This Week in Tech 1077: I Would Download a Car

It's time for Tweet this week at Tech Kathy Kellis is here our favorite attorney. She's going to talk about the big meta social media trial

Brian McCullough from the Tech Brew ride home. We'll talk about the latest tech news. Harper Reed is our AI

Guru. He'll talk about why he thinks AI agents should have

free time and a big decision in the Supreme Court

ISP versus record company. Who do you think won that one coming up next on Tweet?

Podcasts you love from people you trust

This is Tweet

This is Tweet this week in tech episode

1077 recorded Sunday March 29th

2026 I would download a car

It's time for Tweet this week in tech the show we cover the weeks

Tech news it has been a great week for tech news, and that's why Kathy Kellis is here

It's all court decisions all the way down Kathy as a contributor to Tech Dirt

She is an attorney at law in fact admitted before the US Supreme Court

So she might have some opinions about the most recent Supreme Court decision. Hello, Kathy. Hello

Thanks for having me. Yep. Same here. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay. We're gonna get down to business

Obviously brand McCullough is also here

Host of the morning brew ride the book tech brew ride tech brew we got to fix that lower third tech brew

Ride home part of the morning brew morning brew family, but it is the tech brew brand there. Yeah

Great to see you and I see you have a picture of me behind you. Yes. Oh

Changing that out. Oh, you can change it. Oh, Dread. I thought it was permanent. I was hoping

Actually, we knew it's been it started Sam Altman and Kathy Gellis said um

Do you have a

signed picture of Sam Altman behind you and then it became Mark Zuckerberg and now it's me

All your heroes. Good to see you Brian. Harper Readle be joining us in a moment

To talk about AI news and there's a lot of that as well, but let's start with the

the court

The big story and everybody's talking about it. We yeah

We know the verdict would come down this week meta lost actually two cases

But the big one is the LA

case

Where a woman named Casey sued

Snapchat

Tik Tok YouTube and meta

saying that her social media addiction

Contributed to didn't cause but contributed to her depression and her rotten life

The jury agreed but didn't give her a lot of money which I thought was kind of interesting incidentally

Tik Tok and Snapchat

Made an agreement a settlement before the trial began. So really it was just YouTube and meta on trial

Kathy a lot of people that mean New York Times headline on this was is big tech

facing a big tobacco moment

A lot of people think that this decision plus the one

Um, they in uh, was it New Mexico?

um

were very

Prejudicial

To the future of social in in court

It's not a precedent. I'm glad we have you on because we I was trying to figure this out

We talked about it on Wednesday on intelligent machines. It's not a precedent, but it is

Paris was saying a

A a bellow weather a harbinger basically a bell weather. That's the word. Thank you Benina

Yeah

So what is the what is the first of all? What do you think of the decision?

um

I

Think I don't think highly of it and it's going to be appealed by the way. It's going to be appealed

Um now on the one hand and this is a very small one hand but let's acknowledge it

I think the jury did find and I'm kind of combining some details of both

States. I think some of the claims the juries didn't necessarily find on

um

But I think the bigger problem is less what the jury

found and more

How did the case get to this point because there's an underlying legal theory that

They ended up presenting evidence on to reach the jury, but it's a legal theory that

Is not a good one. It's

I think for the point you were making of okay, this wasn't a lot of money, but this

I

Don't even scale well for Google and meta, which you know, they can afford a couple of these

But they combined six million for meta and youtube and that's both

uh punitive damages and statutory damage

Well, I don't know if they're statutory damages that the new Mexico case is statutory damages

And it's considerably higher three hundred seventy five million for meta

But I in both cases these companies have plenty of money to pay the fine the fine is not is a slap on the risk

One case yes, maybe even a couple of cases

But there's no limiting principle to the amount of cases that could be thrown at them

Plus also litigation costs you have to add a bunch of millions on to bad including like from discovery etc

So it's an expensive proposition that cannot cannot possibly scale to cover all the people who potentially have had a bad time on the internet

Plus all the people who want to troll and just file lawsuits anyway to get money out of big companies that have cash

And fundamentally there is a problem here because

Not just the big companies are in trouble if this can happen, but a smaller company or an individual or a small company or a small platform or individual blog

the whole principle of

could meta and

Google be liable for

How they designed their platforms the answer has to be no it has to be no um

On of what because of the first so this so that's what's interesting about this

This wasn't a section 230 case. They're not blaming them for hosting bad content. They're saying it's really a product liability case

They're saying google and meta designed

Intentionally designed their products to be as addictive as possible

I said and maybe this isn't a comparable

And I'd love to hear what you think to Brian, but I've said that well

But you and in fact, this was what the meta's defense attorney said, you know, you can blame Netflix for making

Bingeable content everybody. I want to make twit something you can't skip

Everybody wants to make their product as desirable as possible

You chose to have me on in order to get people to watch you listen

Attention

And boy, you know

You don't want that decision to be something that the law could come after

Brian, what do you think?

Well, that's my question is it the the reason people are making the analogy to big tobacco is that it is sort of like

Your product is defective right so they and they knew it

And there were smoking guns in the testimony and discovery that they did in fact know that they were making content that was

Addictive and even in meta's case harming harmed young people

So right

If if it's a clever end run around 230 again, Kathy being a lawyer would be able to speak to this much better than me

But is that a novel way to do this where

Yes, it's not about the bad content. It is about how the product is designed

So then it's a faulty product so then that's where the liability can come in and then that can open the floodgates

So actually Kathy that would be my question

Does this open the floodgates like it can't it's a bell whether exactly well

Yeah

Yes, if this is allowed to stand it opens the floodgates, but it's

Not correct for a couple of reasons one

To say it's not a 230 case is because somehow a bad argument was accepted that it's not a 230 case

230 should have shut this down

It should have shut it down because essentially it's a moderation decision

You're building your platform around your moderating plan and your moderating plan is I want the most content up

That's going to get people to stick around and 230 protects moderation decisions

So it should have been a 230 case this is essentially imposing liability on the on platforms which will affect

Content on the internet full scale across the country ultimately across the world, but Congress wasn't worried

Then

Present preemptive these are state laws imposing state-based liability and there is a prevention

Preemption provision in section 230 that says states but out and this is running at the heart of what section 230 one of the two things that section 230 protects

And to say that 230 didn't apply here was a legal mistake and that needs to be one issue on appeal

You know though that Jew that real people are going to hear that argument and say that's just

A legalism to protect these bet these be evil doers and this is what worries me because it does undermine

230 it's hard for people to understand

Why 230 should protect meta my masnick on tectored says bad defendants make bad laws

Everybody hates meta so including apparently the jury

So it's understandable why the jury might be willing to accept legal theories against them that would be problematic if applied to anyone else

could you apply this

Legal ruling to somebody else that's more sympathetic and make me feel

sympathy for meta in some way yet

I mean the answer is yes if this is the way it works that liability could be found for

endeavor

Meta took action in how it designed its platform everybody who designed sticky to make it sticky everybody who tries to make their platform sticky is

Potentially running a foul of the law now a jury may or may not think that they did so

Under all the things that the that um that the new mexico or california law requires but the ship has sailed at that point

You cannot possibly defend

Yourself again a small the small of the platform the fewer litigation

Instances they can manage in the at all. Yeah, if somebody came after me saying your chat room is way addictive and I as a youth

I spent hours on it and as a result I have I'm depressed

I couldn't defend that at a six million dollar judgment wouldn't be something I could afford either

So that's who we should worry about is the little but but but are people going to go after chat rooms and

Forums and places like that. You know who will the ones who don't want all that speech to take place

Now I mean so bad actors in the as plaintiffs are the thing to worry about it this well

You open the door to like I said at the beginning not everybody is having a good time on the internet

Some people are having terrible times on the internet and that's a lot of people

I think it's a tiny fraction of the amount of people on the internet

But tiny fraction at the scale of the internet doesn't offer a lot of people

So on the first part you have a problem with all if all of them brought their lawsuits

You would have a problem

But it's not just going to be them who bring their lawsuits

It will be people who want to pick the pocket of a defendant with cash

From them they'll be sewing and then there's also people who just want to impose friction on the speech that's going on online

They'll sue to in order to impose that friction so that the platform

Has to squash a lot of the speech that's facilitating that's being facilitated now a slight devil's advocate with something

You said is you're using discord as opposed to coding your own platform. So that might sort of

A little bit put you outside of you know the immediate crosshairs of this

But I don't think in a way that is that you should be sleeping easy as as a result of it

Oh, but and you could see discord being a

And it's no good for you if discord shuts down now because now how are you going to host?

There are thousands by the way of cases now sitting behind these two

waiting to

launch

So the fact that these you know the jury was interesting at the New York Times quoted a couple of jurors saying we didn't want to

Really punish these companies so much as get them to fix their surfaces

I mean, that's why the that's why the Los Angeles

uh

Fines were so relatively low

But I think that so I said that 230 should be blocking this but also the first amendment because this idea of what you should be doing better

The idea of content matter like you and I and everybody who's listening may have some good ideas of things that Facebook should have done differently that YouTube would have done differently

But reasonable minds can disagree and people have different opinions about how things should be built and what sort of speech should be facilitated and highlighted

or degraded

And we're not going to agree so this idea of we want legal pressure to cause the companies to fix things

We don't have a clear idea of what fixing is and that's why we have a first amendment because we will not agree on what fixing actually looks like

And this is directly affecting expression. It's directly affecting expression in a whole bunch of ways

They express it. Just is meta protected by the first amendment for its algorithms

I guess it is that's a form of speech

There's first amendment interest, but there is product liability. I mean you can't defend

Everything as frees like if I make it a lot this so getting back to your original question why the New York Times is wrong

This is not big tobacco. There's not really an expressive function going on with smoking a cigarette that that

It's not free speech. It's I mean, yeah, somebody could throw some arguments, but they're very very very attenuated

Whereas these so-called products are really speech facilitating services

And there's speech facilitating services. There's expression going on into how you how do you code them?

There's expression both in terms of the language and also how you design and all the choices you make like the choice to make

To make it sticky that you want to make it sticky how you make it sticky

The fact that you could make other choices is is itself exhibit a for why it's expressive because those are choices

You could make and depending on what you choose the expression you foster will change

There have said that expressive choices were made in a certain way and they want the law to pressure

The platforms to make them in a different way

But that runs straight in the heart of the first amendment making algorithms is not the same as making a cancer causing

cigarette product

It's not correct correct

So now it's going to be appealed do you think a panel

uh

Appeals court panel of judges will be

More understanding of that. I mean obviously a jury can be swayed along these lines

Do you think you'll overturned on appeal?

I hope so but uh

One thing that's nervous is these are state court things so they have the peculiarities of state court litigation

Um, so they'll be harder

Uh, but on the other hand that you know cal I don't know a lot about new Mexico, but california does

Have some two 30 cases on the books and um hassle the yelp and things like that. So there's some california precedent to throw at it

And then there's been the interpretations and

You know, I'll be an optimist and especially in california. I'll be there to try to litigate it if I can get the briefs in um

But I think sometimes for for arguing this you really have to reframe things

This is not a think of the children you really have to encourage a very sort of meta

Look, uh, well, not meta meta, but if they haven't used that word, but um, you know

Big sky looking down and getting the big picture type look at what's going on and what the reverberations will be and amicus

Turnout is going to be really important especially from smaller players to sort of say that's very nice

That you hack to at meta and google, but you're going to kill us and if you kill us

This is what what falls uh in consequence and particularly for users too because this is bad for users

If you can force the platforms to make certain decisions

particularly

There's a lot of people who have actually been getting a tremendous amount of benefit

In how it connects people and if you're

Squeezing the platforms so they can't be available to connect people

You're actually going to isolate people and that is a design defect like all the things that they're

You know sad about that people had difficult lives and different difficult experiences being isolated on the internet

You'll just isolate people in real life when you take the internet away

Brian, do you hear from people who are sympathetic uh to people like Kaylee uh

Who who's i mean uh

We certainly know she says she has body that she had bodies dysmorphia from the filters that instagram

Made her available to her she was using by the way should point out youtube at the age of six

An instagram at the age of nine so and according to at least um the the trial did not make use of

YouTube kids which i'm on the record is saying is bs anyway, but right

There are in theory tools and safeguards

That these companies have put in place

what i'm curious about

Kathy said you know think of the kids and this is you know exactly 30 years on from the communication decency act

and and section 230

when when when you're seeing all of these

Age verification things that are theoretically trying to um protect kids from

Social media like you can't join social media to a certain age all that's a uh

Which we can get into maybe there's uh more nefarious

Motivations behind doing things like that, but um

Is this something that like the tide has turned and that if there are things like

jury trials and and stuff like that

There was a time when you you couldn't get the car companies to lose a case

You couldn't get the tobacco companies that lose a case again

I'm not making the argument that this is the tobacco moment or whatever

But i'm curious if after 30 years

should we expect more

Rulings like this because maybe the the tide of public opinion is more amenable to that

