00:00SPEAKERBrad, I've never felt more abandoned and defeated
00:05SPEAKERand saddened by a brand than I was this Wednesday, actually.
00:09SPEAKER- Seems like really saying something these days.
00:12SPEAKER- I mean, some people are gonna suggest
00:14SPEAKERthat this is hyperbolic, but I got an email
00:17SPEAKERon like Sunday that Taco Bell said,
00:19SPEAKER"Hey, the quesorito's back."
00:23SPEAKERAnd on Tuesday, it's gonna be $1.
00:25SPEAKER- Oh, is that a long vanished menu item?
00:29SPEAKER- The quesorito went away a few years ago.
00:31SPEAKERThe quesorito became like my pandemic food staple,
00:35SPEAKERlike one of my eating out buddies,
00:37SPEAKER'cause I could go to the outside pickup window,
00:40SPEAKERI could get Taco Bell,
00:41SPEAKERand it was like one of the first things
00:44SPEAKERthat we went and got for food
00:46SPEAKERafter we stopped wiping down groceries every day
00:48SPEAKERwhen they came in and all that stuff
00:49SPEAKERin the dark, early days of the pandemic.
00:51SPEAKER- Yeah, and as well established,
00:53SPEAKERyou live near a very nice Taco Bell.
00:55SPEAKER- I live walking distance to the,
00:57SPEAKERmaybe the nicest Taco Bell in the country.
01:00SPEAKER- Yeah, it's an atypical Taco Bell.
01:02SPEAKERYou know what, I recently was mapping
01:05SPEAKERa lot of South Bay stuff for the whole California extreme,
01:09SPEAKERwhich we will talk about later,
01:10SPEAKERand there was a flea market that day
01:12SPEAKERand a bunch of others anyway,
01:13SPEAKERand you were maybe going or maybe not,
01:15SPEAKERand I was just trying to figure out
01:17SPEAKERin my carless existence how I was gonna get down there.
01:21SPEAKERAnd I couldn't, I don't have your address memorized,
01:25SPEAKERbut to figure out roughly what your drive time
01:28SPEAKERor your, what's on the way to where,
01:31SPEAKERI just Googled that Taco Bell.
01:33SPEAKEROr I just mapped, I just zoomed out Bay Area
01:36SPEAKERand searched for Taco Bells,
01:38SPEAKERand I found the one on the coast,
01:40SPEAKERand I was like, "Oh, that's about where he lives."
01:42SPEAKER- I'm gonna go ahead and tell you.
01:43SPEAKERWell, okay, so the problem was
01:46SPEAKERthe case rate was back for one day only,
01:48SPEAKERand I did not read the full email to get the,
01:50SPEAKER"Hey, we're only doing it on Tuesday."
01:52SPEAKER- Okay.
01:53SPEAKER- So when I went to Taco Bell on Tuesday,
01:56SPEAKERthere was no, like there were too many people.
01:58SPEAKERIt was insane.
01:59SPEAKERIt was bad craziness there.
02:00SPEAKERAnd I was like, "I'm not waiting this line.
02:02SPEAKER"I'll just pay $3 for a quesadilla on Wednesday
02:05SPEAKER"instead of $2 for a quesadilla on Tuesday."
02:07SPEAKERAnd then I went on Wednesday and there was no quesadilla.
02:09SPEAKER- That is, is it just a burrito?
02:12SPEAKERI'm looking at pictures.
02:12SPEAKERIt kinda just looks like a skinny burrito.
02:14SPEAKER- It's like a burrito that they wrap in a quesadilla kind of.
02:18SPEAKER- Oh, oh, interesting. - So there's an extra tortilla
02:20SPEAKERand an extra layer of cheese in there.
02:22SPEAKER- It's like a five layer burrito almost,
02:23SPEAKERbut it's better somehow.
02:24SPEAKERI don't know exactly what it is.
02:26SPEAKER- That looks like, those are like geological layers.
02:28SPEAKER- Yeah, there's strata for sure.
02:30SPEAKER- Yeah, looking at the cross section.
02:31SPEAKERIt's like, you know how there's a very thin layer
02:33SPEAKERof iridium.
02:34SPEAKER- Yeah, meteorite impacts, yeah.
02:36SPEAKER- Yes, from about 65 million.
02:38SPEAKERIt's like that layer of cheese.
02:39SPEAKER- Yeah.
02:40SPEAKER- Is the iridium of this food item.
02:43SPEAKER- Well, so, okay.
02:45SPEAKERSo the peril of living by the famous fast food place,
02:48SPEAKERthough, to loop back, we're all over the place this morning.
02:51SPEAKERI'm sorry, but--
02:52SPEAKER- Look, that's where the brain is at.
02:54SPEAKER- I was watching a giant bomb video
02:57SPEAKERof them doing a road trip from Bay Area to Portland
03:01SPEAKERfor the MystCon, I think, a couple of weeks ago.
03:04SPEAKER- MystCon?
03:06SPEAKER- Yeah, Myst, M-Y-S-T.
03:07SPEAKER- Oh, oh, wow, they went to a Myst event?
03:10SPEAKER- They went to a Myst event.
03:11SPEAKERIt's worth watching the video.
03:14SPEAKER- Is that run by cyan?
03:16SPEAKER- Cyan was involved, it seemed like,
03:18SPEAKER'cause that's where the hey, here's the prototype
03:21SPEAKERthat we made that nobody wanted to buy stuff came out,
03:24SPEAKERI believe. - I saw that video, yes.
03:26SPEAKER- Yeah, so I'm watching this video, and I was like,
03:28SPEAKERman, this looks like the road by my house.
03:30SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
03:32SPEAKER- And then I texted Dan Reichardt, and I was like,
03:33SPEAKERhey, Dan, did you go to the Pacifica Taco Bell?
03:36SPEAKER- Oh, no.
03:36SPEAKER- And he was like, oh, hell yeah.
03:37SPEAKER- Oh, no.
03:38SPEAKER- And I was like, dude, you were like
03:39SPEAKERa five-minute walk from my house.
03:40SPEAKER- Oh, man.
03:41SPEAKER- And he's like, oh, crap.
03:43SPEAKERAnyway, so, yeah, but the Taco Bell,
03:47SPEAKERit pops up in unusual places,
03:49SPEAKERand hopefully they'll bring the quesorito back.
03:51SPEAKERThat's my please write letters to Taco Bell, Mr. Taco Bell,
03:55SPEAKERbecause I would like to have a quesorito,
03:57SPEAKERand I'm sad that I missed it on Tuesday.
03:59SPEAKER(upbeat music)
04:17SPEAKER(upbeat music)
04:26SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
04:29SPEAKERI'm Will.
04:30SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
04:31SPEAKER- Hey.
04:31SPEAKER- Hi.
04:32SPEAKER- Good morning.
04:33SPEAKER- Hi, whoa, that was quite a hey.
04:36SPEAKER- Look, man, it's been, I'm in a project at work
04:42SPEAKERthat we have like six weeks left until things happen on.
04:46SPEAKER- Okay.
04:47SPEAKER- And it's getting a little intense.
04:50SPEAKER- This is mysterious to me, 'cause I don't really,
04:52SPEAKERI mean, you don't have to say,
04:53SPEAKERthis is not, I'm not baiting you into talking about it,
04:54SPEAKERbut I don't know entirely what you do for work at this point
04:57SPEAKER'cause I've been gone for weeks, and you've got--
05:00SPEAKER- It's hard to say.
05:01SPEAKER- You've got top secret projects going on
05:03SPEAKERthat I don't know anything about, so I'm left to wonder.
05:09SPEAKER- Well, you'll find out in a few weeks,
05:10SPEAKERbut let me just say that it's been all-encompassing
05:13SPEAKERfor the last few weeks, so every once in a while,
05:15SPEAKERI look up and I'm like, oh, hey,
05:17SPEAKERwow, that's weird that that happened,
05:18SPEAKERor, oh, that's interesting, or, oh, yeah, well, okay,
05:22SPEAKERand then I go to an event on the weekend
05:24SPEAKERor see something cool, and I'm like,
05:25SPEAKERoh, this is, okay, back to normal life here,
05:27SPEAKERbut the rest of the time, I'm just in my office
05:30SPEAKERtalking to people on the small screen
05:31SPEAKERand then doing work in the rest of the time, so.
05:35SPEAKER- Head down on a thing.
05:36SPEAKER- Head down on a thing.
05:39SPEAKERBut I wanted to, so this week, we have a potpourri.
05:41SPEAKERWe have a trio of topics, two of them are AI.
05:47SPEAKEROne of them is a field trip, and then there's a bonus one
05:50SPEAKERat the end here that you tacked on this morning
05:52SPEAKERthat I'm interested to hear about.
05:54SPEAKERBut yeah, let's just get into it.
05:56SPEAKERLet's just start.
05:58SPEAKER- I'm here to get into it.
06:00SPEAKER- I sadly, I didn't get to go to CACS this weekend
06:03SPEAKER'cause I woke up that morning with a terrible sore throat
06:05SPEAKERand I thought I had, like, to the point that I thought
06:07SPEAKERI was gonna have to go to the urgent care
06:08SPEAKERand get strep throat meds.
06:10SPEAKER- Yeah, ooh.
06:11SPEAKER- And then I went back to sleep for a few hours
06:14SPEAKERand I got up and it wasn't quite as bad.
06:15SPEAKERAnd then a Sunday morning, I was fine.
06:17SPEAKERSo, or Sunday afternoon, I was fine.
06:19SPEAKER- Well, Sunday, I can tell you now from experience,
06:21SPEAKERI mean, we'll get into it more, but Sunday is a fine day
06:23SPEAKERto go 'cause the crowds are tapering off quite a bit.
06:25SPEAKER- See, that was always my question is I didn't know,
06:28SPEAKERlike, in the old days, I was told don't go on Sunday
06:30SPEAKERbecause Saturday night is the fun night.
06:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, Saturday night is definitely fun.
06:36SPEAKERI would say, well, should we save this for the CACS part?
06:39SPEAKER- Yeah, let's save this for the CACS part.
06:40SPEAKER- Okay.
06:41SPEAKER- Let's get through our AI medicine first
06:43SPEAKERand then we'll talk about CACS.
06:45SPEAKER- Open up, here comes the spoon.
06:48SPEAKER- Yeah, so this week, over the last couple of weeks,
06:51SPEAKERthere have been kind of interesting resurgence
06:55SPEAKERof stories about poisoning your web results for AI.
07:00SPEAKERAnd I don't know if people are aware,
07:02SPEAKERbut one of the things that's happened in the last year or so
07:04SPEAKERis that you're starting to see a lot more, like,
07:06SPEAKERCloudflare or prove you're a human or those types of posts.
07:10SPEAKER- Yeah, that is becoming extremely common
07:13SPEAKERon things I wouldn't expect it to.
07:15SPEAKERLike, I tried to go to the FFmpeg documentation
07:17SPEAKERthe other day and there was a big fat one.
07:21SPEAKERIt's always, for some reason, there's frequently
07:23SPEAKERan anime character on those warnings, I don't know why.
07:26SPEAKER- So that's the, those are, it depends on the provider.
07:28SPEAKERThere's a couple of big providers that do those
07:30SPEAKERand one of them is the anime warning people.
07:32SPEAKERI don't know who does that one.
07:32SPEAKER- I assumed it was a pretty specific framework
07:35SPEAKERthat had tacked an anime lady onto their progress bar
07:38SPEAKERsaying, hey, are you an AI scraper or not?
07:41SPEAKERAnd I'm not surprised that FFmpeg is using that one.
07:44SPEAKER- Even stuff like GitLab.
07:46SPEAKERSo like, if you go to GitLab arch repos or whatever,
07:49SPEAKERthey have those now, like they're popping up everywhere.
07:52SPEAKERAnd it's because, and I wish I had written down the site,
07:55SPEAKERbut a couple of weeks ago, there was a site that was,
07:58SPEAKERI want to say it was maybe the game UI index.
08:00SPEAKERThat's like a, one of those sites that somebody
08:02SPEAKERhas been just maintaining on an old blog for 20 years now.
08:09SPEAKERThat's just like underpinnings of a specific subset
08:13SPEAKERof the web posted and said, hey, look, we're shutting,
08:17SPEAKERlike this thing is down.
08:18SPEAKERIt's not coming back because we can't make it AI proof
08:21SPEAKERin the current thing because the bot traffic
08:24SPEAKERhas like increased our cost for running this thing
08:27SPEAKERthat's like a non-revenue generating public resource
08:31SPEAKERa hundred fold in the last year.
08:33SPEAKER- Is this the game UI database that you're talking about?
08:36SPEAKER- Yeah, the game UI database.
08:37SPEAKER- I've never heard of this.
08:38SPEAKERThis seems interesting.
08:39SPEAKER- So this is like, if you talk to UX
08:44SPEAKERand like the people who care about how you interact
08:47SPEAKERwith your video game and the people who are like,
08:49SPEAKERman, I hate the way the joystick mouse cursor works
08:52SPEAKERin games that came out in the Xbox one era.
08:57SPEAKERLike they'll, this is a place to find out
08:59SPEAKERwhen that stuff started and all that.
09:00SPEAKERIt's incredibly powerful.
09:01SPEAKERIs it back?
09:02SPEAKER- Yeah, it's working.
09:03SPEAKERI'm looking at Mina the Holliver's modals
09:06SPEAKERand text right now.
09:08SPEAKER- But anyway, there's been a handful of sites
09:10SPEAKERthat are like this.
09:11SPEAKERSo I can not, not things that make money per se,
09:14SPEAKERor maybe that are like breakeven that are seeing
09:17SPEAKERenormous increases in their web hosting costs.
