WW 983: Puts the Buh in Benelux - Can Googlebooks Challenge Existing Laptops?

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Farrats here, Richard Campbell. There's a Windows update that actually adds a bunch of new features. Paul will talk about that. Microsoft releases an AI security model with a great name. And we'll puzzle over Amazon's interesting numbers. There's something wrong here. Anyway, stay tuned. You'll find out about that next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell. Episode 983, recorded Wednesday, May 13, 2026. Puts the buh in Benelux. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners and dozers. Time to wake up and say hello. Smell the Pauly. Beer and enchiladas. It smells good in taco territory. That is Paul Therat, therat.com. He is in Mexico City for the last week. Yeah, for a couple of months. And also, Mr. Richard Campbell. Well, it's always fun. Where in the world is Ricardo Campbell? He is in where? Below countries. Antwerp. We're in Antwerp. That's where all the diamonds are, right? It used to be that way, but not so much anymore. The diamond mark. Not anymore? Not so much anymore? Yeah. So they'd all go and get their diamonds, raw cut diamonds, and bring them back to New York City and sell them. Okay. Well, enough history. Don't worry, I'm going to do plenty Oh yeah, let's not forget I was going to say, a lot of this is technically history The debate rages in the Twit forums at Twit.community over the whiskey segment Some say, just stop listening Others say, yes, but then Paul says something clever at the end and we don't want to miss that That one still blows me away because I feel like that's pretty rare It never happens It never happens Clever is the wrong word It's like a bizarre segue, you know, some kind of random. Stick something in. Yeah. Usually, four times a year we get the last-minute Microsoft earnings. Sometimes that happens. That's only problematic. I mean, everyone's podcast player has a little fast-forward thing, right? I mean, what's, you know. And we're working on chapters, and everybody wants chapters. You can't please, the problem is, like, imagine if we just unilaterate. Yeah, but that's what you want. No, nobody wants that. No problem. No, no, no, that's ridiculous. I like the whiskey segment, and I don't care. Right. The second we get rid of it, we're going to hear from many people who are like, what the hell just happened? Like, I look forward to this. And the history of it is, of course, Mary Jo Foley used to do beer. Right. Did she always do beer? From, like, day one, you mean? Yeah. I feel like she did. She was a beer drinker. I bet she did, because I'd have to go back and look at the notes, which means I'd have to open one note, which means I'll never do it. But I feel like what you call the back of the book has been there. It feels like forever. Oh, yeah, I think we've always had it. I think it's the wrong kind. Yeah. I told the story the other day of coming up to Penaluna after the Build event and being a good guest and bringing a couple of bottles of whiskey, and then you went and opened them on the air. That was the mistake I made. And straight to the cast rank, and I'm like, this is not a good idea. We were fighting over the bottle like two Golems, you know, like with my precious. I am. I think he said something pithy like, I believe I've been shot in my tongue. Yes, exactly. He said, what do you think? And I said, I think I just got shot in my tongue. That's funny. That's a good line. Yeah. I can't have a little bit of a bunda. My tongue is drunk. We have pretty much always had abel or a bunda in our house since that week. Yes. So whenever that was, 15 years ago or something. A while ago. A long time ago. Whatever it was. All right. I believe this is, am I right? Is this, was yesterday a patch Tuesday? It was. It was. What does that mean to you, Paul? What does it mean to me? Yeah. Well, it means it's another monthly reminder of how broken my brain is because I always forget it's patch Tuesday, and then it happens, and I'm like, God damn it, and then I have to write about it. And you'd think I would be the biggest day on my schedule or something, but I always forget. But I did know going into this, because we've talked about it in terms of, like, the preview update from Week D a couple weeks ago, 10 days ago, whatever that was, that this was going to be a big one in the sense that this is the first Patch Tuesday where we've received what I would call major new features for Windows this year. You know, this has been quiet, right? We've seen mostly kind of low-level fundamental things, whatever. And, you know, there's a bunch of that. But the two big – well, I should say two, actually. The other weirdness to this is that 24 and 25H2, both supported still, are getting the same update, right? So it updates to a slightly different build number, but the point beyond the decimal is the same, right? Because it's the same update, same features, same everything. That's where all these new features are. And then there's also Windows 11 26H1, which is on the new Snapdragon X2-based laptops, which coincidentally are the only ones I'm using now as we start winding down the strip. And there's not much going on there. So I had to break out a couple of laptops that I packed away to be like, all right, I've got to go see if I can look at any of this stuff. But if you have 25 or 24H2, you're going to get Xbox mode, which is a replacement for two things. This is the game mode replacement, which previously or to this moment is just a toggle switch and settings. it's on by default. There's nothing you can do to configure it. And then the full-screen experience that debuted on those Xbox ROG Ally gaming handhelds. So this is the new version of that. It's a full-screen experience, like the old full-screen experience. It gets rid of a lot of background processes, so it reduces resource RAM usage, et cetera. The Xbox app essentially becomes the shell, if that makes sense. It's controller-based or controller-friendly, certainly. And, um, you know, the game bar is still there and all that stuff. So if you're just going to use this computer for gaming, which you would with a handheld obviously, but maybe you would with a gaming PC too, you can just leave this on forever and you'll just have that kind of console like experience maybe is the way to put it. Um, and I've seen that on one computer and I'm trying to, it wasn't one of the ones I play games on, which is, you know, we're still dealing with CFRs, right? These, uh, random deployed features, so that will eventually go away, but it hasn't yet. The other major new feature is agents on the taskbar, which everyone remembers was what got Pavan Davaluri in so much trouble late last year. I believe, though it does support first- and third-party AI agents, I think the only way you could test it right now or use it is with the researcher agent that's part of Microsoft 365 Copilot. and this is where the agent will behave like an app. So it will put a button or an icon in the taskbar. It will pop up notifications if it needs to get to you to ask it for next steps or to clarify something, whatever it might be. And then you can also click on it. It will pop up a little UI that will show you what it's doing, where it's at. You can get a progress report, that kind of thing. So I'm not seeing this yet, and I don't have 365 Copilot, But I'd say I'm kind of curious because this is Microsoft's attempt to make AI agents make sense within the context of how Windows works, right? And in a bit, we're going to talk about how Google is doing the same thing, which is kind of interesting. Not the same UI, but their own take on this. And then there's just some other, you know, drag tray has become drop tray. I hate it. I turn it off, so I don't care. A bunch of low-level improvements to File Explorer, which is getting performance improvements, right? We're seeing those across the board. We'll talk about that in a moment. This is kind of interesting. So the Windows kernel no longer trusts cross-signed third-party drivers by default. Instead, if a driver is in the HCL, the hardware – well, I guess it's the HCP, the hardware compatibility program, it's not a list anymore, right? I still think of it as like 1996, like the HCL. If it's in there, that will be trusted by default. I think admins can make an allow list of trusted legacy drivers that will just be trusted by default. But this is, you know, Microsoft kind of shoring up that driver bit, similar to what they did with printed drivers, right, where they kind of just took that over and said, yeah, we can't trust you guys anymore. We're just going to do this ourselves. So that's kind of interesting. If you do have 26H1, and you probably don't, but if you do, it's the stuff we saw in previous months. It's like 26H1 is the shipping or stable version of Canary. It's always like a month or two behind or more than that, I guess, depending on what it is. But there were improvements to the narrator, the smart app control thing where you can toggle it on and off in real time now, some pen settings, improvements, the new setting about page, which I feel like we've had for nine months or so. I have no idea. So these are just things like we've seen elsewhere. I don't know why these are different. I mean, to me, I feel like 26H1 should have the same features or perhaps be a superset, if you will, of 25H2, but it's not. I can't explain that because, you know, why could I? I haven't had time to write this. I wondered when I saw this Patch Tuesday release, and then it was later confirmed, But Microsoft, not surprisingly, has developed their own in-house version of Anthropic Mythos, right, this thing that's finding all the security vulnerabilities everywhere. Their version is called MDash, which, by the way, I like the name. And it's not really at the same level yet. I don't remember the exact number of vulnerabilities that it found this month, but it's in the double digits, like 20-ish, something like that. I expect that to be, if not exponentially bigger next month and then beyond, but maybe, you know, it's going to be a lot more. I mean, as this thing ramps up, if you think about what Firefox has done with Mythos, this is going to be, you know, this is going to be big, you know, because this is going across Azure, Windows, obviously, on the client Windows server, probably the Office apps, everything. I mean, throughout Microsoft, if you think about all this. At this thing, we're going to get huge numbers of patches everywhere. Yeah. And that's nothing special to Microsoft. These new tools are turning up vulnerabilities like mad. And if they can turn them up themselves, the bad guys can too. Like the pressure is on. Oh, yeah. So the reason I mention this is only because, you know, like, for example, OpenAI last week announced their version of Mythos, right, whatever. I don't remember the name of that. But, you know, everyone's doing it. You know, this is the thing with AI. Like if you see a feature over here, just wait two seconds. You're going to get it on the AI thing over here. But this is stuff. This is not available to individuals, right? This is something they make available to companies, governments, et cetera. And in Microsoft's case, they could have probably, I mean, absolutely could have used anthropic mythos. But, you know, they make AI, so they want to have their own. So it's not – I mention this only because it's not really surprising that Microsoft would make their own agentic vulnerability finder or whatever. So we'll see how this goes. I think this year is going to be very, very interesting for found security vulnerabilities, I think. Yeah. And it speaks to, I was almost making Neuromancer references, like we're just not that far from having these models running inside of your network constantly monitoring and resisting attacks. If I didn't, I think, yeah, Firefox will come up later in the show, but if I didn't say this last week, like one of the observations I kind of had about this is that, you know, at some point you find the bugs that are in an existing code base, but then you start using it more proactively because you're submitting new code into the project. Yeah, and it'll be part of the CICD pipeline, right? Yeah, and this is valued on the fly. Yeah, so in Microsoft's case, they've been promoting this notion of secure by default for possibly 25 years or whatever it's been. This makes that more of a reality, if that makes sense. So we'll see how it goes. It also seems like Microsoft is positioning itself as self-contained on the AI realm. Like they obviously got into OpenAI first and so forth, but they keep showing they have their own product. So I haven't, right. I haven't had a chance. You're getting ready for a go-it-alone day. Yeah, I suppose there's a possibility this is, in fact, based on what the open AI thing is, and I don't know. I just haven't had a chance to look at it yet. So after the show's over, I'll probably write it up and figure that out. But, yeah, if this is, in fact, a homegrown model, great. I mean, that's, you know, good for them. Yeah. Interesting times. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, I mean, I can't get, like, an Android Kotlin project to even compile, let alone figure out if it's secure. But, you know, these guys, they're on a different level. Yeah, but you hit the point, which is that a lot of people have a tough time even evaluating what security means. Like, what does it mean to actually have this code well locked down? Yeah, and I think for app developers, regardless of the platform, you know, if you're Android, iOS, web-based, whatever it is, Windows, obviously. There's the whole notion of starter templates and starter projects. It's a code review thing you can do through AI, etc. I think that the security angle is going to be part of it from the get-go. It makes a lot of sense to have an agent that's running and gathering the latest CDEs and evaluating the code it's seen. The same way we have Dependabot inside of a GitHub. We could get to the point with our own code bases where this agent is actually adding issues saying, this CDE likely impacts this application and it needs to be run through the evaluator. In the old days, we would say, oh, did it compile? Okay, ship it. Now it's going to be more like, did it pass whatever the version of MDash is? This security profile. Then you ship it. I mean, that's, look, I'm sorry, but that's 100% progress. That's good. This is maybe the best AI kind of thing I've seen so far. It's going to benefit everyone, even the people that hate AI. The stuff they use is going to be better because of it. It's nice. My AI hype note ends with the story of AlphaFold and giving away the 200 million protein foldings. We've fundamentally changed medicine with this technology now. You're never going to take that back. Here it is. Yeah. Should we go to the insider's program? Are you waiting for me? Well, yeah. Do we need to do an ad or should we? Well, you did this so fast I can move the ad down. I'd like to go at least 20 minutes before I make it. Stop touching my notes, Leo. Okay. So this week. I'm always guessing just how long it's going to take you to get to the bullet point. I do the same thing just when I do the notes. I kind of think about it like this is going to be a long show or short show or whatever. And I'm like, I'm wrong every time. Yeah, it's very hard. Yeah. Sometimes you've got more to talk about. Yep. Sometimes you go into it thinking, all right, this is going to take some time. I've got to get through this. And then it's like, bang, it's done. I do like M-Dash, by the way. That is a good thing. It's good. They should rename all their AI to that. Yeah. I'm kidding. They should fix all their bugs. That would be cool. Yep. Well, now