Leo [00:00:22]:
Well, another week, another hacked traffic signal.

Gary [00:00:28]:
Yeah, well, this one I just wanted to mention because it was extremely local to me. Like, I literally pass this traffic signal all the time. It is awesome. I'm talking about on foot. Like, it is a few blocks from where I live, right? So when I saw this story, I was like, wait a minute, that's— I could see that almost outside my window. Unfortunately, I didn't experience it. I did know exactly what they were talking about when I started reading the article and it said that the traffic signal hadn't been used yet because there was a whole bunch of construction going on on the main road through downtown Denver, which is called Colfax. And they're redoing it, adding this new transportation option in.

Gary [00:01:12]:
And so it's been a lot of work. And one of the things they're doing is redoing all the signals and they're redoing a lot of walk signs and stuff. Stuff. So they've got a bunch of these and they're wrapped up because they're not in use yet.

Leo [00:01:24]:
Okay, sure.

Gary [00:01:25]:
So, but the thing is, they wrapped them up, they hooked them up to power, wrapped them up, and at some point the, you know, electric people did their job and turned the power on, right? And they're wrapped up and not being used, and somebody noticed that they've got power, but they could plug in I guess I don't know exactly how you get access to these things, but I assume it's physical. I assume you have to take either a phone, a tablet, or a laptop with the appropriate software, which is probably easy to obtain, right? Just plug in a USB port and then it asks for a password for, you know, modifying the signal, right? And if you know the password, you can get in. Now, since these were just installed and the people working with them didn't even know that power had been turned on to them yet. It was just the default password.

Leo [00:02:15]:
Lovely, lovely.

Gary [00:02:16]:
Yeah, so not as bad as like the situation where it's like they had been in use for a time. Like the people that were in charge of changing the password didn't know that they could go and change the password yet because they didn't know power had—

Leo [00:02:30]:
it was probably on their list, they just hadn't gotten that far yet.

Gary [00:02:32]:
Yeah, yeah. So somebody changed it to say, uh, some funny political things, and people caught it on camera. There's actually, I'm wondering, I'm sure they've all been changed, but there's a bunch because not only is there this construction project going on in my neighborhood, but there are a ton of new crosswalks being installed as part of a pedestrian-friendly movement in Denver. There are tons of places, and as a person with a dog, a person with a dog that actually has legs, Unlike you, I have to walk my dog and my dog. And so I, I not only know the neighborhood because I love to walk around myself, but I also walk the dog all around the neighborhood. So I know the intersections really well. And I'm surprised when I find out that there's— they added like a button you can press now and lights flash and then, you know, the cars have to stop for you. Right.

Gary [00:03:27]:
So I wouldn't be surprised if some of those were vulnerable. But probably after this was discovered, somebody drove around in a truck and really quickly just put passwords into all of them. I also found it interesting reading about it because I was trying to figure out how do they get access, and I never found out for sure that they plug in, but I was like, yeah, it seems like that's the way people are suggesting you do it. They're not internet-enabled necessarily, they're on their own private network, and you have to plug in to initialize them. But I wanted to find out what's the deal with why do so many of these get hacked? One thing I read is that there's not really good information technology stuff going on to the point where if somebody sets the passwords for these things, often the passwords get forgotten. Like there's no, like a lot of cities don't have places where it's like, oh, this is the person in charge of the passwords. And so if people set passwords, they find that like nobody needs to touch it for like 2 years. And then, oh, there's a problem or something needs to be adjusted and nobody knows what the password is.

Gary [00:04:33]:
So they have to reset it. Reset it and start from scratch. So they find it easier just to leave them on the default passwords and hope nobody goes and plugs in a USB device to it.

Leo [00:04:44]:
I was wondering about the password reset process because I have this vision of right next to the USB port, a pinhole.

Gary [00:04:54]:
Yeah, really.

Leo [00:04:55]:
So, so, you know, yeah, you can set a password, but if you've got a paperclip with you, Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of this.

