TWiT 1065: AI Action Park - DeepSeek's mHC Model Training Breakthrough!

It's time for Twit This Week in Tech. Coming up, Dan Patterson from Blackbird.ai and Joey DeVilla, AI developer advocate, a couple of AI experts. We're going to talk about Andrej Karpathy saying he can't keep up anymore. This is the guy who invented vibe coding. We'll also talk about the FCC killing that plan to improve home security and those nude images on Grok, plus why kids can't read clocks anymore. Twit is next. podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit this is twit this week in tech episode 1065 recorded sunday january 4th 2026 ai action park it's time for twit this week in tech yes we're back happy new year everyone the first show of 2026. So great to see you. I'm thrilled that you're here. I also want to welcome our panel this week. This is going to be fun. A brand new member of the Twit community. We interviewed him on Intelligent Machines. He is a developer advocate for AI, Joey Davila. His blog, GlobalNerdy.com. Joey, it's great to see you. YouTuber, blogger, AI guru. Well, thank you very much, and great to be here. Thank you for having me. I loved it so much when you were on IM. I said, get this guy on Twitch. So we're thrilled to have you. We're also thrilled to have Dan Patterson here. Dan went through a little bit of a health scare, but you seem like you're looking fit and ready to run. Yeah, I don't know about ready to run, but it was a challenging year of oncology appointments. but I've got a clean bill of health now. The prognosis is good? So far, so good. I mean, the long story short is I had some tumors removed from my neck in October and I had to rush back a couple days after the first surgery for, I had a hematoma inside my neck. Oh, my gosh. And had a wonderful medical team and a nice long stay at NYU Langone, but all is well now. Well, I'm good. I'm glad to hear it, and I hope you have health insurance. Yes, Blackbird is a fantastic company. Good. Oh, that's right. I didn't mention he's the senior director of content at Blackbird AI. We've got two AI experts here, which is a good thing because 2025 was the year of AI, and 2026 at this point looks to be even more spectacular. I remember talking to a guy who worked at an AI company. His company was responsible for fine-tuning the models down the road. And this was a couple of years ago. He said, this is going to be a very weird decade. He said, it's hard to explain, but what we're about to see is going to change everything. At the time, I thought, yeah, I could see that happening. But increasingly, I'm increasingly convinced that's the case. And by the way, both good and bad. Right, Joey? I mean, we're inundated with AI slob. There's no doubt about that. Yes. The promises of a superintelligence have yet to be lived up to, which is probably a good thing. I would agree. I would agree. Let's figure out what we're doing right now with these artificial intelligences that we do have before we create this supreme intelligence. And you could certainly make the case that the economics of AI at this point are a little iffy. They're weird. Like one-third of the stock market? Yeah. Something like that? The Magnificent Seven dominate not just the Dow Industrial. In fact, they don't dominate the S&P 500. And fully 1% of our GDP growth last year was from AI, none of which at this point is profitable. What has been really interesting to me, at least the story through 2025 and looks to be in 2026, is the productization of AI. And kind of the split between the top-of-mind AI companies between a business focus and a consumer focus. And seeing, like, Anthropic and Google really invest in business. And Google, of course, because they have such diversity of resources or such vast resources, they've created a diversity of products. So, you know, it was only 18 months or so ago, two years ago, that there was kind of a good, healthy gut chuckle about BARD and Google's ineptitude with consumer AI. And I remember the also gut chuckles about the, you know, AI summaries that would appear above Google searches. And those kinks have been pretty fully worked out. Those products, those consumer products seem to be going gangbusters. And on the other side, we see Microsoft using OpenAI, and we see Anthropic with almost every large – well, that's an exaggeration – with many large businesses tapped into the API and using AI as a business resource. So really seeing these products develop was the real story, AI story, that I saw emerge in 2025, and I expect to continue to develop in 2026. There's, of course, the data center story and how these large data centers are kind of driving up RAM prices for both businesses and consumers. Yeah, you know, one of the things that we talked a lot about in 2025 is the electric costs, the water costs, And then, of course, the hardware costs of AI. But some of that has been overreported. Karen Howe, who spread the story that AI was consuming vast amounts of water, has since retracted that. In fact, but I still hear it from everybody. I got in a fight with my daughter during the Christmas break because she said, oh, it's taking all our water. And I said, it's actually taking a fraction of the amount of water as the nation's golf courses. So I don't know. I guess we could get rid of golf and AI, but maybe we should, you know, really think about this. And by the way, the water doesn't disappear. It's not being sent into space. It's still on the planet. In fact, most AI water is recirculated. Anyway, she said, well, what about Elon Musk's plants that he's powering with natural gas and creating huge pollution. And I said, that's not an AI problem. That's an Elon Musk problem. It doesn't have to be that way. So there are, I mean, I will stipulate there are definitely problems with AI. But I agree with you, Dan. I think especially when you look at Anthropic and Google, and then maybe if we throw in some of the really interesting stuff being done out of China right now, it's pretty clear we've made significant progress. I use Claude Code daily now. And I don't have the $200 a month ultra subscription. I just have a $20 a month subscription. It is great as an assistant. It is great. Oh, Google's talking to me. I said the G word. Oh, I'm sorry. Go away. Oh, now it's playing a video about AI. Hey, Google, stop. It's too helpful, right? There's also, you know, open AI has caught a lot of flack, and I'm not advocating for them one way or the other, but they have certainly turned into the consumer angle, and their products have gone from being kind of mid. Like their consumer products a year ago, even six months ago, were just meh. But now their consumer products are somewhat compelling. I don't use their consumer products. Like the ChatGPT, that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean ChatGPT is integrating some pretty interesting features. Their image creation has certainly improved. I know Banana is the winner right now, though. Yeah, right, exactly. And Sora, you know, I don't know that there's been large-scale consumer adoption. I think that was a flash in the pan, wasn't it? Yeah, but it was an interesting experiment. And then everybody tired of it. Yeah. What's interesting to me is not so much the success or failure of these products, but the strategic direction that they've elected to take. And although their API is very compelling and a number of businesses definitely use that API, their focus or their double down on consumer products is what's really kind of interesting to me. Yeah, in fact, that's one thing that has changed in the past year. All these companies were working really hard to get competent AI, less hallucinating AI. But now the differentiator isn't really so much the model. They're all really very similar. It's the targeted audience and how it's being used. Yeah, which is very interesting. I mean, you're right. The story last year or the year before was hallucinations, and now if somebody tells me why AI just hallucinates, and I do have some frustration, and I still write for ZDNet. I still consider myself a journalist in many ways, but much of the journalism community seems to have rightfully a distrust of many of the AI companies, but an equal amount of lack of knowledge of these products. But seeing how these products can assist technologies or human behavior and productivity, to me, really reminds me of, do you remember the early days of Photoshop and when Adobe? Just like that. Right. And the same complaints, by the way. Remember when we were saying, oh, you'll never know if a photo is real again. Yes, I had those exact conversations in newsrooms, and when I was a younger reporter, I had those conversations. That's exactly what I think about Leo, is, well, you'll never be able to, like, yes, we can tell if a photo was doctored, just like we can tell if a photo is AI. And, in fact, at Blackbird, not the log world of Blackbird, but we make products that will help you tell if a product, if a photo or if a claim is real or not. And those things, you know, I remember having those conversations about a year ago, 18 months ago. Well, can we tell? Will we be able to tell? Will we have to watermark? Like, you know, actually we can use AI to figure out if it's real or not. Yeah. I mean, again, I don't want to downplay. There are negatives. An AI slot is one of the negatives. Negatives, for sure. Go on X.com. You want to see a lot of AI slop. That's pretty much all X has become. And if you go there, it's kind of depressing because it is so sloppy. We'll talk about the trouble they got into this week in just a little bit. But you posted, you actually put a link in our rundown, Joey, of a tweet or an X post from Andre Kaparthi, who I, by the way, is my personal guru for AI. His videos have been very informative. Same here. I'm working my way through them. Yeah. Yeah. He was. Yeah. One of them is three and a half. The best one is three and a half hours long. It's a bit of a slug, but very, very good. He was at Tesla. He is now kind of on his own. He says, so this is what he, and you would think he's the guy who knows, right? He's the guy who's, I'm looking to figure out how to use this stuff. He says, I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactors as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse. And between, I have a sense that I could be 10x more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last year. I feel the same way with Claude Code, by the way. And a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like a skill issue. He's falling behind. He says, clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around, except it comes with no manual, and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the professions. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind. He's the guy who coined the term vibe coding. Yeah. And he can't keep up. And remember, vibe coding, that term is not a year old yet. That doesn't happen until February. That is how new the term is and just the general popular concept is. So, you know, I'm kind of thinking maybe it's one of those end-of-year things where sometimes some people just feel a little depressed. Yeah, it was December 26th when he posted this. You know, maybe it was some bad eggnog. But, you know, a lot of people around that time of year are going, oh, my God, what am I doing with my life? But it is an entirely different thing for Karpathy to say that. That's like a cookie monster going, maybe these cookie things aren't all cracked up. No more cookie. But I understand this feeling. And the funny thing is it reflects a feeling I had when I first started covering technology, when I first moved to Silicon Valley, when I first encountered the public Internet of overwhelm. overwhelm. Like, I can never keep up. And this is 30 or 40 years ago. Okay. I mean, do you guys remember that? Feeling that way? I can't keep up? It's moving too fast. Oh, yeah. And this was when I was at Queen's University. And in fact, actually, for Elon and I have some overlap there. By the way, Queen's, not Queen's, New York. Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Canada. Okay. That queen. Yes. Was it Elizabeth I or second? Or was it Victoria? Oh, wait. Was she named after? No, it would have been Victoria. Yeah. Okay. It would have been named after Queen Victoria. Let's get our queens straight. From that era. And, yeah, no, I remember, yeah, a computer powerful enough to do our assignments. We had to go to the lab. We had a lab provided to us by Digital, if you remember that company. Yeah, yeah. My uncle worked for digital. There we go. Yeah, and they got bought up by Compaq, who got bought up by HP. But, yeah, we had a bigger fish eating. Actually, it's like a littler fish eating a bigger fish. It's kind of the opposite. And in Deck Lab, all of a sudden, all the GUI Unix machines that we had, all of a sudden had Mosaic on them. Oh, a browser. Yeah, and that just opened the world. It was wild because before then, I was either on Usenet. Right. And we may have to explain that to people. Or Archie. Yep. Yep. Archie and Veronica. I remember on Mosaic, by the way, Mark Andreessen, one of the authors, not the sole author, but one of the authors of Mosaic, he later turned that into Netscape, turned that into a fortune, and turned that into, well, I don't know what he's become now. But anyway, I remember using Mosaic and seeing, I still remember this. There was a little compass. I'm looking at the screen because it was just text. And there was a little animated GIF of a compass with a needle moving. And it blew my mind. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Boy, that's a blast from the past. It blew my mind. It's moving. There was a sense of openness and hope and fun with the Internet in the 90s and early 2000s. Maybe we've learned better. Cynicism has set in. Because really, you're right. I mean, I remember John Perry Barlow's, you know, cyberspace manifesto. Oh, yeah. People of Earth, you know, leave us alone. And we all had this great utopian vision of what the Internet was going to do. We didn't really foresee social media, phone addictions. We didn't foresee some of the consequences of this. But like any technology, it's a double-edged sword, right? I mean, YouTube's a good example where, yes, there are more videos uploaded to YouTube every minute than you could watch in a lifetime, literally. So that you can't, it's an overwhelming tidal wave of content. And much of it is garbage, yes. Much of it is terrible. But some of it's from Joey Davila. Some of it's, some of it, and I always said, yeah, okay, so everybody gets a voice and there's a lot more content. But just as there's a lot more content, there'll be a lot more. Even though there's a small percentage of all content is really great, that percentage means there'll be even more great content. And I think that that's true. Do you remember, surely you remember Adam Curry and Podshow? