Tech News Weekly 360 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. It's just me this week. Well, me and some awesome interviews. We kick things off with a story of the week about how lots of Amazon Echo devices have made their way to the Amazon graveyard. Yeah, what devices are still around? Which are gone? Which do I really enjoy? Which do I think should be gone or should be here? It's a great conversation about how Amazon kind of just uses us to test its different devices and, you know, kind of pay for it in the meantime.

Then Dan Moren of SixColors is back yes, this time, though, to talk about Apple's new Mac lineup. The iMac, the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro all made their way to us this week, and Dan Moren has the lowdown. Afterward, the VP of Developer Relations at GitHub, Martin Woodward, joins the show to give us the lowdown on GitHub Universe, GitHub's annual conference, where new and very cool tools have been announced. Then we round things out with a rundown Look, we're going up and down A rundown of Apple's Genmoji feature, which is soon to make its way to our devices. A little bit about what that could mean. A little you know some confusion there as well and what you should expect going forward. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

This is Twit. This is Tech News Weekly episode 360, with me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday, October 31st 2024: Github Copilot Goes Multi-Model. It's time for Tech News Weekly, the show where, every week, we talk to you about the people making and breaking the tech news. Hello and welcome to this very show. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined this week by Mikah Sargent.

Yes, this is the fifth Thursday of the month. Therefore, it is just a nice little adventure between the two of us you, the listener, and me, the host, unless, of course, you're listening out loud to a room full of people, in which case, hello, people, it's you and all of us. All right, let's get into things. This week, I've got two interviews planned for you, but I am kicking things off with a story of the week, and the first story of the week that I want to talk about comes from Andrew Liszewski at the Verge, and I want to be careful here. I'm not going to be talking about every single thing in the story that I'm about to introduce, because I want to be careful here. I'm not going to be talking about every single thing in the story that I'm about to introduce, because I want you all to go and check out the piece. I want to make sure that the value is there. So, first and foremost, I'm going to share in the Club TWiT, discord the link to this article and then we'll get to talking about it.

So this is a piece entitled the Amazon Echo Graveyard and I love it because it is a look at the Amazon Echo ecosystem and the devices that, over time, amazon has shuttered or tossed into the graveyard in some way, and when you look at them, all spelled out like that, all listed out like that, it's kind of surprising just how many devices Amazon has introduced and then pulled away from us shortly afterward. You know Amazon it's usually Google that gets the sort of bad press for always going and removing different products that it announces, different services that it announces. But it's not just Google, it's also Amazon and, interestingly, there are a couple left off the list of the Amazon Echo Graveyard. But in any case, I want to talk about a couple of these that existed for a period of time and then disappeared for whatever reason. The first one is actually the first one that makes it onto this list.

It's a device called the Echo. Look. Now, some of you may remember the Echo Look. It was this camera that you were supposed to put in your bedroom and, in particular, in the area where you keep your clothes or around the area where you keep your clothes, and this camera would take a full body length photo of you and also video, and you would use that to provide fashion advice. Now, the interesting thing is, the fashion advice was in part, done using what they called at the time machine learning algorithms and in part done from quote fashion specialists.

I remember when the Amazon Echo look came out and I remember that, right after it came out, amazon really started being in the news for privacy concerns, and Amazon has worked on rehabilitating that image. But the look came out at the sort of peak time of people being very skeptical and concerned about what Amazon was collecting about us and how much information they had. So, if you can imagine, while this is going on, suddenly they've got a device that they're saying hey, you should put this in your bedroom and you should let us see everything you're wearing and let us give you advice on how to wear it. No, no, no, no, no. That wasn't going to work. Also, I should mention it was $200.

The device debuted in 2017. And, believe it or not. According to Andrew Liszewski, it was. It took until 2020 for the device to be discontinued. This piece, by the way, also has a great little part at the end of maybe this is a device that should or shouldn't be resurrected. This one gets the no rating because no one needed it in 2017. No one needs it now, says Liszewski.

Now look, I think that it would be nice in theory, and this is probably what the people who came up with this idea were thinking. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way for me to have a catalog of all of the clothing that I own and some sort of system that helps me decide what I should wear? Yeah, in theory that would be nice, but from Amazon and for that much money, maybe not. And given those privacy concerns, given the fact that the device just simply was not as popular as they had hoped, it quickly went the way of the Dodo. So, yeah, that's just one example. Now there's another example on the list or another. It's not even an example. It is truly a product that was discontinued.

These were the Echo buttons. Now, these Echo buttons came in a two pack and they were what Amazon called A-L-E-X-A gadgets extensions, extensions of the main app or the main, whether it be the app, the Echo app, or it be one of the products, you kind of connected it to them. Well, those buttons were specifically created to be kind of like buzzer buttons because at the time Amazon was super, super, super hyping this game interface and set of features that your Echo devices had so you could play little games, you could do sort of game show style gaming with the Echo and use these buttons to chime in and give you a response. Unfortunately that did not pan out. I don't think I have ever. Even me, who you know tingles with this stuff as much as possible. I don't think I ever played a game on my echo. The closest I ever came was playing like 20 questions, which I don't really know if I consider that a game. But these were supposed to be, yeah, the opportunity to do game show stuff. But what this reminded me of is another product that is not quite Echo but instead was Amazon that I really liked and was sad to see go, and that was the.