Gary [00:05:03]:
It's kind of an interesting kind of like way to protest various things. Like for instance, I know the Flock cameras, of course, we've talked about before, how easy it is to hack into those. And even though the city of Denver now has fired Flock and said, "We're not going to have your cameras anymore," because a lot of pressure on the mayor to do that, then immediately people turn to the point saying that this only got rid of a small percentage of the Flock cameras in Denver because it turns out they tons of big companies use flock cameras in their parking lots, including some really big name brands that have like big parking lots. So if you think you're going to drive around and not be caught on a flock camera, you're wrong. There's tons of parking lot ones that are captured, especially if you park. Yeah, yeah. Or just drive by the parking lot or drive through the parking lot to get to a place, because, you know, parking lots rarely— if there's like a home improvement store that's the anchor for the parking lot, they're going to be flank— flock cameras there. You're not going there.

Gary [00:06:04]:
You're going to the Chipotle on the other side of the parking lot. That has nothing to do with it. Maybe, or maybe Chipotle does use flock cameras too. I don't know.

Leo [00:06:12]:
But, um, it's interesting because now that you mention this, we've had this bizarre scenario, um, at our healthcare provider. Um, they've gone through all sorts of machinations on how to charge for parking. And at one point, they tried to do it completely with cameras and license plate registration, right? So they would have you fire up an app, register your car, and then all you had to do was drive in, drive out, and you would get a bill. That was too complicated for a lot of people. And it's not that they were necessarily concerned about it being automatic or in the cloud or whatnot. But a lot of them, for example, didn't have the devices on which you would install the app that was necessary to register your car. So that went away and they went back to the traditional push a button to get a ticket, take a ticket to a pay stall, you know, payment kiosk, and then show the ticket on your way out. But what I've noticed happening is that, uh, if you, uh, especially if you've been there under or within the free period, right? There's like an hour, hour and a half of free, so you don't have to pay.

Leo [00:07:35]:
If you're in and out in that amount of time, as you're driving out, the gate lifts automatically. And I'm wondering if the cameras are still in use. In other words, it's noticing that we're coming in and that in under an hour and a half we're leaving. So why make you show your ticket? You're done.

Gary [00:07:59]:
That's smart. That's smart. That's like a first level would be recognize a license plate. Oh, they're free.

Leo [00:08:05]:
Right.

Gary [00:08:05]:
Open the thing. And then if it can't recognize a license plate, okay, now show your ticket.

Leo [00:08:10]:
Make them show the ticket.

Gary [00:08:11]:
Still might be free, but we're not going to slow things down. That's really, that's a smart way to do it.

Leo [00:08:16]:
And I'm also thinking that since you pay inside, or you can pay inside. Yeah, if you've done so, it knows which ticket was issued to which license plate.

Gary [00:08:27]:
Sure, sure.

Leo [00:08:28]:
So even if you've paid, on the way out, if it could recognize your license plate, it may very well lift the gate. Here's the thing, it confuses the heck out of everybody. I shouldn't say everybody because I'm not confused, but you end up with people, um, sitting at front of the exit gate. Yeah. Trying to pay even though the gate is up.

Gary [00:08:52]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:08:53]:
Because they didn't notice. And they're— they've been trained that if you get a ticket, you have to show a ticket on the way out. So it's very confusing. But now, honestly, you have me worried that the cameras they're using are Flock. Yeah.

Gary [00:09:06]:
I mean, I don't know. That's more of a specialty purpose kind of thing for a payment system rather than just surveillance. I mean, I suppose Flock could have both kinds of things.

Leo [00:09:15]:
I'm gonna say it's a camera either way, and all you're really doing is recognizing the license plates, which I'm sure Flock does natively anyway, right? I mean, that's part of what its surveillance is all about.

