The soils there are sandy and salty, which is very much the Doggerland style sorrels. And this is an or has been an organic farm today, it's actually a declaration about how they actually operate the farm. Of course, it was always an organic farm, but it was a crop rotating farm. Barley, rye, oats, later they added spelt, they rotate these grains. It's a 500 hectare farm, so that's over a thousand acres broken into 60 parcels. And they rotate the crops between these different parcels. Typically, barley would only be grown on a given parcel once every six years or so, besides the actual cereal crops that they would rotate. And they also rotate through clover and grass for their cows because it is also a dairy farm. And that's super normal.
- [142:23]
Paul Thurrott
Right?
- [142:23]
Richard Campbell
That's the way farming really should work, is that you grow these cereal crops, you might grow some vegetable crops as well, and you rotate food crops that help replenish soils and you rotate your animals through which also replenish the soils. This whole area in Dewey is now a national park. It was designated back in 2007. The lots of the land are protected. So straight lineage of families from 1773. The seventh generation operator of this farm, his name is Nikolaj Nikolai, which is in Nicholas. Nicholas's son started experimenting in making whiskey. So they're barley growers. They've been selling barley for the longest time. But he did start playing with whiskey at the time. They were growing a kind of barley called the Odyssey barley. Barley, which is a modern version of barley, high yield, great for organic farming, well suited for that kind of soil because you're not going to put a lot of treatments on it. And so he's working with a friend of his that owns a distillery, the Nordisk Brander Race Distiller, which is not that far away. Using his barley, they start making these first experiments in whiskey. And one of the things About Odyssey barley is it is not particularly flavorful, it's meant for food. And so it's, you know, it's kind of staple stuff. And when you're going to make other products with it, even beer with it, you'd want a different barley. And Nicholas goes all in on this. In fact, he starts collecting various ancient varieties of barley, over 30 of them, to the point where he even made a request of the Global Seed bank up in Svalbard in the permafrost there to pull some of the ancient barleys and to start see what could still be grown. You know, they had this very mature farm which is regenerated soil and so forth. And so for a few years they did these sample runs of all these different kinds of barleys. You see, given modern methods, do they grow more effectively? What are the yields like, what are the flavors like? As they're starting to experiment with whiskey. So those first experiments happen in 2010 and they start trying these different kinds of barley. By 2014 they get their first edition, which they mysteriously name number one. And that's released in 2015. And it's enough of a success at that time that essentially reaches out to the younger generation, to his kids and some cousins, the eighth generation of the Europes, and encourages them to get involved. And so Ellen and Andreas and Maria and Jacob leave Copenhagen, move up to this far away northwest corner to start building out a proper distillery. First components that they get is they've been using services elsewhere to make their whiskey around the peninsula is they get a melting drum in 2018. So they're going to start doing their own melting. And that's because they're maturing their own barley. And so rather than send it away to get malted, if you're going to handle it yourself, you know, the traditional thing, if you're making whiskeys, you wouldn't do your maltings at all. You would buy pre prepared grist. And they don't want to do that. They want to do it all themselves, including bringing back the old practice of drying the malt with beechwood smoke.
- [145:26]
Leo Laporte
Oh, and it looks good too when they do that. Look at this.
- [145:28]
Paul Thurrott
Wow.