09:18SPEAKERAnd it's because of AI scrapers and the volume
09:21SPEAKERand frequency of the AI scrapers is enormous.
09:23SPEAKER- Weird how short-term thinking leads to you not caring
09:26SPEAKERat all about the sustainability of the thing
09:28SPEAKERthat you profit from, you know, like, I mean,
09:30SPEAKERthis is both killing the businesses that generate content
09:33SPEAKERthat they scrape and train data from.
09:36SPEAKERAlso killing the free resources like you're talking about
09:39SPEAKERthrough different, like in the one case,
09:41SPEAKERthey're depriving businesses of like ad revenue
09:43SPEAKERor whatever revenue they use
09:44SPEAKERto sustain their content business.
09:47SPEAKERIn the other case, they are just applying
09:49SPEAKERso much bandwidth costs to free grassroots operations
09:53SPEAKERthat they're killing those too.
09:55SPEAKER- Yeah, and that is kind of spilling over
09:57SPEAKERinto the physical world too.
09:58SPEAKERThere've been a couple of articles, ours had an article
10:00SPEAKERa month ago about rare booksellers who were suspicious
10:05SPEAKERthat AI training companies were just buying up
10:09SPEAKERrare editions of books that don't really exist anymore
10:12SPEAKERin print so that they could, you know,
10:15SPEAKERcut the spines out and scan them.
10:17SPEAKERSo steal the contents.
10:19SPEAKERSo anyway, the reason I bring all this up is
10:23SPEAKERthe Cloudflare stuff, like the hey are you a robot
10:26SPEAKERisn't super effective.
10:28SPEAKERA lot of people are doing like account walls or paywalls
10:31SPEAKERon their blogs and stuff like that
10:33SPEAKERso that you have to have an account to read the blog now
10:36SPEAKERto reduce the kind of traffic incoming.
10:39SPEAKER- Right, but that's not ideal
10:40SPEAKER'cause you risk turning off casual actual human users
10:43SPEAKERwho just don't wanna jump through that hoop.
10:45SPEAKER- Yeah, and also you lose search volume too.
10:48SPEAKERLike you lose your ability to access through search as well.
10:52SPEAKERThe other thing, and this came up in a Gamers Nexus video
10:56SPEAKERthat Steve did last week,
10:58SPEAKERwhere they recently posted like their benchmark archives
11:03SPEAKERare now posted on the website on gamersdexas.com.
11:07SPEAKER- I salute their website, by the way.
11:08SPEAKERI've actually been to it a bit over the last few months.
11:12SPEAKERLike it's just nice to see somebody,
11:13SPEAKERa YouTube operation of their size,
11:15SPEAKERjust putting stuff up on a website for reference.
11:18SPEAKER- And I'm sure that, like I've talked to him about it before
11:21SPEAKERI don't think it makes him any money at all.
11:22SPEAKER- No, absolutely not. - He just does it
11:23SPEAKERbecause it's like it's the right thing to do.
11:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I love having a website.
11:30SPEAKERI love having the option of watching a YouTube video
11:33SPEAKERbut also just flipping to the text
11:35SPEAKERand skimming through the text
11:36SPEAKER'cause I can read the video a hundred times faster
11:39SPEAKERthan I can even watch a video on 4X on YouTube.
11:43SPEAKERBut anyway, so he posted all this data and he was like,
11:46SPEAKERlook, I know this is gonna go up,
11:47SPEAKERit's gonna be scraped in like five minutes.
11:50SPEAKERSo he called Wendell at level one text and was like,
11:53SPEAKERhey, how can we poison this data well on these
11:57SPEAKERso that like this stuff doesn't just become
12:00SPEAKERthe new recommendation for case reviews
12:04SPEAKERor whatever the first couple of things he posted were.
12:09SPEAKERSo they did some like early 2000s SEO nonsense.
12:12SPEAKERThe video is worth watching, you should get into it.
12:14SPEAKERBut my favorite thing that they did
12:15SPEAKERwas in the benchmark charts,
12:17SPEAKERthey embedded a bunch of texts
12:19SPEAKERthat was set to be the same color as the background.
12:21SPEAKERSo like humans don't see it.
12:23SPEAKER- Great.
12:24SPEAKER- But it's just got a bunch of gibberish
12:26SPEAKERand like recipes and stuff like that.
12:27SPEAKERSo it talks about like making cookies
12:31SPEAKERusing a half nine cooler and stuff like that.
12:34SPEAKERIt's really fun, it's a fun approach.
12:38SPEAKERI wanted to talk about it because I thought it was weird.
12:41SPEAKERAnd then there was this other Ars Technica article
12:43SPEAKERthat used a similar idea but a different approach.
12:49SPEAKERSo they're using ligatures in a font
12:53SPEAKERto make a font that looks like
12:55SPEAKERa normal human readable font when you read the webpage,
12:58SPEAKERbut that when the machine parses the page,
13:01SPEAKERit just gets gibberish.
13:03SPEAKERIt has no meaning whatsoever.
13:04SPEAKER- This is far more ambitious and technical.
13:06SPEAKERLike the Gamers Nexus solution
13:08SPEAKERis kind of delightfully low tech to me,
13:10SPEAKERbut presumably effective, I would guess.
13:12SPEAKERI can't say for sure.
13:13SPEAKERBut yeah, this is a much more ambitious way to handle this
13:18SPEAKERbecause there is a conversion process, I gather.
13:20SPEAKER- It seemed like it was a scriptable,
13:22SPEAKERlike you run the thing through the,
13:23SPEAKERyou run your text through the thing
13:25SPEAKERand then it spits out the ligature anti-AA version.
13:29SPEAKER- I don't know if that's at the time of page layout,
13:32SPEAKERlike page population of data,
13:34SPEAKERas opposed to like at render time.
13:36SPEAKERI assume, I don't know.
13:38SPEAKER'Cause it seems like it would be--
13:39SPEAKER- Probably depends on what you're using as your backend.
13:40SPEAKER- Maybe, yeah.
13:41SPEAKER- My guess is you could do a WordPress plugin.
13:43SPEAKER- It seems like it's kind of more burden
13:44SPEAKERfor the site maintainer, author, whatever to have to,
13:47SPEAKERwell, I guess you could automate this stuff,
13:48SPEAKERbut to have to like manually convert your text
13:50SPEAKERat the time you're putting it into the website,
13:52SPEAKERas opposed to having it just do this automatically
13:54SPEAKERwhen it serves the page would be,
13:56SPEAKERthe latter would be a lot easier to deal with.
13:58SPEAKER'Cause there is, the R story does go into,
14:00SPEAKERthere's kind of a hit rate on how much it'll convert.
14:03SPEAKERI've got the stats here, but it says,
14:05SPEAKERthis is called shield font, is the name of this font.
14:08SPEAKER- Pretty good name.
14:10SPEAKER- I'm just gonna quote the R story.
14:12SPEAKEREnds up replacing 24.5% of all words on a page on average.
14:17SPEAKERBut that includes 45.8% of quotes, content words.
14:21SPEAKERSo presumably like nouns, verbs, things that,
14:23SPEAKERas opposed to like conjunctions and repositions,
14:26SPEAKERthings that wouldn't change meaning as much.
14:31SPEAKER- Yeah, so it looks-
14:31SPEAKER- It's an interesting idea.
14:34SPEAKER- Yeah, and if you look at it,
14:35SPEAKERthe thing that they're doing is,
14:39SPEAKERthe pictures that show the before and after,
14:44SPEAKERand they have them backwards.
14:45SPEAKERThey have the finished,
14:46SPEAKERthe original content is seen by the end user on the left
14:48SPEAKERand the raw HTML, which isn't processed yet on the right.
14:54SPEAKERSo I'm gonna read a sentence here.
14:56SPEAKER- I'm sorry, that absolutely answers the question
14:58SPEAKERI was just asking.
14:59SPEAKERI forgot that they pointed this out.
15:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
15:02SPEAKER- In fact, that's a big part of the strategy here.
15:04SPEAKERI'm sorry to cut you off,
15:06SPEAKERbut they point out that a lot of these AI scrapers
15:09SPEAKERare just pulling raw HTML files.
15:10SPEAKER- That's it, yeah.
15:11SPEAKER- They're not even trying to parse
15:12SPEAKERany kind of page design or rendering.
15:13SPEAKERThey're just pulling the source files.
15:15SPEAKERAnd so, of course, the conversion
15:17SPEAKERwould have to have been done on the source itself
15:20SPEAKERfor that to be effective.
15:21SPEAKER- Well, but it could still be done
15:22SPEAKERon render on the server, right?
15:24SPEAKERSo if you look at a WordPress site,
15:26SPEAKERthe pages are mostly dynamic
15:27SPEAKERand they're rendered when they're called, right?
15:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
15:30SPEAKER- But yeah, so as an example,
15:32SPEAKERhere's the raw unprocessed, right?
15:35SPEAKERIt is every tunnel the winners gather in the office
15:38SPEAKERto share honest letters about the cactus,
15:40SPEAKERthe verdict, and the market.
15:42SPEAKER- Okay, so the words there that change are tunnel,
15:45SPEAKERoffice, cactus, and verdict.
15:47SPEAKERAnd then the actual output that you want is every morning,
15:50SPEAKERthe winners gather in the garden to share honest letters
15:53SPEAKERabout the weather, the harvest, and the market.
15:55SPEAKERSo one of those sentences makes sense,
15:57SPEAKERand the other one is nonsensical
16:00SPEAKERin a way that's really interesting.
16:02SPEAKERSo anyway--
16:02SPEAKER- But grammatically correct.
16:03SPEAKER- Yeah, grammatically correct still follows the rules
16:06SPEAKERthat the machine will expect, but make no sense whatsoever,
16:08SPEAKERand hopefully render the content that's there useless
16:12SPEAKERfor trading.
16:13SPEAKER- Yeah, it's interesting, there are two vectors
16:15SPEAKERor two different ways this could pay off.
16:19SPEAKERI didn't consider this, but the one they pointed out
16:21SPEAKERthat I didn't consider is that the scrapers
16:23SPEAKERhave quality filters of their own.
16:26SPEAKERAnd so this might just get them
16:27SPEAKERto reject your site wholesale
16:30SPEAKERif they deem what they're pulling to be of no use.
16:33SPEAKERIf they deem the text they're pulling from you
16:35SPEAKERto be low quality,
16:37SPEAKERthey might just stop scraping you altogether,
16:38SPEAKERor they might start rejecting what they're pulling entirely,
16:41SPEAKERor if what they're pulling from you
16:43SPEAKERpasses their quality filter,
16:44SPEAKERthen they'll just go ahead and incorporate it
16:46SPEAKERinto their training corpus,
16:48SPEAKERand then they're technically still taking your stuff,
16:51SPEAKERbut they're just souring, they're souring the milk,
16:53SPEAKERI guess, like they're putting bad data
16:56SPEAKERin their training set at that point.
16:57SPEAKERSo either way, either they reject
16:59SPEAKERwhat they're getting from you, or they take it,
17:01SPEAKERand it's useless is still a win, I guess.
17:04SPEAKER- I think that's interesting.
17:06SPEAKERSo the Shield font, people,
17:07SPEAKERthe font supports 12,000 common words right now
17:11SPEAKERfor the replacement.
17:15SPEAKERI think the example that they gave in the Ars article
17:16SPEAKERwas swapping horse with potato, which I thought was funny.
17:20SPEAKERThere's other stuff,
17:23SPEAKERlike it seems like they think
17:25SPEAKERthat they can continue to expand this.
17:26SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
17:28SPEAKER- But also the 12,000 most common words
17:30SPEAKERprobably hits a pretty substantial amount of writing.
17:33SPEAKER- Yeah, there's one other interesting protection
17:37SPEAKERthis might offer here, which is that they mentioned like,
17:39SPEAKERhey, you know, it would certainly be maybe not trivial,
17:42SPEAKERbut certainly doable for the scrapers to get around this.
17:45SPEAKERLike one way they could do that is to,
17:46SPEAKERinstead of pull the raw HTML files,
17:49SPEAKERrender the page on their end and use like OCR
17:52SPEAKERto read the real text.
17:54SPEAKERBut they point out that that too,
17:55SPEAKERlike that is also increasing the burden
17:58SPEAKERon the scrapers pretty substantially,
17:59SPEAKERlike having to like have a whole page rendering pipeline
18:02SPEAKERand OCR pipeline in your scraper
18:04SPEAKERis probably increasing like compute costs
18:07SPEAKERpretty substantially for the scale they're working at.
18:09SPEAKERSo like that also might be a thing that would help deter.
18:13SPEAKER- Well, and the font, having the right font,
18:16SPEAKERlike it's entirely possible
18:18SPEAKERthey'll just use the default fonts too
18:19SPEAKERfor something like that.
18:20SPEAKERSo then this would still be bad, right?
18:21SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:22SPEAKERSo I don't know, this seems like,
18:25SPEAKERwhat this seems to foretell to me is a cat and mouse game.
18:29SPEAKER- I think that's probably correct, yeah.
18:29SPEAKER- Of people coming up with novel solutions like this
18:32SPEAKERto try to combat scrapers
18:35SPEAKERand they find workarounds to deal with it
18:37SPEAKERand then another method pops up
18:38SPEAKERand on we go whacking moles.
18:41SPEAKER- It seems like in the same way that anti-spam
18:44SPEAKERand antivirus became multi-pronged,
18:48SPEAKERit seems like, yeah, you're gonna want something
18:50SPEAKERthat blocks the, that is like a disallow list
18:53SPEAKERfor all the known IP addresses
18:55SPEAKERand then dynamically updates as new ones are added.
18:59SPEAKERAnd then you're gonna also want something
19:00SPEAKERthat makes it a pain in the ass to scrape your data.
