This Week in Tech Episode 912 Transcript
Leo Laporte:
It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech. We have a great show. Tim Stevens is here, Harry McCracken, Christina Warren, three of my favorite people. Of course, AI is the topic. It's an amazing world we live in and some of the new things that are happening with AI and some of the old things that maybe aren't so good. We'll talk about the Microsoft quarterly results, not so hot, Intel, the worst quarter in a long time, and about the Oscar campaign that took Twitter by storm and worked. It's all coming up next on TWiT.
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Leo Laporte:
This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 912 recorded Sunday, January 29th, 2023. Let me consult my AI lawyer. This Week in Tech is brought to you by World Wide Technology with an innovative culture, thousands of IT engineers, application developers, unmatched labs and integration centers for testing and deploying technology at scale. WWT helps customers bridge the gap between strategy and execution. To learn more about WWT, visit wwt.com/twit. And by ACI Learning. Tech is one industry where opportunities outpace growth, especially in cybersecurity. One-third of information security jobs require a cybersecurity certification. To maintain your competitive edge across audit, IT, and cybersecurity readiness, visit go.acilearning.com/twit. And by Bitwarden. Get the password manager that offers a robust and cost-effective solution that can drastically increase your chances of staying safe online. Get started with a free trial of a teams or enterprise plan or get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bitwarden.com/twit.
Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad-supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise at twit.tv and launch your campaign now. It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. I'm just going to put a little black arm band, if you don't mind, on the San Francisco 49ers gold throwback jacket. That's life. Tim Stevens is here. Hello. Oh, that was Harry. Hello, Tim. Good to see you.
Tim Stevens:
Hey, Leo. Good to see you as well. Thank you for having me.
Leo Laporte:
Tim, of course, has been on for many years. He's now a freelancer at Jalopnik, at TechCrunch, at MotorTrend, and The Verge, and he has his very own Substack, timstevens.substack.com. Great article on your visit to the Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia. Wow.
Tim Stevens:
Yeah. That was quite a trip, a really interesting social experience on a lot of levels. It opened my eyes to a lot of things, but yeah, amazing event. I've been doing a lot of great travel lately, so I've been very lucky.
Leo Laporte:
Nice. Well, it's great to have you back. Not much ice racing.
Tim Stevens:
Thanks, Leo. Sadly not.
Harry McCracken:
Are you aware that Tim can't really be heard at least by-
Leo Laporte:
You can't hear him?
Harry McCracken:
Just barely.
Leo Laporte:
All right. Hold on. We are not ready to begin yet.
Burke:
I need somebody to talk to adjust the level, Leo.
Leo Laporte:
He doesn't have headphones on.
Burke:
I know.
Leo Laporte:
So we can't do a bleed. I understand why we had the bleed.
Christina Warren:
That's why there was a bleed.
Leo Laporte:
Harry, do you mind wearing headphones?
Christina Warren:
Now I know why [inaudible 00:03:52] bleed.
Harry McCracken:
I'm happy with whatever works for us.
Leo Laporte:
We could provide you with headphones.
Harry McCracken:
Sure.
Leo Laporte:
I apologize.
Harry McCracken:
No problem. Do you have some? Burke, you can get them out of my office if you don't.
Burke:
I have some. Well, I have [inaudible 00:04:04].
Leo Laporte:
Give him some nice ones.
Burke:
[inaudible 00:04:07].
Harry McCracken:
The good stuff.
Leo Laporte:
Give him good stuff. Give him the good ones. I think there's an unopened box in my cupboard on the left there. Give him some sterile headphones. I'm sorry, Harry.
Harry McCracken:
It's okay.
Leo Laporte:
I wasn't paying attention. Yeah, usually, we use to bleed, but I think-
Harry McCracken:
I suddenly realized you might not be aware that I couldn't hear him.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, that would be a disadvantage to the overall program. That'd be a bad thing. Good. Nobody should hire DeMeco Ryans as a head coach. That would be a terrible idea. It's Lisa's birthday and I really wanted her to have a nice birthday.
Tim Stevens:
Happy birthday, Lisa.
Christina Warren:
Happy birthday, Lisa.
Leo Laporte:
It's also our anniversary because I foolishly thought if we got married on her birthday, I would only have to give her one gift.
Christina Warren:
You didn't think that.
Leo Laporte:
No.
Christina Warren:
That wasn't why you did that.
Leo Laporte:
I just thought it'd be easier to remember.
Christina Warren:
You're lying.
Leo Laporte:
One fewer date to remember or something. I don't know. Yeah. No, it was fun. Unfortunately, the place we got married, Calistoga Ranch, has burned to the ground in the wildfires. It's gone,-
Christina Warren:
Oh, no.
Leo Laporte:
... which makes me sad. She says, "Ah, it's life." Lisa, no. Because we used to go there on our anniversary and stuff. It was really nice. But I've just learned, we had a caller from the new Kona Village, which is opening this summer in Kona, Hawaii, I've just learned that that's reopening and that's on my bucket list as somewhere to stay. That's where Steve Jobs was staying when the iPhone 4 Antennagate happened and he didn't want to come back, but they made him come back.
Tim Stevens:
That's how good it is, I guess, huh?
Leo Laporte:
At the time, there's no TVs, no phones, no internet. It was like you were in a sting in a traditional Hawaiian [inaudible 00:06:13].
Tim Stevens:
Sounds all right.
Leo Laporte:
How's that? Now, you can hear it? You got the volume there so you can control that. Don't deafen yourself.
Tim Stevens:
Can you hear me, Harry?
Leo Laporte:
Harry, can you hear me? Harry, can you hear me?
Harry McCracken:
I can hear you because you're sitting next to me.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, it's not a good test.
Burke:
Someone else needs to speak, Leo.
Tim Stevens:
One, two. Can you hear me? Are you receiving me?
Harry McCracken:
Yes.
Tim Stevens:
Should I tell you what I have for breakfast this morning? Okay, good. All right. Awesome.
Harry McCracken:
All right. I think we're good.
Leo Laporte:
Yay. All right, here we go. Yes, someday, we'll have four in the studio again. That has happened. Christina was here, but I don't think we've had it... When was the last time we had an all in-person show? It's been a while. All right, starting over. You can hear?
Harry McCracken:
I can hear it, I think.
Leo Laporte:
It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news with a panel of fabulous people. I'll start over on my right with Mr. Tim Stevens. We haven't seen in a while. Freelance writer now. You see Tim's stuff all over the place, Jalopnik and TechCrunch and MotorTrend and The Verge. He also has his very own Substack called Around the Next Bend.
Tim Stevens:
I made it myself.
Leo Laporte:
All by your lonesome. That's awesome.
Tim Stevens:
Thanks for having me, Leo. It's great to be here.
Leo Laporte:
No, it's great to see you. We missed you. Lots of stuff to talk about. You just came back from Dakar, in the Dakar Road Rally. I love your pictures, but it was an interesting, I guess, mixed bag of experiences.
Tim Stevens:
Yeah. Thanks. It was a great trip to Saudi Arabia. I learned a lot of things, both good and bad.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Also with us in studio, because COVID is over, no, Harry McCracken, global tech editor at Fast Company, fingers crossed. Hello, Harry. Good to see you.
Harry McCracken:
Nice to actually see you in person.
Leo Laporte:
Yay! You brought your wonderful wife, Marie, with you. Great to see-
Harry McCracken:
I did, indeed.
Leo Laporte:
... you all. She has custody of Lilly, the TWiT pet.
Harry McCracken:
She will be taking Lilly home with us, I'm sure.
Leo Laporte:
Lilly's about the best dog you ever saw in your life, Burke's dog. She lives here. Well, I shouldn't say that because I think it's in our lease she's not allowed to spend any time here, but shh. I didn't say that. I don't think the landlord watches TWiT. Also great to see Christina Warren from GitHub. Last time, you were in studio, senior dev advocate over there at GitHub. Good to see you.
Christina Warren:
Glad to be here.
Leo Laporte:
You made the move this week when Ivory came out. Tapbots was one of the third-party apps that Mr. Musk clobbered at first without warning, then with a lie saying, "You've been violating the rules." For 15 years? You just noticed? Finally, they said, "Oh, they retroactively changed the rules. No third parties." But that wasn't enough to push you to Mastodon and Ivory was the thing that did it. Tapbots was a very, very nice, or Tweetbot rather, was a very nice Twitter client from Tapbots and Ivory is basically Tweetbot for Mastodon.
Christina Warren:
Yeah. Honestly, it was a combination of things. It was that that was I think really the final straw. Also, as a lot of people have commented on, my posts don't show up in people's feeds and I don't see replies and I don't see other people's posts, and so the whole experience was becoming degraded. Then not only did I have Ivory, which was great, but there's Ice Cubes, which is a great open source client.
Leo Laporte:
I like Ice Cubes a lot.
Christina Warren:
There's Elk.
Harry McCracken:
That's also great.
Christina Warren:
Ice Cubes is fantastic. There's Elk.zone, which is a great web interface. I've actually have a GitHub list that I've been making of different cool [inaudible 00:10:10].
Leo Laporte:
This is the beauty of open source and an open standard.
Christina Warren:
It is.
Leo Laporte:
Anybody can develop and they can't cut you off.
Christina Warren:
Right. There will be some people who follow me on Mastodon who didn't follow me on Twitter, but about 10% of the followers that I had on Twitter, now on Mastodon, which not bad for four or five days in.
Leo Laporte:
A lot of people are reporting increased engagement even though there are fewer followers on Mastodon.
Harry McCracken:
I've certainly noticed that.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, absolutely.
Harry McCracken:
Look at the quality, it's high.
Christina Warren:
I have too.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Harry McCracken:
I think-
Christina Warren:
No, that, it will change over time. I think that as more people join, you will see less of that high signal to noise, but right now, I totally agree. I'm definitely seeing higher engagement, higher quality.
Leo Laporte:
It's pretty clear that Elon has decided to heavily algorithmitize the feed on Twitter. He even said, you pay eight bucks and more people will see you. I don't know why he thinks eight bucks from a few hundred million at best users is going to make enough money to pay for Twitter and the loss of ad revenue, but he's doing whatever he can. That's the problem though, is that it then tells people, oh, nobody's engaging with me. I don't want to be here. So you're driving off your creators. Actually, Cory Doctorow wrote a good story about this this week. It's an impolite title, so I'm going to say, TikToks' Enshirtification, using the Good Place's euphemism for that word. I thought it was quite insightful. As usual, Cory made something that's been around and obvious to all of us crystal clear, put in words that a light bulb goes off.
He says, "Here's how platforms die. First, they're good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves, then they die." He gives an example, Amazon, which was customer first, customer first, and then as the customer base got locked in with a variety of techniques like Amazon Prime and DRM and so forth, then they said, "All right, now businesses, businesses," and then if 50% of Amazon sales are in the marketplace, third-party sellers, but they got locked in even though they lose 45% of revenue to Amazon and fees, and now, Amazon says, "Screw you. You're locked in," and they start monetizing. He says, "The company's $31 billion," and he puts it in quotes, "'advertising' program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search."
But what ultimately happens is you've enshirtified your platform to the point where no one wants to use it anymore. This is very clearly where Elon is. Twitter, at first, was all about the users. They couldn't figure out how to monetize it. Then they got brands to go there. In fact, that's one of the reasons all of us were there. That's the best. You have to be there to promote your brand, to build your audience. Then once they got them locked in, now they can say, "Hey, if you want to reach that audience, which we own, it'll be $8, please," but you do that at the risk of driving people like Christina away. He's talking about, in this article, particularly about TikTok doing this, but it happens to every one of these companies. His position, which I really agree with, is this is the way it is and you just move. You go to the next thing. You leave MySpace for Facebook. You leave Facebook for somewhere else, but what we need regulation for is to make sure it's as friction free as possible to move to avoid the lock-in.
You need interoperability. You need to make it easy to move somewhere else, and then you can let the market rule. He says, "As I said at the start of this essay," this is towards the end, "enshirtification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism." The staff, the executives, the shareholders, eventually, they all say, "No, you got to enshirtify. We need the money." "But even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking point and walks away or gets pushed. Individual product managers, executives, activist shareholders, all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability and they're in a race to see who can," I love Cory, "eat their seed-corn first. Enshirtification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." Cory's getting a little cranky in his old age. I don't know. "Enshirtification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 and the company's in a full-blown panic over the rise of AI chatbots." What are your thoughts, Tim?
Tim Stevens:
Definitely, the pattern, it is very clear. We've certainly seen it before. What's missing though, I think, is the actual death of these platforms. I think Twitter is certainly struggling and I think a lot of us are thinking that its days are numbered, but it's still incredibly huge, incredibly popular, and as Musk likes to say, engagement numbers are up because everyone's watching the dumpster fire smolders. I think it's a little too early to say that Amazon has died, that Google has died, that Twitter has died, and so I think that's the piece of the pattern that's missing in this case, for better or for worse.
Leo Laporte:
Certainly, there are, of course, plenty of companies. This is, by the way, not just tech companies, any company with any consumers. There are plenty of companies in that graveyard. We're in the process of watching these companies move in that direction. But you're right. It's hard to imagine Google going away. Facebook, maybe it's not so hard to imagine.
Harry McCracken:
Although Facebook's latest data on engagement since they started pushing videos from people I don't even follow into my feed, apparently, that's actually working at least right now in terms of engagement. The AI they're using to put videos in front of you actually does seem to determine stuff that people will watch. The numbers are a little encouraging lately, especially given how little good news Facebook has hit at any front in the last couple of years.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Christina, does this process end with the end of Twitter or does Twitter just drag on?