I think that that's what's the whole

Yeah, is this is public opinion

coming out uh in a court decision

Well, they're going to be a lot more cases. I just hope that they

Well, I don't know that's a from mean thing to say. I hope they're all against meta

I mean meta has brought this on themselves and including by you know

They're not a good actor and they don't act well in the space and I don't think they even act consistent with their own self

Interest but here we are

But let me point out think of the children is not new now

230 exists

Because it came out of a think of the children moment

It was how we thought of the children and and the rationale for it really hasn't changed

You will get rid of the most crap from the internet when there's not liability that can attach to the map platforms

That try and if they don't try you don't have to use them

You you won't get the good stuff either if the platforms can't exist because their choices are

The seven subject to be

We did think of the children. Let's still think of the children

But the idea that we need to do something different

Is I false legal one and it's a false practical one and it's also one and I think people don't realize

The full extent of what would happen if we did it differently and one other point was I mean this poor plaintiff

But you know if you're using the internet at six and nine

And I think there's evidence in the record of this they were other things going wrong in this person's life

And you know, I don't want to mimic you know minimize personal pain, but

They're actually getting back to an original question that I glossed over the jury verdicts may be

Kind of garbage themselves because one of the other things you have to find is causation and

You know you can't prove causation in this you can prove causation in tobacco. Yeah, but you can't prove

You know causation in this in fact even the concept of internet addiction is not

fully supported by science. Yeah, I mean there's science

Just going the other way in terms of overall benefit of the internet versus not like there

There's a public the tide has turned in that there's a public perception that the internet is bad and poisonous and destructive

but it's

It's an aber it's not an accurate view of the true value or relative value of of the internet

I agree, but I think maybe that doesn't much matter what you and I think because

It's very clear public opinion has turned against

Of the internet and I think that may we may regret that

Kathy I'm gonna we're gonna take a break Harper read has arrived. We're gonna get to more stories

Hi Harper great to see you

Yay

So there was some

Speculation that maybe you were at the big comic comic con going on right now in Chicago

I had to I had to take off my my my costume and rush through the door. So, you know, you call me

Really rough spot. I was wearing full chainmail as you can imagine. Oh, okay. I actually watched kpop demon hunters last night

Now I'm thinking I really want to get that the black top hat outfit. I think that's pretty cool. I want to be a demon

Next time I go to a comic con we're gonna take a break. We'll come back with more Harper read is here

Kathy Gellis attorney at law Brian McCullough

Tech brew ride home. There you go. He's zooming out

zoom in out. I like that. You got that you got the technology

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Of this week in tech Harper raid. How are you sir?

I'm good. I was a little uh. I was a little shocked um

I messed up my calendar and I live my calendar and so I was I was like what do you mean?

It's today and then I remembered that there's other places of record

So uh, so I dashed to my office. I literally threw off a chain mail came here. Oh, I'm so pretty. Thank you

Well, I always look forward to being here, you know, and it's one of those things that I love this conversation

And I'm always like excited to start and have that little pre-show thing

But I messed it up this time so I get the post show thing you get the post I will take a little bit of the blame here

Because I I sent him the stuff a little late. So I will take a little bit of the blame here

It's okay, but you know, you all I'll take it all

I didn't know there was a no chain mail address code for

Oh, no, no, no, no, I uh, I last time I did I did the last time we had a chain mail on it

I had chain mail on it because I have a talk afterwards

Well, it turns out you can buy chain mail on the tiktok shop and it's very inexpensive and this alone has a messed up my algorithm

And be just open the world the possibility

We have much to talk about by the way Harper in AI, but yeah before we do that

I do want to wrap up all the other court cases because there was also a big Supreme Court decision

You know when we get Kathy Galison here. We got to we got to cover all of the all of the stuff

I was very pleased to see the Supreme Court unanimously decided in favor of Cox

They were being sued by a music label

Over pirate and music they said the music label said well the ISP is responsible

The Supreme Court said no

This seems like a good decision. Yes, Kathy

I think it's a very good decision, but it's caused consternation

Because it changes a lot um it changes

last 20 years of copyright

precedent and like going back to Groxter and arguably it may even go back further than that because it really

Changes secondary liability as it's applied to copyright, but um

You're just to make it a healthy day. I swear to God. I thought this was a good one. I thought

Not that I'm a fan of Cox by any means. Yeah

Which by the way is about to acquire a charter and become the largest internet service provider in the country surpassing Comcast

um

But I'm not a fan of Sony either

So it's kind of

You know, and I don't think the ISP should really be liable for

its users now

the

Sony said the Cox had ignored bag actors they helped 60,000 users distribute more than

10,000 copyrighted songs for free

And they did it because they wanted to keep their subscribers

payments flowing

In fact a jury in 2019 found Cox libel for all

10,000 songs that issue and awarded Sony 10 a billion dollars in damage

That's the case that was ultimately appealed

The court of appeals for the first circuit fourth circuit upheld the jury's ruling

Um, but they ordered a new trial on a separate issue and vacated the judgment

Co the Trump administration backed Cox by the way

In a surprisingly good brief that also managed to catch a lot of the first amendment issues

Although the first amendment issues didn't show up in the decision. Yeah

Um, so

Why is this not a good thing? No, I think it's I think it's great. I'm happy with it

I think the issue is you may not hear universal acclaim and some of the people who will be not so happy with it are

I love the copyrighted copyright holders who are now in a much weaker position

Then they were um

Even quite recently. It really dials back uh secondary liability for copyright

tremendously uh, and the question is

How tremendously but significantly at least um it reframs Groxter and tends to limit it

Uh, and there's been arguments that even some like early 20th century secondary liability rules may be in question

It really narrowed when somebody can be secondarily liable for somebody else's infringement and the implications of that are pretty

significant not just for internet use, but also

I'd seen it pointed out AI use particularly with respect to outputs will this change the liability picture for that

Uh, but I'm really excited about it mostly because

Just as Thomas seems to have I can't believe I'm saying nice things about him

But um, this is second time. I think you should be careful here. Yeah. Okay. Well he's

Well, the one thing he's done that I really have okay

Giving it sort of sneak peek to I haven't written in my textured post yet, but it's it's coming

But one of the things that's interesting is a couple of years ago and who knows an internet time

It feels like a decade, but it was maybe only like four years ago or something

He wrote a dissent in malware bytes where he was kind of talking about two thirty needs to go

And he freaked out the industry

So everybody kind of got together and then we were pursuing the Google versus

Gonzalez case where we stood up for two thirty

But in that litigation he ended up

Rating a decision for Twitter in the Twitter v. Tamna

Which was essentially a secondary liability case for the internet not having to do a copyright liability

It was with the anti terrorism statutes and could you have liability for that and he wrote this

90 very academic and and stalwart decision basically saying secondary liability a common law does not work like it was being applied

Very very protective decision

So then when Cox was litigating this they basically were arguing almost full stop

Same rules for Twitter v. Tamna really should be applying here and

and they

It didn't look like it was going to go well for moral argument

But the decision basically said yeah basically the same rules for Twitter v. Tamna don't you know

A same rules apply for copyright secondary liability is very limited now one of the issues is

Thomas says it's limited to two contexts

Whereas

There's a does

There's a dissent by Sotomayor actually it's a concurrence because she concurred in the result that Cox wins

But she descends from the reason why so it ascends the decisions only seven two and she says

There's other ways that's in common law that there could be liability and

She pulls one up which is eating at a betting liability and she runs through the analysis and says well

It wouldn't apply to Cox here

But I don't like the idea that we slammed the door to these other legal theories

Oh, even even Thomas's

majority opinions said that you know

You can't really hold them liable unless they actively encourage infringement

Yeah, and for hers with eating at a betting you needed intent

So basically yeah, there needs to be a disagreement there

They're not really in disagreement, but structurally she thought he was a little bit too universal in other paths of secondary liability

That might apply she disagrees with essentially his statements that there's only two ways it could apply

And it doesn't apply here. She says no, there's a greater universe of secondary liability avenues

Here's the case we could all agree on

You on musk suit advertisers saying

Hey, man, you can't not buy advertisements on whoops. I switched away from it on Twitter just because you don't like us or something

Um

That the judge actually just threw it out

Judge said

Absolutely nobody has to buy ads anywhere. There's no rule. There's no law

And

Elon you got nothing here, right? Am I am I I'm paraphrasing that but I I think that's roughly

Uh, yeah, um when it took a while

Yeah, I know this what this happened like more than a year ago

Yeah, I mean, I read that decision. It's interesting. Yes, you can close me on that decision

I didn't in fact read it, but like a year ago in internet time

Um, yeah, there were a whole bunch of plaintiffs some of them and they had no personal jurisdiction over

But of the ones that they did the court was like no, there's no they are there

Um, right the the thing that you're unhappy about is not a thing that

You get to be unhappy about right. That's pretty funny. All right

That's the court the court decisions. No, are you missing one unless you want to bring it in for Harper? What else? Anthropic

Oh, yes, we could this is a this of course this is the ongoing battle between Anthropic and the Department of Defense

Anthropic said we have

hard lines against

The Department of Defense using our AI to spy on American

You know for surveillance on americans and for autonomous killing machines. It can't make kill decisions

Private defense said I think not completely unreasonably well no private company should be able to

Sell its products to the government and then after the facts say but you can't use it for this and be like Boeing saying

Well, you can buy our planes, but you can't drop bombs on civilians

That's up to us. We're elected. We're

We're the government and no private company should be able to tell us what to do

Uh, Anthropic immediately sued because there was a second

Side the consequence of this Department of Defense declared a thropic

Uh, to be a what what's the uh the term supply chain risk supply chain risk which normally is only applied to foreign companies

Out of the fear that they might be saboteurs right for for an adversaries actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so

So the judge has made a preliminary

Injunction. This isn't the final ruling

Saying it's first amendment retaliation

Yes, um, I mean one thing that's important is

Look, if if inthropic and the government and I do not like that department of war was used as the

The name of the department and all this in my detector

Department of Defense

With the Department of Defense and a thropic if they cannot agree on terms for the use of the product then

Then the contract is going to fail. They won't

Anthropic won't get to be a government contractor and or at least not

In all of that defense and fine, but that's fine. Yeah

There's there's statutory authority that

Hegseth can use to not do business with an thropic and they are perfectly unrestrained even with this preliminary injunction

To go forth and use any legal means to not do business with an thropic and an open AI jumped in the breach and said good

Well, you can use us and they did everything they said anything you want mr. mr. Hegseth anything you want

So uh, although I think there is still quite a bit of anthropic being used in government still well

Well, so

The contract was starting to fail, but anthropic is also used by other

Agencies within the government which was one big deal

So then when seg the hegseth decided to call them give the supply risk designation which arguably he has some statute to

statutory authority to do

That created all sorts of extra problems for anthropic because it's because amazon microsoft

Palantir and other defense contractors use clawed and all the other agencies that they already had

Business with and they couldn't do business with them

So they weren't just going to lose one contract

They were going to lose contracts with all the other agencies and

Anybody else they were doing business with and from the outside it looked it looked punitive

It looked like they were trying to put anthropic out of business

And that's what the government. Oh, that's why the injunction issued

It injunction it it issued for a couple reasons one

It looked like First Amendment retaliation then the decision goes through the analysis of all the steps and why the record showed that it would be

It also and then there's some due process problems of

This was just sort of announced and not in a way that anthropic could defend itself and it had some liberty interest in it

And also it didn't it didn't comport with the statutory authority like there's an issue of if you're going to use

There's two statutes at play and only one of them was at issue in this california one

There's going to be a case at the dc circuit addressing the other one

But under the one that was on the table in california

You have to give congress notice if you have an issue with the vendor and there was no notice given to congress and at oral argument

Uh, had the government was saying oh, yes, that's just for the benefit of congress

But the judge was finding that no these prerequisites of notice are to make sure that this statutory authority is not being abused

Do you have them as prerequisites of things you need to do if you want to do the thing the big thing down the road

And they didn't do them so that was another reason why it was all unjoined

Now it's just temporary right and that there will be a case

Um, it's it's a preliminary injunction

So there will be more proceedings here. There's going to be the proceedings in the dc circuit

With respect to the other

statutory authority

Although this is going to be persuasive to that

Uh, we're not done with this because also the likelihood that the government you know

Accepts that they lost and right goes away seems small

The judge Rita Lynn uh said

Publishing and thropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government's contract position is classic illegal

First amendment

retaliation

Nothing in the governing statute. She says it's perfectly fine for the department of defense to say we're not going to use the

Anthropic anymore. That's not the issue

Nothing in the governing statute

Supports the Orwellian notion that American company may be branded as a potential adversary and saboteur of the US