19:03SPEAKER- Yeah, now the VARS story does point out
19:06SPEAKERthat this is not perfect.
19:09SPEAKERIt's not a perfect solution.
19:10SPEAKERLike this can interfere with like screen readers,
19:12SPEAKERfor example, which are probably gonna end up
19:14SPEAKERreading the bad text.
19:16SPEAKER- It's gonna screw with a lot of accessibility stuff
19:19SPEAKERand like, and your search results as well.
19:21SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, so it's not a perfect solution,
19:23SPEAKERbut I think it's still pretty early in this process
19:26SPEAKERof people figuring out ways to tell the robots to F off.
19:30SPEAKER- It's unfortunate because the cost of doing this stuff
19:35SPEAKERis like the benefit that we're getting out of these machines
19:39SPEAKERand the cost that they're,
19:41SPEAKERthe cost seems to be that the open web
19:43SPEAKERis going to completely go away.
19:45SPEAKER- Yeah, it does seem to be in the process of collapsing.
19:49SPEAKER- The last thing, the last part about this
19:52SPEAKERthat I wondered about is whether this is actually like,
19:59SPEAKERare we fixing this problem
20:00SPEAKERafter the horse has already left the barn?
20:02SPEAKERAre we closing the barn door
20:03SPEAKERafter the horse has already left the barn?
20:05SPEAKERBecause my understanding, and this could be out of date now,
20:09SPEAKERis that the best training data is from the time
20:13SPEAKERbefore chat GPT was unleashed on the web.
20:15SPEAKER- I see where you're going.
20:16SPEAKER- In much the same way that like,
20:19SPEAKERthe steel that we use for Geiger counters
20:21SPEAKERcomes from World War I shipwrecks
20:22SPEAKERbefore we blew up nuclear bombs
20:27SPEAKERand there was nuclear fallout in the air.
20:29SPEAKER- You've gotta hoard your stash of pre-war words.
20:32SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly, like are the best words,
20:35SPEAKERthose ones in the antique books
20:37SPEAKERthat they're chopping the backs off of and scanning
20:39SPEAKERbecause they know those are clean?
20:41SPEAKERLike are we, or is it that they're ranking
20:46SPEAKERhuman written words that people publish for free on the web
20:49SPEAKERhigh enough that it's worth going through this hassle
20:52SPEAKERto block their access to them
20:55SPEAKERso they can't get any fresh words?
20:57SPEAKER- That seems entirely, this all seems like
20:59SPEAKERit might be less of a joke and more serious
21:01SPEAKERthan you might even intend.
21:02SPEAKER- I'm not joking at all.
21:03SPEAKER- You're probably not joking.
21:04SPEAKERLike this is kind of unrelated,
21:06SPEAKERbut I bet they're using AI for this.
21:08SPEAKERDid you see this recent phenomenon
21:10SPEAKERof taking not even like necessarily classic novels,
21:13SPEAKERbut say novels from like the nineties
21:15SPEAKERand you're already nodding your head
21:17SPEAKERin a sad, disappointed way
21:20SPEAKERand basically replacing any number of things,
21:23SPEAKERany number of like dated references in them
21:24SPEAKERwith like modern updated references?
21:26SPEAKERI mean, like something as simple as like an eighties,
21:29SPEAKERthe name of an eighties junk food to like a modern,
21:32SPEAKERlike some snack you would find on shelves now,
21:34SPEAKERyou know, like just like quote unquote modernizing novels
21:37SPEAKERso the people were more--
21:38SPEAKER- Go to hell, okay, Cola.
21:39SPEAKER- Right, yes.
21:40SPEAKER- I think that, I've seen that.
21:43SPEAKERI've also seen the people using the machines
21:45SPEAKERto generate their own like Cliffs Notes for, you know,
21:50SPEAKERit's, okay, so one of the things you missed,
21:52SPEAKERthere was a Sam Altman post that was like,
21:54SPEAKERhey, you know what you can do with the chat Q and P,
21:56SPEAKERis you can generate a podcast
21:58SPEAKERabout your kids' most favorite interests.
22:00SPEAKER- I saw that.
22:01SPEAKER- And like, then you can listen to that in the car together
22:03SPEAKERwhen you're on the way to soccer press
22:04SPEAKERand somebody's first response was,
22:06SPEAKERyo, just talk to your kids, man.
22:09SPEAKERIt's the same thing, right?
22:10SPEAKERPeople are generating Cliffs Notes with the machine
22:13SPEAKERso they don't have to actually read the book.
22:14SPEAKERSo they get more than the Wikipedia plot synopsis,
22:17SPEAKERbut not as much as, you know, actually reading the book
22:20SPEAKERand absorbing the prose and thinking about it themselves
22:22SPEAKERand letting it live in their heads.
22:25SPEAKERSo yeah, yes, people are gonna do all sorts
22:27SPEAKERof horrible things is the TLDR.
22:30SPEAKER- There was a very long piece going around
22:32SPEAKERthat I have bookmarked that I have not read
22:33SPEAKERabout basically the age of reading potentially being over.
22:37SPEAKERDo you know the one I'm talking about?
22:38SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a, well, I mean,
22:40SPEAKERthere's been a lot going on in that space.
22:42SPEAKERWe also, in California at least,
22:44SPEAKERused a pretty widely discredited learn to read technique
22:48SPEAKERfor the last 15 years in large swaths of California.
22:51SPEAKER- Great.
22:52SPEAKER- So the overall literacy rates decreased dramatically
22:55SPEAKERand the rate of childhood reading for enjoyment
22:58SPEAKERhas gone down unsurprisingly as screen time has gone up.
23:02SPEAKER- Yeah.
23:06SPEAKER- The children having a hard time reading
23:08SPEAKERis an ongoing problem.
23:11SPEAKERIt's incredible to me how quickly the rise of video
23:13SPEAKERon the web, and I realize that both you and I
23:16SPEAKERhave created a lot of video for the web,
23:19SPEAKERimpacted literacy rates, 'cause if you'd asked me in 2005
23:24SPEAKERif there was gonna be a literacy problem in 20 years,
23:27SPEAKERI would have said, "No, absolutely not.
23:28SPEAKER"You have to read to be able to use the internet,"
23:30SPEAKERand I don't think that's the case anymore.
23:32SPEAKER- I have bad news about the trajectory of the internet.
23:35SPEAKERThe, yeah, like all the studies I see around the effects
23:38SPEAKERof social media on, I think, cognition and attention span
23:41SPEAKERcenter on short form video now.
23:43SPEAKERIt seems like, in fact, there was a Haltown video
23:46SPEAKERabout this that was quite good.
23:48SPEAKERBut it seems specifically like the short form video
23:51SPEAKERscrolling is like the most laser targeted
23:54SPEAKERat your ability to do any number of things mentally.
23:59SPEAKER- Yeah, I can see that.
24:00SPEAKER- The real quick, I have not read it,
24:02SPEAKERbut the piece I was thinking of is,
24:05SPEAKERit's a piece from "The Atlantic"
24:06SPEAKERcalled "The End of Reading Is Here."
24:09SPEAKEROptimists once believed that universal literacy
24:12SPEAKERwas inevitable, now it seems the age of reading
24:14SPEAKERmight be a short anomaly in human history.
24:17SPEAKER- So, okay.
24:19SPEAKER- Whatever, I'm not here to interrogate that idea
24:21SPEAKER'cause I haven't read it yet, I just,
24:22SPEAKERbut I saw a lot of people linking to it
24:24SPEAKERand thought maybe I should check it out.
24:26SPEAKER- There's very much, there's very much,
24:30SPEAKERlike this is also a thing that happens
24:31SPEAKERevery like 15 or 20 years. - Yeah, sure.
24:34SPEAKER- 'Cause like people always get all up in arms
24:36SPEAKERabout the new thing usurping the old
24:39SPEAKERand the TikToks are coming over
24:40SPEAKERand taking over our libraries and, you know.
24:43SPEAKER- But this convergence of trends really seems uniquely bad.
24:48SPEAKER- Look, the short form infinite scroll video,
24:52SPEAKERwe have limited the amount of access
24:55SPEAKERthat has in our house for certain members of our house
24:59SPEAKERbecause it is definitely, like you can't,
25:03SPEAKERthere's real value in reaching the end of the internet
25:07SPEAKERand like you can't do that, it's impossible to do that
25:10SPEAKERin TikTok or YouTube shorts or even Instagram reels, anyway.
25:14SPEAKER- Anyway, whatever, it seems like there's a lot of potential
25:16SPEAKERfor social movements to step in and maybe stem the tide
25:19SPEAKERor even push back some, you know, there's more and more
25:22SPEAKERpeople getting off of social media.
25:24SPEAKERLike I even see people who are like making efforts
25:26SPEAKERto navigate by paper maps again, or there's--
25:29SPEAKER- That's insanity. - There's some research
25:31SPEAKERaround that as well that like even that kind of dulls
25:33SPEAKERyour spatial cognition, just relying on algorithmic routing
25:37SPEAKERfor mapping all the time.
25:38SPEAKER- So I think video games are the solution to that
25:40SPEAKER'cause like my kid is great at maps because of video games.
25:44SPEAKER- Okay, yeah. - Like that's the entirety,
25:46SPEAKERthat's the like, I don't think I could give her
25:48SPEAKERa piece of paper and she'd be able to figure it out.
25:50SPEAKERMaybe she could. - Yeah.
25:52SPEAKER- But definitely like her mapping skills are good
25:55SPEAKERbecause of video games, not because of, yeah,
25:58SPEAKERturn by turn, Dev. - I can see it.
26:00SPEAKER- Okay, one more quick AI story.
26:02SPEAKERI don't think we need to belabor this,
26:03SPEAKERbut if you are a streamer on Twitch, they added a control
26:08SPEAKERto let you opt out of AI training off of the content
26:12SPEAKERof your streams and presumably chats.
26:16SPEAKER- Yeah.
26:17SPEAKER- Like apparently they've been using training Amazon AI
26:22SPEAKERon Twitch content for years.
26:23SPEAKER- So that's where this really gets rough for me
26:25SPEAKER'cause when I saw this, I mean, it was bad enough
26:27SPEAKERwhen I saw this blow up the other day
26:29SPEAKERwhen they did a stream about this.
26:32SPEAKER- Yeah. - A certain quote came out
26:34SPEAKERof that stream that was basically to the effect of like,
26:37SPEAKERwell, we default people to opt it in
26:39SPEAKERbecause otherwise nobody would ever opt in.
26:41SPEAKER- I mean, it's not wrong. - Like wow, you don't say.
26:43SPEAKER- But when this blew up, I was like,
26:46SPEAKERoh, they've started training AI on Twitch streams
26:50SPEAKERand offered this opt out, we should go opt,
26:52SPEAKERlike I thought the whole thing was starting right now.
26:55SPEAKERIt was when I found out that they've been training
26:58SPEAKERfor years on streams and only now are letting you opt out
27:01SPEAKERthat this really got rough.
27:03SPEAKER- I have questions about the wisdom of training your AI
27:06SPEAKERon Twitch streams. - Yeah.
27:08SPEAKER- I mean, I feel like that's not exactly
27:10SPEAKERtypical human communication.
27:11SPEAKERIt's a format that lives unto itself in a lot of ways.
27:16SPEAKERLike I don't think I've ever said what's up chat
27:18SPEAKERunironically anywhere but on Twitch.
27:20SPEAKER- Well, now how do you feel when I suggest
27:22SPEAKERthat maybe one end goal of this is to allow people
27:25SPEAKERto endlessly generate their own fake live streams to watch?
27:29SPEAKER- Now, see, now you're talking.
27:31SPEAKERSo you're saying passive income for me.
27:34SPEAKER- Well, maybe, I don't know.
27:35SPEAKERWell, no, because the end user is gonna circumvent you
27:37SPEAKERand just stream, they're gonna stream like an AI version
27:41SPEAKERof not that Will Smith, 24/7.
27:43SPEAKER- Oh God, wait, you're saying they're pirating me?
27:46SPEAKER- You know how a lot of people like to just have streams on
27:48SPEAKERin the background all the time?
27:49SPEAKERLike what if they could just start generating?
27:51SPEAKERThey're like, I'm not saying this is a good idea
27:52SPEAKERbut maybe that might be what Amazon is thinking.
27:55SPEAKERI don't know, I mean, probably not.
27:57SPEAKER- Look, there's probably,
28:00SPEAKERI don't think there's enough video of me existent
28:02SPEAKERon the world anymore because most of the stuff I've done
28:05SPEAKERon Twitch, it disappears after three months.
28:08SPEAKERBut there's definitely a corpus of data
28:10SPEAKERthat could train on 24/7 Brad.
28:13SPEAKER- Oh boy.
28:14SPEAKER- Yeah, it could be like that Seinfeld thing
28:15SPEAKERthat was out a few years ago that was terrible and weird
28:18SPEAKERand funny for about 15 or 20 minutes.
28:19SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:21SPEAKER- Yeah, this is grim.
28:22SPEAKERSo yeah, you hinted at it.
28:24SPEAKERFriend of the show, Mary Kish and Mike Benton
28:27SPEAKERdid a live stream.
28:28SPEAKERIt's the regular patch notes live stream
28:30SPEAKERwhere they talk about what's changing on the platform
28:32SPEAKERand it looked like it had like 100 times the normal viewers
28:36SPEAKERthat they have for that on this particular one
28:39SPEAKERbecause AI is a hot button topic.
28:41SPEAKER- Yeah, this does not go over well.
28:43SPEAKER- No, the quote that you alluded to earlier is,
28:47SPEAKERhold on, I wanna make sure I get it absolutely right
28:50SPEAKER'cause it's a pretty stupendous quote.
28:52SPEAKER- If it was opt-in, nobody would opt-in.