Christina Warren:
Well, it can be both, and we've seen both because we've definitely seen social networks just go under and just disappear, and that has happened. Google+ is a great example of that where obviously, Google put a lot of money and a lot of effort into that and it failed and then they just shut it down and got rid of all the archives even, which I actually thought that was not a great move to not even keep the public archives available. But that was a high-profile failure. There have been other ones. But then you also have instances where they continue to stick around until they're sold and deleted and whatnot. MySpace being a great example of that, where that has now had, God only knows, how many owners and people trying to use that, very worthless at this point, email list of users. But MySpace was bigger than Facebook up until about 2009, I want to say. Then you started seeing a really big migration of people from MySpace to Facebook to the point that MySpace just became a dead zone except for a very specific niche of people.
Unlike LiveJournal and GeoCities and Tumblr and some other things, it wasn't really because of any policy changes that MySpace made. It was just because the masses were all on Facebook. Twitter is interesting because as Tim says, it's still this giant place. I think that what will potentially be pushing people off of it is less the alternatives and more when the overall experience becomes degraded, whether because more toxicity is there or just because you're having errors in your feed. You're not able to post things the right way. You can't refresh as quickly. You don't see all of your replies. That's the sort of thing that makes people go, okay, why am I investing time in this? Arguably, you could say that the demise of Twitter started probably 2016, ironically when its engagement was higher when you started to see a lot of the previous high-profile users of Twitter leave the platform for Instagram and then later, TikTok. But you stopped seeing the celebrities on Twitter. I don't know. It's one of those, what's the neologism like it happens slowly and then all at once? I think that's [inaudible 00:19:23].
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. It's like the collapse of the Roman.
Harry McCracken:
Hemingway.
Leo Laporte:
Gibbon said it first. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it about somebody going bankrupt, but I think it was Gibbon who said the Roman Empire collapsed slowly at first and then suddenly, and then it's been applied to a lot of things. You're right, although Instagram seems to be quite suddenly collapsing in on itself. Am I wrong?
Christina Warren:
Totally. You're not. I think Instagram was one of those interesting ones where if they had just stuck to their guns... When they copied Snapchat, that was brilliant because they did stories better than Snapchat did. They had a bigger audience and they added some features that made it better. So that was a perfect example of copying the right way. With TikTok, I think they just had fundamentally misunderstood their audience and have misunderstood that it's a completely different expectation. If they wanted to create a TikTok compete, they should have created an app called Instagram Reels that I bet would've been very popular. But by loading it down with stuff that people you don't follow, people you're not even necessarily interested in, an algorithm that is not as good as TikTok's-
Tim Stevens:
[inaudible 00:20:30] that was Hemingway.
Christina Warren:
... and then you don't even see your friend's photos, the whole reason why people are there to begin with, yeah, I spend a lot less time on Instagram because I'm like, what's the point? I used to come here for a specific reason. Now, this isn't there and even worse, it's a watered down version of this other thing that already exists.
Leo Laporte:
But we are creatures of habit, and you're right, Tim, these things don't die, but they don't exactly thrive [inaudible 00:20:54].
Harry McCracken:
There will be something called Twitter 10 years from now, it's just not entirely clear whether anyone will go at that at all.
Leo Laporte:
There is still MySpace.
Harry McCracken:
I believe there's still a Friendster.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. By the way, I'm sorry. Sun Also Rises, it was Hemingway. You win.
Harry McCracken:
I thought it was Fitzgerald too,-
Leo Laporte:
You win in [inaudible 00:21:07].
Harry McCracken:
... but I recently realized it wasn't.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. It's like a Fitzgerald quote.
Harry McCracken:
But maybe he stole it from Gibbon.
Leo Laporte:
I think Gibbon said it first, but I might be wrong on that as well. How did you go bankrupt? Two ways, gradually, then suddenly. How did you collapse? Two ways, gradually, then suddenly. There are tributaries off of this into a lot of the stories that we're talking about these days. I don't want to do another Elon Musk-filled TWiT, so we're not. Everybody's going, oh, thank God. I thought he was going to start talking about Elon. But really, it's about companies in general going through this business cycle. CNET, your former employer, Tim Stevens, has been accused of some interesting shenanigans. We had Connie Guglielmo on two weeks ago right when this was breaking. Remember the 75 stories and the AI had written in their personal finance section. She said, "Well, these are stories no reporter wants to write, the basic boring stories. We had the AI write a first draft and then an editor look at it, correct it, finish it, and then put it out."
But now it's coming out that in fact, there were far more errors that were not corrected, that a lot of the content wasn't very good and that perhaps CNET has been using it more than just those 75 articles. She said, "Yeah, and we've used for years, as many publications do, programs to put in stock prices." That's not using AI to write a story. That's a very different thing there. I don't blame them for that. The Verge though has been really hammering on CNET. I don't know. Maybe they have a vested interest in knocking down a competitor. I don't know. But they're accusing CNET of doing something a little bit more nefarious. Remember, CNET was sold to equity capital company called Red Ventures, and Tim, you have some probably direct experience with this.
Tim Stevens:
A bit. Yes, I do.
Leo Laporte:
What always happens with these acquisitions is that the equity capital companies raise a lot of debt to acquire these companies, so they're saddled with big debt and when you look at the process, the corporate landscape these days, heavily encumbered companies owning these companies, so a lot of debt. So there's pressure on them from both their shareholders and their lenders to monetize. These companies very often either sell off pieces of the company that they bought or attempt to monetize it as Elon is doing with Twitter. By the way, Red Ventures also owns a number of sites like the Points Guy, Bankrate, and CreditCards.com, which are sites that make their money through credit card affiliate fees. The Verge is accusing them in effect of turning CNET into that kind of site with auto-generated link bait articles designed to rank highly in searches that they can then monetize with ads or affiliate fees. Bankrate and CreditCards have also published AI-written articles about credit cards with ads for credit cards nestled within.
Turns out the same guy responsible for this at Bankrate and CreditCards is responsible for it at CNET, Lance Davis, vice president of content at Red Ventures. I think there's an interesting accusation here that Red Ventures is basically taking this venerable, highly respected name in technology journalism and turning it into an SEO farm. Tim, I'll give you the chance to either to recuse yourself or to give us your thoughts.
Tim Stevens:
Yeah, no pressure. Obviously, I need to be a little bit careful with what I say here both because this is my former employer we talked about and because I have a lot of friends and a lot of people who I respect and agree with [inaudible 00:25:12]-
Leo Laporte:
And I should say that.
Tim Stevens:
... it's really important to say.
Leo Laporte:
So many people, including Connie, that I love and respect and honor.
Tim Stevens:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
I don't blame CNET for this one. I think this comes from Red Ventures.
Tim Stevens:
Well, my take on this is a little bit complicated. I do think that clearly, The Verge has an interest in making CNET it look bad. They're competitors. That's fine, but I don't think that anything that The Verge has reported thus far from what I've seen has been inaccurate. I want to say one thing for sure, I wasn't aware of any of this AI stuff that was going on when I was there. I left CNET around August of last year. There was rumors and talk and that kind of thing, but I wasn't aware of anything going on, so I have no insider knowledge about how any of this came to pass. But I will say that CNET was using tools like WordSmith and others, and those are tools that a lot of outlets use. A lot of publications use those. Basically, what they do is they help you optimize the content that you're writing to make sure that they include the right keywords to make sure that they perform well in an algorithm-based environment. That is really what consumers are operating within right now.
Anyone who goes on the internet and searches for a thing is asking an algorithm what things should I read. So it's only natural for publications to want to make sure that their content performs as well as possible. The thing is, when you use a tool like that, it can begin to feel like you are basically reverse engineering Google. You're reverse engineering a search engine. That's really what this game comes down to [inaudible 00:26:37].
Leo Laporte:
It's AI talking to AI, isn't it?
Tim Stevens:
Right, and that's what we were talking about. For Leo, at some point, what's the best tool to optimize [inaudible 00:26:45] for algorithm? It would be another algorithm effectively. I think by extension, it's a natural thing that CNET would do this. I don't think anybody would be surprised that CNET,-
Leo Laporte:
Well, especially-
Tim Stevens:
... being one of the-
Leo Laporte:
... when there's financial pressure to turn around a big acquisition, right?
Tim Stevens:
Maybe so, but I think that the timing is a little bit irrelevant here. CNET has definitely been on the cutting edge of a lot of different publication types over the years, whether it be integrated affiliate links, things like that. They've definitely been at the bleeding edge, so there's no surprise that they would be at the bleeding edge of adopting AI technology. My concern really is that there wasn't enough transparency involved. I think that's what my problem is. If CNET had come out and said, "Hey, we're experimenting with AI. This is fun and new. We don't really know what this is going to be, but here's what we're trying. This is where we're trying it on. This is some content that was written by AI. What do you think?" I'm sure that they would've gotten some blowback for sure, but from what I could see from my perspective in reading through coverage on The Verge and elsewhere, it just seemed like they were hoping that nobody would notice and I feel like that's really the wrong way to go about doing this.
If you're going to be embracing this kind of technology or investing in it, especially when you're talking about giving people recommendations about where they should put their money in a mortgage, I think it's important to be incredibly transparent. Connie's piece was very transparent, but that came out long after the story had blown up, long after The Verge's piece. I think it's unfortunate that CNET wasn't more upfront with what was going on beyond the scenes. We saw the little disclaimers on Google and things like that, but that, in my opinion, was not enough and that's where I'm disappointed in this whole thing.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I don't blame Connie at all or even Lindsey Turrentine also who has been a regular on this show for many years. I have huge respect for both of them. If anything, I feel like they might have been sandbagged by this and they didn't know the full extent of what was going on and ended up being hung out to dry, so to speak. The Verge quotes, "A former CNET employee saying Red Ventures was using automated technology for content long before the AI byline began cropping up in November," They mentioned this WordSmith tool, which you talked about, Tim, nicknamed Mortgotron. I don't know how you pronounce that, Mortgotron, internally because it was used in mortgage stories. They said it had been used for at least a year and a half, but the siloed natures of the teams across CNET and Red Ventures makes it difficult for journalists at the site to understand the chain of command who's using what tools and when.
So no blame on our friends at CNET. I'm very happy, frankly, to blame Red Ventures and any equity capital company because I feel like these guys are, to some degree, the bane of our existence.
Tim Stevens:
But it's not just VC firms that are pushing companies to use these kind of content. A lot of editorial properties use SEO optimization tools. If you want to perform, if you want to be in the first page on a Google search, you have to be using these tools. So I know a lot of automotive properties are using them. This is not proprietary software. This is stuff that you can go out and license that anybody can use. It'll tell you what keywords that you need to inject into your content. Again, it does make you feel like you're reverse engineering as you're writing, but this is not proprietary stuff.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Harry McCracken:
Also,-
Leo Laporte:
In a way, that's scarier if it's even more widespread use that we don't know about.
Harry McCracken:
But for the grace of God, it goes to everybody in the media business and not-
Leo Laporte:
Not us. We haven't figured out a way to do that yet with podcasts.
Harry McCracken:
Not immediately, but over the course of a time, I think you will see AI play a role a lot more, particularly as some of the issues CNET ran into are less of an issue. Also, CNET probably made a lot of mistakes so the rest of us don't have to and we can learn from them in terms of disclosure. But I feel like, well, we're not doing any of this and have no plans to do this, and in fact, it might not really work well for us. Anyhow, I would not say that at Fast Company, we'll never use AI in any form because I think things are going to happen quite quickly and there might be ways to use it which are actually completely above board and reasonable and result in better content rather than just cheaper content.
Harry McCracken:
... will result in better content rather than just cheaper content?
Leo Laporte:
Somebody said, I'm trying to find the article that ChatGPT is the absolute definition of BS.
Harry McCracken:
Yes.
Leo Laporte:
And by the way, OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT say this. They say, "We never said you had to be accurate. That's not in the training at all."
Harry McCracken:
It has no idea what it's saying and whether it's correct or not. Sometimes it happens to be accurate, but that's not what the technology is.
Leo Laporte:
It's an accident if it happens to be accurate almost. Right.
Harry McCracken:
I did a piece, I have a new newsletter which I should plug at the end of the show.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, yes, plug it now.
Harry McCracken:
It's called Plugged In and if you go to our fast company homepage, there should be a newsletters link that will let you subscribe.
Leo Laporte:
Nice.
Harry McCracken:
And because I'm interested in the history of cartoons, I asked ChatGPT what the first TV cartoon was. And every time I asked, he would give a different answer. Many of them very convincing and none of them correct. Basically, there's so many things where ChatGPT has no idea what it's saying and unless you already know what the answer is, you might well be fooled because it is able to lie in such a convincing fashion.
Leo Laporte:
But it's important to understand that that's not its mandate to tell the truth or to be accurate. It's not a fact generator, it's a BS generator.
Harry McCracken:
It's really good at stringing words together.
Leo Laporte:
You call it a glib bot, which I think is a very... From now on, I'm calling it a glib bot. In a way then, it makes you wonder, should we be... Your company, GitHub, and you can disclaim this again, I know you have nothing to do with this Christina. But it's getting a little heat right now from the open source community over its AI code generator, Copilot which is impressive. Copilot also uses, we should mention, the same OpenAI technology as ChatGPT. It is using GPT.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, I was going to say, I can't comment on any of the losses or any of that stuff, but Copilot does use the GPT-3, 3.5, a large language model that ChatGPT is based on. It uses something called Codex, which is specifically focused on source code rather than the corpus that ChatGPT uses, which is much more broad. But if you use ChatGPT to say, "Write me a program that does this and this, most of its dataset is probably coming from [inaudible 00:33:25] Copilot."
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, because ChatGPT can write code. In fact, one of the stories we had on Security Now is that script kiddies are having ChatGPT write effective malware, I mean malware that works.
And we know somebody who used ChatGPT to write a PowerShell script for Steve on Security Now that looked through your last pass vault and told you some of its attributes. And it worked. And it was a lot easier to develop it because... And I guess Copilot would be even better.
Now clearly, with Copilot, unlike ChatGPT, there must be some rules in there that say, "Oh, and by the way, make sure this isn't made up, that it actually works. Right?
