Leo [00:00:00]:
Good afternoon, Gary. Welcome back after the holiday season.

Gary [00:00:04]:
Yeah. Hi, Leo. Happy New Year.

Leo [00:00:06]:
Have you, did you have a quiet holiday or a busy one?

Gary [00:00:09]:
Pretty quiet. Yep. You know, Thanksgiving's the more of the travel seeing family kinda holiday for me. So the end of the year stuff is a little quieter.

Leo [00:00:19]:
Nice. Yeah.

Gary [00:00:20]:
How about you?

Leo [00:00:22]:
Like I've said in multiple times, boring is good, and the holidays were actually kinda nice and boring. 2024 was a a busy year for a variety of of reasons, but I did I did enjoy not having to worry too much about holidays. Anyway

Gary [00:00:36]:
anyway, I have a

Leo [00:00:37]:
But I've got into it. Yeah. You've got a good one to start.

Gary [00:00:39]:
An update. Yeah. Because we talked about this digital license plate thing. And, so quick summary, we talked about it a couple months ago. Just a a license plate that goes in the back of your car, and it's it's like e paper. And you it it's supposed to be locked down where it'll show your actual license plate number. But things like, you know, your inspection notices will be updated automatically over the air. And then you could even do things like put it into stolen mode so it'll say it's stolen or or whatever.

Leo [00:01:09]:
Remember that.

Gary [00:01:10]:
And we talked a lot about security with it. And all of the things we talked about had to do with other people hacking into your license plate, which we talked about, like, oh, can't really be done. What we didn't really talk about was you hacking into your own license plate, which now has been done even though these things you probably I haven't seen one on the road and I'm sure most people haven't. Somebody's already figured out how to, jailbreak one of these, and you could basically then control it yourself, which is not it's a very different kind of security because obviously it's your it's your car. It's your license plate. If you wanna display something that's wrong back there, it's your problem if you get a ticket, I guess. But it can be used for things like, for instance, changing your license plate temporarily when you go through a toll or changing your license plate if you're on the run from the law, that kind of thing. So it is concerning in a way.

Gary [00:02:03]:
And, Yeah. It's, also, the developer of this or person that did this talked about it more in terms of the, more of a gray area of, like, being able to do things that would normally require a subscription, but you could just do them directly with the license plate, like changing the style or something. It is it is interesting, and it's concerning. And I think it may be enough to actually kill the idea. You know?

Leo [00:02:28]:
My it's funny. My first thought when you said that, you control it yourself, is if I were to use something like this, I would use it in real time to say back off.

Gary [00:02:41]:
Yeah. Yeah. There's that. You know, the the problem is it's I think if these all need to be sanctioned by state governments. And the state governments are gonna say no if it turns out there's any chance that somebody could just change it so that they can't outright them a ticket or, you know, toll you know, appropriately, you know, charge them with tolls. Of course, this is really nothing new in terms of what you could do already with traditional license plates, and in fact, is being done en mass. People, driving around without license plates, people driving around with expired plates, people stealing license plates and driving around with those are happening a lot. And actually, I I guess the general feeling is there's been a big uptick, in the last few years of that.

Gary [00:03:34]:
Certainly, I know the local Reddit, subreddit for my city, it's one of the things people love to complain about is how many expired tags they see or how many cars they see driving around with just no license plate because law enforcement has kind of lowered the priority on such things. So you can imagine, you know, people, previously would not have dreamed of doing that. Now just do it and they're like, it's been months. Nobody seems to care.

Leo [00:04:02]:
And, I think we we mentioned this last time too that, at least in Washington state Mhmm. License plates are no longer embossed. Right? They're no longer they're used

Gary [00:04:13]:
to Same here. Yeah.

Leo [00:04:14]:
Like 3 d. Now they're just flat. They're they're clearly they're being printed on metal. But what that means is that it is incredibly easy now to print your own. Just find a you know, you can there's there's some high quality paper out there that's quite durable. Put your own fake license, throw it on there, and, you know, you may never get stopped.

Gary [00:04:33]:
Right. And, yeah, same thing here. It's like maybe it's not as easy as using an app on your phone. But if you know you're going to, rack up $15 in tolls, because you're on a rush and you're gonna use the, you know, expressway that has that, you could have something you slap on top of your license plate. And as long as you don't get pulled over

Leo [00:04:54]:
Right.

Gary [00:04:55]:
You get away with it. Anyway, you know, it is it is interesting. I I I predict this idea is now dead simply because it needs to be voted on by states. This is enough of an excuse for them to go and say, yeah. No. That's not.

Leo [00:05:10]:
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. The system they've got works well enough. But yeah.

Gary [00:05:14]:
Yeah. Oh, well. So much for that. Speaking of facts and such.

Leo [00:05:21]:
Facts facts are so out of fashion.

Gary [00:05:23]:
Oh, they're very out of fashion right now. Yes.

Leo [00:05:25]:
Yeah. So the breaking news this morning was that Zuckerberg announced that, they were going to get rid of their fact checkers on Facebook, and I would assume that would also include Instagram and threads, and basically replace them with whatever's happening over on Twitter, where basically the community can provide feedback on various posts. But the actual fact checking part that they've been doing, is apparently gonna go away. And, of course, now there's been a wonderful string of, posts on Facebook announcing this along with some random wrong derogatory fact about Zuckerberg himself, to see if they actually ever get it taken down or what happens to it. I thought about this for a while this morning because to be honest, fact checking is really hard.

Gary [00:06:22]:
Mhmm.

Leo [00:06:23]:
There are some aspects of it that are, obvious. Right? I mean, there are some things that are facts and are not facts. That that's you know, sky is blue is not debatable. Even though there are people that will debate it, it's one of those things that's an obvious fact. Where things get weird is in the more controversial areas, especially when those controversial areas stride or span a political divide. Things like vaccinations and that kind of stuff come immediately to mind. It's you want there to be objective fact checkers. But if people don't believe that they are objective, they end up doing more harm than good.