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Which, yeah, right. Oh, don't get me started. Go ahead. Sure. It's a long relationship. He told me. At one point, I'll just give you one thing, just so you know, just to set the stage. Adam and I were doing a John Dvorak's Cranky Geeks show. And Adam had just started Podshow, which was a directory of podcasts. I was signed to Podshow. Yeah, well. He tried to sign me. And he said, Leo, you're going to make wife-leaving money. They promised me very similar stuff. And I said, I don't want to leave my wife, Adam. Screw you. That literally was the end of my relationship. And, boy, I was right not to get involved with Podshow. Look what happened to Luria Petrucci, which is Cal. Oh, yeah, sure. Getting out of that contract. He owned all that content. Yeah. He owned the masters. He was kind of like a record executive. Yeah. My contract, I kept everything. I kept ownership of everything. I mean, well, I had mentors who were from the music business, and so I keep all of my – I own everything. It was essentially a distribution deal that included satellite radio, which was big at the time. But I remember talking to their CEO. It became a company called Mevio, and they had a CEO named Ron something. I can't remember his last name. But I remember him before YouTube blew up, maybe 05 or 06, and him saying one day the Internet, right now the Internet is like 80, 20, mainstream media to our, there wasn't the term creator at the time, but like creator-owned content, but one day, it will be 80% creator content and the mainstream media will shrink. Like, well, one thing that guy said... He was right about that. Yeah. He actually was very smart and had a lot of vision. I will give him credit for that. Really, in a deep understanding, he was an MTV VJ who, when And the Internet came along, registeredmtv.com in his own name. And Viacom, they had a little tussle over that. It's a very famous case. And actually added to the case love, who owns domain names. So he was smart. He was a visionary in that respect. And he was absolutely right. In fact, last year was the year YouTube became the number one content purveyor on people's TVs in their living room. Yep. And that's where Instagram is now refactoring, is to get on TVs. Yep. Not that that's a good thing. But it's the growth strategy. Yeah. Hey, Joey, center your camera a little bit so that you're not leaning over on the frame a little bit. Other direction. There you go. Other direction. We like the octopus. No, no. See how you're just. This way. Thank you. Okay. There we go. I have to explain, Joey's first time on the show, that there is something about technology podcasting that draws a slightly OCD crowd. And if anything is just a little bit off, it bugs them. Oh, yeah. It does. If I listen to a show and it's over-compressed or – Yeah. So we're all a little OCD. So that's why I bring it up. I don't want people to be distracted by that. There is a lot of AI news. We're going to get, actually, let me take a break and we'll get to that. A lot of things happened over the Christmas break. I was talking with Benito, our producer, Benito Gonzalez, who, by the way, is in Manila. This is the other thing that changed dramatically thanks to the Internet, is nobody has to work in the office anymore. And you can live anywhere in the world. And we can all work together. Dan, you're in where? New Jersey? New York. New York. Joey, where are you? Tampa. I'm in Petaluma, California. Here we go. And Benito's in the Philippines. I'm in the middle of it. And it doesn't matter. Right? Anyway, I was saying to Benito that a lot of kind of a little sketchy acquisitions and moves happened in the AI industry over the Christmas break. And I was saying, I think these people think nobody's paying attention during the holidays. So that's the time to do things like, I don't know, invade countries and buy other companies and so forth. And Benito pointed out that's because they still think there's a news cycle. There's no news cycle. Yeah, but they're still playing the old news cycle game of what's called taking out the trash. You announce the bad stuff on a Friday. Right. But does it fool anybody anymore? Not me because I've got a show on Sunday. I'm looking all week long. And by the way, the other thing companies thought is we're going to get everybody to move back into the office. How's that going for you? Nobody wants to return to work. All right, we're going to take a break. It's Joey Davila. It's great to have you at GlobalNerdy.com. I've asked him to play the accordion for us a little bit later on. He's encouraging me. Because I've been learning the piano in 2025. That was my year to learn the piano. And I played old Lang Syne on the piano at the end of the year. But maybe it wasn't you. I thought it was you who said, you know, if you know the piano, it's not such a big step to go to the accordion. That was me, yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought. And I've been tempted ever since to buy an accordion. You know, it is a machine that turns music into free beer if you take it to bars. It's always somebody's birthday at a bar. What about those little holes, though? I could do the keyboard, and it's sideways, so I'm going to have to figure that out. But don't you have to do the holes a little bit? And I can bellow. No, the buttons are just cords. Oh, that's easy. That's very, and they are arranged in a pattern. So I don't have to, I can hit an F major just by hitting a button instead of hitting the three keys? That is correct, and what that allows you to do is hold a beer in your right hand and have a drink. All of rock and roll can be played on those buttons. Yes. It's an amazing thing. Anyway, it's great to have you, Joey. First time on the big show, AI developer advocate. He freelances all over, and, of course, he's on YouTube. But his blog is a great place to start. It's a really fun blog, too, by the way, globalnerdy.com. Dan Patterson is also here, senior director of content, blackbird.ai. We'll talk about Blackbird a little later on because it really is a very useful tool for debunking BS in the world, which we all need nowadays. And he also has a lovely newsletter called The News, which you can subscribe to at news.danpatterson.com. Great to have you both. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler. Talk about AI. This is the world's largest cloud security platform. And these days, if you are in security, if you're a cybersecurity platform, AI very much is part of the story, right? It's obvious that the rewards of AI, we were just talking about it, for any enterprise are too big to ignore. But AI also poses a great risk, not just because hackers are using AI to step up their attacks in ways they just couldn't before, but also because just the use of AI in your company can cause you to lose sensitive data. So we know that generative AI increases the opportunities for threat actors. You just take a look at the phishing emails you get these days. They're perfect, right? And they come rapid fire, right? Malicious code. AI is very good at that, as it turns out, to automate data extraction. But there's also this issue of leaking AI through AI apps. There were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications in 2025. Last year, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. So AI, you've got to have it, you want to have it. It's useful, but it also is a threat. That's why you need a modern approach to Zscaler's zero trust plus AI. What Zscaler does, it removes your attack surface. It helps you secure your data everywhere. It safeguards your use of public and private AI. And it protects against those bad guys, ransomware and AI-powered phishing attacks. It does all of that. You don't have to take my word for it. Check out what Siva, the Director of Security and Infrastructure at Zwara, says about using Zscaler. Watch. AI provides tremendous opportunities, but it also brings tremendous security concern when it comes to data privacy and data security. The benefit of Zscaler with ZIA rolled out for us right now is giving us the insights of how our employees are using various Gen AI tools. So, ability to monitor the activity, make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information, according to, you know, companies' data classification, does not get fed into the public LLM models, etc. With zero trust plus AI from Zscaler, you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition and you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. All right. Let's see. Some AI news. I promised NVIDIA got busy over the holidays doing kind of a weird thing. I feel like this is not a good trend in AI. They basically hollowed out a company, spent $20 billion not to acquire the company, but to acquire its brains, in effect. The acquisition was of Grok, not Elon's Grok. Grok with a Q. Grok with a Q. It's a nine-year-old firm. It was started by Google's TPU engineers. It was never up for sale. NVIDIA came in with a $20 billion deal, not to buy it, but to license their technology and to bring the leaders, including Jonathan Ross, over. Which, if I were working at Grok with a Q, I would be a little perturbed by, Because this means, or if I were an investor, maybe the investors get paid. Do they get a cap? I don't know. I don't know the nature of that particular deal. These are very important brains behind Transformers. So this is a very important brain acquisition for NVIDIA. But it's not the first time we've seen this. The same thing, Meta did the same thing, right, where they hollow out a company, They hire its brains. But the rank and file are kind of left high and dry, aren't they? Yeah, what do I do? Google, I think Google did that with maybe character AI as well. Yeah, I was trying to remember who it was. There's a new name for this. MG Siegler has dubbed it a hackquisition. Remember, we had acquire. We used to have acquire. Yeah. Where you buy a company to hire its team. Now they don't even bother buying it. They just hackquisition it. So the creator of the TPU is now an NVIDIA employee, and the people who are still working at Grok with a Q are left high and dry. I don't know. I don't think they get this $20 billion. If they have common shares, probably not, but I would imagine the investors must be paid off. I can't imagine a board of directors. The board has to sign off on. Yeah, exactly. This can't just happen willy-nilly. Anyway, this is a new trend in AI. There's not much to mention. Certainly, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA has a fat, fat wallet and can do a lot of this. So does Mark Zuckerberg. He just bought Manus, M-A-N-U-S, which is a Singapore startup. Now, this is not an old company. This is less than a year old. They had a demo video that showed an AI agent doing things like screening job candidates, planning vacations, and analyzing stock portfolios. They were funded by Benchmark, giving them a post-money valuation of half a billion dollars. I wonder what that agent is built on, though. Well, I wonder if it's built on Llama, which is Meta's open weights model. Likely. Yeah, which would make sense then for – so Meta is paying $2 billion, which is the amount of money Meta was looking for in its next funding round. $2 billion, that's a deal. That's chump change for Mark. Wasn't Instagram $1 billion? Yeah. And WhatsApp was $26? Yeah, WhatsApp ended up, I think, being 32 once the stock got inflated. But I don't know if WhatsApp was worth it, but Instagram was definitely worth it. Instagram's got to be worth it. I mean, everyone uses WhatsApp. Yeah, that's true. But how do they make money? You know, they're going to have to rework that line from the social network. Oh, they're not a – Facebook is old hat. Mark already pivoted to meta, right, to the metaverse. To meta. But, no, they're going to have to rework the line where they go, you know, a million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. They're going to have to move it up now. I always wanted to do the pinky. When I hear that, a billion. Now they're going to have to say a billion dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A trillion. A trillion. OpenAI opened a job position for the head of preparedness. They are offering a $555,000 a year salary plus stock. That's not stock. That's cash plus stock for the head of preparedness. Sam Altman said, this will be a stressful job. And you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately. It's a critical role to help the world. The Guardian says, in what may be close to the impossible job, The HUD of preparedness at OpenAI will be directly responsible for defending against risks from ever more powerful AI to human mental health. Somebody joked, that's a lot of money for somebody who just sits next to the kill switch all day. Pull the plug. That sounds like you interface with all, like a PR job. It does sound like a PR job. The successful candidate will be responsible for evaluating and mitigating emerging threats and, quote, tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm. They've had people in this job, but none of them have lasted very long. It has a high burnout rate. And since I'm actually in job search mode right now, I have been. That's a million. Well, that's quite a billion. So I've been using, and you know what? Being Canadian, I pronounce it Claude. Claude. It's a French name. It's a French name. I don't know. It is Claude. It sounds wrong. So I've been using Claude, and one of the first things I always do is I give it a job description. I go, evaluate my fit for this job. Oh. So you use Claude code as almost others would use ChatGPT or Claude itself. You use it as a chat bot. Actually, no, this is consumer. This is consumer Claude. Oh, you're not using Claude code. You're using Claude. I'm using Claude code to code. The reason I ask is I know many people, in fact, I've found myself doing this now, who do, in fact, just why launch? I'm using Opus 4.5. I'm using the latest model. I chat with code. And you know what? Actually, I should do that. I mean, I use warp as a terminal anyway. Yeah, if you're in a terminal. I have chats with the terminal anyways for JavaScript. If somebody gives me some JavaScript code, I'm going, you know what? I have no idea what framework this is written in. I have no idea how to launch it. You launch it, and it does a fantastic job. That's kind of a metaphor, right? Yeah. Like using a terminal and a chatbot are very similar things? Yeah. Or a chatbot interface? I actually now, all during the Christmas break, me and Claude have been bunding. I'm going to call him Claude from now on. Is it a him, by the way, or is it a it? I try to use it, and in fact, actually, I want AIs to use the personal pronouns that AIs in classic Star Trek have used. Smart computers from classic Star Trek always said, this unit, and I want these machines to refer to themselves as this unit. I start Claude now with the continue command, and I keep it running. I've decided just to keep a terminal window open at all times and it's always running it's quite fantastic I asked it the other day what's the name of Taylor Swift's latest album and it didn't know and then I said try searching the web for that and it said oh I'm sorry you're right it's Life of a Showgirl it corrected itself let me see I wonder if it remembers I use the the clod agents all the time In fact, I will often write or edit alongside the consumer version of Claude, and I use the API every day. You can now tell, oh, look, it's smart. It learned. It says, I'm going to do a web search. I am not going to give you the bad answer I gave last time. I'm going to do a web search. So I keep it running all the time, and I have a big Claude.md, which is the instruction file for it, and I say, keep that up to date. And I keep that maintained. I say, you know, remember what we did. You know, keep track of that conversation. Yeah, look at this. So that doesn't use the context window or the context tokens. It does. Oh, it does? Yeah, but it's, I think, a little bit – the other thing you can do is you can spin up agents, and that becomes a separate context window, and then you can have the agent boil it down. So there's some really interesting stuff going on. This just came out from DeepSeek, and I'm going to read something called MHC, which some are saying, oh, my God, this is the next thing after LLMs. And I'm going to read what our friend Lou Maresca, who does AI, he is responsible for the AI in Excel, for co-pilot in Excel, so he does it for Microsoft. And Lou said, I had, so MHC stands for Manifold Constrained Hyperconnections. It's a new technique used by DeepSeek. They announced it, I think, yesterday. So this is brand new. And I don't really, I know I asked you, Joey, you said, well, I read the post. I read it. You know what? It reads like SharePoint marketing where you read it and you know less. Yeah. Well, maybe that's why it took a Microsoft guy to figure it out. This is what Lou wrote. And he wrote this as a memo to his team to explain this because they're developing Copilot. He says, MHC, Manifold Constrained Hyperconnections, and this was an archive.org paper that DeepSea published, is primarily a training, stability, and scale enabler. So I, in my mind, I think of it kind of like these glöd agents where you kind of spin off additional AIs to do specific tasks. He says, imagine you're a busy, you're running a busy restaurant kitchen. Hyper connections adds extra prep stations, more parallel lanes, which can increase