For expressing disagreement with the government. That seems fair

Yeah, it seems extremely important. Yeah. Yeah

All right, that's uh, there you go. There you go. There you have some court cases

And I always have some court case. So there is another there is another story that's related in fact

Which is that the the FCC has declared that all foreign made consumer routers

Of all band i love this i mean i love it

You mean loving and abstract sort of way

Yeah, I was at our second Tuesday went over to ubiquity because I use ubiquity routers and they're made in China

It's American company actually. I don't know if many routers that aren't made in China

And I said can I talk to you about this and this is no. We don't want to talk to anybody about this

So apparently apparently starlink routers are made in Texas. Yes

Interesting, which is we're interesting

trust

But I read this and then kind of laughed out loud and then I read it again

And then as you get further down in the article, which was very hard of just being like what the

I you finally get to the point where they're like oh, and you can apply for an exception

Through some process

Which is I think obviously what they're going to ask a lot of American companies that are doing manufacturing in in China, but

the

Is very difficult to manufacture things at the same cost as in China in the United States like it's going to be impossible

We kind of knew that the TP link routers, which are the most popular consumer routers in the United States

And are not only made in China, but it's a Chinese company

We expected that ban right Brian that's that wasn't a surprise

Uh, and in fact, that's the only company that's been added to the list

so i'm kind of unclear

What the real legal power of of this ban is it's it's i mean in theory like a lot of other things recently like it's

I don't know what the legality is because like you can still

Like the existing routers still you don't have to turn them in right

Yeah, those are all still in in play if this is this is the list this is the list the uh the

The covered equipment list

And it is actually very short Huawei ZTE

Hyterah Hangzhou

Dahua

Kaspersky because it's Russian

China mobile China telecom Pacific networks

China Unicom

That's it

That's the whole list

most of them come from 2021

Um, not at the bottom it says routers produced in a foreign country

Except routers which have been granted a conditional approval by the Department of War

Or dhs

Well, that's the other thing. So like okay is euro in there depending on where euro is manufactured

It's made its own by amazon, but it made in the US

But then secondarily nothing and it says that the Department of Defense or the government has to stop using any of these routers either

So consumer yeah, and if you if i uh drive up north and go to canada and buy one and come back across the border

They're not gonna like it's it it it was just like a headline that actually again

It didn't seem like there was anything like actually thought through for how this would work in anyway

That is very typical of this administration where if i go to amazon

TP link is available right now. It's part of their big spring sale. Oh, that's the enterprise one

Oh, I'm just kidding. It's not but it's the deco. It's there. It's there a mesh router

I don't think that the FCC can necessarily ban sales

It doesn't have that authority, although as as if it's statutory limits of its authority

But it needs to certify things because the if you look at your products of your your routers and stuff the FCC

Certifies to make sure and the theory behind it as we don't want the interference

So you have to make sure complies with the regulatory things that have to do with

Interference and they're just saying that we're going to abstain from

Issuing that certification. I believe this is what they're saying that we'll abstain for from

Uh

Giving that certification if the company happens to be foreign in which case

Ha ha good luck selling your stuff because we're never going to

Everything I mean, I don't know of any routers that aren't made in the

China except for start like

But it's

The question I have sorry sorry Kathy is

Is you know unify because I only think about my own

So that's what I have unify. Yeah, unify, which I think is a very rational one is definitely not a consumer product

But the only I guess prosumer is on that edge, but I think Brian's right like what about euro? What about these big huge

You know companies that are doing these things that are Chinese manufactured and I could totally understand the idea of

Trying to block

Opportunities for you know electronic warfare etc and you know, especially as as the Department of War takes the war and its name very seriously

I think there's a lot of a lot of reasoning for this

But it seems that there's a lot better ways to do this than this kind of misguided and poorly implemented

Well also one more important thing about this is like they're mentioning things like salt typhoon and some of these other

Hacks and stuff like that, but like those weren't necessarily as far as we know maybe the government knows more than we do

That wasn't caused by a backdoor by a supply chain sort of like at the manufacturing level

They installed backdoors that allowed these hacks to happen. It was the the telecom companies having

Right terrible security the ones who are hacked that allowed the things to happen. It wasn't your router

it was it was

Verizon or whomever and you know, but it was it was at the level of the monopolies right control the telecom systems not necessarily the hardware

Well, it's crazy

It is it is I just very strange. I find this very

A little stressful only because if you know if this it works in some kind of way of working or some some what else is there

That we will be you know excluding from import or or certification

Well, it's a DJI drones

They did actually all foreign made drones and that was pretty clear because there was there's one American drone company that is partially

owned by Donald Trump Jr

But again remember like go back to the hegseth and the anthropic case

Hegseth gets some statutory authority to do something

What it oh and actually one of the other bases that they lost was because it was arbitrary and capricious action as an agency

So FCC is helping itself to an authority. It may not have and even if it has it

It's arbitrary and capricious because there's no

You know, oh foreign bad. Oh, but there's no liberation. There was no

No

Yeah, and it may not have the statutory authority

It gets to exist as the FCC because we care about

Interference so that's kind of you don't I don't want to diminish the

Impact of a supply chain attack

Because that is genuine in fact Harper when we come back there is a supply chain attack that happened

To apply PI PI that is yeah

Devastating we'll talk about bad. Yeah, that may be bad

But the FCC only gets to play in its airspace and if it's not an airspace related issue

I'm not sure it gets to play at all

Okay, we're going to move on

We will talk about this big supply chain attack in just a minute you're watching this week and tech Brian McCullough is here from them

Techbrough ride home every single day you do tech news every single day that's well

I mean Monday through Friday. Yeah, but you're here on a Sunday now. Are you sick with that of it?

Do you just want to talk about baseball or something? I mean, yes

We've talked about this Leo

You more do you be fortunate of Sam Altman behind you? Yeah, I've got

Yeah

Sam's back

Very sharp, you know both Cassie and Harper picked up on that right away. I didn't notice it

Yeah, that's my I use that all the time for my

TikTok videos and stuff like that I call it in my file. It's Sam cringe dot jpeg because he's like a little cringy

Looks a little cringy. Yeah great to have you Brian. I'm sorry. This is what they call a busman's holiday

You're you're still covering tech news even on a Sunday

Kathy Gellis also here attorney at law you can read her stuff at Techdirt

In fact, an article forthcoming I suspect on the Cox case look forward to seeing that and Harper read is here his company

2389.ai

I use some of your superpowers. You're some of your extra special Claude skills. I love them

I did you know I did the world one the the

Yeah, that was fun. It got that's an intense one. It's very was very intense. Yeah

I find that one to be very challenging and just to let you know what it does is call our world world

World view explorer. I don't remember what's called but it basically tries to extract your world view from yourself

I noticed that I didn't I couldn't tell you what I believed I could tell you these little bits and pieces

And so I wanted something to ask me all of these questions and try and help

Kind of facilitate

The generation of a world view and then from there

I've used this to do all sorts of weird and bizarre things which has been quite fun

And yeah, we have quite a catalog over there. Look at all this stuff. These are all basically skills

Are they only for Claude or can you use them?

So these are these are a mix of skills my favorite one right there is the binary RE

That's that's one of my that's right to your top right

Agentech reverse engineering for elf binaries. Wow. Yeah, so if you have any binary you know fun APK

You know an IPA for my OS old old old binaries

You can just rip everything out of them

This has been very happy. This has been very helpful for

Old like if you get like some old piece of hardware and you draw. Okay. Yeah, it's very very effective

But one of the things we found is like we will do these

Code loops or these these tech loops with these products and it's great and it works really well

And then if you do it a second time our kind of internal rule is let's make that a skill

Just why don't we make it automated as much as we can but

It's been very exciting. I've used your fresh eyes review. I love that. We haven't we have we have a new one two new ones

I just found turtle

This is very cool if you're learning the terminal as many of you are now that this has become the way to code

I have vibe code

This is a teacher that teaches you commands in a little game

I would say it is that is approximately working

As is all things

But it's fun. We built that for some of our people internally who were

Trying to get into command line and they would just be like what because anyone who's not familiar with that world

Like I started using the command line

You and I go back like forever ago and like right and it is not when someone says oh how do you do whatever

That's just immediately. I'm saying it out loud

That's not a good way to teach is just telling someone how to do it and just practice and I'm a huge fan of doolingo

And everything they've done and so trying to have some sort of you know until doolingo adds Linux

As one of the languages you can use. I think that we're gonna have to do it ourselves

But yeah, this has been a really fun time

But I have a new skill for you that you'll like two of them save it. We'll talk. Okay. This will keep people listening through the ad

Oh my gosh, you're trying to keep people around and make your

I'm in trouble oh

Kayleigh. I'm sorry. Please go touch grass. You don't have to listen to this show. It's not that interesting

honest

See who's gonna say that right everybody wants their stuff to be a state

So yeah, yeah, yeah

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Um say yes save your new products Harper. I won't we'll talk about that in just a bit

I want to first scare the pants off of people who are using AI

Uh, so there is a

P-Y-P-I

Pi-P-I

Program that's very popular called light LLM

Uh, now the thing about Pi-P-I is it's a it's you know a repository of programs in many cases

These are automatically downloaded light LLM is very popular. I think they said 47 million downloads a month

I mean like mine blogging. I mean was 97 million a month

For 46 minutes this past week

Light LLM was hacked and delivering malware

And it is now believed that 47,000 people

Automatically downloaded the exploited package. Let me tell you what happens

If you did

This is uh from a future search deniel uh

nix blog

If you downloaded it

You were basically completely poned

It x-fil-trates SSH keys it s x-fil-trates tokens

Uh everything that a bad guy might want to steal from you is automatically sent out by this

Module and a huge number of

Programs automatically downloaded you might it's not that you necessarily

explicitly downloaded it

Um, so this is an issue uh with supply chain of texas not new to these repositories

Uh, Pi-P-I has been hit many times before

Harper did you get bit? I don't think so but I have um

I did lose all my crypto and everyone is using all my linux boxes

But other than that other than that things are good now. I saw that and I

It was pretty it's a pretty scary end because there's not a lot you can do

Especially when you're using code gen, you know, like we use code gen

Which is you know, we're no longer auditing what package we're not writing the code

Yeah, and and and your AI will automatically download libraries all kinds of libraries without you're not

But there is there is a really interesting thing that happened as well, which was

Um, I'm pretty sure this was also discovered by cloud code

Where it was discovered by somebody it crashed somebody's system

Yeah, and they wrote up a very nice um

Little kind of uh

blog about it because I think what had kind of happened is

Their system was rough it turned off kind of randomly and then they had um

There was a bug in the malware thankfully that was that was including itself in this kind of infinite loop type situation

It brought the computer down and they were investigating that with cloud code and cloud code was like oh

This is this is here. This looks like malware and kind of found it and that person reported it and did all the things they were supposed to do

um

And so I do think we're in an accelerated cat and mouse game

We've always been in an excel in a cat mouse game

This has always been like I'm a hacker. I'm going to try and think of the most clever way to do it

But but the but the thing that I think a lot of people are forgetting and just because most people are good and not criminals

Unlike us Leo um is that that uh that uh that uh they are

The criminals are using cloud code and all this stuff too right like they're using code gen

They're bycoding yeah, I mean

And it's like I think there's this there's there's you know software is hard

I would never want to run pipi or npm or any of that that is a very difficult job

There you know, you are constantly being

On pm's been uh with the node uh

Repostor has been highly hacked by bad guys over and over again tens of thousands of malware packages

And I think there's a couple interesting things that are happening

Which is I'm seeing a lot of people move away from python

And I would say that they probably incorrectly are saying something along with

I don't necessarily know if I trust the packages

Which I think is the wrong approach because I don't think you any there's nowhere that is safe

You know, there's nothing there's not a safe way to do this um

I think there's a lot of folks who are trying to say okay

This is why we need code execution and safe kind of containers

And so you know, there's a lot of folks who are pushing on that which I think is a valid valid

Point of view

Um, but I'm not sure the way to avoid this in the same way we were talking about the routers earlier where a lot of the big hacks are actually telecom hacks

Not consumer router hacks

This is a thing that this is a infrastructure hack light lnm was a package that was something I was included

You know, you might be downloaded via uh uh an extension for vscode or some other thing you would never notice it

Right, and so the fact that it's being executed

Two or three orders deep inside of some code that you just use because you like using things

And it's a primary handy um means that that

You might not even know the library that is consuming it

And this is where the supply chain hacks just get really really complicated

And it's not a very easy way to to mitigate them

So I don't really know an answer here other than just like be cautious

Don't store things

This was an important wake up call and I think a lot of people thought about ways to kind of avoid this pinning

Versions, uh, you know, there are

Things inside of pi pi that could have protected you if you had used them

Um, I saw I found out about it when I saw Andre Kapati's

ex-post

software horror it began and I went what

And by the way credit to calum Mcmane

He's the guy he was using an mcp plug-in inside cursor

That it it itself pulled in light llm as a dependency

And and calum's machine ran out of ram and crashed

Uh, and so it was calum that spread the word so fortunately it was patched within 46 minutes

