00:00SPEAKERSo there's some rituals that we have before we record a podcast every week. We, you know,
00:06SPEAKERsit in the room on a video call, we have our lights on bright, we have a little app on our
00:13SPEAKERphones that beeps in sync so that we can sync up the podcast audio easily afterwards. And usually
00:20SPEAKERwe chat for a few minutes before we get going. And sometimes we record those and they become
00:23SPEAKERthe cold open. But today I'm doing something a little bit different. Brad's still out. He's still
00:30SPEAKERdealing with some family stuff and we'll be back when he's back. And I really appreciate all the
00:36SPEAKERthoughts that people have sent to him. That's been lovely to see the comments and the messages on
00:42SPEAKERdiscords and stuff. It's really nice. I know he'll appreciate it when he's back. But it's been a
00:47SPEAKERminute since we did a Q&A episode, since I did a Q&A episode. And rather than subject someone else
00:52SPEAKERto our some poor guest host and waste their expertise on a rambling question and answer
00:58SPEAKERepisode, I sat down and I made a big giant list of questions from our audience, from the question
01:04SPEAKERseeking answers channel or the podcast email address, which I'll share in a minute after the
01:10SPEAKERintro. And we're gonna do questions. But before we get to that, it's just weird to sit in a dark room
01:15SPEAKERand record a podcast. [MUSIC]
01:44SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will and I'm here solo today. It's just me, me
01:50SPEAKERand a bunch of questions from you, the listener. I went through our question seeking answers channel
01:56SPEAKERon the discord where you can post your own questions if you're in the discord and dug
02:02SPEAKERthrough tech pod at content.town and pulled up a ton, just an absolute boatload of questions out.
02:09SPEAKERNow I saved some of them because there's some that are Brad questions. So there's some that
02:14SPEAKERare saved for later. And at some point when he's back, we'll go through the backlog of questions
02:18SPEAKERand we'll pull some out because there's some real bangers on things like drive pools and
02:24SPEAKERbuilding a custom router that are outside of my scope of interest. And he actually has some
02:30SPEAKERreal expertise there to answer. So we'll come back to those. If we didn't answer your technical
02:35SPEAKERbanger about topics of interest to Brad, don't worry, we'll probably circle back around or you
02:40SPEAKERcan send it back in again if you want. But again, if you want to send a question, you can send it
02:44SPEAKERto tech body content.town or you can go to the question seeking answers channel in the discord
02:49SPEAKERand post your question in there. So I guess without further ado, I'm going to start with the
02:59SPEAKERfirst question, which is, let's see, hold on, I do it a new format on the file. So I got to dig a
03:04SPEAKERlittle bit here. Here we go. Chris asks, oh, wait, we do it the other way, don't we? Have you ever
03:12SPEAKERtalked about camera drones on the podcast? Recently, I was on YouTube and YouTube recommended
03:17SPEAKERme an inspire one video from Adam savages tested and lo and behold, it was you will talking to a DJI
03:22SPEAKERrep. That got me thinking, I don't recall you guys ever talking about camera drones on the tech pod.
03:27SPEAKERNow I haven't listened to every show. So perhaps you did. So do you use them? And if so, what sorts
03:32SPEAKERof things do you do with them? If you use other types of drones, like FPV ones, I would love to
03:36SPEAKERknow. So I there was a brief period of time in the early 2010s, when drones were exciting and new.
03:43SPEAKERAnd Norman, I both got super duper into them. And then they started regulating where you can use
03:49SPEAKERthem. And it turns out, where we live in Northern California, where there's a lot of urban density,
03:54SPEAKERand a lot of people around and a lot of like the a lot of the open area is actually national forest
03:59SPEAKERor park. It's not a great place to fly drones, because a lot of the places that we would
04:05SPEAKERthink are good drone flying places are prohibited. I also live just outside that three mile exclusion
04:11SPEAKERzone or whatever it is for SFO. I'm down in a hole in a valley like with mountains surrounding me. So
04:17SPEAKERlike at the altitudes at which you fly drones, it shouldn't matter. But we're still excluded for you
04:22SPEAKERknow, good reasons. So yeah, there's not a great place to fly near us. So I once once we once I left
04:29SPEAKERtested and we stopped covering I stopped covering them all the time. I haven't spent as much time
04:33SPEAKERwith them. Also, that market kind of faster than almost any other technology product I've ever seen
04:41SPEAKERwent from, wow, this is really new. And there's a lot of stuff happening every week, every month or
04:45SPEAKERevery week, to Oh, yeah, okay. So there's like three companies that make these and then you can
04:50SPEAKERdo kits if you want. And then there's like racing stuff happening off to the side and some other
04:54SPEAKERweird stuff. But like the cameras and the flight platforms got really good, really, really fast.
04:59SPEAKERSo I haven't spent a lot of time paying attention to them in the last few years.
05:02SPEAKERI do occasionally if I need one for something, I'll borrow one from I have a couple friends who
05:07SPEAKERhave them that will let me borrow and I still have my I did the thing to get the FAA license
05:12SPEAKERfor flying them. I don't know actually, they may have expired by now because it's been probably
05:16SPEAKER10 years since I did that. And I bet it I bet it's I bet it's run out at this point. So anyway,
05:21SPEAKERthat's it. That's that's why we don't do a lot of drone stuff. If we lived in the Midwest, someplace
05:25SPEAKERwhere I had like a 15 acre farm and could fly around and do fun stuff, I would totally have
05:29SPEAKERa couple FPV drones and do the high speed like racing type stuff where you're flying through
05:36SPEAKERtubes and stuff like that. That seems really fun. And and if I'm being honest, getting the 3d
05:41SPEAKERprinter and setting that up and getting it going again has made me look at like RC cars and drones
05:46SPEAKERas a as a thing I should maybe pay attention to again. So there you go. Um, anonymous rad doc
05:55SPEAKERasks, do we do it the other way? That that last question was from Chris Brad usually reads the
06:01SPEAKERquestions. This is the part I'm bad at. On last week's pod, you brought up eyewear options for
06:06SPEAKERcomputing slash screen work. I'm a radiologist. And for the last 15 years, I've had two pairs
06:11SPEAKERof glasses, everyday lenses and one day one pair of glasses specifically focused on the distance
06:17SPEAKERof a computer screen. And it's been life changing. I stayed away from progressives because of my
06:21SPEAKERconcern for next rain, given that I sometimes have to look at four or five monitors in different
06:25SPEAKERconfigurations and limiting my field of focus in any way is less than helpful in my line of work.
06:30SPEAKERThe anti reflective coatings are a great way to go as well. Highly recommended. And that's from
06:35SPEAKERanonymous rad doc. So thank you for presenting that. And I my glasses are on the way. So I'll
06:39SPEAKERlet you know how it goes. I ended up doing the same thing. I actually, my screens are about arms
06:44SPEAKERlength away, but four feet, three, three and a half feet, I guess. And yeah, I, I got glasses,
06:52SPEAKERI got a prescription that's set for that focal range. So I'll let you know how it goes. I'm
06:56SPEAKERcurious because that is my like the, the problem for folks, if folks don't remember the problem
07:04SPEAKERI'm having specifically is that my normal glasses, I need bifocals, but most of the work I do is not
07:12SPEAKERin the, like tilting my head up to use the bifocals on computer screens would be miserable. So
07:19SPEAKERthat's where I'm at. So good to hear that it's worked out for you, anonymous rad talk and thanks
07:24SPEAKERfor sending that in. Let's see, we've got, Oh, here's a fun one. I've been seeing in the press
07:31SPEAKERslash videos that only Intel's full GPU support SRIOV to allow virtualizing GPUs to split them
07:39SPEAKERup for different VMs, containers, and workloads that embedded IGP use wouldn't get support for
07:44SPEAKERthis, even though the latest IGP you triplet stuff was using the same tech as the big dedicated GPUs.