Gary [00:09:29]:
I wish they would install that. The place I run into it is there's a mall in Denver called the Cherry Creek Mall that several years ago started charging for parking. And it's like, it was a big deal at the time because depending upon where you live, you're hearing me say a mall charging for parking and you're either saying, yeah, okay, 'cause that's what they do, or you're saying that's outrageous, right? Because depending upon what city it is, it's either a normal practice or it's unheard of.

Leo [00:09:59]:
Put me in the outrageous camp.

Gary [00:10:01]:
Yeah, Denver was outrageous 'cause it was really the first one to do it, right? So it went from like this thing where everybody was against it and it was a big story, to now we're just all used to it. And part of the problem was there wasn't good neighborhood parking there, and it was a very convenient place for people to park their cars and take other transportation into town, that kind of thing. But that story never really— if that was true, then they would have instituted the free 2 hours, right? That would have been easy. It's free for 2 hours, so if you want to park and go to work, You're out of luck, right? You know this, but if you want to park and go run into the Macy's and come out with, you know, some clothes, you're probably fine. But the thing that gets me is they don't use the cameras, and I was thinking that they should. What they do is they issue you a ticket. What they used to do is you used to, when you exit, you would insert the ticket and it would suck the ticket in, and then on a screen display, you owe $2, right? And then you would pay with a card. They got rid of the thing that sucks the ticket in, and it just— you show the card and a camera reads the code on the card.

Leo [00:11:13]:
Yep, got a scanner. Yep.

Gary [00:11:15]:
You have a little free piece of paper as a gift from your visit at the mall, but every single time you visit the mall. So, you know, you could probably recognize people that live anywhere near that mall as having a little collection in their, uh, cup holder in the middle of the car. But they did though, they do make progress because first they switched to the machine that visually reads it, and then I didn't think they'd ever do it, they started taking a tap, like Google Pay, Apple Pay. Which was like, they didn't have that. It's like, well, it's going to be 10 years before they decide we need a new system or this stuff started to break, and then they do it. But at some point they upgraded it, which is so much easier in that situation because The whole thing of reaching your arm out, trying to get that card in, it sucks the card in, then you have to pull the card back out and all that. Whereas like your phone gives you like 3 or 4 extra inches at the end of your arm to, to, you know, get the phone over to it.

Leo [00:12:14]:
I suppose for some of us that's important. The scenario that, that I like the most, um, I've only encountered in the Netherlands, and that is, uh, on the train, although I suspect it's for others as well. Envision this, right? You take your Apple Pay or your Google Pay, you tap it on the reader when you arrive, and then you tap it on the reader when you leave.

Gary [00:12:40]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:12:41]:
That way it knows, in this case, it knows where you traveled, but in a parking lot situation, it would know how long you've been there.

Gary [00:12:50]:
Yep.

Leo [00:12:50]:
Yep. So no ticket, no reader, no nothing.

Gary [00:12:53]:
Yeah, that's how the systems for public transportation work for these things. I mean, Denver just started doing that.

Leo [00:13:00]:
Awesome. I think I've— God, I haven't run a— ridden a Seattle bus in years, but I believe that's how they're doing it as well. The other comment I was going to make is that we do— at the parking lot I was talking about, You get a physical ticket and you show the ticket to the reader, the scanner. But once again, it's unclear. Where do you hold it? How far do you hold it? What's the angle that at which you want to hold it? And that again causes a lot of grief, especially for people who are in kind of like high stress. They're trying to pay. There's 6 cars behind them on the way out. I mean, they're getting frustrated.

Leo [00:13:49]:
Yeah, it's—

Gary [00:13:50]:
Yeah, I haven't gotten a chance to try Denver's system. I've used them in other cities, like you were saying, like I used it in Copenhagen, for instance. And, you know, and so Denver switched to it. I don't ride public transportation that often, but I have ridden it since they've switched. The only problem is the previous system was a kind of charge up an app, you know, with an amount of money. And then before you started riding, you went into the app and said, purchase a ticket. You know, there's like a general fee. So it was like $3.