throughput. Now, remember, we're in a kitchen, okay? But if cooks can arbitrarily siphon or amplify ingredients between stations, the whole workflow becomes chaotic at dinner rush, right? You know, give me your miroir. No, that's mine. MHC is the rule. This is the key. The rule that every transfer between agents must conserve total ingredients and keep the average seasoning stable. Plus, it reorganizes the counters, the tabletops, so that people stop bumping into each other. On a small kitchen, one GPU, your constraint is fridge space and how fast ingredients move. So the new rules only help if the counters were your real bottlenecks. Clear as mud. Much clearer than the archive.org papers. Well, have you tried to get DeepSeek to explain DeepSeek? Oh, there you go. I did. And? Okay, and it uses a water park analogy. Oh, that's great. And it's basically saying, okay, old AI brain. So the classic way is LLMs are currently designed like a single straight water slide. Okay. And so I'm having this in my mind. This is what Andre Carparthy was talking about in that three-and-a-half-hour video. This is the training conveyor belt, the workflow. Right. information in, you know, your latest video, your articles, your pictures, turns into tokens in the machine and weights. And that's a linear workflow. It is a straightforward, linear fashion. And what they are saying is, you know what would be more fun is a crazy, unregulated water park. Oh, no. No. Like, I don't know if you remember from the 80s, there's this place in upstate New York, Action Park, a.k.a. Traction Park. No. It had all these dangerous rides. Oh, that sounds great. Do a Google search for Traction Park sometime. Oh, my God. So the idea behind MHC is it's a crazy water park but with perfect safety controls. So in other words, you can still have all these chaotic connections, but there is the manifold part is some kind of regulated connection system between the interconnections. All right. Yeah, and that is... This is what it looks like. They had a... Traction Park had a loop-the-loop water slide. No. No, you can't do that if you're not going fast enough. Yeah, exactly. Oh, this is insane. That's why it was called Traction Park. And they were, by the way, closed, weren't they? Yes. Yeah. And with good reason. Yes. Guests who are not strong swimmers should not enter the action park Oh and yet oh my God Okay So I sorry I got distracted by action park So, you're saying instead of a linear flow of information into tokens and weights. It's more of a crazy, it's supposed to be a more crazy quilt flow of information. but the idea is that there is some kind of guardrail that keeps the information from just flying willy-nilly. So DeepSeek, the analogy it gave me, is a crazy water park with perfect safety controls. And then it did give me a link. But you better be a good swimmer. Yeah. Well, apparently it's supposed to be better than that, and it gave me a Wikipedia link to something called a Berkhoff polytope, which is a matrix formation for stochastic math. Okay. That was, that's based on a 1946 paper by a Garrett Berkhoff. So this is the era when people are, this is the Alan Turing era. This is people defining what it means for something to be computable. Oh, it's a polytope of double-stochastic matrices. I understand. I'm there now, clearly. Yeah, math is hard. But I guess the idea, by the way, you can think of, it's not unusual to think of, in fact, Darren Oakey proposed this on our last AI user group, which we did on Friday, that you can think of, in a way, the AI as a matrix. I always think of matrices as trees. It's different ways of looking at the same idea. And stuff flows through the matrix, and you can transform the matrix. So I guess the idea is that these are a little bit more, I don't want to use the word chaotic because that sounds like action park, but a little bit more richer than a linear matrix. Dynamic. Dynamic. Dynamic. That's a better word. Dynamic would be a good way of phrasing it, yes. Okay. It's doubly stochastic. What could possibly go wrong? Anyway. And stochastic meaning random but predictable. Probabilistic, yeah. Yeah. Which is what these things are, basically. That's the paper Stochastic Parrots pointed this out. They're just basically probabilistic autocorrects. Okay, very interesting. It's way beyond my limited capabilities, But the point being, for much of 2025, people were saying, oh, LLMs are done. We've hit the – well, there were two schools of thoughts. One saying, people like Jan LeCun saying, no, no, LLMs are a dead end. We've got to find something else. And then people like Sam Altman said, no, no, LLMs are so great. We just have to throw more compute at it. We just got more compute, more compute, more compute. And eventually they'll get, you know, super intelligent. Then there was two schools of thought. Well, maybe you're both right because maybe it isn't just LLMs. Maybe we have other models, other methods that we can use. Lacoon was arguing for something a little more physical, real world. A world model. Yeah. Yeah. Leigh also said that. She said an LLM is just language. We need to go beyond just language. We need a model of physics. What happens? You know, an LLM doesn't know what happens when a pen rolls off the table because it doesn't have a world model. So maybe we have a way to go. I guess the point to me is that we have some headroom, that things are still improving and growing. We're only at the beginning. You have to remember, ChatGPT came out, what, three years, one month ago. That is it. Isn't that amazing? And it blew our minds. And I don't feel progress has slowed. Do either of you think that? I think there was a point this summer where it seemed like chat and Anthropic hit a wall. When ChatGPT5 came out, people were disappointed. They said this is not supposed to be. Yeah, that was like expectation of management or management of expectations. But I do think that the consumer products hit some friction. And that probably fed a lot of, well, news cycles. And consumers were probably, the narrative was probably that these weren't at expectation level. But those expectations were also set with this talk about superintelligence and other stuff that just wasn't ever going to be true. Yeah. And I also think that there has been marked improvement in – I mean, Chat 5 is not what was promised, but it's a better product. And Anthropic is, like we've been talking about this entire show, it's just – it's really great. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's very useful. Well, and Gemini, too, which came out later. And Gemini, right. And Nano Banana, the video and still picture models are amazing. Gemini 3 is a very competent chatbot. I honestly don't care about chatbots so much because I'm not trying to get psychotherapy. I don't need a friend. I don't want to marry my computer. But Gemini is useful for getting work done. I have found it fantastic for search, or actually, in my case, job search. So, for instance, Gemini, because it can pull stuff out of video, Actually, I've been using it to find I used to work for Cory Doctorow I used to work at his startup Oh my god, I love Cory Oh my god I didn't know that Yeah, we're both from Toronto Yeah, that's right What was his startup? That was before EFF That was before he became a novelist Open Cola Open Cola, that's right This was during the peer-to-peer era And our thesis There was a little tongue-in-cheek, wasn't it? Well, OpenCola was supposed to be open source, and we decided to make a product, an open source version, to promote ourselves an open source version of the most proprietary thing we could think of at the time, which was Coca-Cola, right? Ingredients 7X, a closely guarded secret. Yeah. So as a promotional tool, we made an open source cola. And OpenCola was basically during the P2P era, and our thesis, and it made sense to me at the time, was that Google wouldn't scale. And what you needed to do was distribute search across every computer connected to the Internet. That's brilliant. Everyone would run a combination client server, which we called the Clerver, that would do these searches, and not just for information but also for files, because this was the peer-to-peer era. And, yeah, the idea was that people who are similar to you are going to have similar interests to you and are going to search for things that are similar to you. COLA stood for Collaboration Object Lookup Architecture. Architecture, yes. Corey and I and I think our friend George Scriven, who also was with the company with us, we made that up over sushi one night. It does sound like what I call a retronym. It's a backronym. Backronym is the term we like to use. Backronym, yeah. You got the word first, and then you figure out what it stands for. Yeah, and in fact, that was my first developer relations job, and that is because I was originally a developer. I brought my accordion to Linux World. I jumped in front of some news cameras, parlayed it into an interview, and by the time I got back to Toronto, this was Linux World Expo New York, Corey said, you're now our developer evangelist. You know what? Awesome. I can see the accordion being the key to Corey Doctorow. I can see that being the conversation starter. That's Corey in a nutshell. Well, he's still doing that. I mean, basically, this is the philosophy that he continues to live up to, this notion of big tech, the siloed tech isn't the solution. It's got to be open and it's got to be distributed. Exactly. But anyways, yeah, I was using Jevinai to search because he quotes me occasionally because he actually uses my dumbest line often, And that is, and I did this back when SARS was a thing, I said, when life gives you SARS, you make SARS-Pirilla. Oh, my God, that was your line? He's used that a dozen times on this show. Yeah, and sometimes he credits it to me. From now on, I'm going to put dash dash Joey Davila. And what I did was, I just had Jev and I search through a whole bunch of YouTube videos, and I said, yeah, tell me if he uses the line. Tell me if he credits me, and if he does, give me the time mark when it happens so that I can reference it in my portfolio as part of my job. Now that we know that, next time Corey's on, we'll have you on. We can have a little reunion. Sure. Make a note of that, Benito. Corey's on a big book tour right now. His book is huge. He coined the word of the year 2024 in shitification, and now he's reaping the whirlwind. Yeah, there it is. There's the book. That's right. Right in your hand, Dan. That's good. There are bits and pieces of Corey's friends, me included, throughout his novels. Oh. Little lines he borrows from us. Yeah. Oh, that's good to know. Well, I'll remember the Sarsaparilla one. That's a very Canadian line. It is, because Sars was a much bigger deal in Canada. It was a much bigger deal in Canada, and actually it was particularly big to me because my sister is the, She was the chief medical officer for the city of Toronto. No kidding. Yeah. Wow. And actually she got her way into the precursor of that job when SARS happened. So that was her first. Yikes. She entered the job on SARS and she left after COVID was over. Yeah, little did. SARS was the warning shot for COVID. It was airborne respiratory disease we thought would be as bad as COVID. But fortunately, thanks to public health people who really did their job right, it did not spread. And it was a big deal because it was spreading through the Asian community rather quickly. And my family, with the exception of me, I'm the black sheep. They're all Asian doctors. Wow. I'm the black sheep. You had to do something different, didn't you, Joey? Yeah, I did. You had to play the accordion. Oh, no, we all have to play instruments. That's a rule. Oh, nice. If you cannot perform on a variety show, you are in danger of losing Filipino citizenship. Oh, you know what? That explains Benito. Yeah. Benito plays like every instrument. I'll be danged. So that's why, Benito, you play all those instruments. It's for the variety shows. Well, everybody here either sings or plays an instrument. Like everybody. That's nice. I think that's the right. That's something we've lost, I think, due to mass media. Because it used to, before you had the radio and TV, you had to entertain yourself of an evening. Well, you know what, Filipino extended family gatherings? There's always talent show after dinner. Oh, how fun. All right, well, we're going to take a break, and then we've been avoiding it, but I guess we'll have to talk about the government. there's a government information we've got to talk about FCC's been busy there's so much going on in fact even an AI angle on this but stay tuned we've got Joey Davila here who coined one of Corey's best lines I love it great to have you Joey globalnerdy.com is the website Dan Patterson from news.danpatterson.com and blackbird.ai. Our show today brought to you by this little fella. Now, if you look at this, if you're not paying close attention, you might say, oh, that's an external USB drive. It's about that shape, a little black box. But maybe if you look closely, you'll see there's a bird on there. Is that a – that's like a canary. Yes, this is the Thinkst canary. And you know what this is? This is genius. This is the security device everybody needs to have inside their network. Here's a question for you. 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We thank them so much for their support and for helping protect our little network, our little podcast network. yes I did yes we got off lucky well it reminds you of a bird because it's the canary in the coal mine right it's warning you something's wrong something's wrong one of the things that happened while we weren't paying attention Congress has proposed a suite of bills that many of us have called the bad internet bills. There's the Screen Act. This is all from a salon. Congress may be about to create the bad internet. I just want you to be aware of these. The Screen Act is going to do federally what many states have done, an age verification requirement for any website. And why? Porn? No. Any website Congress decides is harmful to minors. Any website. That's the Screen Act. The Cooper Davis Act would require any electronic communications service provider, your ISP, to report knowledge of drug-related offenses to the DEA. Wait a minute. What if my communications are end-to-end encrypted? Oh, no, no. You have to know what's – you have to have the clear text. No encryption allowed. It's the 90s again. Do you remember when they wanted all encrypted communications to have a backdoor? They still do. Yeah. Never gave that up. By the way, which screen act? There are two of them. I know. And they worked really hard on these acronyms, probably harder than on the bill. This is a backronym, isn't it? It's the Mike Lee's Screen Act, which has been floating around for a while. Because there's shielding children's retinas. shielding children's retinas from egregious exposure on the net. Fact. They'll have to move fast, though. I mean, this would have to really get through committee. Yeah, I don't know what it's been. Nine months. I just don't. It's probably over, you think. I mean, well, I don't know if it's over, but I just know. Congress has another year before the end, right? Yeah, and this has been, without getting into any sort of partisanship. It's been read twice. and referred to the committee, but nothing much has happened. And it's been a very unproductive Congress. They have just a few months. I mean, maybe six months. Everybody's going to start campaigning now. So it's really, I mean, yes, this is. I just worry, coast this back. It will not die, right? Yeah. It's the Jason of. Yes. Not Jason. Jason. Jason Voorhees. But no, that acronym works harder than the people who came up with it. Screen? Yeah. And then there's the other one. Stopping communist regimes from engaging in edits now act. That's the other screen. There are two screen acts. Who knew that that word could have two different meanings? COSA is the child of the kids, sorry, online safety act. And that's another one that would require platforms to identify minors and censor content. as decided by the states. There's still TAC in Section 230. They're not giving up, and