This Week in Tech 897, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
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Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiTthis week, Weekend Tech. Sam Abuelsamid is here. Our car guy, Gra. Ooo. Our car gal. They're gonna talk about cars and pinball and Daniel Rubino from Windows Central. There's lots to talk about. METAS announcements this week. Microsoft's announcements. This week we'll talk about the video RTX 40 90. Look at the size of that thing, what Apple's gonna do with its announcements. And Elon Musk, his new demands from Twitter. It's all coming up next on TWiT

Speaker 2 (00:00:36):
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:46):
This is twit, This week at Tech episode 897 recorded Sunday, October 16th, 2022. Headphones for your rise. This episode of this week at Tech is brought to you by stamps.com. Get ahead of the holiday chaos this year. Sign up@stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the page and enter the code TWiTfor a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. And by Collide. Collide is an endpoint security solution that uses the most powerful untapped resource in it end users. Visit ka collide.com/TWiTto learn more and activate a free 14 day trial today. No credit card required. And buy noom with their Psychology first approach. Noom Weight empowers you to build more sustainable habits and behaviors. Sign up for your trial at nom.com/twit and buy Mint Mobile. Get premium wireless service from just 15 bucks a month with no unexpected plot twists. You'll make your wallet very happy by going to mint mobile.com/twit.

(00:02:05):
It's time for twi. This week at Tech Show we cover the weeks tech news. I'm still exhausted from last week's show. Maybe we can make this one a little bit shorter. Gang, what do you say? No, it's not gonna be short cuz. Guess who's here. Four hours. Four hours. Sam Abuelsamid, My car guy, Principal researcher at Guide House Insights. Everybody host of the wheel bearings. We got a bunch of podcasters on the show. That means could be a lot of talking going on. Great to reach to see just a little, See what are you driving besides the Miata, which is your regular vehicle, What are you driving? Let's see. This week I have the Ford Expedition Timber Line which is sort of off big off road ish version of the big. Yeah, it's a full size suv. Last week I had a Ford Bronco. Raptor. I'm jealous. Love those new Broncos. That was, It was great until I got it stuck in the mud. I saw the pictures. You said make sure you change your wheels and bring a winch. Yes, absolutely. <laugh> also with us. Some of these very much loves her automobiles. Brianna Wu. Co-host of the Rocket Podcast of afm. What is your, You're driving a boxer.

 Brianna Wu (00:03:13):
I've got Boxter. I have two 911s. I have a Cayman GTS and I also have some really big news. I'm gonna break today on this show. Frank is here to celebrate this with me. I'm happy to announce I'm not just the co-host of Rocket. I am also the number one Princess Peach speed runner in the entire Wu

Leo Laporte (00:03:33):
Princess Peach baby. Wait a minute. Oh my God. <laugh>

 Brianna Wu (00:03:40):
There.

Leo Laporte (00:03:40):
There's husband Frank celebrating. How fast was your Princess? Peach time. And where can we see the speed run?

 Brianna Wu (00:03:47):
It's on speedrun.com and one for the normal run. It's nine minutes and for the run without saving and quitting it is 15 minutes, which is extraordinary time. So, Wow. Thank you Frank.

Leo Laporte (00:04:03):
I think I'm very, very impressed. speed.com folks.

 Brianna Wu (00:04:10):
There we not later. Yeah, we will.

Leo Laporte (00:04:12):
Wow. <laugh>. Where's Princess Peach? I gotta find it while I'm finding it. Let's say hello to Daniel Rubino. He is he Executive editor at Windows Central. Great to see you, Daniel.

Daniel Rubino (00:04:23):
Same

Leo Laporte (00:04:24):
Here. Also the host of the Windows Central podcast. Every Fri Is it Friday? Every Friday,

Daniel Rubino (00:04:29):
Yeah, Friday is 1:30 PM Eastern time on our YouTube channel. Perfect. But then it gets posted later.

Leo Laporte (00:04:35):
Perfect. And do you have any unusual accomplishments you'd like to share with us? <laugh>?

 Brianna Wu (00:04:42):
No. I own a car

Leo Laporte (00:04:44):
Too. Yeah, that's about it. I own a car. Yeah. Exciting. Yeah. Yep. So new. Where would I find, I wanna see your speed run. Where would I find, I

 Brianna Wu (00:04:55):
Just dropped in the chat. I

Leo Laporte (00:04:56):
Just dropped in the That makes it easy.

 Brianna Wu (00:04:58):
Original one on.

Leo Laporte (00:04:59):
Oh, there's a Vimeo of it. Yep.

 Brianna Wu (00:05:01):
Nice. Because you've gotta, you have to record it cuz you've gotta prove it. You actually have nerds that go through it <laugh> and look at how,

Leo Laporte (00:05:09):
Oh no, I can tell that that was an edit point. Yeah. Yeah. So this is all in one run. You said you had a big breaking story. This was not the first thing that came to mind, I must say <laugh> is this, How many times have you long and how many times have you been playing? You've been playing these since it

 Brianna Wu (00:05:29):
Came out. I've been playing these games 1998. So 34 years playing

Leo Laporte (00:05:32):
This game. So you, and you've got, in order to do this speed run, you have to have it completely memorized. I noticed you're not collecting all the coins, the ideas get through, you're not trying to do anything, you're just trying to get through.

 Brianna Wu (00:05:42):
That's correct. Yeah. You have to go through with no health. You can't stop and get any of the mushrooms. You break the game at a ton of points.

Leo Laporte (00:05:49):
<laugh>.

 Brianna Wu (00:05:51):
I literally sit there and play the work fight at the end for a few hours at a time. Just playing the same two minutes. Wow. It is absurd.

Leo Laporte (00:06:00):
You, as you're doing this, like you get here and you do screw up, you start over, right? I mean you don't Yeah,

 Brianna Wu (00:06:05):
Yeah. You've got to. You

Leo Laporte (00:06:06):
Got to. And that, that's to me the now what? How so you don't wanna fight this guy. Oh, you knew he'd send you an egg. He could. You could B him with the egg. Yep. Oh, you're good. So this have to kill this guy.

 Brianna Wu (00:06:20):
Yes. This is Beo. She throws Nick at you. Every 128 frames, <laugh>. So it doesn't matter. You can be a little slower on this fight. It doesn't matter. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:06:32):
Every she's, it's down to the frames.

 Brianna Wu (00:06:34):
It is.

Leo Laporte (00:06:35):
Do you have some special tools that you use to analyze? How do you know it's on her 28 frames?

 Brianna Wu (00:06:40):
Oh God. You look at it in quick time. After you do it, you just, My God, obsess about it.

Leo Laporte (00:06:45):
You're kidding.

 Brianna Wu (00:06:47):
See how you go down here so you don't render and she moves faster.

Leo Laporte (00:06:51):
Oh, that's a trick. That's a trick. Get off screen and she will move faster.

 Brianna Wu (00:06:57):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:06:59):
This is kind of a subculture is what this is. Oh ivory. 128. Every hundred 28 frames. You're gonna get an egg. 1, 2, 3. Okay. Do you know what frame you're at right now? Can you kind of tell, I know when that

 Brianna Wu (00:07:14):
You got a sense for you when the bus is gonna come and when you have to be thereby so you can make a few

Leo Laporte (00:07:21):
Friends in trouble. You should write a book on this.

 Brianna Wu (00:07:25):
I really should. How many speed run records

Leo Laporte (00:07:27):
Have you got now

 Brianna Wu (00:07:29):
For number one, only two. But I've been working on my Jill Run for Resident Evil three, so I'm gonna be competitive in that soon.

Leo Laporte (00:07:36):
So you are at this point, the fastest person in this game? In the entire world. In the entire world. Do you think you will, This record will be broken?

 Brianna Wu (00:07:46):
Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of mistakes I made and one of the things I wanted to encourage people to do is come be my talent. Go to speed.com, Join the Discord. This is a lot of fun to play. One of the reasons the Game Boy version of it is a lot of fun to play is it renders really well on the Mac M one. So I use open emu. The community doesn't frown on emulators.

Leo Laporte (00:08:10):
Oh, you're doing this in an emulator. This you're not.

 Brianna Wu (00:08:12):
I play on original hardware, but you don't have to with this community so's a really low barrier to entry as opposed to other games where you've gotta buy a retro tank and an original NES and something to record it with. There's a really high barrier. So come join our communities. Speed. Run this game with me and maybe you can beat my princess each time. I'd love to see

Leo Laporte (00:08:35):
It <laugh>. So fun. That's awesome. Okay, well I'm not gonna watch the whole thing <laugh>, but I'm tempted to. I'm really enjoying it. Bria, if you wanna watch it, it's on Vimeo and Brianna's channel. Brianna Woo. Or you go to speed.com and there we go. About it. Go. That is so interesting. <laugh>.

 Brianna Wu (00:09:00):
It's a good use of my time. Wait, good use of my time.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:09:03):
Back in the 1990s. Can you imagine that people would be doing speed runs like this and posting them for records?

 Brianna Wu (00:09:12):
What gets me is everyone there is like 20 years younger than me and they're obsessed with these games like we were back then.

Leo Laporte (00:09:18):
So yeah, I can understand why you're obsessed. You're like a baby duck. You got imprinted with it, right? Cause you were a kid. But for a young person today, to go back in time and play an old game is interesting. But I get are the not as good these days or

 Brianna Wu (00:09:31):
I think it's because it's not a cartridge. They're just fewer ways to cheat these older NES games. Yeah, and there's something matters.

Leo Laporte (00:09:38):
What's the emulator you recommend for the M one?

 Brianna Wu (00:09:41):
I use open Emu. It's great open. It works better. Yeah, it's fantastic. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:09:46):
Sorry Daniel, now <laugh>.

Daniel Rubino (00:09:49):
No worries, no

Leo Laporte (00:09:50):
Worries. Let's talk about Microsoft. This was an interesting week because first Meta had an event on Tuesday and then Microsoft had an event on Wednesday and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, did not show up for the Microsoft Surface announcement. It was Panos pane. He did show up for Mark Zuckerberg's meta announcement, which is a confusing signal to send. I know Satya was at the Ignite Conference and there were many more talks later in the day, but it was a weird message to say Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg's walk us over and Oh look who's here? Satya Adela. But this was I think, important to their strategy because they were, Mike Meta announced, of course their new pro version of the Quest $1,500 Pro version of the Quest. And what was weird is they didn't focus on gaming at all. They focused on productivity. And Microsoft was there to announce that you're gonna be able to use Windows 11 with the new Quest and you're gonna be able to use office with the new Quest. Does it seem odd to you that Satya was at this event and not his own?

Daniel Rubino (00:11:09):
I don't think so because Microsoft's ever since he took his job as CEO is taking this position of Microsoft is very open and willing to work with any other company that will basically have them. They're getting away from the closed ecosystem thing. And while Microsoft is building its own metaverse and using its own tools and doing its own thing with HoloLens and whatever comes next after the recent reorganization they want to be where the technology's going. Maybe Facebook's meta system will take off and do very well and why would they wanna join later on versus being on the bottom floor if it takes off and becomes the next Facebook. They're right there with their own productivity tools with Microsoft teams and everything else. So I think it's actually a smart move. We don't know the status of their own hardware, what they're going to do.

(00:12:01):
There's rumors of course, that they have a partnership with Samsung to build some kind of headset. We're not really too sure what that's gonna be. We don't know the future of HoloLens in terms of enterprise use. So I think this is a safe bet for them in terms of making sure that their software and services are being continued to be used no matter who builds the hardware. I'm pretty positive whatever Apple comes out with, Microsoft will wanna be there as well and have all their apps and services that are relevant to that platform be right there for their customers. And I think it makes sense. Instead of just being everything focused on Microsoft in their hardware, they just wanna be open and be wherever they can.

Leo Laporte (00:12:39):
It used to be Microsoft's mission statement that there would be a computer on every desk in every home running Microsoft software. Now as Satya and Alah says, we wanna be where our customers are. So this is right. Is it hedging their bets that the HoloLens won't take off? Or just saying, we don't care anymore. We're not a platform company anymore. More of a services company I guess.

Daniel Rubino (00:13:02):
I think it's because they're a services company, right? And Hollowlens, the mission statement there is a little bit. We're not really too sure anymore. HoloLens is augmented. It's an

Leo Laporte (00:13:11):
Interesting call. This statement <laugh>? Yeah.

Daniel Rubino (00:13:13):
Well we're not sure. My word might not

Leo Laporte (00:13:16):
<laugh>

Daniel Rubino (00:13:17):
Well. Well it's augmented reality and it's built, I was just at in Israel with Intel. They're using it within the boundaries in the fab to both train people on how to fix the equipment and also for remote help using equipment. So if someone's a tech is having a problem, fixing something someone can remote in, see what they're seeing, and then literally overlay in real time tools or pointing to things and you wanna do this and that. So that's an example of how HoloLens and an industrial use is being used. But it's future in terms of more enterprise use for this idea of being in virtual meetings. I'm not really sure HoloLens quite has that role as is because this is more blurring into a virtual reality where you're actually going to another world. And Alex Kitman, before he technically left Microsoft, although he's still there, apparently as a consultant he did have this idea that eventually HoloLens would switch over to a virtual reality. There's this concept of course, of having a clear glass where you can use AR and then it can change intent to dark mode. That tech is probably still a little bit out. So instead of what these companies are doing or did you using front-facing cameras to simulate so you can actually see where you are. And then it's just usually on the inside where it's dark and you can create a virtual reality that's sort of a half step until this other technology I think becomes reality.

Leo Laporte (00:14:44):
Alex Kidman's keynote last year for HoloLens was the one that famously kind of descended into a Burning Man dance festival in some sort of weird way. And by the way, there's GI Li who is the founder of Cir du Soole, about to take Alex on a magic carpet ride into the future. Interestingly also in the news, right about the same time the US Armys starting to report that soldiers are getting sick in the Hollowlens. Remember the Microsoft did a 22 billion deal with the army to provide a hollowlens for a combat troops. The devices would've gotten us killed according to an Army report leaked. And they also said, this is Bloomberg and Business Insiders same day saw this story. They also said that 80% of the soldiers were nauseated under three hours. Not ideal for combat missions is. And so with Kitman leaving the rumors flying that HoloLens that Microsoft is backing off on and then this SA is showing up at Meta, you don't think that that's a indicator that Microsoft maybe is lost confidence in?

Daniel Rubino (00:16:09):
Well they did split the hardware and software and so what you saw with Facebook and Meadow I should say, is the software organization continuing their work in terms of hardware, we don't know. They do have a hardware division dedicated to this. There was also this, So there's this contract with the military. There's also supposed contract with Samsung where Samsung's gonna build the hardware and use some of Microsoft's technology. We don't know much more about that in terms of what's the goal? Is that a consumer device? Is it more enterprise? We really don't know and we don't know since the reorg what they're planning on doing, are they gonna continue with HoloLens three, which was technically scrapped for a while? Are they gonna try to aim more towards the consumer ends? So we're gonna have to wait and find out what their plans are. I would imagine they still have a lot of tech that they innovated in this area. It would be weird that they would just give up and not use it right now. But we'll have to kind of see as leaks come out or Microsoft gives a presentation on what they are planning next.

Leo Laporte (00:17:10):
The new Quest is a kind of classic VR play. You can't see through it like you can with the HoloLens, but they do have outward facing cameras and they say now it's in color. So it's kind of more like a, I guess mixed reality is the term that Microsoft uses and probably the right term for this. Neither VR nor ar, but a mixed reality. And this is, I wanna bring Brianna and Salmon on this as well. There's a lot of speculation that MEA has. Somebody said MEA should have made this an r and D project, not the future, not bet the future of the company on it. They've spent 15 billion, they're doing about 10 billion a year on this. Brianna, I feel like one of the reasons you're seeing Microsoft showing up at MEA probably doing dual with Apple is that no one really knows how this landscape is gonna play out. So everybody's kind of hedging their bets until once somebody starts to win, then everybody, then it all changes, of course. But that we've seen that before in our own technologies. But my question is, is anybody gonna win? Is this a technology anybody wants at all?

 Brianna Wu (00:18:22):
I had a really surreal experience and I mean this with all respect to Emily Chang. I love her. I've been on her show on Bloomberg many, many times. Fantastic person love her. But something, the last time I was on, I noticed it a few times ago, was the day that Facebook announced the meta transformation and there was this discussion on Wall Street, Oh, meta, what is it going to be? Are they going to create? And it was all these Wall Street people with these heline ask visions of the future about white Canadian. For me as a technologist, I'm sitting there listening to it, just analyzing the news. That came out in a very different way and the impression I got from that, this was more of a move for Wall Street to present a vision for Facebook in the future. Just like you were telling us before the show that you kind had to be talked out at the surface. Nine meta comes out with

Leo Laporte (00:19:23):
Occulus. I did buy the Quest Pro <laugh>. Oh, okay.

 Brianna Wu (00:19:26):
Well it's

Leo Laporte (00:19:27):
The quest that's partly cuz it has a 30 day return policy, but also I feel like it's important for me to do the due diligence a hundred percent every few. I did the Kickstarter for the original Oculus Quest. Oh wow. I wanna give it a chance. I don't wanna write it off completely, but every time I try it I say, Well clearly we're not ready for primetime. It's making me sick. It made 80% of the army sick. I think that this is a technology that seems like a good idea, but we don't have the Yeah,

 Brianna Wu (00:20:00):
That's a hundred percent. And that's a hundred percent my point that I bought the original. I have every VR system. They exist because I've done development on this.