Gary [00:14:21]:
And then it took $3 out of your account. And then if somebody asked you, you show them your phone, or if you're getting on the front of the bus, you showed, and the phone was like all colorful and moving and all this stuff. Well, the problem is, is that it was good that they kept that old system in place because I had added money to it.

Leo [00:14:39]:
Yes.

Gary [00:14:39]:
And I have still not yet run out of money. So like, I rode the light rail just a couple weeks ago, and I was like, oh, I'm gonna try out the new system. And then when I opened the app, I looked and it says, oh, I still have $9. So I guess I have to use the old system to take $3 out of that, and I have 2 more rides before I finally will run out of money. And then I can try like the new system and see what it's like to tap at the one location 'Cause I don't know what happens. Like, you tap before you get on the light rail. It's like there's little pylons that come up, and they have a little thing, tap here. And so I tap, okay, great, so now I get on the light rail.

Gary [00:15:17]:
How do I prove that I did that? And I assume that the app will then have a little screen on it that says, you just tapped at the such-and-such light rail station, you're good to go.

Leo [00:15:29]:
[Speaker] The other scenario, and I actually hadn't thought about this with respect to the Dutch trains, but I'm sure it's the same, Your device that you tapped with— yeah, has an ID of some sort. Yeah. Which means that I have just envisions of the old-style conductor coming down the aisle. He'll probably have a device of his own. Yeah. And you would just tap his device and he would see that, you know, yeah, maybe I, I did, I did definitely—

Gary [00:15:58]:
I remember now in London I used So this was like last— not last year, the year before. I used this extensively where I didn't install any app on my phone at all. Nothing. I just have Apple Pay, and then there is a checkbox like in the settings for allow, you know, transit rapid use or whatever it's called, right? And I just tap at one end, get on the underground, tap on the other, and it deducts the proper amount. And I'm all good. But I never had anybody call me on it or ask me for proof or anything like that. So I don't know what happens in that situation.

Leo [00:16:35]:
Anyway, interesting stuff. But yes, the big takeaway for everybody, change your default passwords.

Gary [00:16:42]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo [00:16:44]:
Especially on your crossings.

Gary [00:16:46]:
Yeah, crossing. So here's a fun story. This is really neat. So there's a company that will soon be delivering pizza in various locations using little robots. You know, the little robots we've probably all seen. If we haven't seen them in person, we've probably seen on the news. You know, they look like little coolers that kind of are on wheels and kind of move around sidewalks and stuff. And that alone would be like, we would talk about that.

Gary [00:17:16]:
But what's really cool here is the way that they get around is they're going to use not GPS, or they probably are going to use GPS, but also something called VPS, Visual Positioning System. They're going to have cameras and they're going to basically know exactly where they are, like as far as like where they are on the block, like where the front steps to a building is, that kind of thing, based on a massive, massive database of images that was collected and has been put into this visual positioning system that these devices can use. So in other words, it's like if somebody went around and took tons of pictures up and down your street, my street, everywhere in the world, just of all the, every block, every angle, every weather condition, all of that, and just compiled millions and millions and millions of images to use so AI can figure out like how this little delivery bot can get right to your front door. Where did these images come from? Like, what system did they use? I'm sure everybody's thinking Google Maps to begin with, but yeah, like, did they send cars up and down streets? Do they have like people walking with big backpacks? No, they didn't have to do anything. They mined the data from Pokémon Go, which is awesome. It turns out that the company that was behind a lot of the technology for Pokémon Go was collecting all those images. And if you played Pokémon Go, apparently you agreed to this. They took all your images and they put them in a big database.

Gary [00:18:49]:
Matter of fact, at one point they even introduced a feature that was really kind of on the nose. They had a challenge where they wanted people to take pictures of certain things like buildings and monuments and landmarks and stuff as like getting extra points in the game or whatever. So People did that, and that added to the database. And now they have this massive database, and they are now contracted with the company doing the delivery robots to use this system to help the delivery robots get around. I'm sure Google is really feeling stupid now for having like 1,000 cars traveling around the world getting images.