I think it's important that we remember that and pay attention. But you're right, Dan. Maybe there's some hope because it's such a do-nothing Congress. I don't want to minimize the importance of not taking for granted the freedoms that we currently have on the internet and our friend Corey would loudly remind us that this is very important but from a practical standpoint and I just think about this as I covered politics for many years and I just think about what are the practical implications of something like this and it just will be very difficult next year for this to happen and if the Democrats regain the House it's unlikely that this will, anything will happen other than their attempts to go after the current president. So we've got another three years of nothing, basically, is what you think. Maybe. Again, it sounds like I'm minimizing this, and I don't want to do that. But I just think about, like, what is the next? It's not hair on fire. I will grant you that. Yes, right. I just don't want to put hair and, like, have our hair on fire and go, OMG. No, because what happens, we've had our hair on fire for 10 years now. What happens is eventually you just go, you know, my hair's on fire. That's exactly right. And cynicism is a tool of autocrats. And so when we go, oh, my goodness, everything is bad, everything is terrible, it really makes so many people dial out. And instead, we need to just look at what's in front of us, and what's in front of us is a busy campaign season. Okay, I'm very glad my hair's out now. It's been doused. I'm counting on this administration being ideologically ambitious but operationally sad. That's very wise. What's that acronym? I-A-O-S. And get a K in there, you've got chaos. Congress has been like that for years. Like, Congress's ability to be productive has been disappointing. Well, the states maybe are a little bit more effective. On the day after Christmas, Governor Huckle signed a New York state law that requires social media platforms to display warning labels similar to those found on cigarettes. I didn't explore cookie labels. That's really done a lot of good. Of course, Australia has banned social media for kids under 16, and that is now spreading. Denmark says they want to do the same thing. France is the latest. We tried to get Patrick Beja on the show because I wanted to get him to talk about that. He lives in Paris. There is some good news, though. Texas had an App Store age verification law that was set to take effect this month, and a federal judge has now blocked that. It's only a preliminary injunction. It's not dead. This is SB 2420, the Texas App Store Accountability Act, which was passed and signed into law. Judge Robert Pittman said it's akin to a law, quote, akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door, and for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter, and again, when they tried to purchase a book. In other words, a violation of the First Amendment. So he hasn't ruled on the merits of the case, but he feels, I guess, there is enough concern about it to grant an injunction so that it does not go into effect. So that's Utah, Louisiana, similar laws. These aren't anti-porn laws specifically. These are censorship laws. Yeah. No, basically it's 21st century. A lot of it's probably rooted in 21st century equivalent of book burning. Book burning. Exactly. They've done it in libraries. Now they want to do it on the Internet. The suit was brought by the Computer Communications Industry Association, CCIA, including Apple, Google, and Meta. CCIA said the law imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps. Of course, Google and Apple do not want to have to make their app stores be, you know, the guardian. Yeah, because they already have to do that a fair bit already. I remember when I was doing product management at a fee-for-service software development company, having to fight with the app store, trying to convince them that the app that my company was putting out on behalf of a client was not tobacco-related. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, so that's the interesting conundrum here. I mean, I can understand why you'd want to prevent tobacco-related apps, especially those aimed at young people, from the App Store. Yeah, that's the thing. And I also, you know, we've talked about this a lot on our show Security Now. Our guru, Steve Gibson, is of the opinion that the best place to do this is on the phone, because Apple already knows your age, probably. Yeah. And they have an API already that can be called by apps to say what group, what age group is this person in. They have parental controls that let parents not say a birth date, not say the user of this phone is 12 years old, but just to say which group, which age group this kid falls into, which is good. I think the parent should be allowed to be the one to decide that. So it does seem like technologically anyway, Apple is the choke point. that's a good place to do it. Yeah. And by the way, the Texas law, which required age verification for porn, still stands. Oh, yeah. The judge said this one is too broad. This goes too far. Does Australia have a similar law? Yeah, they have, yes. As of December 11th, in Australia, you have to do age verification to use... That's social media. Yeah, YouTube, Twitter, you know, Meta, Facebook, you know, a variety of social media sites. Some are left out unaccountably. YouTube's the big one to me. I mean, if I were a 16-year-old in Australia and I couldn't look at YouTube, I'd feel pretty peeved. That's the worst I'd like on YouTube, by the way. Well, that's the thing, actually. New Year's 2025, the number of friends who approached me asking about VPNs for a friend. Yeah, yeah. It is a boon, isn't it? Our VPN sponsor loves these laws. But wait a minute. Think about it. That means the next step is to ban VPNs. That's going to be a little harder to get through. But lawmakers are already considering that, talking about that. That will be, but that means that VPNs will go underground. You can't ban it because businesses rely on VPNs. How are you going to ban VPNs? Yeah, it's going to be too hard. And even then, yeah, we were back around. I worked on the user interface for a Cult of the Dead Cow project. Remember that? Cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Peek-a-Booty. I remember Peek-a-Booty. Yeah, so I was the user interface programmer for that. Oh, man. Yeah, and the DevRel guy. We had, back in the tech TV days, we had the Cult of the Dead Cow and the Woo Woo people on talking about Peekabooty. Yeah. So it was me and Cult of the Dead Cow developer Drunken Master who worked on it. Wow. You have some deep roots. I just kind of fall, I just kind of land in the right place at the right time. I'm trying to be the 21st century equivalent of Zellig. Do you remember that Woody Allen? Yeah, Zellig. It was everywhere. Yeah. So Pete Booty was a peer-to-peer file sharing thing, right? Actually, it was a peer-to-peer distributed proto-VPN. I guess that's the best way to describe it. And basically, it was a network of computers that acted as a network of personal computers that acted as a VPN. So if you were on – You were on like Hamachi or Tailscale or something. Yeah, kind of like it. So you were either on the bad side of the Great Wall of China where you were trying to reach sites outside, or you were on this side of the Great Firewall and you were providing those. You were acting as the VPN for someone randomly in China. Wow. Huh. And, yeah, we presented that at CodeCon back in 2002, I think. Cool. Wow. So, yeah, that was Bram Cohen's thing. Yeah. Yeah, before BitTorrent. Yeah, just before BitTorrent, because I ended up participating in the BitTorrent test. Oh, neat. Yeah, because I know him from Mojo Nation, and this is when OpenColo was active, and I was living in San Francisco at the time, doing the developer relations there. I feel like our lives have intersected, and I don't know how we never met in person. We have in Toronto every now and again. Oh, all right. Because you did G4 Tech TV events. Did you come by the show? Never by the show. Just for events. Oh, yeah, I have a picture of you playing the accordion with me and Amber. Amber Mac, yeah. That's right. Yeah, I generally went to Amber back and back. Like at a bar or somewhere. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. Because Amber was the one who also convinced two cows that they needed a children's TV show and that I would be a great host. So it was me and a puppet. As you would be. What was the puppet's name? Junior. The show was called Developer Junior, and it was me and a puppet friend. And we did two episodes. The only reason we didn't do more is that Microsoft did not have a budget for a tween audience. Oh, man. I got to see if my puppet is up here or not. Oh, hey. I don't know where my puppet went. I had a Leo puppet. I think I might have given it away. It was me and puppeteer Brian Hogg. Oh, Brian. Yeah, he made the Leo puppet. Oh, okay, there we go. Well, Brian also made a puppet called Junior. Yeah, he's the guy who made my puppet. Oh, there we go, yeah. That's a small world. I'm sorry, I don't mean to leave you out, Dan. This is some great history. This is wild. I had no idea, Joey. Where is my puppet? Now you've got me going. I hope I didn't give it away. Yeah, I remember hearing about this puppet. Yeah, he made a Leo. In fact, at one point we did a puppet reenactment of the first twit. Oh, wow. I think it's still on YouTube. If you want to see my Leo puppet, the Brian Hogg. I wonder if I can find that. Twit puppet. That should be enough to get close code. You'd think. I mean, how many Twit puppets could there be? Oh, no, unfortunately, Twit has a lot of meanings about this week in tech puppet video. We're going to take a little break while I do this search. And I'm sure that Patrick Delahanty, our engineer, has a link that he will put up in the Discord. If you're a Club Twit member, that's where you go for that kind of weirdness. We are so glad you're here. Happy New Year to you all. 2026 is here, and we are going to continue doing what we do thanks to you guys in the club. Make a big difference to our bottom line. We really appreciate it. If you're not yet in Club Twit, you're missing out. We do a lot of special content. As I mentioned, on Friday we had our AI user group. We do that every month, And it's really a great deep dive into the ins and outs of actually using AI, things like cloud codes and other things. We also had a fascinating interview with a guy who was a talent coordinator, worked on Letterman, worked on Saturday Night Live, and has written a book called Love Johnny Carson. He interviewed over 500 people about Johnny Carson. He was a big Johnny Carson fan. We talked about Johnny Carson for an hour. I know that's maybe a little bit out of our ballpark, but it was a fun conversation with Mark Malkoff, the author of Love, Johnny Carson. Those are both now on the Twit Plus feed. Actually, I think we're going to make that Malkoff interview public, so you can see that on our YouTube channel as well. But that's all possible, made possible by club members like you. So if you're not a member and you want to get ad-free versions of all our shows and you want to get access to the Club Twit Discord, where there's always a party going on, if you want to get access to those special shows we do and support the special programming we do, and, of course, support all the programming we do, about 25% of our operating costs are paid for by the club. It's that important to us. Please go to twit.tv slash Club Twit. We would love to have you as a member. And a special thanks to all the folks who have been such generous contributors to our programming. We appreciate it. Twit.tv slash club. Twit. We also appreciate our sponsors, and I want to thank Monarch This Week, our sponsor for this segment of This Week in Tech. Wouldn't it be nice? Let's start the new year right. Reduce money stress. That's the worst thing. You know, when they talk about the things couples mostly fight about, it's money. The things that can cause such stress in your life, money. 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You can get ready for 2026. And Monarch's auto categorization of your expenditures is perfect. You set it up very quick and easy to all your accounts, including, by the way, your investment accounts, everything, I put it all in there. It's completely private. This is why you don't want to use one of those free tools. You want to use a paid tool so that you are the customer, right? Completely private. But now it auto-categorizes everything that happens. You get automated weekly money recaps. You can track your progress towards future financial goals. I had to make a budget for me. I didn't want to think about it. It's easier than ever to stay financially fit, both in the short term and the long term. And, you know, if you're like me on the verge of retirement where, you know, fixed income is just down the road, this is pretty important. Actually, it's important even if you're a young person. You've got to – retirement's not as far off as you might think. 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I'll raise my hand on that one. 80% say Monarch gives them a clearer picture of where their money is going. That's for sure. You probably made a resolution this New Year's to kind of plan a little bit better. This year, achieve your financial goals for good. Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Use the code TWIT at monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code TWIT. They didn't have that when I signed up. It was worth every penny. Now it's even more valuable. Monarch.com, offer code TWIT. Thank you, Monarch. Thank you. I really appreciate it. You've made a big difference in my life. back to the show we go with a very prestigious panel. It's great to have Joey DeVilla here. I had no idea Joey and I had all these connections. Going back to Brian Hogg of all things. And Dan Patterson who I've known for, it must be 10 years, 15. It's been a long time, Dan. 2009 was my first twist. 2009. 