07:51SPEAKERBut this repo, and there's a link to a GitHub repo, seems to hit that the new Linux XE driver
07:56SPEAKERwill support from 15th and possibly 14th gen IGP use with SRIOV. I'm interested in video and code
08:04SPEAKERmachine learning models rather than LLM stuff, but I'm sure it could be used for that as well.
08:09SPEAKERThat is a fascinating thing. This is from Ben. Thanks, Ben. So SRIOV, for folks who don't know,
08:14SPEAKERis the tech that lets you basically slice up a GPU for, like they said, VMs, Docker containers,
08:23SPEAKERstuff like that. And typically it's a thing you get on really, really high end, not even
08:32SPEAKERconsumer level cards, but the kind of pro cards that are limited to server workloads. So the big
08:41SPEAKERNvidia, I can't remember what they are, they're not the DGXs, they're the industrial compute cards
08:50SPEAKERthat they sell. Intel's not the ARC range of cards, but their big server cards as well will
08:58SPEAKERsupport this. So if that's correct, that means Raptor Lake refresh is actually in play too,
09:04SPEAKERand that would be wild. I would assume it's only Arrow Lake or maybe Lunar Lake and newer, but
09:11SPEAKERstill that would be really good. I'll keep an eye on that. I started the GitHub,
09:14SPEAKERso I'll report back later if we find out more about it. Here's one about hardware undervolting.
09:22SPEAKERThis is something Brad can talk about too, but I'm going to take a shot at it.
09:26SPEAKER"I'm catching up on TechPod episodes and just finished listening to the cooler discussions
09:30SPEAKERfor CPUs. I recently decided to try undervolting my CPU and GPU because I was getting tired of the
09:36SPEAKERheat it was kicking out. I'm finding I'm getting similar performance for a lot less fire spitting
09:41SPEAKERout of the back of my tower. Have either of you ever undervolted your hardware or do you have any
09:45SPEAKERinsights into the practice?" And that's from Doug in Santa Maria. So Doug, I know Brad undervolted
09:52SPEAKERhis Raptor Lake Intel machine for years and years and years. I've done the same on GPUs for a while.
09:59SPEAKERSo for a long time, I was running a 1590 on a 1080p monitor, and there's absolutely no reason
10:07SPEAKERto run a 1590 on a 1080p monitor at full speed. So I literally just opened up the Nvidia app and
10:13SPEAKERturned the clocks, the power down a little bit. And as a result, less heat and less energy going
10:22SPEAKERinto the system. So for the 9950x3D, I did some more aggressive undervolting. You can do per-core
10:30SPEAKERcurves that determine how much power is used at different clocks. And there's a tool called
10:38SPEAKERHydra Pro that basically is an optimizer tool that figures out the curves on each one. Now,
10:46SPEAKERit does that by running different workloads on each core constantly over long periods of time.
10:53SPEAKERAnd it does it in all kind of combinations of the cores. So on the 16-core part, it took a really
10:58SPEAKERlong time to run. On an 8-core part, it takes a lot less time. But it gave me basically identical
11:04SPEAKERperformance, sometimes even slightly better performance that I was getting on the native,
11:10SPEAKERjust running stock clocks. I got better performance with that or the same performance at worst.
11:16SPEAKEROn high multitasking load and multi-threaded loads. And I was using a lot less power.
11:21SPEAKERNow, the bad thing is the way to get that is you have to subscribe to this guy's Patreon.
11:25SPEAKERBut it's called Hydra Pro 2.3a, I think is the most current version. And it's only for AMD parts
11:35SPEAKERlast time I checked. So if you have that, and especially if you have a dual CCD chip, it's
11:40SPEAKERprobably worth paying five bucks and downloading whatever the current version is and figuring out
11:43SPEAKERwhere your curves are, and then uninstalling it and unsubscribing to the Patreon if you're
11:46SPEAKERnot going to keep using it on the rag. But it's a quite useful tool. When Brad's back,
11:52SPEAKERwe'll talk more about his experience with the 14900K because that was a little different beast.
12:02SPEAKERMatthew in Ottawa asks, "Do you have any experience with Peltier coolers?
12:06SPEAKERYour recent topic about AIO coolers made me wonder whether either of you have ever encountered Peltier
12:11SPEAKERCPU coolers. In the early 2000s, I remember seeing one listed at a local computer store and never
12:16SPEAKERreferenced since, which left me curious, even if plugging your CPU coolers directly into... Oh,
12:24SPEAKERleft me curious, even if plugging your CPU cooler directly into a 110 volt outlet seemed dot dot dot
12:31SPEAKERquestionable." Yeah, it was questionable. It turns out we stopped using those for a whole host of
12:36SPEAKERreasons. But the main reason is, so Peltier has worked by having two different materials,
12:42SPEAKERtwo different metals fused together, and they apply current to one. And basically what it does
12:47SPEAKERis it pumps heat from one side of the device to the other side of the device. So they can get
12:54SPEAKERreally, really cold on one side and really, really hot on the other side. Now, that seems like it
13:00SPEAKERwould be a good thing, right? But they're not particularly efficient in terms of how much heat
13:09SPEAKERis transferred per watt of energy put into the device. And because they get very, very cold,
13:14SPEAKERthey can cause things like condensation problems. So in the old days, if you were doing a Peltier
13:19SPEAKERcooler, you had to do things like caulk around the components underneath the thing because
13:27SPEAKERit would form ice and on the non-contact edges. And that ice, when the computer was turned off,
13:35SPEAKERwould then melt and bad things would happen. So they weren't popular for a whole host of reasons,
13:42SPEAKERbut the main ones were efficiency and the condensation problem. I have seen them used
13:46SPEAKERin other places over the years. So often they're used in industrial devices where overall heat in
13:52SPEAKERthe system matters less than keeping one particular thing cold. They have been used, I think people
13:59SPEAKERare using solid state controllers on them now. So in the old days, you would just power on or power
14:05SPEAKERoff. I think now they use like PWMs to turn them on and off really quickly so that they do enough
14:12SPEAKERheat, enough cooling to keep your component cold without actually freezing the cold plate on the
14:18SPEAKERother end. Often Peltiers are what's in those little desktop refrigerators that are wildly
14:26SPEAKERinefficient, the no compressor ones, or also in ice makers sometimes, like countertop ice makers.
14:35SPEAKERSo they're, like I said, generally not super great in terms of the amount of heat that they
14:40SPEAKERgenerate. The other side of this is that they spit a ton of heat out the back. So you'd have to have
14:45SPEAKERsome way to cool the backside of the thing, which usually in the old days was a big giant heat sink
14:50SPEAKERattached to a bunch of fans. So you didn't really get a whole lot of, the benefit was you could get
14:57SPEAKERthe temperature on the plate below ambient temperature in the room. The downside was you
15:02SPEAKERstill had to cool, you had two things generating heat instead of just the one now. So yeah,
15:08SPEAKERthey didn't didn't really take off. There's a bunch of interesting solid state cooling stuff coming now, like the fanless fans,
15:16SPEAKERfanless air movers. There's a couple of those. One is from a company called Frohr is the company
15:26SPEAKERthat makes one of them. There's another one that's shipping now as well. And then there's also some
15:30SPEAKERinteresting stuff happening with phase change on coolers. So the thermal interface, instead of using,
15:37SPEAKERI feel like we talked about this a few months ago, but instead of using like a carbon pad or thermal
15:42SPEAKERgrease, they're using materials that are solid at room temperature and liquid at, or more fluid at
15:49SPEAKERthe temperature the computer operates at. So like a hundred C. And those are incredibly promising
15:56SPEAKERand really exciting, I think. Here is a great question. It's from Joshua. I'm an English major
16:05SPEAKERby education and a commercial contractor by trade. So my summer reading lists often oscillate between
16:10SPEAKERclassical lit and technical papers on building materials and practices this summer. However,
16:15SPEAKERI have an itch to delve into the history of modern computation. That being said, my understanding of
16:20SPEAKERcomputers is extremely pedestrian. Do you have any reading recommendations that could serve as
16:24SPEAKERboth a history of an explanation of current computing, but as a way of example, I really
16:29SPEAKERenjoy the YouTube channel Curious Mark. So, okay. So I pulled a couple out here. Explanation of current
16:35SPEAKERcomputing is hard because the systems are really complicated, but like they're essentially,
16:43SPEAKERessentially what we've done since let's say 1996 or 1995, when the 386 and 486 were rising and
16:52SPEAKERpopular is add more cores and more math capability, more specialized math capability to the computer.