Leo [00:19:30]:
What's interesting is that Google Maps is limited almost by definition to areas that are visible from the road. Yeah, right. In some cases they've gone off to like bike paths and that kind of stuff, but for the most part, um, like, uh, if you are— what comes to mind for me are areas on like college campuses. I think every college campus probably has a quad, right, where there's 4 buildings and there's this wonderful area in between them all. Google Maps ain't there. Yeah. But you can bet that there's at least a Pokémon GO character sitting there somewhere that everybody's taking pictures of, right?

Gary [00:20:13]:
Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. It's really interesting how they did that, you know, use that data. I mean, on the one hand, you know, there's the like, hey, hey, they tricked us into working for them. Right. We thought we were playing a game. On the other hand, it's like, well, it's not like anybody lost it and they still, everybody still got to play the game and have a good time. They're just saying, well, we're going to take all that energy that was put into this gameplay and actually do something else with it as well.

Gary [00:20:43]:
So it's just a fascinating story.

Leo [00:20:45]:
I, I, I, um, it's not a repurposing scenario that you would necessarily think of, but once you realize that it's happening, it makes total sense.

Gary [00:20:55]:
It does. So I imagine like other cities that don't have, you know, like need systems like this, you know, somebody, they could just go and say, well, we need to make a game for our town or our city that sends people out.

Leo [00:21:07]:
Well, or they would contract with the Pokémon Go people and say, hey, would you throw some Pokémon around our city?

Gary [00:21:15]:
Yeah, really? Well, I mean, you could almost, I don't know how, I assume it's still pretty popular, but If you're lacking data in an area, you could almost have the game, yeah, throw a bunch of really high-value Pokémon.

Leo [00:21:28]:
Exactly. Throw some incentives at them.

Gary [00:21:30]:
In this spot where we're missing a lot of data, and then now we've filled that gap. Yeah. It's pretty funny.

Leo [00:21:38]:
Yeah. We've only briefly touched on AI. Let's dive in more deeply. The article that I ran across this morning, but I've heard the issue for the past couple of days actually, is that Benjamin Netanyahu is struggling to prove he's not an AI clone. Now, what's happening apparently is that people are taking a look at some of the videos of him speaking and they are calling out what they believe to be artifacts of AI, implying that the video they're looking at is AI-generated. And, you know, honestly, I'm not necessarily going to weigh in on whether it is or whether it isn't. There's a lot of arguments that, you know, say, well, hey, what about this? And then there's what about that? And then there's counterarguments that say, well, this is easily explained by that. This is easily explained by that.

Leo [00:22:43]:
You're not going to convince anybody along this argument. The reason I mention this is that honestly, this is one of the futures of AI that concerns me the most. Because as I've said a couple of times, the AI we have today, it is the worst AI we will see in our lifetimes. Meaning it's only getting better. And right now, it's pretty darn good in many respects. And in so many cases, you don't really need to prove whether something is AI-generated or not for the accusation to have its intended effect, because the intended effect happens immediately. The analysis always takes time, and by the time the analysis and the arguments and the counterarguments are all put out there and written up or whatever, either it's too late and people are stuck believing what they're going to believe no matter what you tell them, Or the issue at hand has had its intended effect and we've moved on to the next crisis. Even without AI being used, AI is still an issue because let's say, for example, that these videos of Mr.

Leo [00:24:20]:
Netanyahu are actual live, honest to goodness traditional videos. And that what people are complaining about or people are calling out are artifacts of video and resolution and lighting and God only knows what. But let's just say that the videos are actually real. The accusation still has an impact. The accusation is still causing turmoil, even if no AI was used. And of course, when AI is used, well, that's clearly deception. I don't have an answer for this. Like I said, it's only going to get— well, depending on which perspective, AI is only going to get better and this situation is only going to get worse.