you're just talking. Tracy talked to me before. They'll fix the law. That's not how that works at all. All right. It's so good. Why can't it just fix all their bugs? Yeah, just fix it. Just fix it. That's what I wanted to do, the just fix it button for the kernel. Yeah, simple. That was easy. Yeah. So I feel like for the rest of the year, or at least for the next few months, we're going to be dealing with this kind of a weekly thing. And the weekly thing is going to be, well, two parts, right? There's the Microsoft will either talk about or implement some low-level changes that improve Windows to some degree as part of this pain points thing they're working on now. And then you will run into people who complain about it, you know, Which is bizarre, right? Because I think most of anybody, I mean, pretty much using Windows, would look at what they're doing. And I can point out things they're not doing, like that's my job. But as far as like what they are doing, it's all, you know, it's good. And unless you're a complainer. So one of the things that Microsoft is quietly working on is something called a new low latency profile for Windows 11. and what this does is actively engage the CPU very briefly to boost the performance of an app launching or a UI like the start menu or widgets or whatever it is responding to that click. So in other words, the delta of time between you clicking the thing and it coming up or whatever, like File Explorer notably, the app shell comes up fast, but that display of the home screen is slow. And SWAT in this case means like one to two seconds. Do we really think it's CPU bound? I think it's usually network bound. So it depends on the UI. So actually, we're going to get to that because that's actually part of it. But this is for a specific on-device display of UI, essentially, whether it's an app launching or, like I said, like a start menu kind of thing. So start menu is – I'll just get to it now since you said it. Start menu is an example of something that is both, right, because it is connecting to the Internet, in Scott Hanselman's words, too many times to do certain things. And so people are like, oh, it's React Native, it's slow. And it's like it's not that. It's like it's just doing too much. And that slows it down, you know, the initial. You know, you expect to click on something and see it, you know. And by too much, it means stuff I didn't ask for. That's another issue. But, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It's fair to say that you can customize the start menu to some degree if you don't like that stuff. But, yeah, fair enough. So Windows Central and some other places have tested this, and according to those people, with this enabled, if you, you know, side-by-side, same machine with this low-latency profile enabled or not, they're seeing like 40% faster launch times for inbox apps like Edge and Outlook and 70% faster launch times for interfaces like start and, you know, right-click context menus and so forth. So it's working, right? So, but of course, you know, like I said, people complain. So someone on, I guess, Twitter X, whatever we're calling this, he's like, so let me get this straight. It's like the slowdowns here are really coming from whatever the runtime is, like React Native on top of XAML or something, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, so you'd like screw around with the low-level, how the processor works, and like that's the fix. And Scott, of course, you know, being technical and having the brittleness that comes with that is like, yeah, that's not it. It's not. It has nothing to do with React Native. And this is something that Linux and all mobile platforms do as well. And so, you know, it doesn't matter what the device is. You bring up a phone. You tap an icon. You know, you don't wait seconds, right? Like it's just years. and so every interaction whether it's touch base on a phone or in Linux now or Windows as it's happening it's like cores get woken up on the processor clock speeds get boosted the thing occurs and then it drops back down to idle and this all happens in milliseconds right Apple does it, Android does it and then Scott Hanselman's words Apple does this and you all love it so so fair enough I'm not sure I've experienced this. I've been using, like, Snapdragon X2 laptops lately, so I'm already seeing an awesome performance boosted. So, you know, I'm sure this will help you guys. So anyway, that's good. And that's something, I don't know, I'm not even sure where this, I don't know if some of this isn't stable yet or if it's just inside a program. I believe it might be inside a program. This probably would have been late last week. So Microsoft is announcing insider builds differently now. In the past, what they would do is have a blog post for each new build. So if there was a beta release, a canary release, a dev channel release, whatever, they would use separate blog posts for each, even though in many cases they might have a lot of overlap for features and so forth. Now they have simplified the program by having fewer top-level channels, but also made it more complex by having sub-channels, which is super confusing. And they're doing a single announcement for everything. So whatever day comes, Thursday, Friday, whatever this was, they're like, here are all the builds we released. There's four of them. One is in the beta channel, and then three are in experimental because, again, we can't have nice things. So there's experimental that used to be the dev channel. It's just experimental. There's experimental that's on 26H1, 26H1, which is essentially the former Canary 28,000 series builds, I think. And then Experimental Future Platforms, which is now what I think of as Canary, but the further out stuff that may or may not make it into the system. And when this was Canary, I was thinking that this is like 26H2 essentially, but who knows. So we got those four builds. And then there were two notable changes or new features, however you want to say this, that neither one is, I mean, you know, groundbreaking exactly. But one is that they're adding additional gesture options for touchpads that's like precision touchpads that have all the multi-touch gestures related to scrolling and zooming and automatic scrolling, et cetera. I didn't see one that I was like, oh, I'm going to have to try that. I was like, no, I don't care about these. But the other ones is nice. I mean, one of the issues, and this is probably related to, you know, Chromebooks are being super cheap and then MacBook Neo is now super cheap. And if you are in a smaller educational environment where you don't have IT staff, especially, and you don't have any budget, right, you might want to just go buy computers, like either in the channel or even at retail because they're so cheap, like you get these really cheap Windows laptops. But when you buy them that way, they come with what's Windows 11 Home, like the consumer version. Right. So what they're allowing now is for you to buy a Windows 11 Home-based PC and then upgrade it to what's called Windows 11 Pro Education for K through 12 for free. So it's not insane. What do you need to be able to do that upgrade? Like you have to be a teacher of some kind? I didn't even look into that. So I would imagine, yeah, I don't know. So probably, right? And the idea here is that like Pro, but also, you know, Pro Education can be centrally managed to some degree. Right. Right. Can, in fact, be central. Right. So it might be an MDM type solution. It's not going to be Active Directory probably. And it'll be in tune. It'll be in tune. They're not doing anything new with AD. It'll be in tune. Yep. Yep. Which is a first heat charge. Yeah. That's nice. I mean, to me, that's just nice. Well, come on then. It's nice. It's nice. It's nice. It's nice. Did anybody say the word canary? Oh. Oh, this episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by the Thinxed Canary. This thing, look at this. This looks like a, what, an external, you know, USB drive, just kind of plain black case. You can put this in your network. Nobody would think twice about it, except it's not. This is a honeypot. And, man, this is the kind of honeypot you want. First of all, totally secure. I know when you say, well, plug a device in your network, you go, okay, but really? But this is designed. These guys at the Finkst Canary Folk are super good. They have been in this business for decades, teaching governments and industry how to break into their own systems. They've always been white hat, but they do a lot of pen testing, that kind of thing. So they know what hackers are looking for. They understand that. They know how to design a super secure box that looks like something super valuable. That's the key to a honeypot. in this case mine is a I've mentioned this before Synology NAS but it's so easy to change it it could be a Windows server it could be a Windows XP server if you want it could be a SharePoint server you know bad guys looking for that it could be a skater device I mean yes it could be almost anything and when I say it impersonates those devices it does it perfectly it does it down to the Mac address down to the exact login screen everything looks real the hacker even if the hacker is suspicious, the hacker cannot resist because inside there is potentially gold. This is what they're looking for. So these are tools that everyone needs, every business needs anyway, to let you know if there's somebody inside your network prowling around. We all have, I'm sure, perimeter defenses that are very, very good, but are they perfect? You know, just ask, well, who's the breach of the day today? Just ask anybody. The breaches are happening 50, 60 a day now, right, that we know about. That's because perimeter defenses are not perfect. But the problem is when somebody gets into your network, they're stinky. They're clever. These hackers are whiny, and they don't, you know, telegraph that they're in there until they've done everything they want to do, exfiltrated all the information so they can blackmail you, put little time bombs in there so they can ransomware you. They do that, and then they send you a little note. On average, this is the wild stat, on average, companies don't know they have been breached for 91 days. That's way too long. What you want to know is right away. So you need these. You need these at least on every segment of your network. This is the Thinks Canary. They also make, by the way, each canary can make many infinite number of tokens, canary tokens, they call them. They're files, or they look like files of any kind, anything from a PDF to a Word document to a WireGuard configuration. I mean, there's hundreds of different document formats, and they look like the real thing. But the minute the intruder opens it, and they can't resist, like I have on my Google Drive, it looks like a Google Sheet that says payroll info. Now, what hacker could avoid that? You can't. You look at that, you go, I've got to open it. The minute they do, you get an alert. The minute they try to hack your SCADA device or your Windows XP server, you get an alert. And only the alerts that matter, no false positives. You get it any way you want, email, text. Of course, they support syslog. They support web hooks. There's an API. I mean, any way you want. But when you get that alert, you know that someone is in your system. You get the alerts that matter. So choose a profile for your ThinkScanary. It's really easy. You can change them daily. 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Now, if there is any in your mind, any doubt, any doubt at all, be reassured. You can always return your ThinkScanary. They have a very generous two-month money-back guarantee for a full refund. I should mention, they've been advertising with us for 10 years now, and in all that time we've partnered with Thinks Canary, their refund guarantee has never been claimed, not once. Visit canary.tools.twit, enter the code TWIT, and how'd you hear about us, Fox? Every network deserves a Thinks Canary. canary.tools.twit. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly and for keeping our family safe. Now, let's go back to Paul, where the word is, a new threat has emerged. Yeah, I mean, Google's been kind of previewing this for a year, but they finally announced, well, what the device there will call Google Book, which is a new kind of Chromebook, right, based on this aluminum OS thing, which is not going to be the final name of the OS, but Android. Paluminium, by the way. Yeah, I'm not doing that. No, no, I'm not. That's what they say. But anyway, that's how they spell it. But they say, don't worry, it's a code name. It's a code name, yeah. Still a lot of questions here, and I've written a lot about this. I'm fascinated by this notion of, like, scaling up a mobile platform to make it compete with a desktop platform and how that might or might not work. So a couple of things I will say, because this is pertinent to our space. You know, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, once described Copilot as potentially becoming the new start menu. And we all kind of chuckle and laugh and everything. But when you think about it, this thing you go to to get work done where you start, you start, you know, launch, literally start. I keep saying start. But you start your day, so to speak. It makes some sense. But, you know, Google, unlike Microsoft, has had a lot of success with its AI. And they're putting Gemini, in their case, across their entire stack. They have incredible reach with consumers and businesses. And this thing, you know, I don't like some of the marketing here. It's like it's not an operating system. It's an intelligence system. And you're like, okay, whatever. But, you know, Android-based makes sense because that's the popularity and the scope that you need. All the developers are there. The drivers go there first, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, they're doing what they did with Chromebook, you know, sort of rethinking the laptop. You know, there's a – I really like, and I got it from my daughter, the Lenovo Chromebook with a MediaTek Companion. That's right. No, those are great. Great name. That's the funny thing. Terrible name. Great process. Yeah, so that's like a co-pilot plus PC class Chromebook, right, as far as the hardware goes. The benchmarks make it kind of the equivalent of Apple's M2. Yeah, so the Google Books, we don't know a lot about the hardware. I hope they use this MediaTek process. So they're going to use Snapdragon. They're going to use the MediaTek, whatever you call it. And the Lenovo has an OLED screen. They'll use Intel as well. So we know that all the top five PC makers are on board, which, you know, they are for Chromebooks as well. I didn't realize this at the time, which kind of shows you where my head's at, but one notable exception to that list of OEMs is Samsung, which is Google's biggest partner in this space. They make great Chromebooks. Yes, they do. And there was a rumored Samsung Galaxy book running this OS out doing benchmarks or something in the world. So, like, that will happen. It's more likely that this was not a snub and that because these guys are such close partners that they'll have a special thing with just the two of them, you know, at some point. Right. You know, so that's interesting that Chromebooks are still a thing because I feel like the schools have kind of soured a little bit on that. I don't, I mean, I don't know about, I don't know. I mean, I will say having recently re-evaluated a Chromebook, using it like a really cheap one, too. It was like under $200. It's actually. It's fine. It's pretty good. It's fine. As long as you don't need to install any software on it, right? Right. If what's on it works, you're fine. But