17:00SPEAKERBut fundamentally the computers are, you know, the buses are faster. The ways you connect devices
17:06SPEAKERinto those machines are faster. The connection between the CPU and the RAM is faster. The
17:10SPEAKERconnection, the speed of the, of the data storage, the hard drives or the SSDs is infinitely faster.
17:17SPEAKERThere's specialized coprocessors like GPUs and NPUs that do, you know, make games or AI stuff
17:24SPEAKERin the case of the GPU and the NPU, I guess, makes your background blurry and windows on
17:31SPEAKERcall sometimes, I guess. I don't know. But so, so what I, what I did was I came up, I've read a,
17:38SPEAKERI've read a handful of books that I really like for this. They're not exactly in the realm of
17:44SPEAKERwhat's the history of an explanation of how we got to where we are with current computing.
17:48SPEAKERBut I have some basic stuff. The first one is called the Idea Factory. It's the story
17:52SPEAKERof Bell Labs, which was one of the early kind of corporate think, think takes at Bell Telephone,
17:58SPEAKERthe Bell Telephone company in the eighties and seventies, where they did a lot of the transistor
18:03SPEAKERwork and the stuff that became the core foundations of the modern computer. I, it's been a long time
18:10SPEAKERsince I read that, but I remember it being absolutely fascinating. It's not directly relevant
18:14SPEAKERtoday, but it is a good, how we got there. In the same vein of that, Soul of a New Machine won the
18:20SPEAKERPulitzer in like 1981. And it's about the first microcomputers, right? The early, early eighties
18:28SPEAKERmicrocomputers and the kind of path to getting those, turning those from an idea to a market.
18:34SPEAKERFire in the Valley by Michael Swain is another great one. It's kind of the story of Silicon
18:42SPEAKERValley in the seventies and early eighties when like Steve Jobs and Wozniak and the HP guys and
18:49SPEAKEReverybody were building these computers in their garage, garages that were started out as kit
18:54SPEAKERcomputers and then quickly became more mainstream as the eighties kind of adopted them for business
19:00SPEAKERstuff. And then that was written, Fire in the Valley is fairly old, I think. I can't, I can't
19:06SPEAKERremember what it was originally published. It was 2014. So it's, it's actually 10 years old at this
19:10SPEAKERpoint. But yeah, it talks about stuff like the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs interactions when they
19:17SPEAKERwere figuring out DOS and, you know, early, early windows and Mac software. Hackers by Steven Levy
19:26SPEAKERis another like mid 2010s book, I think maybe early 2020s. Oh no, 2010. And it's about that
19:33SPEAKERsame time, the early garage days of the, of the personal computer. And then let's see for newer
19:41SPEAKERstuff. Newer stuff is a little harder. There haven't been as many books written about the last
19:44SPEAKERlike 15 years. The last one is in the beginning was the command line, which is a series of Neil
19:48SPEAKERStevenson essays about the history of human computer interaction and why he loves the command
19:53SPEAKERline. I mean, I think he's a Linux guy still. So it explains a lot. I also, when I was looking
19:59SPEAKERfor these books, I found I did the classic thing where I searched for three things that I like in
20:04SPEAKERthis. And then I found a list that somebody had made on Reddit that included those three things
20:09SPEAKERand a couple others. So I'll, I'll share the link to that, but they list some stuff. There's some
20:14SPEAKERreally good stuff in here that's out of print, but I was able to find it at my local library.
20:19SPEAKERBit by bit is an illustrated history of computers by Stan Augerton. I read that a hundred, a million
20:24SPEAKERyears ago. It it was, it was absolutely fantastic. It's really, really interesting. It's from like
20:29SPEAKER1985. It shows you pictures of circuits when they were still big enough that you could see them
20:36SPEAKERunder a microscope, stuff like that. And then the dream machine by Michael Waldrop is also
20:44SPEAKERreally good. This is a book about the person who in the early days of computers was thinking about
20:52SPEAKERhow we were actually going to interact with them. And a lot of his ideas ended up shaping
20:57SPEAKERwindows and, and, and Mac OS and the internet and all of these things that we didn't really
21:02SPEAKERthink about as, as that are just like background noise of computing. Now that's by Michael Waldrop,
21:10SPEAKERthe dream machine is what that's called. And it's about JCR lick lighter. It's a fascinating,
21:17SPEAKERfascinating read. I read that a long time ago as well. So anyway I hope that helps. I'll share the,
21:23SPEAKERthe list of this Reddit post as well as the books that I mentioned in the, in the show notes. So you
21:28SPEAKERcan find links to them. Let's see, we've got Nate from Fort Collins says I've had my current email
21:35SPEAKERaddress for nearly 20 years now. I have a little over 68,000 unread messages in it and I've used
21:41SPEAKERthis to sign up for countless services. Yeah. So say we all, um, my question is when should I,
21:49SPEAKEROh, well, I don't necessarily have a problem with this address. I'm usually able to catch important
21:54SPEAKERemails as they arrive. I could never truly curate this inbox. My question is when should I declare
22:00SPEAKERemail bankruptcy? I'd have a lot of services to update and I'd have to build the habit of
22:04SPEAKERproviding a good email address. Plus I'd have to monitor this one to make sure I don't miss
22:08SPEAKERanything important that I'd forgotten to update. So this is a great question, Nate. I think a lot
22:13SPEAKERof us are hitting this now because we have 20 year old Gmail addresses and the experience of having a
22:19SPEAKER20 year old Gmail address that I wantonly signed up for a bunch of things in the pre-spam law days
22:25SPEAKERand, and, uh, used a common name combination for, uh, is bad. It turns out I get thousands of
22:33SPEAKERmessages a day and they're almost all garbage. Um, so I did this a couple of years ago and it was,
22:39SPEAKERit was fabulous. It has been a, an incredible change in my quality of life I'm doing. Um,
22:46SPEAKERso I have, I signed up for fast mail. We've talked, we talked about it a little bit,
22:48SPEAKERI think last week or the week before, but, um, it lets you do A lets you hook up at a domain level.
22:55SPEAKERSo if you own a bunch of domains that you use for different things. So like I have
23:00SPEAKERthe podcast domains, I have the other podcast domains. I have, um, stuff for Twitch stream.
23:06SPEAKERI have stuff for consulting and they're all on different domains and different email addresses.
23:11SPEAKERAnd I can set them all to come in to the, to one place and I can set it up on the domain level so
23:16SPEAKERthat I can add new aliases and new addresses on those domains really, really easily, which is
23:21SPEAKERfabulous. Um, it's not for everybody. It's not necessary for a lot of people, but for me, that
23:26SPEAKERworks really well. They also let you do the private address thing that, that, um, Apple and Android
23:32SPEAKERboth launched a couple of years ago as I think premium premium features like Apple's, you have
23:37SPEAKERto be an Apple one subscriber, have to pay them for storage or something to get access to it.