28:54SPEAKERThat's the quote I'm looking at a screenshot.
28:56SPEAKER- Yeah, if it was opt-in, nobody would opt-in.
28:58SPEAKEREverybody knows this, right?
28:59SPEAKERThis is the Microsoft lesson from the '90s,
29:02SPEAKERthe early 2000s when they started doing user research
29:04SPEAKERthat defaults matter because 95% of people
29:07SPEAKERdon't ever look at the settings.
29:09SPEAKER- Or in this case, 95% of people are vehemently opposed
29:13SPEAKERto the setting.
29:16SPEAKERLike what is it?
29:17SPEAKERI mean, it's hard to say what is in it
29:19SPEAKERfor a person to do this, like, unless you were-
29:22SPEAKER- To opt-in?
29:23SPEAKER- Yeah, unless you were some kind of like ideologically
29:25SPEAKERdyed in the wool, hardcore AI believer,
29:29SPEAKERwhat would actually spur anybody to ever do this?
29:31SPEAKERYou're getting nothing out of it.
29:33SPEAKER- The funny thing is one of the comments
29:36SPEAKERon the Reddit thread I looked at for this
29:38SPEAKERon the r/livestreamfail Reddit thread was the irony
29:43SPEAKERis that if you paid streamers to do this,
29:50SPEAKERlike 90% of them would say yes.
29:53SPEAKER- Sure, oh yeah, if you paid them, absolutely.
29:55SPEAKERPlenty of them would, 100%.
29:57SPEAKERBut I'm sure their terms of service are crafted
30:00SPEAKERjust so that they would never have to do that.
30:02SPEAKER- Oh no, of course not, of course not.
30:03SPEAKERBut I'm just saying it's a trend, the audience
30:06SPEAKERfor this setting, 'cause just to be clear,
30:09SPEAKERthis only applies to people who stream.
30:10SPEAKERIt's not content that you generate watching streams
30:13SPEAKERor stuff like that on Twitch, is that if they provided,
30:18SPEAKERif they said, "Hey, we'll pay you to let us train
30:20SPEAKER"on your data," people would absolutely take that back.
30:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I bet most people would.
30:26SPEAKER- Yeah, so anyway, that's the Twitch AI training stuff.
30:30SPEAKERLike, partly it's a nothing burger,
30:33SPEAKER'cause I feel like any free service at this point
30:35SPEAKERis training on your data if you're uploading to YouTube.
30:37SPEAKERThey're absolutely training on your data.
30:39SPEAKERIf you're uploading on the open web,
30:41SPEAKERif somebody's training on your data,
30:43SPEAKERif you're uploading anything anywhere
30:45SPEAKERon the open internet right now.
30:46SPEAKER- We talked about this recently,
30:47SPEAKERlike I had to put some stuff into Google Photos
30:50SPEAKERthat I did not want to put in there,
30:52SPEAKERand I'm sure that Google is running all kinds of stuff
30:54SPEAKERon your photos at this point.
30:56SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like, at this point,
30:59SPEAKERthe only reason I still have Google Photos
31:00SPEAKERis 'cause hard drives are so freaking expensive.
31:04SPEAKERI'm worried about what happens to my photo library
31:07SPEAKERif I lose two hard drives.
31:09SPEAKER- Oh, man, it is so painful.
31:11SPEAKEREverything is so painful.
31:13SPEAKERI shouldn't get into it.
31:16SPEAKERYou and I had another, like, oh God,
31:17SPEAKEReverything is so expensive moment this week
31:19SPEAKERfor something that, boy, I wish I had just bought
31:23SPEAKERthree years ago when I thought about it.
31:25SPEAKERAnyway, we don't need to get into it.
31:27SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, exactly.
31:29SPEAKER- You wanna talk about CACs?
31:30SPEAKER- Yes, that's a feel-good thing.
31:32SPEAKER- California extreme.
31:35SPEAKER- Yes, you've never been, right?
31:36SPEAKER- I have never been.
31:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I also had never been.
31:38SPEAKERI guess I sucked too.
31:39SPEAKERI don't know how we never, you especially,
31:42SPEAKER'cause you live, well, fairly close, it's not.
31:45SPEAKER- I have to drive like 15, 10 miles north
31:47SPEAKERand then come back south again,
31:49SPEAKERso it's the same distance, actually.
31:51SPEAKER- Yeah, that is actually not great.
31:53SPEAKER- It's almost always on a weekend when I'm gone,
31:56SPEAKERfor whatever reason.
31:57SPEAKERThis time in August, it's always right before
32:00SPEAKERschool comes back or something, so I'm never in town.
32:02SPEAKER- Yeah, or this was even a little late.
32:03SPEAKERI think it's usually late July, but it is very much
32:06SPEAKERin prime summer vacation or travel weekend territory.
32:12SPEAKERBut anyway, it's County Northern California's premier
32:15SPEAKERclassic arcade and pinball expo,
32:19SPEAKERwhich if you listen--
32:19SPEAKER- It's CapEx, I guess.
32:21SPEAKER- Yes, if you listen to Giant Bomb for many years,
32:23SPEAKERI mean, this is going back 15-plus years,
32:25SPEAKERbut a lot of Giant Bomb people were way into
32:28SPEAKERCalifornia Extreme for a number of years.
32:31SPEAKER- Yeah, getting hotel rooms and, you know,
32:34SPEAKERgnarling people out of hotels, all sorts of stuff.
32:36SPEAKER- Gnarling people out to the hotel,
32:37SPEAKERbut also hustling for arcade cabinets to own.
32:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I remember one California Extreme when,
32:48SPEAKERI guess, Jeff and Ryan came back with a truck
32:50SPEAKERwith three cabinets in it.
32:52SPEAKERIsn't that where the cabinets in the whiskey basement
32:55SPEAKERcame from, like that joust machine that Vinny bought and--
32:57SPEAKER- Yeah, some of them, I think, yes.
33:00SPEAKERYeah, they were way into, you know, like I'd get it.
33:02SPEAKERIt's never been practical for me,
33:04SPEAKERbut like an arcade cabinet is like decor,
33:06SPEAKERit's furniture as much as it's a video game.
33:10SPEAKERI wouldn't mind having one one day
33:11SPEAKERwhen I had way more space, but I don't know.
33:14SPEAKER- We, when I was a kid, when I was really little,
33:17SPEAKERmy dad traded somebody something for a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail.
33:22SPEAKER- See, cocktails are great 'cause those are extra furniture.
33:25SPEAKERI mean, that's a table, that's a game that's a table.
33:28SPEAKER- Well, and I'm gonna go and tell you,
33:29SPEAKERit was the best like two weeks of my life,
33:31SPEAKERand then he got tired of hearing the beeps and the boops,
33:34SPEAKERand he traded it for a pinball,
33:36SPEAKERfor like a Williams pinball machine
33:38SPEAKERthat had naked ladies on it.
33:39SPEAKER- Wait, hang on, if noise is your objection,
33:42SPEAKERI'm not sure a pinball is fixed.
33:43SPEAKER- Well, he likes pinball and didn't like video games.
33:46SPEAKER- Big fan of pinball and naked ladies.
33:48SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I think the naked ladies
33:49SPEAKERwere just the pinball machine that the guy wanted to unload.
33:51SPEAKER- I see.
33:52SPEAKER- It wasn't like that was the choice.
33:53SPEAKERIt was like, "Hey, yeah, it's that Ms. Pac-Man cabinet.
33:56SPEAKERThese are diamond dozens, you can give 'em at Pizza Hut."
33:58SPEAKERYou know, that cigar chomping guy situation.
34:01SPEAKER- Yeah, cocktails are cool.
34:03SPEAKER- Cocktails are awesome.
34:04SPEAKERI would love to have a cocktail.
34:05SPEAKER- Yeah, I could see it.
34:06SPEAKERThat's definitely a smaller space command.
34:08SPEAKERWell, the footprint is actually not that different.
34:10SPEAKER- But it's more usable, to your point.
34:11SPEAKERIt could be an end table.
34:12SPEAKER- Yeah, so, yeah.
34:13SPEAKER- Hey, honey, I got us a new end table.
34:14SPEAKER- If you arranged it so you could sit
34:16SPEAKERat either end of it and not be,
34:18SPEAKERyeah, that would work, sure.
34:19SPEAKER- My house isn't big enough to have arcade machines.
34:22SPEAKERThis is the problem.
34:23SPEAKER- Yeah, same.
34:23SPEAKEROr I don't even have a house, so it's an even bigger problem.
34:25SPEAKERBut anyway, there's some general show
34:29SPEAKERand arcade and pinball tech stuff we could talk about,
34:33SPEAKERbut there's a couple of specific things from there.
34:35SPEAKERThey have talks at that thing.
34:37SPEAKER- Well, hold on, before, did you play anything noteworthy?
34:41SPEAKEROften they have rare and unusual things there?
34:43SPEAKER- Yes, well, we could just lead with that if you want.
34:46SPEAKER- Is that the thing?
34:47SPEAKERI didn't know that was a special thing.
34:48SPEAKER- Yes, no, that is a super,
34:49SPEAKERI wish I had more firm information about it,
34:51SPEAKERbut I'll say what I know,
34:53SPEAKERwhich is that a Lunar Lander cocktail machine showed up there
34:58SPEAKER- That's wild.
34:59SPEAKER- Which apparently nobody,
35:00SPEAKEReven at the level of the people who run this show
35:03SPEAKERand devote much of their lives to collecting
35:06SPEAKERand maintaining arcade machines, knew existed.
35:09SPEAKER- How?
35:09SPEAKER- Nobody knew because this was never released.
35:12SPEAKER- Oh, as a prototype or something?
35:13SPEAKER- This is basically a prototype that they,
35:15SPEAKERit's effectively just Lunar Lander.
35:18SPEAKERThe classic arcade, or sorry,
35:19SPEAKERthe classic Atari game, Lunar Lander.
35:22SPEAKERAnd I don't know if there's,
35:23SPEAKERI don't know if this is a one of a kind
35:25SPEAKERor they might've made like two of these,
35:26SPEAKERbut it is very much like a prototype type,
35:30SPEAKERlike a proof of concept that got made
35:32SPEAKERand never put into production
35:33SPEAKERand then sat in somebody's garage for 50 years or 45 years.
35:37SPEAKER- Wild.
35:38SPEAKER- Like there's no side art on it.
35:39SPEAKERIt's just like a generic wood paneling on the sides.
35:41SPEAKERThere is no markings around any of the controls.
35:45SPEAKERLike they had put a piece of painter's tape
35:46SPEAKERnext to the one player, two player buttons
35:48SPEAKERto write one player, two player on.
35:50SPEAKER- Is Lunar Lander is just two buttons,
35:53SPEAKERthree buttons, right?
35:54SPEAKER- This one had four,
35:55SPEAKERI'm not a Lunar Lander expert at all.
35:58SPEAKERThis one had four buttons.
35:59SPEAKERI think it's at least three.
36:01SPEAKERI played some of the mystery core after I got home.
36:03SPEAKER- 'Cause it's like the rotate.
36:05SPEAKER- Yeah, there's left, right, rotate.
36:06SPEAKERAnd there's also a dedicated button
36:08SPEAKERfor effectively level out and fire full afterburner.
36:11SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
36:12SPEAKERSo like your OSHA button, basically.
36:15SPEAKER- This one had a fourth button,
36:16SPEAKERbut I'm not sure if that did anything or not.
36:18SPEAKERAnd then like the throttle, like lever kind of thing.
36:20SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
36:22SPEAKEROh, it was analog throttle, okay.
36:23SPEAKER- Yeah, so I mean, it's still just Lunar Lander.
36:26SPEAKERIt's not, but technically a different ROM though.
36:29SPEAKER- Okay.
36:30SPEAKER- Like because they had to do the-
36:31SPEAKER- 'Cause it flips?
36:32SPEAKER- Yeah, because it flips the screen for two players.
36:33SPEAKERSo like technically extra software development
36:35SPEAKERwas done on this.
36:37SPEAKER- That's wild.
36:39SPEAKER- Isolac and Vectormon,
36:40SPEAKERit's Lunar Lander in a sit down capacity.
36:42SPEAKERBut the last thing I'll say about it is
36:45SPEAKERwhere you put your hands on the controls,
36:47SPEAKERyou could feel an immense amount of heat emanating
36:50SPEAKERfrom out from the underside of that cocktail machine.
36:54SPEAKER- Probably the CRT, right?
36:55SPEAKER- Yeah, so I came to, we'll get into this.
36:57SPEAKERI came to understand that vector monitors
37:00SPEAKERuse an extra, extra lot of electricity.
37:03SPEAKER- Really?
37:03SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I did not know this,
37:05SPEAKERbut apparently- - I didn't know this either.
37:06SPEAKER- Apparently vector monitors use a lot of juice.
37:09SPEAKERAnd who knows what is cobbled together
37:12SPEAKERunder the hood of this thing,
37:13SPEAKER'cause it's not a final production model,
37:15SPEAKERbut it was like intense.
37:18SPEAKERIt was like genuinely, it was like,
37:20SPEAKERwhat is going on inside of this thing
37:22SPEAKERthat there is this much heat collecting
37:23SPEAKERaround the controls of this thing?
37:25SPEAKER- Yeah, that's wild.
37:26SPEAKERWas it only one side or was it on both?
37:28SPEAKER- I only played the one side.
37:29SPEAKER- You only played the one side, okay.
37:32SPEAKERI don't think I've ever played
37:33SPEAKERa Lunar Lander arcade machine before.
37:35SPEAKER- I don't think I had either.
37:37SPEAKER- I was looking on Wikipedia,
37:38SPEAKERthey only made a few thousand of them
37:39SPEAKER'cause it was only, it was like 5,000,
37:41SPEAKERwhich I guess was a lot back then.