Leo [00:07:08]:
And I think that that's the position that Meta is coming from, that the fact checkers that, you know, his claim was that the fact checkers they had employed had a bias. It's a yes, they're going to have a bias. We all have biases, but hopefully that bias is to the truth. And apparently, that's not what he was or they were seeing, or at least that's the excuse, if you will, that he was using to, to make this change. I just find it almost an unsolvable problem. I don't know that there's a good answer. I will say that I believe that the new answer is worse than the old answer, but I think it remains to be seen exactly what transpires on Facebook as, as the fact checkers go away.

Gary [00:07:57]:
Yeah. I you know, I mean, this topic predates the Internet. I remember, in when I went to journalism school in the early nineties, talking about this back before just anybody could publish anything. Right? You only had certain publications, newspapers, magazines, and TV and such. And just about, fact checking and, the the blurriness between things that are hard facts all the way to things that are opinion and then all this stuff in the middle. It's so hard to to to figure out how to do it right. Part of the problem is is that a lot of times people aren't debating hard facts. Like Right.

Gary [00:08:43]:
Something is, you know, green or blue or something exists or doesn't exist. They're they're expressing kind of like, you know, a logical train of thought. I think this, bill is good because it will do this, or I think that, you know, something being developed will be a benefit or not or whatever. And it's tough. One of the problems that we run into in a world where anybody can publish anything is that there's, no way to, like, tell or it's hard to tell who's an expert at something and who isn't. You recently wrote in your newsletter, you had a thing about, like, it's okay to admit that you don't know you don't have enough information to form an opinion.

Leo [00:09:28]:
Right. Yeah. They have

Gary [00:09:29]:
something. Yeah. And the problem is is that that's a great thing that everybody should adopt except that not everybody adopts it. And unless a 100% of the people adopt it, we run into trouble because you could have, you know, a debate online between somebody who is an expert and somebody who doesn't know very much about a subject, and it's seen as a valid debate, which shouldn't. You know, you should be looking at like, if if in the pre Internet days, they had on TV, like, we're gonna debate, animal conservation, you know, legislation.

Leo [00:10:06]:
Yeah. We're

Gary [00:10:06]:
gonna have an expert on animal conservation legislation, and we're gonna have this guy who knows nothing about it, and they're gonna debate. People would be like, why why are you doing that? Like, what's Right. What's the point? And probably the expert would drop out and say, I'm not debating somebody who anything about this. You know, find somebody that disagrees with me, but we're both experts.

Leo [00:10:24]:
Right.

Gary [00:10:25]:
But you don't have these one these big debates anymore. You have individual people posting things to place like Facebook that may or may not know anything and they kind of start at equal weight. The expert on something posts something just as easily as the person who knows nothing about it and just has this opinion based on the kind of the absence of knowledge of the subject. It's it's impossible. I think it's a bad idea to get rid of fact checkers. I think fact checking can be done in a way that it's part of the system. And it because they're part of the because you don't have to fact check every post. You fact check the claims.

Gary [00:11:05]:
So somebody claims something, like they they say that, you know, this, this medicine works in this way, and that's turns out to be false. You fact check the claim. Now you put that in your database of, like, we've already figured this out. Anytime somebody states, you know, the this falsehood, this lie, we can now just apply this fact check to it. We don't

Leo [00:11:33]:
They think it's what they've been doing.

Gary [00:11:34]:
Right. Well, they they should keep doing that. And it at least in the it's just about the number of things, like, you know, there's going to be the number one lie of the day. Right? The thing that's repeated the most. And there's going to be, you know, the number 2 lie, number 3. And it goes all the way down until you have this long tail of tiny little falsehoods, and you can't fact check them all. But can you at least fact check the top 100?

Leo [00:11:58]:
Right.

Gary [00:11:59]:
You know, and cover 99% of the bases, and at least then people can't claim false things about the polio vaccine or something. Right. You know? And say, we've taken care of that. That nobody's gonna lie on Facebook about the polio vaccine, and that's done. And then we can deal with the, like, people debating, the, efficiency of windmills in, the Texas energy grid. That's something we don't have time for.

Leo [00:12:24]:
Right.

Gary [00:12:24]:
You know, that goes down, you know, past the top 100.

Leo [00:12:28]:
There are a couple of things that came up for me. One is that not all facts are facts. Do you remember a couple years ago? In fact, it just I think it was 10 years ago because it's, came up as a as a memory somewhere. The dress.

Gary [00:12:42]:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I told her.

Leo [00:12:43]:
This dress. Yep. And people were adamant that it was either gold and white or blue and something else. I forget her black or something else. And that's because they literally saw the dress differently.

Gary [00:12:59]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:12:59]:
And yet each side would claim just, again, no. The other side is absolutely wrong because that's not what I see. That's something that fact checking just doesn't solve. Alright? It would have to come up with the nuances to say, some people say it this way. Some people see it this way. Neither of them are wrong. Neither of them are absolutely right. Mhmm.

Leo [00:13:21]:
The other thing you mentioned about the, you know, great. We're gonna work. We've got this concept of, you know, we have this this database of, issues that we know are wrong that are being posted on Facebook. Mhmm. And I'm assuming that that would be prioritized by popularity. Right? The topic that's getting the most traffic across the platform would probably be highly more highly prioritized in terms of getting, you know, you're getting fact checked.

Gary [00:13:47]:
Yep.

Leo [00:13:47]:
Like you said, okay. Here's a fact about polio that we know is the fact. This is what it is. And we can say that. And now the fact checkers cannot. The people that feel some other way

Gary [00:14:01]:
Mhmm.

Leo [00:14:02]:
As you say, will be given an equal platform. And that just feels wrong. Yeah. Like you said, experts you don't argue against experts if you don't know what you're talking about. And that's almost the definition of social media these days. Yeah.