Gary [00:25:09]:
Mm-hmm.

Leo [00:25:10]:
What I don't know is what do we do when we can't believe anything?

Gary [00:25:20]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:25:21]:
Uh, I mean, right now we've got tools and techniques that do a reasonable job, again, given the amount of— given enough time, detecting what is and what is not real. But that too, I think, is either going to go away completely or at least get prohibitively hard for it to have a meaningful impact. I just don't know where we land on this, particularly in the political landscape.

Gary [00:25:46]:
Yeah, and you know, I think part of it is it's already to the point not only where AI is looking much more realistic and you're able to fake this stuff, but also it's overlapping some people's regular mode of speaking. Like, and I think Netanyahu is part of that because a lot of politicians have a very deadpan kind of way of speaking. And there's two— there, in this, before this, it came up for me twice. Once was a comedian that I often saw for years on places like TikTok and YouTube and stuff, who has a very deadpan delivery and usually has graphics behind him in the videos. But he doesn't move very much, like, and he has a very deadpan voice. And that's just that's just the part of the whole thing, right? But I never thought of that as being odd before, but I saw one video where it triggered something in my brain to say, hey, is this AI? 'Cause I've seen people fake comedians taking like a picture of the comedian, writing some dialogue or monologue for them, and then having it like they're delivering that, you know, what they're saying. And it's been fairly convincing. And I thought that like the same thing got triggered and then I remembered, oh no, this guy, I mean, he actually talks like this and this video looks a little weird.

Gary [00:27:15]:
Like it looked a little low res. So I just kind of filed that away. And the next time I saw a video that I'm sure was not AI of him, I looked really closely and I was like, yeah, in real life he's not really any different. So that probably was real. And then there's also was, it's a woman who does like kind of like a, singing rap kind of thing, humorous little songs. But her whole thing too is it's a very like kind of techno geek kind of rap. And she holds very still when she delivers and like looks straight at the camera and just very deadpan talking kind of music stuff. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Gary [00:27:56]:
It's just that now it kind of looks like AI.

Leo [00:27:59]:
Gonna say their mannerisms are like an AI construct. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gary [00:28:03]:
So it's like, so there's an overlap there. What my brain sees as like, oh, this may be AI, warning, warning, is overlapping some real people's behavior. And as AI gets better and better, eventually that's all just gonna blur and I just won't be able to tell anymore, you know? And I won't be triggered by like an alarm saying this might be AI because, well, AI could be anything now. I certainly do see AI now, produced by some pretty talented people where the problem is not very deadpan delivery, like some of the talking head stuff I played around with like a year or two ago where I tried to get like myself as a talking head with AI-generated voice and all that. I'm seeing stuff now where it's overly expressive. Right. Where the characters are moving a lot and you can almost tell it's AI because it's like, wait, why would that person be moving like that while talking so much?

Leo [00:28:53]:
I mean, So yeah, it reminds me actually, it's not visual, but it reminds me of especially the initial podcast episodes that were created by NotebookLM. Yeah, right. They were overly enthusiastic, right? They weren't natural in a real sense of the word. But yeah, I hadn't thought about specific individuals who basically already have all the characteristics of AI.

Gary [00:29:23]:
Um, well, they'll be, they'll be the first to suffer. Uh, so yeah, and let's go into, uh, another AI story. Uh, you and I both read 404 Media, and this is, uh, one of the top people there wrote a, basically an editorial, uh, criticizing an Anthropic, uh, paper about the effects of AI on on the, uh, on jobs, basically, the labor market. And it was a weird article because I like 404's stuff, but I guess I don't like their editorial stuff because I found this one to be kind of filled with a lot of holes. Basically, the premise is, um, the headline is AI job loss research ignores how AI is utterly destroying the internet. So Anthropic's paper, which of course is going to be geared towards, you know, stuff that would be favorable to Anthropic and using AI and stuff, is looking at like where are we gonna see jobs going from people doing them to AI doing them? And in a way they almost want to actually be like, well, this is what we're building here. Like we are, if you run a company, you will be able to employ less people. That's like seen as a benefit as opposed to like another angle would be saying this is gonna be bad.