Leo Laporte (00:20:10):
Have you? Okay.

 Brianna Wu (00:20:11):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:20:11):
A hundred. It makes sense for gaming. I think it completely makes sense for gaming.

 Brianna Wu (00:20:14):
It can, but I have the exact same. It's like I buy a Quest, it's a really fun 28, 4 to 48 hours and then

Leo Laporte (00:20:21):
Lives in the drawer. It's like never again.

 Brianna Wu (00:20:23):
I bought the Quest too at a really fun, seeing how much better Beat Saber was and then lived in a drawer. And I'm asking myself when it comes to these kinds of meetings with people, do I think there's any chance I'm actually gonna sit down and ever have a VR meeting with someone? I don't see that ever happening. This isn't a new phase for Facebook. They acquired Oculus in 2014 when the stories first started coming out and now eight years later. The question is where's the users? Where's the use case for this? Where are people wanting to have this experience? It does not exist unfortunately.

Leo Laporte (00:21:03):
Ben Thompson writing about this in trajectory, he got an interview with Zuck and Nadella together kind of came out somewhat bullish on this. He says VR does have real utility, but I think utility will be realized in the enterprise first in part because the value of VR only becomes apparent when you use it and you're more likely to use it if your company pays for it. He also says Microsoft is well placed to deliver that utility on top of meta hardware. Meta is likely to be the catalyst for VR becoming a widely used technology. Now he doesn't mention Apple at all. I also feel like a lot of this was a rush to get out in front of the market before Apple announces something early next year. Sam, do you think that's going on?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:51):
That wouldn't surprise me. Meta has been, Facebook's been trying to find something new. Aside from the things that they've bought and copied, they've never really created anything new since the beginning of Facebook. The news

Leo Laporte (00:22:06):
Feed was the last

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:08):
Yeah, I guess. Yeah, that was, yeah. But when you see a potential competitor, another potential competitor, one with very deep pockets that is potentially doing something that could be disruptive to your business, you may want to jump into that.

Leo Laporte (00:22:26):
A lot of companies said, Oh, we should have paid attention. When the iPhone came along, Microsoft famously Steve Bomber said, Ah, it's too expensive. Nobody's gonna buy it. And regretted that live to regret that. Do you think they're worried that the same thing will happen?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:41):
Certainly a possibility. I mean, nobody wants to be left behind when there's something big. I, when you look at the phone, sp the smartphone space, Google and Samsung are really the only ones who were able to respond quickly enough to the iPhone to put up real viable competition. I mean, Windows was too little too late with Windows phone. And I think most platforms, there's probably not room for more than maybe two at most three platforms. So whoever gets a foothold early on and it won't necessarily be the first one out the door, mean there were lots of companies that made MP3 players before the iPod came along. That's right. There were lots of smartphones before the iPhone so it's not necessarily the first that is going to succeed, but whoever does it first, whoever comes up with a good product first is gonna have a better chance of success. And then maybe the second and the third, but most likely only the second will really have an opportunity to be competitive with them because of all the platform lock-in challenges. But going back to what Brianna and Daniel said, and you said, This is not something that I want to use, even in Enter, there are some good applications for this. Some of the training stuff that's done with systems like HoloLens is really useful. I've seen some really good applications for vr, for example, in design, in product

Leo Laporte (00:24:28):
Design. Ford showed us every

Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:30):
Maker does this. Yeah, yeah. Mean when I first saw the Lucid Air in 2016, I was with their head of design and he put an HTC vibe on my head and he gave me a design walk around with that before seeing the actual car and being able to, and it's not just cars, but any kind of product design. It's a great use case for that. But for things like meeting with people I don't wanna sit around with a headset on for 4, 5, 6, 8 hours a day. That is just not something people, people are not gonna wanna do that. I've done shorter stints briefings with, I did a briefing with an automaker last year where they sent out Quest headsets to do this briefing in the Quest environment. And the thing, once you put that headset on, it's like if I'm in a meeting or in a briefing, I wanna take notes, whether it's handwritten notes or type, I wanna be able to take notes. Sometimes recording stuff. You can't do that when you're in a VR headset. It's just a terrible environment to spend extended periods of time in for work.

Leo Laporte (00:25:47):
It really makes me ask, what's the problem it's trying to solve? I, yeah, Zoom meetings may be not the best thing in the worlds but no, neither are in person meetings, but they work. And I'm not sure why it would be better to do teams in an Oculus Pro. Daniel, do you agree? Disagree. You think that that's the future of meetings?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:09):
Yeah,

Daniel Rubino (00:26:10):
I see augmented reality where you still see that your world around you and holograms and everything. There is the real goal of all this. And that seems to me it's gonna be really interesting. But I feel like that's still so many years off from being a reality for average people who can't afford a $3,000 headset. And even there the use case, it's like we still need smarter technology to make use of it. This idea of, and it's kind of scary walking around, but you have a camera on there visually IDs a person and brings up their info automatically. Or you can ID stuff quickly and look it up. Almost like being a cyborg, right? I feel like that's where all this will eventually go and that makes sense. But this idea of a VR headset, and don't forget, Microsoft years ago showed up what they call a hollow flirtation, where to used a room at a bunch of cameras in it and would scan you and it would create a hologram of the person.

(00:27:06):
And this idea of in the future, we may have little setups in our homes that does that. That's a little bit more realistic in a sense because you're still in your environment. You could still take note, you could still do stuff while you see a hologram of a person. And I think that makes sense for, But again, limited cases. And I bet Apple Apple's play here is rumored to be along the iMessage and making video calls. And I'm sure it's gonna be something along those lines where it's connecting FaceTime, a virtual FaceTime. And I think that might work in this idea of you're making a limited calls to people and having that, but not necessarily meetings. Yeah, I don't really see a huge use case for it. Sam mentioned some really good issues. Taking notes I think is a pretty big limitation if you're going to meet, be in a meeting all day.

Leo Laporte (00:27:55):
But yeah, I mean is this a better way or is this just another way? So I think there's a group sync mentality when everybody in Silicon Valley is going, Yeah, yeah, VR a r, our mixed star. That there's this kind of thing like, Oh, well they must know what they're talking about and the more people do it. But is it possible they just could be completely wrong and that they're spend absolutely million a year and tens of thousands of engineers on something that is just never gonna take off.

Daniel Rubino (00:28:26):
Remember when 3D came back? Can we?

Leo Laporte (00:28:27):
Yeah, 3D TV is a really good example. 3D

Daniel Rubino (00:28:30):
TVs, even 3D is a movie theaters. It just kind of came, it peaked a little bit and just no one did the 3D TV thing and it seemed like a great idea. Why not? But it just never caught on.

Leo Laporte (00:28:41):
Nobody wanted to wear the glasses. Yeah, we

 Brianna Wu (00:28:45):
Got through history. Yeah. Sorry, I just wanted to say, can we go through history here a bit? What I find really interesting about all of this is think through the history of the computer industry before Word processors and spreadsheets were easy to use, geeks, people like us, we saw that we were early adopters. We were like, this is such a good experience. We're willing to put up with the headaches. And we pushed through. We did that exact same pattern for MP3 players before it became something like the iPhone. We did it with personal data assistance back when it was the Palm Pilot. We did it on the internet when it was the 2,400 do bo modem that you are dialing into. There's a pattern of us for all of us here that we see the value in these things and we jump in early and we deal with the headaches and we put our foot down with all of that.

(00:29:39):
I think it is so important to this that everyone on the show today has tried vr. We've given it a fair shake. And as we're all saying, it's something that lives in a drawer, eventually there is something that's just fundamentally not useful about any of this. And even for the case, you're talking about Daniel, the HoloLens presentation a while back, Zuckerberg had two avatars he put out, one was a cartoony, silly looking thing. The other one was a photo realistic thing for him to put his vision forward. What I saw with that as a game developer was something that the average consumer is gonna have to spend $25,000 having a team people make with brush and normal mapping and rigging and texture mapping and painting wrinkles into the skin and all this other stuff that no one is ever going to do. And I just don't see people spending that money.

(00:30:42):
And I don't think this is a process that can be automated in a way that looks anywhere remotely real. You'll get to where it just looks like a, Do you remember the N 64 contest where they would put your face on a bond character for you? We'll get that good. Yeah, but it's not gonna like what? Well, it was just cheesy. You can cheat it with displacement maps to a certain extent. But you're talking about something so high poly that then you're talking, the only way to make that data smaller is to do decimation pass on it, which is a professional. You can't automate that. That is judgment. So there's just all these things here. It's like this is not gonna be better than Zoom. And you're taking a hundred times the processing power and it's gonna cost more and you're gonna feel sick all day.

Leo Laporte (00:31:31):
You said something interesting when, for instance, the first time you hit the slash key in the first time I saw an Instagram photo. I always think maybe it's editing retroactively, but I think you knew immediately this is something, Yeah. And you said, Yeah, this is, wow, I got it. This is something. And I don't think, I don't feel that way at all about vr. This is always the challenge for anybody who's covering tech because there's a lot of stuff tech comes up with that that is non-starter. Is James Bond characters on your face or vice versa, <laugh>. And then there's a lot of, Then there's, every once in a while there's something you go, you look at and you go, Yeah, that's something. That's it. That's gonna change the world. The iPhone when it first came out really was kind of overpriced and not very, it couldn't cut and paste, but there was something there.

(00:32:24):
And the same time we looked at the Newton and it was like, there's nothing there. You just, And maybe that's my memory rather than the facts, but I think you kind of know. There was a great tweet storm earlier this week by a guy who's working at Waymo now, Warren Craddock. But he has worked on a lot of he tweets. I worked on a number of high profile failures and he talks about the Lightro light field camera, the Google Glass and Google clips, which is that little box that would take your life story and pictures. And he said every one of them had a fatal flaw. Everyone working on them saw the flaw. But the teams that were working on purposely ignored the flaw. And he goes on in this. And I think it's really interesting. The example of the clips thing, which I had was really cool. It was a little box that would take pictures of your whole day, then upload 'em and you could go through your day. The problem was it wasn't where your eyes are, it was where your chest is. So all the pictures, and he says this, they were just wrong. Cuz that's not the, that's not the point of view we're looking for. And the teams that make 'em the best judges, cuz they're invested now but when end users get Google glass, they immediately go, What? No

(00:33:47):
Is Daniel, Do you trust your instinct when it comes to new products like that? Do you say? Yeah, I could tell.

Daniel Rubino (00:33:53):
Yeah. I mean, so let me give an example of something I do think has value and I think it's really interesting and it reminds me of when I was doing some neuroscience years ago, it was always funny because we do the human brain and we've learned a lot about neuroscience over the years, but we still don't understand how the mind works on a biological level. Just no idea. And part of it's because we don't understand fundamentals of neurons yet. And there was a neurologist years ago and he wrote a book and he said, We should master how a snail brain works first and then work our

Leo Laporte (00:34:26):
Way. Is Jeff Hawkins.

Daniel Rubino (00:34:28):
No, but I'm sure he would agree with that.

Leo Laporte (00:34:30):
Jeff Hawkins wrote a great book about this. In fact, he started a company. He said, We're not, We're noon Neiman machine is ever gonna duplicate the brain because it's not massively parallel enough. So he's trying to create, and I think with and no success at this point, but trying to recreate chips that duplicate that massively parallel brain. Anyway, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.

Daniel Rubino (00:34:48):
No, it's fine. And so there's an example here with the vr ar and all that, which is, Lenovo just announced a couple weeks ago, they're called the T1 Glasses, I believe they're called. They're coming out early next year and it's a stripped down, simplified single purpose device. There are glasses you on, they have a USBC cable you can plug into your phone or you can plug into your computer that doesn't require any software. And all it does is project a second display. It's just a screen and it's just a screen that sits in front of you. It's got really nice resolution. You

Leo Laporte (00:35:26):
Know what? I could actually see this working.

Daniel Rubino (00:35:28):
So if you're on a pc, say you're in public, you could actually turn your PC's display off and just use these, which is really good. If you think about for people working on sensitive documents or anything that they don't want other people to see around them. Or you can use it literally as a second display. So you can just have two displays floating. And it doesn't require any extra CPU power cuz they have another pair of glasses that do require a massive GPU that does all the AR stuff. These don't have a front pacing camera. You could almost wear them sort of normal glasses cuz you could still see out in the world just fine. You could plug 'em into even your iPhone. They will have an adapter or work with your iPhone and you can walk around with your phone in your pocket and watch

Leo Laporte (00:36:12):
Movies, whatever. Wow. These would be great on an

Daniel Rubino (00:36:15):
Airplane

Leo Laporte (00:36:15):
And a coach seat. Absolutely. Exactly.

Daniel Rubino (00:36:17):
This is so cool.

Leo Laporte (00:36:17):
Exactly. And it's micro oland, which is a very high end. These might be expensive. You don't have a price yet.

Daniel Rubino (00:36:24):
They told me they were lied to get 'em between five and $800, but they haven't said all. See,

Leo Laporte (00:36:29):
This is much more interesting than any we've been talking about. Its less ambitious

Daniel Rubino (00:36:34):
Down. Yeah, you look at it and you like what I just described, you either need it or you don't. Right. <laugh> like there's not gonna be really in between people. Yeah, but I really, was it due, what problem does it solve? Well, it solves a simple problem, which is it just gives you a second virtual display in front of you. And if you think an Apple Watch is a great example, and this is something where Apple really has a leg up. You can use your phone in the pocket, use the Apple Watch someday could just become the actual mouse and thing you interact with to control the glasses and anything you're seeing. Right? There's a lot of opportunity here for that kind of technology. I think if we step back and look at this, I think this is way more interesting, way more practical and pragmatic for real world use.

Leo Laporte (00:37:16):
You say in your article when at Central, it just makes sense. This is exactly what I was talking about. Yeah. Sometimes you look at a product, you go, oh yeah, and you know why this makes, It's like this is headphones for your eyes. This is like any place you would wear headphones, Listen audio, these, you would wear these at in bed or on a plane. It's like headphones for your eyes and then you, and it clicks. You go, Oh yeah, not necessarily everybody's gonna buy this, but it makes sense. So that's interesting.

Daniel Rubino (00:37:43):
And you have speakers built in, you can listen to it. So yeah, you could watch a movie on him. Do

Leo Laporte (00:37:47):
Whatever you want. I can see myself in bed at night and I don't want to keep

Daniel Rubino (00:37:49):
Everybody up. Yeah, another great example. Yeah. You could say in bed and do whatever and you won't wake up your partner. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:55):
I need to take a break. I wanna show you another, We're not done with this. And I kind of wanna tie this into in, so I saw, and I'm sure you saw it to Sam, an article that said, after hundreds of billions of dollars and 20 years, cars are no farther along than there's still not happening. And I'm wondering if we are in this situation in tech right now where we're kind of peak tech for smartphones and things like that. Google's Pixel seven is basically a pixel six. And Apple's iPhone 14 is basically an iPhone 13. If we're at this stage where our existing technology is peaked and companies are scrambling to find the next new thing, but they're wasting a lot of money on stuff that isn't gonna go anywhere, like maybe ar vr, maybe self-driving cars. So put a pin in that. Cause I want to keep this conversation going. Great panel here. Sam Abuelsamidour car guy from Wheel Bearings, the podcast, also a principal researcher at Guide House Insights. He lives in ipss, Salanti Fit folks and drives a Miata. So he's cool, right? <laugh> what year Miata? 1990. The original Wilton.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:09):
October of 89. Built 33. 33 years ago this month.

Leo Laporte (00:39:13):
Brianna's jealous. She's a boxer though. She likes her Porsches.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:17):
Oh, she's, She's got a great fleet herself.

Leo Laporte (00:39:20):
<laugh> Fleet is right. Brianna Woo is also here. Rebellion Pack of course is her political action committee. Are you very busy right now? We've got a big important vital actually coming up. We

 Brianna Wu (00:39:32):
Are extremely busy right now but my work is mostly done at this point is just gain the money in sending out

Leo Laporte (00:39:39):
The checks, get those out and TV ads, right? That's the focus.

 Brianna Wu (00:39:43):
We've done a lot of that. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:39:44):
Yeah. Oh man, I'm crossing my fingers Brianna, as I'm sure

 Brianna Wu (00:39:48):
You are. Well see how it shakes out. Yep. Very important

Leo Laporte (00:39:50):
Stuff. And from Windows Central, the great Daniel Reinos. Good panel today. Lots more to talk about. But first a word from our sponsor. I'll tell you one thing that when I first encountered it more than 10 years ago, I went, Oh, brilliant, this is gonna go somewhere. stamps.com, because you don't have to go to the post office to get stamps though. Okay. That's obvious. That's great. You don't have to have a postage meter either. You print 'em out with your computer and your printer. In fact, it gets better. You can do anything. You can do at the post office, you could do@stamps.com, prepare it all, get it ready and then a uniformed employee of the federal government will come and pick it up. You don't even have to get outta your seat now, that's awesome. But stamps.com keeps getting better and better because now stamps.com has all the services of ups.