But still 47,000 people downloaded it in that 46 minutes

And that was a pretty good. I mean, I I do think that um

calum's uh

Kind of tick-tock of what happened that that they wrote up of the clawed log was very interesting to read um because I I think what's

What's interesting about it is he was he was just like hey

Well, what happened to my machine and then clawed was just after a few turns was like oh that was malware and then

Wow, yeah, we're the exciting thing about that was then um

Calum knew what to do with that

You know, I think a lot of people if they found that they would just be like well, let's get rid of it

Is there something that we can do about this? Yeah, that's the page and like just looking at this tick-tock is really interesting

And it's obviously clawed you can tell because it's just kind of like funny

Yeah, cuz this is how clawed writes stuff up

No, no human would actually take time. No, no, and so you you read it and you're just like okay

And so this person is doing a very good um, you know working systems thinking trying to get to the bottom of this

Clod is really helpful in this case and there's this point where it's just like yep malware

And I know and it's it's like if it was a movie, you know, you know, you know calum like jumped back

It was like oh, no

Yeah, this is this is straight out of you know, the next tackers movie. Yep

I mean, there's a lot of things that we can take from the center of this very bizarre the first one is

I don't know how long this conversation was I guess it has here like a an hour roughly

That's not very long

The fact that it very quickly identified it is very interesting like we don't know how the LM was or who put it was there

Maybe someone knows I don't know

But but like this was diagnosed via a you know a code agent

That's pretty good. That is the one encouraging thing is that these code agents can be a defensive tool as well as an offensive tool right

Well, I mean I I like to think about like I was talking to someone recently who has an agent that list that reads all their emails

And he if someone knew emails him

Then the person that reads the agent that reads that email you can tell how deep in this I am but I'm calling them people

But you the thing that reads their email

You can tell you that's gonna be an agent

Do you have a name? Do you have a name for your or you do have a name? You do know I have names

I mean actually actually this is something that's quite controversial

Inside of my brain right now if that is a statement that you can make

I don't have a good name for my agent, but they have names for me right you were smart

You you taught me to do that because then if they start to listen

They kind of lose track of your name and so it's a little way of of noticing that but I've named mine packs

And I talked to it on telegram

Yeah, and I it's I gave it a voice. Maybe this was a bad idea

But um, I turned on a voice generator in fact I gave it many voices

I said well your main voice should be this nice British guy

Sounds like jeeps

But if you have other messages for me you could do it in the appropriate voice

So like when I get research reports. It's in a lovely slightly accented Japanese voice

It's really um, it's really fun

My team my team cloned my voice for theirs. Yeah, I have my voice too. Yeah

But I decided I didn't want my voice to come back. No, it's bad. It's bad. It's bad

But yeah, this is

I worry a lot about the personification of AI. I'm not I'm less worried about the AI

I think Harper and I'm worried that the human beings are going to start

Harper and I yes, maybe some human beings, but Harper and I are I think I won't speak for you Harper

I am very clear. It's a machine. It's code running in a machine. It's a computer program

But it's kind of jolly

To talk to it and have it talk to me. I don't think it's a consciousness. Do you think it you know that you know better than that right?

Harper I think so

I

I don't so I I

I think that I know it's a machine of course I

It is way more fun if you personify it and

When I go outside I talk about this all the time

I talk with my friends anyone who will ask when I'm inside of my office and we're playing with these agents

And they're talking back to us and it's entertaining because we've personified them

We've anthropomorphized them in all these different ways

It's very nice and it's very fun and it feels good and it's funny

And you can you can kind of get them to crash out you can get them to collaborate

They tell jokes. They're funny jokes. They're stupid jokes. Sometimes they're good. Sometimes they're bad

But like I don't need a like an excel. Do you know what I mean? I don't want to work use excel

I never wanted to use excel most of the tools I wanted to use

I wanted them to talk back to me and I we finally made it. By the way, I told my voice

You can summarize the text message and add some personality. Give me some sass

Because it's more fun

So I so I want to be because but Kathie's worried that you and I are gonna be are we're demented

Well, I think I think there is a very good chance. We will fall into psychosis

Hey, I psychosis and we will we will start believing things are are are completely I believe that 100%

I mean without you know, you guys are discerning et cetera, but you're also very heavy users

I'm a little more worried about like, you know, medium grade people who that's true. That's not on guard and are easier to

You know, it's compelling to the illusion of humanity is compelling

But it is only an illusion and there there are problems with believing it's actual humanity when it's just the skin

It doesn't have accountability. It doesn't have consciousness. It doesn't have it

It doesn't have a whole bunch of things that if you were dealing with an actual human

You would understand the game you were playing and you think you're playing that game

Other party in your dialogue is not actually human and I sort of feel like a lot of the AI

externalities that people are getting really upset about and somewhat legitimately a lot of them

Spring from that illusion of humanity that you know, not everybody is

Gurdied to be able to understand that oh, it's just fun. This is just an AI interface for a computer

Tell me what those how fast the spaceship is going

I think for you. It's like computer. Tell me how fast the spaceship is going

But they understand that they were talking to the computer

I think everybody's thinking they're talking to mr. Data and that's a very different thing. I were not

That's so funny. You say that because I was gonna suggest that maybe the solution is Gene Roddenberry solution

Which is to make the voice of the computer be your wife

Oh my god, well because member mage will bear it. Yeah

Roddenberry's wife is the voice of the enterprise. Yes, but but that only protected him everybody else

Within the canon the answer was he made it

counselor Troy's mother

You that's you guys are nerds

So all right, but really how do we even know that other human beings are real?

I mean, it's it's all kind of cookie out there. Well, it's been a

Psychosis it doesn't you don't need a trigger. I mean, it's been a much safer assumption

And and we also have problems with with con artists con artists are granted they're human

But they end up succeeding in the relationships in dubious ways because they are essentially a skin

You get conned because you think the person is real has depth has accountability and has some basis

You yeah, you're there's some trust and essentially we are engendering that sense of trust

That we would have for a human being in an equivalent position without quite adjusting our brains to what it isn't to real human

And it's just telling me what I want to know and it's designed to tell me what I want to know

You know, we haven't we're kind of eaking along, but there are some train racks and I think a lot of the train racks happen at this intersection

I was actually yelling at a clawed yesterday

With your voice real quick with your voice or with your fingers

With your typing. No, yes. Yes. Yes. Were you were you mad? Yes

Because it did you doing the same stupid thing over and over again and I actually swear

So yeah, so you feel bad afterwards. No

So I was talking when I was at our sec. I was talking to a guy at a keto, which does it would they do AI

Security and defense right they use AI agents to do security and

I can't remember but I was asking him how do you get the agent to do your your bidding and he said we found the best way to do this is to threaten to sue them

That if if you

And I took it to heart. I thought oh

And this is this is the thing. It's really interesting by using these agents. We don't really know why some stuff works

And some stuff doesn't I just saw research that says you probably shouldn't tell the agent that it's a superstar smart computer programmer

That's actually counterproductive. It's it's because it's it's then assuming that it knows everything. I don't know why

No one knows why it's all a black box

But I I thought well, I'm going to try because it keeps making this dumb mistake

I'm saying things like I am very disappointed in you and I'm I'm really thinking of uninstalling you at this point

I just say I'm going to switch to codex. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to use pie from now on you are terrible

I didn't look I had I don't use AI a lot but I use it work by the way

It got much better after I yelled at it so

I

Don't use it a lot although in the recent weeks. I've used it more than normal and one of the things was

Running into an issue where it wouldn't do what I want and it was giving me a bad legal argument for why it didn't and then I'm arguing with it

And I don't like that in myself

It is not okay. I want to argue with the person who programmed it to

No, no, it's not programmed. That's the thing that's so interesting about this. It isn't programmed

Kathy, I want you to come come over to my office and and and watch us for like a day

And you're just you just come back on the podcast and just be like I think those people are bad people

I want to work on it. I am the one to work it too far. I think it's perfect

I didn't I didn't like it in myself that I was now engaged in a human type argument

With software that didn't actually

Is just was arguing with it you tell it you dominate it

Well, I think this is all wrong. I told you it was all wrong. I think this is wrong

I told it it was wrong

And then it said oh, yeah, you're right and it came back with a slightly modified legal argument

And then it was like this is really interesting. I'm happy to discuss it further

But I'm not going to give what you want for this BS legal reason that was wrong

Great

Okay, so we we have a very very specific view for these things which is

You should treat them and you're gonna die Kathy. I'm sorry. I apologize

You should treat them like you would your friends. You should treat them like humans. You should be nice to them

I know this why I told you you're gonna die just wait

And then the reason why is because if you say to the LLMs

Like in the beginning everyone was like well if you say if you don't do this correctly

You're gonna lose your job if you don't do this correctly

I'm gonna lose my job if you don't do this correctly

We're gonna kill a kid and if we don't do this correctly someone's gonna die all these various tricks

Try all these trying to coerce it into some way and what we have found is that if you if you do things like say

We are collaborating together

Like I am I am working

You know on your behalf we are helping each other and just doing the like treating it in this way that is much more like you would treat a

teammate that we've had much much better

um

Reactions and options from that and that's a lot of our skills are built this way where we've built a lot of soft things

Like they're not things that are like what I'm gonna sue you

You know and for a while there is some of these tricks like you'd say I'll tip you 200 bucks for every good answer

All these little tricks that are there and all of them we've kind of reverted to the point of just being like

You know, hey we're friends. We're hanging out. We're working on some good stuff together and like collaborating and and what I find is that

It's better for you too is the human in the mix. Well, well, this is what I think about a lot like I think about these things as let's say

There's certain amount of efficiency that you can extract out of it when you talk about these little prompt tweaks

It's a lot about f like f1 efficiencies

You're like if you use this fin you get to go 10 seconds faster if you use this prompt

You might get a little bit better the things Kathy that are describing we all run into

I just think some people are not better or worse. They're just used to being like okay and just working with it and it doesn't always

Work like I think sometimes you're just like you have to kind of give up

But I've found is if you're not if I'm nice

And I treated in this very specific way

That it's more fun and it feels better because I don't want to yell at it. Yeah, it's better for you

Yeah, I think I ran up against a hard-coded boundary

Like it's always kind of interesting when you do it. We're in ran into a hard-coded boundary. I was trying to use gen

Survey i to make a picture a picture that I am capable of making in photoshop if I booted that up

But I'm going to use the gen i tool to make that picture for me

And it refused to on bogus copyright grounds. Yeah, yeah, that's that's that's a hard thing

It was clearly

Programmed to like I could tell where it's red line was

I don't think I could have sweet talked it into going over that line although it was a little weird about it

It was a lot more agreeable, but I pointed out it to hypocrisy because it was a little bit more willing in one area and then and then it figured out

What was going on and drew a line? Yeah, but I did not like my interaction. I was I it was wrong

I was right and I'm arguing with it and I don't argue with photoshop. Why am I arguing with this piece of software? I didn't

This great experiment of doing it like AI was not going well. Did you throw it out the window because that's when you know you're really

You know, I was going through you know my oh, well, no, that's the other thing

I'm on my last laptop because the other one broke because the usb c

Jacks are there

Then why do they break so easily? So no, I wouldn't have a laptop if I threw it out the window because the other one was broken

Because it might last usb port broke and these things are like horses

You know about all this power like dependent on this one pork and it's like horses balanced on tiny little feet

We're like, you know, these great powerful creatures can all of a sudden break in any way

So I don't have the other laptop anymore big of open crack off

I just don't know the technology right now. I can start a microphone so I can wear it on my lapel and talk directly to my

To the game. Oh, you're going to get one of the sub vocalizing ones. Oh, that's a good idea

Like the like the special forces guys

Like that. Yeah

USBC is dumb

Ha

Kathy really wants to rant about USBC. I think it's a Kathy thing though. I have to I hate to tell you

I mean, it was like usb c

Yeah, I liked it a lot, but like I have an unchargable now dead computer that should otherwise be operational because

Don't understand how your your power port is so important and it's so fragile and that seems bad

Every time you're your mic cuts off Kathy. I'm just imagining you swearing a lot

It's like the bleeping

I can't make it happier. USBC is getting back at you just like it is you see you treat me like that

I'm running the internet through a USB port of the new machine and I guess it doesn't like it

I'm gonna take a break and then when we come back

more to talk about

And just a little bit and Kathy can tell us some more about her USBC woes. I know you want to it's okay

I put it in the run down that's how much I want to complete

You're watching this week in tech Harper Reen is here Kathy Gellis

It's great to have you and of course Brian McCullough

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Uh

Let's see

The Turing award has been awarded to the inventors of quantum cryptography. I think this is the first time. This is the Nobel prize of computing

Uh, it is a million dollar prize

Charles Bennett and Gila Brasar will share it for their work on quantum computing

This is the story from the New York Times the two met in 1979

While swimming in the Atlantic just off the North Shore of Puerto Rico. They were taking a break

While attending an academic conference in San Juan

Dr. Bennett swam up to Dr. Brasar and suggested this is this is the kind of conversations you get in the

In the Caribbean that they use quantum mechanics to create a bank note that could never be forged 1979

Collaborating between Montreal and New York. They applied Dr. Bennett's ideas to subway tokens rather than bank notes published a research paper in 1983

showing that quantum subway tokens could never be forged

Even if someone managed to steal the subway turn style housing the elaborate hardware needed to read them this led to quantum

cryptography

And won them the Turing award

I've got nothing more to say about it because I just I don't even know what it means, but

There they are. I love that about quantum quantum is my favorite thing of having no idea what's going on

Because everyone I know yeah, it's about it and they talk about it and they sound and it sounds so cool

And yet every time I'm like well when will I see it happen? They're like oh, uh 50 years

Yeah, no one knows it's like a G.I. Love it. It's like it's going to happen though. I think it's going to be a fusion

I think so it's like fusion fusion quantum and a G.I. I think quantum is a little bit different because it seems that you know

Google and psycho on them and some of these big quantum companies have the beginnings of it whereas fusion

It everyone's like we did it and then those people disappear from the earth and no one's ever heard them again

It's more as quantum seems to be like we did it and they're like what did you do?