Gary [00:30:45]:
For Anthropic anyway, but of course the 404 editorial's looking at it the more people-centric way. But it's saying basically, well, Anthropic's only looking at direct job-to-job comparisons. Like, here's a job that will be replaced by AI, and that's all we're caring about. They're not looking at the holistic view of like, well, AI is changing things and that's going to change the job market. So for instance, some of the things in there, well, AI jobs, people are gonna lose jobs to AI, but that's partially because these studies only guess what will actually change. Well, yeah, but that's kind of what the studies have to do. But then it goes on to talk about how, I found this to be really weird, that AI does stuff like allow people to create their own porn.

Leo [00:31:44]:
Right.

Gary [00:31:44]:
So apparently people are going to be put out of work in that sector as well. I've never heard anybody actually arguing about it like that, but also just AI slop and spam. So people basically that create junk on the internet now will be out of a job because AI can create junk better Better junk.

Leo [00:32:05]:
Yes.

Gary [00:32:06]:
And what regular people can do, which is— it's— I can't argue with that.

Leo [00:32:11]:
It's, it's why the— what was it— the, the Weekly World News with its, uh, pictures of Elvis's alien child or something. Yeah, they wouldn't, they wouldn't stand a chance right now.

Gary [00:32:23]:
No, you just— yeah, you can make your own, make your own National Enquirer.

Leo [00:32:26]:
Um, the, the, the interesting thing, or the observation that I had when I saw, you know, the word slop used here It seems to me that slop is a pejorative that's being thrown around for anything generated by AI, whether it's good and useful or whether it's bad and misleading. Some— the term slop seems to apply. Now, I realize that that is by and large being used by the anti-AI crowd because they honestly believe everything that's generated by AI is, in their mind, slop. It's bad stuff. But I'm seeing it used across the board, even by those who, who, you know, believe in AI or believe AI has some potential. And I find that it makes it hard to have a discussion about what can be, what can be generated by AI. Because the term slop just carries so much baggage to begin with that, you know, there are wonderful positive uses for AI. That's certainly my position.

Leo [00:33:44]:
And yet, is the stuff that I'm creating slop? Is the stuff that I would consider to be useful slop? It seems to be the term du jour. It's just, I don't know.

Gary [00:33:57]:
Yeah, well, the rest of this article goes on to talk about a lot of the things we've talked about over the years, but before AI, like that AI, things like chatbots are killing traffic to websites. In other words, you type a search term into Google, and what you're getting mainly is Gemini coming back at you with like, here's an answer. Let's talk more about this. It's like, oh, I was searching for a webpage, I was searching for a webpage and suddenly somebody is talking to me. But they gave me the answer, so I guess I don't need the webpage anymore. And that's a problem that we've had for a long time, because the history of that, as web publishers, we know is that Google came on the scene. We both came on the scene before Google was around. We were using previous search engines to try to drive traffic to our stuff.

Leo [00:34:46]:
AltaVista, baby.

Gary [00:34:47]:
Yeah, and then Google came around, and one of the things Google did was at some point they said, we're just in the business of We are, you know, getting people to the right webpage.

Leo [00:34:58]:
10 blue links.

Gary [00:34:59]:
Yeah, we are— that's our business. We aren't going to get in the way of the webpages themselves, but every once in a while at the beginning, they start adding in a little something, some little answer or something on their webpage that would just, you know, give you the answer rather than taking you to the page, and then eventually giving you a piece. Oh, here's a little snippet of the webpage. Instead of visiting there, we're gonna just show you the one sentence you need. No need to go to that webpage. So they kept breaking that promise over and over again until they completely abandoned it and started developing a lot of their own webpages and information things and stuff. And then now they're not even pretending because they're just using AI to basically be an answer machine rather than a web search engine. Now we could debate whether, are not, you know, maybe people are better off that way.