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(00:43:17):
Bonus offer stamps.com. We thank 'em so much for their support of this week in tech. You support us too, by the way, when you go to stamps.com and use that offer code twit. Google didn't wanna be left out by the way of all of this. They showed the Verge j Peters of the Verge, their project. We saw this at Google IO last year. I mean, talk about something that's gonna cost a lot of money. You get a special booth with all of these cameras and stuff. However, Jay said it was very realistic. This is a 3D video chat booth.

(00:43:55):
He said it was just like I was sitting across from the person and when they showed me an apple, I felt like I could reach out and touch it. Obviously this is not something you're gonna have in your house anytime soon. It is a very complicated with a ray microphones and stereo cameras and infrared projectors, <laugh> I, But it works. In fact, maybe it's more natural than putting on a visor and going to a teams meeting. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, Google says, Well, we think is another way to go cl this is Silicon Valley groupthink or is this really some insight into the future of business? Brianna,

 Brianna Wu (00:44:45):
I could see this working. This is interesting to me. It's kinda like the crit from the last Mission Impossible movie Ghost Protocol. If you remember that scene at the Kremlin where they're faking the perspective.

Leo Laporte (00:44:58):
Well, you would definitely, I could see this White House in Kremlin hotline working like this. Yeah, it would work much better. Right? Much, much better. Yeah.

 Brianna Wu (00:45:07):
I could see this working. I mean it's feasible technology. It's existed for a while. It's a very expensive implementation of it. But I mean this is Zoom meeting times and millions. So

Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
Maybe this is a better direction to go in than getting everybody sitting around an advisor. By the way, always one of my complaints, and apparently I'm not alone, is that project Horizon or Horizon world, which is METAS meeting place. And you saw this in the HoloLens demo. Alex Kitman had no legs. Legs are hard. Apparently meta announced. Zuckerberg said, Oh no, we're gonna have legs except we now learned that that whole thing was motion captured and fake. So I mean,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:45:50):
Without sensors on your legs, they'd be flopping around. You mean you don't know how to

Leo Laporte (00:45:55):
Move them? Yeah. Where is that? Where you

Sam Abuelsamid (00:45:57):
Got controllers, You got controllers in your hands. You can figure out what the arms should be doing. But unless you put something on your legs, it's gonna be hard to do that. Realistically,

Leo Laporte (00:46:07):
It was interesting that the Microsoft, I'm sorry, Meta actually said this was the most demanded feature in Horizon worlds with legs. Interesting rumor that Apple, which I think the Apple VR is rumored to have 14 cameras, two of them are pointed at your legs.

 Brianna Wu (00:46:27):
So I have a little bit of technical insight on this. So think about video game, something like Rest Evil three where you're moving Jill around, you're using a thumb stick, right? So where or any 3D character their feco as you're walking is actually a really complicated problem. You can cheat it with IK joints inverse kinematic joints in the legs. But when it comes to things like walking upstairs, we have all these animation tree cheats that we use where your foot will magnetically snap to every single step as you go up at, It's actually a really hard problem, but one that we've been doing in video games for really since the PS two era. And people just generally don't notice it. So I saw this and thought it was honestly a really good implementation. Something we don't, Yeah, this

Leo Laporte (00:47:25):
Is from the meta video. These people, they even have stools, but there's nothing below the waist for them to Yeah, I could see how it's hard to do, even if you have cameras. I could see how it'd be very hard to do, but

 Brianna Wu (00:47:38):
That breaks the immersion.

Leo Laporte (00:47:39):
It totally does. It's creepy and weird. Okay. And apparently MENA hasn't solved it. Cuz the whole video that they showed of Mike, of Mark and his co-host dancing around with their legs was faked <laugh>. So we're not, Oh gosh, they know it's important. All

Daniel Rubino (00:48:06):
They're doing is corporatizing second life, that game.

Leo Laporte (00:48:09):
It does look like Second Life.

 Brianna Wu (00:48:11):
Yeah. That's all this is. But

Leo Laporte (00:48:13):
Didn't you, wait a minute. You got legs in Second Life,

Daniel Rubino (00:48:15):
Right? Yeah. So there is that.

Leo Laporte (00:48:17):
It's not even as good as Second Life was 20 years ago. So I feel like there's clearly a disconnect here that these guys have read a lot of science fiction. So we, we've read the Neil Stevenson books, we know Snow Crash. We're a long way off in those books. They're jacking in, they're connecting something to the brain. This is not, And one of the hardest things that is absolutely vital to reality is this thing about moving, not just showing your legs just moving in. Correct me if I'm wrong Brianna, but in all the VR I've done, you have to have some work around for moving. Like a rubber band that you send with a controller in the net goes sucks you over there because you can't really move because you'll walk into your real wall. Yeah. Coffee table. This is a

 Brianna Wu (00:49:11):
Big, It's exactly right. It was to stop you from throwing up to, And

Leo Laporte (00:49:15):
We don't have, I mean we do have, but nobody really wants to use the Ready Player one omni <laugh>

 Brianna Wu (00:49:22):
Treadmill

Leo Laporte (00:49:23):
To treadmill thing. That's weird. I mean, somebody does make it, but you have to be suspended by ropes and it's not a good experience. I mean, why does anybody think this is even close to happening?

 Brianna Wu (00:49:38):
I don't know. I see the leg thing. I see a technically good cheat and I think at some point we're gonna have to think about the computational power. How would you

Leo Laporte (00:49:47):
Move using on this side? How do you move without walking into the coffee table?

 Brianna Wu (00:49:52):
You can't move the bottom one. You need a big empty room.

Leo Laporte (00:49:56):
I mean a really big empty room.

 Brianna Wu (00:49:59):
Studies have also shown that women are much more susceptible to VR sickness as well. So if you've played these early VR games where you just hold forward and you just walk through a level by pushing on a control stick, that is like a formula for making women throw up. It just did. And a lot of dudes too

Leo Laporte (00:50:16):
I throw up too. Yeah, yeah. Well I don't throw up, but I definitely get nauseated. Although, to be fair, the most nauseated I've ever gotten was playing quake on a commuter bus. And that wasn't in vr, that was just cuz the bus was going this way and quake was going that way and it was not a pretty picture. I still get sick sometimes on if I have a big enough screen on just a regular 2D game. So maybe I'm a bad example of

Sam Abuelsamid (00:50:42):
This. Well, I mean this past week I was moderating a conference here in Detroit on simulation run by a company called VI Grade. And one of the things we talked about was one of the things that this company makes is these big motion simulators for driving dynamics development. So you basically put a vehicle, almost a full vehicle on there and it moves around and simulates all the motions. And we were talking about an example back in the late nineties when I was still working in engineering. We built a simulation system using, it was powered by a silicon graphics iris workstation, big giant screen had a driving buck, but the driving buck had no motion. And we were using this for ABS and traction control and stability control development. And I always found it really hard. I could not drive this thing for more than a few minutes. And I do test driving all the time and even more so in those days and doing all kinds of maneuvers. And I could not sit in this thing driving it for more than a few minutes because you've got this big screen that was quite immersive, but you had no physical feedback of the things that your eyes were seeing and it was really hard. So this is a real issue when you have that disconnect between your visual inputs and all of your other senses.

Leo Laporte (00:52:12):
Here we have by the way, thanks to the discord chat, Brianna, the stare <laugh> animation, <laugh> <laugh>.

(00:52:22):
It works perfectly. It's completely convincing. Yeah. It's the disconnect between what your eyes are telling you and what your body's telling you. Your inner ear is telling you and your eyes are telling you. And it is the fud, I think the FUD that's spread by the VR industry that, oh, all we have to do is get latency down and resolution up and you, you'll be fine. And I don't think that's it. I really don't. I think it's also the disconnect between your focal length that's being telegraphed by your convergence point. Cuz your eyes are looking at the screen that's right here. You're converging on this screen that's inches from you and what your brain is telling you the focal point is, which is 10 feet out. If those don't match as your body says you ate something bad, throw it up. Now that is bad muscles.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:11):
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino (00:53:11):
Plus I don't think we also know the long term effects of looking at a screen inches from your eye all

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:17):
Day.

Leo Laporte (00:53:17):
Well that's a good point too. I know.

Daniel Rubino (00:53:19):
I mean, I know with the pandemic, because I spent more time indoors than usual my eyesight actually got worse. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:53:26):
Cuz you don't have the distance focus. Right? You're always focusing

Daniel Rubino (00:53:28):
Focus. Yeah. You're supposed to every, was it 10 minutes or something like that, look out the window and refocus your eyes. And if I don't do that, yeah. My eye and it stinks. If you go to the eye doctor, you didn't train them, you'll get a worse prescription. Right. So I don't know how this is gonna affect our eyes. It's

Leo Laporte (00:53:44):
Gonna be like the jerk where Steve Martin invented those glasses

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:47):
Things, everybody ends up cross eyeing

Daniel Rubino (00:53:50):
<laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:53:52):
We've invented something that'll make everybody very, very near sighted. Yeah.

 Brianna Wu (00:53:57):
Can we come back to the Oculus Pro for just a second here? Because this ties into something we're talking about you. One of the things they're really promoting here versus the first version of the quest is the pass through on it. So it has cameras on it and you can push a button and it will show you the world around you in color. And they're trying to promote that as ar, right? But it's not augmented. It's a camera that's not where your eyesight

Leo Laporte (00:54:25):
Is. Oh, that's really bad. It's

 Brianna Wu (00:54:27):
Almost certainly going to have a certain valve of latency. Every time I've used this feature on a quest or any VR system before, it makes me really, really, really nauseous. And I feel like they're just papering right over that problem when we're gonna experience this. If you're in the supposed Quest meeting and you're reaching down at your desk to take notes, this camera's not gonna solve it. You're still gonna feel sick using that.

Leo Laporte (00:54:55):
So let me take this over to self-driving vehicles cuz the same, This is that thing I POed before the last break, I saw an article that says we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on self-driving vehicles and they still aren't. Is that a fair categorization, Sam?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:14):
So the industry as a whole is spent somewhere in the order of about a hundred billion over the last 12, 15 years on automated driving. But there is a very big difference here. And if you take a Tesla and they're fake full, I think the guy that wrote this, it got a lot wrong.

Leo Laporte (00:55:39):
This is Max Cche in writing for business work.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:41):
We should. So this started from actually trying to solve some very specific problems. I mean, with the DARPA challenge, it started with trying to get vehicles that could go into combat zones and not have to take people in there. But once it got into trying to get it commercialize the technology, it was trying to solve some real problems around safety, traffic safety mobility for people who can't drive to provide them with mobility. And going back to the example of these Lenovo glasses that Daniel brought up, the rest of the industry apart from Tesla, has actually recognized that doing a more focused approach, what Lenovo is doing, having a very specific task that you're doing with it, not trying to recognizing that, okay, this is a really hard problem to solve.

(00:56:43):
They have actually made tremendous progress over the last 15 years. But not trying to do everything but rather focus it on specific tasks like robo taxis in urban environments like last mile deliveries, automated trucking where you're not trying to do solve everything, but you're trying to do specific things. It can actually work quite well. I was just in a couple of vehicles earlier this week with a company driving around Dearborn and it was not Ford but driving around, riding, actually riding around Dearborn. And the system was working really, really well. I was in San Francisco last month with crews and the system worked very, very well. I've seen a tremendous amount of progress early on. These systems were very crude but are getting to the point We've got some real world driverless deployments going on now in San Francisco and Arizona. We're gonna have quite a few more coming in 2023 from a number of different companies in places like Austin, Miami, San Diego, Las Vegas. And it's slowly getting there, but the being more focused rather than trying to solve, rather to boil the ocean as Tesla want seems to want to do. They're trying to boil a pot of water first, and then once they get that going, then go to a bigger pot. And so on

Leo Laporte (00:58:19):
The article quotes one of the early and best known pioneers of self-driving. Anthony Lewendowsky, who of course,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:27):
Well, I wouldn't trust anything that Lewendowsky says.

Leo Laporte (00:58:30):
He left Google under a cloud taking a bunch of documents with him and Google suit and so forth. He has a new startup that does dump trucks. Basically. They're not even driving the roads. They're on industrial sites. He said, You'd be hard pressed to find another industry that's invested so many dollars in r and d that's delivered so little. Forget about profits. What's the combined revenue of all the robo taxi, robo truck, robo, whatever companies. It's like a million dollars or maybe not even that much. Maybe zero. He also quotes George Hots, who is pretty, I think pretty,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:07):
And another person with zero credibility

Leo Laporte (00:59:09):
In the studio. Okay, All right. He's the guy who created comma AI and has a kind of an add-on that you could put in your car. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> turn itself driving. He says it's a scam. Not his company, but

Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:22):
I mean George Hots back in 2016, I was chairing a conference in San Francisco. He was supposed to speak at that conference and that morning I was walking into the event space for, and I checked my messages and I saw a notification on their TechCrunch story that the day before or a couple days before, Nitsa had sent a letter to comma AI saying, Hey, we would like some more information about what you're doing. It wasn't threatening. They was just asking for information about what they were doing. Hots immediately pulled the plug on the whole project and said, Nope. Okay, we're not gonna do this. Because he was the scammer. I mean, if anybody knows what it's a scam is, okay, it's him. All right. What he was doing was never going to work.

Leo Laporte (01:00:12):
So these are two people who you would expect to actually be pretty dismissive of any attempt by Wayne. Absolutely. Cruz. To do self-driving. Yeah. What's the timeframe, Sam, for Level five?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:25):
Level five, Probably never. Or at least a very long time.

Leo Laporte (01:00:29):
Level five is true self-driving, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:31):
Well, no. So level four and level five are both true. The distinction is level five can do it anywhere, anytime. Level four means you can do full self-driving within some limited parameters. It might be limited to a geographic area. It might be limited based on weather conditions or specific tasks. It's just has some kind of limited operating domain. So it's still fully automated. It can't necessarily do it everywhere, and you can still get tremendous value out of doing it even in a limited environment.

Leo Laporte (01:01:10):
I do, I remember the early grand DARPA challenges. We used to make fun of them on the screensavers 20 years ago, these cars would go three feet and go off the road. They were really terrible and very, made a lot of progress really, really quickly. <affirmative> a few years later, they were doing the whole challenge. They had to make it longer and more difficult because the cars got better. But isn't this always the case with AI that the early stuff, the first 80% is relatively easy. It's that last 10% that kills you.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:40):
Yeah, I mean, I was a rule thumb. I learned very early on in my engineering career, the first 90% of any project takes 10% of the effort and then the last 10% requires 90% of the effort. And we're still very early on in that last 10%. There's still a long way to go, but there are real world applications where this is being used today and that will continue to grow over the next several years.

 Brianna Wu (01:02:08):
I wanna back up what you're saying, Sam. I mean I personally, you can go to my Twitter. I'm very, very skeptical of Von and Full and I support the efforts of the National Highway and Traffic Safety Institute to look at what is happening there. That said, I would really encourage any of your listeners or viewers that are skeptical about this, go out and try GM Super Crews. I am not a GM fan. I would not own one of those cars, but it's a really, really, really impressive technology. If I still had a job where I had to drive into downtown Boston every single day, that's gonna take care of 90% of it for you, <affirmative>. And the reason, it's exactly what you're saying, Sam, it's a very limited use case. So I'm trying to drive down 95 and deal with the traffic there. And yes, I've gotta keep my eyes on the road.

(01:03:01):
I've gotta be aware and ready to take over it every single minute, but it's gonna do 90% of the work for me. That work is, that feature is something this our industry has been able to deliver at this point. And it's good. Porsche has a variation of this. I almost think it's, we set our sites too high and it's not helped by Elon hyping something that I frankly don't think is ever gonna happen. From my point of view, I think if we had set more attainable, smaller goals and delivered that to people while working within this regulatory framework to keep the public safe, I think it would've been a better course of action.

Leo Laporte (01:03:40):
This is

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:41):
A yes. Yeah. And that's what the rest of the industry is trying to do, is they're trying to do it safely, trying to in each thing before they release it to the public. Instead of having members of the public beta testing safety critical software, they're doing it internally with professionals and only when they are highly confident that it's going to work reliably, then they release it.

Daniel Rubino (01:04:05):
Yeah, I mean that's definitely true. But I'm just gonna say it's also because they're doing all that work. Only because Tesla is cowboys in the west. They did this, They're putting out in the streets already, as you say, beta testing it with just regular people. I mean it was them that drove this whole industry. Now everybody else

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:23):
Actually doing most of this effort started long before Tesla got involved in it. But I

Daniel Rubino (01:04:27):
Would tell Tesla, Tesla really didn't brought start

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:29):
On until Tesla brought it to the public's attention. But the work was happening many years before Musk ever went down this path.

Daniel Rubino (01:04:42):
But typically with electric cars, he's

Leo Laporte (01:04:45):
Taking all the sensors that except the cameras, right? He's now says, All you need is cameras. You don't need lidar. You, Yeah he's wrong. So yeah, that seems like a bad idea. <laugh>. So then why is he doing it?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:04):
<laugh>? I

Daniel Rubino (01:05:06):
Mean, cause he's doubling down because

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:07):
If he can get somebody to pay $15,000 for the full self-driving option on the vehicles, that is about $14,800 worth of pure profit.