23:42SPEAKERUm, but the idea is you, you generate a throwaway email address that you can turn off at any time
23:46SPEAKERwhen you're signing up for something questionable. So that means in addition to every service,
23:50SPEAKERhaving a unique password because of my password manager, every service, every, every time I sign
23:57SPEAKERup for a pizza joints email plan, I generate a one-off email address and I use that instead of my,
24:04SPEAKERmy primary ones. So even if they do sell my mailing, my, my list, my email to somebody else,
24:10SPEAKERthen I can kill the server, kill that email address and sign up for a new one. You can also turn it
24:15SPEAKERback on with fast mail if you need to at some point in the future. So, um, so I've been doing that.
24:20SPEAKERIt's been really good. I do have to go back in and check the Gmail address, my old Gmail address
24:25SPEAKERfairly regularly to make sure I didn't miss anything. But it turns out often if I get like,
24:31SPEAKERbasically every time I get a, Hey, you need to change your password on this cause we've been
24:34SPEAKERhacked or something. I just put them on the new, on the new fast mail one-off email addresses. And
24:40SPEAKERit's been really good. The other super interesting thing about this is that I think none of the
24:44SPEAKERservices I've signed up for using the one-off email addresses like, you know, dominoes and
24:49SPEAKERmicro center and all that stuff. When I go into the folders that I've created to filter those,
24:54SPEAKERI'm not seeing any sold email. So the spam that I'm getting isn't because some company I gave my
25:01SPEAKERemail address is, is selling my email address to other people. It's just the background noise of
25:06SPEAKERspam is, is truly revolting. It's, it's terrifying. There's a lot, a lot. So anyway, that's it on
25:14SPEAKERthat. I would argue that the reduction in stress from missing emails coming into that, that
25:21SPEAKERimportant, the, the important emails coming into the spam written address has been worth the, the
25:27SPEAKERhassle of switching over. And you can also do it in a more kind of gradual way. You like, it doesn't
25:33SPEAKERhave to be something that you go through and resign up all the accounts at once you can do it
25:36SPEAKERgradually over time. And that's fine because that email address is still going to be there. And most
25:40SPEAKERof the things that you're getting email on from those services, probably fine to ignore.
25:47SPEAKERHere's another Joshua. This is, this was a different Joshua. Joshua asks, I'm in the
25:51SPEAKERmarket for a new laptop and I'm thinking about buying a framework 16. Although it will cost a
25:56SPEAKERlittle more upfront, it seems like it will be cheaper and more sustainable in the long
26:00SPEAKERrun to get something that is infinitely fixable and upgradable. However, I have yet to actually
26:04SPEAKERput my hands on any framework hardware. Are there any major downsides I should consider if I want to
26:08SPEAKERgo this route? Also, do you think that other PC manufacturers will start making their laptops
26:13SPEAKERmore repairable as a result of framework success in the marketplace? Okay. So the second part is
26:18SPEAKEReasy. No, because the framework is still really, really small compared to your Dells and the Novos
26:23SPEAKERand, and HPs and all those. I think, I think the right to repair laws and the the like some of the
26:32SPEAKERlaws coming out of the EU around right to repair and stuff like that probably are going to have
26:36SPEAKERmore impact on that than, than frameworks success, unfortunately. Now the framework 16 model is a
26:43SPEAKERreally lovely laptop. We had one in the PC world office for, for a minute and I got to spend some
26:48SPEAKERtime with it. The one thing I will say about that, and I think they fixed it on their, on the refresh
26:53SPEAKERthat they did last year or earlier this year, I guess now, cause that's still a relatively new
26:58SPEAKERlaptop. But the, the metal, okay. So how's, how to describe this, you know, how there's a keyboard
27:06SPEAKERand then there's a track pad and then there's metal on either sides of the track pad on most
27:11SPEAKERlaptops, including the framework 13, the metal around the keyboard and the, the keyboard itself
27:18SPEAKERand the metal around the track pad are all one piece of metal and the framework 16,
27:23SPEAKERbecause they wanted to support multiple size keyboards and multiple placements for the track
27:28SPEAKERpad. They did these weird spacers down on that place where you put your hands, where you rest
27:34SPEAKERyour, your wrists on the laptop. And I didn't, I didn't love that. The, the seams were kind of
27:40SPEAKERrough. They, they, it felt bad when you're scraping your hand across the disease, moving your hand
27:45SPEAKERback and forth. Now the benefits of buying the laptop that you can replace hardware on are great.
27:53SPEAKERYou can add an extra GPU later. You can replace memory. The memory's not soldered on. You can add
28:00SPEAKERmultiple SSDs, all sorts of stuff. And like, you can do it when you want to, not when, not when
28:06SPEAKERlike, you know, Dell does their product refresh every other year. I also think that they built
28:11SPEAKERa single bottom panel that includes the track pad for people who didn't like that join as part of
28:18SPEAKERtheir, as part of their upgrade path. Yeah. So it's the one piece haptic touch module. So if you
28:24SPEAKERfeel like having those, those, those kind of seams on the, on the wrist rest are going to be a problem,
28:31SPEAKERjust choose the haptic touch pad module instead of the, instead of the modular one, when you,
28:36SPEAKERwhen you pick it up. And yeah, like I love, I used a framework 13 for a long time. It's a great little
28:42SPEAKERlaptop. Like being able to open it up and unplug things or replug things. If something gets weird
28:49SPEAKERor you need to adjust something, or if you need to change the Bluetooth in the device or whatever
28:54SPEAKERis fabulous. So highly recommended. The 16 is big. So I assume you know what, like what a 16
29:00SPEAKERinch laptop is like, but it's a, it's a beefy guy. So consider that. See, let's do some discord
29:08SPEAKERquestions. I've done a bunch from the email address, but let's, let's hit some discords.
29:17SPEAKERI think, Oh, actually, well, I'll come back to that one later. So this one comes from OhMoshiYoshi,
29:24SPEAKERnot really a Q, but I wanted to thank Will for that whirly pop recommendation all those years
29:28SPEAKERback as someone who just moved to the UK where buttered popcorn is apparently not a thing.
29:32SPEAKERIt has been a lifesaver. What's the point of this free healthcare if I can't clog my
29:36SPEAKERarties up was up with some of that buttery goodness. Do people really not eat buttered
29:40SPEAKERpopcorn in the UK? That's wild to me. I mean, that's like, look, I will put all sorts of like,
29:47SPEAKERI'll do a cheese powder. I'll do a, I've been doing some nutritional yeast and onion powder
29:52SPEAKERand garlic powder lately. That's pretty, that's pretty bomb for popcorn. I'll do a kettle corn
29:59SPEAKERwhere you put a little sweet candy shell on the outside. I love a caramel corn. I'm never going
30:03SPEAKERto make that at home. But but I'm, I enjoy the popcorn. For folks who don't know, the whirly pop
30:09SPEAKERis this it's a it's an aluminum bucket with a spinner. Basically, it's just like a pole that
30:14SPEAKERcomes down the middle and a crank and I want to say I got the original recipe for this from
30:20SPEAKERsomebody on the shack news forums 100 years ago, like 20 years ago at this point, and I bought it
30:25SPEAKERI was like, Oh, wow, I can make popcorn better than the movie theater at home. It's 100% true.