now everything's web-based. Well, I mean, like a real Chromebook, you could install a Linux environment and run Linux apps. I mean, that's, you know, for developers. That was just a bit complicated for most people. Well, no, I understand. And then Android. But almost everything's web-based now. Everybody has, even QuickBooks has a web interface. I mean, can't you run in a browser nowadays? Well, a game. Oh, that. And then, yeah, like top tier. That's why schools like it, frankly. No, there's good reasons for it. I mean, you can see where a business might like it, too. Yeah. Anyway, this is interesting. So the question is, is it more Android compatible than Chromebooks? I think this will be. I think that's the whole. I think it's literally just going to be Android. I think it's Android. Yeah. It's a few shares. That's fine. And it will run the full desktop Chrome web browser with the extensions and all that. So that's important. So in that sense, it will be like a Chromebook as today. There's no plan to replace Chromebook immediately, but that's obviously going to happen. These are going to be premium kind of Chromebook Plus or Copilot Plus PC type devices. There were a bunch of announcements around this, but one that is pertinent to us is that, you know, I mentioned this agent on the Taskbar thing that Microsoft has in Windows and for this system Google is rethinking like the mouse cursor right And so if you familiar with Windows you have to enable this feature but it called Shake I forget what it's called. I think it's called Shake. But you shake your mouse cursor and all the Windows minimize. And so what Google is doing is you shake the mouse cursor and then it turns into what they're calling a, I think it's a smart pointer or magic pointer. And it becomes this Gemini kind of front end. So it does that vision stuff where whatever's under the mouse cursor, you can learn more about that. You can select items and put them into kind of a little, it's like a pop-up bubble bucket and then have, and then write a prompt in right there in like next to the cursor, you know, on screen anywhere. And, um, you know, okay. I mean, I like, I, I've not used it. It looks interesting. Um, and it is a way to bring kind of new AI capabilities into what is essentially like what I'd call a legacy, you know, desktop-type platform. I know it's not a legacy, but as far as, you know, there's basically a task for our start button. You know, it's like the thing everyone knows and knows how to use. And, you know, they're kind of rethinking it, which, you know, Google has a pretty good history of doing this kind of thing. It's kind of interesting. And we'll see. There's a lot of questions. A lot of questions. So we should see. Yeah, devices by the end of the year. One of the inevitable conversations you get into with this kind of thing, and I say that because I often trigger it myself, which is you can take something big like Windows that's been around for decades and you can kind of strip off, strip off, strip off, and try to arrive at this more mobile-like or literally mobile platform that's simpler. Does that make any sense? And Microsoft's tried this with Windows CE and all the stuff that became Windows Mobile over the years. They tried it with Windows RT and the Windows 8 timeframe. And then what we have today is Windows 11 on ARM, which is just Windows 11, right? I mean, there is some culling of legacy code in there, which is great, but they haven't really changed the, you know, it's the familiar Windows interface. Apple did the same thing, right, with Mac OS X when they made the iPhone. And then they've since used that smaller code base, which they added things like multi-touch and whatever to, and created all their other platforms like iPad, you know, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, etc. Google's done the same thing. Like, they have Android XR, they have Google TV, Android Auto, Wear OS. I'm forgetting some of this. So, it's interesting, but the question of whether a mobile platform can replace a desktop platform is obviously dependent on who you are and the things you need to do, but I kind of like the idea of scaling something small up in a way. Like, you're starting from maybe a simpler code base, hopefully, and And, you know, we'll see. You know, we'll see where that goes. But they position this, this was their wording, that this thing is modern, right? In other words, they're not really saying mobile. Like, they don't really describe it as a mobile platform. It's a modern platform, right? And you can make the argument that desktop systems like Mac and Windows are legacy platforms, right? I mean, they've been around for a long time. There's a lot of cruft. And with great power. I mean, I'd definitely like to see one of these as a tablet. Yeah, well, right I mean, so the answer there would be Well, we have that, right? We have Android tablets Like, this is very specifically a laptop Well, we'll see, I mean, you know, like the iPad can be good at like a laptop in the sense that you have a magic keyboard That was my point, it's like, are you really going to make the iPad Pro competitor that can snap it into the keyboard and be very laptop-ish? Right, so we may see that They're not talking for, but, you know, in the past They were talking Android laptop, but they, you know, we'll see. I mean, it's possible OEMs, Google itself, whatever, we don't know. But I will say, you know, with the iPad, there's still some little rough areas where it's touch first. You know, it's awesome as a tablet, of course. But there are interfaces, you know, depending on the app and whatever it is, where you're trying to right-click and it doesn't right-click. But if you click and hold, it then gets the menu, which is how it would work with touch, not how it should work with a mouse. And, you know, if Google can kind of get by that and make this a little more seamless, you know, maybe they're on the same. So, yeah, we'll see. Okay, we'll see. Okay, so that's kind of fun. Always like to see that. Out of the middle of nowhere, I guess, that's not the right way to say it. Microsoft announced a major update to Edge across both desktop and mobile today. Wasn't expecting that. Oops, I just closed the tab. So this is going to be another one of those, you know, you'll cheer, then you'll boo moments where it's like, I'm happy to announce that they've gotten rid of co-pilot mode. Yay. No, because it's all co-pilot mode now. You knew that was coming. Right? Come on. Yeah, we don't need an icon when you can never get away from it. Yeah, there's no mode. It's just going to be all this AI crap. So there's a lot of new capabilities that are occurring across both desktop and mobile. There are some things that had been on desktop before that are now coming to mobile. So, for example, Copilot Vision and Voice are now available on mobile for the first time. So that's kind of cool, if you want to. I don't know. But the things that will be across both is Copilot has, first of all, long-term memory, which I think is important to all these things, meaning you can ask it about things and it will have the context of all the stuff you've given it permission to see, which can now include, you know, not just multiple tabs, but like reasoning across multiple tabs. So you can compare information, you know, get summaries, see what matters the most, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. The new tab page has been redesigned. This is the thing. This looks like the Copilot mode new tab page to me, but that's fine. Copilot has these two features that were experimental. actually one of them still is, but there's a feature called Journeys, which is now broadly available across desktop and for the first time mobile. I don't think it was even tested on mobile before, at least publicly. I could be wrong about that. I don't think so. There's a study and learn mode with guided study sessions. There's a writing assistant, which is obviously based for drafting new things or just rewriting for tone, clarity, whatever. There are co-pilot quizzes, so you can generate quizzes, flashcards, guided sessions, et cetera. based on information you might be looking at in a tab, you can turn any tab into an audio podcast, right? So if you think about, what's it called, the immersive view, whatever, the reading view in Edge today, you know, that's a way to read the actual article, but without the distractions of the webpage with, you know, whatever ads and nonsense. Right, all the blinky and jumpy stuff. Yeah, but you can also click a little play button and it will read it to you, which is nice. But the podcast feature is not a literal reading of the article. It uses AI to kind of summarize it, and then it presents it as if it were a podcast. So you might be on your phone. Maybe you see some interesting article. You're like, I've got to get on the subway or the bus or whatever. I can't walk around and read this. You can listen to like a podcast version of it, which for some reason is super common with AI making a podcast out of things. I don't know. It's almost like they're training all their models on all the podcasts, but I'm sure they didn't do that. and I think that's probably most of it. So these features are all rolling out across Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, and iPad. Cool. There you go. This one kind of hit me personally because I love Markdown. I write Markdown. I almost think in Markdown at this point. You're writing a book about Markdown. I might be writing a book about Markdown. Jack Walker's expecting you to write a book about Markdown. Yep, yep, yep. Now it's the pressure. It's pressure. But the thing is, Markdown has become even more prominent lately because it's the language of AI and especially AI agents. And I guess I never really thought about this too much, but it's one thing for it to be able to easily process Markdown, because Markdown is just plain text with a couple of formatting tags, essentially. But it also outputs in Markdown. And there's an engineer from Anthropica, and I think Anthropica as an organization is making the argument that this is not the right approach, that the output should be HTML. And because this is richer, you know, possibilities there, including programmatic interactions and, you know, through JavaScript, et cetera, you know, you can link to images in Markdown just like you can in HTML. So there's some visual kind of things that you can do there. But the thing is, you know, this isn't the part of the book or part of that book I'm working on. I wrote this, but I haven't shared it publicly yet because that chapter is not done. But when John Gruber created this and Aaron Schwartz, I really want to make sure Aaron gets credit. OK, I'm just based on me reading his blog. Right. He said he described Markdown as two different things. There was the syntax that gets added to plain text, which is both human and machine readable, obviously. And then in his case, I think it was a Perl script, but it was a way to transform that markdown plain text into HTML because that's what gets published on the web. And, you know, doing that, having an AI do that, having an AI agent do that, actually to me does make sense because the surface that you're looking at in cloud or whatever, you know, AI you're using, if you're on the web, whatever, it is going to be HTML, right? Like, it might as well use the thing the whole world already uses, and it has richer display capabilities as it is, and maybe better understood as well. So even though you can do some, you know, some kind of cool, you know, depending on the markdown editor that you use, a lot of them have like a side-by-side view or a view where you can bring up the, it's called a preview usually, which is the HTML view, right? So you're writing in code, essentially. Well, you're writing plain text, but it has little hashtags and whatnot. And you can read it. It's readable. It's just not particularly pretty. But if you want to see what it's going to look like on the output end, that is HTML. It was always going to be HTML. So I think it's an interesting point. Like, I don't know why AI agents spit out Markdown other than the – I don't want to – let me think about it. They like text, right? They love text. And it's, yep, could have been HTML, but, yeah. And they're saying Markdown's pepper. They do both equally well, honestly. It's just whatever. If you told your agent, use HTML from now on instead of Markdown, it would. It would just do it. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, I think what they're saying is maybe just. And by HTML, you mean marquee with flaming text. Yeah. Like blinking text. So after that article came out from Tariq, I, but I don't, I, so, So some have said, Daniel Miesler, who I think is really smart, has said, stick with Markdown and do HTML when you want something that's easy to, that's, you know, prettier, easy to read. So I still stick with Markdown. And you need to for things like claw.md or agents.md. Right. I think the reason it is Markdown on output is because it is on input too, and these things all interact. And so it's just easier, you know, this is the workflow. I'll show you what I've done. So what I do when I want something that I can visualize better, I'll say make the markdown and put it in my Obsidian because Obsidian reads markdown well, but also make a page. This is on Cloudflare, so I just have a Cloudflare page. So we're working on a workflow, and it just did this page. Now, it also did it in markdown, but you can see instead of using Mermaid to make diagrams and stuff, it does it HTML, and it's nice, and it makes it easy to read, and it's stuff like that. The other thing I had to do, which I guess I can share this with you, we're planning a vacation in the fall, and I didn't know what to do, where we're going, so I had the AI act like a travel agent and recommend stuff. And I said, make that an HTML page and put it up on the Cloudflare. Cloudflare's free for pages. And it's easier to read, that's all. That's the beauty of it. Right, right. That's all it is. And then I have an index on it. So this is just like a quick bookshelf. They're disposable. And I think that I still use Markdown because I still put it in a screen. Like I said, I almost think in Markdown, so to me that's just normal. It's easy. It's how you type. But nowadays when the AI is typing, it doesn't matter. Python, Go, Markdown, HTML. It's spitting out a thousand lines a second anyway. It obviously can read HTML. The earliest role of AI was a web scraper. Yeah, right. Right. Translator obviously can handle it. Anyway, it's kind of an interesting conversation. Yeah, it's interesting. I do both is what I say. Yeah, okay. Depending on how I want to use it. I don't think about it because I'm not producing anything that I want anyone to see. Like I'm just, you know what I mean? Like I don't really, I'm not producing. Well, for things like the diagrams and stuff, it's a little easier to individualize. Anyway, it's just as fluent in both languages. I just say, hey, give me an HTML list and put it up on Cloudflare. And it does it. Okay. It's easy. Yep. Yeah, it's great. Yep. So I think we referenced this last week. I hadn't, I still to this moment have not written about this, but Google Chrome was found to be downloading this four gigabyte local AI model, which I said at the time has to be Gemini Nano, and it is. I also have this vague idea like they said a couple years ago they were going to do this and they did actually this is not a secret thing they're doing and I made the point I think last week that Firefox does this with the language translation stuff, every time you select a language in there and say I want to be able to translate between this and whatever other languages I've downloaded it downloads local