- [145:29]
Richard Campbell
At this point they basically selected down the those 30 old species of barley to two, one called imperial and the other called Langeland. And these barleys are a lot more flavorful even if they don't produce as much yield as the Odyssey barley. Enough that they're not really using in their whiskey yet because the beer makers all want it. Like they kicked off this sort of revolution in these other kinds of barley. So they're doing their maltings and they're doing experimentations with beach smoke drying and so forth, which is not peaty at all. It's got a very different flavor. And this is what this whiskey is that we're going to try. So by 2019, they actually get the distillery in operation with a 1000 liter aka very small still, but only a single still. It's a Mueller Armoz still. This is not your typical pot still from Forsyths in Scotch Scotland, right? This is a European still typically used for brandy. Now, that being said, in 2019, when they finally have all the equipment to actually start their own distillery, is when they win their first whiskey award. So this is still Nicholas's efforts with his friend at the other distillery where the original Dewey Boog, which is a whiskey I tasted. Although this was part of what they call their. Their original series, this was called Number nine Wins Best European Whiskey of the Year by the Jim Murray. Now, Jim Murray is one of the gods of whiskies. Scottish obviously, but he really had an appreciation for what they did there because it's a smoky whiskey, but not peaty. Now, this is farm to glass, right? They're growing their own barley, They've now built out their own distillery. And because it's still an operating farm, they've only taken a small chunk of it to dedicate to actually distilling all the byproducts. Distilling, like the draft off from doing their distillates goes to the farm animals. So it's very much closed cycle. And by 2024 they win single Estate Distillery of the Year in in London with the last of their inaugural editions, number 24. And now this is the point where they move on from Nordis Branderie, which is the original, these 24 editions that they made, they start doing their new series that they call the Limited and Single Cask and their Core Expressions. And so what we're actually, what I actually tasted was from the Core Expressions, that's the thigh boot. The current distillery operation is tiny, so they have three malting drums. And that's not because they need that much to make whiskey, but because they're malting for other folks as well. So each of those malting drums it take will take 5 metric tons of barley at a time. They wet it down and it rotates to keep it evenly mixed and allows it to sprout. And once it's sprouted sufficiently, once you're happy with it sufficiently malted, then you pump hot air in to dry it. And you can choose to make that hot air smoky with beechwood or not, depending on what you're doing. And that kills the malting so that you, you stabilize it. So now that you can start making it into wort. And so off to a thousand liter mash ton where they do the sugar extraction, and then over to a thousand liter washback. Notice the sizes. These are really small. I've seen a picture of the setup. It all fits in a room. Typical fermentation is four to six days. Although I did listen to a discussion with one of their master stillers about sometimes they'll leave that ferment to sit for up to two weeks to pull a few more esters and flavors out of it towards the end. And then it goes into this little thousand liter stilt. But it's only a single stilt. You know, traditionally for Scottish distilling, you'd have a wash still and a spirit still. That's not what they do here. They use this unusual style still. It's more of a combination still. So it's a pot still initially with very high neck and lie arm, so lots of reflux. So the alcohol eats up and falls back in and heats up and falls back in. But then as it comes across the lye arm, it actually goes into a kind of column still or a rectifier where again the alcohol has to climb through the still to be finished. And if it doesn't climb well enough, it falls into a reflux line which puts it back into the pod still. So you're seeing lots of repeated treatment of this distillate and the final completion. And it's typically a run off of that. Five tons of mash is six hours. They'll do two runs in a day to do rounds of new make. And the amount of production out of that little still will be enough to fill. Fill one. Exactly one 250 liter barrel.
- [150:12]
Paul Thurrott
Wow.
- [150:13]
Richard Campbell
So they make a cask a day at normal operation. They use a very traditional rack house. Oh. Basically open air. The ends are minimally closed in, but the barrels are on the side stacked on wood pallets. Our second wood embraces three high. But the salt air and the real terror of this part of the world is a part of the process. So they're only producing about 50,000 liters a year. So little. Little, little operation. And no, not sold in the U.S. in fact, it's not even sold in all of the eu. You get it in Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden, and that's about it. So their New core expressions now are traditional single malt, purely barley, and this particular one, the D Bug, which is the smoky one. They also make a CO edition where they're actually made. They have one that call spelt rye, which is a combination of rye and spelt and barley, which I'd love to have a taste of, but I couldn't find it. So this particular edition that I had a chance to taste was their 2025 edition of DBUK. Only 4,200 bottles made, none of the fancy barley. This is their odyssey Barley, the main production barley, but it's 95% of that barley is beached with smoke. So it is genuinely a smoky Whiskey distilled in 2020 and then aged in a mix of sherry casks, some oloroso, some palocartano and some Pedro Jimenez. And so that's about five years in barrels and then combined together it's 50% ABV. And like I said, it's smoky but not peaty. Like to me it was very Danish. And I've got this love affair going just like I did with the Belgians. This little Danish farm, in doing a farm to glass operation, has made distinctly Danish whiskey with that little flavor of beech barley grown the way they, they grow it and at the same latitudes as Scotland, but on the other side of the North Sea. So it is Danish whiskey steeped in Danish tarrar. And if you get over in this part of the world, hunt yourself down a bottle, man, you'll have a great time.
- [152:17]
Leo Laporte
I love how much it's cooking, isn't it? I mean, really is. It's, it's a, it's, it's cooking. You know, you're cooking something.
- [152:25]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, you're making something you're doing without a doubt.
- [152:28]
Leo Laporte
And the whiskey part of the process, and I knew this, but it's, it's really clear in the video they have on their website is clear. It's like water. All that color comes from the aging later in the oil.