16 years. That's nice. 2009. We had just gotten going practically back then. I think Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis were in. Oh, I was listening to that show again. You mentioned that. And I thought, oh, that's fun. I have to listen. And that show, not only that, Jason kept bringing celebrities on. Like, it was a wild show, and I really enjoyed it. It actually made me feel good. I thought, you know what? This isn't a bad show. This isn't such a bad show. I really enjoyed it. I was doing my taxes. I remember this. So it was April. And you mentioned that that was your first show. And I listened to it. I thought, that's pretty darn good. Weirdly, you remember, the federal government goes back and forth on this. There was an embargo on Chinese ships being sold, on American ships being sold to China for AI. Weirdly, Jensen Wong, I don't know, he went to the president, had dinner with him. The president said, you know what, you could sell those H200 chips to China. Go right ahead. China's response was, eh, we don't want them. The U.S. has just approved Samsung and SK Hynix can ship their chip-making tools to China this year. It's so confusing. It's so confusing. They do this, I guess, every year, and so I guess it could change. TSMC, also exempt. I'm just going to, without comment. I shall just say this without comment. I don't understand. What about the super precise Dutch chip equipment Ah yes Which the Chinese have now reverse Have they I thought they were having trouble with it Well, they were, because if you've looked at this machine, this is ASML Holding, and they make EUV, extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. It's a $200 million machine. If you look at this machine, it is a Rube Goldberg device. And so very difficult to reverse engineer. Except the Chinese got a former employee of this company to come over, ASML, to come over and work for them. And last I saw, they believe they have a working prototype of the ASML UV machine. We've been blocking them getting that because that's what allows these really tiny 3-nanometer, 2-nanometer processes. So I think you can give up on that. Were they not? I mean, my understanding is, and this is from Peter Zion's book, so the geopolitics guy in Colorado. And he was talking about how it wasn't until 2017 or 2018 that the Chinese were not able to completely home make ballpoint pens. Really? The ball bearing is too precise. They needed to have external equipment to make that ball bearing. But if you read Apple in China, I was just going to say. Yeah, but that's the thing. How do these two things? Apple, so the Chinese government gave very, very friendly terms to Apple. They basically built cities, you know, the iPhone city. They built that out of nothing. And, of course, Terry Gao of Foxconn was instrumental in that. And China, Apple could not resist. It's a great story, the book Apple in China. Apple could not resist, but that involved a huge transfer of technology to China. And so they have all these capabilities. So here's the story from Christmas Eve on Tom's Hardware. China's reversed-engineered Frankenstein EUV chip-making tool hasn't produced, so you're not wrong, Joey, has not produced a single chip. It's still years away from becoming operational, not because the machine doesn't work, but because the supply chain for the machine is. Oh, so interesting. Yeah. So you could build it, but you've then got to feed it. Right, yes. You need the components. Right. Ultra-pure silicon and the necessary impurities that actually make the circuits. But, yeah, that's what doping is, isn't it? Yeah. Making it impure. I would not count against China getting there. It may not be there today. It may not be there this year. But at some point, that's going to happen. And are we, I mean, I understand we want to be, we're so afraid of China that they would get these chips and use them militarily? Is that what we're afraid of? Or are we being protectionist for American companies? I think it's geopolitical or geoeconomical. Geoeconomical, I invented that. It's not a strategic necessity, it's an economic necessity. Yeah, I think so. So I submitted for your approval. Exhibit A, the DJI drone ban. The U.S. at the end of the year, the FCC banned not just Chinese drones, but all drones not made in the United States of America. Do we make drones in the U.S.? I don't even know. Well, to turn out, Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., owns stock in and advises several American drone startups that have received billions in loans and subsidies from the Pentagon. so there is I think good reason to believe that this ban of all foreign major, not just DJI you could say oh well we don't want DJI to drones in the United States because they have they're a Chinese company China government, the PRC has golden shares in the company they have involvement with the Chinese military etc etc you could make that case But this is drones made everywhere in the world. And, well, this Trumpson's drone company, is it strictly military? Because there's a lot of agricultural uses for drones. Oh, there's a lot of reasons why you would want good drones. Yeah. If you have, by the way, a DJI drone or another non-U.S.-made drone, you can continue to operate it. They didn't ban its use. They just can't buy new ones. What about parts? Ah, that's an interesting question. Can you get it fixed? Yeah. No, because, yeah, on the startup bus tour, we visited the University of Florida, and they were talking about all the agricultural uses of drones that they were working with for the future, but also present-day use of agricultural drones for things like looking for diseased crops, optimizing irrigation, actually doing crop dusting, very precise crop dusting. Yeah, well, and there's massive military use. In fact, we used in the invasion of Venezuela on Saturday, a lot of that was supported by drones. Sure, and, yeah, same thing's happening in the Russo-Ukraine war. That's right. And 70%, DJI has 70% market share on drones in the U.S. So I guess you could say it is a ban against DJI. The other companies don't make much difference in the equation. But it is all foreign-made drones. It's not just DJI. Carl Bodie writing at Techdirt, Trump's drone ban is corrupt protectionist nonsense dressed up as a national security fix. But there may be consequences, right? Law and shortage. Military. Shortages everywhere. Agriculture, industry, real estate. Possibly even rock and roll, because you have to remember that Randy Rhodes, Ozzy Osbourne's guitarist, died in a crop duster joyride. I did not know that. Oh, that's right. Very famously almost hit the bus. Oh, no, it clipped the bus. Yeah. And that's why it went crashing into the ground, because the bus driver, they were staying at a farm. The bus driver said, hey, look, a crop duster. Who wants to go for a ride? Oh, man. Randy was an amazing guitarist. Oh, absolutely. Bode writes, some U.S. drone makers asked Daddy to protect them from global market competition, and he did. Now U.S. consumers have to pay twice as much money for much crappier technology. Instead of translating the proceeds into new jobs, better tech, or lower prices, the executives at the companies responsible will simply pocket the proceeds. It's not about national security. It's not about American labor. It's not about industrializing. Across consumer and business technology for the foreseeable future, that there is just a slowdown, and because of these protectionist policies, it might be far more difficult to advance products and capabilities at the rate that we've seen in the last decade or so. I mean, I can go on and on. I don't want to. Wired Magazine's story, December 31st, fears Mount U.S. Federal Cyber Security is stagnating or worse, government staffing cuts and instability. CISA pretty much shut down, right? They closed down 18F and they closed down the United States Digital Service and realized, oh, my God, those people, we need, so they've created this, what do they call it, Cyber Force? Yeah, on the defensive end, defensive cyber, I think offensive cyber was deployed in Venezuela. Oh, I'm sure. Oh, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. So it's shifted our posture, or it appears to have shifted our posture. But FCC has also killed a plan. We were very excited about this. The Cyber Trust Mark Program, an FCC plan to improve home security. The idea was when you bought a home security device, it would have a stamp on it certifying that the smart home device, whether it's a router, a camera, a door lock, would meet certain cybersecurity standards. Approved products would have a shield icon in the package like an Energy Star sticker. It was launched last year at CES. Nobody's put the mark on, and apparently the FCC has now decided to kill it. that's disturbing Underwriters Lab which was going to be the safety testing company announced it's stepping down and that's because the FCC has been investigating Underwriters Lab for ties with China anyway yeah this is not good this doesn't make us more secure doesn't make things better, doesn't make us safer. It's a little scary. But on the other hand, Waymo has updated its cars now, so when there's a power outage next time in San Francisco, they won't all stop in the road. Oh, my. This is a big problem. San Francisco's got a big power outage. And Waymo said, well, because the cars won't operate with the traffic lights aren't working, we're going to pause our service. The thing is, the cars didn't go back to the barn. They just stopped in the middle of the street. They just paused their service. They just stopped working. Probably because they're paused. Probably because they rely on those traffic lights. Yeah, they don't have, they don't know how to, I guess. I mean, it's for safety, I guess. I mean, I don't trust humans, never mind when the traffic lights are out and we're all trying to figure out, okay, which one of us goes next. Most humans treated the traffic lights that were out as four-way stops, right? Yeah, as a four-way stop, that's right. Cars, anyway, they would freeze in the intersection. Yeah. Ironically, two days later, after the power eyes was cleared, power is back, but then the National Weather Service issued a warning about a powerful storm, so Waymo stopped again. Is this making our city streets better? Is this improvement over cabs? I don't know. I live in New York City, and all of these things are like normal human drivers in the middle of the street. everybody just stops when the power goes out in New York that's a disaster it is a disaster well it's not that I mean it's a disaster but New Yorkers they survive flip you off and swear you need to drive yeah they figure it out hey I'm driving here out of my way buddy I would and I would absolutely not like to see Waymo navigate the Holland Tunnel during rush hour. So you don't have Waymo yet in Manhattan? Not that I'm aware of. You can't miss these cars. They're Jaguar. I don't think it's allowed here. And I don't know that it would survive. Are you of the opinion that Uber caused traffic congestion in New York City? Well, I want to be careful with my opinions, but it sure seemed that way. I remember when Uber came to New York City and certainly remember their policies, which has been mimicked by a number of tech companies. They simply just came into New York City despite regulations and operated until they changed the regulations. And now I see a heck of a lot less yellow cabs. Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately. Although, you know, a lot of women like Waymo because there's no driver. I know many women will not do Uber or they will request a female driver. They just are scared. And I'm sure it's the same with cabs. And so I know a number of women who say, oh, you know, I far prefer Waymo because it's safer. Yeah, so do I. Or at least who have said similar things about Uber and Lyfts. did it cause, did it create congestion? I don't know because that would, look, New Yorkers are going to take a cab or take a car regardless as to whether it's an Uber or a yellow cab. Right. The cars are still going to be there, I guess. The cars are going to be there. Although apparently that congestion pricing has been very helpful. It seems like it has. Yeah. It's not a huge fee, but paying a little fee to come into town during high traffic hours. Yeah, and everybody just goes on the West Side Highway or the FDR anyway. Like, if you're going uptown, you're not going up Broadway. So Professor Panda, who is one of our good friends who lives in Chinatown in Manhattan, says Waymo is still in beta in New York City. He does see them roaming around and mapping. Huh. I've never seen one. Yeah, you can't miss them. Yeah. Phoenix, San Francisco, including San Jose, they just announced that they're going to be in our neck of the woods as well, although I doubt they'll come up here because I don't think there's enough business to make it worthwhile. We barely have Uber. Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta. They're expanding soon into Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. Good Lord, Orlando. They've been testing here in Tampa. There was one right on my street, and I'm on a residential street. Well, that's the fun in San Francisco because there are certain neighborhoods in San Francisco with Waymo congestion problems. There's, like, places you can't turn right, and the Waymos get confused, and so they bottleneck up. Oh, well, what about the DDoS that somebody pulled? He got a bunch of people to call several Waymos to a dead-end street where they all block each other? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You can hack them. Well, that's maybe why at Mayor Mom Donnie, by the way, congratulations on your new socialist mayor. at his inauguration they banned flipper zeros not just guns and bombs but raspberry pies and flipper zeros yeah as they did I had a flipper I played with it it was fun I taught it how to break into our offices back when we had the door key thing and then I thought you know I'm going to give this to a real hacker I gave it to Father Robert Balancer the digital Jesuit so he could hack the Vatican I've put it into my shopping cart and been inches from purchase, and then I think, what am I going to do with this that doesn't involve getting into trouble? That's the right question. It's pretty cool. You can't play Snake on it. But I think that's more for plausible deniability if the authorities say, what's that? What's that, kid? Oh, it's my snake box. I mean, I think until pretty recently, it would be, and most people I know would have no idea what it is, but I think law enforcement probably has an understanding. But I think you could walk around with it in your pocket and most people wouldn't know. It's not illegal. This is a little, it's a, it's not, it's not here. In Canada, it might be. Oh, really? Yes. Oh. I remember hearing something about it. I don't know what the definitive ruling on that was. I'm just looking to see where they prohibited items. Large bags, weapons, fireworks, explosives, drones, strollers, coolers, laser pens, flipper zeros, and raspberry pies. Why raspberry pie? Because you can make it. I guess you can. A flipper zero is just a raspberry pie with a nice costume. Yeah. Big and plunky. But at that point, you know, they've got to ban the Wi-Fi pineapple. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Although that is so, I mean, like, that's a fantastic device, but I feel like that is a niche device. Well, that's how the Flipper Zero is built, as the Wi-Fi pineapple is built, is as a pen testing tool. This is for you to test your security. To test the security of your network. Exactly. Not other people's security. I believe Robert has used his to good effect. But I don't want to say how. Does he take it into the Vatican? He lives in the Vatican. So he can't help but take it. So he has the security of their networks. Yes. Yeah. He does say, though, you don't want to mess with the Swiss Guard. They may wear gaudy, clown-like outfits, but they carry submachine guns. Well, yeah, because they can fit them in those pantaloons. Pantaloons. Pantaloons. You can't hurt me. You're wearing pantaloons. Oh, yeah? It's not just this halberd I'm holding. He could hack the conclave vote. Oh, yeah. We could have had a hacked pope. Hack the conclave. Hack the pope. Hack the pope. By the way, Robert's going to be on next week. He's going to CES. We will have his CES report, as we have every year. He's going to make a nice video for us, and he'll bring us some toys. the Mixon Electronics Show. Simpler times. These were simpler times. Back to the conclave. I love it. Let's take a break. We will talk about CES. Yes, right after this show, in three hours, Samsung's going to do its first, I think it's the first press conference of CES. They have Samsung, they have so many products. They have the TVs in the TV section. They have the tablets. They have the phones. They probably have a car. I don't know. Sony's going to show its Ophelia car again. We'll talk about that. CES coming up. It starts tonight, in effect. Having some fun. It's great to have a movie. Is tonight unveiled? Yeah, I think, you know, actually Saturday, you know, all the third-party Trump shows like Showstoppers and Pepcom are making all the money. so the CEA, the people who put on CES decided we better have an event and we better have it the day before PepCon so they do it on Saturday so I think they did that last night tonight's probably showstop yeah, I don't miss all that did you guys used to go to CES? no, never went never went, oh Joey, you should go once everyone should go once it's like Action Park everybody should drive the water loop-to-loop Once. Even if you've been to a massive conference, you still should see CES just to go, oh, I don't want to come here. It's not as big as it used to be. It's only 130,000 people this year. More booths, I think. It is a privilege. I would tell myself that when I went that a lot of people want to be here, and I am a reporter who is here. At the same time, I greatly appreciate it. Not a punishment. It's a privilege. Typing from my sweatpants back in New York City. Oh, it's just, it's... I'm trying to remember the show that Two Cows, where I used to work, was banned from. It's probably Comdex. Was it Comdex? Yeah. It was the