Leo Laporte (01:05:17):
I wasted $5,000 on my Model X for self-driving, which I never got in. And then finally the lease ran out and so I just gave it back. But I would never spend money on any promise of full.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:32):
Yeah, I mean on the radio show, you talk all and on the podcast you have always talked about never buy a piece of hardware or product with the promise of what it might someday do. Buy it based on what it does today because it never does. If you get <laugh> and if you it improves over time, great, it's a bonus. But do not buy something expecting that someday it might do something it doesn't do today. I

Leo Laporte (01:06:00):
Was kind of a

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:01):
Prop

Leo Laporte (01:06:01):
Suck for Elon. I also bought the bio weapon defense mode. I bought the ludicrous acceleration mode <laugh>. Oh boy. I was a, Yeah. Oh boy. In hindsight I looked like an idiot. Maybe even in foresight in middle sight. I look like an idiot.

 Brianna Wu (01:06:17):
Yeah, we had some reporting that came out that showed the Elon was trying to pressure all of his engineers to limit the camera to two cameras cuz he kept telling the engineering team that, Look, humans have two eyes. That should be good.

Leo Laporte (01:06:29):
That should do, that should be fine.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:31):
Well even how

Leo Laporte (01:06:32):
Can be so stupid? Not you got a car dude, you got two eyes, but you don't see everything that's happening around the car with your two eyes.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:40):
Well

Leo Laporte (01:06:41):
And cameras are cheap. How many cameras co are gonna be, are on the Quest Pro 11, How many gonna be on the Apple reportedly? 14. Why would you reduce it in a hundred thousand dollars vehicle to two?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:53):
Well, and they've got eight cameras on Tesla vehicles today. And the thing is, they're not even configured the way our human eyes, our human eyes are both looking in the same direction and you know, can take advantage of the parallax of your two eyes seeing the same object from slightly different points of view to do depth perception. Tesla doesn't even do that. The cameras are all pointing in different directions. <laugh>. So you can't even do accurate distance measurement with the way they have their cameras configured. <laugh> <laugh>. It's all their distance measurement is done by inference, which is an inherently bad way to do it. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:07:29):
It's bad, yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:07:30):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:07:32):
And I thought they had sensors on the Gull wing or Falcon wing, whatever kind of wing doors they had that it wouldn't hit anything, right? I mean I was certainly given that impression, but it kept hitting Lisa in the head <laugh>. She really hated that car. She called it Christine. She did not like that car one bit. Let's take a little break. Lots more to talk about, including Elon. We got a couple of Elon's stories, so why not? He's the gift that keeps on giving. But first a word from our sponsor, our show today brought to you by Collide. This is a solution that has every company who uses Slack should adopt immediately. It's an end point security solution that instead of treating your users as the enemy and so many MDM solutions, do that right? Oh my God, you gotta defend against not the bad guys out there but your users.

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They're the ones that there glue the USB ports shut. Don't let 'em do anything. The problem with that is when you criminalize your users in a company, your employees in a company, what do they do? They go out and they start using their phone and their laptop and now you got a real problem when you're <laugh> trying to achieve security goals, whether for a third party audit or your own compliance standards. The conventional wisdom is you treat every device like Fort Knox, just lock it down. And that means you start using old school device management tools like MDMs to force disruptive agents onto employees devices. Problem is, employees know this as slows performance. It treats privacy as an afterthought and treats them like the bad guys. That way of doing things turns your IT department into the enemies of the end users. It creates its own security problems.

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(01:11:45):
I thought. Okay, a little more on the Microsoft thing cuz there was a lot in there. The thing that kind of took my breath away, it was towards the end of the Panos Panay video in which they announced that Dolly two was going to be part of Microsoft's new designer product that's their Figma or their Canva competitor and built in the Bing image creator. Now did they explain, First of all, it's coming next year, right Daniel?

Daniel Rubino (01:12:14):
Yeah, I believe so. There's gonna be an early access too for

Leo Laporte (01:12:17):
Some people. And did they explain how they Cause with Dally you pay for it after a certain number of right. Is Microsoft gonna pay for it? How is that gonna work?

Daniel Rubino (01:12:26):
Yeah, I'm not sure about that part. I know it's just gonna be in part of Bing search. It's just gonna be like another tab. You can just go right into it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean there've been, I think they saw this early on as being a big thing. I remember they partnered with them pretty early. You can even use a Microsoft account to register with Dolly two currently. But yeah, I'm not sure. Cause after 50, I believe it is with Dolly two you. Yeah, you only get free ones. And

Leo Laporte (01:12:51):
Dolly too by the is now open to everybody. It's no longer a wait list so Right. Get in there. Yeah,

Daniel Rubino (01:12:56):
So maybe Microsoft is subsidizing it which I think would probably make sense.

Leo Laporte (01:13:02):
It said a big investor they're putting an investment in, so maybe yeah, they're giving a chunk of change and letting you use it, which is great.

Daniel Rubino (01:13:10):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:13:11):
To me is, so we're talking about technologies that are slow, they aren't coming along, maybe they're never gonna come along and then all of a sudden outta nowhere. AI is interesting cuz you get these weird wins all of a sudden Alpha Go can beat everybody at everything <laugh>, give it a game in four hours, kill you and then now all of a sudden you get Dolly two and Stable Diffusion and Mid Journey. I think Stable Diffusion really powered it because it was open source and everybody could run it and all of a sudden AI art is everywhere. Kind of amazing. Yeah,

Daniel Rubino (01:13:49):
Yeah. AI is like there's again, bring it down to just more realistic things. I just picked up the UV doorbell dual. So it's got two cameras on it, one that looks out and then up when it looks down to see if the package for you. Yeah. And it even has a new beta AI experiment where it'll detect if it's a package and alert you that a package was given and then it can give you another reminder if you didn't pick it up yet. And it's been working, I've only had it for about 48 hours and already had a couple of Amazon packages, but soon as someone puts a package down, I get an alert. It says, Oh, there's something there for you. And it's been pretty accurate. I, I love that these little usages of AI to improve life versus these big ideas of robots and cyborgs and all this kind of stuff like taking over the world. But these little examples including that using art I think is really, really intriguing cuz it's just way more pragmatic and practical.

Leo Laporte (01:14:44):
Maybe you do the easy things first and get people used to it, right? Instead of trying to wash their dishes <laugh> at the

Sam Abuelsamid (01:14:54):
Sink. Right. Well and to some follow up on that and something that Daniel talked about earlier with us not really understanding how the human brain works, applications like this for art or for doing image recognition for your doorbell and things like that are great ways of starting to get AI into some real applications where it's not necessarily safety critical because the reality is these AI systems, they don't work the way the human brain does. There's so much about the brain that we don't understand about the way we perceive the world. And for all of our flaws, we're actually remarkably much more so than AI systems are right now.

Leo Laporte (01:15:44):
Well it's just like you were saying, Daniel, the neuroscience of it is the human brain is vast mystery and a baby can recognize faces better than a machine can right

Daniel Rubino (01:15:56):
Now. Yeah. We're just brute it at this point with microprocessors and machine learning. You just give it like a billion examples, <laugh> and then it learns. Humans don't require a billion examples. Stick up a pattern. We do it quite easily and we can break that pattern just as easily.

Leo Laporte (01:16:09):
I think that's maybe the way to go is to think about we're good at pattern recognition. Maybe these AI should do the things we're not so good at right Already. Memory is a good example. Memory, human memory is flawed, not great. And as I get older it's worse and worse. But thank God for Google. I don't know how people in earlier generations survived getting older because I don't have to remember everything. I just Google it and I often will say, Oh I can't remember what is yesterday my board op at the radio show said there was a protest across the street. It was a flag, was a green and white flag with a lion on it. And we were able with image search to find out what that was. It was the Iranian flag. It was an Iranian protest that, I don't know how you'd do it 50 years ago. You'd go to the library maybe in a week you'd find out. I don't know. Here's an example of ai, I guess doing voice impersonations. This is a new podcast from podcast.ai. The first episode they had, Bro Jo <laugh>, the famous podcaster interviewing a guy. They wouldn't say who it was. Well here, let me play a little bit cuz the voices are pretty good.

Speaker 6 (01:17:29):
I came on the show.

Speaker 7 (01:17:30):
How's it going? Good to see you buddy. It's been a long time since I've been on the show. I missed this. It's always fun.

Speaker 6 (01:17:37):
How's it going? Come on, tell me about jobs <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:17:41):
The laughter's not working.

Speaker 6 (01:17:43):
It's always good to see you buddy. I'm so happy you came on man. Yeah,

Speaker 7 (01:17:48):
It's great to be on the

Leo Laporte (01:17:49):
Show. No, I don't listen to Joe Rogan, but I think this is actually pretty close to a real Joe Rogan.

Speaker 7 (01:17:53):
You know what? Oh yeah. Washes over you and tells you that everything is connected. You're not here by accident. You were put here for a purpose. And if you can figure out some of this is what that is.

Leo Laporte (01:18:02):
Clearly the AI was trained on actual Steve Jobs quotes.

Speaker 7 (01:18:05):
It's pretty intense. I mean it's not a lot.

Leo Laporte (01:18:07):
And then the voice is, well, it doesn't make you feel bad. So some of these it just

Speaker 7 (01:18:10):
Reveals you for who and what

Leo Laporte (01:18:11):
You are. Sentences are

Speaker 7 (01:18:12):
Actually take L S D A second time,

Daniel Rubino (01:18:14):
The Joe Rogan stuff is way better just because he's so prolific.

Leo Laporte (01:18:17):
There's a lot more, again voice.

Speaker 7 (01:18:18):
It was this

Daniel Rubino (01:18:19):
So it can train easier.

Speaker 6 (01:18:21):
A new programming language and operating system. And then he became even more famous for making three applications for that computer.

Leo Laporte (01:18:28):
So it's just like

Speaker 6 (01:18:29):
Word processor, a spreadsheet and an image editor that just showed me that this dude was brilliant, had amazing tapes. They

Leo Laporte (01:18:38):
Even have the microphone pops that I could be even in

Speaker 6 (01:18:40):
One 10th of the genius that my friend took.

Daniel Rubino (01:18:43):
What it lacks is the intonation and any kind of emotion that still the area that it still needs to work on.

Leo Laporte (01:18:48):
And the content is a little lacking as well. I might add, but

 Brianna Wu (01:18:51):
I do have to say one of the applications, this exact same tech, I'm not gonna get into Twitch drama with Twitch streamers, but there is a very high profile Twitch streamer who uses this technology on one of his enemies in this. And then has the enemy voicing terrible things that the chat is saying live on the show. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:19:14):
No.

 Brianna Wu (01:19:15):
It's almost like we invent a technology and then we find out what the worst ways to use it.

Leo Laporte (01:19:21):
<laugh>

 Brianna Wu (01:19:21):
The worst human beings alive. Yeah, I just wanna say with Dolly going back to that, look, this is a great technology. I'm really happy Microsoft is doing this It, I love that it's an artistic tool for people to have the ideas that they have brought to life. But I also think you've gotta ask yourself where are these images coming from? What are the image libraries? What artists are they basing this work off of to generate this art that basically takes their style and emulate it? And I'm not gonna get into it, but I think there are some really ethically questionable decisions they made in how they got these large data sets and people being compensated for it. So, well

Leo Laporte (01:20:07):
We, we've certainly talked about it mentioned a couple weeks ago, Getty, Sure the stock photo company won't allow you to use art generated by these AI or won't sell it because, and they pointed out they've scraped our entire database so that Getty's watermark shows up <laugh> just randomly when you use some of these, I think it's stable diffusion that did it. Yeah, they're clearly copyright problems. Greg Gutowski, who's the great illustrator is very mad because he's one the most commonly used term in stable diffusion is draw a penguin standing on its head in the style of Gregory. And on the one hand, I think a lot of people now know who Greg Rutkowski is. That didn't. But on the other hand, his style that's kind of being whole wholesale lifted and I guess the AI scraped his entire online database.

 Brianna Wu (01:21:04):
I think about in the game industry, I cannot tell you how many times I've gotten this back when I was running a game studio, how many times I got this resume, it was like, Hey Brianna, I am just outta school. I am a expert in Illustrator. I need a job doing concept art. Do you have anything at all? And these people are fighting the tooth and nail with these illustration degrees to just get their foot in the door and there's nothing for them. The people that do that work at Blizzard have been there for a decade and for a small indie studio will throw out a thousand dollars contract here and there. But it's not something a lot of people are gonna be able to

Leo Laporte (01:21:47):
Do. You say, I generated

 Brianna Wu (01:21:49):
Stuff. I think you could use AI for a lot of this stuff. Now there's a game that came out this week called Score, right? It's based on hr, Geiger's art style. So you could type all those things into Dolly and say give me a shredding machine in the style of HR geer and it could create something like that. So I do think this is going to have a very negative impact on already very limited art jobs. And I'm not saying it's bad or we shouldn't use it, I'm just saying it's gonna be a consequence of the technology

Leo Laporte (01:22:22):
With this scorn use AI to do these.

 Brianna Wu (01:22:26):
No, I'm just saying this is an example of a game that really needed those concept artists and I'm not sure they would if they designed it

Leo Laporte (01:22:34):
Today. Yeah, yeah. There's an interesting article, Matt Welsh who worked at Google and Apple as a coder wrote a piece, The end of programming, Actually I should give credit to Jeff Jarvis who found this and wanted to talk about it on Twig, but I'll talk about it now. He says, The end of computer science is coming, programming will be obsolete because it'll be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed. And in a way you are doing a kind of programming now when you write a prompt for Dolly or stable diffusion, but it's not in C or c plus plus it's in English and you're just telling the computer to generate what you want. He says things like is just scratching the surface. The future is clear that software will be written by ai, but all controlled by humans. Does that make as a coder. Does that make sense to you, Brianna?

 Brianna Wu (01:23:34):
Yeah, I think that's true in some ways. I also think that there's another story that came out this week basically talking about how Moore's law in this constant growth of a processing power does seem to be coming to an end soon. And I think that when that happens, refactoring old code writing efficient code, I do think, especially as we have energy crises more and more on earth, I think that writing efficient code is gonna be a highly valued skill. I don't think that's something AI is gonna be able to do as well as humans. So I think it's a little hyperbolic to say the end of programming. I do think we're gonna have better tools to help us write

Leo Laporte (01:24:16):
Code. What you will be doing though, more likely instead of writing say a binary tree search is you'll say give me a binary tree search and it will sure, it will write the underlying code and maybe probably write it better than you and I, Let's

 Brianna Wu (01:24:33):
Be honest, so much of programming is stack overflow. So Sorry,

Leo Laporte (01:24:36):
Go ahead. Yeah, that's what they just copy their stack overflow

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:38):
<laugh>.

 Brianna Wu (01:24:39):
Well you look at these samples certainly.

Leo Laporte (01:24:41):
Yeah, yeah, go ahead Dave. I

Daniel Rubino (01:24:43):
Was just, Oh yeah, I was just gonna say the same predictions have been made for news writing in general. That's happened.

Leo Laporte (01:24:48):
News writing in sports writing for sure. Right?

Daniel Rubino (01:24:51):
Yep. Cause it's just facts. And the idea is you can string it together and in theory you would actually weed out any kind of bias reporting and word usage, although that remains to be seen. But yeah, that's expected to happen too in the next couple years. So we'll see what happens

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:06):
From the starting in the late nineties up until I left engineering in 2007 in working on electronic control systems for vehicles, we put a lot of effort into developing and working with automatic code generation systems using tools like matlab for example, that we used for development purposes, for rapid prototyping. And then using that and other tools to generate code from the models. So we would create models, algorithmic models, and then auto generate code from that to run in vehicles. Now in those days, the code that it generated was not nearly efficient enough to fit in the amount of storage and memory that we had. So we ended up doing a lot of rewriting by hand, but mean this is not a new phenomenon. This is something that was started a long time ago and it's still ongoing. This idea of using building models and then generating the code from that. And that's what a lot of what's being done today is based on,

Leo Laporte (01:26:19):
There's a new startup that is doing videos in the same way as Dolly does still images. You give it a couple of images a script, it will generate the whole video for you, <laugh>. So I think that it's clear that there are some things humans are gonna have to do. And I think what's happening is we're starting to see the landscape of where AI could do a good job and where humans are needed. And it isn't as obvious. You might have said, Well, humans have to do the creative work, but Dolly has shown stable diffusion have shown that not isn't necessarily true. Although they think AI

Daniel Rubino (01:27:00):
Writing's the biggest surprise. Yeah, yeah. Cause I mean, we always thought AI would do the menial tasks, which is still what's kind of happening. But I didn't predict this idea of art and you know, course we've all heard the stories of AI art being entered into art contests and actually winning <laugh>. Yeah. I mean, which calls it to question judging of art by humans versus what AI is and everything. But yeah, it's a whole other world that just quickly came upon us and I'm sure it's already happening with music. Music there already know, especially with pop music, there's kind of a secret sauce to it in terms of, and everything that the human brain responds to. So just a matter of time before we start getting AI generated music. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:27:45):
Don't be fooled by the bad AI music we've heard so far. I think you're exactly right. Just as all of a sudden AI art exploded, I think AI music's gonna explode. And I would not want to be a pop musician right now. I think that's, that's gonna be a tough world in the next couple years. How about the Nvidia RTX 40 90? Woo. Huh? How about that? A $1,600 video card? Invidia has a problem because they were making bank when the video cards were in high demand from Bitcoin miners. But now that that's collapsed and there's all these old highly used GPS on the market for pennies on the dollar they've had to find some other way to make money. And I think they might have found it with this beast of a GPU Devra hardware reviewing it. And Gadget says it's the fastest consumer GPU we've ever seen. You could even run a K, but it's also, as I said, 1600 bucks. Maybe I'll sell the Oculus Pro Quests Pro and buy this instead. I'd have to get a machine to go in it. How much does it take? More than one slot? It looks like it's

Sam Abuelsamid (01:28:55):
Two and a half slots. It's huge.