Christina Warren:
For the most part. I mean there are suggestions that you can get that will not run. That's why we call it Copilot. It's not do it for you, it's your Copilot. It's auto fill and suggestions plus one. And the more that you use it, the more that it gets to know your code. It does get to know your style and your intent and it can give you better and better suggestions for what you're doing.
But no, you can absolutely the same way you could get a wrong suggestion, you could get a wrong I guess paragraph from ChatGPT, you could get some incorrect code suggestions. For the most part though, I think that the training model there is a little bit better because it is focused more on one thing rather than however great the corpus is for everything that ChatGPT is doing.
And as I said, it is learning based on your own style and the stuff that is in your project folder. But no, I mean this is why I always tell people, look, Copilot is amazing and it has saved me so much time, especially with boilerplate stuff. But if you're trying to use it to just.. You think you can just automate it to write a program for you, you might get lucky if it's something really simple, like a PowerShell script or something like that. But you really need to have a better idea of what you're doing so that you can actually see what code it's suggesting and then make edits if that needs to be the case.
But even if you still need to make edits, I think there's still value there because it can save you a lot of time of having to manually Google and command-C, command-V from Stack Overflow or wherever you go
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, people, well, and that's that every programmer knows this, but maybe a lot of civilians don't. That almost all code is to some degree or another copied and paste from somebody else. That's how it works.
Copilot is a natural way to do this. Copilot's quite impressive. It's quite amazing. Here's the story, from earlier this month by Checkpoint, research of malware, research company. They call it OPWNAI: Cybercriminals Starting to Use ChatGPT. And Checkpoint's research, "Previous blog we described how ChatGPT successfully conducted a full infection flow from creating a convincing spearfishing email to running a reverse shell capable of accepting commands in English." That's pretty scary.
This is a case of something called Info Steeler, which was created late last year by ChatGPT. A cyber criminal showing how he used ChatGPT to write the code. Looks like JavaScript. A hard code. How to write code to basically steal files from a FTP server. It's amazing what they're doing.
One of the things that really becomes obvious is this is a conversation a year ago we might not have had. This has happened all of a sudden, out of nowhere.
Tim Stevens:
And you can imagine we're not that far away from these AI being able to emulate... I mean they can already do very compelling voice work. How far are they from being to emulate your voice, your mom's voice and make up a call. And then say, "Hey, it's your mom. I forgot my password. Can you tell me my password?"
Leo Laporte:
Oh, yeah, I think that's already. I'm sure that's already happening.
Harry McCracken:
That should be doable right now.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. There is a generative AI music already. I don't think it's quite there yet. This is a paper from Google Research, they call it Music LM. It's based on large language model, like Lambda, generating music from a text prompt.
Christina Warren:
Yep.
Leo Laporte:
This is the prompt, "The main soundtrack of an arcade game. It is fast-paced and upbeat." We didn't check my audio. Do you? I think, we'll try it. Turn my audio on. I want to play this song. "It's fast-paced and upbeat with a catchy electric guitar riff. The music is repetitive and easy to remember with unexpected sounds like symbol crashes or drum rolls." Does this sound like an arcade game to you?
Maybe the front screen, the attack mode or maybe Sonic is running down the... That's completely AI generated.
Harry McCracken:
Although apparently, it's generated by an AI that does a fair amount of plagiarizing.
Leo Laporte:
Oh yeah, it's totally plagiarized.
Harry McCracken:
Which is why Google is not releasing to the public yet.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Totally... Here's a slow tempo bass and drums led reggae song. Ya, man, everybody get together. We're going down to the beach. No, no? Hand says no to that one.
Harry McCracken:
Seems like it has the potential to blow away the stock music industry pretty quickly.
Leo Laporte:
But yeah, it's a lot better than the crap stock music we've been using.
Harry McCracken:
Won't be a stock music. You think you'll be able to generate something unique to your own?
Leo Laporte:
"280,000 hours of real music as the training model to generate coherent songs for descriptions of significant complexity," as the creators put it. You want to feel like you're lost in space. Ann is becoming our taste tester. Let's see if Ann agrees this is.
Sounds like an AI did it. Doesn't it? Sounds like robot music. Now here's the question. Can we get taken down from YouTube for playing that?
Harry McCracken:
You may get sued by a bot.
Christina Warren:
See, well, that's going to be an interesting thing I think actually...
Leo Laporte:
Who owns that?
Christina Warren:
If you're able to generate these unique things. Right. Well that's an interesting question, but also, I think it becomes a very interesting question, which is I think of this YouTube, it relies on someone else being able to say, "I have the copyright of this." And usually have a file registered someplace. There a Content ID, can go and find the same thing. But if it's a uniquely original file, then Content ID's not going to find it. That's cool.
Leo Laporte:
What a world we live in. What a world.
Harry McCracken:
But do you think there might be some cool stuff that might happen if actual human musicians work with some of these tools to brainstorm and riff on ideas?
Christina Warren:
Yes, yes.
Harry McCracken:
I mean that seems like that could be cool.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I'm sure it's happening right now.
Christina Warren:
No. No, exactly. I honestly, I think that the way that... And I know that a lot of creators are really freaked out by generative art and generative music and all this stuff. And I understand the fear. But for me, what excites me about this is that the best AI art that I've seen has been from actual artists. Those are the people who've been using the best prompts or have been taken some of the prompts.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, makes sense.
Christina Warren:
And have taken some of the results and have then made really great things. And I think with music, it's the exact same way. You might be able to get something that sounds slightly better than stock music, but it's still not going to be great. It's going to take a real artist to then take that and edit it and interpolate it. And do what real artists have always done and turn it into something else.
And so, what I've trying to been tell people because this isn't going away. Whatever your feelings on this stuff is, it's not going away and it's only going to become bigger. We can have conversations about ethics and we should. We can have conversations about safety rails and we should, but this is not going away.
And so, the conversation I've been having with people for the last year or so is embrace this as a tool to your arsenal to make new, unique and better things, rather than looking at this as some sort of existential threat because you're not going to outpace this. This is not going to be something that you can get away from. But it might be something that if you are able to use, you could actually enhance the stuff that you do naturally. And that goes for writers as well.
Leo Laporte:
Last week, Brianna Wu, who was on the show, her husband writes science fiction, among many other things. Said that Frank was stuck with a story that, I think he was writing for Analog. But he was stuck with a story and he gave a very extensive prompt to ChatGPT, which wrote a mediocre story but came up with a lot of things that became a starting point for him and unstuck him. And that seems like that's a very good use of something like ChatGPT. I've heard so many descriptions. I love your name for it. What is it, GlibPT?
Harry McCracken:
Glibbot, I guess.
Leo Laporte:
Glibbot? I like Glibbot
Harry McCracken:
I remember I wrote that.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, that's good.
Christina Warren:
Cool, I like that.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it's good. I've also heard it say the ultimate mansplainer, because it's confidently wrong.
Christina Warren:
It's so confident, it's [inaudible 00:43:07].
Leo Laporte:
And it's a little patronizing. It's like, "Oh no, let me explain to you how the world works."
Harry McCracken:
Although if you tell it that it's wrong, then it gets really humble.
Christina Warren:
It apologizes. Yeah.
Harry McCracken:
And it apologizes at great length and says it'll never do it again.
Leo Laporte:
Does it correct itself? If you correct it, does it stay corrected?
Harry McCracken:
Yes. And in fact, if it says something that's correct and you tell it that it's wrong, it will apologize for that too.
Leo Laporte:
Stephen Wolfram wrote a very good piece about how confidently wrong ChatGPT is on things that WolframAlpha, his own AI. Is it an AI? I don't know what you call WolframAlpha. Search engine for knowledge or something. But he said, "We should partner because we are good at getting the math right, which ChatGPT is terrible at. And then if we worked together we maybe get something out of it."
He pointed out some really hysterical examples. This is his article from his blog at stephenwolf.com, some hysterical examples of just ChatCPT getting it terribly wrong. How far is Chicago from Tokyo? To which ChatGPT confidently says, "Distance from Chicago, Illinois to Tokyo Japan is approximately 7,600 miles. That would be 12,200 kilometers. It's a very long distance," blah blah, blah, blah. Turns out it's not even close, it's 6,313 miles.
You correct it. You tell it and it says, "Thank you for correcting me. You're correct." Of course he is. The distance is 6,313 miles. How far is Chicago to Tokyo? And then it gets it right, at least in that continued conversation. I think that's interesting. But kids don't do your math homework with ChatGPT. Stick to WolframAlpha because it doesn't even know three to the power of 73, which is pretty pathetic.
Harry McCracken:
Is that?
Leo Laporte:
By the way, not even close. It said 14 billion. I can't say how big the number is. It's a lot larger.
Harry McCracken:
There was that story about ChatGPT passing an MBA exam. But the article which said it also pointed out that it wasn't capable of doing high school math, which I found interesting.
Leo Laporte:
Well, many MBAs can't do high school maths.
Harry McCracken:
Because I didn't realize you could become an MBA without having high school math.
Leo Laporte:
I think it just passed a law school exam too, didn't it? This is now the new thing is for professors to give exams to ChatGPT.
Christina Warren:
Sort of. There was a paper that couple of... There was somebody from University of Chicago and someone else did with GPT passing the bar. And they gave it part of the multiple choice parts of the bar exam. And it did better than random selection and it came close to humans in a couple of categories.
Leo Laporte:
It got a C+.
Christina Warren:
And some of them passing, but it's not like a... Right, it didn't quite pass. But it is impressive because the interesting thing though was that it did significantly better than random selection. It wasn't one of those things where you're just randomly, okay, how would you have done if you were just randomly selecting the answer?
It had some better accuracy.. And in some categories, it was close to humans, but obviously this is only for the multiple choice parts and it did better in certain areas than others. But I mean to me, all this really says is, okay, then if you're big concern, whether it's high school students or graduate students and professionals taking tests, if your big concerned is the AI cheating at the test, well then you need to start changing how you're testing. You're obviously not testing the right things.
That to me, is the big takeaway that we shouldn't be freaked out that these AIs are able to pass the test. It's more like, okay, well, what's the goal of this and are we testing the right way? And I think in most cases, the answer would be no, we're not testing the right way.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, maybe that's the flaw of the tests. Although as you point out, ChatGPT doesn't do math very well. It's good in constitutional law,
Tim Stevens:
How long do we think it'll be until ChatGPT is our public defender and that you need to pay extra if you want a human to defend you in a lawsuit?
Christina Warren:
I don't think that's going to happen.
Tim Stevens:
That feels like a Black Mirror sort of thing.
Leo Laporte:
The guy who was doing the robot lawyer, I think has just decided to run away with his tail between his legs because then...
Tim Stevens:
Good.
Leo Laporte:
DoNotPay, which is actually, a really cool service which helps you get out of traffic tickets, created an AI powered robot lawyer that was going to go into court. I don't know. First of all, I think any judge that would throw it out immediately was going to go into court.
Christina Warren:
Absolutely.
Leo Laporte:
To help fight a traffic ticket. State bar prosecutors threatened the Josh Browder, as the CEO of DoNotPay, with jail time. And so Joshua says, "We're postponing our court case and we're going to stick to consumer rights.
Tim Stevens:
Wow.
Leo Laporte:
Okay.
Christina Warren:
Oh totally. Well, this is the whole thing, is could it? Maybe. But do you think that there of any profession, can you think of any class of profession who would be less likely to allow this in the court? No.
Even if you could potentially automate things and do things better than your typical public defender, do you really think that the Bar Association and the various lobbying groups for lawyers, do you really think that they would allow this in their courtrooms? Absolutely not. They're going to protect their own interests above and beyond more than any other industry. They're going to be the ones who are like, "Nope, not happening."
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, that's a good point. If you're going to pick an industry to disintermediate, do podcasters, don't do lawyers. We're pushovers.
Christina Warren:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte:
Be a lot easier to go after us. Your company, Microsoft, just acknowledged that they already put a billion dollars in, they were one of the founders of OpenAI. And now they have a even better deal with OpenAI. The rumor was additional $10 billion. I think that was confirmed by Satya Nadella, over a period of time, obviously. And that ChatGPT or that kind of technology will be used in a Microsoft Office. But I think a number of people are saying the real thing to watch is Bing. Thoughts about that? I know you work at [inaudible 00:49:31].
Christina Warren:
I work at GitHub, so which is owned by Microsoft. Opinions on my own. Look, I think this is exciting. I think that there's also been reporting that Google's been having a crisis about how successful ChatGPT has been. And I don't blame them because Google, and this is not in any way to try to denigrate any other company, but they have probably amassed the largest quantity of AI talent from academia and from industry of anyone.
And the fact that it was ChatGPT, which what's interesting to me about that, is that it wasn't really that demonstrably different from any of the other GPT-3 things that have been available. It was just the interface that I think made it so accessible has become this very mainstream thing where I've been thinking and been talking about OpenAI stuff for several years, but now this is a mainstream thing because the interface was so ripened.
And yeah, I definitely think that search is a great area where it could be helpful. People have created extensions to add ChatGPT things alongside Google results and it's better. And I think that Google results, Google is the primary search engine that I use. And the results have gotten worse over time.
And I don't think that it's because of the SEO stuff. I think it's because Google has optimized for different sorts of results and they've wanted to highlight other things. And so, I often end up typing Reddit into my search because I find that I get much better results from Reddit than I do feel because searching...
Leo Laporte:
Because what you're really doing is asking for information from real experts about a topic, right?
Christina Warren:
Right. Or I know I just want to actually get the conversation, the info where it's actually going to be. But searching reddit.com is a mess. Searching Google for a query and then adding Reddit to it is a good alternative. But people have created side-by-side extensions to add ChatGPT stuff to Google things. And I think that, yeah, this is an opportunity for Bing, I think is an opportunity for a lot of consumer products.