I can't remember exactly what they called them at the time, if it was prime button or Amazon button, um, but these were little buttons that you could buy. There are physical buttons and you would use uh, you'd, you'd stick these somewhere near a product that you regularly purchased. So, let's, I buy my paper towels from Amazon. You could buy a branded I'm trying to think Charmin, yeah, that's a paper towel brand, I think Paper towel button and you'd stick it in the cabinet, the pantry, wherever you keep your paper towels, and then, as you started to run low, all you had to do is hit the button and then it would put in an order keep your paper towels and then, as you started to run low, all you had to do is hit the button and then it would put in an order for your paper towels. They would come soon after.

I bought a lot of those buttons because basically, I think they were like $4 or something like that, and if you bought one and you used it, then it would take the cost of the button. I think it was $4.99. It would take the cost of the button off of your first order. So essentially it was free and so $4.99 would come off of the first order. I had maybe 10 of them for different products that I owned and I really liked them.

Some people might say, well, you could do the subscription. Right, you could just have it on a subscription, but sometimes I use things faster, sometimes I use things slower, and so this was just a great way to say, oh, I am starting to run low on this. Boop hit the button Two days later or in some cases now one day later, it would be that would arrive at my doorstep, got Amazon in trouble with the government and, honestly, it still makes very little sense to me. But they had to discontinue them as well, and that was one of the products that I actually thought was really great. Since then, people have come up with ways to use those buttons for kind of to be smart buttons that you can control, you know, turn on and off lights and stuff, but I just never, you know, played around with that, so I kind of let those go. So that exists in the graveyard, in the Amazon graveyard, but not so much the Amazon Echo graveyard, but these Echo buttons reminded me of that.

Another product that made this list was the Echo Wall Clock. Actually, before I get to that, though, burke in the chat asked me where do you put 10 of these buttons? Whenever it came to those product buttons again, it was just wherever the product was. So if you keep your toilet paper in some place, then on the door of the cabinet you just stuck the button because it had like 3M sticky stuff on the back that was removable. You could remove it like restickable, I guess, is the word I'm looking for, and so I would put you know, the one in there. There I have a, had a cabinet that had my cleaning supplies in it, and for each of the cleaning supplies that I had, you know, dishwasher tablets, the dishwasher rinse aid, my favorite multi-surface cleaner just three of those buttons would be stacked right next to each other because they're very small on the cabinet door on the inside. So then you just have the door open and then you boom, boom, drop it. That was for the other buttons, not for these Echo buttons, which are a totally different thing. I just am comparing the two. So Burke was asking are they not palm-sized? These Echo buttons are the Amazon buttons that I was talking about were much, much smaller. They were just a little bit bigger than a AAA battery, because in fact they were powered by a AAA battery.

Moving along here, one product that I'm so sad was discontinued by Amazon, and so sad enough, in fact, that I actually have the listing in a camel camel camel alert in case Amazon ever decides to bring it back is the Echo Wall Clock. The Echo Wall Clock is this device that the Verge says it was kind of simple and underpowered, and so it. You know it wasn't very useful. I thought it was. It served as a regular clock but it connected, kind of like the other gadgets, to your Echo smart speaker and it would tell you the progress of timers that you had going, so you could glance up at the wall clock If you had, you know, a 15 minute timer, a 10 minute timer, and you would be able to see how much of that time was left by these kind of LED lines around the outside of the clock. I thought that was brilliant and I just was. I'm really sad that it's not around anymore. I think that if Amazon did bring it back, maybe you put a microphone in it so that it can be another place where you would be able to actually interact with the Echo via A-L-E-X-A. But I thought that it was a clever use of, you know, wall space and I think that's what it was too. Is that it's kind of up and out of the way, but it gives you just a little bit more information than you would otherwise have, and it was just a nice looking clock. Frankly, the clock looked nice, so that clock was announced in 2018 and discontinued shortly thereafter. Apparently, there were some connectivity issues involved. Amazon worked with Disney on a Mickey Mouse version. That one stuck around for a lot longer, and I was bummed about the uh loss of that.

The other thing that was not on this list, um, but was very much a an Amazon and an Echo device, was a product that was one of Amazon's first look products. These are I think they were called Amazon day one products, and the day one product that I thought was super cool was this little, what they called a sticky note printer. It had a special kind of sticky note material inside that would work with a thermal printer, and you could use it to make a shopping list, make a quick little note. You could also print out a Sudoku puzzle or a crossword puzzle. Whatever you wanted to do, you could print it out on the sticky note printer, and all you had to do was just talk out loud to A-L-E-X-A as a day one product, though it was basically the idea that if enough people are interested in it, then we will put it out into the world. If they're not, then we won't put it out into the world. People were interested enough in it and so it did become a thing the smart sticky note printer. Unfortunately, as you can see, if you're watching from this listing, it says currently unavailable. That means that Amazon really didn't stick with it, as it were. There are quite a few more devices that make this list and you should definitely go read it just to get a reminder of all of the stuff that Amazon has announced over time and has unfortunately kicked to the curb. Amazon loves to do the spaghetti projects and we are all kind of its public beta testers who help to fund this stuff, and I think that list is a good reminder of that.

All right, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with our first of two interviews today, and the first one's going to be all about the Apple announcements.