Leo Laporte (01:28:57):
<laugh>, huge. Geez Louise and

Sam Abuelsamid (01:29:00):
Four power

Leo Laporte (01:29:01):
Connectors. Four. That's it. Four count 'em, four power connectors. So how many watts? 700 watts.

Daniel Rubino (01:29:09):
Probably something she could combine it with the 13th gen processor and you're gonna have a little device that basically uses as much power as a space heater. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:29:18):
You. Well

 Brianna Wu (01:29:18):
Good.

Leo Laporte (01:29:19):
Christina

 Brianna Wu (01:29:19):
Had to talk me outta getting this. I have the RTX 30 90, it's great. But I wanna be honest with you, I already have not found a game. Literally, I cannot run maxed out at all settings.

Leo Laporte (01:29:31):
No, I have a 38 diminishing returns frankly. And the 30 80 runs fine at Fort.

Daniel Rubino (01:29:35):
That's what I got too. Yeah.

 Brianna Wu (01:29:36):
And for me, we just Massachusetts is great. They have this fantastic program where you can get they basically paid the cost of your solar panels going on your roof and they just charge you more for electricity and that slowly pays off the solar panels. So yeah, I saw this and I'm like, well I don't have to worry so much about the power usage these days, but I mean honestly, it's like if you can run cyberpunk at max settings at a hundred fps on a 32 inch monitor, like running of the really good recipe, that's

Leo Laporte (01:30:09):
Vr.

 Brianna Wu (01:30:10):
You need this for, right?

Leo Laporte (01:30:11):
That's VR right there. Who needs a helmet? I'll just 30 inch though. I got a OED 55 inch. That's woo. Because now it's almost peripheral vision, right? You're immersive. When I play stray, I feel like a kitty cat <laugh>. I live the kitty cat life.

Daniel Rubino (01:30:33):
The race now is of course the frames per second. But again, that's also the refresh rates on laptops now are going over 300 hertz for the refresh rate, which is insane. But it's like, again, it's like what Brianna was saying. I mean it's diminishing returns ultimately. It's nice to have. And if you're a video, if you're rendering video, I could see where this will be a big benefit. Maybe it'll definitely cut your time in half. But in terms of video games, which is usually the primary usage of them, it's like how much better is this going to be for a lot of people?

Leo Laporte (01:31:01):
Well, nobody because I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Brianna, if you were a game studio, you could say no, we're gonna require the 40 90. Oh, but that would be suicide <laugh>. Yeah, you're gonna make sure that it'll run fine on a 30 60 or less, a 10 70 do game companies that say really good at, But we're gonna have an ultra high resolution frame rate, infinite distance, Z, the Z goes all the way <laugh>. And then say if you have a 40 90 we've got a mode for you

 Brianna Wu (01:31:35):
That That's exactly it. Modern engines are really good at scaling. I can do that. We're seeing the implementation of DLSS looks amazing. I just to, I hate to be the killjoy on this show, but yeah, there was a story that came out

Leo Laporte (01:31:48):
To me, Kill my joy Brianna,

 Brianna Wu (01:31:51):
One of Russia's Vladimir Putin's final light, his hail marries in to win the war against Ukraine being to sabotage his own pipeline and spike basically destroy the energy supply throughout all of Europe. Leaving people literally choosing between heating their homes and eating right.

Leo Laporte (01:32:13):
Oh, was it 40, 90? You don't have to choose because it will heat your home and play again, I

 Brianna Wu (01:32:19):
Guess. Okay, that's fair. I'm just saying at some point here a card that takes four. I agree connectors for you there. There's an environmental question I think is worth asking ourselves. That's

Leo Laporte (01:32:32):
All I'm saying. This has a TDP of, I think they said 450 watts, but they recommend that you have a 850 watt PSU <laugh>, right? In order to run it. Yeah. Cuz you gotta have some wattage for the rest of the computer. <laugh>. Oh my God. We're what Brianna, welcome to the modern world where 1% has everything they want, including giant screens and 40, 90 cards. And the rest of us are walking barefoot through well desiccated onion fields, <laugh>. I don't know. I don't where I'm going with this. I'm suddenly channeling Dolly too, but I, This is the where we are headed with massive income inequality and it's terrifying, frankly. Doesn't mean Invidia shouldn't,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:33:36):
It's only gonna get worse foreseeable future. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:33:38):
Exactly. And then climate change really starts hitting hard and have whole parts of the world that are uninhabitable, which means massive refugee crises. Okay, I'm sorry that my mind's going wrong,

 Brianna Wu (01:33:52):
<laugh>. Sorry, I didn't mean to do that.

Leo Laporte (01:33:53):
Sixth extinction is on its way late Surface

Sam Abuelsamid (01:33:55):
Pro

Leo Laporte (01:33:56):
Nine. Well meanwhile let's talk about arm, actually, I wanted to ask you about Invidia because Sam, because Invidia is not just making video game cards, they are making AI chips and they're making self-driving chips, right? They're very much, Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:34:11):
They are. In fact a couple weeks ago when they had their fall gtc, they announced a new chip that's scheduled for 2025 productions called Thor. It's an SOC with 2000 terra ops integer performance and 2000 terra flops floating point performance which is designed to be able to have this one chip power the entire car as at least as in terms of computing performance. It's still three years away from production programs. But this is just, they won't said how much many watts this thing consumes. But as an example other automated vehicles that I've seen, their compute platforms, just the compute, not including the sensors and everything else can consume as much as four kilowatts just for the compute to do an automated vehicle <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:35:12):
Yeah, God, we're gonna need a bigger battery

Sam Abuelsamid (01:35:17):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:35:18):
Wow. That's actually what Dendra says is the 40 90 is such a leap ahead. He likens it to a black hole so massive at warp space time around it. This is the new standard. This is like we're putting that plant that flag way out ahead. And so you're gonna see this is setting the mark in effect. And I guess that's what they're doing in automotive as well.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:35:44):
And that Thor chip they, last year at the spring gtc, they announced a chip called Atlin, which they canceled and replaced with Thor because since Atlin, they introduced an arm SOC for data centers for servers called Grace and then also a new GPU architecture called Hopper. And so what they did was they realized, well we can take the technology we've got in Grace and Hopper, combine those with a bunch of other stuff to make this other chip that would give us twice the performance of what we had already announced. And those chips, some of the areas that NVIDIA's involved in, some of the data centers that they're powering all kinds of robotics applications. It does go way beyond GPUs. GPUs, there's just one small part of their business now. And I think there was a story that was further down, I think on the rundown about American exec chip companies American chip companies operating in China recently, a few weeks back there was an announcement from the administration barring the export of a lot of these high performance data center chips and server chips to China. And Invidia is one of the companies that's impacted by that so far. There was something else that just came out the other day that I haven't been able to dive into in depth yet but it seems like they may maybe expanding those sanctions to cover other types of chips as well. So that might end up impacting both in Invidia and Qualcomm which is also selling. Yeah, I

Daniel Rubino (01:37:35):
Think they bumped up the nanometer to 16 nanometer anything. So it's even older legacy chips won't be able to be used and it also affects actual people. If you're an American citizen working on this technology in China, you can either give up your citizenship or face arrest if you come back or leave the country.

Leo Laporte (01:37:56):
That's the Wall Street's, their journal story today. Yeah. At least 43 senior executives working with 16 listed Chinese semiconductor roles. Companies hold roles from CEO to vice president. They're the ones facing after the, this prospect of either you quit and come home now or you're gonna have to give up your citizenship and stay in China.

Daniel Rubino (01:38:19):
It's a massive brain drain. It's gonna really cri cripple China's like chip industry and for super chips used for weapons and the military primarily, but also for driving ai, self-driving and all this other stuff. It it's almost seems, I don't know, a little too much <laugh>, like they're really serious sanctions. I mean it's gonna really, really hobble China. And you gotta wonder of course, what's what China's gonna do in response to that, right? Cuz they're not going just oddly sit by. And I think that's kind of the real big question that we have to wait now. This is to see what happens.

Leo Laporte (01:38:51):
This is worse than a trade war. This is a shot across the bow. And I understand why the US government did it. There was real concern among the intelligence community as you say, that they were using our technology to power their military and their AI for military uses so that we were in effect helping build up their military when they pose a real threat at least to Taiwan or Ally, but also to the whole region and maybe even the whole world at some point. So I understand why you'd wanna do something about it, but it seems like it almost seems like a war-like action, especially with she president. She now going for his coronation is the emperor of China at the Party of Congress, which is going on now. And he's been in order to secure his power and his position doing a lot of saber rattling. And I just worry that we're heating up and this is about geopolitics as much as it is tech. But I agree with you Daniel. I worry we're heating up this already Volvo space and maybe gonna have consequences that we will long regret.

Daniel Rubino (01:40:01):
Yeah, I mean Ian Bremer made this good point about the future of the geopolitical atmosphere. It's better when the Chinese and American economies are intertwined such an

Leo Laporte (01:40:12):
Extent. I a hundred percent agree

Daniel Rubino (01:40:13):
That if a war would just be unfeasible cause it would just destroy both economies and just wouldn't be worth the risk. But as soon as we start separating ourselves from China and disengaging, and I get it, we wanna build up intel, something happens to Taiwan, we wanna be, make sure we have a fab here and all that. So I kind of get that. But yeah, I mean there is a risk here that the more we go down this route, the more dangerous it's gonna get. I

Leo Laporte (01:40:38):
Guess we have to trust our government and our intelligence agencies, but that's historically hard for us to do <laugh>, especially in this country. Yeah,

Daniel Rubino (01:40:47):
I

 Brianna Wu (01:40:48):
Don't know if it's the intelligence agencies I as much as the State department.

Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
Well what you talk, yeah. For months administration officials have debated this is from the New York Times, what they could do to hobble China's progress. China, according to the Times, was using super computing and artificial intelligence to develop stealth and hypersonic weapons systems and maybe even worse to crack our encryption. And this is according to intelligence reports. So you're giving another country the power to become a real enemy. But then at the same time I agree with breer, the better, it's better to be allies even if your frenemies because it preserves the piece. This is not the kind of move that preserves the piece. Yes, you're taking away an important weapon, but I also think that the Chinese given a little time, it's not dumb. They have high smart people in high technology and great universities. I don't know why they couldn't duplicate our efforts. So I don't know what

Sam Abuelsamid (01:41:54):
Your should be. It's best a short term

Leo Laporte (01:41:56):
Solution. It's a short term solution.

 Brianna Wu (01:41:58):
<affirmative>, what I wanted to say was I think there's a longer term view to have here. If you look at the Marshall plan following World War ii, I really feel like a lot of people on my own side really underestimate this. We've had the longest historical period of peace and prosperity in worldwide history

Leo Laporte (01:42:19):
Because of interdependent

 Brianna Wu (01:42:21):
World War, because of interdependency, because of the Brenton woods, because of these alliances to create this basically economic dependency between nations. This has been good. And on one hand when I see the United States doing things like shoring up domestic chip production, I a hundred percent support that. Yes, in many ways I do think we need redundancies here, even though it doesn't make sense in some ways because we don't have the tools you actually need to build this chips. But that's a whole nother discussion. At the same time, this really strikes me as being similar to the discussion we had in the eighties when the fear was Russia was gonna copy American chips on this and that and they were gonna use it in nuclear missiles. So I that I don't think that the answers for us to withdraw from the world and to withdraw our industry from the world, I think we need to be doubling down and doing our own development in this area. That's my take on it at least.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:43:20):
Yeah, I agree that we don't want to completely withdraw. I mean a big part of the strategy for the last 50, 60, 70 years has been the idea that if everybody's engaged in trade across borders, we become dependent on each other and we are less likely to go to war. I mean that was the whole theory behind the European Union. On the other hand, one of the downsides of the way it's been implemented over the last several decades is that we ended up with way too much consolidation of, with too few companies producing stuff in too few places. And we got too dependent and we ended up with supply chains that became very brittle, which is led to the situation we've had over the last couple of years where if you have any kind of disruption, whether it's a pandemic, natural disaster, geopolitical issues, you end up disrupting so many things in economies globally.

(01:44:27):
And so what we're actually starting to see now over the last year or so is a lot of companies moving back, backing away from the consolidation approach we've had to being, becoming more diversified in their supply chains, getting things from more companies in more locations so that we're not totally dependent on any one location, which is actually, I think in the long term, gonna be a better thing because you don't necessarily want to have be totally self, I mean ideally it's good to be self-sufficient, but you know, wanna have some trade cross-border trade to get some dependency, but you don't wanna be totally dependent on any one location.

Leo Laporte (01:45:10):
And that's moving very quickly <affirmative> to do that. It's estimated the next few years that at least half of iPhone production could be done in Vietnam, India, Brazil, other countries not China. Yeah, that seems a reasonable <laugh> long term goal. Here's an interesting use of ai. There's a charity called Give Directly, Give directly.org. The idea is it's an ngo, but instead of kind of wrapping your gift into a bunch of administrative costs and complex charities you just give directly. They've been using, they're funded by the way, by google.org, their charitable arm as well as USA and other companies. They're one of the things they're doing now to help in the survivors of Hurricane Ian is using Google and AI to figure out where the greatest need is and then algorithmically send people money, which I think is fascinating. 3,500 residents of Collier, Charlotte and Lee Counties got a push notification on their smartphones offering 'em $700 cash, no questions asked based on a Google algorithm deployed in partnership with Give directly, they used satellite images to see where the need was greatest. What do you think that's a good use of ai? Is that a, I think it's a positive.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:46:42):
Yeah, I could definitely

Leo Laporte (01:46:44):
See that. I could see it going wrong too. I understand.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:46:46):
Yeah, no, I mean if it works, and this seems like an application where vision systems, machine vision systems could probably do a pretty good job and it should be able to work pretty well to pick out at least locations where help is needed.

Leo Laporte (01:47:05):
AI for disaster response. A paper presented a couple of years ago at an academic workshop said an AI doing that could match those of human experts with 85 to 98% accuracy. So humans doing it probably has flaws too. So very, But you could

Sam Abuelsamid (01:47:24):
Probably get it, find it a lot faster with this approach. Exactly. Rather than just sending people out into the field and trying to find the people that need help, you could probably do it a lot more quickly and hopefully distribute the funds to people, get money into people's pockets to help them find some place to stay, get food, whatever to help them get through that initial period.

Leo Laporte (01:47:57):
Although, and this is, I think, an indication of <laugh> life in the 21st century. Of the 700 people who got push notifications, only 200 responded. It's thought that the other 500 thought they were fishing scams and just ignored that

Sam Abuelsamid (01:48:10):
Offering. Not an unreasonable response.

Leo Laporte (01:48:13):
No, not unreasonable at all. No, I think they're right. I think they're right. No, that was real money. Sorry. It was, but it was, It's buried in about 300 other text messages offering money from Nigerian princes and others. Brianna Woo, great to have you from the Rebellion Pack and the Rocket podcast, that great show you do with Simone Na Roho and our wonderful Christina Warren, who was a host at the festivities at Microsoft's Ignite this week, which is kind of cool. I'm sure. Proud to work with her. She's amazing. Yeah, she's the greatest. And of course, Daniel Reino from Windows Central, he's executive editor there. Did you watch all the Ignite videos yet? Some of 'em looked pretty interesting.

Daniel Rubino (01:48:55):
<laugh>. I did not. I mean I was in New York that day for the surface stuff, but they still haven't gotten, not been able to go

Leo Laporte (01:49:01):
Watch it. So they had a, Okay, so that's interesting. There's this debate about whether Apple should have an event this month. They've got a half dozen new products to announce. And I thought Microsoft kind of punted and recorded a video. Panos pane. I mean obviously all of that was recorded, but then mm-hmm <affirmative> released it at a specific time, 7:00 AM Pacific <laugh> on Wednesday, and I had to get up for that. So it was, But they did, but they actually invited people to an event as well.

Daniel Rubino (01:49:29):
Yeah. So I didn't realize that sitting. And I believe LA had an event too for

Leo Laporte (01:49:34):
Media. Did they have a hands on and stuff like that? Yeah.

Daniel Rubino (01:49:37):
Yep. They had all the stuff out there and we got to play with it.

Leo Laporte (01:49:40):
What Apple did last months with the iPhone, they had a recorded event, but journalists went to the campus and got to do the hands on. I don't know why they wouldn't do that again this month, but the rumor mill seems to agree that's not gonna happen. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. It's great to have you Daniel. Also Sam Abuelsamidmy car guy. Well he's our car guy. Wheel Bearings podcast, A great podcast for people who are auto enthusiasts. Our show today brought to you by Noom. I love about Nom. You looked like you might have done Noom there,

 Brianna Wu (01:50:16):
Brianna. I lost over a hundred pounds with me, so I did. I did. So I had a running injury a while back and I could not run for six months while I was waiting for surgery. They drilled six holes through my tibia to basically fix it. It was dreadful. And I put on just a ton of weight at my heaviest. I was 220 pounds. See,

Leo Laporte (01:50:42):
I don't think I've ever known you this thin. Yeah. And you transformed. How long did it take?