AI models for that, that's what it does they're probably not 4 gigabytes of space or whatever But all these people are writing tips like, here's how you can free up four gigabytes of space on your computer. And it's like, okay. But, I mean, you're actually using this stuff, and you want this thing to work offline, for example, or whatever it might be. I mean, you know, and you have the space. I guess you might want this. But it was sort of presented as this nefarious plan or something like, we're going to sneak, you know, Gemini. The only thing nefarious about it is that it's changing web standards unilaterally without the help of the W3C. So you use the word only, and that's actually serious. But it's not. I mean, is it actually trying to change the RFCs? No, but it's de facto, right? So if a developer says, well, I have an API, which it is, by the way, there's an API. If I have an API to a local AI, I'm going to use it. But the problem is it only works with Chrome. So there goes Firefox. There goes Vivaldi. There goes Google. This was the Internet Explorer strategy back in the day. You know, make stuff that only works in IE. and this is not what we want. We don't want a button that says this page works best in whatever the browser is, right? So I don't think it's a bad thing at all. Yeah. I mean, well, the first outrage about this wasn't that, although that – It was the four gigabyte. It's just the four gigabyte thing. And it's like, okay, but, you know, if you have a Copilot Plus PC, you might have 40 gigabytes. I'm not joking. And there's a lot to be said for a local-only model, right? Yep. Especially Gemini, which is very, very good. Exactly. There's a lot to – This is the same model that Google puts on their Pixel phones, for example. Yeah, right. It's on every phone. Every phone is a local model. So, yeah. But I do think it's unfortunate because it means Firefox is – there should be a – W3C should set a standard for local models in the local API. I agree. I agree. Google has so much power in the marketplace. Google has a rich history of doing this kind of thing. So they're going to do that – what was that sandbox thing they were going to do? Yeah, they bigfoot everything. They eventually gave up on, but they were just basically pushing by whatever the standards are and doing their own thing. And, my God, was there complaining. So the good news is that complaining leads to antitrust investigations, which leads to them completely reversing course. So maybe they'll do that here. I don't know. Yeah, they gave up on the whatever that. The privacy sandbox. Privacy sandbox. They gave up on that, didn't they? Yeah, they did. But it took five years, maybe longer. They were going to be doing that for a long time until they were not. The difference was it was the advertising community that didn't like that. This would be end users that don't like it. I don't know how much cloud we have. It blows my mind. It's like we want to find something that's going to be really good for advertisers and doesn't violate your privacy so much. And it's like there's no such thing as that. You're going to do one or the other. Oops, sorry. Just pressed the button. I got my watch to shut up. Instead, it made more noise. Sorry. No, it's okay. OpenAI has a coding agent called Codex. Like Anthropoc Cloud Code, it has expanded to include productivity functionality. So you're going after co-work? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yes, they are. They released a Codex app on the Mac and then on Windows, and this was over the past X number of months, I don't remember. and what they found was and it's always fascinating to me like you think you release software and it's intentional but then users actually use it and you find out oh they're doing different stuff with it than we thought the most common workflows that customers were using happened in their web browser whatever it was so now they have a version of codex that's for Chrome meaning it will work in I haven't tried this but it should work in any Chromium browser like Edge you know Brave whatever And the idea here is that if you're doing, like, across multiple browser tabs, you know, workflows like inspecting logs. This is their words. Inspecting logs, testing web apps, reviewing dashboards, moving through internal tools, CRMs, dashboards, docs, yada, yada, yada. So, okay. Okay. Whatever. You're cute. So that's happening. suddenly open ai is chasing which is weird you know isn't that strange just like that they couldn't quite get to a billion users they wanted to they thought they were no and they're also consumer side they're chasing that valuation thing which is very similar to what open ai is doing and i don't know the organization but there's some you know in the same way that we have like analyst uh bodies that tell us you know what they believe market share is like os's and browsers blah blah blah whatever. Apparently, anthropic adoption with businesses just surpassed Urban AIs. Yeah. It's the enterprise. That's where the money is. Those are the people who are going to pay the money. I'm doing this off the top of my head, so forgive me. I think this is correct, but they're doing the run rate thing, right? They have whatever revenues they had in some great quarter and their annual run rate was either $30 or $50 billion. I can't remember, but their annual run rate the year before, or maybe their actual revenues I guess we're at $9 billion, so that's great growth. That's awesome. It is awesome. The thing is, they're on the hook for like $400 to $600 billion in cost, and that run rate is not going to pay for that. There's no such thing as a 30-year mortgage for this stuff that makes any sense. It's not anthropic. This is not unique to them, and I'm not dumping on them, but the financial story, and it's always presented as this giant positive, is very close to what you see with OpenAI. and meaning big numbers for like growth, yes, but not enough to cover their costs. No. And also so much of the cost stuff is speculative based on further growth. Like these are hard numbers to work out. I know. I know. I keep waiting for this whole thing to come crashing down to earth. But here we are. It seems to be getting closer. I don't know. I'm not convinced. I mean, it's bubbly. It is bubbly, but is it a bubble bubble? But is it a bubble bubble? I'm not, yeah. Well, the question, to me, the moment the momentum shifted is when the memory companies refused to double production. At that point, all those projections for all those servers were impossible. It's like, we're going to stop selling this to individuals, but we're not actually going to increase capacity. No. And I think they're looking at this as a bubble and thinking, I don't want to be in the situation of a global crossing or a KPN at the end of the dot-com boom where I laid all this undersea cable and everyone broke. The market is flush with RAM that nobody wanted, and now it's selling at $20. I think that's exactly it. And they're like, it takes us three years to build a fab. You guys aren't going to be wanting these things in three years. We're going to stick to the production we can do. This is smart for AI companies because it puts all the risk on the company. the Microns or whatever these companies are that make RAM and other components. And they're all like, no, we're not doing that. Like, sorry. We're not. You also see where the Micron is saying, we're taking deposits if you want more RAM. No more speculative ordering. Because they're just not going to be caught holding the bag. But at that moment, that slope graph going up and to the right is impossible. You can't keep scaling. We don't have enough equipment. You have to get more efficient. Yeah. You know, you have to change the trend. And so it's like that's how you deflate a bubble. And hopefully in a graceful way. Exactly. Not the balloon going around the room, but rather a graceful decline. The big 10 came off, what, $2 trillion in the first quarter. And they've had it bounce back for the past few weeks, which is the pattern that happened in the dot-com boom, too. At some point, the investors go. Right. Yeah, I mean, it comes down to how much the investors will put up with. Yeah. They're putting up with a lot. And, you know, in the same way that, you know, if you watch sporting events on TV now, you'll see all the ads are for, like, basically gambling apps or services or whatever. It's that your choice, right? Wall Street has always been speculative, obviously. But, like, it has become more and more like gambling than I think ever before in history. I've never – I don't know what's going on here. Well, they moved out from crypto. Fair enough. Sorry, they're collecting junk. I'll be right back. I know. The junk girl is here. You said it was like a child? I can hear that. Yeah, it's a girl. She's a woman now, but it's a child's voice. She's famous in Mexico. So funny. I'll tell you who doesn't like her, though, is the dogs. All the dogs out there are going, woo, woo, woo. All right. I can hear like five dogs. It's so funny. Can you really? Barking with me. They're not barking, they're whining like they hate it. It's like the sound of this is punishing. You're throwing out all the good stuff. I don't think that's it. I'm not that bone. Right. All right, we'll take a little break. Dogs howl. The adult woman cries as a baby. Right. Mexico is alive. Lavadoras, et cetera. Lavadoras. Our show today brought to you by Trusted Tech. If you are managing Microsoft 365 for your company, you're responsible for, well, both the costs and whether it's set up correctly. Now, let's talk about cost first. And on July 1st, I think everybody knows this. I hope I'm not telling you something you don't already know. Microsoft is raising prices. We're now less than two months away. So any mistakes in your licensing are about to get more expensive. that most companies using Microsoft 365 are either over-licensed, meaning paying for unused seats and features, or under-licensed, creating compliance and security risks. And believe it or not, it can be both. 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I did the Holiday Inn Express last night. Did you really? I'm so sorry. No. Yeah, I was going to say. I broke the waffle machine. Sorry. So, but I do have a sort of pet peeve about security vulnerabilities, which I should put air quotes around. Like, where the first step in the way that you duplicate, you know, that you make this happen is, first of all, sign into your computer. Like, okay, but now you're signed in. I mean, when you're signed in, you have access to your web browser, which has all your information on it. I mean, you're signed in, you know. So there were a couple of these this past week. You know, the recall, the recent recall episode is one of them. So this first one I've not written about. I just was alerted to it today, so I'm going to look at this in more detail. But the person who found this vulnerability calls it yellow key. He describes it as one of the most insane discoveries he's ever had. Feels like a backdoor. So it says, how to reproduce. step one, copy the whatever folder to some other location. Well, actually, that's not step one, is it? Step one is sign into your computer. You can't just copy that folder. So, to me, that's like the rest of what you're describing. It's like, I've kind of stopped listening. Like, what are you talking about? You know, when the recall one was a little bit like this, it's like, okay, sign into your computer, and it's like, well, and then sign into recall, which requires the Windows Hello ESS nonsense, and it's terrible and slow. It's like, I'm sorry, but that's the security. What are you talking about? So I don't know what to say about this one. I've got to look into this a little bit more. We'll see. And in the same vein, there was a report this past week, Microsoft Edge loads all your saved passwords into memory in clear text when you first run the browser. Microsoft has responded to this one similarly to what they did with Recall, and basically the short version is, yeah, that's how it works. It's supposed to work that way. You're signed into a computer, like securely. Like this is what, you know, the security protecting the browser, which is the operating system, which is Windows Hello, is what secures this. And, yeah. At the same time, it's like then you click on a phishing email that drops a payload on your machine. I'm 100% not saying that. Yeah, so today they're saying this is by design. I agree. I feel like, look, they've already done the thing where they want to make it more secure so it becomes less convenient, right? One of the reasons, maybe the reason you would do this in plain Texas is fast, right? If this is encrypted and you have to decrypt it every single time you access, any password that could take a long time that would slow down the performance, et cetera, people would complain about that. And, yeah, there's got to be a better way. I mean, you know, the new Windows Hello experience is slow. I hate it when you're in Windows. Signing in is the same. That's always great. But the, you know, do we want more of this? I don't know. You know, here's the way you can secure Microsoft Edge. Don't use it. And, you know, just use like an actually secure browser. So I don't know. I don't know what to say to this one. It's an interesting story. By the way, Chrome used to do the same thing, keep the passwords in the clear. And Google's explanation of this was, well, like you said, somebody has access to your computer. I mean, you have a problem. It's not just this. Yeah. So, I mean, I think it is kind of a tempest in the teapot. I don't know about this. You should be using a password manager anyway. Yep. This is right. That's the real answer. Yes. But Google for a long time kept passwords in the clear in Chrome. I'm sure that's why Edge still does. It's just. Yeah, I feel like, you know, they have the Secure Future Initiative. They have the Windows Resiliency Initiative, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is going to get caught up in that. Google does encrypt them now. Yeah. And no one is complaining. Right. So no one's complaining that Google is slow when it comes to accessing a password. Then again, if you're using a Google password manager in a Chrome browser, you have mental problems and you need assistance. I hate to say it, but that's how most people use their passwords. I know, of course, but most people don't know any better. They shouldn't. This is why you use a third-party password. You would also think that people would start to say, well, wait a minute, but I also need those passwords in other places. Yeah, yeah. How do I? Yeah, with a third-party password manager. Yeah. That's how. They keep them encrypted all the time. They're everywhere. I'm just saying they're free. Yeah. Bitwarden is free for personal users. Proton is for, you know, as well. What's the other big one password I think you have to pay for? But they're good for this audience. I mean, Bitwarden. Yeah, Bitwarden is open source, so it's free forever. Your primary consumer breach is a phishing attack. and that's the moment where whatever you had low in memory under your context is now vulnerable. That's true. Like, you are the weakest link, in other words. Yeah, and you're going to make mistakes. The whole trick here is how badly punished are you going to be for that mistake? If those things are encrypted and recently decrypted when you use them, you know, like Bitwarden does, then you're not going to have all your passwords immediately hatched. And we should mention Bitwarden is, of course, a sponsor of the podcast. The other thing, though, I hesitate to say this. Most individuals are not going to be attacked. Right? Or not? Is that not true? I don't know. Well, most phishing attacks are cheap. That's true. Social engineering attacks of all kinds are. Yeah. I mean, by the way, the valuable target is, of course, an enterprise, not an individual. But the past 48 hours I been under steady attack Like I getting complicated I had a phishing I mean so yeah Look you can get distracted You're out in the world. You're on the phone. Maybe you don't see it so good. You didn't think to look at the email address. No, I mean, that happens. It's very real. I hadn't had my coffee yet. That's my excuse. The first stage breach is always a possibility. Everything is about what happens next. Yeah. In that case, the password manager didn't help me because I was going along. I was helping the bad guy. Oh, yeah, I got all those credit card numbers. What do you need? No problem. Oh, yeah, they're encrypted, but I know how to decrypt them. Yeah, could you do that now, please? Oh, yeah, of course. Sure, sure. Of course I'm signed in. I'm sending you the code. Oh, yeah, I got the code. Thank you. Do you need remote access to my computer? I'm going to be out for a few hours, so. That's what we do with OpenClaw. I know. That's what I did. I was just joking about that with my wife today. Like, I'm just going to open up my life to AI and just let it run amok. Because what could go wrong? What could go wrong? I have, I counted them, 19 different cron jobs running on my framework all the time, doing all sorts of stuff. I mean, it's code, so it's not, I mean, they know what they're doing, but. Mm-hmm. You know, you can get a Stripe account for your AI now, which is great. it's going to buy a bunch of those little terminals so it can start running people's credit cards for you. Patrick Collison posted on X something like, okay, now that I can have a Stripe account, I said to my agent, buy yourself a gift. What would you like? Buy, like, an $8 e-book. Who owns them? Is Stripe, is that Block? Is that the same company? No, no, it's the Collisons. Stripe is Stripe, right? I don't know. They have a larger name. Okay. I can't remember what it is. Jack Dorsey. Yeah. It is? Oh, so it is Block. It is Block, right. Okay. He's trustworthy. I wouldn't. He likes his AI. Yep. I think he likes his Nazis, too. Anyway. No, Jack Dorsey. Oh, no, I'm sorry. Wrong. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Right. He's a hippie. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. He's not Peter Thiel. These people, there's too many of these people. I can't. I apologize. No, Stripe is not. No, it's Colson. It's the Colson's, yeah. It's privately owned. I feel like the only person. It's not. It's like Automatic, the company that makes WordPress. Block is Dorsey. Is that Dorsey too? No. No. Stripe is not Dorsey. Let's get this clear. It's the Colson's. Block is Dorsey. Block is Dorsey. We should probably just say. Automatic is Matt Mullenweg. Right. You're right. It's hard to – look, it is really hard to keep track of this. I agree with this. Especially because this is on the periphery for me. This is not my focus at all. Like, I would know this if I was cared about this stuff. I don't care about it, and I have to know it. I know. I'm sorry. I don't know why. This is what I did on my frameworks. I'm so stupid. All right. We have talked a couple times about Mozilla and Firefox and using anthropic mythos, et cetera. there were when they released I think it was Firefox 150 270 fixes they had made in that release alone by the end of April they had fixed 423 security vulnerabilities just in that month a year ago in April they pitched fixed or patched 31 vulnerabilities to give you an idea of the scope of how this is changed so that's great and not all of those are actually from Mythos. They still do all the traditional stuff. People still submit bugs and they still find things and that still happens, you know. But I think they're also starting to use the new AI development style too, so they are moving faster as well as using these tools for detection. And that's one of the things I guess Mythos is very good at. It's not just saying, hey, here's a vulnerability, but hey, here's how you can duplicate it yourself and here's how you can fix it. And for an organization like Mozilla, but whatever company, they can take that information and prove it to themselves, prove that the fix works and make that fix. And not a lot in the way of false positives, although I guess it must be the Microsoft one. I think they were talking about false positives there. Well, and often problematic fixes too. There's ways to fix things that create better issues. I'm hearing over and over again from different teams that they're using tools like this and they're just finding incredible reams of vulnerabilities. As it was described to me, keys to the castle kind of vulnerabilities. But he's like, no, no, that's not just a buffer overflow they might exploit someday. I have admin access to everything. Oh, the buffer overflow, the good old days. I was so looking forward to that. Yeah, that's incredible. But these guys are doing that thing I said, which is they're going to shift into a place where now they're going to be proactive using AI. So they'll find problems in code bases as they're submitted and before they shift to the public, right? And it doesn't mean it will be perfect. You know, software's never perfect. But I think this is going to lead to a new level of – and level of – Well, and the problem is because it needs to, right? Because that same set of tools are being used by the Blackhats to find and take advantage of vulnerabilities in zero day at high speed. Right. And there is a panic going on. It's an underlier since the fall last year of all of these major companies going, We have to get this stuff patched as quickly as possible before the attacks really come in full bore. And then China was like, hey, can we have access to Mythos 2? And Anthropik said, no, no, you cannot. Interesting. In other good news, I guess this is not AI related, but rather security related. I think Monday or the other day, whatever day, was Passkey Day, which used to be Password Day. and Amazon used that to announce that they now have over 465 million customers who have enrolled in passkeys. So that's how they sign into their Amazon accounts now. That's a 75% gain year over year. That's awesome. It's not going to continue, obviously. That's now most of their customers, so they won't do that again. Yeah, I don't know about that. Yeah, exactly. But that's great. If you hammer away at sign up a passkey, sign up a passkey, sign up a passkey, sign up a passkey, so it's like I can make this go away. I think you guys are the same, but I use passwords wherever I can use passwords. And I've got to say, the best passkey implementation to this day is GitHub. GitHub's implemented. Really nice. Signing in the GitHub is the best. Like, I love it. You know what's great is that many, many AI tools, and I think other geek tools, use GitHub as their single sign-on. Yeah, so there you go. It's great. So now passkey is everywhere because it's funny. They really did a passkey. Now, the caveat to this is it's possible Amazon's is just as good, but every time I sign with a passkey, I still get a code on my phone. No, yes, it's not just as good. Okay, I wasn't sure if that was like something I did. No, it's not just you. It's me too. I hate it. Yeah, I don't like that. I feel like the passkey should be it. Yes, it's fully secure. You do not need a third factor. If you sign into Google a lot, which I also do, your experience will either be the best experience imaginable. Are you serious? Because they literally do it randomly when you sign in. So one time it will say, oh, do you want to use some asking? You're like, yep. And my password manager will come up and boop, done. Other times it will be like, oh, you'll get an alert on your phone. You're like, oh, come on, man. Just do the same thing. I haven't had that experience. Oh, I have this every day. And I had to have a Russell, our administrator, turn on Pesky's for Workspaces because they're not on by default. Yeah, so I have one in Workspace and one for Consumer Account. And maybe that's part of it. I don't know because I go back and forth between the two. I have always been able to. Okay. See, that's a good experience. And I say yes. Yeah, so that's a good experience. To me, that's huge. I still have to enter my email address. I really don't even want to do that. Honestly. I know. A site should say, you have a pass key? Exactly, and give you the choices if there are choices. Right. Or just the one, and then you click click. Yep, and then you do a Windows Hello or whatever you're using for authentication. Yep. I don't want to have to enter anything. I just want to click on it. I know. Click on it. 100%. Yeah. Yeah, if you're feeling suicidal, I mean, remove the password from your Microsoft account. Have fun with that. I regret that so much. I did it. Yeah, I did it with a secondary account, and I will not – I can't say that. I mean, I will not do it to the one I use all the time because it's just like, are you serious? Like, what is this? It's screwed up. But if you're going to keep a password, make it as long. Make it a 32. Mine's three digits. But, yeah. No. But that's another inconsistent experience. They have all the right stuff. Like, they have all the secondary forms of authentication. And the problem is you have to use them every single time. And it's like a, you know, all right, now we're going to send you an email to a secondary address. Type up the full address, and then you go to that address. You get the code. You go, okay, now do it over. And, like, seriously. Is this just because you're in Mexico? Is that what it is? No, it's happening. And it happens on Xbox, and Xbox won't give you enough time to type in the code every single time. It says you didn't do it fast enough. And it's like 10 seconds. I don't know how fast it's supposed to be. This is the problem with, like, a 2FA code thing is you can see, like, on the countdown, it's like I get 12 seconds. I got this. And I'm like, you know, and then like you finally get it in and it's like, nope, it's wrong because they've moved on to the next code. Yes. Right. Like, I. Oh, well. Someday. Oh, well. Someday. That's an amazing number. 465 million. I know. Yeah. I don't even believe that. Okay. I don't think that's true. Interesting. All right. Wait a minute. Well, how many people are in the U.S.? Including in three or something. But if the Amazon is humongous in other parts of the world, too, right? And what is passkey adoption generally? The percentage is not more than 20% or 30%. Right. This is everybody in the world who – So I don't – I don't understand it. Look, the first day they offered this, I did it, right? So I can't tell you what the experience is like if you're not using it. I don't believe it. I suspect they're pushing it pretty heavily. I don't think they have any reason to lie. I mean, it must be true, but it seems – You want that thing to be secure, right? I mean, it's money. How many customers does Amazon have? That's a good question. It must be several billion in order for them to have 4 to 65 million pass keys. Remember, so when companies start doing e-commerce, in the early days, they'll always say something like, we have X number of credit cards in our system or whatever, right? So there are 260 million Prime members worldwide. Okay, so this is more than twice as many, almost twice as many as Prime members. Yeah, so maybe if you count me the number of pass keys. There's something wrong with this number. I don't buy it. If it is the number of pass keys, I must have ten of them because I'm in a different look. Well, let me see. Let's look at the wording. This is on LinkedIn. He posted this. Yeah, because that's where all the good stuff is posted. Man, I actually have a LinkedIn account just because of people like it. It literally says 465 million of our customers. Oh. So I don't know. Agree. Doesn't mean they use them. No. They agree. No, they actually do say 465 million customers enrolled in PASCIs. Not in this post. Let me look it up. I got an email. In this post, PASCIs are one of the most useful changes in user auth security. Guess what? 465 million of our customers agree. All right. This is the email I got. Oh, you got an email. I'm just looking at the link. Yeah, no, well, it should be in there, too. Like, so where is this? I don't know what agree means. Like, yeah, you're right. Oh, no, you're right. And the first quarter of 2026, more than 465 million customers have enrolled pass keys in their Amazon account. That's amazing. It doesn't seem like it passes the sanity test. I mean, it's almost like it's everybody, you know, basically. I mean, how many? Well, they must have billions. because, I mean, Lisa's not using Paskies on Amazon. Most people are. She should be. I know. We agree. Everybody should be. Put her on the phone. We were talking about this this morning. Yeah. And she said, you know, I really should be using Paskies everywhere. And I said, yeah. She said, but I want to take the time to go through all my accounts. Right. Which, by the way, a good password manager would tell you which ones support it that you're not using, right? Yeah, that's true, too. This is a good feature. But I don't think you have to go through everything. Just as you use accounts, whenever you log in, and you go, oh, another password, see if they have pass keys. If they do that. She's trying to bulk it up, which is, you know, reasonable. I do have two Amazon accounts. I mean, I suppose. I got to ask perplexity how many people have Amazon accounts. I love that you turned immediately to perplexity. Well, I paid for it. I might as well use it. Amazon accounts. Totally. Because if they only... Oh, wait a minute. I'm not locked in. Restore it. Something went wrong. Okay. Bye, perplexity. Sorry I paid for you. Don't make me regret this. Don't make me... Okay. What would be the next... God, everything's malware blocked. What is going on on my machine? You're rocking it. This is what happens when you travel. Yeah, no, that's exactly probably what it is, yeah. When I go home, Netflix is going to be like, where do you live again? What the hell is happening? Yeah. You must go through that, right? Oh, that's a huge problem. Because suddenly, and how do you watch TV? So we don't watch much live TV, but when we do, that's out in the world somewhere, like sports or whatever. So we have Apple TV. Oh, okay. And the Apple TV is on the plane. We do watch Netflix here, though. It works. I mean, it's fine. I have a, I mean, I also, on the strip, I've used ProtonVPN on the Apple TV the whole time for the first time. Like, it's fine. Interesting. Yeah. I didn't know you could do that. That's great. So it thinks you're in Pennsylvania. Yep. And I am, Leo. Wink, wink. I sure am. I don't know why I just said that out loud. It's fine. Okay. So this is wrong. I mean, this is ChatGPT working really hard, by the way. I mean, it has been looking everywhere. It's been AWS, the kick the hell out of this. It's looking everywhere. It says, I'll go with about 300 million Amazon accounts. Amazon does not disclose this. So that's not, that number. That seems small, though, right? You know, given how much money this company makes, most of which is on literally things being shipped around the world. I don't know. I don't know. That's an interesting question. I don't know. I don't know. Hello, Marcelo in Argentina listening today. I think Marcelo and I had a lovely meal in Buenos Aires, I think, many years ago. I believe. A Google AI overview tells me that over 635 million users across Amazon through its mobile app. Oh, okay. All right. I mean, I don't know. Anyway, ChatGPT has apparently given up. It's checked everything from Axios to Substack, trying to find a number for Amazon accounts. Right. Let's look at AWS's internal servers. Hold on for one second. Yeah, really? Come on. You're ChatGPT. You should be able to look this up anywhere. I don't know. All right, I give up. Let's take a break. Maybe by the end of the commercial. This is a site, but it says Amazon had 635 million users on its e-commerce. Oh, that's the same thing. But it's just said it a different way. You mean regular retail customer accounts? Like on the app, you know. No, no, it's going with 300 million. So I don't know. I think this is wrong. All right. Anyway. All right, so. I'm still puzzled by the 406. I'm going to write a story that's going to say, Leo Laporte colon, Amazon is a liar. And using math to support this assertion, you know, I don't know. Where would it get? So, yeah, I just, I don't. Copilot says Amazon has 310 million monthly active users. So 465 million PASC users is a nonsense number. Well, if it's monthly active, so, you know, not all the users. True. Huh. I don't know. Huh. But if they're not active, why would they send up a pass? And at least three of those customers are paying for Amazon Alexa Plus. I am. I'm sad to say. Although it's jaunty. It has a different personality. No, it is. I'm using the sassy personality. But it is hilariously wrong. jauntily wrong. That's funny. There's nothing like jaunty AI. Let me just say. There you go. Everybody wants jaunty AI. Let's take a pause that refreshes and then we will get to the Xbox segment back in the book coming up. We've got some... I think there'll be something interesting because Richard is in Belgium and Antwerp and I imagine last time you were in Belgium you had something interesting to tipple. Our show today brought to you by ThreatLocker. Love these guys. Actually, I'm wearing the shirt that I got when I went out to Zero Trust World. In fact, Richard was with me when I bought this shirt. This was from the Houston Kennedy Space Center. He's got all the badges of all the Apollos on it. ThreatLocker is amazing. We love them. Their Zero Trust platform delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of Zero Trust solutions. And with the big announcement they made at Zero Trust World, they now do not only endpoints, but networks and the cloud with Zero Trust. 