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Alrighty, we are back from the break and we are here with a familiar face joining us from somewhere on the East Coast. It's Dan Moren, SixColors East Coast Bureau Chief. Hello Dan, hello Mikah, happy Halloween to you. Happy Halloween to you as well. I hope you have lots of candy to either hoard or give out.

0:20:48 - Dan Moren
I've eaten too much of it already. It's bad news around here.

0:20:53 - Mikah Sargent
So, yeah, originally we had places to go, people to see, and then that changed, and so I rushed to get some candy, and I'm looking forward to handing it out and being the house on the street that gives full size. Oh man, you're a legend. I hope to be. So you are joining us not to talk about candy, but to talk about eye candy. I don't know. You're here to talk about Apple's week of announcements. Caramel covered apples. Now, this is the series of products that Apple announced this week. Instead of doing an event, and it's all about the Mac Apple, if I'm not mistaken, kicked off the week by talking about it or by introducing its new iMac. Can you tell us about what we're working with there and what updates we've seen?

0:21:49 - Dan Moren
Sure, yeah, this is the M4 iMac. We have previously seen both M3 and M1 versions of it. Skip the M2, because you know you don't need to be. Don't show off iMac, you're okay. You know a lot of what we're seeing here is not necessarily totally blockbuster and new. It comes in colors, which the previous one did as well. They've done a refresh in the colors to make them, I think, pop a little more. Mikah, I know you, like me, are a big fan of the color green.

0:22:15 - Martin Woodward
And I think the green iMac looks fantastic. It's phenomenal.

0:22:20 - Dan Moren
I know I wish I had a reason to get one because it looks great. But under the hood we're looking at the M4 processor, which, of course, is the new generation of Apple Silicon. It debuted earlier this year in the iPad Pro, but now it is getting moved throughout Apple's other products. The big part of that, the reason that we're seeing such a push on that, is, of course, apple intelligence and making sure that all these processors and Macs are equipped to do that, to carry out all those generative AI features Apple is rolling out over the next several months. There are a couple of nice additions here in general, for example, the higher level iMac.

I'll be clear all of them come with just the M4. There's no M4 Pro or any better processor in this. But if you move up from the base level to go from the model at the very bottom that has two Thunderbolt ports, you can move up to one that has four Thunderbolt ports. Previously it was two Thunderbolt ports and two USB-C ports instead. That was like the best you could do, but now they're all Thunderbolt ports in the back and they're Thunderbolt 4 ports, which previously, I believe, they were Thunderbolt 3 ports. So you know, it's a little better. You get a little more bang for your buck.

Apple has also raised the minimum RAM across the board for all of its computers to 16 gigabytes, so all of these benefit from that as well. Other than that, there's not too much here. You know, it's a nice little update, but it's nothing that's going to blow people away. The only other little detail is that they've also refreshed all their input peripherals the Magic Keyboard, magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse to swap out the lightning connectors, which have kind of been deprecated for USB-C. Other than that, yeah, the iMac remains, as the iMac has often been, an all-in-one computer.

0:24:01 - Mikah Sargent
That's pretty affordable one computer that's pretty affordable. Uh, of course, with the, with the, the promise of apple intelligence across the board. This helps to bring that in line. Um, when apple announced this imac, how much of the push involved the kind of what we've seen before, where Apple Intelligence was first and foremost in the announcement and in the videos about it Did this get positioned as a new Apple Intelligence device?

0:24:40 - Dan Moren
Yeah, absolutely. That was a big part of the press release they issued, and the video was probably about a third about Apple Intelligence, a theme that you'll see continuing throughout the week. I should mention two other minor updates here that are nice. One they've added that 12 megapixel center stage camera that's on so many of the other devices, including the studio display. And two, they also are now offering a nanotexture glass option on this, which is the less reflective. You know, if you're worried about having your computer someplace with a lot of glare, it can sort of minimize that. But yeah, it seems like the biggest part of this push was really about hey, let's have the iMac ready to do Apple intelligence, and that also rolled out on Monday along with this round of updates, the iMac updates.

0:25:24 - Mikah Sargent
Would I have to buy a green iMac in order to get a green Magic Keyboard, or can I just get that separate?

0:25:31 - Dan Moren
I'm sorry, you cannot. You can only buy the keyboard's only coming white and black, which is mostly just silver with white or black keys. Yeah, you can't buy individual color versions. However, I will say, keep an eye on eBay because you never know those things could pop up. People get rid of them because they use their own keyboard. So there's a chance. There's always a chance.

0:25:51 - Mikah Sargent
There's always a chance. I would love it. So that was the thing that kicked off the week, and then Apple kind of had a little pop in to say by the way, 18.1 is here, which means the first round of the two rounds of Apple intelligence features are here, and some of you will have that now and some of you will have it later, and also it's on a wait list and maybe you'll be on the wait list. That's all a mess and I don't want to talk about that, because I want to talk about the next good good, the next Mac product that Apple announced, one that seems to be a darling among the tech press in particular and nerds everywhere, and that is the Mac Mini. And apparently it got a little more mini this year, which is why I have to say it like that very annoyingly.

0:26:41 - Dan Moren
Apple does have very strict rules about those things. Yeah, I mean, is it a darling of the tech press? Well, that's because it's adorable. It's a tiny little computer that they made even smaller. They've revamped the Mac Mini.