 Brianna Wu (01:50:49):
I did. It took me probably about six or seven months. It was honestly not hard. It was just recording the calories of what I ate and just becoming more mindful.

Leo Laporte (01:51:04):
That's what Numi is so good about, I think.

 Brianna Wu (01:51:06):
A hundred percent. Yeah. It's not a diet, education, education, how what you eat affects your body. Well, you look

Leo Laporte (01:51:13):
Gorgeous. I mean it's amazing the transformation and you're not the only one. We have a guy in the chat room, I don't wanna name names, but I think the chat room knows who it is who went on our geek cruise. And I knew he was going on the cruise and I hadn't seen him in a few months and I couldn't find him. And I texted him, I said, Where are you? He said, I'm right next to you right here. And he just was, He'd lost 60 pounds on Noom. He was unrecognizable. I was like, You're a new man. He says it's great. He's kept it off. My wife Lisa, the same thing. She didn't look like she needed as it didn't look like she needed to lose any weight, but she wanted to lose about 20 pounds, little less. She did, I think 18 or 19 pounds.

(01:51:56):
I've lost 20 pounds on him. It works cuz it isn't a diet. There are no restrictions. There are no foods you can't eat. It's a psychology first approach. New weight allows you to build more sustainable habits. A sustainable's so important with weight loss cuz the worst thing for you is to lose the weight and gain it back. With nom. You get behaviors that last 3.6 million people have lost weight on nom. Now I have to tell you, our weight loss is not typical. On average, nom users lose about 15 pounds and 16 weeks, a hundred pounds. Not guaranteed. But I have to say 95% of customers say new weight is a good long term solution. And that's what you're looking for. It's based on scientific principles like cognitive behavioral therapy, C B T, so you understand your relationship with food. Lisa says she was a fog eater, and I am that way too.

(01:52:51):
I'm an emotional eat, but she was a fog, eat well. She would eat and not even know she was eating. I'm emotional. I get home and I reduce the stress by stuffing things in my mouth. Learning about that has been so valuable. One of the things we now do is we turn off the tv, we put away our phones, we sit down to a meal at a table with napkins, silverware, and we eat thoughtfully, mindfully, chewing every bite and really enjoying the food. Sometimes I'll even close my eyes and really taste it and it's amazing what a difference that makes in how you eat. I'm eating consciously. All of a sudden nom doesn't believe in restricting what you can or can't eat. So whatever your health goals are, the flexible non-restrictive program focuses on progress, non perfection. And it's not just the lessons which are great.

(01:53:40):
You could choose how long those lessons are for you. It's also a coach. Personal coaching. You choose the level of support. They have groups as well. You can participate in them or not. It's up to you. Five minute daily checkings, personal coaching, whatever works for you. And the thing it's important to understand, progress is not a straight line. So noom, you get off days. In fact, as you go with Noom, you'll get bonus days. In fact, my coach would say, Okay, bonus day, eat whatever you want. Don't log it. It's fine. Both Lisa and I love it. And as you hear from many of our panelists, they love it too. NUMs published more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific articles and informed users, practitioners, scientists in the public about their methods and effectiveness, stayed focused. And what's important to you with noom weight's, psychology based approach. Sign up for your trial today, noom n o om.com/TWiTnoom.com/twi. Sign up for your trial at noom.com/twit. Thank you enough. Noom, you've made a huge difference in our lives. Brianna, I had no idea you'd lost a hundred pounds. That's a

 Brianna Wu (01:54:48):
Hundred percent. And I've been, since I lost, it's been almost a year. No issue putting it back on whatsoever. Yeah, because the weird thing is it changes what you think tastes good and where before I might have grabbed something like some chips or whatever you want to eat the yo. Right? It really changes your mind. Reprogram. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:55:10):
Yeah. It's kind of amazing that that's even possible. It's really great. I love it. Well, thank you Newman. Thank you dear listeners for going to nom.com/twi. 'em know you saw it here. Oh, there's so many stories. So much, so much to talk about. So little time. How about this? CNN is backing down on its NFTs <laugh> <laugh>. They had a NFT market selling collectible moments tied to major news events. They've dropped it. But now this is the problem. Users are saying it's a rug pull. We've sent spent thousands of dollars and we were sold in exclusive access and features and coming in the future, and now they're killing it. On Monday afternoon, CNN edit ended. Its big web three project. By announcing we've decided that it's time to say goodbye to the vault by cnn. I hate to tell you, NFT users get ready <laugh>. A lot of rugs gonna be pulled intentionally or not. I guess NBA's still doing the top shot, but I, Here's the thing. NFT trading volumes have collapsed 97% since the beginning of the year.

Daniel Rubino (01:56:26):
Still not enough needs to be 99%

Leo Laporte (01:56:28):
<laugh>. Yeah, well, but here's what's happening is people buy these things basically. It's a speculative thing. It's not an investment in art. I mean, some people say, Oh, I wanna support the artist. That's fine. I wish the artist would sell a print so I could support 'em by buying something I could hang on my wall but people buy these because they think they're gonna be able to resell for a lot of money later. It's an investment and a speculative investment at that when the market tanks as it has all these people and you knew it was gonna happen or left Holden, their board Apes <laugh>. Just like, Well now what do I do? There's no market for

Sam Abuelsamid (01:57:08):
It. What are board Apes worth these days?

Leo Laporte (01:57:11):
I see, that's the question. You can say, what are they worth? And I can go tell you $300,000, but is anybody actually paying that? That's just a number. Somebody's attached to it there.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:57:24):
And there were reports that a lot of these, the board apes and a lot of the other NFTs were, they were going through I forget the term for it, but basically people would set up multiple accounts and they would sell it to themselves, trade it between different

Leo Laporte (01:57:41):
Accounts. The problem, I think there's a little bit of hype. Yeah. So there were a 38 board APE sold in the last week, 3.72 million. The average price is 98,000. I think the top price was over a million dollars for one Board ape, Board Ape Yacht Club 1,000,015 days ago. The guy with a crown. Now what makes this one worth a hundred went through a million dollars when this one's worth 225,000. Cuz he is got a pipe, not a crown. It's just a stupid drawing of a vaguely racist nature. <laugh>. I don't understand. I just don't. But I think the only reason you'd spend a million dollars for this is cuz you think some knit wit's gonna come along and give you a million and a half down the road.

Daniel Rubino (01:58:29):
I think it's because rich people, the 1% of people have so much money that they could just afford to waste it on dumb stuff like this. And it's pocket change where the rest of us are just looking at it. They're all nuts. But that's what happens when you have literal billionaires with 20, 30 billion or more. Like Allison was gonna lend Elon Musk a billion dollars for Twitter. It's just like, it's insane. So I think they're just bridge people have run out things to buy <laugh>.

 Brianna Wu (01:58:58):
I think it was a lot younger, a live younger 20 something that got caught in this as well, thinking it was a legitimate,

Leo Laporte (01:59:07):
What worries me is more naive investors like my kids who, Oh, this is great, This is the future. And there is this notion, I've talked about this before, that somehow you're restoring equity to the world with Web three Defi, cryptocurrency, NFTs, that somehow you're taking the power away from big tech. That's the promise of web three. Somehow some magical way, except for, I gotta point out that the primary proponents of web three are the big venture capitalist entries. Capitalists. Yeah. <laugh>, right? So yeah, we're giving it the big tech Not really but I understand the motivation. When Jay-Z started a school among for poor black kids to teach 'em about crypto, I think he was thinking, this is a good thing to know because this is democratizing finance.

 Brianna Wu (02:00:10):
Spike Lee put out that commercial where he had exactly all the white presidents on the dollar and he's like, Oh, we've got our new money now. And it was like, Oh, I don't know about this Spike Lee <affirmative>. But what I wanted to say about this story particularly is we've got real journalists here, not fake journalists like me. And you think about all the rules that exist at CNN to make really sure that the reporters are not going to malign the reputation of the news network. Think of all the second guessing when you post on Twitter or the editing an article again and again or hunting down a source. And then you've got the Moneymen at cnn. They're doing this cheap crack cash grab with web three and think about how much this damages CNN is a news organization and the trust in it is just so, it's

Leo Laporte (02:01:05):
A very good point they made. It's estimated by the Press Gazette, they made $300,000 on these NFTs. In fact, in this analysis from the News Gazette the Press Gazette news publishers have made nearly 12 million on NFTs since March, 2021. Yeah, that's, that really casts a lot, by the way, the number one money maker, Time Magazine, cnn number three on the list,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:38):
The key to making money on this stuff is to get in early, Sell them, Don't hang onto them. Right. Sell them and take the money and run. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:49):
Forbes made a half a million, but donated it to charity. The Economist, four $22,000 donated it to charity as did ginette. The New York Times raised $560,000 on NFTs, but donated it to charity. I hope. I guess <laugh> time has earned the most from web three initiatives. Out of all the publishers, here's their marketplace and open sea. Look at the fine things you can buy <laugh>. This is crap. It's crap. They're selling you crap for thousands of dollars. I just feel bad for expense of their credibility. Yeah, it does. I think less of 'em. And I really feel for any young person or naive person or person who can, Ill afford this, who bought into it being on the promise of, it's democratizing. It's changing the world. You're just being scammed. It's yet another. Griff, welcome to the land of gr. All right, well thank you CNN for shutting it down. Of course. Now all the people who bought those NFTs are pissed off <laugh> without the marketplace. That's it. <laugh>. Alright, well one more break and then we should talk about whether Apple's gonna have an event. I'm curious what you think PC shipments, Daniel have down 20%. The steepest drop in more than 40 years. Not a good quarter for PCs, but Mac sales up 40%.

Daniel Rubino (02:03:26):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:28):
Okay. Thank you. <laugh>. An honest response. Which side?

Daniel Rubino (02:03:35):
So the problem here is there are actually three sets of numbers. There's IDC Canal and Gartner, and they all say vastly different things. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:03:45):
Idc. Cause the companies themselves don't say

Daniel Rubino (02:03:47):
Correct. Especially Apples figure it out particularly tough. Yeah, yeah. Cuz Apple does direct sales a lot of times. So IDC says, Yeah, Apple sold 10 million or shipped 10 million laptops, which was up from 7 million. So you get 40% growth, which is, that's the headline like, Oh my God. Right? You go to Gartner, they said only 5.8 million were shipped. Oh. Which is down from 6.9 million. So it was a 15.6% drop <laugh>. And in between that was Canal who said it was 8 million and it was a 1.7% growth. God.

Leo Laporte (02:04:21):
So they know what, They have no idea they're making

Daniel Rubino (02:04:23):
These conversations, have no idea. And same with the PC numbers are a little bit closer. I mean, think there's definitely a trend here, which shouldn't be surprising that in general, laptop sales have dwindled and everyone predicted this, right? Because the pandemic was gonna be a big expansion of it. But still the numbers are still higher than pre pandemic, which is the good news. And now we're entering into, the market has changed. We do have remote workers. A lot more people are relying on PCs, which means within a couple years they're gonna probably things hold and we don't all return to the office in the old ways. There's gonna be a cycle of companies buying new laptops and getting into that again, which benefits enterprise. In fact, I think it was trying to think, Oh yeah, it was analysis who said desktop was actually up 10%.

(02:05:15):
And so desktop sales apparently are doing better than laptop sales. So I think the numbers a little bit over all over the place, but when it comes to the general trends, they're probably all gonna be going down a little bit. I think that's not unheard of, especially we're entering into a possible recession. There's inflation right now, every company I know of is pulling back either on advertising or on purchases. Cause everybody's waiting to see what happens. But they say once the economy when it recovers, things will probably return to a better state. But I think we shouldn't make too much of this where macro headwinds right now aren't very good for laptop sales.

Leo Laporte (02:05:51):
We should also point out that this is a decline in growth. So they still sold 68 million PCs in the last three months. Yeah. I mean it's not <laugh> just that they

Daniel Rubino (02:06:02):
Sold I

Leo Laporte (02:06:03):
Million before, so last year. So it's still a huge number and it's more than before the pandemic. I mean, 64 million piece or 68 million PCs in three months is a ton of computers. People are buying computers like crazy. It's just not growing maybe as much as it used to or

Daniel Rubino (02:06:24):
Yeah. And I think the consumer market will be hit the hardest here, which I think makes sense. Whereas enterprise is a little bit more resilient because they know they're gonna be around and they need this equipment. The big question of course is does this trend continue in a sense of do we still need laptops and PCs and desktop? Yes. Going forward. Yes. Yeah. And I don't see that changing soon. This idea was years ago we'd have tablets and phones. We don't need computers anymore. No. And now it doesn't seem like the case at all. So we need 'em all. I, Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And lot of trends and improvements in these devices has really make them worth it, especially when it comes to the cameras and being able to work remotely and the power. And of course the battery efficiency of them is improving as well. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:07:07):
All

 Brianna Wu (02:07:08):
Right. I think the Apple number there is really interesting. I mean Apple, their sales are gonna be out cuz the M one laptops and this entire generation in MacBook is just absolutely amazing. Everyone that owns them, myself included, thinks it's the best MacBook they've ever owned. So it's not surprising to me. Mac is doing very well. I'd love to see PC like come up with a way to deliver that long battery life and performance and the stuff they put out. Because my razor laptop has a battery that'll last about 40 minutes.

Leo Laporte (02:07:41):
<laugh> we will talk a little bit about what Apple might be doing in the future, but I wanna take a little break right now. I should mention Daniel, you're right about recession. And we are seeing this also at twit, where commitments for next year's ad sales have basically fallen off the face of the earth because of the economy. People don't know what's going on. A lot of companies are not necessarily gonna stop, but they're just saying, We're putting a hold on

Daniel Rubino (02:08:10):
It. Wait and see. We

Leo Laporte (02:08:11):
Don't know. Yeah, and

Daniel Rubino (02:08:12):
Ukraine, Russia is also weighing down.

Leo Laporte (02:08:14):
Absolutely. Absolutely. And the coming World War II in China, all of this is not good for economy. So we're seeing this too. In fact, it's one of the reasons we mention more than usual. We've been mentioning Club TWiTbecause it is for us, the key to keeping the operation going, keeping the lights on, keeping the people we employ, employed, keeping the shows going, keeping the shows growing if we can. So I wanna just put in a plug for our club twi. If you're not already a member, we just got a new corporate member and we're just really thrilled and grateful.

(02:08:51):
It is a way of, I think, supporting us, but also supporting your employees and supporting your brain. You get ad free versions of all of the shows. We thought that was the big pitch. Turns out, no, not even close. The big pitch, the big benefit is Discord. You get access to a very active, very fun discord where people are chatting about not just the shows as they're going on. We have this week in tech chat going on right now, just like in our irc. But about everything else, I'm always talking and coding with my friends about programming. We've got a beer, wine and cocktail group, <laugh> Pitching Store, New concepts and cocktails. There is a crypto Defi and NFT group. There's food, there's gaming, there's hardware, there's Ham radio, there's Hacking, there's Lennox and more. Plus there are shows in the club that you don't get in public.

(02:09:49):
That's where we launched new shows. That's how this week in space happened. We got together with Rod Pile from the National Space Society, tec malik from space.com. They do a great show called This Week in Space. The club financed its launch, so to speak, a little cheaper than a Falcon nine. They could finance the launch and now that it, it's off the ground. We made it public. But we've got more shows in the club that we haven't yet made public. Like Micah Sergeant's, Hands on Mac and Paul TH's, Hands on Windows, the Untitled Linux show. Stacy's Book Club coming up October 27th. These are all shows you get as a club member, I should mention, you can buy individual shows ad free, including those shows for 2 99 a month. But why not just spend the seven bucks, get access to the Discord, get the ad free shows, get the special TWiTplus feed.

(02:10:38):
I think it's a really worthwhile way to help us. And I ought tell you, going forward we're looking into the abyss of 2023, The club we're counting on to keep things going in 2023 as it becomes harder and harder to sell advertising. I don't just think it's the bad economy. I think Spotify Amazon Microsoft, iHeart, they're all Apple. They're all starting to do podcasts and they're starting to do exclusive podcasts and a lot of the advertising is going to these big companies. So I have a feeling it's gonna get harder and harder for an independent network like Twit to survive without your help. That's why we started Club TWiTand we appreciate it. Thank you very much. twi.tv/club twit. Just a little self-serving plug, but I really appreciate it. Now I also am very grateful for our existing sponsors cuz they're wonderful and we are very careful.

(02:11:32):
You might note that we use the products we talk about in almost every case. We are very careful what we pick. For example, Mint Mobile. Sure, I love Ryan Reynolds, but that's not why I use Mint Mobile. I use Mint mobile cuz I get Premium Wireless starting at $15 a month. Now what do you pay for your T-mobile bill, for instance? Wouldn't it be nice to get the same great 5G service, unlimited nationwide talk and text high speed data on the nation's largest 5G network for $15 a month. And now for the plot twist, there isn't one <laugh>. Yeah, I know. We're all used to these secret hidden fees and fine print. There's not seriously Mint Mobile. Premium wireless starting at 15 bucks a month, No trapping you into a two year contract, No hidden fees. You open the bill and go, What the heck's this.

