In This Episode: Are you an AI? Robot music… is it good or bad? Ditching VPN and saving photos.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:08:49 — 63.1MB)
This week the TEH Podcast is hosted by Leo Notenboom, the “Chief Question Answerer” at Ask Leo!, and Gary Rosenzweig, the host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.
(You’ll find longer Bios on the Hosts page.)
Top Stories
- 3:08 LN: “How Do I Know You’re Not AI?” – Article coming up “tomorrow” as we record this.
- A problem that’s only going to get “worse”, for some definition of worse
- As things improve, will it matter? Good content is good content regardless of the source, right?
- 7:00 GR: Starting to suspect PR pitches are using a lot of AI
- Every one now starts with flattery
- Suggestions can be totally of the wall
- 12:00 GR: AI Music
- Needed music, Suno was easy and “safe”
- What are the alternatives?
- Music without soul? Or, not all art needs to be Art.
- 15:00 Link to video montage: https://vimeo.com/1187110569/1742b3aeb4
- Cain Walker: https://www.youtube.com/@CainWalkerMusic real or AI?
- 27:00 LN: Anthropic’s Mythos: hype or legit concern?
- Pronunciation controversy? 😏
- Supposedly extra good at identifying vulnerabilities
- “We have identified thousands of additional high- and critical-severity vulnerabilities that we are working on responsibly disclosing to open source maintainers and closed source vendors.”
- Just as good at fixing?
- Project “glasswing” – a select few, but you know it’ll get out
- Not targeted at vulnerability detection, just a Really Good Model that happens to do this well. What else will it do well?
- 30:00 Is this the future of AI Model releases?
- Assessing Claude Mythos Preview’s cybersecurity capabilities – Anthropic
- Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Finds Thousands of Zero-Day Flaws Across Major Systems – Hacker News
- 37:00 GR: Ditching VPN
- I’m done wasting my vacation time
- 46:00 LN: Didn’t work in the hospital either
- 47:00 GR: Travel: Real camera kept winning
- Big sensor, big glass, viewfinder, but also mindfulness
- 54:00 Dehazing… How I saved Machu Picchu
Ain’t it Cool
- 58:00 LN: The Boys – not for the faint of heart, but fascinating, and the subtle and not-so-subbtle digs to current events are great. (Daredevil also.)
- 59:00 GR: “Apple: The First 50 Years” by David Pogue
BSP: Blatant Self-Promotion
- 1:01:00 LN: How Do I Know You’re Not AI? – https://askleo.com/191783
- 1:02:00 GR: 10 Weird macOS Features That Are Somewhat Useful (2026)
Transcript
Machu Picchu
re: Mythos
Dave Plumber (Dave’s Garage) has commented about its ability. Gary matches his comments that the software vendors will have an advantage because they can let it see their copy of the source code that is not available to the public. The open source software will be at higher risk because people with evil intent have the same access to the complete source. He did comment that a significant amount of old Windows code has been leaked to public access.
I am assuming (hoping) that companies will be running Mythos first without the non-public code to block the most at risk issues, then on the private code to go deeper to fix things.
Dave is a former Microsoft developer that did a lot of the work on Task Manager.
Leo: I don’t know what you did at Microsoft, did you know Dave?
re: AI music
Fil at https://www.youtube.com/@wingsofpegasus does a lot of music analysis, especially regarding the present standard of actual bands adjusting the vocals to be exactly on the staff lines and losing the inflection that live vocals have.
One of his recent videos is about a “band” that pretends to exist (lists tour dates, looks for donations for them to continue, and has all the gear for sale) and does a lot to obfuscate with interesting redirection to questions if it is AI. Interestingly, some of “their” music shows the effects of tuning to the lines and some (in the same song) appears to be untuned. Apparently, the AI was trained on both old and new recordings and doesn’t realize that one or the other style. His absolute give away is in the videos (that they claim to be live performances) because the lead guitar keeps having obvious problems with the frets on the neck and at least 4 very different headstocks (one with only 5 strings) on the guitar.
I play percussion and I was freaked out when drum machines came out in the early 80s, but it really hasn’t put percussionists out of business. AI is different. It produces an artificially human experience. Even Richard Dawkins got emotionally (not romantically) involved with an AI chatbot and felt he was interacting with a human. He wasn’t fooled, but the feeling was there., making this a potential danger to vulnerable people.
I do something similar and get into arguments with AI bots for fun, but I’m tempted to feel I have to explain myself to ‘Save face’. I have to occasionally remind myself I’m interacting with software.