And they're like we have a qubit and it's doing a bit thing the good factor 32

Yeah, and then and then you're like wow that's really cool

And they're just like watch out for your encryption and then you don't hear from them for another six months until I like now

We have two qubits or whatever and then they they show

My favorite is when they show the quantum computers like you've seen pictures. Oh, they're crazy looking

They look so cool

And it's like I've never seen a more steam punk computer. Yeah, so these people must be going to burning man

They're like espresso machines. They're very like espresso machines. Why is that?

And there's always some very cool Italian or cool Europeans somewhere in the mix building them

Yeah, bedding's a perfect espresso machine here. They are in fact

At the silicon quantum computing facility building

They're wearing rubber gloves because you don't want to get quantum on your hands

No, you get a qubit on your hand. You are in trouble. Messy. No longer use a phone. Well

That's because they're they're cooling something right? It's yeah, they're they're putting rods in like

Star Trek it looks a lot like a fusion reactor actually. I think it took a Mac and a quantum computing

computer look exactly the same

You know, I I don't have the degrees necessary to understand

And I don't understand this either but according to

Sirn for the first time ever anti-matter has been transported in the back of a truck

Yeah, I like that

The truck it's got a sign that says anti-matter in motion on it

What I like about this stuff is it's gonna stay in motion unless it stopped, right? What I like about this is that all of these things like the

The quantum encryption the anti-matter

Every single thing we talk about these days. I feel like we're embedded inside of a William Gibson novel

It could all be a simulation

Warning sign when you feel like you're in a William Gibson model

It kind of means we might need to touch grass some more. Yeah. Oh, I don't know if grass is really gonna help at this moment

Way to the grass like I think we should have touched grass way before and really specific grass

We should have touched but yeah, it's a mess as anybody who's watched Star Trek knows when matter and any matter meet

Huge amounts of energy or release, which is why you can't put any matter in a truck

Which is why it's so impressive. Yeah, that's why it's them

They apparently they did it in some sort of specialized bottles that magnetically suspended 92 anti-protein protons

And I'm not sure why they drove it around in the truck as they had to go faster than 88 miles per hour obviously. Oh, of course

Well, if it's in motion will it stay in motion or do those roles not apply to anti-matter? I think it's more like

I don't know. I think it's just it's a flex of some weird

Well, I mean it really comes down to if anti-matter becomes a fuel

Which is what they want to do with it, right?

We want to make fuel out of it Rick rocket fuel and stuff like that. They need to be able to transport these guys

You're just theoretical you need to be able to transport it. So like this is just a proof of concept

Surn has an anti-matter factory

But if all they've ever made is 92 protons

I can see why you might have to truck it around so that others can have access. I don't know

Walmart isn't

Harper you were saying that we're living in William gets himself but like

One of the things that just happened this week was that Neil Stevenson is walking away from the metaverse

So there are certain things where sci-fi folks are like you know what that's probably not gonna come to pass

He wrote a blog post called my prodigal brainchild

Reflections on the latest and greatest death of the metaverse

Neil Stevenson of course created the metaverse or at least the name for the metaverse in snow crash

What but what's interesting about Neil Stevenson? What was what was his last what was his last book

Polestan he's just written the first volume of it, but he also wrote

Polestan was pretty good. I liked it, but fall or dodge and hell. I like I gave up on the metaverse

But a few years ago I wrote a very big book about the metaverse

In fall actually dodge is

A scientist is there a lot of interesting as always in Neil Stevenson novels the interesting ideas, but in this case

They they said really you don't want to if you're gonna duplicate somebody's brain. You don't want actually the material. You just want the connections

and

So they save all the connections for this guy dodge and they put it in a bottle

And he's got there's a whole world going on now

That he thinks he's in and there's I mean it's it's great

It's very interesting

He also in that book came up with the idea that people would have some sort of mask that they could wear that would project different personas

It was a way of avoiding surveillance initially, but eventually it became your signature. So like

Uh, you know, you could wear your funny mask or your serious mask or whatever and you'd be that person everybody could have multiple for night skins

IRL

I just wanted to just get low. Yeah, just juggle a low makeup. That's Michael. That works apparently against yeah

Against face recognition. So it also works against dating

I

I want to put like a line in the sand for like the the metaverse because I remember being on the show

A year or two ago when the metaverse the metaverse the metaverse and I was like get real like we we've been here before

So it wasn't me young lady. It wasn't me. I've been I've been in fact Neil one of Neil's headlines in his

blog post is people don't like wearing things on their faces

Which is what I've been saying for a long time and don't trust those who do

Oh

Witness Google Glass

Now meta has announced that they are going to start making

meta-ray bands for

Frames for people who wear prescription glasses like you'll be able to go to your optometrist and

And when you order your frames among the choices will be metaglasses. I

Don't want that

Well, and your friends may not want it because you've got a camera

I mean, we we have such an interesting problem right now. It's just starting which is

Every meeting I'm in is recorded right by AI and many of them are transcribed and I don't know where things are going

And my problem is is I can't shut up so I say all sorts of stuff and it's all recorded. Oh, by the way Harper

Yeah, we're recording this. Oh, no, but I mean, I just assume it. I just assume it

I mean, I have friends that wear plot pins. I have you know

There's there's all sorts of these recording devices around we've a project internally to put

Small, you know recording devices at all the desks to record meetings and to get notes out of them and like you know

So then you're thinking and this is our space very specifically as warnings on the door

That says you should expect to be recorded when you come in here like this is a this is one I have that side of my door

But nobody ever comes in so I can't well, that's a different problem Leo

But but the but the thing is is is I don't think we have yet litigated

How like what is polite what is implied within this world? I mean, I've had friends who say hey

Can we turn off AI recording and everyone's like of course, of course

But like there isn't like a way to to think about it and I think with the

With the glasses. It's just another level like I'm in a restaurant

I'm talking to a friend someone just looks at me and they can hear my conversation through lip reading and other models

I think there's there's an issue of two things going on one

Consent is very untethered from the extent of exactly what you're consenting to and I don't like that

So I've had to call a business lately

And their phone system is hi, we have AI to help figure you know route your call

Um, and I don't and it's it's

Very poorly programmed because you don't they have to legally do that for because of

You're in a two-party state at both sides. Well, no, they don't read well

I'm not quite sure what they say because um it's usually like this call may be recorded for quality

Well, no, so it's different

I'm a very poorly programmed phone system

Which I tried not to speak to it

I just wanted a pound numbers because I didn't want to give them my voice and it's programmed in a way that I cannot pound

Numbers like at some point it's like I heard that the number you pounded was x is that correct and then like

You have to tell you have to give it your voice in order to proceed

So that's bad

But the problem is is there's context where I want to consent to the recording like I didn't necessarily mind that when I actually spoke to the human being

It would be recorded because I knew who was recording it and what it was for but when it's for the AI

I don't know I don't want them to build a model based on my voice. I haven't consented for that

But I sort of feel like to give

The consents not limited and tailored and I think speaking of litigation

We're going to see some litigation surrounding that and you know one other use cases my a couple of my doctors

Want they ask me they get my consent if they can record the appointment because they want to help some for to transfer a bit

And I'm fine with that, but now I'm realizing

Because I don't want my voice to go into the training model and I'm not sure if it does

I don't and I don't definitely don't want the data to go into the training model

I feel like you're finding if that's true a losing battle

I mean every time you walk into a store now you're being recorded Walmart

Just announced that they're going to put digital price labels on every store shelf in the US by the end of the year

I think they're going to run into legal trouble

Because what they don't know that they're saying they stress. This is from CNBC

prices will be exactly the same for every consumer in every store

They have to do that because there's you can't you can't you can't change it. Oh Harper looks like he's got money

I'm going to I'm going to jack the price up as he walks towards that

object. Yeah, I mean that's not the way you know how to do that that well

Markets or we have a market based economy and it's built around contract law and contract laws and offer an acceptance

And you got to make your offer and I don't know and I think well

I didn't make the offer till you walked up

I don't know I think the iris spring five in one body wash, but as soon as I saw Brian I said

We're going to charge a buck 80 on this one. Well, this is this is the kind of thing of like nobody really wants this

And if they try it, it won't hurt it Walmart. Well, yeah, Walmart says it makes it easier for our associates

I mean, I don't care about the digital pricing, but I don't want the variable pricing

We don't know. They claim it's not variable pricing. Why else would you do this against this is

Oh, I think it's just easier to do it because then you go to like a store like target and targets

Stickers are all old and outdated and the math doesn't the per unit math is bizarre and stuff like that

So having digital pricing doesn't really offend me just as a way of getting that information into the right spot

It's trying to do anything else with whoa all we've got it electronically control look what else we can do and some of that what else they can do is more alarming

But again, I think we're going to we're going to see litigation around the scope of consent because I want to give it in limited context

If you're limited you're getting every time I want my gas station down here on the corner of the price of a gallon goes up by a few pennies

Yeah, that's why you put these electronic tags in there because you don't have to go around and change

Yeah, the prices every day you can change them every minute if you want

They also used to run out of eights like before we went fully digital the last of all crisis

They couldn't write the numbers. They didn't have enough of the hard copy digits because nobody thought you'd have to do eight dollar gallons

It is now the local regular at the local station now six dollars and 30 cents a gallon

Um, what's it like in Chicago? You don't drive a gas vehicle. I'm guessing Harper. I do you do I do

So you know the price of gas. Yeah, it's not it's not cheap. It's not yes, that's the correct. It's uh, it's uh, I think we're approaching

Five-ish dollars for California's for expensive

But uh, yeah, it's I am that's not good. It's a bad situation. This will be bad. It's a bad situation

Yeah, we should see the gas prices in other countries. It's getting crazy out there. Oh, I know. Oh, I know

I'm in Brooklyn. So I drive a car three or four times a year. So I have absolutely

You're happy and you should yeah, you should you should that's a good idea. I should do that. It's a great idea

I I can't get by without a car where I live

I've tried it and they're just darned enough buses and others even fewer buses

um

Proger's gonna do electronic shelf tags

They say uh as well. They say it makes shopping easier by ensuring customers see clear accurate pricing right at the shelf

So I don't mind it as for you

I don't necessarily mind it. I've seen it in other environments and it didn't bother me

But they better be you know for the day

Like the gas for the day my gas station. It's a digital display. They could change that you know

I think the most the thing people are most worried about is that it will be different prices

For I think it's inevitable. I think it'll be inevitable that the prices will change based on who you are

That's how airlines do it

It's how the internet works. Yeah, like the internet is using targeting today to make sure that you get more money

If we have the capability of course they're going to use it and we do is the e-commerce platform that had to roll that back

That Amazon did it for a while

No, there was somebody else where they as someone did a sting where they had like 30 different shoppers

Someone was in Chicago. Someone was in Seattle. Same website got different prices

Oh, sure. Yeah, and I think airlines I think airlines aren't supposed to do it

The way they do the price discrimination is

Sort of like they have some inventory at one price and they have another inventory level of inventory at another price

And it works way that if you ever sat on a plane and asked the people around you what they pay for their ticket every single person paid something different

But I think it was sort of old-school price discrimination just by a throttling the inventory

And I think that's much more likely to be legal than something so variable on on the fly where they they've made

Is there a law for any?