one where they brought... Comdex. One of the things that you could do was they had a raffle, and you could either win some money or you could win a cow, and they brought a cow into... A real cow? Yes. A live cow? Convention Center, a live cow, somehow without approval, and two houses have been banned from this. That convention center is also the home of the world's largest, most famous rodeo every year, just months before CES. So I don't know why they'd be bummed about a cow. But all right, if that's how you feel. Everyone else is on that show floor. Yeah, because I remember going through a list of conferences or conventions and going, why not this one? And they said, well, there was the incident. The incident. That feels like a Black Hat or DEF CON thing. Maybe it was Black Hat. Yeah, that's more. No, DEF CON's like you put concrete in the toilet. Somebody did that at DEF CON. Oh, my God, the DEF CON. Yeah, because that was DEF CON 2000. Yeah, somebody did that that year because I was at that one. You mean quick-drying, fast-acting concrete? Yes, and they called it a denial-of-service attack. You know, you can do the same much more effectively with just a little bit of cellophane. Okay. Yeah, and I was there on behalf of OpenCola actually presenting a little prototype called Colavision, which was a Gnutella, if you remember that. I remember Nutella. Yeah, that was a file-sharing tool. It was a Nutella. After Napster, yeah. Yeah, it was basically a Nutella system for broadcasting your favorite video clips. Nice. Written in Visual Basic, believe it or not, because we had to do it in a hurry. Nothing wrong with that. But it worked. But you know what? Vibe coding is the new Visual Basic. Yeah. You know, I write most of my code in Common Lisp just to be ornery. And it's weird because, believe it or not, Kludd is very good at Common Lisp. And then over the holiday, I bought myself a Christmas present. I bought myself a ThinkPad X1 Carbon because it has an OLED screen. I really like OLED screens, and it's very light. It's a little under two pounds. And I put CacheOS Linux on it, which is my new favorite Linux. but I decided I wanted to use a tiling window manager instead of, I usually use GNOME, but it's boring. And I don't need a big GUI. I really do most things full screen. Emacs is full screen. Claude Code is full screen. So I thought I'm going to do a tiling manager. And I set up Wayland as the compositor in Sway. But all of this stuff is for hardcore. You've got to read a lot of documents, a lot of websites, It's all wikis. Not so much with cache EOS. It's Arch, but it's Arch for people like me. It's easy to install. But setting up Sway, it's all configuration. Next configuration files. I just got cloud code to it. It's beautiful. It knows exactly what to do. Cloud said, of course, what do you want? I said, could you put the temperature on the weather on? Yes, I will write a little script. Can you tell me how much memory I have left? Okay, I put a little icon there. I mean, it was incredible. Cloud is amazing. and knows all this arcane stuff. And the point of it is, it's read the wiki, so I don't have to. Well, yeah. And it's read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and all the smug Lisp weenie books that are standard. I wish I'd known. There we go. You know what? I wish I'd known that you were into Lisp back during your G4 Tech TV days because my deadbeat ex-housemate, when he moved out, left his Symbolics. Oh, my God. in the house. What did you do with it? I actually put out an ad for it. By the way, I should explain to people who are going to the camera. This is a Lisp machine. It was a CPU that ran Lisp on the CPU. It was designed just to run Lisp. And now, by the way, in today's world, it would be considered a complete slug and and almost worthless. I can run it much faster on a stock PC. But piece of history. Yeah, I ended up giving it to Hack Lab TO. Okay. Well, I'm sure they did good things with it then. Yeah, but it's 150 pounds of machines, like the size of a New York apartment radiator from the 1940s. It was because all of it. This was early AI. This was all about AI. And in those days, these guys just couldn't, you know, they finally said, we're going to have to design our own machine. Nobody's going to let us run Lisp on their IBM 370s. We've got to design our own machine. And so they did. Wow, that's a piece of history. I would have loved to see that. That is very cool. There is one at the Computer History Museum. Like, when was this? It would have been late 80s, early 90s. It was one of the first machines where RAM was measured in megabytes when we were still in the kilobyte range. Yeah, and for its time it was fast. And this would have been circa 2000, 2001 that I had the machine in my house. Data Lore is asking, this book is the absolute essential read for anybody who wants to be a computer programmer, except nobody reads it anymore. This was the introductory book for computer science at MIT for 20 years, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. It's Scheme, which is a lisp. It's a lisp. But if you – and I'm rereading this. Well, I can't pretend that I actually have ever finished it, but I'm going to finish it this time because I decided, you know what, I am suffering. When I do these Advent of Code things, I'm suffering from not having formal training. I've done how to design programs. This is the next one. And I've been reading it for eight years now. It's a slog. It's like a Karpathy video. It is. This time I'm going to do all the exercises. I'm going to finish it. And I don't know. I'll be dead by then. Why is somebody my age doing this is a legitimate question. Shouldn't you, Leo, be out sitting and playing checkers somewhere on a porch? That is the checkers. It's my checkers. You are 21st century whittling wood. Yes, checkers. And you know what? I was a Chinese major in college in the mid-'70s. Oh. Did you play Go? I did play Go, the Japanese, but I played it. And I played also Chinese chess, which is an amazing game. But finally the world came around. At the time, this was a useless skill. China hadn't even been opened yet. But the world came around. Now, AI. The world's finally coming around to Lisp and AI. And I'm here. I'm ready. Anyway, we're going to take a little break and come back. And we will talk about CES. And Amanda Silberling's wonderful TechCrunch article, the dumbest things that happened in tech this year. And there are a lot of dumb things. We'll get to that in just... And Darren, the world is coming around a list. And desktop Linux. This is the year. This is the year, Darren. I will not cede that point. I will actually talk about our sponsor for this segment. Melissa has been the data quality expert since 1985, longer than we've been around, 40 years now. Forward-thinking businesses are now using AI in all kinds of new ways. But AI is only as good, and we know this, as the data you feed it. You can have the most sophisticated AI tools in the world, but if your customer data is incomplete, duplicated, or just plain wrong, you're training your AI to make expensive mistakes. That's where Melissa comes in. They have been known for 40 years as address validation experts. Really, they're more than that. They're data scientists. In fact, they have many great, talented, smart data scientists working for them. They have been the data quality partner, really. That's the better way to think of it, for 40 years. They help businesses get their data clean, complete, and current. 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Of This Week in Tech, long-time, long-time supporters, and then back in 2026, we're very pleased about that. Amanda Silberling has been on the show many times. Love Amanda. She's actually a regular on Tech News Weekly, too, every month with Micah Sargent. wrote a great article. I've got to give her credit for it. The dumbest things that happened in tech this year. And you will remember them. You might wish you didn't. Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, sued Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. The lawyer posted ads on Facebook to promote his practice. Mark Zuckerberg, Esquire. But they kept suspending him for impersonating Mark Zuckerberg. And they made him pay for the advertisements even though he was suspended. He says, I can't use my name. Folks, if your last name is Zuckerberg, do your kid a favor. Do not name him Mark. I can't use my name when making reservations or conducting business. People assume I'm a prank caller and hang up. My life sometimes feels like the Michael Jordan ESPN commercial where a regular person's name causes constant mix-ups. The lawsuit is ongoing. February 20th is the next filing deadline. Thank you, Amanda. Keep us up to date on that. Do you remember when the founder of Mixpanel, Suhail Doshi, posted on X to warn fellow entrepreneurs about a young engineer, Soham Parikh. He'd hired Parekh to work for his company, but then realized he was working for several companies at once. This is an epidemic, by the way. Yeah. I fired this guy in his first week, told him to stop lying and scamming people. He hasn't stopped a year later. No more excuses. It turned out that Doshi wasn't the only one. Three days later, I mean, sorry, just that day, three founders reached out to thank him. They were also employing Parekh. But I know people, I have to say, I know people work at home. This is one of the reasons companies don't like working at home, who have multiple 40-hour-a-week jobs because they go, well, I get the job done. It doesn't matter if I work 40 hours for them or not. That's what the Reddit forum is for, overemployed. Overemployed. Is that Reddit? Yeah. Yes. There's a Reddit subreddit. Yeah, I love it. Do you remember when Sam Altman got in trouble for using his olive oil wrong? What? It was a video made for the Financial Times, lunch with Financial Times, and Sam deciding to show he was a regular person made pasta. But he bought this very, it's very trendy. You'll see this in stores, olive oil called Grazza. They have two olive oils in convenient squeeze bottles. One's called Sizzle, which you're supposed to use for cooking, and one's called Drizzle, which you're supposed to use. It's too good to cook with. You're supposed to use that for dipping or topping. But Sam apparently squeezed his drizzle on his drizzle. Let's just put it this way. There was a social media uproar. Faux shizzle. Oh, shizzle. Mark Zuckerberg, as you know, writing big checks to hire people for open AI. but it wasn't just money at one point he actually delivered soup to a guy he wanted to recruit in December OpenAI's chief research officer Mark Chen said on a podcast he'd heard Mark was hand delivering soup to recruits in fact he went to Chen's direct reports and tried to woo them away with soup So Chen went and gave his own soup to Meta employees. It goes on. I will go to TechCrunch, read Amanda's article. You can find out why you might need to sign an NDA if you're going to build Legos. You might be surprised to hear that Brian Johnson was live streaming his shroom trip. Gemini and Claude reckoning with their mortality by playing Pokemon. Lots of stories. It was a crazy, crazy year. The picture on the front is Elon Musk's anime girlfriend. Yes. Have you played with the little avatars they have on Grok? I have not touched anything. Don't. And touch is the operative word. Yes. So there's the anime avatar that you can apparently get not only to talk sexy, but to start stripping. There also is a little fox. And the day he rolled it out, I am, like Cory Doctorow, a non-consensual blue tick on X. So as a result, even though I pay them nothing, I want to assure you, I get Grok Pro and all the benefits of Twitter Ultimate. Sure. So I went, and they had the little fox, and I talked to him. And he, it's actually a moment on Intelligent Machines that we had to censor. He was so profane. He started talking about, forgive me, children, don't listen to this, teabagging the mayor. I said, what? He said, yeah, just tell me which mayor, and I'll go teabag him. and then the next day it turned out that was the kids fox that was the one that was supposed to be for little kids Grok's still in trouble this week Grok's been in a lot of trouble for allowing ex-users and Grok users to create sexual images of women France has actually flagged the content as illegal according to Bloomberg Grok created and published images of miners in bikinis and other even worse poses. In fact, at one point I heard I didn't go there and I'm proud of this. X was flooded with this content. Because once people figured out you could do it, everybody had to try. Yeah. They call it spicy mode. Oh, good God. Which permits partial adult nudity, sexually suggestive content. That's apparently what I got was the spicy fox. Grok's response, AX's response is, we will actively go after anybody who does anything illegal, and we will refer you to the authorities. So don't. Rather than turn off the capability. going back to the beginning of our conversation about productization of AI I wonder if this was an attempt to get out ahead of open AI's of course it was because open AI is announced they're going to do adult allow adult content for adult but I think open AI is not going to be quite so salacious erotica or something no they're going to go for her like the movie her if anything. Well, don't you think, though... Allman's obsessed with that. These guys know... Yeah, right, he loves Scarlett Johansson. She didn't love him so much. These guys know that in the past, we've always said technology is driven by adult content. The Internet was. VHS tapes were. That's what killed Betamax. There was no adult content. And this is, you know, this is nothing new, But like many people, I have OpenAI mapped to the action button on my – a chat GPT mapped to the action button on my iPhone. And so when I'm just walking around, I'll hit that button and ask questions. So it's not far for sexy times. Sexy questions. Hey, what are you wearing right now? Well, I'm actually water-cooled. I wish I had that creativity, but mostly it's about pizza. Pizza? Where's the best pizza? Where's the next pizza? I know where the best pizza is. What's the best pizza in New York? Tell us. I need the closest pizza Oh what the best Well I mean the best pizza in New York City look I can get into trouble If I say the best that going to be very controversial but I will say my preferred slice that is in the New York Times one of the best slices is definitely Frank's on Smith Street, on Court Street in Brooklyn. Oh, I've got to go. Have you ever been to John's on Bleeker? No, most of my pizza consumption is in Brooklyn, but I don't know. Can you get a good pizza in Brooklyn? I feel like you have to go into town. Can you get a good pizza? Frank's not pizza. Well, the only reason I bring that up, next time you're at John's on Bleeker, go next door. John's is always aligned, so I think it's got to be pretty good. I think it's widely considered one of the best. I don't know if they do slices. It's, you know, it's kind of made. Well, if you don't do a slice, what are you? You've got to have a slice. Slice and a Coke. What else are you going to do? Even pizza. Yeah. And it's got to be so greasy. And it's first got to hold. You've got to fold it. It's got to fold. And the grease has to drip off the point, or it's really not. It's a Sicilian slice, which is a fantastic slice as well. Look, I do not discriminate when it comes to my pizzas. Anyway, go next door when you're at John's, because that's where my son's sandwich shop is. Oh, I'll go to your son's sandwich shop. Deemed one of the top 50 restaurants in New York City, according to Decider. deemed by the New York Times the best sandwich in New York City. Where is it? It's on Blair Street. Bleeker and what? Jones. Excellent. I'll go. It's called Salt Hank, and they only serve one sandwich. It's the French dip. That's it. Interesting. You know, a couple of weeks ago, he was going to expand because it's an expensive sandwich to make. It's only the best cut of – it's everything the best. He said, I didn't want to – no compromise. Everything the best. So it's a $32 French dip sandwich. That's what I warn you. But it's