30:31SPEAKERSo the secret to the whirly pop popcorn, I'll repeat it here because I don't think we've talked
30:35SPEAKERabout on the tech pot at all is let's see, you take the world you get a whirly pop it's about 20
30:42SPEAKERbucks on Amazon or at your local home goods store. You get some coconut oil the the solid stuff the
30:49SPEAKERnot the not the partially hydrogenated coconut oil the natural stuff. You get half a cup of popcorn
30:57SPEAKERkernels whichever kind you like freshers better. And then you put like two tablespoons of that
31:02SPEAKERcoconut oil and the bottom of the of the popper. Oh, you also want you want popcorn salt. So
31:08SPEAKERpopcorn salt is a finer salt than you get normally it's small enough that when it hits the popcorn
31:14SPEAKERwhen it's still so when popcorn pops it's soft right when it comes out of the kernel and it
31:19SPEAKERdoesn't get crispy until it dry until it cools down. And the cellulose rehardens after it after
31:25SPEAKERit because what happens okay we're going to do some popcorn science here. When popcorn pops what
31:31SPEAKERhappens is there's a cellulose mixture inside the cell inside the inside the kernel and the
31:37SPEAKERhardness of the kernel lets that get over pressured when it's heated up so that the the
31:43SPEAKERpressure inside that kernel reaches the breaking point of the kernel and then everything the
31:48SPEAKERliquidy soft cellulose structure blasts out of the shell and that's what looks like a popcorn kernel
31:55SPEAKERthat we're all familiar with. Until the popcorn cools down it's pretty chewy like if you've ever
32:01SPEAKEReaten popcorn right out of the right out of the popper it's a it's a it's not a great experience
32:06SPEAKERit tastes it almost is like gummy in your mouth and while it's still in that state if you hit it
32:12SPEAKERwith really fine salt or something that you want to stick to it it just gloms onto the moisture in
32:17SPEAKERthe in the popcorn it gets sucked into the inside of the kernel so you get this really fine it's
32:21SPEAKERcalled popcorn salt it's just a much much finer salt than you get normally with table salt or
32:25SPEAKERkosher salt or whatever and you chuck that in right as it's coming out of the popper anyway
32:31SPEAKERhalf a cup of popcorn two tablespoons of oil put it in the whirly pop crank the whirly pop slowly
32:39SPEAKERyou want you want medium high heat and you want the oil to shimmer and almost smoke maybe even
32:44SPEAKERsmoke a little bit because you want to cook that coconut that sunscreen flavor out of the oil
32:48SPEAKERbefore you put the popcorn in otherwise your popcorn is going to taste a little sunscreeny
32:52SPEAKERso you cook it uh you shimmer the oil dump the popcorn and all at once crank the crank the
32:58SPEAKERhandle on the whirly pop close it up crank the handle on the whirly pop whirly pop fairly slowly
33:04SPEAKERyou don't want to like jam it around and your goal is for all of the popcorn to pop in the in the tub
33:10SPEAKERas quickly as possible so you want it to not pop you don't want it to pop over like a two minute
33:15SPEAKERperiod you want to pop over like a 30 or 20 or 30 second period and then as soon as the as soon as
33:20SPEAKERthe kernel the popping rate slows down you turn the heat off dump it into a bowl salt if you have
33:25SPEAKERbutter you pour butter on it whatever you want to put on at that point is is fair game um so highly
33:31SPEAKERrecommend it it takes a couple of tries to get the knack down but once you do you'll be able to make
33:35SPEAKERpopcorn better than the um better than the than the movie theater i'll uh i'll put a link if i
33:42SPEAKERthink about it i'll put a link to the whirly pop that i like there's a whole they've they
33:45SPEAKERthey got bought by somebody and thanks to certification there's now probably 30 different
33:49SPEAKERmodels um the only trick is if you have induction stoves you have to get a different one because
33:55SPEAKERobviously the aluminum doesn't work on that so they have a steel one i think as a result of that
34:00SPEAKERand then they also have a steel one for people who don't want aluminum which is which is fair
34:04SPEAKERthey have models that have the plastic gear on the top and the metal gear on the top my advice
34:10SPEAKERis to buy the plastic the nylon gear one i've been using the same one for 15 years now and i've never
34:15SPEAKERhad a problem with the gear stripping um but if that if you're making um if you're gonna make
34:21SPEAKERcaramel corn especially but even kettle corn stuff that's going to be tougher to stir you might want
34:26SPEAKERto get the metal the metal gear um and if you want to do kettle corn in this thing that also is easy
34:31SPEAKERyou just chuck a couple of tablespoons of sugar in the oil as the oil heats up and then the popcorn
34:37SPEAKERwill be kettled when it comes out which is which is pretty easy um let's see uh mosfet555 asked
34:47SPEAKERa question that a whole bunch of people asked which is with dual boot diaries closing and brad
34:54SPEAKERnot being able to make it onto the show with the stuff that's going on please consider having brad
34:59SPEAKERand adam patrick murray on an episode of take control once things settle out phrased in the
35:03SPEAKERform of a question would you consider having brad and adam on an episode of take control once things
35:06SPEAKERsettle out yeah absolutely if not there then here we'll we'll we will do the promised brad and adam
35:11SPEAKERand we'll talk about linux episode someplace whether it's here take control feed or whatever
35:16SPEAKERon the take control front i finally have the first episode done almost so um maybe i'm going out of
35:23SPEAKERtown next week so maybe when i'm back from that i'll post it so it's later than i wanted to go but
35:28SPEAKERwe'll we'll get it up eventually um thanks for asking though mosfet a bunch of people asked
35:32SPEAKERthe same question which is why i put it in here so you can stop asking it's gonna happen we will
35:36SPEAKERmake it happen i promise um girard vn says it's been a while since i heard someone mention the
35:43SPEAKERinternet of shit is the internet of things getting better or i think there are just worse other things
35:47SPEAKERto worry about right now um yeah i think that's probably a little from column a and a little from
35:52SPEAKERcolumn b i feel like the like the the current state of home automation for people who are using
36:02SPEAKERlike home assistant is really really good like the tools for building complicated workflows and
36:07SPEAKERcomplicated automations and all of that stuff are so good in home assistant now the overall
36:13SPEAKERsoftware is still like a little bit open source-y and kind of confusing until you figure out what
36:18SPEAKERgoes where and how it works but once you once you internalize that it is it's just it's just
36:24SPEAKERreally really good and i'm so the way i use home assistant these days i think we've talked about
36:29SPEAKERthis before um but i i use um i use home assistant kind of as the container and um i point the apple
36:42SPEAKERhome stuff to the home assistant install so most of my day-to-day interaction goes through siri
36:47SPEAKERbecause that's instant and direct inside the house from my phone to the home assistant install
36:53SPEAKERthrough the apple home stuff it doesn't get mediated by the by the cloud like the google
36:57SPEAKERum the google home stuff does but yeah it's it's quite good um there's like i think the thing the
37:05SPEAKERother thing that's happened and kind of congealed in the community is that especially in the
37:09SPEAKERenthusiast community people talk about this this in the discord a lot i don't buy stuff that
37:15SPEAKERrequires a cloud connection anymore like if i'm looking at light bulbs or some switch thing or
37:21SPEAKERa volt meter or a motion sensor or a web camera security camera any of that stuff none of that is
37:29SPEAKERif it if it requires a cloud connection i just go buy something else because there's other better
37:33SPEAKERoptions that don't require the cloud connection uh the other thing is that that i've moved most
37:39SPEAKERof my motion sensors like the door sensors and stuff like that to the matter and thread radio
37:44SPEAKERinstead of um instead of using uh zigbee or z-wave and the the there it's just much better it's it's
37:54SPEAKERlike seems much more reliable at least in my house i know everybody's rf environments are different
37:59SPEAKERbut um i've had phenomenal luck with that so far so um yeah i i think at the same time is lg putting
38:09SPEAKERshitty ads in their tvs yeah are is samsung still trying to put make screens on the front of your