Gary [00:14:22]:
Exactly. And, you know, it's a shame too, because if you do disagree with the expert, it opens up a path for 2 experts to debate something. Right? And that would be more interesting. Of course, the problem is sometimes you don't have an expert on the other side. I remember, there used to be this, you know, probably younger people don't even know about this, but this equal time idea, back from our youth when, you know, there would be things on TV, political things, and there'd be equal time to both sides. Right? It had to be if you gave a 15 minute interview with an expert that had one opinion on something, you had to give 15 minutes to the other, you know, the other side of it. And

Leo [00:15:05]:
reply to politics. But yeah.

Gary [00:15:06]:
Yeah. Yeah. Very much to politics when because there was something to debate. Right? There was, like, the oh, this new tax bill or something. You know? And the the thing about the equal time or one of the thing reasons it's not around anymore is because the assumption back then was you would have 2 experts and both would be very knowledgeable experts, and both would kind of acknowledge each other's expertise and say, yeah, I disagree with this person, but their their process is logical, like how they're getting to their conclusion. That doesn't happen today. You could have somebody that says, here, I've got here's all this factual. I I know this stuff.

Gary [00:15:42]:
I'm educated in this. I've worked in this field, and here's this thing. And then somebody else comes and has none of that and just says, I want equal time. Right? Why is my opinion not as valuable as yours? Well Right. It's not as valuable because you just don't know anything about the subject or your your position is ridiculous, which often happens. And I think I remember in the early days of, like, the death of the equal time stuff, where a lot of, like, stuff on, like, you know, UFOs and aliens and and everything Mhmm.

Leo [00:16:11]:
Where

Gary [00:16:11]:
I was like, let's have let's have an expert on both sides talk about this. It's like, how do you do that? So you're gonna give 15 minutes to a guy saying, well, let me talk about the Fermi Paradox and all the, astrophysics and all this stuff, And then another guy's gonna go and say, oh, you know, I've talked to people who have been abducted and probed. Right.

Leo [00:16:30]:
Right.

Gary [00:16:30]:
It's like it doesn't the the 2 those two sides don't fit, but that's everything on social media.

Leo [00:16:36]:
Right.

Gary [00:16:36]:
You have people debating all from all sorts of weird angles and coming up with stuff and then even coming up with these strange things like the the I'm just asking a question kind of deal.

Leo [00:16:47]:
That's not a debate. That is that is

Gary [00:16:50]:
But it's seen as one. It's it's choosing as one.

Leo [00:16:52]:
It's yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's, trying to, you know, trying to get the other person to engage in a way that they honestly shouldn't have to engage.

Gary [00:17:01]:
Right. And trying to get people I mean, you can express an opinion to somebody without actually expressing the opinion. Yes. By saying, well, I'm just asking the question, why is the why are things like this? And you never say that you think they should be different or that you think they should be the same, but you're implying it. And you know that out of your audience, whoever's looking at that post or watching that TV show, that a certain percentage will will hear it and take it literally

Leo [00:17:31]:
Right.

Gary [00:17:31]:
And just say, yeah. They were just asking that question. It's a weird question to ask. But a certain percentage will actually forget that.

Leo [00:17:38]:
They will adopt it as a

Gary [00:17:39]:
And adopt it. Yeah. Exactly.

Leo [00:17:42]:
Yep. It it

Gary [00:17:42]:
it's very difficult, and this whole thing is very concerning. And, man, I just don't know I just don't know where we go from here. I guess, yeah.

Leo [00:17:52]:
I think about all we could really say is the time will tell. We've seen it. I mean, honestly, we kinda sorta know what this looks like because this is the kind of stuff that has been happening on Twitter, since Musk took over. Right? The the model that, Zuckerberg is adopting is apparently the same model that's currently happening over on Twitter slash

Gary [00:18:14]:
ads. Apparently, because I'm not I'm not there and I don't think you're there either.

Leo [00:18:17]:
So I do not pay any attention to Twitter anymore. But hearsay, we certainly hear a lot about the kinds of things that are going on over there. And I suspect that there is a possibility that it may not get as bad because the audience right now on Facebook is, significantly more diverse, I think, than Twitter's ever was. You don't have, you know, families on Twitter. You don't have you know, talking to each other over Facebook. So it may not never get quite as bad, but I do think it's going to head off in that direction.

Gary [00:18:53]:
Yep. Yeah. So I guess I don't know. I don't know where we go from here.

Leo [00:19:01]:
Let's talk about podcasts since we're in the middle of 1.

Gary [00:19:04]:
Yes. Okay. Yeah. So we talked before on the show about, an AI thing called notebook LM, which is, basically, the whole idea and the reason it's called notebook LM is the way you're it was originally intended to be used, I think, I gather, is you threw a bunch of stuff into it, like a couple studies, some p d, PDFs of stuff, whatever. You threw a bunch of stuff into it, and then you can then use that as kind of like a way to ask questions about the material. Mhmm. Right? So imagine that kids, you know, somebody studying for a test could throw all the material in there and then talk to the AI about that material. Or if you just wanna be brought up to speed on something before a meeting, you know, you could throw all the material from work into, you know, the thing, and then you could talk to the AI about it.

Gary [00:19:55]:
But a side feature that became very popular was the podcasting feature, where you could throw a bunch of stuff in there and then say, alright. Now create a podcast. And you got an AI generated podcast that was both the script was AI generated, and then it was voice acted by AI with 2 hosts, a male and a female host, who then did a very convincing fake podcast about it. And and it works you know, people that first time people hear this, it's they're amazed. Right? And it's I haven't personally used it like I thought I would, but you could basically throw a bunch of things in there. You wanna be brought up to speed on something, have it create it, put it on your iPhone, and go for a walk, and then you think you're listening to a podcast of 2 people talk about the material.