(02:12:26):
There's no luing you in with free subscriptions or streaming services. You'll forget to cancel and be chill it far and charged full price for There's none of that. This is clean. This is simple. This is the right way for anybody who hates their phone Bill. Mint Mobile offers wireless for just 15 bucks a month. And of course you should look at your existing bill, see how much data you need. You get four gigabytes a month for 15 bucks. If you need more, you can get more. They even have an unlimited plan, but it is the best rate. I guarantee you there's no one comes close. MIT Mobile gives you the best rate whether you're buying for one or a family. By the way, all plans come with unlimited talk and text, high speed data. Use your own phone. If you want MIT Mobile, send you a SIM for free.

(02:13:09):
Or you can buy a phone from MIT Mobile. I get a great iPhone SE from them. 15 bucks a month service, 15 bucks a month. That's 30 bucks a month for a phone and service. Still a third. What I pay the other guys switch to Mint Mobile, get premium wireless service, just 15 bucks a month. No unexpected plot twist mint mobile.com/twi. These guys are really have now become the disruptors in this space. And I think maybe it's a little bit, thanks to Ryan Reynolds. I feel like he's throwing his a little bit of his Deadpool Mojo into there. Mint mobile.com/TWiTit. You'll make your wallet happy mint mobile.com/twit. Thank you Mint Mobile for your support. We had a great week this week on twi. We've got a little mini video. Why don't you take a look? I was thinking of getting a Surface Pro nine with the S q3. Oh, do not get anything on base on Windows ever. No.

Speaker 8 (02:14:05):
Previously on TWiTWindows Weekly.

Leo Laporte (02:14:08):
This is a big day. We got up early for the surface event. Each one of these things has a problem. Okay? They all have the same problem which is that they're the same exact design as before. Surface Studio two plus 11th Gen Intel chips, not latest gen. Are you kidding? Quad Core. How many Cores does an H series? 12th gen chips that have now 16. This is something like that. Quad Core is like what's in my Sonology Tech News Weekly. You actually have the chance to check out the Meta Quests Pro.

Speaker 9 (02:14:39):
There is potentially good usefulness here because they have things like, say, a Microsoft partnership where you can have virtual screens with office. And Meta is just a massive company that has a lot of resources to throw at this. But Holdens and Magic Leap have also been trying to identify specific companies that need specific things and then tailor their devices toward them. And the Quest Pro seems much more like they just crammed as much futuristic stuff that they want in their next headset into this device. And now they hope that it's good for someone.

Leo Laporte (02:15:13):
<laugh>. Today on this weekend space, we visit Nancy Shabo of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to talk about NASA's amazing dark mission.

Speaker 9 (02:15:21):
DART has demonstrated one way to potentially deflect an asteroid from hitting the earth in the future if this was needed. This method is called a kinetic impactor technology, which is just a fancy way of saying crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid and giving it a small nudge.

Speaker 8 (02:15:37):
Twit making the world safe for technology.

Leo Laporte (02:15:41):
Yeah, Rod told me that on the scale of their expectations for the DART program they moved that a asteroid right at the extreme end of the best case scenario. It was a huge success, which if anybody's worried about an asteroid hitting us, given Bruce Willis kind of retiring, I think this is the next best shot that we have, so to speak, at Saving the World. Was it really interesting week this week, thanks to Microsoft and Metta. Will next week be interesting? Thanks to Apple? Seems to be a little bit of a debate over, I think Apple should have an event if Microsoft could have an event for those things, which were, It was interesting. It was similar to Apple's thing where we're gonna take existing designs, put more chips, better chips in it, that kind of thing. I think it's such a great opportunity to get the attention to the press, get people listening and talking about it. It's a big hour long end, why wouldn't you do it? But they're apparently point Markman and others in the know, probably not gonna have an event. They're just gonna put out a press release.

 Brianna Wu (02:16:51):
Yeah,

Daniel Rubino (02:16:51):
I think the only reason Microsoft actually did an event was because it's its 10th anniversary a surface. Okay. And so they kind of want to have something there. And really the Surface Pro Nine was the only real star of the show that actually had some interesting things to talk about it. Laptop five was purely expected. Although the bigger news there was, they dropped amd. but again, I think that might also have to do with the fact that they're not anticipating a lot of laptop sales because of the current economic environment. So maybe they just didn't wanna have so much inventory with two chips. It just, so to make sense this time around. So I think that's probably why Microsoft actually had the event. But I can understand with Apple too. They're just gonna put new processors in there. And let's be honest, that's usually how Apple does it. They do even less change than Microsoft does in its devices. Right?

Leo Laporte (02:17:42):
Well, if you've got a, and you need Apple

Sam Abuelsamid (02:17:45):
Gonna get all the coverage anyway. That's Press Releaser an

Leo Laporte (02:17:49):
Event. Yeah. You okay? The police outside <laugh> that you, Daniel <laugh> Siren. Siren went off. What do you think, Brianna? You were just singing the praises of the M two MacBooks.

 Brianna Wu (02:18:03):
Well, I mean, look, obviously, I'm sorry Daniel, I have an Apple fan girl. We could still be friends but I almost feel like these events have lost something in the post covid era just because, So I mean, they're beautifully produced, right? You've got the drone cams of everything flying through the year transitioning. It's well done. But I mean, am I the only way thinks it feels just a little bit artificial?

Leo Laporte (02:18:32):
Well, so no. In fact, lately I've been saying this is just an infomercial. Why are we, why doing this? We're giving them all this air time.

 Brianna Wu (02:18:42):
A hundred percent. If they don't have a really sexy, interesting product to bring out, I don't think, in 2022 slightly revised Apple, silicon hardware.

Leo Laporte (02:18:55):
No, you're right. Is

 Brianna Wu (02:18:57):
Something worth holding in?

Leo Laporte (02:18:58):
It came from the days when Apple was, every time they were doing an event, they were announcing some big breakthrough. And you could do that for a while. But eventually it's just gonna be incremental improvements. Maybe next year when they do their mixed reality headset, they'll for sure have a big event around that

Sam Abuelsamid (02:19:14):
<affirmative> or maybe the Apple. Silicon Mac might be a reason to

Leo Laporte (02:19:18):
Do an event. Well, that's what I thought. Maybe they do an event. So Apple's quarterly results come out the 27th. Guin says between now and then, probably on the 24th, they'll release iPad OS 16, which has been held back along with an announcement of new iPads. We're still waiting for the new Mac Os Ventura. We were waiting because we thought, well, they'll release it with New Max. And they have promised, they had promised a new Mac Pro this year. Thinking is they probably will announce something and then offer it for sale next year. So anyway, we'll find out. We'll, we passed the opportunity for the 18th. We would've had some news about it before now. So now we're gonna look at the 24th of 25th for an Apple event. All right, it's time for the Elon Musk segment. I saved the worst of the best for last, depending on your point of view. <laugh>, the information has seen the new proposal Elon has made to Twitter for ownership. And according to these documents, Elon will have absolute control. He will have sole discretion to decide whether to pursue a sale of the company, an I P O or some other refinancing transaction involving the business. In other words, the board, no nothing to say about it. There won't be any shareholders cuz he's buying the company from the shareholders. So there won't be any shareholders. How? Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:49):
There will be some, I mean he's got

Leo Laporte (02:20:51):
Oh yeah, employees, investors, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:53):
Investors. Well, I don't know if the employees will even have shares, but certainly his other partners. People like Larry Ellison and Jason Calcan apparently. And Saudi Arabia.

Leo Laporte (02:21:06):
Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Sovereign Fund.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:21:09):
Yeah. I mean there there'll be a bunch of investors but not publicly traded.

Leo Laporte (02:21:13):
Obviously he is apparently considering an ipo, a put it back in the public market. That's one way to try to make your 44 billion back. By the way, I'm watching Twitter, stock price creep up. It's over $50 now. His offer is for 54 20. As it gets close to that number, it just means the stock market's starting to believe, maybe Elon's gonna close. Musk will have exclusive authority to appoint and remove members of the board. See, this should send, if you're an employee at Twitter, this should send chills up and down your spine. All minorities investors have to agree

Sam Abuelsamid (02:21:48):
To this company. So

Leo Laporte (02:21:49):
Is that how

Sam Abuelsamid (02:21:49):
He has total control Total? Yeah, he has total control at Tesla. Yeah. I mean, he owns enough of Tesla and SpaceX that, and he's got very, particularly a Tesla. He's got a very compliant board that basically just rubber stamps whatever he wants to do that there he is effectively in total control of all of his enterprises

Leo Laporte (02:22:14):
In years past. That would've been a good thing. When we thought of him as Tony Stark, that would've been

Sam Abuelsamid (02:22:21):
A good thing. I never thought <laugh>. Yeah, I never thought of him as Tony Stark. Now

Leo Laporte (02:22:25):
That we've seen his Twitter bizarre Twitter tweets, is he selling a perfume called Burnt Hair?

 Brianna Wu (02:22:32):
Oh God, yeah. It's like something the world would do

Leo Laporte (02:22:36):
A hundred dollars a bottle,

Daniel Rubino (02:22:38):
But his audience is so dumb that they bought it all and he made a million dollars. They said like, it's absurd.

Leo Laporte (02:22:45):
Well,

 Brianna Wu (02:22:46):
Can we have an honest discussion about what this is gonna mean for free speech? A story that came out last week is it was reported that Elon had a talk with Vladimir

Leo Laporte (02:22:59):
Putin and Putin

 Brianna Wu (02:23:00):
Exactly before coming out with this poll. Basically advocating, Hey, do you think Ukraine should forfeit the Crimea and also have to supply them with water literally coming out directly before that. He's talking to

Leo Laporte (02:23:18):
People. Those are Russian talking points.

 Brianna Wu (02:23:19):
Yeah, that's correct. Then immediately after that, they suddenly decide, Oh, well I think we're gonna cut off access in the Crimea with starlink greatly hampering any efforts to retake that territory. And now you're talking about Elon Musk being in charge and what I believe, and many in the State Department believe is our most weaponize space when it comes to information warfare. And I have extreme concerns about all of this. I don't think this sale should go through, I think for a million different reasons. I think it's gonna be bad for free speech. I think it's gonna be bad for women and black people and gay people. I think that I'm worried about national security, and I think if you followed how Elon runs any of his companies from Tesla to SpaceX, it pops in with these crazy ideas. But he is not an engineer. It doesn't lead to a better product. There's a lot of hype, but there are very few promises that end up being delivered on. So my concerns here could not be more serious.

Leo Laporte (02:24:32):
Elon after tweeting his Russian Ukraine peace plan

Daniel Rubino (02:24:40):
They've got the China one too.

Leo Laporte (02:24:42):
Yeah, same thing. He

Sam Abuelsamid (02:24:44):
And he agreed not to sell Starling service in China, which would've been a way to circumvent the Great Wall, the great firewall. Interesting. The Chinese said, Yeah we don't want Starling here. Tesla

Leo Laporte (02:24:59):
Is made in China, if you do, and they sell a lot of cars in China,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:25:03):
But the Chinese government owns the land on which the Shanghai Tesla factory interesting is situated. And the loan, the original loan agreement for that, the lease agreement gives them the right to basically take it back anytime they want. So Tesla essentially has to do whatever the Chinese government

Leo Laporte (02:25:26):
Wants. And we see this with Apple too. <affirmative>. If you wanna be in the Chinese market, you do whatever the Chinese government wants now. So really the only question is Tesla just a businessman pretending to be a free speech advocate, or is he some sort of bizarre libertarian? It's kind of hard to figure him out. When he proposed the peace plan on Twitter, the outgoing Ukrainian ambassador said F off, he said, in the most diplomatic way, F off at which Elon says, Hey, you know what, we don't wanna pay for those starlink base stations in Ukraine wrote a letter to the DO o d saying it's costing us 400 million over the next year. Could you pay for this? And then of course there

 Brianna Wu (02:26:15):
Was additional reporting that came out that actually the Pentagon has been paying for, I believe 80% of those costs to

Leo Laporte (02:26:21):
Date anyway. Yes. Yeah. Not to mention this massive subsidies he gets for SpaceX and so forth. He says now it's the pettiness. Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's just babyish in a tweet yesterday. He said, Okay, the hell with it, even though starlink is still losing money and other companies are getting billions of taxpayers dollars, will just continue to fund the Ukraine government for free. But you're saying that the DODs already paying a big chunk of Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:26:52):
Most of SpaceX's revenue comes from NASA and the dod. Yeah, yeah. Rights. They do do some private stuff for other companies, satellite launches, but the bulk of their revenue comes from NASA and the Department of Defense,

Leo Laporte (02:27:08):
Elon Musk and Kanye West. Kind of <laugh>. Yeah. Hand in hand. These billionaires should, I don't know what, Go away.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:27:19):
Billionaires should not be on Twitter.

Leo Laporte (02:27:21):
They shouldn't be on Twitter for sure. But in a way, I said this about Trump too. I was glad he was on Twitter cuz that we saw his true self. We see the true Elon Musk, but he

Sam Abuelsamid (02:27:31):
Didn't really help,

Leo Laporte (02:27:32):
Did it? No, it doesn't help. But at least we know we don't have that fantasy anymore about who Elon Musk is or Kanye West is. We know the truth is out there. And so in a way, I think there's a value to having these people be in public. If I were their advisor, I'd say, Shut the hell up. But I know everybody's told Elon to do that a hundred times. Ain't never gonna do it. He says, he talks to Kanye about the anti hole antis thing and it's gonna be, He got it. He got it. So

Daniel Rubino (02:28:07):
Although isn't Connie on Twitter today with another interview and he's going off

Leo Laporte (02:28:12):
Morning. Oh, podcast, podcast. Oh my God. He's repeating every antisemitic trope from the elders of Zion on down. I mean, it's all complete and utter BS from the manual of antisemitism. You might as well be quoting mind comp nuts anyway. You think Elon is just putting on a show and he's playing 12 D Chess?

 Brianna Wu (02:28:42):
Nope. <laugh>. I think that he's not as much on the right or the left.

Leo Laporte (02:28:47):
No, I don't. He's political.

 Brianna Wu (02:28:49):
I think his text messages that were leaked in this lawsuit really show he's a billionaire. It's a reality. All of its own with a concern and honestly a victim complex. That is really interesting considering the amount of power he wields in this world. Very trouble. Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:29:13):
Yeah. And one of the reasons why he does today runs his companies, the way he does in total control is he never got over getting pushed out of PayPal. That was something that, from what I've read and people I've talked to, has always bothered him the way he got pushed out there. And this is one of the reasons why he's always insisted on maintaining such a large equity stake in Tesla, in SpaceX in particular, and then his other ventures. And he wants to retain control of everything that he's involved with. He doesn't want any, The one sort of exception is at SpaceX where Gwen Shotwell the COO runs, basically runs the business day to day. And that's good. Is she an engineer

Leo Laporte (02:30:12):
Or no

Sam Abuelsamid (02:30:14):
Or she's a business person, remember? Yeah, I think she's an engineer, but she does

Leo Laporte (02:30:19):
Keon at bay

Sam Abuelsamid (02:30:20):
Somewhat. Yeah. But she does a good job of running the company. She knows how to manage the company, which is something that for all the capabilities that Elon's got as a marketer, an ideas person, he's accomplished a lot. But he's a terrible manager. And if he was just executive chairman or something where he was providing the vision for the company and then letting competent people actually execute on that, I think all of his companies would probably be in a lot better shape. But he, he's always feels like he needs to retain total control. And you see that, especially with Tesla over the years, the tweets about sleeping on the floor of the factory when they were having his production problems. It's like that's not something a CEO should be doing. A good CEO hires the right people to manage those sorts of things and then steps back and lets them do their job. You know, don't need one individual that does that is going to be hovering and micromanaging like that. And I think that's the problem you're gonna see at Twitter if he ultimately takes control of Twitter is he's going to be micromanaging all kinds of things. And I think it's just gonna turn into even more of a mess than it always has been.

Daniel Rubino (02:31:50):
But he wants to turn into WeChat, he says that's the big vision. This one killer app, he calls X. And some of the ideas actually come from his time at PayPal, speaking of when it comes to commerce that he wants to finally build upon and build into Twitter. But yes, it's concept, which if you remember Skype even tried this years ago with bots and everything. A lot of companies have tried this idea and in western markets to emulate what has happened in China with building this one app to rule them all. But really no one has had that success. And I don't see how this late in the game Twitter is gonna do that. But that's apparently what he's gonna attempt to do with the service, which, yeah, it's gonna be almost what Facebook did where just kept throwing stuff in there hoping that people will start to use it and they'll, it'll be profitable at some

Leo Laporte (02:32:41):
Point. I'm guessing that Elon does, knows that that's impossible. That WeChat happened in a climate, the Chinese government run climate that was very different than anything in the United States. And he's just saying that because he's trying to keep the investors quiet and happy. And in the long run, his hope is an I P O. If he can trick everybody into investing in Twitter, will get him out of this. Cuz he now knows he's stuck paying the 44 billion. By the way, I wanna fully credit Gwen Shotwell. She has a degree, a Bachelor of Science and Mechanical Engineering, a Master's of Science and Applied Mathematics. She worked at the El Segundo Research Center of the Aerospace Corporation, did technical work on military space research and development contracts. She worked on STS 39 in thermal analysis. She worked at Space Systems engineering and project management positions. Joined SpaceX in 2002 and convinced Elon that SpaceX needed a dedicated employee to work on biz dev full time. And since has risen to company president. She is a business person at this point, but with an absolute aerospace background. So president and COO of SpaceX, probably her number one skill, I would guess is strong,

(02:34:05):
Keep an Elon at bay. Although he likes to tweet about how, Yeah, I was just spent all night talking about how those jets should work on the <laugh> Falcon.