The Mac Mini has had very few design changes in its history. The previous design, which is sort of that unibody design, had more or less been there for 14 years and was originally designed to be wide enough for an optical drive. So that dates it pretty well there. So obviously they had an opportunity here, especially with Apple Silicon, to basically say can we make this smaller? Can we reduce the amount of material we're using to build this, all of those things? I mean, if you looked at the previous Mac mini generations, they're almost largely empty, like they had a bunch of empty space in them. So this was really an engineering feat that was enabled by the switch to Apple Silicon.

It's about five inches in each direction, so it's a bit smaller. The previous one was 7.75 inches. It's closer, probably in just sort of the footprint, to a Apple TV these days, a little bigger. The Apple TV is, I think, 3.6 or so, so it's still got a little bit of size on that, but it's much smaller than the previous mini. It is, however, taller. It's two or so, so it's still got a little bit of size on that, but it's much smaller than the previous mini. It is, however, taller. It's two inches tall. So it is taller than both the Apple TV and the Mac mini, though not together. I checked and it has an entirely new thermal system that helps enable the cooling. They've really packed in the technology there.

One big addition that I think is great they have, for the first time in the history of the Mac Mini, put ports on the front. There are two USB-C ports on the front, in addition to a headphone jack, which is an interesting choice in this day and age. But there it is. They also features three Thunderbolt 5 ports. If you're using the M4 Pro version, there are Thunderbolt 4 ports if you're on the base M4, as well as HDMI, gigabit Ethernet and power. One other fun note S the power button. It's on the bottom. It's on the bottom of the computer.

0:28:35 - Mikah Sargent
So why, so why? Why do you? What do you? How come, why?

0:28:45 - Dan Moren
Well, they saw the way that the magic mouse charged and they're like that doesn't go far enough. No, uh, why?

we think they were thinking here. I have a theory, and my theory is you know, when it comes to apple making these kinds of decisions, they're almost always born out of some degree of practicality. Uh, if you look at the previous version of the mac mini, the back was all plastic. It's now aluminum all the way around, and in order to get a button in there, they would have had to do something either like put it plastic coming through the aluminum, which I can see why they wouldn't like or if you do it metal, it has to be curved, which is yeah, like it is on the studio.

yeah, exactly, and that may just been something that was slightly more expensive, and they just didn't want to spend the time and money and research and design doing that and they figured, hey, people don't turn their Mac minis on and off. Maybe that much, right, I mean, you might restart it, but a lot of these also exist in like server environments and you generally don't need to get to the power button very often. So I think this is just a matter of expediency. They decided, you know what, it's easier and cheaper for us to put it on the bottom and it's really not going to affect that many people. So there you go, and I will say gone are the days right when these things had spinning disks in them. If you want to literally just pick it up off your desk and press the button it's not going to affect anything that's happening there.

I mean, if you stack something on top of it, sure, but it's not going to break anything inside the computer.

0:30:06 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that was my one thing is there are times when I do need to get to the power button on the Mac Studio rare, but they do happen. Yeah, sure, and even with it on the back, because it's so, because of what you've said, it's, you know, it's got that nice little curve, it's metal and so it's very hard to find. You know, there's no anything like that, and so I like the idea that you kind of won't miss this button. But it's on the bottom and so if you've got a bunch of stuff plugged in it and some USB I guess, since they're anyway, it feels a little weird.

0:30:39 - Dan Moren
It is a little weird. It's a little weird, it's fine, it's fine. I mean, I always forget on my mini right now which side it's on. I always have to put my hands back there and be like is there a power button on this side? Is there a power button on this side?

0:30:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I feel like.

0:30:51 - Dan Moren
I'm in one of those things where you put your hands in and you're trying to figure out what people have put like tactile yeah.

0:30:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly, it's a tactile puzzle Every time. It is Every time. And then, last but certainly definitely not least, apple announced a new MacBook Pro. Tell us about this, because the MacBook Pro seems to be on a really, really steady cadence and when you've got a really, really steady cadence, it can be kind of difficult differentiating. Have they differentiated here and what's going on in MacBook Pro land?

0:31:31 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I think a bunch of the MacBook Pro updates this time around are kind of nice to haves. So, for example, one of the things that they have updated is on the base model there's now Thunderbolt ports on both sides, which there previously was not, which is like all right, that's nice. You get an extra Thunderbolt port on the other side as well, so if you're like charging, you don't have to like always be plugged in on the same side. That's fine. I mean, we've got that same 12 megapixel center stage camera, obviously. And then there's the finally moved the unified the color options. Previously, on the low end you could get like silver or space gray and you had to go up to the higher end to get the space black, but now it's the same across the entire line it's silver and space black. This is, more than anything, a showcase for the M4, and especially the M4 Max, which is also introduced along with this product.

Macbook Pro may not be its best selling laptop, but it's certainly its most important, because I think it's the one that really appeals to most pros. I mean, a lot of people are. The majority of Macs that Apple sells are laptops, not desktops, and this is the pro offering right. So this is the one that they are sort of putting out there as, like this is our most powerful laptop around, and so they want it to be great, and that it has yielded a year over year cadence, which is most evident in the introduction of the new processor generations.