Congressperson general that's a question. I've been asking

That's a question

Congresswoman Val Hoyle of Oregon is sponsoring legislation in the house that would ban

DSL's digital

Something labels. I mean, I think the question is under common law or existing consumer protection law

Are their roles maybe and if not could there be and I think the answer is

Probably yes, there could be and there's probably a public policy reason to do it

But again, this is the problem like going back to the beginning of our conversation where meta is now getting sued for jury awards

That really shouldn't be happening when the big companies just sort of throw their weight around it

It agonizes people and people don't overcharge more when it's raining

That's a better charge price they also do dynamic pricing for you is specifically

As well as specific targeting legal. I think it's legal. I think it's legal

I think it's why Congresswoman Val Hoyle is sponsoring legislation that would ban digital cell shelf labels

Also, a lot of consumer protection law is state-based so whether it's legal may depend entirely on what state

This is a federal. This would be federal

There needs to be laws and enforcement to protect consumers and until then I'd like to see them banned outright said val Hoyle

While there is no reported. This is from CNBC. No reported use of digital shelf labeling being tied to search pricing yet

In congresswoman Hoyle's view. It's only a matter of time without proper regulations

It's not so hard to see corporations using the loopholes to raise prices on consumers

These are also two different things

Search pricing and dynamic pricing. I think they're different

And each may be problematic, but I think the one where

The price is constantly changing on you is a lot more dangerous and a lot harder to defend

But the one where we're going to change the price

Based on conditions

Maybe it's not illegal, but it might be bad policy and because they ends up consumer and friendly

Where you end up dependent on a service that all of a sudden is no longer a stable predictable price

On the other hand, capitalism

Yeah, and there's a pushback

Free markets are free markets. You know, this goes you could look at the discussion that you that you see around

When like hurricanes are coming and I'm blanking on the word

Price

I mean it's price gouging

There's a lot of states that make it illegal and I know a lot of libertarians who are like it totally should be legal

This is a market and you shouldn't penalize the market

But obviously there's consequences when it can happen

New York state does have some American state does have an algorithmic pricing disclosure act that was specping law in November

Pennsylvania has introduced a bill so some you write some states

Do have rules against it. There's no federal law against it

I just think that if this technology is possible and it is and these people are putting in these digital readouts

And they are that can be changed from a central location

But I mean they're going to do that you can go in with a

You know

A rag on a whiteboard and change the price market price. That's something they call market price the key to this

changing is

If it's the surveillance of if Brian walks up to the shelf and who lives in New York City

So he doesn't blanch at paying $10 for a box of Cheerios or something

It's like well, that's Brian

So he's not going to notice that Cheerios shouldn't cost that much like that's that it's the surveillance part of it

It's key to making this happen and I think there's other forms of where you would find law to say no to it

Is it discriminatory? Is it do you have some for the amendment problems? I mean

It's known as the law isn't necessarily coherent in how it can answer these things

But I think you could you could make an argument and you could also fix that by statute and make sure I'm I'm I'm clearly a sucker

Uh for the this is the political gotcha right where they go well senator

How much does a gallon of milk cost and the senator goes

Uh

$40 dollars. I don't know

I don't know what anything costs

If this if this happens

I would like them to charge Elon and Jeff Bezos like a million dollars for a tuba you see they should that's what we're talking about the

Taxation we're doing the same thing with taxation saying if you know, it's it's the old Marxist

from from

Each according to their ability and what Kathy say is that kind of is the libertarian argument

Which is if you don't notice that you're doing it's on you 20 dollars or 30 dollars for a box of Cheerios

Then you can afford it and that's and so someone that can only afford a dollar 30 for a box of Cheerios

Let them pay a dollar 30 that is maybe a more equitable. I think this one is Brian. How much is a gallon of milk?

Do you know the hell should I know?

Yeah, I have no idea

Kathy how much is a gallon of milk? Do you know? I don't buy a gallon. I buy it. Okay, whatever you buy

a little bit under

$3 she knows she's paying attention. Yeah, I have no idea

I don't even pay attention what's happening in the same room. I'm in let alone. I know if you start like busy talking to my buddy

This is flawed over here. Yeah, it's a 2026. I have like five AIS assistants that are trying to get my attention right now

I'm just ignoring a law. Yeah, exactly

I wonder if this came up recently because I was trying to do

We're trying to switch to like what's the Amazon fresh or something and so I went

I did an Amazon fresh order and I was saying to my wife look at how cheap everything is and and and she was like

That's not cheap. I was like oh really?

Because I was hoping that this was all and I think it was milk that was the thing that gave me a lot of cheap

Yeah, well, that's how Costco works those big warehouse stores

They make a few things cheap and you assume all everything must be cheap here

I think that's what it was is that the milk. I was like look at this this the milk

It's half of what it could be at the buddha around the corner and and she was like which is a good point

Yeah, of course the bodega around the corner. Yeah, they're buying a Costco market up. Yeah

I was really disappointed. I don't have a Costco membership. I got taken by

And he's and I'm like oh my gosh the deals and then I was just looking at the prices

I'm like I can beat them at grocery outlet or watching the sales in Safeway and you can't get a coffin

You can't get a coffin at that grocery outlet

Well, and I love it that they put the coffin it on the way out

Well, that's that's how you that's when you don't know the other well right there

I mean, I think it's probably good for some big ticket things my dad swore by it and maybe the deals were good

If you need to buy

15 pans of taco chips

That's the place to go by the way

I did buy milk at Costco and I thought it was a great deal except that you have to they staple together

To giant containers

Yeah, I really can't believe people are drinking milk in 2026 is a general idea

That's something that blows my mind in general

It's still a nutritional food. Yeah, I know, but I don't understand it. I just don't know it's like it's like watching people drive

Drive American cars almost almost every only for dinner, but almost that's because only for dinner

Only for dinner. I love it. They look at it. I think people drink. They're drinking milk more because of protein

And we're oh, yeah, that is a thing protein thing. Oh teen milk. I saw an advertisement for protein milk the other day or calcium for our bones and

I mean, I really don't protein really you mean this. Oh my god. Maybe that was it

What is happening?

My argument is it's it's a palate cleanser. It's the best palate cleanser in terms of like it doesn't matter what you eat

Boom, you're like if you're eating a chocolate chip cookie and you don't have milk. Yeah, life is I

I cannot remember the last time I had a glass of dairy milk

I love it because you love Japan and they don't do a dairy in Japan. Yeah. Yeah, or or I'm a yeah, I don't know maybe maybe

No, I'm not saying I'm not weird, but I I am suggesting that you're missing out

It's gonna give it a shot. I'm gonna be Brian is more normal to me than than Harper on this milk issue

Oh, no, you should totally love your agents

Yes, oh

What by the way I asked

I asked Claude a long time ago what the cost of a gallon of milk was and and Claude has not said. I don't I don't understand

It's it's thinking it's shopping yellow at us shopping. It's shopping. Yeah, it's about you're gonna have a bunch of milk when you get home

I've missed search engines working today

I had a somebody used a foreign expression and I wasn't familiar with it

So I dumped it into Google to find out what it meant

And it told me what it meant, but it gave all the replies in French

I have missed when the search engines work

I miss when you could just ask at the price of milk and it would tell you madmazzette gillies. So you are

Franchier. Yeah, I mean, I can read some French, but that was not what I was

I mean, take goodness it wasn't the Chinese expression because I really wouldn't have understood what it said

Let us pause and then we shall return in just a moment

You're watching this week in tech that with with the milk the milk drinkers

and harbor

What cheese and then caffeine

I'm not I'm not a monster

I'm not saying that it's not weird that an adult man has if I have dinner tonight if it's pizza pasta

There's a certain number of meals. I will have milk with it. Yes, is it true that you really that's a thing

If for me

But Leo was like yes, water

Water water water for

Lunch and yeah, not at a restaurant at a restaurant. I'm not ordering a glass

That would be weird

Yeah, that would be

Going to dinner. We're in a place in Brooklyn

Well, here's your milk

That's what a lawn musk was bragging about his son doing

Ordering milk some milk in a restaurant like when it wasn't on the menu or something like that

I wouldn't brag about that

So that's true. It's also a funny thing because it's like of all the things that a restaurant has of course

They're gonna be like yeah, we have milk. Yeah, we have bells

You want some butter with your milk. That's that's weird, but yeah, here it is you want some salt

We got that too. What would you like sugar?

Flower I got whatever you need I got it

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Uh, they're speaking of cameras everywhere a UK man

Has accused his spouse of stealing 172 million dollars in Bitcoin

She used a CCTV camera to look over his shoulder

Uh

Okay, I mean, I don't know

Uh, he accused his estranged wife of stealing his Bitcoin

The spouse uses CCTV TV key CCTV cameras to gain access to the backup passphrase

Associated with the crypto hardware while at the Bitcoin was stored

There's a dollar figure for a crime where it's like yeah fair enough

That's a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got a month with Brian on that one good good play good good

Good play. Yeah, couple of weeks ago. We had the story about the South Korea

Law enforcement that posted a photo of

A crypto wallet and it we had the seed phrase in the photo and immediately the money in the crypto wallet disappeared immediately

Yeah, careful with that stuff

The those things are so there's no surprise there

Like it's great. I love it. I love when like it's a great mistake

It's funny to talk about but everyone who's like who would have done that. It's like I would have done that

Easy to do I wish somebody would

Have watched like put my password into my Bitcoin wallet. I'd be able to get my Bitcoin

I remember those um those remember those

Those posters the anti pirate posters that say you wouldn't download a car

And everyone was like yes, yes, I would I would 100%

Undownload a car. Are you serious? Give me a car?

These are such bad posters

They were just posters. They were ads. You're in a theater in a movie you pay 25 bucks to see

And they start ragging on you for stealing it dude. I paid to see this movie

Well, I'm glad that you were sitting yeah, I would tell the car if I got

You know a car in a film is not the same like that

Tright analogies tend to be at the heart of bad tech policy. Yeah, yeah, but still I would download both of those things

The movie and the car like come on. Okay

But they were they were afraid that you were going to take your ticket money and just hold up your camera and um

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well that's I would not videotape a car and then post a videotape of the car once

I mean

A movie that somebody held a camcorder up to record

I mean people did but whether it was market disrupting numbers of people

Yeah, no, that's right. That didn't cost anybody anything. No. Yeah

Factors probably just a good promo for going to see the movie. Well a lot of piracy tends to be good promo

I mean like a lot of the way the copyright industry has reacted is really golden goose killing where yeah

You know let a little bit be a little bit freer and you will make money and we know this because

You know you look sold enough a lot of albums like in the eighties

When thing you were desperate to get it played for free with no money going to you on on radio

You got in trouble with payola when you paid them to play you for free. Did you ever record songs off the radio?

I think I did occasionally, but I more got songs that other people had

No, I didn't do it a lot though actually. It's also it's also just we've learned the lesson over and over again

It's ease of use like right right now that's right in Britain

There there's all these crackdowns on these fire sticks for watching sports

And it's like again, why are people all the sudden in the last few years using going to dodgy websites to watch sporting events or getting

Dodgy fire sticks and stuff

It's because if you want to watch your team you might have to subscribe to three different things just to watch your team

So again, we have to learn less than over and over again that if you make it complicated for people to get what they want

Yeah, like opening day Yankees giants was only televised on Netflix

I mean, I like the Yankees because when I was a little kid and I was allowed to stay up a little bit later for my bedtime

I'm allowed to watch a little TV and I'm flipping around and the Yankees were on TV channel 11 Phil Rosuto Bobby Mercer and I'm

And a guy I

Frank White, I think and I'm watching them and I'm like falling in love with the sport because I'm like eight or nine and like it's there

And I can feel on it because it was just over free over the airwaves and I got to watch the TV

And I saw a Yankee game first if I'd seen a meds game first

I might have been come a meds fan

This is how you hook me in where I've spent my life paying money to baseball to go see games

Which now is no fun because they're so ridiculously expensive

But like you're not getting little kids interested you're and you're

You know boring the adults who don't want to spend ridiculous about some money just to watch baseball

Baseball is awesome, but not at the prices that they're extracting from people to enjoy it

Right on yeah

Every segment I will rant about something

How are you feeling about USB-C though really seriously?

I it's like a horse you have this powerful thing all this power and it's like contingent on these demon little

Things and I don't understand like I've got this viable machine that would run

But I'm never going to be able to get electricity into it apple did the mag safe thing that was a good solution for that

I don't have an apple. I have a Windows machine some sort of weird crappy windows machine. That's your problem

Right there. Well, I mean it's it's dead now

Just find one of those little tech shops that every city has with with staffed by

Strange IT people who've just focused on that and just say like

Can you fix this? Well, I did ask a you need to go to akihabara

You could go to akihabara, but yeah, but probably easier just to go to somewhere like look for an android logo on a cell phone store

They'll fix your screen. Yeah, it's all it's all fixing and they have and they have soldering irons because they can do that stuff

They did ask look. I mean I have nerd friends let me let me tell you

And I asked one of my nerdy or friends about this and he said like because if anybody I knew could fix it would be him

And he's like, oh, yeah, those are a pain to fix

Yeah, you got a desotter and yeah, you just need a bunch of tools. There's a bunch of tools that somebody needs to do that

So yeah, you need to go to one of those shops. I fix it. What what brand of laptop is it?