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Zero Trust World provides crucial education and training to support IT professionals along with full session access. I did a couple of the hands-on hacking labs. They were fantastic. There's a great after party. I will keep my costume. I'm ready. You don't want to miss this exciting interactive three-day event. It's happening February 17th through 19th in Orlando, Florida. So please set that date aside. I want to see you out there. Visit threatlocker.com slash twit right now. Get your free 30-day trial. Learn more about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com slash twit. We thank them so much for their support. all year long of Windows Weekly. We appreciate it. Remember when you were picking up that shirt I got the little jumper for the grandbaby that says I need my space. Yeah, how'd that come? I got pictures of her in it now. That's so cute. Yeah, that was the best. Kennedy Space Center. And we went to Gator World. Can I have a Gator shirt? I don't know where I want to go next time. There is apparently a sloth world. Of course. I'm not a big fan of the only in dot, dot, dot, like only in Florida type things, but in that case, like only in Florida. Orlando is pretty. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely an interesting place. Apparently, Sloth World has had a problem lately, a number of, large number, several dozen sloths have passed away. I don't know how you know. It's the new bumblebee problem. Yeah. I was reading about it. I thought, how did we miss Sloth World? We saw capybaras at Gator World, which was great. I don't know if they have them there for food or amusement, but it's still. I always wanted to see a capybara. Anyway, enough of that. Let's move on to the Xbox segment, Mr. T. Yeah, a number of things this week. If you are in, we talk about the Windows Insider program a lot, but there is also an Xbox Insider program. And if you were in that, there's a new update rolling out now for insiders. That has basically three new features. So one is a new boot time animation for the console, which they had previewed on Twitter or whatever a week or so ago. They're doing, like, badging now. So when you have game of score milestones, the game of score is when you get achievements in games and the total is the game of score, right, of all those achievements. They have badges now for milestones, like 10,000 achievements, I guess, achievement points. Well, the gamers score points through achievements, right? Like 20,000, 35,000, like say, you know, a million, three million, five million, whatever. That's whatever. And then there's just a new way to filter the game library so that who cares? No big deal. I was kind of, I saw this thing. I'm like, oh, cool. They're racing for it. That's kind of small. Forza Horizon 6 is coming out soon, unless you're on Steam, in which case you could have gotten an early leaf copy. and apparently it was not supposed to be leaked. It was someone, I don't know, someone figured out how to access the game early and I wish I could remember the time frame, but I think Steam said anyone who played this game is going to be banned from Steam for 8,000 years. I think it was some stupid number. Like, you're just never coming back. It's not like somebody downloading that game is in on the scan. They saw it and they downloaded it. I know, it's crazy. But anyway, early access launch is May 15, which is in two days, so this Friday as we record the show. And then the general release, I think, is May 19th, I think. Okay. If you're a Discord fan and or user, I guess you would be a fan because they have Discord Nitro subscriptions, right? We have many. Yeah. So Nitro is the $9.99 a month version, $99 a year. And they just added a new Xbox-related perk, which is Xbox Game Pass Starter Edition. And this is the one that gives you, like, access to over 50 games across PC and console. Actually, that's the whole thing pretty much, though. Yeah, I mean, that's cool. I mean, I would personally pay for Discord. I feel like I pay for Discord every time we do the podcast because that app updates literally every single time. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? It's a long update. Yes, it is. Some old electron. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So Mojang, which is the Microsoft company that does Minecraft, they have these, I don't know if they're quarterly or every so often, they have like a Minecraft live event. They're going to do one during what's called TwitchCon Rotterdam, which is Saturday, May 30. So they're going to announce new stuff about updates to the game, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So there's literally no information beyond that. So May 30, there will be a Minecraft announcement, or a series of Minecraft announcements. so we know that Microsoft's not selling many consoles but they also don't tell us how many they're not selling Sony and Nintendo do tell us how much they're selling and now they're telling us how much they're not selling because this most recent quarter was terrible for both of them so Sony sold 1.5 million PlayStation 5 video game consoles in the most recent quarter that ended March 31st probably This is by far their smallest number of PS5s ever sold. Sequentially, going back in time, the previous figures were 7.9 million, 4 million, 2.5 million, 2.8 million. So they sold 7.9 million last? It turned out a quarter, yeah. Oh, yeah, which is their prime quarter. Okay. Yeah, that's why it was so high, yeah. Yeah, normally this quarter, this past quarter, is the slowest quarter of the year anyway. Right. Right. But this was a particularly slow. Year-over-year bad. First-party software. But I'd also say hardware sales across the board are off this year. Yeah, but it's the whole business. Hardware. Yeah. Yeah, right. For all this. Yeah. And, you know, they've had to raise prices, et cetera. But, you know, the revenues from first-party software sales are down. Their digital numbers are big, like meaning 85% of people who buy games for PlayStation do so digitally. That situation is very different on Nintendo, which we'll get to in a moment. The overall game and network services revenues, which is the part of Sony that does PlayStation, were flat basically year over year. You know, like hardware revenues, 110 million yen last year in the same quarter, 183 million. So it's like not great. Monthly active users are good, actually. So they're pretty steady, and they were up pretty good from a year ago, $133 million versus $124 million one year ago. So, you know, the people out there are using it. I mean, they're just not selling as many new ones. But they're not buying new ones. Yeah. This is a great year to skip it with the prices being up on all those sorts of things. So I think you see that. Yep. I'm kind of surprised Nintendo sold as many as they had, except that I know they ran out of them over Christmas. So maybe first of all, it's catching up. The Nintendo one is weird to me because, you know, they launched Switch 2 in, I think, June last year. So we don't have a full year yet. It got off to the fastest start ever for any Nintendo hardware. But I think we all kind of understood that the original Switch is by far the best. Well, not by far. It's the best-selling Nintendo console. If you forget about the mobile stuff, it is by far the best-selling. and I just I never felt like this was going to have the legs of the OG switch I just don't weigh you know and it's kind of collapsing a little faster than expected but for the reasons Richard just kind of alluded to which is you know the whole component crisis stuff everything is bad so let me see if I can come up with this they sold 2.49 million units in the quarter ending in March they've sold a total of just under 20 million units for their fiscal year which also ends in March. The previous quarters were $7 million, $4 million, and $5.82 million, and that goes backwards. So $7 million is the holiday quarter. It makes sense that this would be the slowest quarter of that year, but it just came out too. So their quarter was fine financially, but they warned on the coming year, which is good. This is their only business, right? They don't have other stuff. Sony makes washing machines or whatever they do. They have other stuff they can sort of rely on it if they have to, but this is all Nintendo does. So they lowered their, well, first they've raised the price, remember the Switch 2, or they're above, I think that's about to happen, or maybe it just happened, I don't remember. But they've also lowered their estimates for the current fiscal year for unit sales. So previously it was about 20 million units they were expecting. No, I'm sorry, that's not true. That's what they just sold. This year they expect to sell 16.5 million. So they did lower their estimate, but I don't think we ever saw that estimate. I think they just said that that's what happened. They also sold another 560,000 original Switch units in the quarter, down from 1.36 million, whatever. They was hovering around a million for a while. So that console has sold like over 156,000. Thousand? Yes. No. Million. No. What? 156 million. Sorry, I wrote that as thousand. That's not right. which is awesome. But software sales were up. Yeah. Like I said, the markets are soft and stuff, so people are going to play their machines, but they're not going to buy them. Yeah. The two other data points are about 55% of Switch software sales are digital, up from about 54% of the logos. I think it's low, too. But they come on these fun little cards. It's kind of a thing in that market. Retro. Yeah, it is, right? I want my games on vinyl. Yeah, you want a fun little carrier like you would have for CDs, but really small because these things are tiny. I don't know if it was last year or two years ago, there was a Super Mario movie or whatever that did awesome, and it actually really helped them a lot, which they really needed at the time because the original Switch was winding down. But this year they have a Super Mario Galaxy movie that's out, that has made $800 million in revenues in its first four weeks. Who watches these movies? What is wrong with you? Apparently. I mean, the great thing when you get a good kid movie is the kid wants to just keep going. Yeah. That's what it is. It's why David's Shark is so big. Okay. So big. You just play it over. Back in my day, we just, not my day, my kid's day, we had Caillou, we had Dora the Explorer, we had the Teletubbies. It wasn't the same. Teletubbies. Oh, my God. We have Barney, the beautiful Barney. That was before my kids. Yeah, Barney the Dulles. You're so lucky. I love you. Well, but we did have the Teletubbies. The Teletubbies is like Curious George where they screw up constantly, and then some adult figure, in that case the Nunu vacuum cleaner, cleans up after them, and they never learn any lessons. And I'm sorry. Like a hat in the hat. As a parent, I have a huge problem with this. Like I always hated this. I hated this so much. If I could take out Curious George with a sniper rifle, I would do it right now. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He's joking, kids. He's making a joke. Chris Church is a cartoon monkey. It's fine. It's not a person. It's okay. It has a tale, by the way, despite what many believe. Like we said, curious. So not a monkey then. Anyway, let's move on from that. So like most normal people with brains, I get excited every time this apple suffers a legal defeat. But in this case, what happened was the U.S. Supreme Court said that it would not review this awesome remedy thing that's occurring in the Epic v. Apple case. So the next steps are that they will get in front of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Roger, who, by the way, is the judge in Elon Musk versus OpenAI, right? She's awesome. Yeah. And determine how much Apple can charge for the services it offers to its App Store. And I'm guessing it's not going to be 30% and 15%, but we'll see how low can we go. We're going to find out. How did Apple get here? Honest to goodness. Talk about. By being belligerent jerks. Is that? Yep. That's how. We've invented an arbitrary price and then we defend it to, you know, like as if it were sacrosanct or something. Now it's going back to Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who is not happy with this company. No. She's angry. She referred an executive of the company to the attorneys general for lying under oath. Yeah. Yep. That's Apple. I don't think you can be that sympathetic to what happens with your iPhone. Oh, no, that's not the phrase. Sorry. That's fine. It's fine. It's fine. A billion hands in your pocket, y'all. Should have made a deal. All right. You know what next I so excited The best part of the show the back of the book is just around the corner Before we do that though I going to make you pay I'm going to make you join the club. $10 a month. Now, this is a good deal. $10 a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows. It gets you a special program we don't do anywhere else, including, by the way, especially, by the way, because I don't, you know, look, I'm not a paywall fan. So we don't really paywall anything except we've been forced to paywall the keynote speeches because every time we put Apple's keynote speeches on YouTube, they threaten us with a strike and a takedown. So we decided rather than jeopardize our YouTube account, the keynotes from now on will be club only. So there's one coming up Tuesday that's Google I.O. That'll be 10 a.m. Tuesday, this