- [152:38]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's all bare. You know, it's normal. New make is always clear right in. You know, they try and avoid having it clouding. And that's part of the head heart cut, pro head heart tail cut process. You know, they, the heads tend to have some nasty flavor stuff in them. Yeah, they want that little fraction sticky. About 60, 65% of the given run is that's going to be in the heart and that's going to be nice clear make and continue doing that.
- [153:00]
Leo Laporte
Does it taste like whiskey at that point or.
- [153:02]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it does. But it's all the grain and yeast flavors. Right. Though you, you know, we always talk about this, whether how much of this is wood flavor and traditional distilleries, yeast and traditional barley, they don't have a lot of flavor in them. Like, we talk more about the flavors in umake when we're talking about. About bourbon. Right. When we have the corn and the rye and the. And the barley playing together. But when you're just doing straight barley and more of the traditional barleys, they're not big. It's pretty clean. Just sort of alcohol flavor.
- [153:33]
Leo Laporte
It's going to be smoky, though, because the barley has been smoked, right?
- [153:36]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. If you've got. If you're doing a peated, you know, then you're going to have more. The smoke's already there. Right. It's introduced at the very beginning.
- [153:43]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [153:44]
Richard Campbell
But these are fruitier barleys that they're using. And that long fermentation process apparently brings up more fruit like nature to it. And then it goes into use Sherry cast. So you're getting color from the sherry and you're getting that European or that really American oak and European oak flavors into it as well. It's only that single weird still means they actually come out at about 65 or so. And then they tend to cut it down before they put it in the barrel anyway. So they're coming in the barrel a little lighter, sweeter than would be normal Scottish whiskey. But I think it's all part of the Danish terrar, the Danish effect. They. They've picked a style while still doing very much, you know, barley water, yeast. But they found ways to make it distinctive to their part of the world.
- [154:32]
Leo Laporte
Very cool.
- [154:33]
Paul Thurrott
How long before we're vibe coating whiskey?
- [154:36]
Leo Laporte
I've had vibe coated whiskey. You don't want it.
- [154:41]
Paul Thurrott
Speaking of hallucinations.
- [154:42]
Leo Laporte
No, no. Somebody brought me a whiskey that was made in a. In a lab based on sampling all the esters and trying to duplicate them. And it was. It tasted like burnt rubber. It was not good.
- [154:57]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [154:58]
Richard Campbell
If I had done my research earlier, late last week, I probably would have taken off this weekend and tried to go up there. You know, they've got a nice little visit. Visitor center.
- [155:07]
Leo Laporte
Really looks like an amazing place.
- [155:08]
Richard Campbell
It's a beautiful place. It's on my list to. To go visit that and when I'm not even done with Danish whiskey. We'll have another one next week. Well, it's not that many.
- [155:17]
Leo Laporte
Saturday's their festival. It's not too late to go up to the Danish Tui whiskey festival.
- [155:23]
Richard Campbell
And I gotta go home at some point. You know, I'm with you. Yeah, that, that would be it.
- [155:28]
Leo Laporte
That would be fun. And I noticed you can buy your very own cask, which I think is even more fun.
- [155:35]
Richard Campbell
And the very common thing for young distilleries. Right. Just to try and cultivate some more business and get some money into the system. So you prepay a CAS that you're not going to be able to touch for four or five years.
- [155:45]
Leo Laporte
I love the idea though. It's yours. Mr. Richard Campbell. You'll find him@runasradio.com that's where Runasradio and.net rocks his two other podcasts live. And of course you'll find all of the Whiskey segments. Well, almost all because we're catching up. If you go. Well, it's all on YouTube in a playlist, but we've made a special URL for the playlist. Something weird from my closet.com you can see all of those. Oh, wait a minute. And apparently you could also now go to Twit TV Whiskey.
- [156:14]
Richard Campbell
That's nice and short. I like that.
- [156:16]
Leo Laporte
We have our very own URL. Twitter.
- [156:18]
Richard Campbell
Oh yeah, and we got a new one, just freshly added. Number127, the tealing whiskey history.
- [156:25]
Leo Laporte
So we have officially endorsed the this. And by the way, we spell whiskey the old fashioned way.
- [156:31]
Richard Campbell
Without an E. Without an e. It was the Irish that added the E because they were asked Patrick to make an alias and he said I'll have to set up an alias.
- [156:40]
Leo Laporte
He wouldn't do an alias. Probably because he is Irish. Oh, wait a minute. That means he would do an alias.
- [156:45]
Richard Campbell
I'll ask him again.
- [156:46]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [156:47]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I love it. Now it's official. It's official. You don't have to go to something weird from my closet. You can go to Twitter TV Whiskey.