good enough for two. So it's really only $60. And that's it. They have limeade and French fries, and that's it. But he was going to have another sandwich because it's expensive. He was going to have a chicken sandwich. It's less expensive to make. He could have a less expensive sandwich. Nobody would order it. All they ever wanted was a fried. So he stopped. He said, well, I'm not going to stop down in the kitchen and start making, you know, chicken parm sandwich that nobody orders. We're going to stay with the French dip. I can be there in 20 minutes. It's closed now. In fact, if you're going to go, you've got to get there really pretty early. The doors open 1130, but they sell out by 2. That's so cool. That's the sign of a real restaurant in New York City is the line. He says, that's right, he says New Yorkers love to line up. All the time. What is this line? I don't know. shoes. It's got to be good. It's where we hand in our flipper zeros before we go to the inauguration. That's what I was doing on break. Maybe I should put this flipper zero into my shopping cart. No! So New York City has, as many jurisdictions have, California is about to do it, ban cell phones in schools. According to Gothamist, they've learned that that's a problem. Some students can't read clocks. Oh, yeah. That's a major skill they're not used to at all, says Tiana Millen, assistant principal at Cardoza High School in Queens. Teachers complain. Maddie Morinweg, who teaches high school English in Manhattan, says the constant refrain is, Miss, what time is it? She says it's a constant source of frustration. Everyone wants to know how many minutes are left in class. I finally got to the point where I started saying, this is high school. Where's the big hand? Where's the little hand? Dan, you learned how to tell time on a pie face on an analog clock, right? Yeah, of course. Of course. It's on my, you can't see it, but it's on the wall. I got my kid a little, I have a three-year-old, and for the holidays I got her a little analog. It's a dinosaur. Are you teaching her how to read the clock? Yeah, that's what I want. I want her to be able to tell time on an analog clock. For you. I have one analog clock in here. I've got 40 clocks, 40 ways to tell time, but only one analog clock. And the only reason I don't like them is because I have to set them by hand every twice a year. I don't want to change the time. And every newsroom I've ever been in has analog clocks. I mean, there's a digital countdown, but, like, there's analog clocks in newsrooms. Yeah, it's said that you can tell kind of better where you are by the analog clock. You see the – there's a more volume. It's more glanceable. I'm a digital guy. Would you feel dumb for not being able to read a sundial? No, exactly. It's as antique as a sundial. Right, right. You know, because it's the nature of the technology of the time. For the longest time, the only way we could display a repeating cycle was to have some kind of circular mechanism. So that's why we that's why clocks are designed that way. But we don't have that. We don't have that limitation anymore. According to the New York City Public Schools, the education department, students are still taught how to read clocks in first and second grade. The problem is they forget because they never have to practice. Officials said kids are taught to say master terms like o'clock and half past o'clock. How archaic is that o'clock? It's three o'clock. Three o'clock. half past and quarter to in early elementary years, but they forgot the skill because they never used it. It is two hours in the post-meridian. In the post-meridian of the O'clock. It is kind of archaic. It's pretty funny. So maybe it's the quarter hour because you're programming by the quarter hour. Oh, yeah. Well, in fact, yeah, when I was doing radio, I had... A hot clock. Yeah, a hot clock. I learned a hot clock. I actually wrote a program. Yes, exactly. Right. In a color code. Yeah. Right. Is this a... Because I had to hit network time. You know, you had to be done at 0930. Yep. Right. The network sting would come on, and if you kept talking, it didn't matter. You're gone. My radio mentor, a guy named Dave Diamond, this was one of the things we absolutely had to do is we had to slice up a hot clock and then we'd program it. Like, what songs are you going to put in what hour or what segment of the hour? And he wanted to see that you had a feel for the flow. Like, could you program the flow and drive a listener past the AQH or drive up your average quarter hour listens because they stay listening past the 15-minute mark? That's right. And you get an extra quarter hour if they cross that. Yes, exactly. Cross that mark. Yep. Exactly. You don't have to listen for all 15 minutes. Just one minute. Just one minute. Okay, one more. Right. That's why you say the bottom of the hour. Yeah. And that's why you say, give us 20 minutes, we'll give you the world. Yeah. 10-10 news and all of that. Speaking of arcane, radio. Yeah. Radio. I feel like a dinosaur in some ways. I should fire up my hot clock. I had to write it because I was so bad at sticking to the timings because I had some that could move and some that couldn't move. But if I was loose with it, the commercial break would move closer and closer to the network break, and then I'd have to do, like, all of it all at once. Did you ever have carts? Oh, yeah. Ooh, slam the cart in. Slam the cart, yeah. Slam the cart. So I went to the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame Awards a couple of months ago to support my old friend, Cammie Blackstone, who got inducted into the Bay Area Hall of Fame. And out front, there was the KFRC Mobile. Oh, KFRC, yeah. Mobile Studio. They had long ago retired at KFRC. I don't even know if they're still around. 610. KFRC. The Big 610. The Big 610. And had Dr. Don in the morning. And somebody had retired or sold or I think actually they sent it to a junkyard, the old mobile van. Somebody bought it and restored it. They had a cutout of Bobby Ocean sitting in front of the microphone, and they had all these cart machines. Yeah. And they had the carts. They look like eight tracks. They actually are eight tracks. Yeah. But they only have one track on them, and they're a loop. And the reason you want these is because you play it, and the machine keeps going and gets it back to the start. So when you hit that button, it plays, you know, 1010 News, and then it rewinds to the beginning again, and you can hit it again in a few seconds. Yeah. So they have the carts. Yeah, they make use of the cart machine on this last season of Stranger Things. Do they? Yeah, because now I have to watch it. Because their central operations is a radio station that the kids have taken over. Oh, my. Oh, my. Cool. that's kind of cool. So it's an old school radio station? Yes it is because the show takes place in the 80s. This last episode takes place in 89. I might have to watch that. Oh yeah. I needed that clock and I ended up writing a version of it for my successor when he took over the radio show I said okay you're going to love doing this but the biggest issue is this clock. You gotta do the clock right or they're gonna get mad at you. So Rich DeMuro, I gave him a special version of the clock. I think I even named it Rich on Tech. The Rich on Tech clock. And gave it to him. I'm gonna see if I can find it. I think I still have it here. And in Scheme. And I wrote it in Racket, yeah. Okay, wow. Yeah. Only because I guess that, well, why no I didn't do it in Lisp? Because Racket had a graphics library, so I didn't have to go too far to get there, because it's a graphical block. Do I have it? Oh, well. Oh, yeah, if I just run it, will it run? Isn't it fun? Do you ever do that, Joey? go through old archives of your old programming days and look at code that you wrote many years ago? I just crashed my machine. The problem is a lot of it won't run anymore. As I've just learned. Or the run times are gone because my first job out of school was working at a CD-ROM company, Macro Interactive Multimedia in Toronto and they wrote in HyperCard and Supercard, and I convinced them just so that we could serve both platforms, go to director. Wow. And bingo. Here is the hot clock. Oh, look at that. Yeah. Remember that? There we go. Radio station-style hot clock. That's the hot clock. And I think, let's see if this will run. Will it run? Oh, yeah, there's the. So I have six minutes and 42 seconds left in this segment. Okay. Nice. And then it's going to go yellow when I only have 30 seconds left, and then it goes red when I have 10 seconds left, and then it yells at me if I go over that. I need this. You know what? Benito is going to make me bring this back so I don't show. Yeah, I keep forgetting to do the commercials. In fact, let's do one right now, and then finally I will talk about CES. There's not that much to say. We've got to talk about CES. A very relaxed but I think very enjoyable version of Twit this week. Thanks to Dan Patterson. It's great to have you. Blackbird.ai. You can go there and create a free account. What is the address for the text checker? We call it a context checker because it provides a heck of a lot more context, including like GIFs or images. It's compass.blackbird.ai. That's compass.blackbird.ai. I use it all the time. If you read something online and you go, I don't know, can you really drink spring water and cure cancer? You could go to Compass.Blackbird.ai and ask. And it's very useful. If you want to owe really somebody on Reddit, that's the best way to do it. Oh, really? Or owe actually? Oh, actually. Compass.Blackbird.ai. Well, actually. It's great to have you. Thank you, Dan. You too. Thank you for being here. And, of course, you can subscribe to Dan's newsletter at news.danpatterson.com. Joey Davila is also here. Hey there. Get the accordion. I think you might have to play a closing theme for us. He's at globalnerdy.com. Look at that. It's beautiful. Who makes the best accordions? Actually, I have no idea. And I've heard some accordionists are going to get on me. In fact, I found out that this accordion is more valuable than I thought. I bought this off a drummer for $80. Nice. And it turns out this is a post-World War II Camerano. I was going to say, it looks like the colors in the body that look pretty sweet. And then I just added puffy star glitter stickers just for fun. This is the beater accordion. This is the one that I take out drinking. It's always somebody's birthday at a bar. So this is a machine that turns music into free beer. I like it. Awesome AI cameraman. Okay, this is the first. We've never had an accordion on Twit. Okay. I'm the AI cameraman. I used to do a radio show. Good friend of mine, Tom Santos, who had a band called Those Darn Accordions. Yes. And it was a giant accordion band. Oh, yeah. Many, many accordions. So that's why people said, Those Darn Accordions. And I can play the official, the official unofficial anthem of AI. What's that? Okay, and it goes like this. I'm going to get a job, but then came AI. I'm now an unemployed snob because of AI. I'm hiding from Terminators, yeah, you know why. Yeah, hey, because of AI. Because of AI. Because of the day. Yeah. Thank you, Joey Davila, everybody. Where's my applause button? My radio applause button. Yes. Joey. Thank you. Joey Davila, everybody. Globalnerdy.com. Wow, this is like the old radio show. We'll have more in just a bit. You're watching This Week in Tech, first show of 2026. And we're beginning it with a bang. Actual accordion serenade. Our show today brought to you by, and when I say brought to you by, I mean it, a service that we use on our website, Redis. You know about it. I hope you know about Redis. Redis is the real-time data platform that powers ultra-fast applications. Used for caching. That's kind of how we use it. So our website's always fast, always loads, always up. It's used for data storage. It's used for search. People use it for vector embeddings, AI workloads, and more. 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That's why you use Redis. Extremely low latency, high throughput, automatic scaling, global availability, simple setup, and a generous free tier. So you can try it right now. Redis Cloud is the real-time context engine that gathers, syncs, and serves the data you need to build accurate AI apps that scale. to learn more or to try Redis Cloud for free, just search for Redis Cloud or visit Redis.io. That's the website, R-E-D-I-S.io. Thank you, Redis. Oh, and the hot clock says there's only 40 seconds left in this commercial break. We're counting down. It'll go red in about five seconds. Three, five, four, three. I think it, yes. Now we're running out of time. No, we're not, actually. But we would be if we were on the radio. That's one of the reasons I don't miss the radio. Right, Dan? You can't do anything long. I miss the urgency of live. Yeah. That's why everything I do is live still, because I do love live. You know, if this weren't live, would we have Joey Davila singing because of AI? No, I think not. I think not. All right. CES, you're not going. Neither of you are going. Next week, we will actually tell you what happened at CES, because Father Robert Ballester will be here. We're going to get Jason Heiner on, I think, too. He will be there. Love Jason. Yeah, Jason. And Jennifer Patterson, too, as well, who will be on that show. She'll be covering home automation at the show. So, yeah, really good panel next week for covering it. We're the three who aren't going and are happy to see that. Sony has their Honda Afila. This is the car they keep showing every year. The Afila one will be showcased. That's the worst name for a car. I have to think they were thinking of Afilia, right? For almost a decade, they've been showing off this car. We don't know what it's going to look like because, you know, they only show you a teaser video. That will be streamed Monday, January 5th at 8 p.m. Eastern. So tomorrow, 20 since CES 2020, they've been showing this car. Will they ever sell it? I don't know. They say it will be $90,000, but I don't think they're making it yet. Tim Stevens, good friend of the show, said, it feels like a PlayStation 4 in the PS5 era. Oh, that stings. Samsung is going to be doing their thing tonight, their first look CES 2026 presentation, the first press conference. It's tonight in just a couple of hours, I think 7 p.m. Pacific, 10 p.m. Eastern. You can watch it on YouTube or on the Samsung Newsroom. Or if you have a Samsung TV, guess what? It'll be on the Samsung TV+. They are going to be announcing, I think, the newest QD OLED. I have their original QD OLED, which is the best. Now, don't confuse it with QLED, which is an LCD screen, an LED-backlit LCD screen. QD OLED is a true OLED screen, but brighter with quantum dot technology. They say they have the brightest QD OLED they're going to announce tonight. I think they said 500 nits. I really it is my favorite TV the QD OLED I'm not crazy about Samsung TVs you know all that Samsung stuff in the back but okay you've got some stuff Dan you're looking for really you're going to get one of these the clicks communicator no I just think like when I think about the interesting things at CES I really have a hard time because it is a cycle A lot of the stuff that's announced at CES never makes it to the right. Yeah, exactly. Like the Athea. This is the one thing. If I thought about a thing at CES, I like this thing. Is it a phone? Yeah, I mean, it's an Android phone, but in a BlackBerry format. Oh, I kind of like that. I'm also not on social media. and, you know, I'm an iOS user, but I always have some sort of Android backup, and it just looks compelling because of the price point and because of what it doesn't do. And what doesn't it do? Well, it's half a screen and it has a massive keyboard on it. I'm sure it'll do all of it. I'm sure you can do Instagram on it. Does it have a camera? Yeah, it seems like it has a pretty perfunctory camera on it. It just seems like compelling because of the price point and because of that keyboard. But the real story or the thing that I am most interested in is the storing price of RAM and the impact, the follow-on, the knock effects of RAM prices on consumer