But there's a couple other nice things here too. It gets the same nano texture option that you can get on the iMac, so if you're somebody who works outside a lot, it will increase that. It gets brighter screens for SDR content, which is a nice addition as well if you're working outside. But I think at the end of the day, it's mostly about performance. With those M4 Pro and M4 Max chips on offer, it really is pushing the bounds of what a laptop can do, and I think that's a big part of it. And, of course, as with the Mini and as with the iMac, a lot of the emphasis Apple is putting on this is about Apple intelligence and intelligence on the go, and building your laptop for generative AI features is a big talking point across the industry these days, so it's no surprise that Apple's jumping in that pool as well.

0:33:34 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and I agree about not being surprised. The MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini, the iMac Can you give us, just to round things out, are these all available right now? Can they be pre-ordered? Has supply shifted? What's the kind of up and down on whether people can get their hands on these and when?

0:34:03 - Dan Moren
Yeah, these should all be available for pre-order now. They should be available in Apple stores on November 8th, so that's next week. You know they're coming in short order. Apple is clearly ready to fulfill demand on these things and you know it's really clearly gung-ho about bringing the entire Mac line to the M4. So we can expect probably to see some updates to the remaining Macs sometime, beginning to middle of next year on, like the Mac Studio, MacBook Air, Mac Pro Got it.

0:34:33 - Mikah Sargent
Well, dan Moore, and I want to thank you so much for taking some time to join us today to give us the lowdown, the high up on the I don't know, that was weird the Mac line up. If folks would like to keep up with what you're doing, where's the best place for?

0:34:48 - Dan Moren
them to do that. Well, you can find me on social media at dmorin. My website is dmorincom and I write regularly about Apple for both Macworld and sixcolorscom. And, of course, I host the weekly Clockwise podcast with Mikah every week on Wednesdays. Go tune in over at relayfm.

0:35:05 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Thank you very much and we'll see you again soon. Thanks, Mikah. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Goodbye, spooky spooky. All right, folks, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with another awesome interview.

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We are back from the break and I have to tell you I am super excited because we have the Vice President of Developer Relations for GitHub joining us today to talk about GitHub Universe. It's Martin Woodward. Welcome to the show, Martin.

0:37:41 - Martin Woodward
Hey, Mikah, thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.

0:37:43 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you for taking the time to join us. I know it's been a busy week for you. It really is wonderful to have you here with us today and getting to talk about all of the fun stuff that's been announced at GitHub Universe. Before we do talk about those announcements, though, I think it's important not everybody knows about GitHub Universe. What is GitHub Universe?

0:38:04 - Martin Woodward
Sure, yeah. So GitHub Universe is an annual conference we do usually here in San Francisco, where we bring the whole community of developers into a different place. This year it's Fort Mason and then we all come in, listen about the latest news in tech, see the latest product announcements from GitHub and generally have good vibes. It was a great kind of get together of a lot of people from open source community and the enterprise communities and things getting together and meeting, so that was good.

0:38:33 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Yeah, I noticed that from the show floor. There were lots of different booths and things like that. Who tends to be, you know, joining from that community? Are there some big names? Listen, people, it's not about favoritism, it's just big names that you know people would recognize. For example and now of course it's not coming to me, but at one point, oh, Figma was in the background there. Are there other big names like that that pop up, and are they there to show off the offerings that they have, or are they there to like mostly attend the conference and see what GitHub has rolling out?

0:39:15 - Martin Woodward
Yeah, it's a trade show, so you know you have lots of people there from across the whole development world, really GitHub being the center of the developer ecosystem, so lots of different people come in. So you had IBM Red Hat, you've got partners like Datadog and things. You also have Microsoft Azure there different people who want to go talk to developers who they know are using GitHub as the platform kind of thing they want to come and exhibit. It was a good show.

0:39:45 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome, yeah. And so let's get into the show. Because, you know, over the course of those two days of you know keynotes and the presentations, a lot was announced. Well, we can use a nice GitHub blog post to sort of narrow it down to some of the big announcements surrounding Copilot and some of the tools therein. First and foremost, there was a big talk about the multi-model Very important that we differentiate, not modal model. Multi-model Copilot. What does that mean for someone who hears that and is going wait, okay, huh.

0:40:28 - Martin Woodward
Exactly. It's like Spideyverse, isn't it? So for people that don't know, git or Copilot, is a developer tool that helps you use the power of AI and large language models to help you code. People can use kind of ChatGPT or Claude or something like that to go and write code in the browser and it can give them some code. But Copilot brings in the context of your development environment, brings in context of everything else, uses some models, packages up that data and then sends it to a prompt and then gives you back an answer. So it helps you code very easily.

So lots of developers use it. It's used by gosh. I think it's like 1.8 million Copilot users now across the world and, including this, over a million kind of students and teachers and open source maintainers use it for free. So it's used by a lot of people. Previously yeah, lots, and previously that was all being used. It was using kind of the latest models from OpenAI. So we've been through different versions. It started off with a fine-tuned version of GPT-3, and now it's running GPT-4.0. What we announced at the show was actually developers now have the choice between GPT-4.0 or Claude 3.5, sonnet, which is a cool new LLM that lots of developers are getting into, and then also probably the most surprisingly to the developer audience Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro as well. So it's across the whole ecosystem. You're able to kind of use the LLM that you want to help you solve that problem.

0:42:14 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and you know, I think I'll make that external observation of the surprise there.

Observation of the surprise there, Definitely knowing that GitHub is under the umbrella that is Microsoft.