Obviously, one of the big wins here is for Azure, for other businesses who want to take advantage of those models and build it into their products, having AI as a service. I think, look, this is going to be hot. This is going to become an arms race, even more than it already has been.
But for whatever reason, OpenAI has been the first to really commercialize this in a way that the mainstream understands. And it's exciting. I mean personally, as a technologist to me, all the other fears we might have around it, I look at this as a moment of this is exciting. To me, this is much more the next big thing versus the Metaverse. This is much more exciting to me.
Leo Laporte:
I agree.
Christina Warren:
And seems much more tangible.
Leo Laporte:
I agree.
Christina Warren:
As to what the next big place of computing is going to be. Forget about the Metaverse stuff. The AI stuff is, I think really what's exciting.
Harry McCracken:
OpenAI has less to lose than a Google or a Microsoft.
Leo Laporte:
Well, that's why OpenAI was created really, right?
Harry McCracken:
I mean that these are enormous companies with an enormous customer base.
Leo Laporte:
And they're doing it in secret.
Harry McCracken:
And reputations and paying customers. And OpenAI not having any of that stuff. Why not throw it out into the public and see what happens?
Leo Laporte:
Although Yann LeCun who is the genius AI researcher.
Harry McCracken:
Facebook.
Leo Laporte:
At Facebook said that, "Oh, ChatGPT isn't particularly innovative. We've been doing that for years."
Harry McCracken:
Oh, I think if you're an AI scientist, you know about the Transformers.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, sure you have. If you have...
Harry McCracken:
Which were, and Google basically...
Christina Warren:
Yeah, of course.
Harry McCracken:
Invented transformer technology.
Leo Laporte:
Yes. This is what Lambda did, right?
Christina Warren:
Yes, they did.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Harry McCracken:
And Meta has done some cool stuff with that too.
Christina Warren:
Absolutely. But they haven't productized it.
Harry McCracken:
But it also feel a little bit like sour grapes, right? It's like, "Oh no, we did that."
Christina Warren:
I was just going to say, sure you have, but you didn't productize it.
Harry McCracken:
You didn't tell anybody.
Christina Warren:
Okay. Right. You didn't productize it. I don't think that anybody would make the argument. I don't think Sam Altman or anyone from OpenAI would be like, "Oh, this is the most innovative thing and no one else has done this." I think what they would say is, "This is the first time that the public has actually been able to interact with it in a way that had a really good user interface."
Harry McCracken:
That's what LeCun...
Christina Warren:
The chatbot was a brilliant user interface. And that's what you use it, right.
Leo Laporte:
That's what LeCun said. He said, ChatGPT is "Well put together." He said that compared to other companies in the field, OpenAI is not particularly advanced, Google, Meta." And he said, "Half a dozen other startups have equivalent technologies, but that's the difference. They were doing this in public and letting the public use it." Although it makes me wonder, is there something better under the hood somewhere else?
Harry McCracken:
Well, GPT-4 apparently is an enormous advance over 3.5.
Leo Laporte:
But Sam Altman, who's CEO of OpenAI said, "Don't get your hopes up." It's not AGI, right? It's not the artificial general intelligence.
Harry McCracken:
They actually did put out a AI chat bot a few months ago and they immediately got flack for it.
Leo Laporte:
Didn't it get racist instantly?
Harry McCracken:
Being racist and anti-asymetic and so forth. They tried to be bold, but they weren't quite as bold as ChatGPT, so they didn't get as much credit and they got a lot more flack about it. I think partially because Meta is the company that's going to get flack no matter what it does, which is not true of OpenAI at least yet.
Leo Laporte:
I've been using a search engine that was founded about five years ago by former Google search executives called Neeva, N-E-E-V-A. Are you familiar with this?
Harry McCracken:
I did a big story on it.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, in fact, that's how I learned about it actually.
Harry McCracken:
And yeah, the CEO was a former top guy at YouTube. And he got a little bit depressed about the monetization of search.
Leo Laporte:
The certification of Google.
Harry McCracken:
And he worked at Google, so he went off to do a search engine with a paid model.
Leo Laporte:
And yeah, that's the premise. We don't run ads. In fact, even when Google started, Larry Page famously wrote, "A search engine can't have advertising or it will then become beholden to the advertisers." They only held that off for a few years before getting involved in advertising.
I pay five bucks a month for Neeva. I get a lot of... They actually give you a free one password account and another stuff, but I think it's really good. And also, because they're in this arms race, they added a AI generator at the beginning of search results. I searched for ChatGPT and Bing just now. And this is the result I got from the AI. I think AI is a very good at synopsizing and summarizing other content. They even do footnotes to say where this information comes from, CNET, The Guardian, Observer, and the Verge.
"Microsoft is reportedly integrating AI technology such as ChatGPT, into its Bing search engine, which could potentially revolutionize search as we know it. This technology is capable of generating a wide variety of text and human-like ways in response to written prompts. Microsoft hopes to launch this feature before the end of March in a bid to make Bing more competitive with Google."
I think Google should be scared, not just by Bing, but by Neeva. I think this is pretty cool. I've been using Neva full-time instead of Google everywhere, including on my iPhone for about a month now. The only negative, the only hit on it is it's amazing how quickly Google comes back with a result. Neeva, there's a palpable second or two. But other than that, the results are excellent. I love this AI thing and there's no ads. It doesn't favor Google content over anybody else's content. I think...
Harry McCracken:
I believe there's a dash of Bing in Neeva's technology along with some of its own technology as well.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, is it? Interesting.
Harry McCracken:
I believe they've licensed some data.
Leo Laporte:
Okay. Yeah, they have their own crawler, right?
Harry McCracken:
Yes. I think they mashed together some of their own stuff and some stuff they've licensed.
Leo Laporte:
And I don't know what this thing is, but it's pretty cool. There's a little slider here at the top. I don't... Currently showing top news from all sources, currently showing top news from all sources. I don't know, there's something going on there that I can move around that slider. I think it's very innovative. I have no relationship with them. In fact, I meant to ask you about this because I did read your article about it. You talked to them. You think they're pretty compelling?
Harry McCracken:
They're smart folks and they've added a lot of stuff since they launched. [inaudible 00:57:53]
Leo Laporte:
It's brave to say we're going to go against Google.
Harry McCracken:
Yeah. I mean they're a tiny company.
Leo Laporte:
But maybe now.
Harry McCracken:
We've all been used to getting our search free for the last 20 years. But I think if there is a time where we're at an inflection point, where the idea of going up against Google no longer sounds quite so insane, it's now. Although of course, Microsoft is probably in the best place to take advantage of this inflection point, given that it's already a large company with a large search engine. Although I am curious how they could shortly roll out ChatGPT as part of Bing, just because of this issue with accuracy.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I think the way Neeva does it with the footnotes is the only way you could do it. And this is the difference between that knowledge graph in Google, which is almost entirely from Wikipedia, almost always and is never sourced.
At least Neeva says where this stuff came from. I've found it actually quite useful. I'll ask it technical questions like coding questions, like describe Dijkstra's algorithm. And it does a really good job. It's quite... This is exactly what ChatGPT should be good at. And nevertheless, to beat Google at its own game is not... Maybe not, I don't know, maybe now's the time to do it. This is your article from last June? Yeah.
Harry McCracken:
June before last.
Leo Laporte:
Oh yeah. 2021.
Harry McCracken:
That was right when they were first launching.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I hope they do well.
Harry McCracken:
Me too.
Leo Laporte:
It's an interesting bet. And I love not having the ads in there. And I just hope they continue to be agnostic, not picking sides. I don't want them be them to be a Bing licensee or a DuckDuckGo licensee. They also, by the way, when you install it, they install a tracker, which an anti-tracker tool plug-in, in your browser, which shows you what trackers are on Fast Company. There you go. Not bad. There are far worse. Let me tell you. There's some where there's 30 or 40 trackers on a single page. It's amazing.
Harry McCracken:
We were trying to make our pages meaner and leaner just because that makes them run faster.
Leo Laporte:
That load fast.
Harry McCracken:
Quicker results and happier users.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. All right. Want to take a little break? There is a lot more to talk about. We've got a great panel. Couldn't have a better panel for this conversation. Tim Stevens is with us now freelance and doing great. He's driving his way home on Substack at timstevens.substack.com. He is also Mastodon on the mastodon.social but still says a little bit, a little tiny bit of Twitter in there too. Thank you, Tim for being here. We appreciate it. Harry McCracken.
Tim Stevens:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte:
The technologozier, global tech editor at Fast Company. We started putting people's mastodons up on the screen. I think that's great.
Harry McCracken:
There we go.
Leo Laporte:
I think that's great.
Harry McCracken:
But you can't add anything more because it's like two seems to be the maximum.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Well, we got your Twitter and your Mastodon.
Harry McCracken:
Not my Post though.
Leo Laporte:
So there you go. Are you on Post as well? I have an account, but I haven't really been using it.
Harry McCracken:
See, I don't know. See, to me, going to Post is like not learning the lesson of Twitter. It's like, oh, good, let Marc Andreessen run everything. No, I don't... I think it's better to be... I love the idea that we can go somewhere that is not owned by somebody. Right. I really like that.
And if you suddenly, or you're on TWiT.social or on Mastodon and you hate the way I'm running it, you go somewhere else. That's easy. Also, on a new Mastodon user and more than welcome, Christina Warren, film_girl. And are you using film_girl? You are at maston.social.
Christina Warren:
I am. Yeah. Yeah. I'm @film_girl. I might wind up switching to another instance at some point because the Mastodon platform is so big that there can be...
Harry McCracken:
You're on the big one.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, I've had the account since 2018. I don't know. I had it just to have it, but I might end up moving to another.
Harry McCracken:
It's easy to move your followers. It's hard to move your toots. You can do it, but most of the time I think the stuff that you have tooted or tweeted, the old stuff, that's water under the bridge. Start fresh. But you're-
Leo Laporte:
That's water under the bridge. Start fresh. But you at least can bring your followers with you. That's very easy to do that on Mastodon. I like our TWit cial because you have to be a TWiT listener to be in there. It is a community. Harry's on SFBA, which is for San Francisco Bay Area people. The local timeline really gets a point of view if you choose wisely. When you're somewhere like Mastodon, that social is just like a mini Twitter, basically. It's everybody who didn't look farther than the biggest instance. It's also pretty big now. It's well over 100,000 people. That could be good.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, or the people who signed up in 2018 when they didn't have a lot of these other things and-
Leo Laporte:
Right. There was no TWiT.social back then, yeah.
Christina Warren:
I was also on a smaller one xoxo.zone for my very favorite conference, XOXO. I did migrate, but I never used it. I did go ahead and migrate the followers that I had amassed there over to, and there was some overlap, I'm sure, but I did migrate those followers over to the main account that I'm on. That was actually seamless. I was worried about what that process was going to be like, but it wasn't difficult. That's good news.
Leo Laporte:
I've done the same thing. I was unmasked on that social way back when, when it was the only mass instance. When I started my own, I migrated over to TWiT.social. I also have something on Pixelfed, which is a Fediverse, not Mastodon, but kind of Instagram clone. I really like it on Pixelfed.social. I really like it because it's Instagram like it used to be with just a bunch of photos. Golly, whoever thought of that? No reels? No dancing chipmunks? What kind of place is that? One of the nice things about Ivory and these other clients is you can actually have multiple accounts in your client. You can have your photos on Pixelfed and your toots somewhere else. Our show today brought to you by our good friends at Worldwide Technology. Worldwide Technology is at the forefront of innovation.
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Let's see. I do want to do a quick plug for our, I think it's the last chance to take the survey. Yeah, there's only two days left. twit.tv/survey 23. We survey our audience once a year. We don't want to spy on you. We don't put trackers in a podcast. It's RSS. But we'd like to know more about you. Our advertisers would like to know who those ads are going to. We can't compete with people like Spotify who will spy on your every move and know who you are and all that stuff. It's the surveys. They're only a tool, but it helps us a lot. It should only take a few minutes. It's completely optional, of course. Answer any questions you want. twit.tv/survey 23. I want to get people from every show participating though so we know about what we're doing and whether it fits your needs. twit.tv/survey 23. Last chance. Don't put it off. We thank you in advance.
Some really interesting news from the Department of Justice. There was a ransomware gang called Hive. ransomware has become a plague, obviously. It's really a problem. Although I saw that the revenues, and they know this because they can look at Bitcoin transfers were significantly down in 2022. The thinking is, because people aren't paying. It's not that ransomware's not hitting you. It's just people have said, "Screw that. We're not giving you any money." Maybe they've got better strategies for mitigating a ransomware attack. But also the DOJ is going after them. This was a press conference from Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. It turns out, I think this is fascinating, that the US had infiltrated, the FBI had infiltrated the Hive ransomware group last July. And as a result, and maybe this is why ransomware is going down, too, under the covers, that's not quite right. Officers were able to warn victims of impending attacks in secret saying, "Hey, watch out. They're going after you."
They also got decryption keys and they were able to hand out more than 300 decryption keys to people who had been hit by the Hive ransomware, saving them more than $130 million. The US estimates Hive and its affiliates, it's one of those ransomware as a service companies, I don't want to use the word company, but that's kind of what it is, collected over $100 million from more than 1500 victims. They went after, and this was their mistake, hospitals, school districts, critical infrastructure in more than 80 countries around the world. One hospital was left unable to accept new patients because of Hive. They worked with the UK's National Crime Agency and other law enforcement agencies around the world to help victims in the UK. 50 organizations were given decryption keys and on Thursday, the FBI shut it down. They took Hive's website and communications networks down with the help of police forces in Germany and The Netherlands. That is a successful attack on the attackers.
I don't know if they arrested anybody. I don't see that, and that's the problem because as the head of intelligence at Mandy and John Hallquist said, "Until you arrest them, they're not going to be gone." It's like cockroaches-
Harry McCracken:
[inaudible 01:11:26] start up over again.