38:15SPEAKERrefrigerator a thing absolutely uh does my oven still not update the time daylight savings time
38:22SPEAKERautomatically even though it's connected to the internet yeah sure that's absolutely a thing that
38:25SPEAKERhappens so you know maybe maybe we don't talk about it as much anymore because ai has made the
38:32SPEAKERwhole internet kind of shit um or maybe we don't talk about it anymore because people have gotten
38:38SPEAKERbetter at sussing out which which things are good and which things are bad i don't i don't actually
38:42SPEAKERknow that's a that is a good uh that is i'd be curious actually in the comments if people
38:47SPEAKERhave feelings about that i know like it's much harder it's much easier to find out if something's
38:54SPEAKERgoing to annoy me before i buy it now than it was say 10 years ago when this stuff was all relatively
38:59SPEAKERnew so um but yeah leave comments let me know what you think about this i'm curious uh feral pug
39:07SPEAKERsays i am in the market for a car i'm thinking ev but my old house only has a 100 amp panel i have
39:13SPEAKERto get my panel replaced to a 200 amp if i want to be able to charge the ev correct well okay
39:20SPEAKERferal pug this is this is one of those tricky ones it depends on how many open break my understanding
39:25SPEAKERis that a this is a consultant electrician situation it depends on a couple things it
39:29SPEAKERdepends on whether you want to do 240 volt charging like the higher speed charging
39:35SPEAKERit depends on how much you drive and that depends on how much you drive every week so
39:38SPEAKERif you're driving back and forth commuting every day and you don't have charging at work then you
39:43SPEAKERprobably want um depending on how long your commute is you probably need to have um the
39:48SPEAKERhigher speed charging level two charging is what that's called um i drive two or three days a week
39:54SPEAKERand we've been on level one charging the 120 volt charging for the four years five years we've had
40:00SPEAKERelectric cars now and it turns out it's fine even when even when my daughter was going to school
40:05SPEAKERevery day like six miles each way it was fine we never never hit a problem if we needed to charge
40:12SPEAKERi would just go to those fast chargers by the house and plug in for 20 minutes and and be fine
40:17SPEAKERbut i think i only did that a handful of times and i don't maybe i did it once before we went
40:21SPEAKERon a road trip on the on the current car um so let's see the um
40:35SPEAKERokay so that's that's the first part of the question is if you don't drive a whole lot
40:38SPEAKERyou're probably fine on the level one charger that comes with the car if you are driving a lot
40:42SPEAKERand you need a level two charger and your power um and your power uh your your breaker box is only
40:51SPEAKERis full and doesn't have room for two a two breaker line run to the car charger then yeah
40:58SPEAKERyou probably have to upgrade the electrical service for the house which is which is a pain
41:01SPEAKERin the butt um i've had uh for what it's worth um i've had a bunch of different quotes here labor
41:10SPEAKERis really expensive here it depends on how old your panel is like whether you have to do exterior
41:16SPEAKERwork to put the new one on like build like our in my part of california a lot of our electrical
41:22SPEAKERpanels are outside so we have to build a little house that's big enough to hold the new panel the
41:25SPEAKERnew box which is like another couple 500 bucks or something um but it was i think with the last time
41:32SPEAKERi talked to somebody was like eight grand to do the whole thing and that included uh with more if
41:37SPEAKERi wanted to do the the shunt over so i could turn off external power and run off batteries um if we
41:44SPEAKERwere if we do solar and batteries so um anyway that's that the power company depending on where
41:51SPEAKERyou are our power company seems to be encouraging people to move off gas so i think we're going to
41:56SPEAKERbe able to get money to do that uh from pg and e maybe if it's like every other pg in the incentive
42:01SPEAKERthey the incentive will know where come nowhere near covering the actual cost of the work though
42:06SPEAKERso we'll see um but i highly recommend like the other option is that the fast charging especially
42:12SPEAKERif you get a car that charges quickly the fast charging is fine like we usually only charge
42:17SPEAKERthe ionic to 80 at home or on the on the fast chargers and it's almost it's always like 20
42:25SPEAKERminutes to 80 on the ionic so like i can park at the grocery store plug the car in go get groceries
42:32SPEAKERcome back and by the time i'm done it's it's at 85 or 90 um to go from zero to go to 100 it's usually
42:40SPEAKERanother 20 minutes past that for the so 20 minutes to 80 from wherever you are and then it's 20
42:46SPEAKERminutes from 80 to 100 if you're on a fast actual fast charger there are some slower chargers but
42:51SPEAKERthat's like up to 230 kilowatts per hour i guess um okay super pants says how's the steam machine
43:01SPEAKERgoing after a month well that is a fine question i um i'm using it almost every day like anytime
43:06SPEAKERthe tv is free if i'm sitting in the living room i'll assuming i'm playing something appropriate
43:11SPEAKERto play in front of the family i'll i'll load it up and and and play um i set up some emulation
43:18SPEAKERstuff on there and i think i talked about this a few weeks ago but i i set up the emulation
43:23SPEAKERsyncing the save syncing uh between my let's see linux machine my mister and the and the server
43:32SPEAKERand then it goes out to all the retro art machines in the house which is awesome um and yeah i've
43:37SPEAKERi've been playing like i've played almost all of first light on the steam machine i played um i've
43:44SPEAKERbeen playing rebel galaxy outlaw lately which is an incredible game uh and it plays great on the
43:49SPEAKERsteam machine it required a little bit of hacking to get settings done which we'll talk about i
43:53SPEAKERguess in a second here and um yeah it's it's become like the only thing i wish it did that
43:59SPEAKERit doesn't do and i i absolutely understand why it doesn't do it because it's an impossible ask
44:03SPEAKERbut i wish that i could hand off to like the steam machine when somebody wants to use the tv
44:08SPEAKERwho's not me because like i don't know about your house but in my house the tv like the order of
44:15SPEAKERpriority for the tv is if my wife wants to watch something she gets first dibs on the tv because
44:19SPEAKERshe hardly ever wants to watch anything um if my daughter wants to watch something like if anytime
44:24SPEAKERsomebody wants to watch something that two or more people are going to be engaged with then i'm not
44:28SPEAKERgoing to try i'm not going to ask for the tv uh if everybody's kind of hanging around and and nobody's
44:33SPEAKERusing the tv then i'll often i'll often put a game on also it's basketball and baseball season right
44:40SPEAKERnow so in full full like full disclosure i do do a lot of steam deck gaming during sports during
44:48SPEAKERthe the two sports that i watch the most of um scoot says hey now that you've had time to play
44:54SPEAKERwith the steam machine have you had any issues with the 8 gigabyte ram vram limitation are there
44:59SPEAKERany games where this gave you trouble uh and then follows up with do you find yourself using game
45:04SPEAKERdefaults tweaking game settings a little or maybe tweaking game settings more than you like so uh
45:09SPEAKERthe 8 gig vram thing isn't a problem because i'm playing at 1080p on almost everything and either
45:14SPEAKERi mean i'm playing on a 1080p tv in the living room so uh don't when i did the upscaling testing
45:19SPEAKERthat was on the 4k monitor in my office so 1080p it's 8 gigs totally fine if you were running a
45:25SPEAKERnicer tv then that might be an issue tweaking the game defaults generally speaking the defaults out
45:32SPEAKERof the box for games that are showing as compatible are pretty good there have been a couple of games
45:37SPEAKERthat like launch at 1280 by 800 or or doing steam machine settings where i had to do a little bit of
45:42SPEAKERshenanigans to fix that rebel galaxy outlaw requires a specific microsoft c class it's like mfc
45:49SPEAKERfour two i think that they don't have flagged in the back end or that that uh steam the proton
45:56SPEAKERdoesn't know about so you have to manually install that using proton tricks and then it works fine
46:01SPEAKERbut um but yeah uh i haven't beyond that i haven't had to fool with any settings like it's it's um