37:43SPEAKER- This is super random, but I got to reading about it.
37:46SPEAKERMortal Kombat II was there and it's probably my favorite,
37:48SPEAKERit's definitely my favorite arcade game of all time.
37:51SPEAKER- I can see that. - On balance.
37:53SPEAKER- Fine choice.
37:53SPEAKER- I got to reading a little bit
37:55SPEAKERabout the business that game did.
37:57SPEAKERAnd granted, Lunar Lander is what?
37:59SPEAKEREarly '80, late '70s, early '80s.
38:00SPEAKER- '79, yeah.
38:02SPEAKER- MKII came out in '93, so it was slightly different eras,
38:05SPEAKERbut they were saying that, yeah,
38:07SPEAKERso a machine that did 5,000 units in the early '90s
38:10SPEAKERwas considered like a big success.
38:12SPEAKER- Wow.
38:13SPEAKER- So yeah, that kind of gives you a scale,
38:14SPEAKERor it gives you a sense of the scale of the manufacturing.
38:16SPEAKERJust for reference, MKII lifetime moved 27,000 cabinets.
38:21SPEAKER- What did they, like, I have no idea
38:25SPEAKERwhat a new cabinet would have cost in 1979.
38:27SPEAKERWas that like a couple of grand, probably?
38:29SPEAKER- Oh, in '79, I don't know.
38:30SPEAKERI was gonna say in the early '90s, I can tell you.
38:32SPEAKER- It was like five grand, right?
38:33SPEAKER- I think it was less.
38:34SPEAKERI think it was like 2,000 to 3,000, depending on the cabinet.
38:36SPEAKERI think, I wanna say MKII was around 3,000.
38:40SPEAKERI looked up "Ninja Turtles" when I was 10 years old,
38:43SPEAKERthe "Ninja Turtles" Konami four-player beat 'em up,
38:46SPEAKER'cause I loved that game in the arcades so much.
38:48SPEAKERI was just like drooling over like,
38:50SPEAKERwhat would it be like to own one?
38:51SPEAKERAnd I wanna say that one was like 2,000 in the late '80s
38:55SPEAKERfor an operator to purchase.
38:57SPEAKER- It's not too bad.
38:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
39:00SPEAKERAnyway.
39:01SPEAKER- Did you land the spaceship?
39:03SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
39:04SPEAKERI landed on the 5X several times.
39:08SPEAKER- Wow.
39:09SPEAKER- That game's awesome.
39:10SPEAKER- Crazy.
39:11SPEAKER- The game's really good.
39:12SPEAKER- And then I played somewhat on the "Mr."
39:13SPEAKERand it actually works quite well on an analog stick.
39:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
39:16SPEAKERI've done that too.
39:16SPEAKER- I was surprised to see.
39:19SPEAKER- They had that set up at Huntsville
39:21SPEAKERat the Space Center there when I was a kid.
39:25SPEAKERThat was the first place I encountered that.
39:26SPEAKERI didn't realize, I thought it was a NASA thing
39:28SPEAKERand not an actual video game.
39:29SPEAKER- It's fun.
39:30SPEAKERYeah, but there's, hmm.
39:33SPEAKERI wonder, maybe there's some stream potential
39:35SPEAKERfor some like friendly "Lunar Lander" competition.
39:39SPEAKER- Well, you'd have to.
39:40SPEAKERWell, you could just play each person
39:41SPEAKERwith their own game on each end.
39:43SPEAKERIt doesn't have to be all in the same game.
39:44SPEAKERYou could just play.
39:45SPEAKER- Yeah, you could just keep a tally
39:47SPEAKERon the right side of the screen.
39:48SPEAKER- Play the same stage
39:50SPEAKERand you can just hash the scores yourself.
39:52SPEAKER- Are the stages fixed or are they generated?
39:54SPEAKER- That's, it would depend on that being the case,
39:56SPEAKERwhich I'm not 100% sure it is,
39:58SPEAKERbut you do pick a difficulty at the beginning.
40:00SPEAKERSo I think maybe the stages are locked to that.
40:02SPEAKERI don't know.
40:03SPEAKERIf not, then my idea wouldn't be unworkable, but.
40:06SPEAKER- I mean, we could do some science.
40:07SPEAKER- Yeah.
40:09SPEAKER- Okay, anyway, there were talks there.
40:11SPEAKERI only went to one talk, but I was quite excited about it.
40:14SPEAKER- Okay.
40:15SPEAKER- Long time listeners of this podcast
40:17SPEAKERwill know this project already
40:18SPEAKERbecause Steve Lin and I saw it
40:20SPEAKERat the Vintage Computer Festival West two years ago.
40:23SPEAKERIt is the open source CRT chassis.
40:27SPEAKERYou remember that?
40:28SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
40:28SPEAKERIt's the, is this the one where they were placing the gun
40:32SPEAKERon the back of the tube?
40:33SPEAKER- I don't know if it's the gun
40:34SPEAKERjust because I am CRT ignorant enough
40:36SPEAKERto not be able to say if the gun is part of this
40:38SPEAKERor is the gun inside the tube.
40:40SPEAKERMaybe you know, probably know more about this than I do.
40:41SPEAKER- The gun is the thing that hangs off the back of the tube
40:43SPEAKERis my understanding.
40:44SPEAKERBut this is a place that I never bothered to learn
40:45SPEAKER'cause I was always afraid of them.
40:46SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm guessing this is a place
40:48SPEAKERwhere different people use different jargon
40:50SPEAKERfor this kind of thing.
40:51SPEAKER'Cause there's like, there's a yoke, there's a neck board.
40:54SPEAKERI can like rattle off terms.
40:55SPEAKERI know for parts that hang off the back of a CRT tube.
40:58SPEAKER- So the yoke is the magnet thing
41:00SPEAKERaround the end of the tube, right?
41:03SPEAKER- Probably, I think the yoke is the first thing
41:05SPEAKERthat touches the tube from outside the tube.
41:07SPEAKERYou know, the tube is self-contained of course, in a CRT.
41:11SPEAKERThe tube is the tube and then there's all this,
41:14SPEAKERlike all these circuit boards
41:15SPEAKERhanging off the back basically.
41:16SPEAKERAnd I think the yoke is the first thing
41:18SPEAKERthat touches the back of the tube.
41:20SPEAKERBut anyway, so the TD CRT is the name of this project.
41:24SPEAKERIt's just named for Thomas Dady is the guy who's making it.
41:29SPEAKERSo this project takes a tube
41:30SPEAKERand just replaces all the electronics,
41:32SPEAKERall the power supplies,
41:33SPEAKERall the boards that drive the signal to the CRT tube.
41:37SPEAKERAnd the ultimate goal, you know, we talked about this,
41:39SPEAKERyou can go back and find that VCF episode
41:41SPEAKERfrom two years ago if you wanna hear more,
41:43SPEAKERlike Steve does a much more thorough job
41:44SPEAKERof explaining this project than I do.
41:46SPEAKERBut the upshot of this is that instead of getting a CRT
41:50SPEAKERthat needs to work,
41:51SPEAKERincluding all the electronics off the back,
41:53SPEAKERwe talked about my sidewalk TV, right?
41:55SPEAKER- Yeah. - On the Patreon episode.
41:57SPEAKER- Yeah, but you should, you found a TV on the sidewalk.
41:59SPEAKERIt's the TLDR.
42:00SPEAKER- I found like a pretty nice 27 inch late 90s Trinitron
42:03SPEAKERon the sidewalk.
42:04SPEAKER- Damn. - That does not work.
42:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
42:06SPEAKER- That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about here,
42:09SPEAKERwhere presumably from what I can tell from the error code
42:12SPEAKERthat's blinking on that thing,
42:13SPEAKERit doesn't work because one of the circuit boards
42:15SPEAKERhas got a problem with it.
42:16SPEAKERIt's not the tube itself.
42:18SPEAKERIt's the electronics are what go,
42:19SPEAKERbut you know, capacitors age and need replacing,
42:21SPEAKERlike different things happen on circuit boards over time.
42:25SPEAKERAnd that I think more often than not,
42:27SPEAKERthat's what kills old CRTs.
42:28SPEAKER- Yeah, the tubes last a long time
42:30SPEAKERas long as they don't break.
42:32SPEAKER- Right, yeah, exactly.
42:33SPEAKERSo this is a project to just throw out
42:35SPEAKERall the old electronics and replace them
42:37SPEAKERwith much newer, more compact, more energy efficient
42:40SPEAKERand software programmable parts.
42:44SPEAKER- Software programmable CRT is a really interesting concept.
42:47SPEAKER- Totally, and so I got the sense that this guy,
42:50SPEAKERI went to his talk and it was about 80% of this talk
42:53SPEAKERwas him just talking very in depth about how CRTs work,
42:55SPEAKERlike at the electron level.
42:57SPEAKER- Yeah.
42:58SPEAKER- Including a lot of like electrical formulas
43:00SPEAKERand circuit diagrams.
43:03SPEAKERSome, most of which was over my head,
43:05SPEAKERbut I still picked up a lot of details from it.
43:07SPEAKERAnd I get the sense that arcade machines
43:09SPEAKERmight be the reason he actually started this project
43:11SPEAKERin the first place.
43:12SPEAKER- That makes sense.
43:13SPEAKER- Because it was very much in that frame.
43:15SPEAKERI mean, we were at an arcade show,
43:16SPEAKERbut it sounds like that might be his like first passion,
43:20SPEAKERbut that's a good thing because he talked about
43:21SPEAKERhow arcade cabinets, the monitors and arcade cabinets
43:25SPEAKERuse all kinds of insane ranges of resolutions
43:27SPEAKERand frame rates and like update rates.
43:31SPEAKERThere's like 15 kilohertz versus 31 kilohertz.
43:33SPEAKERYou know, like there's all kinds of like,
43:35SPEAKERso he basically has designed this thing
43:36SPEAKERas universally as possible to be able to drive
43:38SPEAKERlike any resolution and frame rate and scan,
43:41SPEAKERblah, blah, blah, like all the parameters
43:43SPEAKERthat would change across CRTs this thing can handle.
43:46SPEAKERThat's where the software programmable part comes in
43:48SPEAKERis that you, like he literally has made a data protocol
43:51SPEAKERand an iPhone app.
43:53SPEAKERSo you can sit there. - Wild.
43:54SPEAKER- That's how he was demoing it two years ago
43:56SPEAKERwas he had an iPad hooked up to this thing
43:58SPEAKERwhere he was just changing the resolution
43:59SPEAKERand the scan rate and stuff that were going out
44:02SPEAKERto the TV on the fly on this iPad.
44:04SPEAKER- How close is it?
44:05SPEAKERLike I'm looking at his GitHub repo right now.
44:07SPEAKER- Yeah, it's still very much not ready
44:10SPEAKERfor regular people consumption if you look at the GitHub.
44:13SPEAKERBut so that's kind of what I'm here to talk about
44:15SPEAKERis the updates to this thing in the last two years.
44:17SPEAKERSo he was showing a working one at the VCF two years ago,
44:20SPEAKERbut the current version is significantly smaller
44:22SPEAKERthan that one was.
44:24SPEAKER- Okay.
44:24SPEAKER- I meant to send you, I took videos
44:26SPEAKERand I meant to send you a video.
44:28SPEAKERWhat if through the magic of podcast editing,
44:30SPEAKERI sent you the video right now?
44:32SPEAKER- Perfect, that sounds great.
44:33SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
44:35SPEAKEROkay, I just got to the open back of the monitor
44:38SPEAKERyou showed at the start of the video.
44:40SPEAKER- Thomas had a tiny little arcade cabinet at the show
44:42SPEAKERrunning one of these setups in person
44:44SPEAKERand it's the new setup.
44:45SPEAKERIt's the much smaller, lighter one.
44:48SPEAKERAnd you can see how small it is now.
44:49SPEAKERIt's like three small circuit boards
44:51SPEAKERand then the yoke or whatever it is
44:53SPEAKERthat attaches to the back of the CRT.
44:57SPEAKER- Yeah, it's smaller than the stuff
45:00SPEAKERhung off the back of any CRT that I've ever seen.
45:02SPEAKER- Like substantially.
45:03SPEAKERSo that's where the updates come in here.
45:05SPEAKERIn the last two years,
45:06SPEAKERhe has done a new revision of this thing.
45:07SPEAKERLike new parts have come online.
45:09SPEAKERLike he is, I gather from the presentation,
45:11SPEAKERhe's constantly looking for smaller, more efficient,
45:14SPEAKERmore sustainable and readily available like chips
45:16SPEAKERand MOSFETs and all the electrical components
45:20SPEAKERthat will go into making this thing.
45:21SPEAKERSo it's continually getting smaller and cooler
45:25SPEAKERand less complicated.
45:26SPEAKER- I also love the kind of melding
45:29SPEAKERof what looks like modern green,
45:32SPEAKERassembled in a factory PCBs
45:34SPEAKERand like the old school electronics
45:37SPEAKERthat I assume are powering the tube.
45:39SPEAKER- Yes.
45:40SPEAKER- Like there's like big transformers hanging off the side
45:42SPEAKERthere that are like,
45:44SPEAKERthat clearly came out of the back of an arcade cabinet.
45:47SPEAKERRight? This is cool.
45:48SPEAKER- So, okay.
45:49SPEAKERLike I'll cut to the chase here.
45:51SPEAKERAt the end of his very technical presentation,
45:53SPEAKERhis final slide was entitled, "Can I buy it?"
45:57SPEAKERSo he is thinking in that direction.
45:59SPEAKERThe answer is no, not quite yet.
46:00SPEAKERI mean, you can make it yourself.
46:01SPEAKERAll the plans are up now.