Leo Laporte:
They just move somewhere else. It'll slow them down. If you went to the Hive Cruise website, you would see this notice from the FBI, "This hidden site has been seized," with lots of badges. Hive was not the biggest of the ransomware gangs. There are bigger ones, although REvil, which was perhaps the biggest in 2020 and 2021, did get arrested around the world. This is good. DarkSide was taken down in June of 2021. This is good. This is what it takes.
Let's see. What els?e Intel. Do you want to talk about Intel? It's not a good quarter for Intel. The worst beating in over a decade, Andrew Orr writes for Appleinsider. They're may be a little happier than they ought to be about this 32% drop in revenue year-over-year since the holiday quarter of last year, 2021, actually. Fourth quarter results coming out. Revenue 14 billion down 30% year-over-year. Entire year revenue down 20% year over year. This goes along with drops of 30, 40% in PC sales as well. It's just been a bad year for PCs. Does that mean anything, Harry?
Harry McCracken:
I think Intel has known and acknowledged for a while now that it's in this rebuilding process after falling way behind other chip companies, and that it was not going to result in fantastic numbers immediately because they have to get back to where their process is competitive again with other technologies. I believe they've said that maybe by year after next, they think they'll be in a place where their technology is great again, which is maybe as long as they give Pat Gelsinger, their CEO time to get there, maybe that's when we can really judge them.
If the numbers are still this bad, then it's a really bad sign. But I think that at least as of when Gelsinger started, I wrote a feature about him last year, the board had given him quite a bit of runway in understanding that it was going to be difficult and there would be more bad news before there was any good news. Although they may not have anticipated the degree to which the PC business would be so crummy. I think people and companies may just be postponing PC purchases because everybody's so cautious about the economy this year.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, everything's down. It's not just PCs. Plus, we bought a lot of PCs during COVID.
Harry McCracken:
Right. People have relatively new nice computers now in a way they didn't before the pandemic.
Christina Warren:
Right. If you look at the increase in chips between 2020 and now, not to say that some of the gains haven't been impressive, but if you're not an enthusiast, you're not actually going to really notice, I think for a lot of people. It's increasingly looking more and more like what was happening. All that excess buying in 2020 and even a little bit into 2021 was a combination of both the supply chain, maybe even making more of a frenzy because people couldn't get [inaudible 01:14:53], people having to work from home. It's an anomaly. I think too then, as a lot of businesses did, try to base it as like, "This is the new baseline," was clearly a mistake, because that has not continued. I think being able to look back, we can say, "No. Why [inaudible 01:15:12] expected those trends to continue year-over-year because that's just not consumer buying patterns in the last decade or so. We haven't seen that.
Leo Laporte:
We have been saying for a while the end of desktop computing. What do you think, Tim? Is the end of desktop computing exaggerated?
Tim Stevens:
I definitely think it is. I think we've got a long time to go before that, and certainly people's usage patterns show that they're shifting away from desktop computing if you look at overall utilization, what devices they're consuming content on and even creating content on. But if you look at overall time, I think that number's going up and desktop usage is probably staying pretty much static for the past few years. I think we still have a long way to go there. But if you also look at the number of layoffs that we've seen lately, that's a lot. Fewer corporate laptops that are being needed. And certainly with nobody hiring, that means that there are fewer laptops being needed there too. If you do get hired now, I think there's probably a pretty good chance you're getting a hand-me-down.
Leo Laporte:
You're going to get Joe's laptop. We fired him last night.
Tim Stevens:
Yep. All right, Joe.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, sorry Joe. God, 12,000 layoffs at Google. It's just been tough. We had on Wednesday on TWiT, we had just completely a representative because I think one, we talked about these layoffs and I think tech industry since the beginning of the year, 200,000 jobs lost. We talk about that in this just kind of abstract numbers. I wanted to bring a face to it. We had Richard Hay on. He was a Google engineer who had been an engineer for 17 years at Google, and was one of the people just summarily dismissed, kind of abruptly, lost his job without any warning. His boss didn't even know ahead of time. I wanted just to bring home the face of it because that's 200,000 people with families, with bills, with mortgages, with rent, and they don't know what tomorrow is going to bring. That's a huge hit and I don't want to diminish it in any way by just talking broad numbers.
Tim Stevens:
Yeah, it really is a shame how that has to happen these days. The corporate implication of layoffs is really tragic and nauseating, honestly, having recently been through that myself, how depersonalized it has been mandated that you cannot have any empathy. You cannot talk to anybody about the situation. You are very restricted in what you can say, when you can say it. As someone who has tried to be an empathic leader, as someone who treated his employees like his friends, you have to go through that is really, really difficult on both sides of the equation.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, it's so hard, of course, yeah.
Tim Stevens:
I don't know where this pattern came from or why. It is almost legislated into corporate law these days, but it is really disgusting that that's where we've gotten to a point now where your ability to be an empathic leader has to end at the time when it's most important for you to be an empathic person.
Christina Warren:
Yes.
Harry McCracken:
I worry that Elon Musk sent set the bar so low for being empathetic or just decent to the people who worked for you that if these large companies beat Elon, they figure that it's okay. There were stories about Google employees who came into work and waved their badge to get in. Either it turned green and they were able to go in or it turned red and they knew they had been laid off, and that's how they got the news. I don't understand what the excuse is for that.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, yeah. That's unquestionable.
Christina Warren:
There's no good way to do layoffs is the reality. But there are ways that you can do it worse. I agree, for all the excuses that ... And this has been a thing, I think I've noticed because I first was seeing this in media where people would find out sometimes that they were laid off by losing access in Slack. Then people would disappear, and it would be like the Snap, and you were like, "What happened?" It brought back PTSD one day when people lost access for Slack for a completely unrelated reason and everybody freaked out. They were like, people just [inaudible 01:19:22] fired.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. "What does this mean?"
Christina Warren:
Right. You do this for the automation reasons, "We don't want people to have access to things." It's like, "Okay." Especially for people who you're paying a certain amount of money and who worked for you for a certain amount of time, it's like have some freaking humanity. There's a way to do it. There's a way to take access away. That doesn't mean that someone is entering the office at 7:00 AM hasn't checked their email, their personal email, doesn't know what's going on, waves a badge, and finds out that way. It's awful. There are better ways to do it. There's no good way to do it, period. But there are ways to do it that are worse than others.
Leo Laporte:
Somebody in the chatroom just told me that Krista Bonna, who was one of the founders of FLOSS Weekly, a great friend, is also an ex Googler. He was a director at of Open Source at Google. I did not realize he had lost his job as well.
Christina Warren:
I didn't either. That's a massive loss for them. That's a massive concern for Open Source because of all the work and money, and resources that Google has given Open Source projects over the years, sponsoring conferences and other things. That's been a discussion that has come up in the last couple of weeks was with these big layoffs is what does that mean for the open source ecosystem? I don't think that it's a wrong one because budgets are tight everywhere and these are things that some people in the open source movement don't like to acknowledge. But a lot of the money and a lot of the funding really does come from these corporations, whether you're comfortable with that or not.
If those checks go away, what does that mean? Because sustainability and open source has been a really big topic for the last number of years, and corporate goodwill or corporations paying their own way for services and support is one thing. But the goodwill aspect, which has been increasingly I think that we've seen happen, I can see that potentially at some places going away. That's really discouraging and I think it have really negative consequences because people haven't always wanted to maybe acknowledge how much of a role those checks and that funding can really play for a lot of small projects.
Leo Laporte:
Microsoft also laying off about 10,000 workers. This is the thing. I'm sure you do this too, Christina, you go and you look, and you just check and see, "Oh, gosh." I'm sure there's corporate slacks and stuff that you can go to and see who's there. Apparently at Twitter, there were these salute icons as people got dropped off the face of the earth. Microsoft-
Christina Warren:
Well, I think it was-
Leo Laporte:
Go ahead.
Christina Warren:
No, I was going to say, I think that what made it hard for Microsoft, and I'm sure for Google, too, is a lot of people are working from home. There were a lot of-
Leo Laporte:
It just disappeared.
Christina Warren:
... shadow groups of people. Yeah, you don't know if people checking in with one another. That's what I was doing. I was checking in with my friends at Microsoft. I'm in a few group chats and that's what I was doing, and then checking Twitter and seeing some people were laid off and whatnot. When you're talking about numbers this big, it's not about performance. It really is decisions made usually about entire divisions [inaudible 01:22:48] focus areas.
Leo Laporte:
[inaudible 01:22:47] slash divisions.
Christina Warren:
Right.
Leo Laporte:
One of the stories, and again, I'm not going to put you on the spot. You don't represent Microsoft in any stretch of the imagination. But one of the things that we did learn is that Microsoft's VR, AR, HoloLens division suffered massive cuts. And that sounds to me like more of a strategic decision to not pursue those areas. And instead of making hardware to make their software available to companies like HTC and Meta that are going to make the hardware in Apple one imagines, that are going to make the hardware, and then make the productivity software for that hardware, which actually probably is a better bet than putting all your chips in on legless, sexless people wandering around in a low polycount.
Harry McCracken:
Microsoft also-
Leo Laporte:
To take Corey's prose. Yeah.
Harry McCracken:
Microsoft also gave up on AltspaceVR, which was a startup date acquired a few years years ago, which was a platform. I would be cautious about assuming that Microsoft doesn't have any AR-VR/Metaverse platform ambitions forever. But if they do, maybe this seems like a little bit of a reset and-
Leo Laporte:
Sure doesn't sound like it.
Harry McCracken:
It seems perfectly sensible at this point to redeploy some of that metal bandwidth and resources into AI, which so clearly is going to have so much impact starting at this very moment as opposed to the Metaverse, which is still maybe at some point and maybe not to the degree we expected kind of thing.
Leo Laporte:
Isn't it risky though to chase the flavor of the month? Because I mean that's why they chased VR.
Harry McCracken:
True. Although, for all the reasons to be cautious about AI, I think even if it's only 5% as impactful as people expect that it's going to be incredibly important.
Leo Laporte:
There were a lot of reasons to think VR AR was not going anywhere from day one. The 11% of the people who used it were nauseated, is a pretty good indicator that there's going to be, this may not be the mass appeal product you hope it will be.
Harry McCracken:
There's some, if you want to have magical glasses that look like these but have great battery life and fantastic [inaudible 01:24:58].
Leo Laporte:
Well, that's Apple's plan, right? Spectacles.
Harry McCracken:
They gave up on that, too. There's some fundamental piece of technology we have no idea how to build so far.
Leo Laporte:
Right, right. We know how to do AI but we-
Christina Warren:
How do you do the battery life?
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, exactly.
Harry McCracken:
Chemistry moves at a glacial pace compared to digital stuff.
Leo Laporte:
That was one of the stories from the week Mark Gurman saying Apple is going to push off its spectacle based AR vision for at least a couple of years to 2025, if not later, because they can't get it working. Even their headset, which still rumors are strong, they're going to offer for $3,000 this year has a battery in your pocket because it's too heavy to wear on your head. I think there are some fundamental technical issues with it. The problem is we all read the same science fiction stories by William Gibson and Neil Stephenson.
Christina Warren:
Right. We all want this.
Leo Laporte:
We all to jack into the metaverse.
Christina Warren:
We all want this.
Leo Laporte:
But it's not sci-fi.
Christina Warren:
The battery thing is one of the biggest ones. I've been a proponent of going nuclear for a decade, at least.
Leo Laporte:
You want a little nuclear power plant near your head?
Christina Warren:
Honestly, I would trust it more than lithium ion. If you look at the safety record, I honestly would.
Leo Laporte:
Do we have that technology? I know we have pocket nuclear reactors for power, but pocket means the size of this room.
Christina Warren:
I don't know if we do or not. My point is more like, I wish that we'd been investing more over the last decades in looking at that as a power source than in some of these other things because I do think in my mind, that's the only way you can get the long lasting battery life and the micronization that you'll need for these things. But I just don't think it's going to be possible with lithium polymers. I just don't. People [inaudible 01:26:48] physics and chemistry [inaudible 01:26:50].
Leo Laporte:
I understand. I'm just not sure people are anxious to wear a nuclear power plant hat.
Christina Warren:
You're not wrong. But again, I mean maybe it needs a rebranding. I'm just saying the brain is-
Leo Laporte:
Don't call it the nuclear hat. Okay, that's a good start.
Christina Warren:
Right? Don't call it the nuclear hat. I'm just saying, it's a branding thing. But I think that the technology, that's obviously one of the only solutions that I can think of that we already have because solar is certainly not going to be fast enough or powerful enough to do that sort of thing.
Leo Laporte:
Our listeners in Australia are probably aware of the fact that a tiny Cesium-137 went missing on its way to Perth this past week. Just one. Let me see if I can find a picture of it because it's so small. They warned the public not to touch it, but it's so small. I don't know even know how you would find it. It's about the size of one of those little lithium ion batteries that you put in your pocket. Here it is. Here's the size next to a Australian something, 10 pence piece. I don't know what that is. Six millimeters by eight millimeters. If you see it-
Tim Stevens:
Turn it in.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Don't touch it. Don't pick it up.
Tim Stevens:
Don't taste it.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. You guys are too young to remember. When I was a kid, there were constant ads not to touch blasting caps. None of you remember that. Do you remember that, John?
John:
I don't know.
Leo Laporte:
Blasting caps. Maybe that was a major problem. I don't know. "Kids, if you see this, don't touch it." Well, kids, if you see a six millimeter by eight millimeter shiny silver capsule, don't touch it. It could kill you. It could kill you. Do you want to wear that on your head? I don't know.