electronics. That is one of the reasons I bought that ThinkPad now is because I was very worried how much a laptop would cost later this year. I want to get Apple's, you know, it's rumored, and I think it's probably true, that they're going to announce a fully redesigned MacBook Pro at the end of this year or early next year that will have an OLED screen. I only buy OLEDs now. I'm sucked in by OLEDs. And it will have the, I guess, M6 processor, so it will be a brand-new 2-nanometer TSMC 2-nanometer system on a chip. So it's a reasonable upgrade for my M3 MacBook Pro. But I'm afraid about how much it's going to cost because with any reasonable amount of RAM. And now with AI these days, you'd want 64 gigs. In fact, you want more if you can get it. Totally depends on how Apple builds the M series of chips. Because unlike most other laptops, the RAM is incorporated directly. like it's all there on that single chip versus most other laptops. They still have to buy DRAMs, though, to put it on there. So it's not like they're not affected by the price. They might be less affected only because they buy everything. I was just going to say. Yeah. Well, I'm not sure how they make the M1s because I think the actual memory circuitry is part of the process. It is on the die. It's right on the die. I don't know if they buy that separately or do that. And Apple makes them see when they're making it. Yeah. Apple's supply chain is unique, and you might be right, because they are so differentiated in the market. But I think everyone will be constrained by RAM prices in the next 36 months or so. So like, yeah, like is Ram the new air conditioning copper pipe? Like, are we going to just start having people steal it? The other thing that might protect you is Apple already grossly overcharges her memory. They have a certain amount of headroom built into this, right? And they put in these orders long in advance. And I think that that might be something that insulates them a little bit, Whether it insulates consumers, who knows? Yeah, because Tim Cook is a supply chain genius. That was his... And going back to Apple in China, it describes much of those processes in China, the supply chain and their buildup in China. So DRAM prices have doubled. In fact, so much so that Micron, which is for consumers, has decided to stop selling to consumers because there's so much more money than he made selling to manufacturers. And that is a shame because, you know, I love Crucial RAM. I know. Crucial's great. It's in the Windows machine behind me. Apple, I think, gets its DRAMs from Samsung and will be facing, I think, price increases if they haven't already locked in prices. And that's what you're saying, Dan, is they probably have locked in. Locked it in a long time ago. Right now, DRAM is more than twice as expensive as it was this time last year. And VRAM is bananas. Right. Maybe we should put out a call right here on Twit, Intel. This is your chance. You started in RAM. Come back to RAM, please, Intel. Right. Come back. Start making. So I found an article from TechNave that says that Apple's agreements with Samsung and SK Hynex are expected to expire in January this year. Oh. If that's true, then there could be a crunch. I don't know. Apple has done a pretty good job so far of insulating. I mean, the iPhone, which, again, was premium priced to begin with, did not go up in price particularly this year, right? the iPhone 17 is roughly the same price as it was last, the 16 was last year. Maybe there might be a trend towards hyper-efficient, hyper-memory-efficient programming, like it's time to break out those C books. It's time to pull out the Kernighan and Ritchie book. Everybody learn C for relearning. The gaming world is melting down right now, though. Yeah. Oh, yeah, GPUs? Well, that's an ongoing thing because NVIDIA GPUs went through the roof. And, of course, those have GPUs. Yeah, from two grand for the 5 Series to five. Amazing. Amazing. So this has already been a problem for years in the gaming community, now with RAM and GPU prices skyrocketing. And the thing is, AI also drives that. Not only does AI use GPUs, but it needs RAM. I bought a framework desktop with 128 gigs of RAM so I could run local AI. and it's running on the AMD Strix Halo platform, which means like Apple, the RAM access is universal to both the GPU and the CPU. So you can use much, I think, up to 92 gigs of that RAM, effectively as GPU RAM, as your AI's RAM. So that's why I bought that machine. But that's going to, you know, it's not just OpenAI that needs RAM for its training. It's everybody who wants to use AI in their businesses and their homes, local AI, that kind of thing. It's going to be a crunch. I pointed this out before, though. Remember, every time there's a shortage like this, companies respond by bumping up capacity. Now, they have to build new factories to do that. They're already in capacity with existing factories. So it's not going to happen this year. But in a couple of years, RAM may plummet again because of oversupply because they've built so many new factories to take advantage of this, you know, windfall pricing. So we'll see. I wouldn't be surprised to see RAM come down in two years to even cheaper. Yeah, but you know what? The quantum people will then hog the RAM just like before. Yeah, right. There's always somebody, right? Yeah, because before it was crypto, right? And now. This has become a very Manhattan-centric show. What we're going to do, as I do usually at the end of every show, kind of obituaries, end of the line. And it was the end of the line for the MetroCard this year. Now, you know, I know, Dan, when you ride that subway into town, you have that little yellow card with the mag strip on it. I probably have a few. Every time I go to the city, I buy a MetroCard. Well, you won't need it. In fact, the last time I was in the city, I think Jeff Jarvis said, no, don't buy a MetroCard. Use your watch. Yeah, watch or just tap your phone. Your phone. And I didn't even need to sign up. I just tapped my watch and it went, and you're in. Yeah. I don't think I got the senior discount. The MetroCard. There is even a video, YouTube VideoStar podcast, where he interviews people on the subway pretending the MetroCard is a microphone. It's hysterical. But that credit card is going away because the MTA is phasing it out in favor of tap-to-pay. The new system is known as Omni, One Metro New York. It'll save a lot of money for the MTA every year, less plastic waste, shorter lines. And, you know, if you're lucky, you've got a watch or a phone, you just tap it. I don't know what people do who don't have that, though. Do you still have subway tokens? Oh, God, no. I grew up in the token era. Yeah, I remember the tokens, but the tokens have been, and MetroCard's been around forever. I think I might frame mine. I cannot remember a time where I don't have a MetroCard in my wallet. Jody Shapiro, who is the Transit Museum curator, said, when the MetroCard debuted in 1994, everybody was like, I don't want to give up my tokens. You'll get my tokens out of my cold, dead hands. But, of course, tokens went away. Everybody got used to the plastic Metro cards. And, you know, you have to, it's not easy to swipe those. You've got to really know exactly. It's an art. It's an art. But you know what? It killed the great counterfeit token industry. Oh, the great token market. Yeah. Or black token market, really. Tokens, they were like Chinese coins, right? They had a hole in the middle, right? Yeah. In New York, yeah. That was great. In Toronto, no. We had tiny little, tiny tokens, a little bit smaller. What does Toronto do now? Do they have cards? There's a card. Yeah, there's a card. Yeah. In France, you have the billet. It's the end of the line for the MetroCard. And I guess if you don't, what do you do? I don't understand what you do. Does everybody have to have a smartphone now? I know. But the other thing is, you know what? That might also put a damper on the great New York tradition of jumping the turnstile, because if your phone's in your pocket, it'll register it out. We're getting rid of the turnstiles. There's new non-jumpable gates. Are they gates? Yeah, there's gates and big barriers on the turnstiles now. And then I guess the last story is a sad story. One of the people who started this business, Stuart Sheffey, the creator of the Computer Chronicles, passed away December 28th. He was 87 years old. I'm sure most of the people who watch this show, our show, or watch tech TV remember Stuart. In fact, I interviewed Stuart on a triangulation episode where it was just fascinating. He told the story of how Computer Chronicles started. He was a station manager at a public TV station in San Mateo, California, KCSM. and this was in the early 80s, he decided that maybe they should do a computer show and create a computer chronicles. But he said, I wasn't like a coding geek. I was just a regular geek, a fan of technology. And so I decided I had to have a coding geek on the show. Here I am interviewing Stuart in our old studio. So he found somebody, a guy named, you may remember this name, Gary Kildall, who created CPM and then founded Digital Research, created DRDOS. And in the early days of Computer Chronicles, it was hosted by Stuart Sheffey and Gary Kildall. There are videos, lots of them on YouTube, of the original Computer Chronicles. Here they are at Comdex. Speaking of trade shows, showing off the first Macintosh computer. There's Gary interviewing somebody at the Telos booth. This is a lot of fun for me. If you haven't seen Computer Chronicles, Stuart told me that the best place to get it is not on YouTube where there are kind of pirated copies of VHS tapes, But go to the Internet Archives where they have all of the shows. Stuart donated all of his masters to the Internet Archive, and you can watch. There's Gary Kildall. You can watch the old Computer Chronicles shows if you want. And it really is a trip back in time. There is one I've seen on YouTube, but I'm sure they have it on the archive as well, with John C. Dvorak looking particularly nerdy in his aviator glasses. Stuart Shafay lived a good long life, passed away at the age of 87, but he was so instrumental in, really was the first, I'm pretty sure the first computer TV show and paved the way for all the rest of us. So RIP Stuart, you'll be missed. He was a great guy. And the triangulation episode is on our website, trip.tv slash TRI. It was episode 114 from August 7th, 2013. It was a lot of fun to sit and talk to Stuart and remember the good old days of computing. Dan Patterson, great to see you once again. I'm glad you're doing well. So nice to know that. Health is better. Senior Director of Content, Blackbird AI, Daddy to a three-year-old, teaching him how to read a pie clock. And soon a Flipper Zero. That's next. That's next. Very important. I think, honestly, bringing a kid up nowadays, you've got to start to introduce technology at some point. At the same time, I understand why parents are very reluctant to get their kids in front of a screen. What are you going to do? Boy, that's a challenge. I know a lot of parents just do Apple Watch, but, I mean, really I'm just going to teach literacy and skepticism. Good. You need both. And, of course, she'll be using compass.blackbird.ai at a very early age. Subscribe to Dan's newsletter. It is thenews at news.danpatterson.com. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. It's Nerdy Little Joey DeVilla, Globalnerdy.com, which is, by the way, a site devoted to kind of just fun stuff, quirky stuff. How long have you been doing that blog? Since 2006. Wow. This is a blog in the original sense of a blog, isn't it? Yeah. Like where you just put stuff that you're interested in, quotes, pictures, stories. It's really good. I highly recommend it. Globalnerdy.com. Yeah, the domain actually came from an app, an application I built for Tukas called the Duke of Earl URL. It's called that way. And basically you'd give it some keywords and it would suggest available domain names for you. And Global Nerdy was one of them. So I said, hey, I like that. I'll buy that one. You have also the adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st century. That is my original one, and, yeah, that's from 2001, and I made it because Corey, I kept sending Corey suggestions for stories when he was on Boing Boing, and he said, start your own blog, and I did. Yeah, Corey's no longer with Boing Boing, Boing Boing lives on. Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah. So, yeah, that one's been going on since 2001. Nice. Nice. Is there any accordion music on here? I need to get back to that. I used to do more than I will. Because of AI, you've got to record that and put it up somewhere. Well, that's on the Global Nerdy YouTube channel. Oh, okay. All right. So, yeah, I do a couple of versions of it, and I'm trying to do a full one with more verses, including one about the price of RAM and getting cap-paged. So all the usual stuff. And I need to record the Oompa Loompa Service Pack 2 song. All right, Global Nerdy. It's YouTube.com slash at Global Nerdy. Let's get some more subscribers in there and look for the accordion music. Yeah, that's a relatively new project, and I've got to start covering some of my AI projects, including what we talked about in Intelligent Machines, the Too Many Cats MCP server, and other. That was great. Yeah. I learned how easy it was to write an MCP server thanks to you. He is an AI developer advocate and available for contract work, of course. Or hire. Or hire. Do you have insurance? I love insurance. Oh, nowadays. Insurance and RFUs. What you miss, believe in Canada, you know. If you're still up there in Toronto, you'd have health care. Oh, yeah. I do miss that part. I know. I know. Rene Ritchie, when he struck out on his own on YouTube, said, I couldn't do this if I didn't live in Canada, but I can do it because I have health care. I have health insurance. Otherwise, I'd have to have a real job. Of course, he ended up taking a real job at YouTube anyway. Rene's been okay. It's hard to turn down when Google comes to calling. Hard to say no. Thank you, Joey. Thank you, Dan. Great to see both of you. Thank you. Thank you. And Joey, great to meet you. Great to meet you. Some real history with the Joe. I didn't know that. Wow. We do Twitter every Sunday. Next week, our annual CES show with Jennifer Patterson-Tui and Father Robert Ballasier, the Digital Jesuit. We're hoping to get Jason Heiner on there as well. 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific, 5 to 8 p.m. Eastern, 2200 UTC. We stream it live, so you can watch live if you want to. You don't have to. But if you're in the mood and you want to chat with us live, you can do it in a variety of ways. Club members, of course, can do it in the Club Twit Discord. But everybody can see it on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash twit. We're also on twitch.tv slash twit, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and kick.com. So six different ways you can watch live after the fact. On-demand versions are available at our website, twit.tv. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to This Week in Tech. That's got the video. We've got audio and video. And you could subscribe in your favorite podcast player, audio or video or both. Make sure you leave us a good review now so you tell the world about one of the longest running, if not the longest running tech show. I think there are actually others that are a little bit older. But 20 years we've been doing this. And after 20 years, it's hard to get the word out. We're not the new kid in the town. So tell the world about this week in tech. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Happy New Year to you all. We will see you next time. And as I've said for 20 years, and I will see. And for another 20, God willing, if the cricks don't rise, another twit is in the can. See you later. This is a main day. Doing the twit. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right. I was going to get a job, but they gave AI. I'm now an old boy sloth because of AI I'm hiding from Terminators, yeah, you know why Yeah, hey, because of AI, because of AI, because of AI