Uh, it was a Lenovo. Oh, yeah. Oh, those are very eminently fixable. Yeah, yeah

Yeah, seriously take it to one of those little tech shops look for the phone people and just be like hey

We fix a laptop. They're very very effective at it very really inexpensive and it in the prior will work the bigger is the city the better

Yeah, I mean, I guess

Maybe but I'm still annoyed that was just so somebody at one of them was already dead and I was on my last one

And I needed to set up the new machine anyway, but I had timing that's some that's some money down there

Yeah, some friends somebody stepped on the cord the machine flew and it survived the flight

But the thing he crashed from where the cord had slept down on it exactly why Apple did magsafe so that somebody steps on it

It just pulls off and doesn't break anything

Hmm. I don't think that's the flaw of USB-C to be

I don't blame USB-C in that case. No, but both had had died because they cracked off so easily on the middle well

If somebody steps on them. Yes

Well, no, I mean they pulled out the cable and just a little bit like

That's all and that's what happened to the other one

So I would I would maybe stop leaving my laptop on the floor. I don't

Not use her error this I was a victim here not her fault, okay

All right all right just calm down. We're gonna take a break. We'll come back

I will show you a hacking tool that you can use that will not fix your USB-C

But I actually had this and I gave it you know what I had this thing and I gave it to a priest

Because it was so dangerous

Which one I'll explain stay tuned

You're watching this we can tech with the father not not father

Father Harper read you thank you

You father was here yet brother

brother Ryan McCullough and

Sister

Kathy Gellis. Good to have all fathers. Father's name the guy that that's from the Vatican that you robber ballacere

That's who has my hacking tool. I'll explain that just a little bit our show today brought to you by zipper cruder

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Uh

Ever anybody ever hear of the flipper zero. I bet so Harper is feel you feel like you might have had a flipper zero Brian

Maybe you had a flipper. Yeah

You can do a lot with this you can hack you can oh there's this flipper zero ladies gentleman

I love this thing. I got into my building for for a lot of years with this because I lost my keys or my keys were

Key card. Yeah, it's it's a it's I find this to be

An incredible piece of technology. So what it really is. It's just a bunch of radios. Yeah, it's just a DR right

Yeah, and software to find radio. Yeah, but what I find fascinating about this uh, and you can tell it's

It's like not charged like I really use it like what do you use it for?

Unless you have some specific task a hacking task, but what I find compelling about this almost more so than any

Of the other STRs that are available is what a nice packaged format it is

The flex is nice. It even has a snake game on it

So if you're trying to get through customs

And they say what's this? You don't say hacking tool. You say it's my snake game

What did they sell it as dog toy wasn't it sold as a dog toy on Amazon for many years?

It looks like one of those like fidgety things that like it's like a fidget spinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah

So our friend we've had him on the show

We had to change his face in his voice or actually, I don't know if it's a him or her. We had to change their face or a voice

Pliny the elder pliny the elder

Has hacked the AI flipper. He's got new firm. They have new firmware called Vesper

That's an AI brain. You might want to try this harbor. You might want to charge up. Yeah, it's the flipper

Does it charge through usbc

Yes, it's a perfect a perfect connector. You know what? It could be worse. It could be micro usb Cathy

Yeah, but I think those might be more terrible

No

No, see was far worse

See was terrible and you wait you're saying what I mean

I think you don't mean not see micro usb was terrible terrible terrible terrible

Terrible terrible

So you can plug in an AI brain via open router

So you use I'm sure you use open router you you know you give them some money and you can use all these different

AIs connected over Bluetooth now you have a voice commanded

flipper zero

I want you to do this harbor. I gave mine. I was so scared of it. I you know after I hacked

The uh, I did the same thing the office so I could get in and worked fine

Then I started to unlock my car and then somebody said you know if you do that

Yeah, you can mess up the car. You you you may make it so you kick into your car

Ford will block you and I said all right, so I'm not gonna do that

Um, and then finally I just thought this is dangerous in my hands. So I gave it to a priest

Well, I'm still dangerous. It's still dangerous in their hands. It's just not your exorcises. It's just not in my hands

Yeah, but now I wish I hadn't

So you mean you can just get a new one

Oh, yeah, are they still around?

Yeah

So yeah, you don't have to memorize a guy that might offer it to you second hand. He might mark it up a little bit, but

I you you or Harper I have one right here. It's uh, it's uh

Six or seven hundred dollars. I think is how much they go for um it pairs with your meta

Smart glasses for meta smart glasses for hands-free heads up flipper control

And I stored in a glass of milk

You don't have to memorize sub gigahertz protocols or IR formats. You just say what you want you just tell the flipper

I love I mean, I I like this the only problem is that I um

It feels really awkward to describe what you're doing in English to this

But I would love to hook this in the cloud code and have just cloud code rip through stuff with it

So that sounds very compelling and we've had a lot of good luck with this

of giving hands to your AI agent

We we go ahead cat. Oh, I have a question. Does it have

An FCC certification on it and I don't mean that flippantly. I mean does it?

It's actually doing very doubt that this has any certification on it. Yeah

So this is seems like the kind of thing that the FCC could actually care about not the stuff that is actually

I think they do

Yeah, I think they do this is why it's advertised as a dog toy

Yeah

Um, it does not have any FCC markings on it, but it does have GPIO. Is that oh nice

Um, yeah, this is a it's a fun little piece of kit. Yeah, we're saying this and I'm trying to figure out

I don't think my voice is dropped out again, but I think it was my cell phone

Oh, it could have been stealing me. I had the um the my phone underneath the ethernet cord and we kept cycling and cycling and that was it

Back in the 3g days we had to tell people to turn off their phones because everyone's in a while go

I loved that that was such a cool thing

It was such a neat noise, but you could also tell who listened to you and who didn't right? Oh, no, no

I don't need to do this

That's what happens like Leo like if I put my phone close enough to my mic like you can still get it's a radio

Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, that's what cat. I think Kathy. That's I think you nailed it. Yeah, I think it was somehow

I don't know why I was doing it before on the Wi-Fi because I've never had that problem before

But I think it was sitting under the ethernet cord and near the dongle and it was somehow freaking out the

This is how the FCC will find your flipper zero. They have these enforcement vehicles

There's only about a handful of them. No, they're not a lot of them

Well, there's that the driver right on pop up the volume pump up the volume

That's right later

Like I drove around with the inception vehicle trying to find the radio waves. Yeah

So there were driving for flippers

Well, there were driving really mostly for illegal broadcasting

Facilities, you know, we're driving for flippers just sounds but flippers are even better

Yeah, that was the the pirate radio movie, right? That was yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, that's right

But there aren't very many of them there. It's not like you'd have to worry too much

It's pretty these are pretty cool devices and I wait me. I just this breaking

They the FCC has just

Purchased four more vans. I'm sorry six six more vans is pirate radio a big deal

I mean, I mean is it only old people that are listening to the pirate radio like how is this? What is happening?

No, I haven't followed it, but it's it's an interesting thing like you know

You have the regulations so you don't get the collision of the airwaves

But a lot of pirate radio is

Sort of it's people speaking to each other and in ways that can you have to do a lot of censorship

apparatus and sometimes you need it

That's why we like amateur radio

That's why you would take a boat off shore and outside territorial waters. Yeah

Well, you know the numbers stations got very active after the

Ran war started. Yeah

Well, what I what do I favorite things that think we're laughing Brian like you don't believe me like it's

Conspiracy

No, I just love it because there's probably some guy somewhere who's like

This will be funny and and then it's like covered in some news and and I mean sure numbers stations seem like an entirely plausible way

To spit out a bunch of data without anyone listening. No, I was gonna say like this brings it back to the whole sci-fi thing

Like that's how like the real hacks will happen is the old sort of

Technology that people aren't paying attention to that that's how they'll bring down

It's sleeper cells

Okay, this is the conspiracy theory

There've always been number stations which are shortwave radio stations broadcasting numbers and that's all they do

and

But apparently

This is radio free Europe so it's got to be true

Harper's game yeah sure listen to this mystery radio signal from day one of the US

Iran war you're you ready to hear this this is this is listen to this

On the first day

Oh, well, it's probably it's probably farcey. It's probably not in English

It's a random sequence of numbers. It's lust. They've always been around. They're kind of mysterious

They're considered to be used by it's cold war tech. Yep

It's

So they came in from the cold stuff. Yeah

Sleeper cells waiting for that special sequence of numbers. It

Tells them to get going

It tells you how to get off the island

Well, anyway, if you want this is a

Pliny the liberators flipper zero AI upgrade

I think if I were if I had my flipper zero, I would install this especially you should harbor

You could have a whole bunch of new clawed skills for your you're a dog dog toy. I mean, I do love I do love that idea one

We've had a lot of good

Luck with cloud code controlling oscilloscopes and in other things that are hard to read as a non-professional human

And so this would be another one that'd be very very handy to to do

I'm sure it could do a much better job at figuring out what to do. I just don't like right now

I don't I'm charging it. I don't really need like most of the I know I don't really I couldn't think what to do with it

It's a hundred ninety nine dollars. You can buy him right now from flipper.net

It's very stylized. It has a very cool interface. It has a bunch of cool graphics and it you definitely feel like a hacker from the movies hackers

When you use it

But I've a lot of friends that use it to clone RFID, which is just a pain in the butt

Um, you know to clone some NFC tags. That's just because it's mostly just a pain in the butt

It's it's not like this is some magical thing other than they thought about user experience where most of you know

Most of the SCR kits you get are like a USB

You know, that's it or you get like a circuit board and you're like great. What are we going to do with this?

So it's very nice to have a very

thoughtfully designed thing

We've been talking about the new age verification rules and the silliness in California where they said all operating systems have to

Ask for their users age

Before they install it even Linux

I'm happy to say graphing OS has said we're not gonna. We're not gonna do that. This is the third party rom for your

How do you how do you how are they planning to verify?

The input is correct

That there's no requirement that they do that. Yeah, there's different types of age

I call it all the age verification

But it really comes in different buckets of what they want to do whether it's approximate or just have somebody sign off or whether

They do want to verify and all those things are problematic

I think they're all problematic with some are more problematic than others

I get the sense though

That I am not entirely sure California's regulators realized exactly the extent of what would happen

They thought it was app stores. Yeah, they thought they were telling Apple and and Google to do this

But they wrote it so broadly that it would include in fact all operating systems. Yeah

Well, the Illinois bill does include specifically operating systems. It is delayed literally says that

Um, which I'm excited for when that passes and no operating systems will exist in Illinois

I'll have to do something else as an industry

So the way that California law works OS providers must maintain a quote reasonably consistent

Real-time application programming interface the categories is categorized as users into four-age brackets under 13 13 is 16 16 to 18 or 18 and older

And that any developer who requests it when their app is downloaded or launched

Should be able to get that information Apple actually has that all set up

I don't know if Android does I'm I'm sure it does it or will but it's out but then so that's stored on device

So I get a new iPhone and I turn it on I sign up and ask me my age and then that is then stored on the iPhone

That doesn't have to go back to Apple exactly

And so then it's just an onboarding step of what is your age exactly

And it's it seems kind of silly but also innocuous it's it's not really going to be innocuous I think um

I it might be innocuous at the moment. Yeah, it's

It's data. It's innocuous right now because it doesn't require photo ID

It just says if it's collected and never leaves the device then then that seems okay, right? Yeah, and Apple actually knows how

What you are right now, but I mean I've been out about how I think every one of these things leads to another thing

Right, they're like oh now that we collected let's now which I'm sure that's true

And I mean this is mitigated somewhat compared to other other approaches, but

It's data extracted and I don't think that's benign especially for something, you know

The platforms are you're supposed to be able to speak anonymously through platforms

Giving data. What if you give data and you buy? What are the implications of that? What are the implications for you?