Leo [00:20:41]:
Right.

Gary [00:20:42]:
At, there are a few updates to that the last week, and one of the interesting updates is you can interrupt the hosts if you're still on the site. Obviously, if you export it as a file, you can. But if you're still on the site, you hit the play button, and you could be listening to it, and you could click a button and interrupt them. Like it's a live podcast and ask a question. It's really interesting. And you do it with their voice too. So they could be debating, you know, whatever it is, and you could hit that thing and they'll actually, like one of them will say, oh, yes. Yes.

Gary [00:21:18]:
We have a question. You know, and then wait for you to respond. And then you could ask questions. Oh, what do you mean by this? Or is does the study have anything? Whatever. And they'll be like, great question. Let's talk about that. And they go in like they're taking audience, questions. I did it as part of a, like a group I was in talking about AI.

Gary [00:21:35]:
We did it live where the host kept interrupting and asking questions and even bringing us into it and saying like, you know, Gary, I wanted to know about this. And they were like, oh, okay. Well, thanks thanks Gary for that question. Let's go and take a closer look at it. And it was really interesting. It was a a neat way to, interact with information. Have you given it a try yet?

Leo [00:21:57]:
The only thing I've done with notebook l m is the first example where I threw one of my articles at it, like, your article, and had it generate a podcast of it. And it was an amazing podcast. It was really well done with one exception. They were overly effusive about the wonderful characteristics of the guy that wrote it. They were basically over the top, you know, talking about how wonderful I was.

Gary [00:22:32]:
And

Leo [00:22:32]:
that just that, you know, not only did that feel icky, but it's certainly not something that I would ever have chosen to promote in area, publicize in any way. Yeah. But the bottom line of the information that it was talking about, it did a really, really good job of, like you said, not just interpreting it, but turning it into a discussion.

Gary [00:22:52]:
Yep. Just a new way to digest information. Like, I I envision myself throwing some long Wikipedia pages into it and then taking the dog for a walk and then listening to this thing and then coming out of it knowing something. And hopefully having a a fewer errors, you know, fewer hallucinations Right. Because it's based on, you know, here's a document. Take this document as fact and talk about it. And it's a way to way to deal with that. That's one of

Leo [00:23:20]:
the ways, though, that I end up using pretty much all AI is I don't ask it for information because the information that it's getting is questionable. The interpretation that it's making on that information is questionable. Whereas if I give it a pile, it'll be at an article to summarize or something else to to use as a database, it's restricted to the information that I've given.

Gary [00:23:43]:
Mhmm.

Leo [00:23:43]:
And I have some faith that that information is at least factual to the extent that I was able to make.

Gary [00:23:51]:
I mean, you weren't just gonna read the article anyway. So if there was an error there, it's not being introduced by the AI. Right. Correct. It's it was there originally. Yeah.

Leo [00:23:59]:
You know if there's a, a size limit to how much you can give notebook LM?

Gary [00:24:04]:
I don't know, but I've given it some I've I've heard of people giving it some really long things, and I've given it a quite a few things. Like, I gave it a god. Did I give it the whole Mac user guide or something at one point? Like, a fairly long, big PDF of stuff just as background information.

Leo [00:24:21]:
Interesting. The reason I ask is because I think I think, you know, I've been itching to come up with a way to, come up with I'll call it an AI version of Ask Leo. Yeah. But, basically, I want to I'm thinking of if I can export all of my articles, and there's, like, 4 or 5000 of them now, can I just import all of that into something like notebook lm and have it then be able to q and a against that database?

Gary [00:24:49]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's if it's designed to be exactly that, but it's certainly in the area. There are other things I've seen that are trying to be like, the Instagram AI, I think, is trying to be that. But

Leo [00:25:05]:
Funny, the one thing we didn't talk about, with respect to AI, because this is this is diverging a little bit, was, Meta's introduction of completely AI personalities.

Gary [00:25:17]:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I did hear about that.

Leo [00:25:19]:
Yes. And it's funny. The one article, that I saw that actually linked to one of them Mhmm. It was already gone. Oh. So I suspect it was not, well received, and that Facebook did the right thing and took it down. But, I just thought that was really interesting. Do you not have enough people on your platform that you have to make more? Yeah.

Gary [00:25:41]:
I know. Well, maybe I mean, part of the problem because I saw it, and I almost responded to the person that posted it that, well, can it be can it be that much worse than most of the people that most of the real humans on Facebook? You know? It's just, I mean, at least it'll give you somebody to interact with if you don't have anybody to interact with or don't have anybody have anybody you feel like interacting with right now.

Leo [00:26:07]:
Right. It's very bizarre.

Gary [00:26:08]:
I mean, I I don't think if it's gone, I don't think it's gone forever. Like, I think it's being refined. I mean, I think assist you having assistance for apps like Facebook may be kind of a future thing. Like, instead of interacting with Facebook where it just, like, here's your screen. Here's a bunch of posts. Here's all this stuff. It's more of a, like, you know, hi there. You know, your friend, you know, so and so is on a trip to wherever and just posted some pictures.

Gary [00:26:39]:
And then there's also this news story posted by, you know, this person and all that. And then you're like, yeah. Don't show me stuff by that guy anymore, but I do wanna see those pictures from my friend's vacation.

Leo [00:26:49]:
Right.

Gary [00:26:50]:
You know, that kind of thing.

Leo [00:26:51]:
Your own personal Facebook docent almost. Somebody Yeah.

Gary [00:26:55]:
You know, and there was, god, what what what book was it? It was oh, it was, Neal Stephenson's, Fall or Dodge in Hell from a few years ago where he has a little bit of a future America kind of thing where everybody has a a filter or a person they pay to filter their feeds. So you don't have to see the spam and other things that you don't wanna see, because you subscribe to a filter who is like a real person, although I think now it would be an AI that would actually go through and filter out stuff. And I, you know, I do that. On Blue Sky, you can not only filter people and say I wanna block people, you can block words.