46:03SPEAKER- Yeah, but getting boards made
46:04SPEAKERand stuff like that is a pain in the butt.
46:05SPEAKER- He is working toward a scenario
46:07SPEAKERwhere anybody's gonna be able to just buy a kit
46:10SPEAKERof this thing and potentially use it.
46:13SPEAKERBut he's got further refinement he's still trying to do.
46:15SPEAKERAnd the other thing he mentioned
46:16SPEAKERis he even wants to write a lot of documentation.
46:18SPEAKERLike that when you look at the GitHub
46:20SPEAKERand you see how bare it is right now,
46:22SPEAKERhe recognizes that that's a problem.
46:24SPEAKER'Cause I get terrified
46:26SPEAKERwhen I see highly technical GitHub repos like this
46:28SPEAKERwith like zero explanation for what to do with them.
46:31SPEAKER'Cause it's just like, okay,
46:32SPEAKERnormal people are just never gonna be able
46:33SPEAKERto approach this thing.
46:34SPEAKERBut he recognizes this is gonna need a lot of documentation
46:37SPEAKERbefore more people can use it.
46:40SPEAKERAnd I went and talked to him after the presentation
46:43SPEAKERand I said, okay, like building on your,
46:46SPEAKERcan I buy it slide?
46:47SPEAKERAnd the fact that you want to get it in a state
46:49SPEAKERwhere you can do that,
46:50SPEAKERlike what's the level of technical competence
46:52SPEAKERsomebody is gonna need to install one of these things.
46:55SPEAKERAnd he basically said, every specific model of tube
46:59SPEAKERis gonna need its own wiring harness.
47:01SPEAKERLike that's gonna vary by tube.
47:04SPEAKERBut there's only so many types of tubes
47:05SPEAKERthat have been made in the world.
47:06SPEAKERLike they were used in multiple models of TV.
47:09SPEAKERSo like, this is my speculation,
47:11SPEAKERbut I could see like a community Wiki springing up
47:14SPEAKERor maybe not even, you don't even need a Wiki.
47:16SPEAKERI bet people will just sell different wiring harnesses,
47:18SPEAKERbut I'm sure like every tube that gets used for this project
47:22SPEAKERwill get documentation for like,
47:23SPEAKERhere's the wiring harness for this type of Hitachi
47:27SPEAKERor whoever makes this range of tubes
47:30SPEAKERthat go in these models, you know what I mean?
47:31SPEAKERLike that'll get defined, I think over time.
47:34SPEAKERAnd then at that point, he said,
47:36SPEAKERhe basically said like, there's really only one thing
47:39SPEAKERyou need to hook up to the tube
47:40SPEAKERonce you have the wiring harness for that tube in hand.
47:43SPEAKER- So does that mean you have to have a yoke
47:46SPEAKERthat goes with the wiring harness?
47:47SPEAKERThe yoke is the thing that steers the beam, right?
47:49SPEAKERIt's the vertical and horizontal magnet.
47:52SPEAKER- We're getting way out over my skis
47:54SPEAKERin terms of what I can explain credibly here,
47:56SPEAKERbut maybe, maybe not.
47:58SPEAKERBut like the simplified gist is that he's pretty confident
48:03SPEAKERthat eventually this will get to the point
48:04SPEAKERwhere you could just kind of buy a kit
48:06SPEAKERand get the right wiring harness and install it.
48:08SPEAKERI mean, provided again that you know what you're doing
48:10SPEAKER'cause CRTs are dangerous and you don't electrocute yourself
48:13SPEAKERand that kind of thing.
48:14SPEAKERBut like, it sounds like it's gonna get there
48:17SPEAKERor he's confident it's gonna get there.
48:19SPEAKERAnd this is gonna hugely broaden the range of viable tubes
48:23SPEAKERthat are out there because you can get some,
48:26SPEAKERI don't know, you can get some nine inch Sylvania
48:29SPEAKERat Goodwill that doesn't work
48:31SPEAKERand pull out all the electronics off of it
48:33SPEAKERand get one of these and drive it with that.
48:35SPEAKERAnd then you have, 'cause the tube is all that matters
48:37SPEAKERat that point, the electronics that may be faulty
48:40SPEAKERcan just go to e-waste.
48:41SPEAKER- Well, and my question is,
48:44SPEAKERand I think I asked this last time too if I had to guess,
48:47SPEAKERbut this means that you'll be able to take like a TV,
48:50SPEAKERa CRT from a TV and then run it at like arcade refresh rates
48:54SPEAKERand resolutions, which has always been,
48:57SPEAKERlike the problem has always been that you need a CRT
48:59SPEAKERfor TV stuff and then you need a different CRT
49:01SPEAKERfor whatever arcade stuff you wanna do
49:03SPEAKERand never the twain shall those cross.
49:06SPEAKER- Yeah, so you could, theoretically, and again,
49:08SPEAKERthis is at the limits of my understanding,
49:10SPEAKERbut yes, you could change the resolution
49:12SPEAKERand the type of signal and the X, Y, and Z parameters
49:15SPEAKERof the signal you're feeding to it based on your needs.
49:18SPEAKER- Imagine plugging this into your mister
49:20SPEAKERand you can use the same screen for both your,
49:23SPEAKERwow, that's amazing, yeah, that sounds really good.
49:25SPEAKER- Or you can go down to the e-waste center
49:26SPEAKERor your Goodwill or whatever
49:28SPEAKERand just get a couple of $20 TVs
49:30SPEAKERor find them on the sidewalk
49:31SPEAKERor wherever people dispose of CRTs.
49:35SPEAKERThat's the more exciting thing,
49:36SPEAKERas opposed to just having one screen for everything,
49:38SPEAKERyou could get multiple screens
49:39SPEAKERbecause the people still are throwing them away to this day.
49:42SPEAKERBut again, it's not gonna be like,
49:45SPEAKERoh, I need the high-end Sony
49:46SPEAKERwith the good comb filter in it anymore or something.
49:48SPEAKERIt's just like, oh, any tube now could be driven by this
49:51SPEAKERin a way that is useful.
49:53SPEAKER- Now, this doesn't solve problems
49:55SPEAKERlike if you have a tube that has burn-in
49:56SPEAKERor something like that,
49:57SPEAKERthat's still gonna be present, right?
49:58SPEAKER- Yeah, for sure, for sure.
50:00SPEAKER- But yeah, this is very cool.
50:02SPEAKER- It's very exciting.
50:03SPEAKER- I wanna dig into, he had some documentation
50:05SPEAKERon the booth on his table that isn't on the GitHub
50:08SPEAKERthat I really wanna dig into
50:10SPEAKER'cause he has diagrams that look like he's made
50:12SPEAKERthat show, there's one in the bottom of the cabinet
50:16SPEAKERthat shows the actual wiring for his stuff
50:19SPEAKERand the tube and the cathode amplifier
50:21SPEAKERand the flyback circuit and all that stuff.
50:24SPEAKERThat is very cool.
50:25SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe I'll try to post this video somewhere
50:28SPEAKERand put it in the show notes
50:30SPEAKERjust so people can see this thing.
50:31SPEAKERAnd there's probably some other coverage of this out there
50:34SPEAKERfrom the show, but the exciting thing
50:36SPEAKERis that it's getting smaller and cheaper over time.
50:38SPEAKERAnd he's inching toward a situation
50:41SPEAKERwhere this will be available to people to buy and use,
50:43SPEAKERwhich is quite exciting.
50:45SPEAKER- That's really cool, that's really cool.
50:48SPEAKERThis is my favorite kind of weird project on the internet
50:51SPEAKERwhere some guy is just really into this thing
50:54SPEAKERand doing something that seems wildly impractical.
50:57SPEAKER- Well, and in particular, as we said a couple of years ago,
50:59SPEAKERbecause these will never be made again.
51:02SPEAKERThe supply of CRTs that exists now
51:04SPEAKERis all that will ever exist
51:05SPEAKERand it's gonna continue to get smaller
51:07SPEAKERas they're destroyed in e-waste and that kind of thing.
51:09SPEAKERAnd so--
51:12SPEAKER- And we don't really have the human knowledge left
51:14SPEAKERto recreate those products.
51:19SPEAKERThis is one of the examples of once you stop making this,
51:22SPEAKERit's really hard to spin that back up again.
51:23SPEAKERIt'll take 10 years to get back to the point
51:25SPEAKERthat we can make a late '90s era quality CRT again,
51:29SPEAKERjust because it's built on the shoulders of giants, I guess.
51:34SPEAKER- Yeah, in his Q&A, somebody asked him,
51:37SPEAKERdo you think with developments like this,
51:38SPEAKERthere's any chance of manufacturing of tubes
51:40SPEAKERever spinning back up?
51:41SPEAKERAnd he basically said, absolutely not.
51:44SPEAKERHe said, the last time anybody was making CRTs was 2015.
51:48SPEAKERAnd it was a single factory in India
51:51SPEAKERthat was literally melting down old tubes
51:53SPEAKERto reclaim the materials to make new tubes with.
51:57SPEAKERAnd even they shut down over a decade ago.
51:59SPEAKERSo that's just done.
52:01SPEAKER- Look, let me tell you,
52:03SPEAKERif you've come up with a way to steal content en masse
52:07SPEAKERat a trillion dollar scale and it requires CRTs,
52:11SPEAKERthey'll spin it back up again.
52:12SPEAKER- Maybe, maybe.
52:13SPEAKER- If there's will and money, it'll happen.
52:16SPEAKER- But again, I'll just reiterate for the nth time
52:19SPEAKERthat this makes many more tubes viable
52:21SPEAKERthan were viable to use before.
52:23SPEAKERAnd that's what's exciting here.
52:24SPEAKERThe last thing I'll say is looking at this video again,
52:27SPEAKERmakes me wonder like,
52:28SPEAKERI mean, this is probably 10 plus years away
52:30SPEAKERif this project really catches on,
52:31SPEAKERbut the electronics are so small
52:33SPEAKERand continuing to get smaller on this thing
52:35SPEAKERthat like tubes are still heavy and bulky.
52:37SPEAKERLike I'm not gonna deny that,
52:39SPEAKERbut I wonder if you could start seeing people
52:40SPEAKERmaking smaller, more compact enclosures for the TV
52:44SPEAKERand these boards that then might be light enough
52:48SPEAKERthat you could like rotate them for,
52:49SPEAKERthere's satay mode, like vertical monitors for arcades.
52:53SPEAKERLike it might be more viable to make the CRTs
52:55SPEAKERand custom housings a little bit smaller and lighter
52:58SPEAKERand easier to deal with, which would be cool.
53:01SPEAKER- Do you remember the low profile CRTs,
53:03SPEAKERlike the short neck CRTs?
53:04SPEAKER- Vaguely.
53:05SPEAKER- They were popular briefly at the end of the nineties
53:08SPEAKERand it was basically a tube that was,
53:10SPEAKERit looked like it was squinched the long way.
53:12SPEAKER- Okay.
53:13SPEAKER- So that it was, it wasn't a flat screen,
53:16SPEAKERit was a thinner screen.
53:17SPEAKER- I'm looking at some pictures.
53:19SPEAKERYeah, we're not, you're not talking about
53:20SPEAKERlike the Sony Vega style flat TV,
53:22SPEAKERbut more like a smaller housing, right?
53:25SPEAKER- Yeah, it's just like a less, instead of it being,
53:28SPEAKERwhat is it?
53:29SPEAKERIt's like the diagonal distance of the monitor
53:31SPEAKERis the throw from the front to the back of the neck
53:35SPEAKERor something, the diagonal size of the monitor.
53:38SPEAKERAnd I don't think, I think that these
53:40SPEAKERwere smaller than that.
53:41SPEAKERIt was, it was very briefly a selling point.
53:44SPEAKERI think that they had, I think they had image,
53:47SPEAKERI think the image got a little distorted at the corners.
53:49SPEAKER- Yeah, that happened on flat TVs too.
53:51SPEAKERLike the geometry got weird on the flat tubes
53:54SPEAKERin a way it wasn't on the old curved ones.
53:56SPEAKER- Yeah, so they didn't really,
53:58SPEAKERand also they were really expensive if I recall.
54:00SPEAKERSo they didn't really take off.
54:02SPEAKER- But it looks like Samsung had a slim fit line of,
54:06SPEAKERlet's see, from, I don't see a date on these,
54:10SPEAKERbut anyway, yeah, they were,
54:11SPEAKERSamsung was selling like compact CRTs toward the end,
54:14SPEAKERbut I think Toshiba did too, yeah.
54:16SPEAKERAnyway, yeah, it's neat stuff
54:18SPEAKERand hardware resurrection stuff
54:19SPEAKERcontinuing to happen out there.
54:21SPEAKER- That's really cool.
54:23SPEAKERIt's really cool.
54:24SPEAKERAnything else?
54:25SPEAKERAnything else going on in your neck of the woods?
54:28SPEAKER- We want to hit one other quick thing here.
54:30SPEAKERI just wrote this last bullet point down
54:32SPEAKERin case we needed more material.
54:34SPEAKER- I'm generally curious about what you've written here.
54:37SPEAKERSo yeah.
54:38SPEAKER- I'm trying my best to score
54:41SPEAKERa refurbished MacBook Pro right now.
54:44SPEAKER- Okay.
54:47SPEAKER- Trying to think where to start.
54:48SPEAKERI over the last, basically since Black Friday,
54:50SPEAKERthe last several months, all year,
54:52SPEAKERbasically since late last year,
54:53SPEAKERI've been methodically trying to upgrade all my Apple devices
54:55SPEAKERbecause, or in some cases buy them where I didn't have them
54:58SPEAKERlike with the case of the AirPods,
55:01SPEAKERbut all my stuff was quite old.