I too was pretty kind of excited to see that you can go across the aisle, so to speak, and that people would be able to use Google Gemini as part of that experience, and I think the cool thing that that does is it really does help separate co-pilot from the what we've known to be the underlying technology up to this point in in in some ways I know it's not entirely that, but thinking of it as an open AI GPT tool to being sort of agnostic and being able to, you know, change the underlying tooling.

Now, one of the things that I actually wanted to talk to you about with this conference is that many, if not most, if not all, of the demonstrations were very much live and what I? I'm kind of curious just your take on that, because I will explain it again from an external perspective to say that I have appreciated seeing different companies that are showing off in particular, ai technologies doing live demos and rolling with the system, because it feels more honest, it feels more authentic and it also teaches people how to go about. You know, dealing with a prompt and a response that maybe is unexpected or goes one way and trying to make changes therein. Is that a conscious effort in setting up a conference like this and showing off tools that involve generative AI for you?

0:44:13 - Martin Woodward
It is for me. Developers are skeptical by nature, and so I think you have to show the tool as it's really being used, to prove it's real. With these, you know large language models of a lot of generative AI. You get amazing results sometimes from all of them, but they're non-deterministic and so they don't do the same thing every time, and so you know you need to kind of show what it really is like to use for a developer to trust that this is a tool that they want to try, and so we insist on doing live demos during our keynotes, during the breakout sessions, as much as we can, just to give people that authentic experience which makes it fun for us, because you kind of you know you want to go yeah, yeah, I knew this was totally going to do this, you know, and you sort of it's kind of a trust fall into the AI to make sure it's gonna work.

So there's lots of rehearsals and there's lots of kind of practices, and you also have to be quite a good coder to be up there on stage. Cassidy Williams, who's up on stage, did the co-pilot demo. She's an amazing, amazing coder and you kind of have to so that you can. You know you're checking? Yeah, that makes sense, great, while you're talking and cracking really bad git puns.

Well, hey, we'll branch out from doing git puns. That's not difficult.

0:45:29 - Mikah Sargent
There we go. That's good. It's very difficult though. Oh man, that is I can't imagine, because you know, while I'm doing this show and I'm talking to you, there are things that are going on in the background and I already have, you know, the the level of ability to do that. I can't imagine also trying to go that code. Actually, that's, that's true skill. Um, the another tool that was shown off, um that honestly, I was pretty excited about um is called GitHub Spark, and I was curious if you could tell us a little bit about GitHub Spark and maybe kind of where this tool came from. Like, has it always been something that was planned? Did something come along and you're like, you know what this is? What makes sense next? It just seems like, in my opinion, a natural evolution of things, but I'm curious if that's kind of what it was. Just a natural evolution?

0:46:31 - Martin Woodward
So, as we've been using a lot of the AI tools, we're finding that you get this ability to code with natural language, and so by that I mean you know, speak human and get code kind natural language. And so by that I mean you know, speak human and get code kind of thing. And we have a team called GitHub Next that are our R&D arm or research arm, and so they kind of wanted to take that and explore it to its ultimate. What if we focus around the language prompt itself? How can we create a structure which allows people who are technical but not necessarily expert coders or not coders at all, to be able to become developers, to be able to code?

Github have a goal of helping the world create eight you know, create a billion developers in the world. There's only eight billion people, so we need to obviously make it easier for people to code and an interface like Spark, where somebody like you, Mikah, who's technical but not a coder, or somebody like Leo, who knows how to code but doesn't code all the time, can type some prompts in, can say, hey, build me this kind of app, do this, do that, and can iterate and build an application that works for them, that solves their problem and deploys it and has it running in a working website with a working database backend or from a single prompt. It's pretty magical.

0:47:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, seeing some of the examples on stage were certainly inspiring, because you kind of can go from there and go, oh, here's something, and I like the idea of of being able to use it, maybe as a means of I don't know. It started there for me and I took it and said, okay, now what if I could feed it kind of these custom code sets and get help when I am doing little coding projects, cause I've got, you know, a couple of devices like a certain uh, certain hackable badge, but also a little LED display and they each use kind of their own flavors of coding language, and if I could give it the documentation and then, kind of, here's what I've made. Here's the part where I'm struggling. I love this idea of sort of a collaborative building tool, because that's how I learned how to do web development. Coding in the first place was kind of playing back and forth between those two things and learning HTML, css and, at the time, a little bit of JavaScript, and all of that was kind of in this play and create space, and so I do think that, you know, on the face of it it may seem like something that is all and entirely a way to just, you know, type in some words and get something out.

But I think that folks shouldn't forget that this is also an opportunity to inspire people to reach further, because you start there and then you go, but now I want to change it like this, and then you actually learn how to do it, to change it like that after you've seen it being built. So I think it's going to inspire people in so many ways. And that's one thing where it feels very in line with Microsoft, because we've seen them do it, do a lot of low code, no code stuff on the enterprise side. So in that way I thought, oh, you know GitHub, spark here, as this tool seems pretty cool. Now that is kind of there on the sort of, it feels, more consumer reaching.

There was also a lot when it came to the developer experience with GitHub, GitHub, copilot and VS Code, copilot, workspace, copilot, autofix. Before we let you go, could you tell us a little bit about those other kind of grab bag things that have come, although I'm sure for the teams who work on it it doesn't feel grab bag, but it kind of got grouped into one little category there.

0:50:21 - Martin Woodward
Yeah, I mean there's a blog post you can read with over 50 features that were shipped to the event.