Leo [00:27:42]:
Oh, really? I did not know that.

Gary [00:27:43]:
Yeah. So

Leo [00:27:45]:
add on for Facebook where I do that. But

Gary [00:27:47]:
Yeah. And it's you know, the problem is, of course, is you if it's a it's hard to use word blocks to block out, like, if if somebody like if you're a a scientist researching vaccines, and you wanna block out, you know, idiots talking, you know, about lies about vaccines. How do you block that out? Because if you block out the word vaccine

Leo [00:28:08]:
Right.

Gary [00:28:09]:
You know, then your good stuff's gone too. But an AI, could potentially go and block out, just, you know, get the get the gist of what's going on, what's being said, and block it out. And as long as there's a flood of information, you should be fine. In other words, a false positive where something you wanted to get is blocked won't matter because if it's important, you're gonna get that story.

Leo [00:28:38]:
Up another way.

Gary [00:28:38]:
Yeah. The 10:10 different times from 10 different people. Right. So yeah. But, anyway, yeah. Interesting. Interesting stuff. We'll have to see.

Gary [00:28:48]:
I I I'm not on Facebook much anymore either, so I don't know. Even if I started now to pay attention to it again, I I wouldn't be able to notice the difference because I haven't been using it enough.

Leo [00:29:00]:
Right. Right. So And I I've got that same problem in a sense because like I said, I've got a, it's actually a browser plugin

Gary [00:29:07]:
Mhmm.

Leo [00:29:08]:
For, for my desktop browsers that, you know, it does things like remove ads and a few other different things. But one of the things that it does is it actually will make posts disappear if they contain certain

Gary [00:29:19]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:29:19]:
Heaps. Yep. So that gives me a skewed experience of what Facebook is like today as well. Right? My Facebook is clean. What what the what a, quote, unquote, normal person is seeing.

Gary [00:29:32]:
Yeah. I guess we'll just have to pay attention to what other people are finding, to see if these effects work, which I doubt, or how bad they how bad they how much worse they make things.

Leo [00:29:44]:
Right. So when was the last time you were at CES?

Gary [00:29:50]:
Never.

Leo [00:29:50]:
You've never been to CES?

Gary [00:29:52]:
No. Because back in the day when I would have gone to CES, I instead, it was after Apple split off from it. So I went to the Apple Mac World Expo

Leo [00:30:01]:
Ah, okay.

Gary [00:30:02]:
Instead. And I went and I was also at a game. So I went to the e 3 Electronics Expo. And, so those were since I was going to those, CES was just not gonna happen for me. So I never I never went. I've never been in I get the gist. E 3 was basically the same kind of thing but for games.

Leo [00:30:21]:
Sure. It's funny because CES is going on right now. And I've been a couple times, years ago, you know, a long time ago. But, I was taking a look at the news stories about current CES, the one that's going on right now. And I was looking at, you know, some of the the the the the hottest items, the hottest new things, and here's the gadgets that are being released and so forth. And I just walked away with a, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's it's the stuff you kind of expect from CES, I suppose, but there just wasn't anything really earth shattering, at least not for me.

Leo [00:31:03]:
I don't know if you feel the same way, if you ran across anything interesting there or or what?

Gary [00:31:07]:
I haven't run across yeah. Because I pay attention to the news stories that come out. You know? And, Yeah. I haven't seen anything interesting. I mean, the two things that interest me the most, I guess, that caught my attention are minor things. One was I saw that, Lenovo showed a rollable display. Right? So all, you know, companies are continuously trying to, you know, can we have foldable displays? Can we have curved displays? You know, well, there's different ways to have displays. So they demoed a rollable display.

Gary [00:31:39]:
So the idea is think of a normal laptop, but half the screen is actually curved underneath the keyboard. And you could pull the screen up, and you get a highly vertical display, you know, as it kind of like reveals more that's coming out of from inside the laptop, which I thought I looked at it. It's one of those things you you look at. You instantly say, yeah, this is never gonna steep later today. Like, nobody's gonna have this. You know, maybe they might release something. I'm never gonna see it in a Starbucks near me. You know, it's just not gonna happen.

Gary [00:32:09]:
Tons of stuff like that. Matter of fact, the whole idea that they would, you know, these displays, they keep trying to come up with these displays. And the more I see of foldable, rollable displays, I I really feel the answer is either having multiple displays is, like, that's not a problem. Like, it's not a bigger problem as people think, having a line between displays.

Leo [00:32:34]:
Right.

Gary [00:32:35]:
Tons of people have multiple screens. I'm looking at 2 just displays on my, desktop right now. I don't see any advantage to ever having, like, not aligning between them. Like, I need it to be an unbroken path. My display in front of me is big enough to watch any one single thing like a movie or whatever. Right. I can have another window in the other display. The same thing with, like, laptops and phones.

Gary [00:32:59]:
Like, I think we will have foldable phones. You know, the Apple will eventually come up with a foldable iPhone. They will eventually become more standard. But they'll just be 2 displays, and there will be a thin line between them of some kind.

Leo [00:33:12]:
Right.

Gary [00:33:13]:
And that'll be fine. Everybody will be perfectly fine with that. Nobody the regular users are not gonna be, oh, I wish I could spend twice the amount of money to not have this thin line between the 2 displays. So, yeah, I've it's just another one of those things. I mean, I guess, you know, everybody wants to hedge their bets and try to develop technology in case it happens, but, I don't think it's gonna happen.

Leo [00:33:36]:
Funny. You reminded me of something that I ran across. I believe it's at CES. I think what I saw was CES related. It's from Pro Display, it's a transparent Yeah. So, I don't know that most screen output actually uses the alpha channel. But, the the the very concept of being able to look through the screen, you're looking at, say, an animated GIF on screen, and everything that is the GIF is visible, and everything that isn't is whatever is behind your screen. It looked interesting.