Tim Stevens:
To Christina's point though, we haven't seen any real progress in alternate sources for power in a while. I remember seeing this about a decade ago, there was a hall full of portable devices for hydrogen power basically, so you could have a fuel cell in your laptop or on your phone, even. There was so many different vendors. It seemed like it was just a couple of years away. Then I'm guessing they started popping, exploding in people's pants, and that was probably the end of that. But we haven't really seen anything since then. Certainly, salicylate batteries are just around the corner. I think we'll see those soon and those will provide a pretty big step forward in terms of charging speed, discharge speed, and will help to reduce the overall volume of a given capacity of battery. But really, like I said, biochemistry happens slowly and there really isn't any kind of shot in the dark that's coming soon for portal devices. For cars, super capacitors and things like that, I think we'll have some big gains in a decade or so. But there's nothing like that coming for smaller stuff.
Leo Laporte:
Microsoft's quarter was not great. Revenue is up 2%, profit down 12%. This primarily, I think, due to this PC drop off, both below Wall Street expectations. Amy Hood, Microsoft's chief financial officer said, "New business slowed in December, and it expects growth to continue to slow in the current quarter, which ends March 31st." On the other hand, I think Microsoft is very well-positioned. This open AI investment is looking very smart right now. Clearly, if AI is taking off, businesses like Azure are going to do very well. Nobody wants to invest in the storage and the TPU capacity that's required for learning big sets of data. They do it often in the cloud. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all benefiting for that. I think I would be bullish about Microsoft, Christina, and certainly about GitHub. GitHub past 100 million developers this week.
Christina Warren:
Yes, yes. That was very, very exciting news. A hundred million developers and a couple years ahead of schedule. The goal had been 2025. We were able to hit it early 2023. So very, very exciting about that. When you look at the trajectory of how many developers have joined the platform, even in going back to 2016, it's really ramped up. I think it's because one of the great things is that the definition of developer has changed, I think, in a really important way. People who are working around code or making contributions that might not be code-focused, can still use platforms like GitHub. The rise of the lower code movement around people who are building business applications and doing other types of things, when you see a lot of data scientists and other people doing really innovative stuff. But again, in their mind 10 years ago, they might have said, "I'm not a developer." Now you can be like, "No, you are." The stuff that you're doing might not be coded in a traditional sense, but it definitely is impacting things, or in some cases is absolutely code.
Leo Laporte:
What's the weirdest thing people are using GitHub for? Maybe that's a loaded question. I don't-
Christina Warren:
No, no. It's interesting because, people so [inaudible 01:32:12].
Leo Laporte:
It's not all code. I know novelists and writers use it, right?
Christina Warren:
Yeah. I was going to say, we have this product called GitHub Projects which is like a project management stuff, and you will see people who will just use it to just manage their life, to just have it as a very organized kind of to-do list thing. That's really cool to see. But as you see, novelists, people who use it for writing, I think that is definitely a really cool way. Then we also see it used in really interesting ways by people in NASA and in other organizations. A lot of the data science stuff is really interesting because you can see people putting their Jupyter Notebooks and their other output there. That I think is actually really great. I think seeing notebooks has been such a great feature to happen. I think in ...
Leo Laporte:
Such a great feature to happen, I think, in code for a lot of reasons, and as we've gotten better support for that stuff within GitHub, I think that's been a really cool thing to see the data sets and that stuff that people have used. That's really awesome to me because those are things that wouldn't fit with a lot of traditional code things, but is a really great way where, we had an incident, I think it was last year, where we got rid of one of our original URL shorteners and we did it because the code behind it was really antiquated and it hadn't been up kept, but we had to wind up migrating a lot of the URL's over and keep them working because it turned out that there were a number of academic papers where people had used the URL shortener, which would just go to a GitHub repo in their academic papers. And that's always really interesting to see how many people will put the full data sets and other information of academic papers on GitHub repos. That's always really cool to see.
Somebody has got an open AI chat, GBT prompt for a link bait article. Better GitHub with this one weird trick. I think we should write that right now. Somebody will come up with that.
Christina Warren:
We should totally write that.
Leo Laporte:
Somebody I hugely admire, one of the most famous programmers in the world. Peter Norvig, he's an AI scientist at Google uses Jupiter Notebooks on GitHub. I follow him because I do the advent of coding problems and he does these every year. And of course, here's one of the best programmers in the world. This is what a Jupiter notebook looks like on GitHub. He's got cartoons, he's got code that runs, he's got results. It's amazing. He's even got visualizations in here because Jupiter Notebooks, which is just one of many kinds of notebooks, but Jupiter's probably the most popular, allow you to run code and write texts so you could do true literate programming. I think this is fantastic. I am so impressed. I think to me, this is a great use of GitHub. I mean this is actual Python code that runs.
Christina Warren:
Exactly. And it's such a great teaching tool, honestly. It really is, I think one of the best ways to teach stuff, and so using that with advent of code and that's beautiful, that's really cool to see. I love this.
Leo Laporte:
And it's marvelous to look at his code because it's clear, and it is a little terse, but it's very clear and precise and inspired. This is a guy who speaks code and it's so fun to look at this. I always wait until after I've tried to solve the problem before I read his post. He's also got somebody doing cartoons. And all this, this is a GitHub page. This is a repository, which is pretty darn cool if you ask me.
Anyway, Microsoft, tough quarter, but I think the market rewarded missing its targets with a 4% bump in the stock price, because I think of the future of AI. And everybody knew that this PC slowdown was going to hit Microsoft just as much if not more, because of course, they make the operating system for most of these computers. So I think you're at a good company. If I were you, Christina, I would keep that job. Just my advice to you.
Christina Warren:
Definitely. That's definitely the plan, right?
Leo Laporte:
Yes.
Christina Warren:
There's uncertainty everywhere, but that is definitely the plan. I definitely feel very lucky to be at GitHub and yeah.
Leo Laporte:
Well, we love you and you could always come here if you needed to, but I don't think I could pay you anything like Microsoft pays you.
Christina Warren:
But I appreciate.
Leo Laporte:
Just so you know. Bring your shoes. Come on over. Yeah.
Christina Warren:
I will bring my shoes. I'll come to Petaluma. Okay.
Leo Laporte:
What's your new kicks? What's your hot new kick? Anything exciting?
Christina Warren:
Oh, okay. Yes, actually, I don't have them in this room with me. They're in the other room, but I went to Vegas last week with my mom. I took her to see Adele last weekend and it was amazing.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, how fun.
Christina Warren:
The best time.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, how fun.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, my mom has never been to Las Vegas and I haven't been for a non-work related reason in a really long time.
Leo Laporte:
It's a very different experience, isn't it, when you're not going to the convention center every day, all day?
Christina Warren:
Honestly, it was like a completely different thing for me. We had such a great time. But we were staying at the Palazzo, which is part of the Venetian, and they have a big mall, and then there's the one in the Encore next door. And anyway, I went into Ferragamo and I bought a pair of a camo sneakers. I will put them in the chats. They are great. But that is my new pair.
Leo Laporte:
Can I? I shouldn't. This is gauche of me. How much were they? Can I ask?
Christina Warren:
Like 800.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Well, that's not bad. Everything at Ferragamo starts at 800, so you really got a deal, I think.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, exactly. So I got the low end. Well, here's the thing, there was a pair I liked that were a little bit more expensive. They were still within my budget of what I would've spent, but I'm a five and a half, which the salesperson had never seen someone with feet as small as mine.
Leo Laporte:
I have tiny little feet too. I feel like I'm just going to fall over in a stiff wind, so yeah.
Christina Warren:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
All right. We're going to take a break. You go get those Ferragamo's if you want, because we're going to talk about our sponsor.
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All right. Let's see those kicks, Christina. Christina's new kicks. These are, ooh. Yeah. What's that logo? Is that Ferragamo? What is that?
Christina Warren:
I guess so. I'm not even sure. I did like how it looked. And then I really liked the back, which is like this black polka dot thing.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Christina Warren:
And again, I'm not defending-
Leo Laporte:
Are you ever going to wear them or are you just going to put them on the shelf and sell them to somebody else someday?
Christina Warren:
No. No, no, no, no, no. I wear my shoes. I don't buy them for the resale value. A, my foot is so small that-
Leo Laporte:
No one's going to buy a five and a half.
Christina Warren:
No. Exactly right. That's a very small number of people who are able to wear my shoe size. No, I buy them to wear, I have them on the back wall because-
Leo Laporte:
I know, I see them and I can see the soles are used. You are not one of those people.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah. Just puts a shoe on a shelf and lets it suffer in silence.
Christina Warren:
And I have some friends who do that. That's not me. For me, I'm like, no, shoes are to be worn. Fashion is to be worn. Don't hoard it in that way. Because, if I spent money, even if it was $50 on a pair of shoes and then never wore it, that's a waste.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I agree.
Christina Warren:
You buy it to enjoy it.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I am wearing a 49ers jersey, which is now for sale, cheap, if anybody... No, I'm just kidding. But Lisa's birthday is today and our anniversary. So she got a lovely birthday present. But I bought her a... Our young star quarterback, the rookie, Mr. Irrelevant, Brock Purdy, I bought her a Brock Purdy jersey to wear during the big... There's a big game today for those of you who-
Harry McCracken:
I learned about that.
Leo Laporte:
Yes. You didn't know at first, no. Sport ball. What is that? So I bought her a Brock Purdy jersey. But now Marie, you tell me if I'm right or wrong on this. I thought, what size should I get? And then I said, I'm getting the small right, because if it's too small, that's fine. If I got large, no, that would've been bad. So a little husband tip, start with the smallest size, whether it's a shoe or a shirt, start with the smallest size. You can always return it and get the next one up, which I'm going to have to do because she's not that small. She is. She's tiny. I thought it would fit, but I guess women's small is pretty small. It's probably the equivalent of a five and a half shoe.
So I did something really gloomy last night and I watched a movie called To Leslie. Anybody see that yet?
Speaker 3:
I haven't yet. It's on the list though, for sure.
Christina Warren:
No, I haven't.
Speaker 3:
No spoilers.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, but everybody started talking about it and then I got all the nominations.
Leo Laporte:
This is proof that Twitter, for all its problems still is very powerful. Normally this time, or actually last month in December, especially in Los Angeles, which it's a company town, billboards, ads in every magazine, TV ads for your consideration, movies that they want the members of the academy to vote for, to nominate for best picture, best actor, because it makes a big difference in box office. So there was a tiny little movie. It only made $27,000 at the box office called, To Leslie. The movie company could not possibly afford even one billboard on Sunset Strip for your consideration, but somehow they got every mainstream A-list actor in the world to tweet something just like this.
This is Edward Norton. I don't post a lot about film or actor performances. Maybe I should more often, but for those interested in really great acting, I'll share that. Andrea Riseborough's portrayal in To Leslie just knocked me sideways. It's about the most fully committed, emotionally deep. And then there's a dot, dot, dot. I don't know, maybe there's more. Oh, here it is. Physically harrowing performances I've seen in a while, just raw and utterly devoid of performative BS is tough, but really elegant and compassionate film by Michael Morris where the emotion is really learned. I happen to catch it. Wow. I was really... Three tweets. Staggered by the depth she reached. Very rare. Checking it out.
But turns out it wasn't just Edward Norton. It was pretty much everybody in Hollywood tweeted. This was a mass Twitter campaign to get this actress who's frankly not well known, an Oscar nomination. Cate Blanchett, Steven Spielberg, Oprah, happy birthday Oprah, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, Martin Scorsese. But Brian Rowe pointed this out on Twitter. All use this exact phrase, the greatest screen performance in the history of the cinematic medium. Marie, you worked in PR, do you think that was a coincidence?
Harry McCracken:
And was that the greatest performance in the history of the cinematic media?
Leo Laporte:
Okay. There's no lie there. Oh, you watched a two Anne? It was a really good performance. It was amazing. She got a nomination for best actors, beating out some people who everybody thought were shoeing, including Viola Davis for Wakanda, I'm sorry, the Queen, right? What was the name of it? Woman King. Queen, King. Woman King. Apparently great. I did not see it. And then there was Till and the actress in Till, who everybody thought both actresses snubbed by the Golden Globes and now snubbed by the academy. But this very little known actress with a film that made $27,000, got all of this attention and got a nomination. That's the power of Twitter, right? You didn't need a billboard on Sunset-
Christina Warren:
Twitter and-
Leo Laporte:
Go ahead.
Christina Warren:
Well, it was Twitter and then was also, didn't like Ed Norton and some other celebrities, didn't they have screenings for academy members at home?
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. So Jennifer Aniston says, come over to my house and we can watch this fine movie, To Leslie. Who's going to turn that down, right? Distributor, Momentum Pictures did not have any money to mount a campaign. Riseborough was not nominated in the Golden Globes or the SAG awards. It's basically a word of mouth campaign. Kicked off two days before Oscar voting began too. It was a late entry.
Christina Warren:
Very late to campaign.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Christina Warren:
That's incredible. Even though obviously, it was getting the voters to see it. But the Twitter thing, you're exactly right. And I followed this stuff for a long time. They didn't have money for a campaign. So this is a really interesting, I think example of, the right connected people stepping up and using social platforms to highlight something that otherwise would not have been getting this sort of attention, whether or not she's going to win or not, that remains to be seen, but that's pretty fantastic.
Leo Laporte:
Here's a tweet by Crazy Cons. He tweets, something weird is happening. Here's Mia Farrow, here's Meredith Vieirra, here's Joe Mantegna. And by the way, all of them say a small film with a giant heart, a small film with a giant heart, a small film with a giant heart. Dule Hill, a small film with giant. I do want to congratulate Mark Maron, who is billed as an executive producer, probably because they couldn't pay him for it. But he's a well-known podcaster, does the WTF podcast, famous comedian. I feel like he's one of our own. He has a very large role and he's quite good. Didn't you think Mark Maron was good in it? Do you know even know who he is? He was the guy with the beard who did the...