But I think probably what was also interesting is it's an event where we bring the community together as well as all the features which GitHub shipped, which is cool. We're also celebrating the fact that actually the community on GitHub Python is actually now the number one language that we're seeing people build products in on GitHub. Python is actually now the number one language that we're seeing people build products in on GitHub, overtaking JavaScript, which is fascinating. And that kind of shows you again that's a different kind of community is coming into code. You know the Python developers.

There's lots of people from maths backgrounds, from science backgrounds, makers and hobbyists and things coming into coding and it just shows you how the community is really growing and continues to grow year over year and new people come into coding, which helps everybody because then we can solve problems through code and get better. And it's also across the whole world as well. We're seeing massive rise in the amount of people coming from India and from Brazil the whole world as well. We're seeing a massive rise in the amount of people coming from India and from Brazil and different countries as well, all joining this ecosystem that used to be quite Bay Area centric really.

0:51:31 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely yeah. Anything else that you want to mention from the event? Maybe one thing that really, for you, you're excited to tell people about, or that you've liked playing around with before we let you go?

0:51:47 - Martin Woodward
Yeah, I do a lot of large language model developments and a lot of development around AI tools. We actually shipped a product called GitHub Models and that allows you to take one model and compare it side-by-side with another model, feed it the same prompt, have the same system prompts and then compare the results. And compare things like how quickly it gives you the results, Because some models take a bit longer, use more processing time, are more expensive, but give you more data, more reason behind it, Whereas there are models that are much quicker but maybe don't give you quite the same reason, quite the same responses. And so this allows us to give you that, allow you to compare the models side by side, have the choice and see which models fit for purpose, because there's no point spending dollars per kind of prompt when you could actually spend less than a cent per prompt and get good enough results back. So that's probably the coolest thing for me, the thing I'll probably use the most, to be honest.

0:52:48 - Mikah Sargent
Very, very cool. Yeah, I love that idea. Like you said, depending on what the developer is making, maybe they don't need to have the more robust model and they could save some money. Oh, this one provides exactly what I need and I don't need more. It's just determining is there a pumpkin in the photo or is there not a pumpkin in the photo? I don't necessarily need the highest level of reasoning from an app. I can just use something that's a little bit more, like you said, cost effective. Martin Woodward, I want to thank you so very much again for taking the time this week, on a very busy week, to join us here on the show and help us understand some of the fun stuff that GitHub has announced. Congrats on what has been an excellent another GitHub universe. If people would like to follow along with what's going on, where are some places they can go to stay up to date?

0:53:43 - Martin Woodward
Well, they can just go to github.om. That gives you the latest results, and then also you can follow us as well. I'm Martin Woodward on most social media, including GitHub. So there we go.

0:53:55 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Thank you so much and hope to see you again soon. All righty folks, we are going to take another quick break. I've got a story of the week for you and then we'll say goodbye, but let me tell you about Veeam. We're bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. Without your data, your customer's trust turns to digital dust. That's why Veeam's data protection and ransomware recovery ensures that you can secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it, no matter what happens. Ugh, ransomware is terrifying and Veeam is going to help keep that data protected. As the number one global market leader in data resilience, Veeam is trusted by more than 77% of the Fortune 500 to keep their businesses running when digital disruptions like ransomware strike. That's because Veeam lets you back up and recover your data instantly across your entire cloud ecosystem, proactively detect malicious activity, remove the guesswork by automating your recovery plans and policies, and get real-time support from ransomware recovery experts. Data is the lifeblood of your business, so get data resilient with Veeam. Go to Veeam V-E-E-A-M.com to learn more, and we thank Veeam for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly.

All right, I wanted to round out the show by talking about something that's coming iOS 18, iPadOS 18, MacOS Sequoia, et cetera. Apple revealed AI Apple intelligence, the AI for the rest of us, as the company called it and with it came a host of features, many of which are well, I should say, some of which are now available. If you have the latest version of iOS 18, which is 18.1, iPad OS 18.1, etc. Uh, then you have access to the writing based tools and look, we've talked plenty about that, I've had people on the show to talk about that. If you watch ios today and you've learned plenty about that, it it's everywhere. So I'm not going to go into detail about it.

But one of the features that Apple announced was Genmoji, and this feature lets you create emoji using generative AI. The way that it works is by using kind of a custom-trained image model so that you can type in a description of tuna, an astronaut with gray hair, a chihuahua which I'm just now realizing I have never created using Genmoji, and that is an oversight on my part and what it'll do is it will spin a little bit and pop out an answer or a result, and it will actually do a few results and you can choose from them. Keith Broney over at Emojipedia has given a really good rundown of Keith's hands-on time with Apple's Genmoji AI Emoji Generator and with this, Keith talks about some really kind of interesting things. First and foremost, this tool works in your messages and you access it by tapping on the emoji keyboard and then there's a little plus icon to the right of where you describe an emoji and that's like the search functionality for emoji. It lets you then create one. Also, if you describe an emoji that doesn't exist, then it will prompt you to say why don't you just generate one? So you can do it that way as well.

Now there are some protections in place. Now there are some protections in place. You can keep the, or the system rather keeps you from doing things like not safe for work images. It will say try a different description. It will keep you from if typed in purple iPhone and it would not generate it. But if I typed in purple smartphone, then it would. So it's clear that certain brands are probably protected in that.