46:09SPEAKERi'm trying to think like i don't i think that the james bond stuff worked great out of the box
46:15SPEAKERlike doom the dark ages and indiana jones all were totally playable at the 1080p resolution
46:21SPEAKERum i haven't had to fool with upscaling on anything i don't think yet um and yeah it's it's
46:27SPEAKERit's quite good like it is it really is a console that lets me play steam games in my living room
46:35SPEAKERwithout any of the like it's funny i plugged in after i'd had it for two or three weeks i plugged
46:41SPEAKERit in plugged in a keyboard a wireless keyboard my wife's like oh no you gotta gonna do this again
46:47SPEAKERi was like no it's just for like two minutes it was while i was setting up the the the emulated
46:52SPEAKERsave syncing and uh once i did i unplugged it put it back in my in my office and i haven't needed it
46:57SPEAKERsince so it's quite good the one thing that was bad about that was the toby the dog the realized
47:02SPEAKERthat he could turn on this tv by stepping on the by nosing the keyboard because i had the keyboard
47:08SPEAKERlike leaned up against my chair where i sit and and his favorite game for a brief 20-minute period
47:14SPEAKERwas hey look i could turn on the tv and it makes a beeping noise and it was very reminiscent of
47:20SPEAKERthe old what was it the launch xbox ones made that really good beeping sound when you touched the
47:25SPEAKERtouch sensor on the front to turn it on and uh i think when that thing hit the house came into
47:30SPEAKERthe house the first time my daughter was exactly the right age to smash the button anyway so that's
47:38SPEAKERthat's uh i think this i still think the steam machine is quite good uh i you know pricing stuff
47:44SPEAKERaside you know situations beyond everyone's control i don't i don't think there's anything
47:51SPEAKERwrong with the i think they did it's a fair price for what you get i i'm sad that it isn't seven
47:57SPEAKERhundred dollars or six hundred dollars or whatever it would have been had we not been in a rampocalypse
48:02SPEAKERuh let's see bunny fiend octothorpe bunny fiend asks sunscreen on the bald spots yes or hat
48:09SPEAKERuh it's either either or both not never none uh getting a sunburn on the on the thin part of the
48:16SPEAKERback of your head is is really really unpleasant and i don't ever want to do that again i do i do
48:21SPEAKERsunscreen on the part even these days because you know that's how i roll but also if it's sunny out
48:26SPEAKERi usually have a hat on because you know it gets hot here uh so yeah uh i have i actually bought
48:33SPEAKERwhen i was at um i was at a hotel one time i bought a hair his spray on sunscreen
48:42SPEAKERspecifically for your hairline and your part and your bald spot and i highly recommend that you
48:48SPEAKERjust squirt a little on there and then kind of rub your head uh and it works great so uh highly
48:54SPEAKERrecommended okay i think i have one more question maybe two um coal asks we know that most computer
49:03SPEAKERcomponents are absurdly overpriced due to gestures wildly uh my question is do you think it's possible
49:09SPEAKERthat that could push down the prices of other components due to lack of demand from fewer
49:13SPEAKERsystems being built i know the world doesn't work this way but i've got 90 of a system in the
49:17SPEAKERbasement that needs a psu so i i actually do think that that's i don't know if i don't know if they're
49:23SPEAKERbeing pushed down i think everybody's desperately trying to hold on to the margins that they have in
49:26SPEAKERthe places that people are still buying stuff but i do think that you you have a potential
49:32SPEAKERfor some deals that maybe wouldn't exist otherwise so like we saw some really good bundles on
49:37SPEAKERmotherboards and cpu's when you bought them with like one eight gig stick of ram earlier this year
49:41SPEAKERand stuff like that so so definitely keep your eyes out um i i know that the case manufacturers
49:48SPEAKERare hurting because people aren't buying as many cases i know that them i've seen some spectacular
49:53SPEAKERmonitor deals part of that's that oleds are getting cheaper part of it is also that like people aren't
49:59SPEAKERbuying as much stuff right now so so you will definitely see some better deals as a result of
50:03SPEAKERthat because nobody likes to hold inventory um i i my ram has started getting wobbly i got a i got
50:10SPEAKERthe hey man your your power on self-test is weird um you might want to might want to inspect this
50:17SPEAKERand i looked at what it would cost to replace 64 gigs of ddr5 and was like well i'm gonna probably
50:23SPEAKERjust be just be a laptop guy from now on if this if or or i think i have a spare 32 gig someplace
50:30SPEAKERi could jam in but anyway wobbly ram not great right now uh so yeah that that's that's that let's
50:37SPEAKERsee um i have a couple more questions here uh this one this one's this one's going to start
50:48SPEAKERsome business i hesitate to ask it but i'm going to do it anyway um nicholas says i have a pixel
50:55SPEAKERwatch 4 and recently google changed the fitbit app to google health in the app they inserted the
51:01SPEAKERcoach the coach is an ai that's supposed to offer you relevant information while taking all your
51:05SPEAKERdata from your wearable into account turns out it frequently is wrong about a lot of the data and
51:10SPEAKERhas changed data without people's permission has the grading sycophantic tone of most ai chatbots
51:16SPEAKERand all the other terrible things associated with ai in general reading the threads of long-time
51:21SPEAKERfitbit users who are angry with this change i have also seen ai defenders they talk about how
51:25SPEAKERyou just have to get good at prompting crafting the personality of the ai and use prompts that
51:30SPEAKERare written just the right way all in the hopes that the ai will actually continue to use those
51:34SPEAKERinstructions reading this i had a thought are ai apologists just a new version of the stereotypical
51:40SPEAKERlinux guy who a decade ago would insist that linux is great for everyone but you just have to
51:46SPEAKERinsert steps that most users never take on their windows machines and hope it works uh thanks
51:51SPEAKERnicholas so okay i feel a little attacked a little scene here with this linux guy stuff but i do
51:58SPEAKERunderstand what you're saying i think that the stereotypical linux guy is in a little shorter
52:02SPEAKERsupply or maybe the ratio of linux users to oh yeah you just need to you know run your cron tabs
52:08SPEAKERor whatever guy is is has reduced some the thing that you're talking about where some people really
52:14SPEAKERreally like the ai and find it incredibly useful and um have a bunch of things that they think are
52:20SPEAKERthe reason they do that i i've experienced this myself i also had have had multiple conversations
52:27SPEAKERwith people who i consider to be very smart software engineers like like people who are
52:33SPEAKERtop of their jobs really good at this who have a completely different read on ai that i do uh and
52:40SPEAKERit's because they're using a their workloads are different the things that they're using it for
52:45SPEAKERare different and a little bit less um what's the word uh code is is a little bit if you're using an
52:56SPEAKERai to generate code there's a right way and it doesn't work way and then there's some probably
53:03SPEAKERsome inefficient or wrong ways in between but it's pretty good at doing the right like it's pretty
53:08SPEAKERgood at generating code that does the right way if you constrain the prompts really well especially
53:12SPEAKERif you're using some of the newer models the frontier models is the thing i i've had uh i've
53:17SPEAKERi've been told like a friend of mine was telling me the other day that when they switched to the
53:22SPEAKERclaud is it fable i think the frontier model they went from saying giving specific constraints to
53:31SPEAKERsaying hey i need something that does this like having a design functions that and then having
53:37SPEAKERthem architect the way the functions go together to saying hey i need a program that does this and
53:42SPEAKERthis and this and this and this and like it just spits out something that's usable um now do i want
53:51SPEAKERthat applied to health care absolutely not like there are five stories a week about people that
53:56SPEAKERask chat gpt for help and then don't go to the hospital and almost die because they have an
54:01SPEAKERaneurysm or they have like like don't don't ask large language module models about health stuff
54:07SPEAKERespecially not the general purpose ones because they're they just tell you what you want to hear