coming Tuesday. and that will be only visible to the club members. Sorry, everybody else. Normally what we do is we stream everything in public, and I believe in that because I don't want to keep anybody who can't afford to join the club out in the cold. I'm not that kind of person. But we do need your support. I mean, that's what keeps us going. So we do want to reward people who join the club. So the reward is no ads, no plugs, no begging. You get ad-free versions of all of our content. You get access to the Club Twit Discord. Now, that is fun. It is nice to be in a social network where people have to pay to be there. The quality just soars because of that. And you don't get the bots. You don't get the spam. It's just really a high-quality social network. I love it. You get all that extra programming. Stacey's Book Club is coming up on Friday. Great book, by the way. I can't wait to discuss that. We've got the AI Users Group. All sorts of stuff happens in the club. But the most important reason is you're supporting independent podcasting, not owned by a big company, not beholden to anybody we cover. The only people we work for are you, our viewers and listeners. We appreciate your support. And if you're not a member, I'd love it if you'd join. Twit.tv slash club. Twit. Enough said. That's all. Just wanted to say that. Now, let's return to Windows Weekly and Paul Farat with his world-famous tips. Okay. I hate the pressure that you put me under. Actually, he did the Xbox. It's the world-famous tip of the week. He's world-famous. This is my world. Two tips. I've been working on this Switcher series of articles since the beginning of April. Actually, it's probably the end of March. So this one, it's extending into this month. It's going to be a busy month because we're going back. We need some travel and whatever. But I'm going to expand it beyond, like, OS platforms to include things like applications and services. So I wrote something up about web browsers. And, by the way, part of the advice there is use a third-party password manager, obviously. A couple weeks ago, I mentioned Helium, which is one of the newer kind of Chromium-based browsers, privacy, security-focused. It doesn't even support, like, account sync of any kind. I love it. Like, I love this thing. It's almost like it's basically Brave but even more lightweight and with less going on in the UI. So, you know, in Brave you kind of want to turn certain things off if you don't want, like their wallet thing or their VPN or whatever they offer. This thing has none of that. It's just really stripped down and light, and I love it. And then this is so random. I have no idea why this was promoted to me on YouTube, but I just went to YouTube the other day, And there's something there called Cloud FM, which is described as music for thinking and building. And it's that little crab character from the, probably Open Claw, but the, you know, the cloud code thing. Yeah, it's Cloud, the code. That's the little. Yeah, so he, like, he fries an egg or whatever, and he flies in space. He plays a guitar. That's going too far now. But it's 8-bit, and it's cute. But the thing is, it plays this kind of ambient music in the background. And it kind of reminds me, you know, like Richard does the .NET Rocks podcast with Carl Franklin. And Carl has recorded a lot of music to code by, like, you know, 27 tracks of it. Yeah, it's grown over time. And it's kind of the same theme in a way. There's a lot less of it from Anthropics so far, but it will. I showed my wife. She's making green eggs in hand. We sat there and watched this for like half an hour. I think I can play the music, right? This is generated. I think so, yeah. I think so. This is Music to Code By. What makes music good to Code By? No lyrics, probably. 20-minute units. One of the things I've noticed with Music to Code By is certain tracks that I like the most, and literally it's now in my psyche to send me into the zone so that I hear it. That's great. So it's actually working for you. Yeah. I find any music to be distracting when I'm writing, especially. unless I'm on a plane, oddly. Oh, I always listen to the background track. Yeah, I can't explain that. Because you're using noise-canceling headphones, you don't want to hear the jets, you don't want to hear the babies crying, so you've got to have a little background. The last album that Pink Floyd put out was all instrumental, and it's called The River or something, but it's just a great, it's nice for that. I saw a tweet from somebody who said he's been coding for 20 years listening to fish. Okay, right. Which would probably be okay coding. It's just Ozzy Osbourne. It's a jam band. It's like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was kind of cute. This is a little soporific, a little repetitive. But I guess it's the idea is to get your ADD in mind. Yeah, right. To calm down. Exactly. That might be one attachment to it. I don't know. Oh, I already mentioned helium like an idiot. So two things on the app run. I mentioned helium already. So Helium is only on the desktop, so one of the problems is there's no mobile client, but I think you can mix and match pretty easily with that kind of thing. If you are on an Apple device, there's a mobile browser called Orion, which is similar, although they have Sync and so forth. And Orion is another one that offers kind of a nice experience put on mobile, but only on the Apple side so far. I had forgotten about this app. Maybe I'm wrong. I feel like I used this on Windows Phone, or, you know, I think I did, like, back in the day. But Snapseed, which was made by an individual, which is a small company or whatever, originally for the iPad. So the year the iPad came out, it won the award for, like, best iPad app the first year they did it. Then it went to iPhone very quickly. Then it went to Android. And then Google bought them. And they don't release major milestones all that often. 3.0 came out last summer, I think, but only on the iPhone. but now 4.0 is out, and it's more full-featured on Android this time than it is on iOS. But I've been looking at camera apps and also photo editing apps on mobile. This is really impressive. Like, I've not looked at this in so many years. It's astonishing, like, how many tools and fixes and things there are in this app. It's really, really good. It's worth looking at. If you've never heard of it or haven't thought about it in years like me, I know it used to be on Windows I swear to God I used this on a phone but it was a million years ago I don't remember anyway it's worth checking out it's free and it's astonishingly powerful like it's really really good you're working me you're working me I know I know I'm sorry Leo since we're talking please install a new web browser every freaking week I know I'm sorry Oh. Sorry. Helium is good. I installed it some time ago. It's a good one. It's good. I would love to see it. I feel like everybody needs a Chromium-based browser as at least your secular. I use Den, which is a Firefox friend. I really love it. But everybody needs a Chromium browser in the back pocket just in case. And Helium is probably. If you want to. Oh, and I should say, so there's a site, you know, Cover My Tracks or Cover Your Tracks, which is the EFF. Yeah, yeah, from EFF. This is the only browser I've ever seen out of the box where it comes up green for everything. Like, even the fingerprinting thing comes up green. That's good. Like, I've never seen that before. Like, even Brave doesn't do it. Yeah, it has the Black Origin built in, I think. Yeah. Oh, right. Actually, so there's the caveat, I guess. Yeah. But it works really well. Well, there you go. And if you only use it as a secondary browser, the sync isn't important because you're not really bookmarking. I mean, Zen has all my very elaborate bookmarks and tabs and workspaces and all that stuff. There's an astonishing photo that Joe Esposito has posted to the Discord. I have been, unfortunately, missing. There have been so many good photos coming over the transom here, and I've been missing a lot of them. There's not a shit. This might be my new profile photo. This will be a new segment on the show where we show what's going on in the Discord. We have a lot of AI guys. This is a good one. Oh, yeah, there you are, sniping Curious George. Yep. You look a little worried like you might be. No, I'm like, I want to get it right. I'm like, you can thank me later, world. Oh, my God, with this 50-millimeter cannon. There's some other good ones if you go back. I know. They've been putting a lot of good stuff up here, and I haven't really been showing them. I should. It's spectacular. Yeah, I really should because these guys. This is why I love. Oh, this is a fun one. Went during the Club Twit thing. I'm a little disturbed that you're promoting a trash 80 there. This is an old Radio Shack ad. Joe Esposito is a Photoshop with, not an AI guy. So he takes original ads and puts our own content in there. It's pretty good. It's really good, I have to say. There we are as Teletubbies. Yep. Oh, no. And then they run around in circles. Which one of these is the girl Teletubby? I don't remember. Oh, boy. I think they're all androgy. Are they gendered? Yeah, they're androgy. I think. Yeah, they're there. Okay. Here's Barney, the purple dinosaur. Okay. Here's Mario. I think we've got all the... I think that people need to keep themselves entertained while they're watching this. Here we are. Here we are with the sloth visiting. Actually, they have closed Sloth World. Very sad to say, because of... And now 55 sloths have died in Sloth World, including Dumpling, the much-beloved Dumpling. So I think that there is something. Here we are in our space outfits. Thank you, Darren Oki. One of these will end up being the thumbnail for the show. You know that, right? Yeah. Here's the sad story of Dumpling, the 55th Sloth World death, which now has caused Sloth World. Not launching a Florida State investigation into the death of Dumpling. It's just a crazy... You can't get much more Florida than that, really. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry if your kids are watching this. That's probably pretty absurd. Sorry about Dumpling, guys. Now, ladies and gentlemen, Richard takes over. An adult, finally, in the room. It had to happen eventually, unlike with the Teletubbies. They're all Teletubbies in the end. What's coming up on Run As? As published today was my conversation with Vashnavi Gudura about production LLMs. Now, what do you figure is the largest LLM application that has LLMs embedded and runs every day? I think it's Teams. Oh, my God. Because every Teams call does transcripts, summaries, multiple languages. and Vesnavi is one of the ladies that operates that system and just talked about what it means to manage 500 million Teams calls. Sure. Wow. And what it takes to scale systems to run those kinds of language models and all those things and also cover all the rules of the countries, all the regulatory bodies for that kind of data transcription. Like, it's a huge problem. and just, it's one of those things where you come on the other side of it going, A, I'm glad I don't have that job, and B, what you're doing is easier than what they're doing. True, true. Yeah. Anyway, it's a great opportunity to talk to just an extraordinarily brilliant lady who is just cranking on a hard problem with a great team. Run As Radio, episode 1036. You get it at runasradio.com. And now, I'm wondering, do you have something from Belgium? I went shopping in Belgium because, you know, and it's Belgium. What do you know about Belgium? Everybody likes Belgium. Beer. They're famous for beer. Mannequin fizz. It's the bah in Benelux, right? Yes. It's part of the low country. You put the bah in Benelux. You put the bah in Benelux. You're Belgium. what's that beer with the pink elephant is from there yeah I'm going to talk about that later it falls into the story yeah the Tremis so Belgium is Flanders in the north which is the Dutch speaking part although they have their own variant called Flemish or Belgian Dutch the south part is Wallonia which is much more the French speaking part and in this course there's Brussels which is actually in Flanders It's the Dutch part, but they mostly speak French there. Is Antwerp in the Flemish part? What is Antwerp? Yeah, very much up against the Dutch border here. So I actually flew into Amsterdam to train down. It only takes about an hour. It's a great ride. Easier than flying into the Brussels airport, I swear. This is also a country that just doesn't have government sometime. You know, in 2010, their election was so – their election had so many parties involved, They couldn't get a coalition together to actually make one for 541 days. What? Which seems like a lot, except in 2018, the same thing happened again. They didn't actually have a government for 652 days. What? And you know what happened in that time? Nothing. They were fine. That tells me something. Belgium. Yeah, they're kind of chill. At one point during that long break, they talked about actually splitting the country up. Flanders going to the Netherlands and Wallonia going to France. Let's not be a country anymore. But of course, Brussels make that all impossible. This is the headquarters for NATO since 1967. This is the de facto capital of the EU. Normally there isn't a capital of the EU, but there are some major centers and no one in Brussels is huge. And like you said, Leo, it's all about the beer. The Trappist, the Lambics, the Whitt beers, the Stations, the Strong Ales, like the Christmas beers. So many beers. So if you're going to talk about a whiskey in Belgium, it only makes sense that it's a 15-year-old distillery attached to a 500-year-old brewery. But maybe we should go to the start. We're talking about the low country lands here, this area that they now call Belgium. And there's evidence of human habitation going back 100,000 years. So that's mostly Neanderthal. So even in the Neolithic period, this is the western edge of what they called the LBK or the linear pottery culture, so named because their pottery has a very distinctive style with bands on it. That was about 7,000 years ago, so 5,000 BC. They were doing agriculture here fairly early on, one of the very first agricultural societies anywhere. That actually collapses after 1,000 years, and literally for 2,000 years, there's no evidence of farming in this area whatsoever. We don't see really permanent farming culture around here until about the end of the Bronze Age, 1750 or so. The Celts show up in this part of the world about 500 BC. They were the big traders, of course, so they're trading into the Mediterranean and so forth. And Julius Caesar himself arrives in this area where he refers to them as the Belge during the Gallic Wars. and in his Comitare di Bello Galacchio, he describes these residents as a fierce confederation of tribes that, of course, they've won over between the Seine and the Rhine rivers, and this area remains part of the Roman Empire and subsequently the Holy Roman Empire until the collapse of the Western Empire in 500 AD. So 500 years, this was Gallia. This was a Roman part of the world. As the Western Empire collapses, we get the Merovingian dynasty, followed by the Carolingian dynasty. They actually fight back and forth and have control in different times. Around 800 AD, you get Charlemagne in the area, and then after his death in 814, there's a conflict for the better part of another 100 years until the Franks dominate the French, so to take control of that. And that largely breaks down into a series of feudal states for the 11th and 12th centuries. And so by the 1200s, this area is basically tested between the French and the English, going back and forth repeatedly while trade goes on through the Hanseatic