I imagine if you type in something like Shrek eating a waffle, it's going to say type something else. So you'd have to do a green ogre eating a waffle, green ogre eating a waffle. It can also use a person to serve as the foundation for an emoji. So an example of that is, if you're talking to another person who's in your contacts and you have a contact photo for that person, you are able to choose that person as a contact or as a kind of prompt addition, and it will create a Genmoji based on that person. But that's not all that's involved with this. Through of the protections, there was a user on X, also known as Twitter, called Greg's Gadgets, who was able to, by creating a contact for Donald Trump, create a Donald Trump emoji, and so there are some ways still to circumvent the system. I remind you that this is all still in beta and I imagine that this will be something that gets fixed in the interim. It's still early days as far as this goes, and you will see some kind of errors that go along with it. But there's one more thing that I want to talk about when it comes to these Genmoji and we will get to that after we take another little quick break, because I've got another sponsor for you, and that is BigID we're bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly.

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All right back from the break and we will round things out. Right now I'm talking about the Genmoji, the emoji generator that's coming in 18.2. Now, the very awesome Emojipedia, which kind of catalogs emoji and gives descriptions for them and also talks about Unicode and the kind of body of decisions that take place there, were able to do a hands-on uh of the new Genmoji AI emoji generator, uh. Keith Broney of Emojipedia is writing about this, and there's one interesting aspect that I wanted to mention with this Um.

First and foremost, a lot of people, especially those that aren't as tech-headed as we all are, are unaware of from where emoji come. They think that Apple make emoji and make the decisions about emoji and Google make and make the decisions about emoji and they come from your phone. Right, and in part, in part, that is true because it turns out that the group that is responsible for the creation of uh emoji are headed by people who are from these companies. So you've got someone from Google, you've got someone from Apple on the team the last time I checked in and this subcommittee, and so in that sense, yes, they are, but just talking to Apple alone is not going to make it so that the emoji or complaining to Apple is not going to make it so that a new emoji makes its way to the system.

Instead, the emoji subcommittee and Unicode, as the larger group, defines a set of emoji based on a code point, and a description is provided for that emoji, and then individual companies, organizations, whomever, whatever systems are able to display emoji, they assign an image to that code point and description, with the understanding that the description provided by Unicode matches up in some way to the image that is displayed up, in some way to the image that is displayed. So, in that sense, apple is responsible for the way that the emoji is rendered, but not the description for the emoji. So it is limited to the scope of how it is described, and the same applies for Google. That's why Google emoji and Apple emoji look different from one another, but you can kind of see the same uh, wide smiling eyes and the, the, the screaming emoji, that there's a similarity between the two, but they are different the art rendering. Now, when it comes to this, you have to understand, then, that Genmoji do not fall within this same scope.

Genmoji are images that are generated by the system and simply appear as if they are emoji, and simply appear as if they are emoji, but they are not part of Unicode and they are not able to be defined with a Unicode code point, which means that they may not show up in different places, but because of how Apple is rendering them, it gives the impression that they are emoji, and that's what I love about this Emojipedia piece is that in the Emojipedia piece, they talk about a new API that was introduced with 18.0, called NS Adaptive Image Glyph API, and the NS Adaptive Image Glyph API is basically a means of getting an image of some sort to render as if it were an emoji, and so if an app supports this API, then the Genmoji that you create will be able to be rendered in those apps for you, the person who creates it, and them, the person who's viewing it on the other end, which is going to further muddy the waters in terms of believing that these are emoji. So what that would mean is that if, say, for example, the X slash Twitter app decides not to implement the NSAdaptiveImage glyph API, then someone might go writing a tweet, add one of their little Genmoji to it and then it wouldn't properly show up. Now, if I send Genmoji to a person who is not running at least iOS 18.0, is running a previous version, then the Genmoji show up as images. They actually show up. They appear in the message as full-on images, and so you can kind of tap through them like a carousel if you send more than one. So understand that when 18.2 comes out, you need to be aware of where you're using these, how you're using them and whether they'll actually work in those different places. So the NS Adaptive Image Glyph basically gives developers the ability to support Genmoji anywhere that supports rich text, but you gotta make sure that you're able to do that as well. So that is a quick little kind of rundown of where Genmoji are right now, with the understanding that this is still in beta and is supposed to come out at this point, it's looking like early next year. We'll see, though.

Folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode. Emily will be joining. Emily Forlini of PCMag, will be joining Abrar Al-Heeti of CNET for that episode, and so I hope that I know you all will enjoy that. They are both wonderful and Emily's going to do, I know, a great job for her second time hosting Tech News Weekly in my place. In the meantime, if you'd like to get all of our shows ad-free. You should check out Club Twit. It's just $7 a month and that gets you every single Twit show with no ads. You also gain access to the exclusive Twit Plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else, including behind the scenes before the show. After the show, special Club Twit events get published there and access to the Club Twit Discord server a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at Twit.

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If you'd like to follow me online, I'm at Mikah Sargent on many social media network or you can head to chihuahua.coffee that's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to tune in later this week, sunday, to watch my show Hands on Tech and, of course, watch later today iOS Today and Hands on Mac, which publish on Thursdays. Thanks so much, and I will not catch you again next week, but Emily will. I'll see you again in two weeks. Goodbye, and thank you for all the fish. Look, I know it's thanks for all the fish. It doesn't matter. Bye.