54:12SPEAKERlike this is the fundamental problem with this technology if they had rolled this out i mean
54:15SPEAKERokay there's more than one fundamental problem with the technology but this is this is one of
54:20SPEAKERthe big huge ones is the syncophonic tone is is really really damaging on a whole host of levels
54:26SPEAKERand it makes a lot of people like like that that and the overall level of trustworthiness combined
54:32SPEAKERis a real one-two punch of bad ideas um so yeah don't don't use the ai stuff for your health stuff
54:39SPEAKERthis is honestly the the jamming ai into everything is one of the main reasons i'm not um
54:45SPEAKERuh i i'm not running uh uh google stuff as much anymore because like they're putting it everywhere
54:54SPEAKERthe results are still really bad like i i wanted to say you know i i i started working on some
55:00SPEAKERstuff for the search engine episode and i went back and i was putting the same query into kaji
55:06SPEAKERand duck duck go and google and for stuff that i know the answer to right and on those google ai
55:13SPEAKERresults the the answers were not just a little wrong they were a lot wrong on some of the stuff
55:18SPEAKERyou know they were like about stuff that is easy to search and and uh find like uh cpu generations
55:26SPEAKERand ram limitations for chipsets and stuff like that like i was i was doing some kind of specific
55:32SPEAKERstuff that i was getting ai search results for that were terrible so so yeah it's it's bad no
55:37SPEAKERthe place there are a couple places where okay so that's the answer to the question
55:46SPEAKERi think the the real answer to the question is no i don't think the ai apologists are a new version
55:51SPEAKERof the linux guys i think that your experience with ai is wildly divergent based on which models
55:57SPEAKERyou have access to and what kind of stuff you're trying to do so if you're trying to do one of the
56:02SPEAKERtwo or three things it's really good at like if you're a spammer you love ai it's great for you
56:07SPEAKERif you're doing writing specific kinds of code it's really really good and can really make you
56:12SPEAKERlet you work a lot faster if you are um if you are generating text if you're asking healthcare
56:22SPEAKERquestions don't don't do that that's bad um i i think integrating it in the google health stuff
56:28SPEAKERis going to open up google to some enormous potential liability and i'm i'm honestly surprised
56:33SPEAKERwe haven't seen any enormous settlements yet for the people who got bad advice for
56:39SPEAKERbad health advice from chat gpt or claud or copilot or whatever so yeah don't don't i it's
56:45SPEAKERshocking to me that they don't have guardrails on health care advice child care advice um like the
56:51SPEAKERplaces that the liability is going to be enormous if they mess up and kill somebody when they mess
56:56SPEAKERup and kill somebody um i mean and then that's not to say nothing of the mental health stuff
57:01SPEAKERthat we've seen um where the where the llms encourage people to self-harm and stuff like
57:08SPEAKERthat so um and now i have to put a content warning on this episode uh so yeah uh so that i think
57:14SPEAKERthat'll do it on that i feel like i need a cheery end note here i should have just stopped at the
57:20SPEAKERbunny fiend sunscreen on the bald spot question the indignity oh wait let's see uh siradar asked
57:25SPEAKERfor a toby check-in toby is doing well we've gone to two puppy classes he knows how to sit
57:32SPEAKERand to wait and to he's learning how to walk on the leash without yanking it right now which is
57:38SPEAKERvery exciting uh he is now pooping while the leash is on which is very exciting because for a long
57:44SPEAKERtime he only would poop when the leash was off which was challenging let's see what else what
57:49SPEAKERelse has he learned he we're working on lay down this week it's challenging because he's long so
57:53SPEAKERhe just kind of scooches forward when you're when you're trying to lure him into the lay down pose
57:57SPEAKERbut yeah he's uh he's generally generally doing really well he's sleeping really well he is not
58:04SPEAKERbeing as much of a bud we've gotten him these yak chews they're like yak milk congealed into
58:12SPEAKERinto the two bone form and he absolutely loves those those those are resulting in a lot of
58:18SPEAKERnervous energy getting worked out and he's a much more chill dog as a result um let's see let's see
58:23SPEAKERi've taken him on i think since the last time we talked about toby his vaccines have cleared
58:30SPEAKERso we can take him on walks around the neighborhood now which he loves like he's
58:34SPEAKERextremely excited to go out the front door i took him on a walk up to the beach and posted
58:38SPEAKERsome pictures on my blue sky of that last weekend and uh but that that was really fun he's he's
58:46SPEAKERalways excited to meet people he's a he's a really chill little guy is the kind of tldr and if we can
58:52SPEAKERget him to poop reliably while i'm walking him late at night and the skunks are around
58:55SPEAKERso he's on the leash everything will be fantastic that's all we're looking for so yeah toby's doing
59:00SPEAKERreally good there's there's an upbeat ending uh so that we aren't in bummer territory
59:07SPEAKERum and on that note i guess i should probably wrap up the show and we will be back uh next week with
59:13SPEAKERanother edition of the tech pod i do have to do a patron episode maybe i'll see if my favorite
59:18SPEAKERdaughter wants to hop on um wants to hop on the uh the patron episode we can talk about technology
59:26SPEAKERa little bit see what she thinks about stuff because i think it would be very i i would be
59:30SPEAKERcurious to hear what she thinks about some of the stuff that we talk about here so people have
59:34SPEAKERquestions for a 13 year old about technology maybe send them to tech body content or i guess this is
59:40SPEAKERa patron episode post them in the in the discord and i will pull from there uh this is the part
59:46SPEAKERwhere we remind you it's a patron supported show we only take money from you guys audience we work
59:51SPEAKERfor you not for anyone else so for five dollars a month you can get access to the patron exclusive
59:56SPEAKERdiscord where people talk about all sorts of interesting things all the time everything from
1:00:01SPEAKERlike what's going on in different art scenes to what's going on in everyone's favorite tv shows
1:00:06SPEAKERand movies um there's a robust linux channel when i was figuring out how to get the the mr
1:00:12SPEAKERsave syncing working the mr and other emulation channel was incredibly helpful the the linux
1:00:18SPEAKERchannel has been just an unbelievable resource over the last year as i've switched over to linux
1:00:22SPEAKERfull-time so this is the last episode of the month which means i thank not just our executive
1:00:29SPEAKERproducer tier patrons but also our associate producer to your patrons so uh let's see let's
1:00:37SPEAKERstart with associate producers this month and we're gonna thank uh thanks to star soul eric
1:00:42SPEAKERbrutal kerfuffle felix gramer andrew dicey shoulders andrew uh andre m burke p.e ben
1:00:50SPEAKERtalman nathan phelps steve lynn jad rita ricin thomas shay oh and thomas shay thomas you're the
1:00:58SPEAKERlast one uh thank you also so much and uh let's see uh we also want to thank our executive producer
1:01:06SPEAKERtier patrons including james kamek david allen octothorpe bunnyfiend jordan lippett uh in felicit
1:01:15SPEAKERand in felicit strips thank you also so much we will see you uh and i guess that's the end of the
1:01:21SPEAKERshow so uh please let me know what you thought of this uh i can i again i we don't know how long
1:01:27SPEAKERbrad's going to be out i haven't had a chance to talk to him in a couple of weeks um but we will
1:01:32SPEAKERuh as soon as i hear something i'll keep you posted in the discord or the next week's episode
1:01:37SPEAKERuh if he's okay sharing it and uh yeah we'll be back uh next week with another episode of
1:01:41SPEAKERthe tech pod i have a fantastic guest lined up uh for next week i think i'm really excited about it
1:01:47SPEAKERand then i'm going on a trip the next weekend so uh we'll maybe have some interesting stuff
1:01:52SPEAKERto talk about out of that as well but thank you all so much for supporting the show we
1:01:56SPEAKERappreciate each and every one of you and uh we will we will be back next week with another
1:02:00SPEAKERedition of the tech pod as always please consider the environment before printing this podcast
1:02:26SPEAKERso
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