Leo [00:34:16]:
I'm not sure what all of the applications are going to end up being, but I think that there's some possibilities there that folks aren't necessarily thinking about. Doing a transparent display in front of something else specific could potentially have some, some interesting applications. Anyway, you're talking about displays made me think of that. So I threw the link into the show notes.

Gary [00:34:40]:
Yeah. The, and another related thing related to displays, of course, is, you know, I've been using Apple Vision Pro all, you know, for well, it's 8 months now. And, there was a tiny, tiny mention of the Apple Vision Pro at CES in a weird way, but it caught a few writers' eye that they mentioned it like this and it certainly, was interesting to me. NVIDIA, of course, who has a ton that they are showing at CES, they have a product called GeoForce Now or GeForce Now, which is something I've talked about before on our podcast. And it allows you to stream games. So you, you know, you're not installing the game on your computer. The game is installed on a very suitable computer somewhere on a server farm. Right.

Gary [00:35:30]:
And then you're playing the game by streaming the screen, and then you said to send the keys and the the clicks. And if you've never tried it before, you probably think, how could that ever work? But it does work, and I've used it to play a lot of games. One of the advantages is that you could play, Windows games on a Mac. And it's not even a complication. You're just streaming. It it doesn't matter that you're on a Mac. And but there are other advantages as well. Like, for instance, you don't need to install the game on your computer.

Gary [00:36:01]:
Doesn't need to take up all that space. Your computer just have to be suited for the game in terms of its power or anything. It's all done, you know, remotely. And it's so it's nice, to actually play a game, and then you're all the like, you there's no impact for you. You log in, you play it, you finish the game, you don't play it anymore, and you there's nothing to uninstall and all that. Now the mention that NVIDIA, did was saying that they will soon have their player compatible with the Apple Vision Pro.

Leo [00:36:35]:
Right.

Gary [00:36:36]:
So the Apple Vision Pro, of course, you know, the thing that would be cool to do is play more games in it. And there are bunch of games you can get for it. They're all very casual game like, not hardcore game. And, of course, you can show your back screen in it, and I've done that to play some more hardcore games like real time strategy with a nice big ultra wide display Mhmm. In the Apple Vision part when it's really cool. I like doing it. If GeForce now is available in it, then you could play all these Windows games, big, you know, a and, you know, a triple a titles and everything, in your Apple Vision Pro. They're still 2 d.

Gary [00:37:14]:
They're not gonna become 3 d or anything like that. But at least you get this very nice screen, where, you know, it's it's definitely something I would wanna do. And, yeah, they say that in a month or something, they will have, that available. So that's kind of cool. I'm looking forward to doing that, playing some of the game. And the neat thing is if you own a game and, you know, you're using it on Steam usually, if you own a game on Steam, you can go to GeForce Now. There's even a free tier that you you're limited in how much you could play per day or whatever. But even in the free tier, you could go log in and then you log in to your Steam account and then you play that game.

Gary [00:37:56]:
Like, you there's no additional, like, you don't have to purchase the game again or anything like that. Right. So I could I don't even have to, like, oh, I'll have to get a game to test it. No. I I have a, you know, a dozen games in Steam that I could probably test this with on day 1, and that'll be cool. At least it'll be something until, you know, we get a better kind of gaming experience going on in the, VisionPRO.

Leo [00:38:19]:
What I thought was interesting, you mentioned, you know, NVIDIA behind all this. Just very coincidentally, I was taking a look at news headlines this morning. Mhmm. And there were 2 about NVIDIA in sequence, but you can tell that the time difference was significant. The first one was mentioning that NVIDIA stock was going up in anticipation of their CEO, I guess, making some kind of an address to the CEO CES crowd. The next headline talked about the precipitous drop in the NVIDIA stock price because the talk didn't have some random thing that everybody was expecting the talk to have. Now stock market, people's expectations, very fickle. Very, very fickle.

Gary [00:39:11]:
Yeah. I think half the time, it's, you know, the real reason like, for instance, today was a generally down market day. So the question is, is was the journalist actually even correct in saying that it that's the reason it went down? Because, a lot of times, especially, having, you know, Apple is one of those stocks that will, do funny things. Mhmm. Like, if you don't look at it carefully, it'll go up, like, a few percent before an announcement in the in the weeks leading up to announcement and then drop slightly afterwards. Even though they announced exactly what they said and the whole idea being, oh, the but the the, all of that, you know, it going up, that was part of that. Right. You know? So it, it went up 3%, but it actually went up 4% and down 1%.

Gary [00:40:01]:
But Right. The the net gain of 3% was because of that thing that they announced. It was just that it was built in. Everybody already predicted that. So

Leo [00:40:10]:
And there wasn't one more thing that they could, you know, surprise everybody with.

Gary [00:40:14]:
Yeah. And even when there is, a lot of times, those one more things were always already, you know, things that they people people knew about or had been rumored and have been built into it. Right. And also anyway So

Leo [00:40:31]:
we got an interesting one coming up here.

Gary [00:40:33]:
Okay. Yeah. Let's, see. So, so so this is something we haven't talked about, but it's been a ongoing story. So this has to do with rent. Right? The the the rent is too damn high. Right? And the rents going up, one of the reasons that they've been going up apparently is from collusion, price collusion. But it's not the type of price collusion that usually would take place in the past.

Gary [00:41:00]:
Price collusion usually is when you have, like, 3 companies offering the same thing and they're competing, and then they all get together, in a backroom and say, hey, why do we all agree to raise the price at the same time? What's everybody gonna do? Right? And then we all can make more money, and that's price collusion. Well, there's a new type of price collusion where the the party that comes in that says, hey, let's raise the price, isn't one of these companies. Right? It's software or a company making software. So there's a company that makes real estate software, and the idea this sounds like a, you know, typical tech pitch, is let's have software that'll help, companies that rent out places, so big landlords. We're not talking like individuals. We're talking like companies that have, like, tons of apartment buildings and stuff. Like, it could help them set prices. Right? Instead of trying to guess how much in a a one bedroom apartment should go for in, you know, Chicago, This will just look at all the data and say, this is what the market price for 1 bedroom apartment is.