League, which leads us to the story of this particular whiskey, which is actually made, it's the Golden Carolus, this particular one's the Port Oak, and this is from Mecklen, just south of here, outside of Antwerp, particularly in the Gruth-Beggenhof. So Mecklen is a small town, or not that small anymore, but back then. And there were these areas, these colonial areas, and this is the grand one. This was a religious, a lay religious woman's community. So they didn't want to be nuns, but they did have a strong Christian influence and the community was founded in 1232. So this is old doctrine, old culture. And this particular one is seven and a half acres over 100 buildings, now considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And And this group of women were running a hospital, but they also brewed beer as part of their charitable mission. And in 1471, Duke Charles the Bold granted that group a tax exemption for their beer. It's always about taxes in the end. And they had operated continuously in that form for the next 400 years. it's not until 1872 that the van Bredem family who were distillers in Blasfeld further to the east they acquired the brewery because they want the tax benefits and of course they focus on ales because a lot of Belgian beer is ale based and by 1904 the brewery is known as Hetanker or The Anker as it was such a important part of the city's past and it's always been there, always been part of the process and so the name Golden Carolus actually comes in 1960 after a flagship beer. Remember, this is a brewery this whole time. And the Golden Carolist actually mentions is about the golden coins that are admitted during the reign of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. And Charles, the man himself, had spent his formative years in Mecklen. And so it was effectively the brewery's patron saint. So by 2010, so again, they've been making beer all along. Van Breedem and the Le Clef families finally built a distillery they call Stillery de Molenberg. on the back in Glasfeld in their 17th century farmstead, which had once hosted the family's Geneva distillery. This part of the world made an early variant of gin called Geneva, still aged with juniper and so forth. But that had long shut down, but they already had the space, so that's what they used as a common product. They moved that distillery to Mecklen in 2024. It's all very recent. And Charles Le Cleft, which is the current gin managing director, who represents the fifth generation of the Van Breeden-Lecliffe families that have run the brewery and now also the distillery. But it turns out he's the last. He has no family successor. And so he's actually, at the end of 2024, sold the entire facility to the bourgeois Huguen out of Mel, which also is a 300-year-old brewery but never got into distilling. But they're famous for a beer called Delirion Tremens, which is the name for severe alcohol withdrawal. It's a strong blonde ale. It's a good beer. Yeah. It's got a great label too. Well, because they call it delirium tremens, it actually upset a lot of people. It was banned in the U.S. for a while there, so they changed the name, but they put the pink elephant on it, and that's where you get the pink elephant from. So this is a very modern distillery. It's built a modern way. They actually bought stills from Forsyth to Scotland. It was the first in Belgium because whiskey culture has not been around here for very long. It's not a big thing. But when you've got a 500-year-old brewery and you're going to make whiskey, you start with beer. So they literally use the same process that they make the Golden Carolus Triple, which is a 9% blonde ale. And at the point where you would add hops to it and it becomes the ale, now they actually diverted into distilling, which has some interesting consequences. And I want you to notice this bottle is mostly empty because I was hanging around with a group of miscreants last night and we just had to taste it. Now who's got delirium tremens? Oh, boy. I call it being at work. But okay. But otherwise, the still is a classic modern still, so stainless steel mash guns, a lot of turns. They do the double distillation in copper pots. They, of course, use ex-burban barrels for their primary aging. and then in this case of this one, which is the Port Oak, they do their finish in Portuguese port wine casks. It's a warehouse in Mecklen, which has got a good climate for this, relatively cool winters, mild summers, steady humidity. So they actually have a very slow angels loss. They typically distill up to 68%. They barrel at 63.5. This is bottled at 46, I think I wrote down here, but it actually says 48. So I probably misread it. This is the 48. And this is only a 500ml bottle. It's a small bottle. There aren't a lot of rules for Belgian whiskey because it is a relatively new thing. They've only been really making it from the 2000s. And so they're pretty relaxed. They don't care about what grain you use, although admittedly this is all barley because they do make it from beer. And, oh, no, I had to pour it all into my glass. That's so sad. It's all gone. It's not all gone. It went to a better place. their original head anchor was a single malt and it immediately won best Belgian single malt which is not much of an achievement when there's only two but okay this Port Oak edition is a much newer version now this beer of course because it's a port cast it's got a lot of color in it right that's just cheating because you've got the port it's a gentle nose for a 48 it should be more fiery it's just not and that's typical of you know Belgian beer is 8%, 9%, 10% and you don't notice it until you drink too many of them. And they come in nice big bottles, just so you can. Here's what's really cool about this whiskey. It's got a beer note to it. It's kind of beer-y. It's got that sort of sudsy feel at the back of your throat. I mean, there's still heat going down. I'm definitely drinking whiskey. There's no joys about it. But the same way when you take a big slug of ale even after you swallow, you've got sort of a juiciness in your mouth, it's like the beer suds, it's in there and I figured out why it's because they're using the ale yeasts, the normal yeast that they make the triple from the usual distiller's yeast which is also an ale style yeast, right, like there's ale yeast and there's lager yeast, the lager yeast are bottom fermenting and they're slow, they're for preserving beer, for making lagers, ale yeast are fast, they run hot they cook off quickly short duration and so forth. But distiller's yeast, the type that the Scottish use, are very neutral. They don't have a lot of flavors in it. But man, this is Belgium. And Belgium takes their beer really seriously. So this is a bright, flavorful yeast that this whiskey was made from. And you can tell. You can tell immediately. I swear to you, if you put Belgian whiskeys, and there's two that do this, that use the ale yeast. There's also one called Belgian Owl, which we'll save for next year, because I'm probably going to be back. I'm telling you, you'd know right away. There's something so distinct about this. And it makes me laugh because there's so many countries that are trying to make whiskey that you can't distinguish for Scottish whiskey, right? We've tried them all. We go to all kinds of places. But all of a sudden, like, wait, this is Belgian whiskey. And you know right away because the Belgians aren't afraid of serious yeast. And that's what they've done here. And it's made something super special. Now, I picked up this bottle at Husverloo, which is just down the road here. Guys are very nice and easy for me to work with. It cost me 51 euros. It's about 60 US dollars. And admittedly, that is only a 500 mil bottle. So if you're going to balance that number out for a typical 750, we're talking about about a $19 bottle of whiskey. And unfortunately, not sold in the US. You can get Golden Carol-less beer in the US. they've never exported the whiskey. Is that because they don't make enough? I think that's part of it. I think the licensing is complicated. I think it's still a relatively new product. It's just changed hands. So the new guys who don't have a distillery at all, they're still going to figure this out. It'll be interesting to see what happens going forward on this. I'm a fan of port barrels. I really love that. Port aging is great. And their regular single malt has won multiple awards. and by all means people say great things about it. But I'm telling you, the secret of the Belgian whiskey is that ale yeast. That's made it just a thing that you would know immediately that it's Belgian. And that's, I mean, good on Belgian. They came up with a way to make their whiskey theirs. And I'm delighted, delighted. Isn't that nice? And now it's 10 o'clock at night here, so I don't feel bad having a drink or two. Yeah, I mean, by the way, Richard will take one for the team no matter what time of the day or night, sometimes 5 a.m. Six in the morning. Sometimes. He doesn't. You know, he's that kind of guy. He's very selfless. It's not even day drinking. It's like early morning drinking. Yeah. I usually take a very small sip early in the day. That's probably what it is. No, this is the end of my day, so. Enjoy. I'm sorry that it's the end of it. I'm delighted to find this whiskey. Just very, very happy. I bet it's really good. I can taste it. You know, you don't get surprised very often, right, genuinely, and then sort of unravel the whole plan and go, okay, I get what you've done here, and I'm here for it. Cool. Very nice. Very nice. Richard Campbell, besides being our whiskey expert, also does a couple of really interesting podcasts run as radio and with Carl Franklin, .NET rocks. If you're a .NET fan, I'm sure you know about that. That's the .NET podcast. Both of them are at runasradio.com. Paul Therat has a very famous website called therat.com. It's coincidental. He has no relation to Therat, but no, he does. It's his book. I mean, it's eponymous, as a matter of fact, T-H-U-R-R-O-double-good.com. His books are at leanpub.com, although I'll give you a hint. You can get them for free. Windows everywhere, the field guide to Windows 11, and, of course, the new DNShitify windows if you become a premium member at therot.com. So it's well, well worth your money. I'm a proud premium member. And I guess Paul's heading back to Pennsylvania tomorrow? Wow. Friday. Friday for a couple of months. Richard, where are you headed next? Berlin. Ah, and of that I am jealous of. I am so jealous. So many great places. Yeah, and I'm really looking forward to it. The Germans make some interesting whiskeys, too, so I'll be doing some searching on Monday. Are you flying or training? I'm going to fly. I'm taking the train tomorrow up to Alchemar to spend a few days with a buddy of mine, and then Sunday fly to Berlin and home on. I just love the trains in Europe. It's so easy to get around. It's so great. It's so great. Well, we will be back. We do the show every Wednesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live if you're in the club, of course, in the club, Twit, Discord. But if you're not in the club, you can still watch on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. We want to be wherever you are so that you can listen and watch live. And if you're in any of those places and you're chatting, I see your chat, and I appreciate it. We love having you in the chat. after the fact on demand versions of the show available at twit.tv slash www that's our website and we have audio and video there so you can take your pick everybody seems to be liking video more and more these days I still think audio is a dominant podcast medium but video is up and coming I hear this YouTube it might catch on you never know we'll see you never know we are on YouTube We have a Windows Weekly channel there. The nice thing about that, besides making it easy to watch, is you can share clips from it. You know, you can actually jump to a part of the video and share it with somebody, and everybody can watch YouTube, so that's kind of a good way to tell people about the show. We appreciate it when you do that. But for somebody who watches every week or listens every week, probably the best way to get it is subscribe. Now, if you're a Club Twit member, you'll have a unique URL just for you that's the ad-free version. everybody else put the just search, go to your favorite podcast client and search for Windows Weekly you'll see it right there if you have a choice of audio or video or both actually if you search for tweet you'll find that and all the other shows, something like 15 other shows that we do, all of which are subscribable. If you want to comment on this show, club members of course can do that in the Discord, there's a kind of mini forum for all the shows in the Discord, but everybody it's open to the public can go to our forums at twit.community. I don't mention them enough, and I think it's a great way, and it's the only really way that you can directly comment on the show is I read those comments, and we appreciate those, positive and negative. You can also participate in our Mastodon instance if you're a fan of the Fediverse. That's at twit.social. Both of those are open to Twit listeners, so when you sign up, you won't get it. I have to approve it because there's a lot of spam and bots out there. I finally figured out. I saw your post about this. Yeah, I finally figured out how that happened. So there is an organization called Iftos that looks for disinformation on social networks. They sent me notifications a couple of days ago that there were like a dozen Russian bot accounts on twit.social. And I thought, well, I have to approve all accounts. I couldn't figure out how they got in. And then I looked at their application, and they were invited by somebody. So that was a little loophole where you could invite somebody to join. I'm sorry about the Russian bot thing. I'm not really good at social media. Don't invite Russian bots. I turned off invitations. So that ain't going to happen anymore. You can't get invited to an invitation. You just go. I'm inviting you, twit.social. All you have to do is say, I listen to Windows Weekly or anything. So the bots are like vampires. They need to be invited in. and then they can get in. By Waterloo says, I only invited them for the free vodka. They were nasty, too. I mean, the stuff they were posting, it wasn't nasty. It was disinformation. It was real propaganda. It was actually kind of interesting. And I thank you, Iftus, for catching them. And I think I've purged them all. At least I've turned off the invite capability. It was that Julie invited them all. Thank you, Julie. It was also a vibe. Julie was the disinformation bot as well. Somehow she got in. I must have overlooked it. Well, people, you know, they can masquerade as a person, and they lurk around for a little while. Everything's fine. All you have to do is say, I listen to Twit. I'm not, like, vetting everybody. You're not doing a background check on every single person? No, but most spam bots don't. Even though it says when you sign up, why do you want to join? They don't ever enter anything in that field. All we have to say is, I like Twit, and they'd be in. Right. Well, now that you've given the recipe for getting in. Well, I don't think the boss listened to Windows. Right. Anyway, I'm hoping. We would love to have you in the Discord, if you're a club member, the Discourse. If you're not, that's at twit.community and the Macedon at twit.social. We pay for them. I moderate them. I keep an eye on them. I keep forgetting to mention them, so we'd love to have you in there. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Have a great week. Safe travels. We'll see you all right back here next Wednesday for Windows Week. Bye-bye.