55:04SPEAKERAnd the price creep was coming.
55:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
55:07SPEAKER- And so I basically, it's just like,
55:08SPEAKERI'm going to like try to upgrade stuff as I can,
55:10SPEAKERas there were Black Friday deals as this and that happens.
55:13SPEAKERI wanted to get an M5 MacBook Pro.
55:15SPEAKERI don't know if you kept up with those,
55:17SPEAKERbut they actually like were shockingly what's the term,
55:21SPEAKERlike the bang for the buck on those
55:22SPEAKERwas kind of shockingly good when they launched.
55:26SPEAKERIf you, I don't know if you saw that.
55:27SPEAKER- Well, yeah, but it wasn't like the M4
55:31SPEAKERthat was just a minor refresh over the M3.
55:34SPEAKER- The M5 is a pretty big change over the M4.
55:36SPEAKERThey did a lot of stuff to that chip,
55:38SPEAKERbut what I mean is more, they bumped the base specs.
55:42SPEAKERSo they bumped the base specs on the MacBook Pro
55:44SPEAKERto 24 gig of memory and one terabyte of storage,
55:47SPEAKERwhich is like-
55:48SPEAKER- Oh, that's like, I would buy that.
55:49SPEAKERThat's a laptop I would just buy.
55:51SPEAKER- So the cheapest M5 Pro, MacBook Pro,
55:53SPEAKER'cause there's a distinction there from the regular M5,
55:55SPEAKERwhich does not have the changes to the chip.
55:57SPEAKERThe regular M5 is still the same kind of architecture
56:00SPEAKERas the M4.
56:02SPEAKERAnyway, we'll need to get into that.
56:03SPEAKERBut the point is like the cheapest M5 Pro, MacBook Pro,
56:07SPEAKERwas like 1650, 1700, something like that.
56:10SPEAKER- That seems like a good deal in retrospect.
56:11SPEAKER- For base specs.
56:13SPEAKER- 24 gigs of RAM, that's like 24 gigs of RAM
56:17SPEAKERplus the $600 for a computer.
56:19SPEAKER- Or I believe that's the case.
56:20SPEAKERIt might've been a little bit more than that,
56:21SPEAKERbut it was still like, again, by Apple standards,
56:23SPEAKERpretty good.
56:23SPEAKERAnyway, I had to leave town.
56:25SPEAKERI did not get around to doing that upgrade.
56:27SPEAKERThey raised the prices on all MacBooks $300 in the interim.
56:31SPEAKERI'm sure you noted the across the board Apple price increase.
56:35SPEAKER- I did notice that.
56:37SPEAKER- So that happened.
56:38SPEAKER- Look, at least you can still buy that.
56:39SPEAKERIt's not like the quesadilla that's just gone.
56:41SPEAKER- Yeah, so now the laptops are quite a bit more expensive.
56:45SPEAKER- That sucks.
56:46SPEAKERSo you're looking at refurbs?
56:47SPEAKER- That's not the main reason
56:48SPEAKERI went to looking at refurbs though.
56:51SPEAKERThe real reason is that I kind of really want
56:54SPEAKERa space black one this time.
56:56SPEAKER- Oh, and they don't make that anymore?
56:57SPEAKER- No, no, they totally do.
56:58SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
56:59SPEAKER- They do, but then I got into looking at how
57:03SPEAKERthe anodized aluminum wears over time.
57:06SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it looks nice actually.
57:07SPEAKER- Are you one of the patina is good types?
57:09SPEAKER- I like a patina, yeah.
57:11SPEAKER- Okay, like they're a lot more prone to dings
57:13SPEAKERbecause you know, like anodized aluminum scratches,
57:15SPEAKERyou're gonna see the pure aluminum underneath.
57:18SPEAKER- I mean, it's the layer is a few molecule,
57:20SPEAKERa few atoms thick.
57:21SPEAKER- Yeah, I've come to realize that the anodized part
57:24SPEAKERof the aluminum is quite thin and does not last over time.
57:28SPEAKER- I will say on phones,
57:30SPEAKER'cause I've had a lot of the different colored phones,
57:32SPEAKERit's held up remarkably well.
57:34SPEAKER- Yeah, I've got a black phone and it's fine,
57:37SPEAKERbut I don't know if there's something different about
57:40SPEAKERthe way the phones are being done.
57:41SPEAKERI can't imagine. - I'm sure it's
57:42SPEAKERthe same treatment.
57:42SPEAKERThe big thing is that if you do drop it
57:46SPEAKERand get a good gouge in it, it'll be there forever.
57:49SPEAKER- Yeah, it's gonna be very obvious,
57:50SPEAKERbut there's more to it, like the ports wear over time
57:53SPEAKER'cause people hitting the sides of the ports
57:55SPEAKERwith the metal connectors.
57:57SPEAKERBut the big one is, and this, you know, it's all cosmetic.
57:59SPEAKERA lot of people just don't care about this stuff,
58:00SPEAKERbut I like my devices to look nice.
58:03SPEAKERThe wrist rest area, like apparently like your sweat
58:06SPEAKERand like the acidity of the pH in your sweat
58:08SPEAKERand things like that. - You cry to wear it down?
58:09SPEAKER- So there's like all these pictures out there
58:11SPEAKERof like, they're just huge silver blotches
58:13SPEAKERwhere your wrists go in front of the keyboard.
58:16SPEAKER- You just smack a sticker on that and call it a day.
58:18SPEAKER- Anyway, between the price increase
58:20SPEAKERand wanting the space black,
58:22SPEAKERbut knowing it was gonna kind of wear down over time,
58:24SPEAKERI was like, ah, maybe I should just get a refurb
58:25SPEAKERand then I won't care about it wearing down.
58:27SPEAKERLike knowing that it was cheaper and technically used,
58:31SPEAKERI was like, ah, you know, if I can get the space black
58:33SPEAKERand then when it starts to wear in the way
58:34SPEAKERthat I know it will, it'll be like, ah, well, it was refurb.
58:37SPEAKERIt's fine.
58:38SPEAKERIt's all on your head.
58:39SPEAKER- Well, it's all on your head.
58:40SPEAKERMy head, my head, I'm like, use the thing,
58:43SPEAKERscratch it up, ding it up.
58:45SPEAKERHow much of a discount do you get on refurbs these days?
58:47SPEAKER- It's typically from, I would only get it from Apple
58:50SPEAKER'cause they have a pretty rigorous refurb process
58:52SPEAKERas I understand.
58:53SPEAKER- Well, and they warrant it as well.
58:54SPEAKER- Yeah, it's got a year warranty on the refurb.
58:57SPEAKERAnd I think I gather most of the MacBook refurbs
59:00SPEAKERare just coming from people who bought it
59:02SPEAKERand returned it in the 14 day window.
59:04SPEAKER- But this period for sure, yeah.
59:06SPEAKER- I'm gonna say that a lot of other people
59:09SPEAKERhave had the same idea.
59:10SPEAKER- Oh, they're hard to get?
59:11SPEAKER- That's why I'm actually talking about this.
59:13SPEAKERIt's about 15% to answer your question.
59:15SPEAKERThey don't post the discount,
59:16SPEAKERbut you can do the math basically on the specs.
59:18SPEAKERAnd I mean, the interesting thing
59:20SPEAKERabout trying to get a refurb from them
59:22SPEAKERis that you're subject to whatever they have at the time.
59:24SPEAKERThey don't keep stocks of every configuration
59:27SPEAKERand every model.
59:29SPEAKERAnd so it's interesting to watch this.
59:31SPEAKERThe stock fluctuates like hour,
59:33SPEAKERmaybe not exactly hourly,
59:34SPEAKERbut multiple times a day you will see models appear
59:38SPEAKERand disappear from what they're selling.
59:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I went through this whole rigmarole
59:46SPEAKERa couple of years ago for an iPad for the kiddo.
59:49SPEAKERAnd it was wild.
59:51SPEAKERLike you'd see a lot of like 256 gig
59:55SPEAKERor one terabyte iPad pros.
59:58SPEAKERAnd then it would be nothing for weeks, right?
1:00:02SPEAKER- Yeah, and these trends have actually even changed
1:00:04SPEAKERin the like week and a half,
1:00:06SPEAKERtwo weeks that I've been keeping an eye on this.
1:00:08SPEAKERAnd which is to say that currently the cheapest refurb,
1:00:12SPEAKERI want a 14 inch pro with an M5 pro, not a max.
1:00:16SPEAKERLike I'm basically looking for a baseline.
1:00:18SPEAKER- Is max better than pro?
1:00:19SPEAKER- Max, yes.
1:00:20SPEAKER- Max is like the AI chip.
1:00:22SPEAKER- Max is substantially better.
1:00:23SPEAKERWell, it's got two GPU's on it.
1:00:25SPEAKERIt's like a way beefier chip in a lot of ways.
1:00:28SPEAKERSo I want a regular M5 pro,
1:00:30SPEAKERalthough I kind of want the upgraded M5 pro
1:00:33SPEAKERwith the more CPU and GPU cores, but still a pro.
1:00:36SPEAKERMax is way more expensive.
1:00:37SPEAKERAnyway, the upshot is the cheapest refurb they have
1:00:41SPEAKERis over $2,500 right now.
1:00:43SPEAKER- Because it's like more storage and more RAM.
1:00:45SPEAKER- Yeah, but what I mean is the baseline spec MacBook pros
1:00:48SPEAKERhave not even been in stock at all on their refurb page
1:00:51SPEAKERfor like since beginning of the week, I think.
1:00:55SPEAKERAnd those had been there previously every day I had checked.
1:00:57SPEAKERLike it's just, they are really getting,
1:00:59SPEAKERlike there's a hard run going on refurb MacBooks right now.
1:01:03SPEAKERAnd I have to assume it's just like everything else,
1:01:05SPEAKEReverything is so crazy expensive now that people are looking
1:01:08SPEAKERto eke out an advantage anywhere they can.
1:01:10SPEAKERLike it's just been really interesting
1:01:11SPEAKERto watch the stock fluctuate several times a day.
1:01:14SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna say,
1:01:16SPEAKERlike I looked at the Mac minis for a while
1:01:18SPEAKER'cause I wanted to set one up to run as a server
1:01:20SPEAKERin the house and they're basically impossible to get now.
1:01:25SPEAKERNew or used, like new refurbed, whatever,
1:01:27SPEAKERthey can go out of stock at the moment they go on sale.
1:01:30SPEAKER- I believe it.
1:01:32SPEAKER- But mostly because of the eyebrows in that case.
1:01:34SPEAKER- Yes, I'm sure that's probably the hardest.
1:01:37SPEAKERWow, yes, I just backed out to the top level
1:01:40SPEAKERof the refurb store.
1:01:41SPEAKERThe Mac mini category is completely grayed out,
1:01:44SPEAKERmeaning they don't have any right now.
1:01:45SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I mean, they don't have a main stock either.
1:01:49SPEAKERYou have to, there's a six month wait list or something.
1:01:51SPEAKER- Oh wow.
1:01:52SPEAKER- When you, I bet your M5 Pro is in the same category
1:01:57SPEAKER'cause if what they're doing is buying a large,
1:02:01SPEAKERthe thing people have realized is
1:02:03SPEAKERfor running the small agentic models,
1:02:06SPEAKERyou actually need CPU, a decent GPU
1:02:10SPEAKERand a buttload of system RAM is better
1:02:12SPEAKERthan having like a 32 gig G-Force.
1:02:16SPEAKER- Interesting.
1:02:17SPEAKER- Yeah, just because you can run five small models
1:02:22SPEAKERin like 128 gigs of RAM.
1:02:24SPEAKER- Oh, well, I think these laptops top out at 64,
1:02:27SPEAKERif I'm not mistaken.
1:02:28SPEAKER- Well, 64 is still sufficient, but yeah, more RAM is better.
1:02:32SPEAKERThis is why people are buying those Ryzen AI Max.
1:02:36SPEAKERThe Strix Halo laptops and like the framework desktop
1:02:39SPEAKERand stuff like that is because they can put
1:02:41SPEAKERa whole buttload of RAM in them
1:02:43SPEAKERand then run a bunch of models locally
1:02:46SPEAKERand not pay for Claude, basically.
1:02:47SPEAKER- Amusingly, this is kind of reminiscent of browsing
1:02:50SPEAKERlike the laptop tent at the flea market.
1:02:53SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:02:54SPEAKER- Because like there's all these expensive ones on here,
1:02:56SPEAKERfor example, and I'm like, there are a couple
1:02:57SPEAKERof $6,000 MacBooks on here, but I'm clicking through
1:03:01SPEAKERand it's like, one of them is that expensive
1:03:03SPEAKER'cause it has eight terabytes of SSD in it.
1:03:05SPEAKERAnother one, but it doesn't have that much RAM.
1:03:07SPEAKERAnother one has like a ton of RAM, but not much storage.
1:03:10SPEAKERYou know, it's like, it's weird to just browse
1:03:12SPEAKERthese very specific configurations
1:03:14SPEAKERand that's all you can get here, but.
1:03:16SPEAKER- It's weird to me that they let people return
1:03:19SPEAKERthose custom one-off configurations,
1:03:21SPEAKERbut I guess there's always somebody who'll buy the,
1:03:23SPEAKERlike there's somebody who's making a movie
1:03:25SPEAKERwho needs a footage logging laptop
1:03:28SPEAKERthat needs eight terabytes of storage, right?
1:03:30SPEAKER- Totally, totally.
1:03:31SPEAKERSo I'm an idiot, I have decided I want baseline RAM
1:03:35SPEAKERand storage, but I want the upgraded chip,
1:03:38SPEAKERthe more CPU and GPU and I want it in space black.
1:03:42SPEAKER- And it'll come up eventually.