- [156:53]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, we got our page for it now. Yay.
- [156:57]
Leo Laporte
Paul Thurat. Mr. Paulie is@thot.com Become a Premier Member, a premium member, and you can get all of his books, including the 1200 page field guide to Windows 11.
- [157:08]
Paul Thurrott
Well, it's, it's under 1100 pages now because I made some cuts.
- [157:13]
Richard Campbell
Congratulations.
- [157:14]
Leo Laporte
You really slimmed it down, didn't you? He also has Windows Everywhere, which is a really great kind of history of Windows through its frank programming framework and D and shitify Windows, which everybody needs. You can either get it@leanpub.com or get it by joining thorat.com Paul and Richard convene, as do I, every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That's 1800 UTC. So you can watch us do this live. We stream it live in the club. Of course, in the club. To discord. But everybody's allowed to watch on YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and kick after the Fact. The website has video and audio of the show at TWiT TV WW, there is a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. YouTube.com I think Windows Weekly Show. And of course, best way to get it is to subscribe on your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically the minute we're done. Audio or video?
- [158:13]
Richard Campbell
Or both. Paul.
- [158:16]
Leo Laporte
Richard. Have a great week. Paul. You staying up in Pennsylvania?
- [158:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, actually, we're going to be in Nashville next week.
- [158:23]
Richard Campbell
Wow.
- [158:23]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we're just visiting with the kids,
- [158:25]
Leo Laporte
but yeah, I think it's good to be in Pennsylvania. For America's 250th, you can enjoy the Ultimate Fighting Championship. You can watch Greenwood. It's gonna be Milli Vanilli. It's. It's gonna be a good time, at least.
- [158:39]
Paul Thurrott
Millie.
- [158:39]
Leo Laporte
I'm not sure if they're to be gone, but.
- [158:43]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Yeah.
- [158:44]
Leo Laporte
So you'd be there for the fourth? Do they do a big thing in Makunji on the 4th?
- [158:49]
Paul Thurrott
They do things all over the valley, so we have friends that live up on a hill on the edge of the valley. You can look down and see all the fireworks from the place. Yeah, it's really cool.
- [158:57]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that sounds fun. Great. Well, no wonder you're in town. Stay there for a little while anyway.
- [159:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [159:02]
Richard Campbell
And I'll actually be home for a change.
- [159:04]
Leo Laporte
Richard Campbell. Now, what do they do in Canada on the 4th of July?
- [159:09]
Richard Campbell
Make fun of Americans? I'll be in America for the fourth of July.
- [159:12]
Leo Laporte
Oh, good. Okay.
- [159:13]
Richard Campbell
In Snohomish, because I like the sound of steady artillery fire.
- [159:18]
Leo Laporte
It's kind of our.
- [159:19]
Richard Campbell
Our Federation Day is July 1, and we do the. The fireworks and all of those.
- [159:25]
Leo Laporte
Good. Yeah, you. Three days, just like your Thanksgiving. You just got to be first.
- [159:30]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, we get it ahead of time. Although that was until 1867. None of this 1776 stuff.
- [159:37]
Leo Laporte
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here for Windows Weekly. Come back next Wednesday. We'll see you again. And if you're watching live, stay tuned. Intelligent machines is just around the corner. We'll be talking about the latest hotness in agents.
- [159:51]
Richard Campbell
Hermes.
- [159:53]
Paul Thurrott
Is there agent news this week? That's weird.
- [159:55]
Leo Laporte
There was fable. Fable's fascinating.
- [159:58]
Richard Campbell
What?
- [159:59]
Leo Laporte
In about, let's see, about five minutes. I can. I can find out more about linear B and proto elamite. I'm very excited. I. I'm just glad my AI has a hobby, that's all. And it's not me.
- [160:14]
Paul Thurrott
You got to keep them busy, you know, have absolutely. Your agents talk to my agents. Keep busy. That's nice.
- [160:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [160:20]
Richard Campbell
Trying to find some way to consume all your tokens.
- [160:22]
Leo Laporte
Oh, man. I have, I have done. I don't know how it knew that my subscription was going to run out tomorrow, but it keeps mentioning that. Like we better get this done fast enough.
- [160:34]
Paul Thurrott
Knows it's arguably the most important part of the technology.
- [160:37]
Leo Laporte
The bill.
- [160:38]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [160:39]
Leo Laporte
Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.
- [160:53]
Paul Thurrott
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please. For the last love, everything good in this world stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try. @mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.