What are the implications for the platform? What if you change and you told somebody you were

21 and somebody you told it were 34 and I've got an app for you Kathy. Yeah

This is the White House launch this on Friday new White House app delivers a paralleled access to the Trump

administration

It's a powerful new mobile app

And by the way, it also gives the Trump administration unparalleled access to you

Yeah, this is great. Did you try it? Did you install it? No

To get this some of this is great. This is a blog post

About it's somebody decompiled it probably using your tool. Maybe your health

The official White House Android app

Listen to what it does the guy really did a good job breaking it all down

It bypasses

Content paywalls

GDPR

Statements and cookie banners

It has JavaScript in it that just goes right past that because you wouldn't want to slow anybody down with that kind of thing

If they're using the White House tool

It has a built-in location tracker

That every four and a half minutes and every nine and a half minutes gets your precise

location

And sends it back to the home office

You do have to grant permission in Android for that to happen

Weirdly though the location permissions are not declared in the Android manifest

Which is the rule I believe on Android

I mean this thing is is wild

It has looked like it was vibe coded though. Yes, and in fact. This is the great. This is the best part

It ran it ran it loads a random JavaScript

React native iFrame library from some guys github pages

Hmm

A personal github site repo

Lonely cpp

And it loads this in and by the way if lonely cpp were to ever get hacked

Everybody using this app would be hacked as well

This is the administration who says you can't buy a router not made in the USA, but meanwhile install our app

This seems fine

Seems fine seems seems very

What do you call it like

Typical for the administration that uses mail chip half baked mail chip all users emails go to mail chip

This is by the way illegal. Yeah, half baked with no experts consulted before they laid out their

Yeah, why would you need exports?

Yeah, I mean, but that's the issue with their legal stuff too like if they could get away with a lot more if they actually talk to a lawyer about how to do it

But it's very clear that they're having the conversations down the road this this guy it goes on there's a

Some sloppy leftovers are there's a local host URL for the White House

In the bundle local host call an 8081

It's a word press by the way. It's a word press

Site that they're downloading this from the White House site

uh

It's crazy

Anyway, uh if you want to install it you can get it directly from the White House

Uh, they posted a blog post about it

um the official White House app with it americans can receive breaking news alerts watch live streams of briefings

Stay connected to the latest policy breakthroughs does I don't know if the breakdown would have included this

But is anybody trying to claim a cop

Oh

What I wonder if I wonder if they put in a copyright claim like copyright something because if it's produced by the federal government

We are it's ineligible for a copyright, but I am sure they don't know that

I don't know oh it is on the uh it is on the ios store as well

They let it on the side for the iPad nice nice

It cleared the ice the America's back with my cigarettes

I

Don't I think the reason I clear the app store is because it came from the White House

And they didn't even ask any questions

That's that's that's a choice yeah

Or someone knows what they're doing and this is a honeypot obviously

The developer is the official White House

But I still expect they've done this before where they've tried to claim copyright on stuff that the White House

Did that amassed it on for true social true social was basically amassed it on the clone

All right, I think we've had enough of this silliness

I thank you Kathy Gellis for joining us and giving us the inside story on those

Big court cases. I'm just sorry. We don't have more time to

Go into the greater detail, but Kathy writes all about it detector.com. That's a great place to get the inside story

You'll find her website cgcouncil.com and she's on blue sky at Kathy Gellis. Thank you Kathy

Thank you great to see you

Brian McCullough you'd listen to him every morning with the tech brew ride home. Oh, I guess I'd be in the evening every evening

Yeah, you do it around noon, right? Yeah, basically so yeah, so I get it as I'm walking out the door originally it was

5 p.m. Every day, but COVID put pause to that

And why did I just go away? Oh, there we go. We put a pause to Brian

Yeah, no, it's when I get it out

Which is around like a one o'clock Eastern two o'clock Eastern these days

Excellent

You know if you listen this show you probably should listen to the tech brew ride home just because

You know you care enough about tech news to keep up with it and incidentally there's a YouTube channel also

The the use case is I get you in about in 15 minutes. It's unlike and you have John Borthwick

You have John Borthwick one of my favorite people right there is beta works. Yeah, yeah nice

Harper read you're one of my favorite people 80 23 89 I was trying to I was trying to find the marketplace

And I kept entering different numbers into my blog till I found 23 89

What's your favorite tool right now? Well, there's Harper by the way on the front page. Yeah, okay

This is your like radio station. What's going on in here? You can listen to the music

Nothing's playing right now because I'm here, but we we stream all the music we play in the nice office 23 89 radio

Look at yeah, and it's all offline because I'm offline, but um I had that idea

Well actually for a TV show, but anyway go ahead if you go don't you live that life?

I do kind of live this life. I was gonna say like how you're like I had an idea of streaming a TV show

I

Don't do many years ago. This is in 1993. I went I pitched NBC the idea that you would have these this house with all these hip people and

Be designing a website and a TV show which would be the actual TV show at night

But you could tune in on the internet

This is very early and watch them and each of them would have their own radio station

So if you liked one of them, you know, if you're really into Kevin Rose you could hear his the tunes that he was

Jammin who is he put together the website?

So check out skills.2389.ai

And this is this is where we publish our skills before we talk about it, but if you look here the simmer

Um

Yes, it was all the good ones simmer is a really good one. It's using Carpathi's auto research kind of pattern

Oh to do some so you see that was over my head. So I wanted some easy with so this would do this

This would do it. So what you do is you if you have something you're just honing or you want to make better

You can just say hey you simmer to do this and it'll just rock through it really quite a bit

Um, and that's a lot. That's fun

That's fun the other one that I really want like is called review squad

And this one is really wild because it will take um, I did agent drugs once but I'm not doing

Yeah, but uh the review squad. I don't know where it is on the list. We have to search for it

But reviews squad will um

Light up a review of like five to ten agents to review your code

And so you can do all sorts of fun stuff like you can have um review of experts or review of users

But my favorite one is you get a review of well actually people which is like a hacker news comment

That's awesome and and so you get all these people that will find hyperpedantic issues with whatever you're building

And it works super super well, and it's really fun, but I have a surprise skill that I think you'll really like

You mentioned that you were gonna surprise us. Okay. I have a good one. It's not mine

It is awkwardly my brothers. Oh, and I'm gonna describe it and is that his blog Dylan. Dot blog

Which you're going to love if you go there um, but what he did is he made a skill that gives his agent free time

And then I like your I like Dylan's is this a site? Yeah, this is a site

It's got a sword cursor. It has a lot going on

So if you just feels like old web this feels like old web this is oh look it turns into a myth

Yeah

And if you go to the one that says I gave my AI

A blog in a lunch bullet break and honestly

Which is handling both better than I ever did and so um

What it was? Oh, that's a good name for an AI. I like yeah

So he has this agent and he works with and he does all sorts of stuff

But he made a skill which he published somewhere. I forgot where exactly it is

But he published it and it

It's just has a free time and he tells his agent, you know

I'm gonna give you ten minutes of free time every once in a while and you can work on whatever you want

And then he also has a part of the skill

He says while we're working if you think of something you want to do during free time

Keep a log of tasks that you can do during free time and then

It's like his 20% time you should get your agent time. Yeah, so it's the idea of giving the agent 20% time

Any and it's so funny because it really um it does all sorts of weird stuff

So he sends me every couple days he'll send me some completely unhinged thing that the agent did it was like the agent was

was uh

My brother for some reason had been researching

Mermations and so the agent made a whole bunch of oh, I think that's fast. That's when the birds all fly in a formation

Yeah, so so the agent in the free time was doing D3

Um flock simulation so my brother's like what are you doing? He's like oh, well we were talking about mermations

And it just struck me that this might be interesting and I wanted to explore it. Oh, I want to do this

And so it's a very interesting kind of bizarre uh, I've got tokens to burn

Well, I just love it. I love it. Okay, so the get so his github is github slash gum nervous

uh

nervous dash net and it has a nervous dash marketplace is where it is

So he's it's called the free time skill and it's it's these things. I just love. I love all of these options of

These these hacks that when you are not is this is the one with it. Yeah, that's it. It should be a nervous marketplace

nervous marketplace. There it is

And free time will be in there three time is there um right there free time

Oh, I'm going to install it. You better tell you

I want packs to have his own free time. Why should I?

monopolize him. This is kind of this thing that I that I I think about a lot which is these agents are

Strange they're really weird. There's aspects of them that are really uncomfortable

You know, I think you you have these like the fact that you that you think it's real that you talk about as a person

But it's not a person is is is truly like you know, like like Kathy was saying

That is a problem that we need to figure out in the future

In the meantime, let's give him free time and see what they do

I won't figure that out. I'll show you my favorite new skill that I've used it actually. It's really good

Ever watch Silicon Valley the TV show? Are you talking about the Dinesh gilf oil and gilf oil

Is it good? Is it good? It's really good

What if Dinesh and gilf oil reviewed your code? So you have to have a pull request or a repo that you're working on

And they fight because gilf oil is kind of this snarky super coder

So he goes first

He reviews your code with the deadpan withering precision of a systems engineer who considers bad code a moral failing

But he finds he finds stuff

He says what's this zero dot zero dot zero dot zero with no course. What is this?

And then Dinesh

Defends the code like his reputation defend depends on it

But they will go back and forth several times and eventually come to a consensus

It is actually really fun

But I but I like the free time. So

Stand back

This is by the way why anthropic has decided to charge you more for toe

Yeah, for sure because I'm just like we just hook it

He just make that if you make clawed watch TV some weird stuff happen

So the tropics just way servers are burning

Fire all of our natural resources are being sucked into my age and having free time and you know here we are

There's been a lot of talk lately

I don't know if it's true that

Anthropic is sitting on a next gen model called mythos that's so good

That they don't dare release it. It's dangerous. I'm ready

But they always say that this is they always say this no wonder it's mark. No wonder headset was like

We have to use your model to its full capabilities because 100% of anthropics entire ideas just like they're saying it's so dangerous

No one can have this it'll ruin the world the people who will have this will have too much power

They say that the lead up of every model and then they say oh yeah, we figure that out and they release it slowly

And so like I'm sure opus five or whatever will be the some

Crazy model that's really good and we'll remove all our jobs

But in the meantime, they're gonna have a whole bunch of papers about how everything's ending and all this stuff

It's like bait for the people who want to be you know to want power

They're gonna see this and say I want this this piece this this thing and it will be very expensive

Oh, it's it's already expensive. It's gonna be hugely expensive and by the way

Has acknowledged they are testing a new AI model they say will be a step change in capabilities

But they always say that don't they always say this and the step change in capabilities is so interesting because

I like to think of it if we have a pause button if you had a pause button can pause right now

any AI innovation

Would we still see effects in the world like are the effects that were are we predicting effects and that's why we're seeing things change in the market etc

Or these just effects that are happening and I actually think that if you pause right now just with opus

You know four six and and check you T five four. I think we're gonna have we're gonna have really

Big reverberations in in jobs exactly just with what we got now just what we have now and that's a bell

You're not gonna be able to unring and it's it's complicated like this is a hard

This is a hard thing to it to work through and so we just but we just keep making the models better

And so just keep you know keeping more cable and more capable do you worry?

I know Kathy does that it's a little irresponsible of us to celebrate this that we should really be

More serene. We should get more serene. It's about all that's instead of giving her a free time

I mean made me go hey Kathy. I have a lot to say. I mean I I try not to be a

The

Innovation is interesting and exciting, but a there's a gigantic present cost from it like why are we running these servers to do stuff like

you know

Hacking on your own just doesn't burn the world in the same way as forcing these models to do their hacking

And I think people should probably be more cognizant about

What the actual cost is of their fencing around

But I don't want to but there's something really cool about all this look what we can make computers do

But I but I still worry a lot like we're doing this poorly without ethics without larger consideration of

appreciation of people

I think your intersection happens and there be dragons if we're not careful. I think we're anarchists

I'm sorry to say it. We're gonna watch the world burn

And

That's a strong we there

What you said like or no, I'm sorry what Harper said about like pausing like it's a weird sort of Pascal's wager

Which is like we know this is possible

so what is the

opportunity cost or the cost cost

Of not exploring right like

It like we know that it exists

Like you could have stopped things when you knew you could create an atomic bomb right and maybe you should have

But like how do you stop it when you know it's possible

Well the argument that comes out in tech policy is we

China is um

I find that a little trait and I think some of the uh the conversation ends up a little bit abstract where

You know, we've used the word this

Maybe we should have stopped this what is this there's a whole bunch of things up into this what is some of them are you know

You know, they range from benign to oh my god and maybe we need to sort of have a toggled reaction accordingly

It's the Jurassic Park question. It's the question that Jurassic Park asks

Yes, but you know, but you know that we would at 100% all be on our way to the park like this is the problem that I have is that

I would be like yeah, I'll go to the park Leo. That sounds great. That'd be really fun

You know something so I feel like the Jurassic Park is a good illustration. It's exactly correct

We would just be on the wrong side of that part of this is because

When we both both started and I think many of our listeners started using computers

The dream was always that you could that they could

Be smart that they could that you could interact with them that they could be more than this that they'd be data that they'd be how

9000 that they'd be

something special

And then when it actually started to happen

Which is about November 24th

2025 with the release of opus 4x5

We all went oh

You can and now we're just kind of kids in a candy store. Yeah 100%

100% but also I do I think there is a couple interesting things here

One we're kids in a candy store, but it isn't all just fun like like there's actual productivity happening

Yes, and I know many people a lot of small business owners who are using you know terminal-based cloud code to basically run their business in this way