Gary [00:42:05]:
And, it seems really useful, right, for these companies to be able to to do that instead of maybe doing all this research and maybe guessing wrong and then losing money or, you know, in one direction or the other. Well, the problem is is that you get a bunch of different companies, different, like, landlords buying the same software, and they're all pricing their apartments the same based on the software. So now the software can basically say, oh, let's raise everybody's rents. And since a huge percentage of the market is controlled by the software, it's the same as collusion.

Leo [00:42:41]:
Interesting.

Gary [00:42:42]:
Yeah. So, you know and the lot I know a lot of consumers have been calling this stuff out for a while now, and the justice department has been on it and is, is suing the this company now. And it's interesting because it's like on its face, you see it as like, oh, they're helping it's a it's a, you know, a piece of software that helps businesses price things accurately. But it does allow for price collusion in a way that didn't really exist before.

Leo [00:43:12]:
It's accidental price collusion, though, is

Gary [00:43:14]:
it? Yeah. I don't I think they're arguing that it's not. Right? Because the idea is, hey, our software will help you maximize profits of your rentals. Right? So it's like they're not they're not a consumer based thing. It's like not we're gonna charge a fair amount so everybody's happy. This is like for the landlords to make more money. So What's the there is no incentive to for them to actually have lower prices. The the incentive for the software algorithm is to charge as much as possible, as much as they can get away with, and if it can do that because it controls a large part of the market, then it's basically collusion.

Gary [00:43:58]:
It's just a very weird way of going about colluding. Like, I don't I don't think the landlords some of them, I don't think plan this. I think they're happy.

Leo [00:44:06]:
Right. But I don't think they plan it. But yeah. So what's the alternative? What what

Gary [00:44:11]:
Exactly. What's the alternative? Because, I mean, the alternatives go back to everybody has it's a secret, what we should charge, and we have to research it, and we have to, like, make mistakes. Yeah. It it's a weird thing. I mean, if you look at, like, the stock market, like, the price of stocks are, like, it's all controlled by computers and what everybody's buying and selling, and that's how the price of the stock comes out. Right? So this is kind of like treating, the price of rent as a stock. But, yeah, it it's weird. What is the right thing to do? Right.

Leo [00:44:50]:
My my guess is the software if the software were to change its goal Mhmm. Right, the goal is a very capitalist one. Right? Maximize profit for the landlords.

Gary [00:45:05]:
Mhmm. But

Leo [00:45:05]:
I in theory, one could do the same thing with a different goal. That being, I'm not sure how you measure affordability.

Gary [00:45:16]:
Yeah. It

Leo [00:45:17]:
could certainly change the target so that that profitability, is not the only or is not weighted as highly amongst other goals that would include things like reasonable, you know, rental prices as opposed to, you know, those that make profit.

Gary [00:45:34]:
Yeah. The problem is is, like, what's the incentive for a company to create something like that? Because, technically, a company could create something exactly like that, but who's gonna pay them?

Leo [00:45:45]:
Right.

Gary [00:45:45]:
You know? Nobody. So they they almost would have to be kind of a public service or charity kind of situation, a foundation to come up with equitable rental prices.

Leo [00:45:57]:
Landlords would have to in a case like that, landlords would be choosing not to maximize their profits

Gary [00:46:02]:
Yes.

Leo [00:46:03]:
Which is is unlikely. So I also suspect that there would have to be some, much as I hate to say it, government intervention that says, okay, Here's how we're setting our rental prices.

Gary [00:46:15]:
Yeah. Well, the, rent controls are a thing in many cities. And, of course, affordable housing initiatives are a thing in many more places even, where there are controls on, you know, you get incentives as a builder. I I don't really know much about this. We're getting into the territory of, like, I don't know much about it, but I'm talking about it. But I I gather that governments do basically tell companies, hey, build affordable apartments that and then they have these rules. Right? And then we will give you benefits, like we'll give you tax breaks or we'll give you funding of some sort or loans for building that that are an advantage to you, but you have to have affordable apartments rather than, just trying to, you know, build luxury apartments that, that aren't helping the housing situation.

Leo [00:47:06]:
I suppose go ahead.

Gary [00:47:09]:
Well, I I mean, it's just one of those things where, yeah, like, pure capitalism by itself would be horrible. Right. You know? It it would end up with, like, lots and lots of luxury apartments And and, you know, maximize the number of people in luxury apartments, and maximize the number of people who are unhoused. Right?

Leo [00:47:29]:
Yep.

Gary [00:47:30]:
That's what capitalism by itself. So we already have some government, you know, incentives, rent controls, things like that to try to balance that out. But how would you do that in software? Like, you would have to

Leo [00:47:43]:
Well, there have to be some rules now that says here's the definition of what it means to be affordable. Yeah. And this kind of software could be used to presumably do that.

Gary [00:47:55]:
Yeah. It could be used to yeah. Yeah. To do something. I mean, I guess if I guess if the the company itself, or or a new company that came up with software like this also had on the other end the ability for governments because I don't know of any foundations that actually do this. I guess there could be some, but it would have to be governments that would come in and say, well, we have these incentives to build affordable housing. We have these other incentives for various things and rent controls. Let us have an in into the software and let us tweak it.

Gary [00:48:29]:
So in other words, we can come up with this idea for some affordable rentals, and then that gets into the software and the software says, yeah. That's not gonna make any difference. And they say, oh, well, what if we adjusted it like this? And then the software said, ah, now you're bringing down prices. Or now you're make now you're housing more people

Leo [00:48:49]:
Right.