And then the other guy who was in it, is Bubbles from The Wire. And I'm watching this guy, I'm saying, I know this character. Who is this actor? Remember Bubs in The Wire? He was the kind of strung out junkie and former, that was actually, you couldn't take your eyes off him when he was on the screen. He's in it as well. Ant, out of five stars. How many?
Ant:
Three and a half.
Leo Laporte:
Three and a half. I give it more than that. But it's very grim.
Ant:
It's dark.
Leo Laporte:
It's dark. And then it has a, well, I don't want to spoil it for you.
Ant:
It's just too dark.
Leo Laporte:
But I guarantee you that this suddenly is going to make millions of dollars, right, in streaming. You can stream it on all the major streamers.
Harry McCracken:
And also open up questions.
Christina Warren:
Yeah. I'm going to-
Harry McCracken:
Sorry, go ahead, Christina.
Christina Warren:
No, I was just going to say, I'm definitely going to be streaming it. I meant to watch it this weekend but I didn't have a chance.
Leo Laporte:
I made a point of watching it last night, so I'd be ready for today. It's good. I'm glad I watched it. It's no Wakanda forever, but it's okay.
Harry McCracken:
And it's raising questions about the ethics of these campaigns and there are rules about what you can and can't do with these campaigns, but they may not have anticipated the Twitter era and this campaign. Which, if it was based primarily on Twitter, didn't cost anything, but was apparently extremely effective.
Leo Laporte:
And it shows you the power of, well, coming over to Cate Blanchett's house is one.
Christina Warren:
That the big thing, right?
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. But also-
Christina Warren:
Honestly, that's the big thing. The last one I can remember that I guess was similar to this was the campaign for Frozen River, with Melissa Leo. And that was nominated for Best Picture, and that was a very small film. And Melissa Leo was nominated for Best Actress. She won the following year for Best Supporting Actors for The Fighter. And I don't think she would've won had she not been in Frozen River the year before, even though The Fighter had a very large campaign behind it. I think that Melissa Leo won because of the Frozen River campaign the year earlier. But no, but it's interesting to see, and you're right Harry, there are ethical things, but at the same time, yeah, they're all used in the same language, because some PR persons send it to-
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. There was somehow where Cate Blanchett wrote to everybody, saying, here's a suggested tweet.
Christina Warren:
And then everybody just copy, pasted and just did the same as the Instagram influencers, like The Kardashians oftentimes would just copy the entire prompt, including the stuff they weren't supposed to copy, and they'd post it on their accounts. But I don't think this breaks any of the rules. I think that if a very famous and influential person decides to have other people, voters, over at their home to watch something, I don't think that breaks any rules. Maybe it should, but I don't think it does.
Leo Laporte:
Or maybe just everybody knows Andrea Riseborough and thinks she's really wonderful. Now I'm learning she's English, which does impress me more because she didn't play an English character in there. She plays a Southern character.
Christina Warren:
That's hard.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, that's hard. She hasn't done a lot. She was in some movies I've heard of, but never saw, like Nocturnal Animals and The Death of Stalin, and I don't know, it's an interesting thing. What were you going to say, Harry?
Harry McCracken:
I think I said it.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, you said it already. Okay. By the way, the character who played Bubbles in The Wire is Andre Royo. I want to give him credit. I have not seen him ever since, but he plays Royal in the movie. It's worth seeing that for Mark Maron and Andre Royo, if nothing else. And yes, Andrea Riseborough's good. As I'm watching it, I don't want to spoil it. I'm thinking, don't do that. Don't do it. I know they're going to do it, but I don't want them to do it. And they did it. That's all I'm going to say. I don't know. That's not a spoiler. Hey, by the way, there are a couple of cool things we didn't mention with GitHub. I just wanted to mention, there's now a co-pilot paintbrush, right? That you paint your code. And now you can say, hey, GitHub.
Christina Warren:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
That's wild. So, you can-
Christina Warren:
Which is fantastic. So you can-
Leo Laporte:
If you've got carpal tunnel or something, you can just say, hey GitHub, write this login code for me, I'm too tired. Oh, it wants me to log in. Okay. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 4:
Hey, GitHub, talk-
Christina Warren:
Yeah, it's very cool.
Speaker 4:
Import pandas, import graph plotting library. Hey GitHub, insert new line. Get Titanic CSV data from the web and assign it to the variable Titanic data.
Leo Laporte:
Holy Co.
Speaker 4:
From Titanic data where age is null. Fill middle values of column fair with average column values. Drop duplicates from the frame Titanic data. Hey, GitHub, new line. Plot line graph of age versus fair column. Changed the scatter plot. Show plot. Hey, GitHub, exit code mode. Hey, GitHub, run program.
Leo Laporte:
Oh my God. That's pretty impressive. That demo right there. It's writing Python code.
Christina Warren:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
No typing involved. This is a very common kind of data query for data scientists and you don't have to type all those brackets, and tabs, and semi colon's. It just does it.
Christina Warren:
And the impressive thing with that is that, obviously, there's been a lot of tex to speech technology for years, that's very good. But it has not worked well with code, because that's-
Leo Laporte:
It's so specialized.
Christina Warren:
Than, what it's designed for.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Christina Warren:
Exactly. And when I was hit by the car five years ago and I broke my wrist, my primary hand, typing, before I was in a cast, when I was in traction was impossible. And it made coding basically impossible. And I was using a lot of text to speech stuff, or voice to text stuff rather. And that was the biggest challenge. And so when I looked at, Hey GitHub, I was like, okay, not only is it so cool that you can just speak what you want it to do and it can write it the right way, in actual language, but the fact is that you can say things like, new line or you can say, import pandas and other things, and it's not getting confused, because it's been trained for this specialized thing as you said, which is really awesome.
Leo Laporte:
Kind of amazing. Kind of incredible.
Interesting story about ADSB. So I had never heard of ADSB not being a pilot, but if you heard about the Elon Jet tracker, that was using ADSB, which is a database, it's actually technically ADSB exchange. And it was kind of like IMDb or Wikipedia. It was created by users. And the reason it worked is because jet airplanes, all airplanes I guess have transponders, transponding their tail number and their location as they fly around. That's how they know where everybody is. And air traffic control uses it. And I imagine other planes use it.
Well, it turns out if you're an enthusiast, you can also have a little receiver on the ground and monitor all the traffic going ahead. And then if somebody were to write a way to aggregate that data onto a map and you had enough people with those little receivers all over the world, you'd have a pretty good tracking map of all the flights. Well, that's what ADSB Exchange was. And I say was, because it was owned by one person. A lot of people contributed, but Dan Streufert founded the site and was the sole owner of the site, and he sold it to JetNet, which was, by the way, owned by Get Ready private equity company.
And at this point there is a little rebellion going on, including by the guy who does Elon Jet who said, I'm not going to use this data anymore and I'm not going to contribute to it anymore. It's understandable. The server costs, the hosting costs were expensive. ADSB exchange couldn't really monetize very well. It's free to use. They used advertising and then they had a kind of higher paid tier, but it's still an expensive thing to run. And so at some point, Streufert decided he was going to sell it.
Jack Sweeney runs the Elon Jet Twitter account, said, today is a sad day. If you feed ADSB Exchange, we encourage you to stop feeding. ADSB exchange was found on the principles of hobbyists, community, not for profit private equity firms. So it'll be interesting to see within a few hours after the sale became public, the 11,000 feeders, 11,000 people running these receivers dropped significantly to 9,500 people in a span of a few hours. I don't know where it stands right now. I'm not an expert on this, but I'd be very curious to see what happens. One user said, flight aware, flight radar win, Elon wins, all the guys who are out to get us win.
So remember the saga of Elon Jet and Elon chasing it off Twitter, and he went to Mastodon and then Elon blocked every Mastodon mention on Twitter. There's a final line in that story. It's kind of sad. Wednesday they announced that they had been acquired, kind of like IMDb or CDDB, or all these other... Fortunately, nobody's acquired Wikipedia. I hope not. And no one can acquire Mastodon. Again, this is the argument for these distributed places. JetNet is owned by Silversmith Capital Partners. They were acquired last year. The acquisition is the second of what the company anticipates will be several future acquisitions as JetNet expands its data-driven product offerings for the aviation industry. So you got a problem there, if you've got volunteers freely uploading this data and suddenly you make a killing selling it, and this private equity comes along, you need the volunteers, don't you? Anything to say about that, or should we move on?
Christina Warren:
I'm sort of sympathetic I guess, to the volunteers. At the same time, the jets tracking stuff, I know it's legal. I'm not arguing the legality at all, because obviously, the FA has to be able to know what planes are in the air, and I'm not questioning any of that. But I do think the jet tracking stuff is gross. I do.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Well, honestly, I understand Elon's point. But
Leo Laporte:
I understand Elon's point. I mean, but I mean it's not exactly assassination coordinates. And Sweeney could have done some things to protect Elon, like delaying the tweet by an hour or two, and a chance to move on.
Christina Warren:
And I'm not saying that it was assassination thing. I think that was the hyperbole. People in fandoms, like teenage girls, have been doing this for years for their favorite pop stars and it was gross then. And they would put stuff on Twitter and on Tumblr and whatnot. It's gross now.
I do feel for guess the aviation enthusiast community who feels like this thing they've been contributing to has now been sold to private equity, who will be making money off of it.
But at the same time, the data's either open or it's not. You know what I mean? You can create your own thing, but I mean, this is public data for a reason.
Leo Laporte:
I remember watching Gaga's Gaga's movie and I just watched Taylor Swift's Miss Americana movie. And the thing that I really sticks in my mind is these poor people go out of their doors of their apartment, and at any time of the day or night, there are hundreds of fans standing there, waiting for them. They have to have big security guards just to get them to the car. And barriers.
And I'm starting to read, I'm much to my chagrin, Prince Harry's Spare, and it's somewhat the similar situation. It killed Princess Diana.
Christina Warren:
Right. Well, and the way that a lot of the paparazzi finds where the celebrities are going to be, is that they track their jets because a lot of them have... If they own their own jet, then it's registered. If they are simply renting one, then it's harder.
But Taylor Swift owns her own planes and now she's doing the thing, I think where she hides the registration, which you can do a certain way. People still... Her fans are insane. And I say this as a big Taylor Swift fan, but not one who appreciates or encourages any of this because I think this stuff is just gross and disgusting.
The K-pop fans are the same way, where they will literally track exactly where people are at all times, to try to know and put it up on the internet and not realizing... Then they get mad about the paparazzi stalking their favorite stars.
It's like, how do you think they're figuring out exactly where they're landing, and then showing up at private airports. Or God forbid they're having to fly commercial, showing up literally at baggage claim outside LAX. That's because people are doing things like this and they're tracking their upper movement and there's something gross about that.
And again, I think that's not trying to say that everybody... In fact, most of the people part of this community are not involved in that at all. But I do think that when we have those discussions, and again, I don't think that calling it assassination was in any way correct. But there is this very gross aspect for high profile people having no privacy because you have really obsessive people out there who are tracking their every move and then in turn passing that on to people who are then going to take photos to sell for lots of money.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I know that Taylor Swift... Let me see if I can, I don't want to jeopardize her safety. I feel bad for her. I feel bad for anybody in this situation. She uses face recognition at her concerts to find the most... Go ahead.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, I was going to say she did, I think at the last concert. Yeah, I think they said-
Leo Laporte:
Because they know who these most dangerous stalking fans are
Christina Warren:
I don't remember sharing my face.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Oh, you don't. Well, but they don't need to walk up to a camera and smile. They see you coming in and-
Christina Warren:
Yeah, I guess so. I guess, yeah, I guess was just... in my mind I was... because I saw, I remember at being at the concert and seeing the signs up, but I don't remember. Obviously there wasn't anything when you entered where you had to scan your face.
Leo Laporte:
No, no. They just look at the crowd. They just watch you coming in and have, apparently they have face recognition data for people who are considered threats, and more power to her. I don't blame her for doing that. I don't blame her people for doing that because her life is at risk. It's a shame she has to. But it does raise some interesting questions. So there were big signs saying what, "Your face is being captured?"
Christina Warren:
Yeah, something like that. I took a photo of it. I'll have to find it. I don't have it off the top of my hand, but I did take a photo of it when I saw it at the Seattle Reputation Tour concert. I'm sure it was at the one that I saw in New Jersey as well. This was in 2018, which was the last time she toured. But yeah, there was something like that that said that your photo maybe used, that by being at this concert, you've consented to your photo being used in a database for whatever the purpose might be, which fair enough if it's something that if you want to attend this concert, you have to make that trade-off.
There are plenty of people, I'm sure who would be like, well, I will never go to a concert that does that, but I obviously... So many people have my face, my faces in so many databases. I wanted to see the concert.
Leo Laporte:
So apparently they put rehearsal clips up on a kiosk and then people would go over and look=.
Christina Warren:
That's what it was.
Leo Laporte:
They would go over and look at the clips.
Harry McCracken:
Sneaky!
Christina Warren:
That's what it was.
Leo Laporte:
And there was a camera inside the display taking their picture.
Christina Warren:
But that's what it was. And then, yeah, it was this kiosk thing, and then there was a sign on the kiosk that told you what it was doing.
Leo Laporte:
Oh my God. The images, this is from Rolling Stone, which broke the story. This is back in 2018. The images were being transferred to a Nashville command post where they were cross-referenced with a database of hundreds of the pop star's... hundreds of the pop star's known stalkers. Everybody who went by would stop and stare at it, and the software would start working.
And presumably if you were one of those people, some big burly guy with a walkie-talkie, you would walk over and say, "Excuse me, sir." Now this is relevant to today because it's been happening, and we've talked about this before at Madison Square Garden, the Dolans who own MSS G and Madison Square Garden owns a bunch of other stuff.
Harry McCracken:
Radio City Music Hall.
Leo Laporte:
Well, this happened first at Radio City Music Hall, a mother with her Girl Scout Troop went to see the Rockettes for the holiday show and was informed as she enters, "Nope, sorry lady, you can't come in."