Daniel Rubino (02:34:15):
I think that's the weird, the myth around him is, so if you go into the responses on Twitter, the people who defend him, which is a whole other weird thing boy, they all think he literally invents, Right. Designed

Leo Laporte (02:34:29):
Stuff. The Rockets.

Daniel Rubino (02:34:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's an engineer and you're like, he's one of the biggest inventors ever. I he's ever met that anything <laugh>. Yeah. He's told people to invent. He's invested and paid. Maybe

Leo Laporte (02:34:40):
If he's done anything right, he's chosen the right people. Choosing Shotwell is

Daniel Rubino (02:34:44):
The right. That's a skill. Skill.

 Brianna Wu (02:34:47):
I also also think something I really appreciate about Elon, and this will probably be the only nice thing I say on this episode today, but I think something I respect about him is he is presenting an idealistic version of the future that really is straight from a 50 science fiction novel. He's pushing for automated

Leo Laporte (02:35:06):
Thomas Swift. He's not

 Brianna Wu (02:35:07):
Automated. Yeah, yeah. He's pushing for automated Androids that will do work around the house, self-driving cars, rockets that go to the moon, all these things. It really is amazing what he is pushing for it. I think that his males very male, younger supporters, they see that and they feel like they're in on this story where they can create their own reality. And I think you have that there. And then I think you have the press over here that bought it for the first five years, but now there's a lot more skepticism. So when Elon comes out and says like he did at the AI Tesla event, like, Oh well this robot can't stand up on its own now, but we'll be walking in a week. Well, maybe five years ago the press would've believed him on that today. I don't think anyone does. And I think that's why you have these competing realities.

Leo Laporte (02:36:02):
Yeah. We've all learned a little bit of a lesson about hype hype masters and maybe we are not quite as cred credulous as we have been in the past. I certainly am not. One last story, I don't know about you. I am looking at Netflix thinking, is this worth 1499 a month? Netflix knows kind of the thought everybody's going through right now. There is nothing on Netflix that is as commanding as some of their previous efforts. Like Stranger Things, the Queen's Gambit, The Crown. So they are looking at ad supported Netflix. They've announced it'll be $6 99 cents a month launching next month. Netflix basic will be available in 12 countries. So now you have three choices. Quit Netflix, keep it at the high price and hope something good comes on <laugh>. Or 6 99 a month in watching ads.

Daniel Rubino (02:36:59):
Whatever you don't get. The 4K tier is even higher. It's like 29.

Leo Laporte (02:37:02):
Oh that's right. 20. That's right. 99. I spent a lot of money on Netflix. Yeah,

 Brianna Wu (02:37:06):
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:37:07):
We were actually getting ready to cancel Netflix and then I switched to a different T-mobile plan that was gonna save me some money. Now that I'm old enough to get the 55.

Leo Laporte (02:37:20):
You got Silver Plan. Oh good.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:37:21):
Yeah, it's the 55 plus snacks plan from T-Mobile. So can I

Leo Laporte (02:37:25):
Tell about Netflix for free? <laugh>? No, you don't get Netflix for free, unfortunately.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:37:31):
<laugh>? Yeah. Well, I mean, actually the reason why I stuck with T-Mobile, cuz I was actually thinking about switching away, is because they offer a version of the Google One plan that still has unlimited Google Photos. Original original resolution. So for 15 bucks a month, I get two terabytes of storage plus unlimited Google photo storage on top of that,

Leo Laporte (02:37:56):
Netflix has lost over a million subscribers so far this year. I wonder if you're, You're not alone Sam. I think a lot of people are thinking, do I really need to?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:38:08):
Well, I mean we've been doing, for the last several years, Netflix is, Netflix and Amazon Prime have basically been the only two that have stuck consistently Amazon Prime because we use it for shipping and other stuff and Netflix for obvious reasons. But all the other streaming services, I mean, we quit cable TV six, seven years ago and all the other streaming services, we turn 'em on and off every few months depending on what we're watching. So I just turned off HBO Max for a while and we'll probably come back to it at some point.

Leo Laporte (02:38:44):
How has the dragon comes back? So does actually, I'm a after now watching both. I think the power brings, The power really won the what do you guys think? I like the rings of power a little better than the Hus of the Dragon.

 Brianna Wu (02:39:00):
I haven't seen it. I

Sam Abuelsamid (02:39:03):
Seen you either.

Leo Laporte (02:39:04):
What kinda TV watchers. What kind of couch potatoes are you playing? Pinball driving your boxer around. Come on, sit on the couch.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:39:12):
You just watching Bad Sisters on Apple tv? Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:39:14):
That's supposed to be good. Is it good? Oh, that's

 Brianna Wu (02:39:16):
A good yellow.

Leo Laporte (02:39:16):
Yeah,

 Brianna Wu (02:39:17):
It's good. That's good too. Oh my gosh.

Leo Laporte (02:39:19):
Hey I really loved the Rings of power. It took a while. It started really, really slowly, but by the last episode it all gelled. I think they've been, Does

 Brianna Wu (02:39:29):
It have women in it? Because the movies don't, The

Leo Laporte (02:39:32):
Star is <laugh>.

 Brianna Wu (02:39:33):
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte (02:39:34):
She's the hero. In fact, that's one of the things that's interesting about both the House of the Dragon Rings of power. It's about women in most it really? Okay. Yeah. That little too much childbirth for me in the House of the Dragon. But you, We'll let that slide sort so to speak. Brianna. Woo. Thank you. Yes, you rock.

 Brianna Wu (02:39:52):
Yes. Cohos. I tell a super quick story before we jump off today. Yes. So I wanna tell y'all a story about a couple weeks ago. So I'm sitting there on my phone in the afternoon, I'm just doing my job and my phone starts blowing up and they're like, Do you know Alex Jones is talking about you? What? At the Alex Jones trial? And I'm like, What <laugh>? What's going on? So I go and I turn on court TV and I go back, I get the clip, I see the Alex, the Sandy Hook families have brought up Alex Jones's lawsuit against me as part of the prosecution of their case. So just to give a little bit of background on this, wait

Leo Laporte (02:40:37):
A minute. Minute. You defamed Alex Jones.

 Brianna Wu (02:40:40):
He said, I did. I did.

Leo Laporte (02:40:42):
Congratulations, <laugh>.

 Brianna Wu (02:40:44):
So the Connecticut Post put out an article talking about the factual events that happened. This a reputable local paper talking about how when Alex Jones turned over a bunch of information for discovery to the Sandy Hook parents, there was a bunch of child porn in that. Oh. So I saw that story and I accurately quote the Connecticut Post. I put none of my own opinion on that. And I linked to the story below, very clear, This is reportage just as neutral as I could possibly be. And Alex Jones, his lawyer, threatens me on Twitter and goes, I'm gonna sue you if you don't take that down. Wow. Yeah. Go. And I look at that tweet, I'm like, There's nothing there that could possibly sue me over. I mean, I'm just quoting, I'm linking to a reputable paper and quoting a story. So he sues me. And long story, the lawsuit itself is not a mystery to me. Why Alex Jones has lost so much in court because court case is riddled with typos. It makes no sense.

Leo Laporte (02:41:57):
He sued the Young Turks as well

 Brianna Wu (02:41:59):
Sued the Young Turks and Andrew, who was a journalist for Buzzfeed at the time. So eventually they're just forced to drop the entire suit because it makes Absolut absolutely no sense. Right. Here's where it gets interesting.

Leo Laporte (02:42:13):
By the way, did it cost you a penny?

 Brianna Wu (02:42:16):
Nothing. Good. I had no pro bono lawyer. Good. That looked at this and said, I would love to represent you. Good. This is third. And if he kept the case up, we would've brought it to Massachusetts where I would've done anti slap and sued him for triple damages. Awesome. Cause you had no stand on. So the Sandy Hook families looked at this and they're going, Okay, so in our court case, Alex Jones is saying, free speech. I need to be able to claim this. Yeah. I need to be able to report on things. And then they try, they bring up this court case, which the lawyers work so hard to suppress because they know it destroys their defense because Alex Jones wants free speech for himself. But for people like me to be able to put my opinion out there, he tried to shut me down. So obviously this was a very small variable in a very well argued legal case. But I had a small role to play in that billion dollar judgment against Alex Jones, which I am very proud

Leo Laporte (02:43:23):
Of. <laugh>. That's something to celebrate <laugh>. That is something to celebrate. Wow. So in what context were you brought up in the current trial? They just mentioned this or,

 Brianna Wu (02:43:32):
So there was a whole thing. His lawyers work so hard to try to exclude this. It was a whole period of questioning where he brings me up and he's like, You see Brianna Woo because of this. Do you remember her? She was saying stuff on the internet, blah, blah, blah. And then they go into the free speech argument like, Well, don't you see how you're saying one thing for yourself? Right. And another for other people. So

Leo Laporte (02:43:56):
Unbelievable it. One could hope that he'll be bankrupted by the billion dollar judgment, but one sadly knows he makes far more than that. Well on his little Brianna Woo. Executive director of Rebellion Pack Rebellion pack.com.

 Brianna Wu (02:44:17):
Yes, that's it. Help the rebellion. If you wanna help us out, join the rebellion. It's the best place to go. Help the rebellion, not join the rebellion That URL was taken.

Leo Laporte (02:44:26):
<laugh> <laugh>. But you don't have to get a tattoo. That's the good news on this one.

 Brianna Wu (02:44:33):
No, we won't

Leo Laporte (02:44:34):
Ask you to do that. Yeah. Help the rebellion. Rebellion pack.com. Progress in America starts with you. Awesome. Good job. And of course, listen to Brianna, as I started to say with Simon de Roho and Christina Warren on her great podcast Rocket, which is bigger and better than ever@relay.fm. Just wonderful podcast. I just Great show. I wish I could do a podcast half as good as that, but

 Brianna Wu (02:44:59):
Well, first of all, you do. But there's nothing else out there like Rocket. There's just

Leo Laporte (02:45:03):
A, It's so good. Yeah, well done actually. Relay's got a lot of good. Mike does a good job. He's got a lot of good podcasts on that network including some from our own friends like Andy and Naco and a Florence ion material. And you and Christina, would you help us get ahold of Simone? She doesn't return our calls. I want to get

 Brianna Wu (02:45:25):
I will do that. I

Leo Laporte (02:45:26):
Wanna get her back on the show. I think she's so wonderful. You

 Brianna Wu (02:45:30):
Should have a week where it's just the three of us we come on and do TWiTwith.

Leo Laporte (02:45:34):
We could do a CoLab. Rocket meets TWiT<laugh>. Although so

 Brianna Wu (02:45:38):
Good.

Leo Laporte (02:45:39):
<laugh> <laugh>. I like it. Thank you. Daniel Rubino. wonderful job. It's not Rubino, although it was Rubino. Yeah. Executive editor at Windows Central. I just kind of latinized your name. <laugh>. Yeah. Anything else you want to talk? You do the Windows Central podcast every Friday. I know. Yep. What else? Anything else you wanna plug? Oh well

Daniel Rubino (02:46:03):
Yeah, I'll just say stay tuned. We got until 13th Gen Desktop reviews coming out soon. Surface reviews, I'm sure we'll be out soon as well. So

Sam Abuelsamid (02:46:13):
I

Leo Laporte (02:46:13):
Have a 12 Gen Dell 15 and I like XPS 15 and I like it. People have been kind of badmouthing the 12. You think the 13 would be better?

Daniel Rubino (02:46:23):
So it depends what you value. If you value performance, The 12 and 13 gen, and especially to 13 Gen, are very powerful processors. I'm running the core I five right now and well, I can't reveal any numbers. It's powerful. And I gotta slap in an I nine a little bit later to test that one. The problem with them is, comes to laptops is the efficiency part is not quite there. Right. But they're very much aware of that. But right now they're tackling power.

Leo Laporte (02:46:48):
Right. I was hoping for extraordinary Battery of Life. But it's fine. It's good. And I love the idea on the 12th that I can run an I five and get some pretty good Pro. I didn't get an I seven or an I cuz I was worried about Throbbing. You

Daniel Rubino (02:47:02):
Don't need

Leo Laporte (02:47:02):
It. And I feel like the I five really is a very nice system. Right. Windows Central, Read all about it. Those reviews coming soon. Thank you Daniel and Sam, my friend. He appears every week on the Tech Guy show to talk about cars. Guide House Insights is his day job. His podcast Wheel bearings is available@wheelbearings.media, wherever you find podcasts. Always a pleasure. When you coming out here to drive a vehicle?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:47:29):
Anytime soon. I will be in Palm Springs in a couple of weeks. Have fun to drive some BMWs, including the new I seven

Leo Laporte (02:47:39):
Electric. It's such a good job. I'm so jealous.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:47:42):
Not the worst gig in the world. <laugh>. I could. So I'm lucky I get both in my job as an analyst and part-time journalist. I get to talk to a lot of really interesting people, a lot of really smart people. Like this conference I was at this week on simulation. There's a lot of fascinating people there. Learned a lot of things. And so I've been in the auto industry over 30 years now in various roles and I've been saying for several years now. And it remains to true that this is the most interesting time of my career. Absolutely. There's so many things happening. Yeah. I'm always learning new stuff and I really enjoy what I do. It

Leo Laporte (02:48:29):
Was a legacy industry, so about 10 years ago and all of a sudden it's cutting edge, which is fascinating. It's just really interesting. Yeah. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Brianna. Thank

Sam Abuelsamid (02:48:39):
You. Thank you. Just and just one more note. Yes, I did, bought a new Samsung Galaxy Book two a few months ago. Oh. With the 12th gen I seven in it, and I really like it. And it's a fabulous laptop. It was. It's light thin has great performance compared to what I had before. They're

Leo Laporte (02:49:00):
So thin, they're so beautiful. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:49:02):
The

Daniel Rubino (02:49:02):
Performance on that laptop is better than you would think it was. It's one of the best performing

Sam Abuelsamid (02:49:07):
Laptops for that generation.

Leo Laporte (02:49:09):
Do you ever use the

Sam Abuelsamid (02:49:10):
Pen? It's got an AMT screen. Ooh, nice. Yeah, I have the regular Galaxy Book too. Not the Pro. Oh, okay. So it support the pen, but I don't, It supports the pen, but I don't have one. I would never use it. But it's got a beautiful AMT screen on there.

Leo Laporte (02:49:25):
How's the battery? That's fantastic. They're climbing 21 hours. You getting?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:49:29):
Well, I think that's for the new, That's for the three. Oh, maybe No Galaxy Brook two

Leo Laporte (02:49:34):
Pro. This might be the Pro. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:49:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. Oh yeah, that's the, I think mine is rated at I dunno, 14 or 15 hours. I can get, I've gotten 7, 8, 9 hours depending on what I'm doing. If I'm just writing, it'll run nine times.

Leo Laporte (02:49:51):
Oh yeah. I wish I'd known about this before I bought the Dell. This looks really nice. Yeah. I wish I could justify getting a new laptop, but really they don't wear out as fast as I wish they would. <laugh>.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:50:02):
And I don't hate Windows 11. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:50:06):
No, I love Windows 11 I I think it's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing wrong with Windows 11. Thank you, Sam. Brianna, Daniel, you guys are great. Thanks to all of you for joining us. If you wanna watch live, we do TWiTevery Sunday afternoon, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 utc, right after the Tech Guy show. You can watch us at live dot twit tv if you're watching Live Chat with us on our irc. I just found out that IRC turned 34 years old yesterday. Wow. I thought it was older than that to be honest with you, because we started using IRC just four years later in 1992. So we've been using IRC for 30 years of those 34 years. That's kind of amazing. Love that irc, irc.twi.tv. Of course, you also can chat if you're a Club TWiTmember in our Discord after the fact. You can get a shows on demand@twit.tv.

(02:51:05):
There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week Tech. In fact, all of our shows have their own YouTube channel, which is nice. Great way to share little clips if you wanna do that. YouTube's really good for that. And of course, the easiest, best way to get the show, any of our shows, I would say, is to get it through a podcast client. Podcast is very popular. Apple's Podcasts, Google Podcasts, because then it gets downloaded automatically the minute we finished cleaning it up, editing it, taking out the square words. And if your podcast client, as many do allows for reviews, please leave us a five star review. The one disadvantage of being the longest Running Tech podcast in the world since 2005, almost 18 years now, is that people forget that, that you're around. I email all the time, said, I thought you were dead. So <laugh>, tell the world, Leah's not dead. <laugh>, TWiTlives on. Leave us a good review and maybe somebody will discover it. Thanks for joining us, everybody. We'll see you next time. Another is in the camp. Bye-bye. Bye bye

Speaker 10 (02:52:23):
Baby. Doing the All right.