Gary [00:48:49]:
Because of that. I don't know. It it's interesting. It's, it's it's weird that this is a technology problem and that we're talking about it, but it is. There you go. This company has created this problem, by creating this software, which seemed to be good on its face at least for

Leo [00:49:07]:
the And, you know, especially especially in the Wild West that is AI right now. You know that, it's not going to be uncommon for AI driven solutions to real problems to have side effects generating other problems that were unanticipated.

Gary [00:49:25]:
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah.

Leo [00:49:30]:
Cool this week. You know, we Gary and I were in another meeting earlier before this with a couple of other folks, including, former cohost of this podcast, Randy Cassingham, who is now living on a ship. Mhmm. Apparently off the coast of South America right now. I think Peru or Chile or something like

Gary [00:49:50]:
that. Chile. Yeah.

Gary [00:49:52]:
So one of the things that I discovered some time ago is a website that is called marinetraffic.com. And what it does is it's a map that has overlaid on it. Every ship currently underway with the transponder, which is pretty much every ship, certainly all the commercial ships. So all of the freighters, all of the cruise ships. In fact, even here in Washington state, where we have a fairly active ferry system, all our ferry boats are on marine traffic, and you can see exactly where they are, where they're going, how fast they're going, all that kind of. And in many cases, there are photos of the ship that you might be looking at. The photo might be a little bit out of date. For example, the the photo for, Randy's Odyssey, the VV Odyssey, is still of its former paint job, but it's the ship.

Leo [00:50:51]:
It's the it's the right ship. Anyway, I just thought that was I personally find that fascinating, especially when you zoom out at more or less a global level and you can see all of the patterns, all of the shipping lanes and all the crowds of ships going this way or that way or up a river or any of those different kinds of things. So, anyway, marine traffic dot com. Again, as always, links in the show notes. It was kinda it's kinda fun.

Gary [00:51:17]:
Yep. It is. I I go there too. For me, a book I I so I reread the book I've been claiming is my favorite book of all time, but I haven't read it in the second half of my life at all, like the last 20, 30 years. I read it a bunch of times when I was young. And ever since, yes, my favorite book is, I would have said The Hitchhiker Strikes to the Galaxy. And it occurred to me I haven't read it in a long time, and, I just needed something maybe that reminded me of, you know, days you know, the past when things were simpler and also I know brought me great joy. So I decided to reread it, but I was scared rereading it because I thought, is it gonna seem silly or juvenile or not as sophisticated as I remember it? And I read it, and I loved it.

Gary [00:52:06]:
I enjoy it so much, and I found it to be just I mean, you know, at this stage of my life, just as enjoyable as I found it when I was younger. Some of the some of the stuff in it is so, interesting and well written. That was fantastic. Also, if I I'm a I love true sci fi where it's the real science fiction. And in addition to Hitchhiker's Guide being humor, which is just filled with humor, I mean, there's there's so much humor in it. It's it sets a whole different standard because they're sci fi books that are called humor books, and really, there's just a few humorous situations that arise and that's it. Hitchhiker's Guide is just page after page after page, whether it's like one liners along with ridiculous situations and all that. In addition to that, it's filled with science fiction.

Gary [00:52:56]:
I mean, there are different types of spaceships and aliens and, concepts and everything. It is so packed with sci fi. I get frustrated when I read a sci fi book, and afterwards I think, well, the whole book was only sci fi because they had this one little device Right. Or they just happened to be in the future or something. And Hitchhiker's Guide is packed with stuff, and it's real sci fi because they it's try they tried to explain it. Well, that is important, though, because they don't just say, oh, there's a spaceship. It could travel faster than light. Don't ask any questions.

Gary [00:53:35]:
But instead, it's like it travels using this concept. You know? It's probability

Leo [00:53:40]:
if I'm not mistaken. Yes.

Gary [00:53:41]:
Yeah. This robot is depressed because and an explanation for how it you know, why that is the case or why the computer cannot, you know, dispense a cup of tea. You know, it goes into exploitations. Makes it makes it fantastic. Anyway, I'm so pleased to find that my favorite book is still my favorite book.

Leo [00:54:04]:
Excellent. That's good. Yeah. I was I was worried that, it wasn't going to live up to the expectations, but I'm glad that it did. Yeah. In terms of blatant self promotion, I would like to point folks at an interesting article. It's gotten a fair amount of reaction, especially with the video on on YouTube. Are humans getting more stupid because of computers? It's askleo.com/7634.

Leo [00:54:28]:
It's actually an article that I first wrote probably about 10 or 15 years ago. And the update now, of course, has to include the impact of social media. And it's interesting because I don't I think, honestly, I believe the answer to the question is no. In many ways, to the extent you believe we're stupid, we've always been this stupid. What's allowing what's allowing it to look like we might be getting more stupid is that there are more opportunities to share our stupidity with each other, hence social media. But, anyway, it's an interesting discussion. It's an interesting thought exercise. Are humans getting more stupid because of computers? Askleo.com/76 34.

Gary [00:55:12]:
Cool. And I'll point to, one of my most recent videos about how to use the new transcription features, built into the latest, Mac operating system. A lot of people don't know they're there just because you don't happen to use voice memos or whatever, but you can use them to transcribe just about any audio. And it's kinda neat that, you know, it was it wasn't that long ago when people would ask me, is there a way to do this? And I was like, no. That's it. That you have to pay for a service to do that. It's a whole thing. And now my answer is, yeah.

Gary [00:55:41]:
Yeah. There's a way to do that on your Mac.

Leo [00:55:44]:
Cool. Cool. Cool. Alrighty. Well, I think that wraps us up for the first episode of 2025. I still have a hard time saying 2025. Yeah. Thanks as always for being here, and we will see you again or talk at you again real soon.

Leo [00:55:59]:
Take care, everyone. Bye bye. Bye.