Had to wait outside out front while her girls watched The Rockettes found out it was because she works for a law firm that has a lawsuit with MSG, and apparently the Dolans have been doing this. MSG's been doing this to any lawyer that has anything going on with MSG. They have face recognition and they will lock you out.
Harry McCracken:
Or just if few work for a law firm that also has other lawyers.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, yeah.
Harry McCracken:
Suing them.
Leo Laporte:
The mom said, "I don't know anything about this. This is not my... I'm not suing them."
"Sorry lady."
And of course, James Dolan, who gave a fairly fiery interview about this couple of days ago, says, "That's all right. It's a private institution," to which the liquor licensing authority in New York says, "Well, not exactly," because when you have a liquor license, there are caveats, covenants, things. You agree, including being open to the public. You can't have a private liquor license.
So there is some question. In fact, New York State Attorney General Leticia James is paying attention, investigating New York State legislatures have introduced a bill that would ban face recognition in sporting events. And now the Liquor Authority, the New York State Liquor Authority, SLA, is saying "Your liquor license is in jeopardy."
Dolan gave an interview Thursday, a fiery, I'm told I didn't watch an interview with Fox 5, channel five in New York, in which he defended his family's right to "Block anybody we don't like from coming in."
And of course, Madison Square Garden is the home of the Rangers' hockey team and a couple of lawyers. Now we'd mentioned earlier, you don't want to get on the bad side of lawyers. They'd say, "We'll sue your ass." And I think there probably will be some lawsuits. Dolan says, "Well, all right, liquor authority you watch, I'm going to pick a day and we're not going to serve any beer at a Rangers' game and then see how you feel."
Harry McCracken:
And I think he said he was going to be with the phone number of the liquor authorities.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, you call them.
Harry McCracken:
[inaudible 02:13:03]
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, he doxxed him. He actually gave out the number on the TV.
Harry McCracken:
It seems incredibly petty and a great way to get bad publicity without really accomplishing much of anything.
Leo Laporte:
So I understand why Taylor might do this at her concerts. In fact, it's sad that she has to. But I understand why. I don't think James Dolan really has to block lawyers from coming into Rangers games.'
Christina Warren:
No, no. I mean, I think it's one thing to be like, okay, I think she's had people show up in her house when she's not there and take showers and I mean, it's awful. And she has very serious mentally disturbed people after her. Totally get that.
It's another thing to be like, "Oh, you work at a law firm that's involved in litigation with my company, so you're banned from entering the premises."
I mean, A, that's really concerning that you have the facial data of everybody who works at law firm. That's concerning right there.
And then B, it's like really? Really? So they can't even come see the Rockettes. What does that have to do with anything?
Leo Laporte:
Here is, we don't have to zoom in on this, but here's a little thumbnail from YouTube of Dolan holding up the name of the SLAs chief executive, and his phone number and his email, and his picture saying, "I'm going to put this wherever we sell alcohol. I'm going to put this up in the stadium."
Harry McCracken:
I can't imagine all that many people side. With him.
Leo Laporte:
Wow.
Christina Warren:
No, no.
Leo Laporte:
No. New York State Senator who represents the part of Manhattan, that Madison Square Garden as in described Dolan's interview according to the Washington Post as "A public meltdown called him the poster child of privilege who receives," and this is an important point, "A $43 million a year tax break from New Yorkers." As is often the case with these big sports venues.
Christina Warren:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
Sometimes face recognition gone wrong. Sometimes, most of the time. Again, Taylor Swift seems to be the only actual legitimate use of this, because you got to protect Tay-Tay. I'm sorry, that's just not okay.
She's all right. She's doing okay, though, right?
Christina Warren:
Yeah, I think so.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. It's a good movie. I liked it. I enjoyed it. That's the thing now. Everybody has to do this. Selena Gomez. Gaga, I think. I don't know if she started it... Madonna started it, didn't she? And then Gaga.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, she really did. It was Truth or Dare.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, Truth or Dare, with Warren Beatty hanging around the dressing room. Saying "What are you doing today? You want to go out after the show, you want to have a drink, you want to hang out, huh?"
All right, one more break then we are going to wrap this puppy up, but it is such an important advertiser. I want to tell everybody, you got to get Bitwarden. Bitwarden is my choice for a Password Manager. I know a lot of you followed our advice, I'm sorry, and went with the other guys. That hasn't ended up so well. We didn't know, honest.
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When Bitwarden called, I said, "Yes, yes, yes. I will do your ads. I will happily do your ads."
Hey, we had a lot of fun this week on Twit, and you know what we did because we were so worried. Some of you might have missed some of the exciting moments. We've made this mini-movie for your consideration, watch.
I hereby verify that I, Leo LaPorte liked the script to create an overdub version of my voice. Why do you want this, Anthony?
No idea.
What the hell? What the hell? Well, hey, hey, hey. It's AI Leo Laporte, the AI tech guy. This week on Twit Mac Break weekly. Jason has his reviews of the new Apple hardware. We'll talk about that.
Tim Stevens:
It's Our first Apple silicon boring speed bump release, right? Where... Not that they're bad, they're remarkable computers. They're just not particularly new. They're just what you expect from last year or from two years ago, I guess, except faster.
Leo Laporte:
This week in Google, Richard Hay is here. He is the face of all of those layoffs. Google cutting 12,000 jobs.
Speaker 5:
Richard, I had breakfast with a friend at Google's by [inaudible 02:22:58], and he said that his boss has hundreds of employees, and didn't know.
Speaker 6:
Yeah, my boss, I and I just had a meeting with him on Tuesday, and there was no inkling of anything like this on the horizon. So the decision was made on a whole other level.
Leo Laporte:
Tech News Weekly. The Taylor Swift Saga continues. Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and a whole lot of angry swifties.
Christina Warren:
When Senator Blumenthal says that Ticketmaster needs to look in the mirror and says, "It's me, I'm the problem. It's me." You don't expect those kinds of jokes to happen at a Senate hearing. There are diehard swifties that are watching this hearing and these aren't people that are typically like, "Yeah, let me tune in to senate.gov/whatever."
Leo Laporte:
It's me. Hi, I'm the real Leo. It's me.
Okay. It still has a way to go, I think. But that was pretty good. Thank you to Anthony Nielsen who snuck in here, said, "Just read this if you don't mind," and boy, that that's scary. That's terrifying.
So Christina, it's completely coincidental, but two, not one, but two Taylor Swift stories in one episode.
Christina Warren:
I know.
Leo Laporte:
Two. Just for you.
Christina Warren:
Which is very exciting. Just for me. I should point out that if anybody, I'm going to put a link in it both in the Discord and IIRC found this week thanks to Macedon, thanks to Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror, who there's a mashup of Where's My Mind from the Pixies, and Anti-Hero from Taylor Swift, and then it's edited to include both Fight Club and the Anti-Hero Music video.
It's A, the baseline fits perfectly. It's one of the best mash-ups I've heard in a long time.
And B, the video editing is superb. So if you're a fan of Fight Club and Taylor Swift, which I know is a Venn diagram, which might just be me, this is everything you've ever wanted in your life. It's fantastic
Leo Laporte:
It's a very small group of people.
Christina Warren:
But it's so good.
Leo Laporte:
There was actually, now we didn't do it as a story, but Alex Lindsay sent me a link to a Billy Eilish song that somebody used AI to replace Billy Eilish's voice with Ariana Grande's voice. Have you seen that?
Christina Warren:
Huh.
Leo Laporte:
I probably can't play it. Probably shouldn't play it. Let me see if I can find the link. It's on YouTube. It's the song Happier than Ever. Should I play it? Will I get now? Do I get taken down if I play a Billy Eilish song with Ariana Grande singing it?
Christina Warren:
I don't think so.
Leo Laporte:
Who would sue?
Tim Stevens:
Hang on, let me ask my AI lawyer over here.
Christina Warren:
Yeah, I was going to say.
Leo Laporte:
Hang on minute. It's actually, it's interesting because it gives you some idea of what could be done. Let me play it. What could possibly go wrong?
(Singing)
Is that weird? Because I don't know the Eilish song.
Christina Warren:
Oh my God. No, I do. This is amazing.
Leo Laporte:
It really sounds like Ariana Grande.
Christina Warren:
It really does.
Leo Laporte:
Ariana never sang those words, and I guess they just took a Billy Eilish audio and applied Ariana Grande's prosody to it or something like that. And go ahead, YouTube sue me.
Tim Stevens:
I did ask the AI lawyer, and it says, it is possible to get sued for playing an AI revision of a song on YouTube if the revision infringes on someone's copyright, copyright laws very by country, but in general, creating an AI revision of a song that incorporates substantial parts of the original song without permission could be considered copyright infringement.
Leo Laporte:
So go after this Tears Hero guy, not me. Okay. He's the guy. He's the guy who did this. That's wild. I think we're going to see AI is, this is, I'm happy because I was tired of saying things like, "Elon Musk ruins Twitter again" and I'm, I'm looking forward to talking more about what AI can do.
Harry McCracken:
What AI can ruin from now on.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, let AI ruin it. Nobody will defend ai, I'm guessing. Tim Stevens, I appreciate all you do and I'm so glad that you have landed successfully at Substack, timstevens.substack.com. Now we got to get you to write more for it. Right? How long have you been doing it?
Tim Stevens:
I watched a couple weeks after I left CNET, so I've been trying to do about a post a week, give or take, but that's really just kind of a place for me to air my thoughts, that kind of thing.
You can definitely check me out on Joe [inaudible 02:27:53] , Road and Track Motor Trend, TechCrunch, a bunch of other places as well. I've been really fortunate to have a lot of great assignments and there's a lot more good stuff coming up too.
Leo Laporte:
Good. I'm really pleased. It's always great to see you. I'm sorry you didn't get to do any ice racing this year.
Tim Stevens:
Yeah, that's okay.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. All right. Did you do any ice fishing? That's the question.
Tim Stevens:
None of that either.
Leo Laporte:
No, okay. Thanks Tim. I appreciate it. Christina Warren, always a pleasure to see you. Thank you so much for bringing your shoes, your tiny feet, and your brilliance to this show.
Christina Warren:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm sorry if we're having audio video problems, but this has been great. It's been great being on with Harry and Tim and always loved talking about stuff. Always loved being on Twit.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. She's a senior developer advocate, the senior developer advocate @github. Mastodon.social@film_girl. Our newest mastodoner. And Tim Stevens is on Mastodon Social as well. Tim Stevens at Mastodon Social.
Harry McCracken. You're also on Mastodon, but you're on the San Francisco Bay Area Mastodon
Harry McCracken:
Sfba.social.
Leo Laporte:
That's awesome. Slash Harry McCracken. Technologizer. Global Tech editor at Fast Company.
Harry McCracken:
Can I plug my newsletter again?
Leo Laporte:
Yes.
Harry McCracken:
I have a new newsletter called Plugged In. You can either go to fastcompany.com and click on the hamburger menu and look for newsletter or just Google Fast Company newsletter, and you'll see how to sign up. And it comes out every Wednesday morning.
Leo Laporte:
And I really enjoy it. I mean, I've always enjoyed your writing because you have... The thing that's great about you have a unique, and I think well-informed take on what's going on in tech. You've been doing this a long time.
Harry McCracken:
I try, at least.
Leo Laporte:
And you have a voice. I mean, who else would write "Big Tech's Layoff Binge Stinks" as a headline.
If Macs get touch screens, Apple's Age of Intransigence really is over. How many writers do you know would used the word intransigence in this sense.
Harry McCracken:
I've actually thought it over. And I'm sure if I asked Grammarly, they would've told me, "No, people don't know this word."
Leo Laporte:
I like it. If ChatGPT doesn't get a better grasp of facts, nothing else matters! I agree. And Nine Tech Products You Found Essential in 2022.
All of that and more at the new Plugged In newsletter at Fast Company. Fastcompany.com. Just look for plugged in the Hamburg hamburger menu, and thanks for bringing Marie. It's great to see you, Marie. I appreciate it.
We thank all of you for joining us. We do this show every week, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 22:00 UT C on a Sunday afternoon. It's the best way to spend your Sunday with us if you want to watch it live @live.twi.tv. If you're doing that, join us in the chat room, irc.twi.tv. All you need is a browser, but if you have an IRC client, if you're an old school kind of person, you can also use that.
We have a Discord thanks to our fabulous Club Twit members. Club Twit is seven bucks a month and gives us a little bit of a financial boost, which these days we kind of need, but it also gives you ad-free versions of all of our shows, access to the Discord, where you could find all sorts of fight thing-
Oh, this is the Fight Club thing! I might play this after the show so we don't get taken down.
Christina Warren:
Absolutely. But it is very good.
Leo Laporte:
Put that in there. See, she's in our Discord. You also get shows that we don't normally put in the regular feeds like Mikah Sargent's Hands-On Mackintosh. Paul Thurrot does Hands-On Windows.
Coming up in a couple of weeks. Winton Dow'.
S Fireside Chat. She's of course the host of all about Android. February 10th, Daniel Suarez joins us. His new book is coming out in just a couple of days, and we will be talking about Critical Mass with Daniel, and if you're in the club, you'll get to ask him questions directly. So that's great.
Sam Abul, Sam at our car guy will be talking March 2nd.
Stacy's book club. We've decided on a book, Sea of Tranquility.
Oh look, Victor's going to do an inside Twit chat! One of our favorite editors, Victor Bogna, will be doing that.
So Ann Pruitt, our community manager's been putting together a lot of events. It's kind of like... I don't know, it's like the 92nd Street Y for the internet. Come on by, join the Club. Seven bucks a month. Look at all you get. Twit.tv/clubtwit.
Thank you so much for your support.
Thank you all for being here. We'll see you next time. Another Twit is in the can.
Harry McCracken:
Bye-bye.
Leo Laporte:
This is amazing.
(singing)