1:03:44SPEAKER- The day after I started this search, that came up.
1:03:47SPEAKER- Oh, and you missed it?
1:03:48SPEAKER- I missed it for reasons I don't need to get into.
1:03:50SPEAKERI was not confident I was gonna be here
1:03:52SPEAKERin their shipping window and the last thing I want
1:03:54SPEAKERin the world is having FedEx drop a laptop on the sidewalk
1:03:57SPEAKERand driving off while I happen to not be here.
1:03:59SPEAKER- God.
1:04:00SPEAKER- Also, you can't trade in old Apple products
1:04:02SPEAKERon the refers the way you can on new.
1:04:04SPEAKER- Oh.
1:04:05SPEAKER- I wanted to trade in my old laptop
1:04:07SPEAKER'cause that's still worth a fair amount as a discount.
1:04:09SPEAKERSo that's also, anyway, so I,
1:04:12SPEAKERmy unicorn of a specific laptop has come up once for a day
1:04:15SPEAKERand then vanished and I'm not sure.
1:04:17SPEAKER- Look, you could also sell your laptop on Craigslist
1:04:19SPEAKERor whatever in like, it would take
1:04:22SPEAKERlike 15 minutes right now.
1:04:24SPEAKER- I don't know about you, but I always say,
1:04:26SPEAKERoh, I could sell that and then I never get around
1:04:27SPEAKERto selling it 'cause selling things secondhand
1:04:30SPEAKERis I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle or not.
1:04:33SPEAKER- I, so I cleaned out my garage and took some stuff
1:04:36SPEAKERto the flea market and then Adam sent me a message
1:04:39SPEAKERthat was like, hey, are you sure you wanna put this
1:04:40SPEAKERin the flea market?
1:04:41SPEAKERThis is kind of worth more than it seems like right
1:04:44SPEAKERfor flea market.
1:04:45SPEAKERAnd I was like, yeah, I guess I'll take it back
1:04:50SPEAKERand sell it myself.
1:04:52SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:04:52SPEAKER- And yeah, anyway.
1:04:53SPEAKER- It's just, I have limited experience selling things
1:04:56SPEAKERon Craigslist, but it's.
1:04:58SPEAKER- I just go to the fire department by my house.
1:05:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:05:01SPEAKER- Parking a lot of the fire department to do the handoffs.
1:05:05SPEAKER- Oh, it's more just like the haggling, you know,
1:05:07SPEAKERor it's like they don't show up or they show up with like,
1:05:09SPEAKERoh, I only have this much cash, take it or leave it and like.
1:05:12SPEAKER- Leave it.
1:05:13SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:05:14SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it is, it's, you expose yourself
1:05:18SPEAKERto a level of humanity that is,
1:05:20SPEAKERthat I usually try to avoid.
1:05:22SPEAKER- Right.
1:05:23SPEAKER- And that I often find annoying.
1:05:24SPEAKER- Right, like even one aborted sale is like more wasted time
1:05:28SPEAKERthan I want to deal with.
1:05:29SPEAKERSo that's why I would rather just trade it in to Apple
1:05:32SPEAKERif I could.
1:05:33SPEAKER- Well, and we have the Pacifica Free Stuff thing
1:05:35SPEAKERthat's like on, I guess it's Facebook,
1:05:38SPEAKERis a Facebook group that's like, hey, you have,
1:05:42SPEAKERyou're cleaning out your garage,
1:05:43SPEAKERyou have something that's good that you wanna get rid of,
1:05:44SPEAKERbut you don't wanna fool with selling it.
1:05:45SPEAKERSo you just put it in your driveway and you post it there
1:05:48SPEAKERand then somebody comes by and grabs it with a truck.
1:05:50SPEAKERI've even had those people,
1:05:51SPEAKERlike I had a big giant air compressor I was getting rid of
1:05:54SPEAKERand I posted it and somebody was like,
1:05:57SPEAKERhey, can you drive that over to my house?
1:05:58SPEAKERI was like, dude, if I had a way to move this to your house,
1:06:00SPEAKERI wouldn't be putting it on the Pacifica Free Shit, right?
1:06:03SPEAKERLike, yeah, anyway, a little crazy.
1:06:06SPEAKER- Yes, well, hey, circumstances are such out there
1:06:10SPEAKERthat I can see why it would drive people a little crazy.
1:06:14SPEAKER- I mean, look, we're all a little crazier
1:06:16SPEAKERthan we were two years ago.
1:06:17SPEAKER- Yep, and on that note.
1:06:19SPEAKER- Yeah, this is the time, thanks everybody for listening.
1:06:22SPEAKERThis is the time of the show where we talk about
1:06:24SPEAKERBrad and Will Made a TechPod being a listener supported show
1:06:27SPEAKERwe wouldn't be here without you all, the listeners,
1:06:29SPEAKERand we appreciate each and every one of you.
1:06:31SPEAKERIf you would like to find out how you can support the show,
1:06:33SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod
1:06:36SPEAKERwhere for five bucks a month,
1:06:37SPEAKERyou get access to the Discord,
1:06:39SPEAKERwhich is full of nerds talking about cool nerd stuff
1:06:42SPEAKERall the time, pretty much.
1:06:43SPEAKERThe conversations in last week's episode,
1:06:48SPEAKERI guess, talking about VCF, were really good.
1:06:52SPEAKERI was pleased that we didn't discover last week
1:06:55SPEAKERthat any podcast players aren't sanitizing
1:06:57SPEAKERtheir inputs anymore on the title.
1:07:01SPEAKER- I put that title into the thing with great joy last week.
1:07:04SPEAKER- You're a chaos agent, Brad Shoemaker.
1:07:07SPEAKER- Joy is maybe not even the right term.
1:07:08SPEAKERIt was more like I was daring something to break.
1:07:11SPEAKERI was just like, you know what?
1:07:12SPEAKERI'm not gonna let somebody's poorly constructed pipeline
1:07:16SPEAKERstand in the way of a good title,
1:07:18SPEAKERor a title that I would have fun putting in.
1:07:21SPEAKER- Look, the title made you smile.
1:07:22SPEAKERI saw it come up at midnight,
1:07:24SPEAKERand I was like, oh, Brad enjoyed this one.
1:07:26SPEAKERI wanted to make sure we talk about this.
1:07:28SPEAKERAnd there was a similar conversation
1:07:30SPEAKERin the Discord about that as well.
1:07:31SPEAKER- I didn't see anything break,
1:07:32SPEAKERbut are you confident that nothing broke?
1:07:35SPEAKER- I mean, look, the all-time greatest one of those
1:07:37SPEAKERremains the 99% Invisible episode about,
1:07:42SPEAKERI think it was a Honda head unit,
1:07:44SPEAKERthat the ID3 tags would jack up the crash,
1:07:48SPEAKERthe head unit in the car.
1:07:49SPEAKER- It's like the head, the entertainment software
1:07:50SPEAKERdidn't know how to deal with a certain character.
1:07:52SPEAKER- It wasn't even the entertainment software.
1:07:54SPEAKERIt was like the head unit software
1:07:56SPEAKERwas before there was like a dat.
1:07:58SPEAKERIt was just, I think it was a text display,
1:08:02SPEAKERand it was crashing on a particular ASCII
1:08:05SPEAKERor Unicode character or something.
1:08:07SPEAKER- Anyway, a lot of people who don't know last week's title
1:08:10SPEAKERhad numerous equal signs and quotation marks
1:08:12SPEAKERand a couple of braces in it.
1:08:14SPEAKER- The braces were the dangers.
1:08:16SPEAKERThat's when you flew close to the sun there.
1:08:18SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause those are used in who knows
1:08:20SPEAKERhow many different types of serialized data formats.
1:08:22SPEAKER- All sorts.
1:08:24SPEAKERBut yeah, again, you can go to patreon.com/techpod
1:08:27SPEAKERand chuck us a couple of bucks,
1:08:29SPEAKERget access to the Discord,
1:08:30SPEAKERget access to the Patreon exclusive episodes
1:08:32SPEAKERwhere we talk about a wide variety of topics
1:08:35SPEAKERthat maybe aren't meaty enough to make a full episode.
1:08:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm gonna attempt to jailbreak my Kindle again soon.
1:08:42SPEAKERMaybe we'll cover that on there.
1:08:44SPEAKER- After it failed the first time I tried
1:08:46SPEAKERand became impossible.
1:08:48SPEAKER- I have, once I jailbroke my Kindle
1:08:51SPEAKERand pulled all the old books off and DDRM them,
1:08:55SPEAKERI almost entirely stopped buying books from Amazon.
1:08:58SPEAKERLike occasionally I'll still pick up something,
1:09:00SPEAKERbut it's mostly library these days
1:09:03SPEAKER'cause the Libby app is the bomb.
1:09:06SPEAKERAnd I'm kind of thinking maybe I should switch
1:09:09SPEAKERto a more library-friendly reader,
1:09:10SPEAKERlike a Kobo or something like that,
1:09:12SPEAKERthat you can just like work directly with.
1:09:15SPEAKER- I think that's the play at this point.
1:09:16SPEAKERIt's just the last time I bought this Kindle,
1:09:18SPEAKERI didn't even know there were still other e-readers.
1:09:20SPEAKERI thought everybody just bought Kindles.
1:09:22SPEAKERI had failed to do the research, but yeah.
1:09:23SPEAKER- But also the ecosystem for that other stuff
1:09:25SPEAKERwasn't quite the same yet.
1:09:28SPEAKERIt wasn't there yet, so.
1:09:30SPEAKER- But I'm mainly doing it to get access to Co-Reader
1:09:33SPEAKERor KO-Reader, however you say it.
1:09:34SPEAKERBut yeah, like just better reading software
1:09:37SPEAKERwith more customization options.
1:09:38SPEAKERAnd actually you can also control,
1:09:41SPEAKERthere's a way, I don't know if it's an app or how it works,
1:09:43SPEAKERbut you can also control Home Assistant from a Kindle
1:09:46SPEAKERwhen it's jailbroken.
1:09:47SPEAKER- Oh, so you have like a dashboard?
1:09:49SPEAKERI have a bunch of old Kindles I could turn into screens.
1:09:51SPEAKER- Well, so that would work.
1:09:52SPEAKERBut then also I fall asleep reading a Kindle
1:09:55SPEAKERand don't have a phone nearby.
1:09:56SPEAKERSo being able to control lamps and stuff from the bed
1:09:59SPEAKERwhile I'm reading my Kindle was gonna be extremely useful.
1:10:02SPEAKER- Wait, do you, so if I'm reading a Kindle in bed,
1:10:04SPEAKERI have the lights all off, it's dark.
1:10:06SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, they're all set to go off at a certain time,
1:10:09SPEAKERbut sometimes I want to sleep earlier
1:10:11SPEAKERand I don't wanna like get up and find a phone
1:10:13SPEAKERto turn off the lamps.
1:10:14SPEAKER- Oh, see, that's why I just start yelling at Siri
1:10:16SPEAKERto turn off the lights.
1:10:17SPEAKER- Yeah, well, you know how I feel about microphones.
1:10:19SPEAKER- I know, I know.
1:10:20SPEAKERYeah, look, I increasingly, I think you're probably correct.
1:10:24SPEAKER- So how many more stories do we need of like employees
1:10:27SPEAKERof X company caught listening to thousands of recordings
1:10:30SPEAKERfrom customers' houses or whatever?
1:10:33SPEAKER- I mean, they're gonna hear a lot of weird stuff
1:10:35SPEAKERabout the dog basically in my house.
1:10:40SPEAKERSo that's good luck with them.
1:10:42SPEAKER- The last thing I will say real fast
1:10:44SPEAKERis that since I looked at Kindle jailbreaks last time,
1:10:47SPEAKERthere is now a KPM, Kindle package manager.
1:10:51SPEAKER- Ooh.
1:10:52SPEAKER- Apparently now you can straight up just terminal install
1:10:55SPEAKERall the apps onto the jailbreak and Kindle with that.
1:10:57SPEAKERSo I'm interested.
1:10:59SPEAKER- Are they running Android?
1:11:01SPEAKER- No, it runs on top of whatever Amazon's OS is.
1:11:04SPEAKERI don't know what the nature of that is exactly,
1:11:06SPEAKERbut you're not, it's still running Amazon stock software.
1:11:09SPEAKERAll it does, all it's letting you do
1:11:10SPEAKERis run additional stuff that you've,
1:11:13SPEAKERsomebody else has written on top.
1:11:14SPEAKER- Additional like unsigned software basically.
1:11:16SPEAKER- Okay, that's fun.
1:11:18SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:11:18SPEAKER- Well, good luck with your jailbreaking.
1:11:20SPEAKER- Thank you.
1:11:21SPEAKER- Thanks to everybody who supports the show.
1:11:22SPEAKERWe appreciate each and every one of you,
1:11:23SPEAKERbut a very special thank you to our executive producer,
1:11:26SPEAKERto your patrons, including James Cammack,
1:11:29SPEAKEROctothorpe Bunnyveen, David Allen, and Felicitous Rips,
1:11:32SPEAKERand Jordan Lippett, thank you also so much.
1:11:34SPEAKER- Thank you.
1:11:36SPEAKER- That'll do it for us this week.
1:11:38SPEAKERBrad Shoemaker, always a pleasure.
1:11:40SPEAKER- Thank you.
1:11:41SPEAKER- Good to have you back.
1:11:42SPEAKERI know I said that last week, but I'm gonna,
1:11:43SPEAKERyou keep saying it 'cause it is lovely to have you back.
1:11:46SPEAKERAnd we will be back next week with another edition
1:11:48SPEAKERof the TechPod.
1:11:49SPEAKERAs always, please consider the environment
1:11:52SPEAKERbefore printing this podcast.