Leo [00:35:50]:
My— it's funny, I've actually made the statement that it is a better experience for most users, right? I mean, obviously I have a dog in this fight, as do you, but the fact is, um, if you search for an answer and the first thing you get is the answer you are searching for. That's great.

Gary [00:36:17]:
Yeah, right.

Leo [00:36:19]:
Now, can you trust the answer? That's a different question. That's getting better. Um, and you know, I'm guilty of it myself. I have— I don't use search near traditional search nearly as much as I used to. I'm using Claude these days and it's giving me answers. And honestly, occasionally there'll be references, right? If I wanted to click through to find out the source of the answer, I could, but I don't need to.

Gary [00:36:53]:
Yeah, it's, um, another side to it is not that you're just not driving traffic to web pages anymore where the web publisher is getting credit for providing an answer. But where do the answers come from? For a while, they were basically being stolen from web pages, right? Here's a snippet from this web page. They're not going to make any money off of it even though they worked to get the answer. Google's going to make money off of it. So it was like, it was direct, like felt like, hey, you're taking my content or the answer that I worked out and you're selling it yourself. With AI, it kind of obfuscates that. Google is now saying, oh, we're no longer gonna steal from any individual. We're just gonna train a massive AI engine to go out there, steal from everybody.

Gary [00:37:47]:
So you're not gonna lose a hundredth of a cent in advertising now. You're gonna lose a millionth of a cent in advertising because it's, you're only a, smaller piece of you is actually going to exist in this answer. Yeah, so we're just gonna have to see where it goes. The end of the conclusion is something that, I mean, it's kind of true, and I'm gonna quote here: AI is eating and breaking the internet and social media. We are moving from a many-to-many publishing environment that created untold millions of jobs and businesses towards a system where AI tools can easily overwhelm human-created websites businesses, art, writing, videos, and human activity on the internet. And I kind of, I mean, I can't argue with that, but also I kind of feel like it's saying that, okay, AI is going to be killing a lot of jobs, but there are a lot of jobs that haven't been around for very long. Like a lot of these jobs didn't exist 20 years ago, right? You know, content create, being a content creator, especially like a video content creator, but a lot of website stuff, The job didn't exist 20 years ago. It existed for this brief period of time, and now technology is putting it out of existence again.

Gary [00:39:06]:
I know you want to point out a metaphor, but the metaphor I had in mind was there's a big building in downtown Denver. Written on the side of it says Ice House. And if you take a few seconds to think about it, what was that building? That building was an ice house a long time ago. Now it's a cool name for whatever businesses are in there. They're in the Ice House. But it used to be that for for a short period of time, there was a viable business in going up to the mountains, getting ice, bringing it back in huge blocks, storing it in a building in the city where you could resell it. And then technology put that whole business, you know, out of business. And it was a job for a while, and now it's not a job.

Gary [00:39:46]:
Should it have stayed a job? Probably not. But, you know, it's the same kind of thing. If you create content now and you I'm not saying that people shouldn't be creating content, but if you made a bunch of money creating content for some reason, it may just be the reality that that was a job for 20 years and you got lucky enough to intersect with those 20 years and make some money off of it. But unfortunately now there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Like, I don't like it, but I don't see like the solution being let's just ban AI from doing the job, you know.

Leo [00:40:24]:
Yeah, no, I agree with you totally. Yeah, my metaphor is very similar in the sense that like buggy whip manufacturers, right? They lost their jobs when automobiles came along. Do we have a responsibility to somehow maintain their industry, their niche, even though it's no longer truly necessary? Um, it's, you know, the obvious answer is no. I mean, technology moved on. What they were doing successfully for however many years they were doing it is no longer necessary. And that's kind of the nature of, well, human evolution, right? As, as, as we discover new things, as we learn new ways of doing things, of necessity, those often end up replacing the ways we used to do things. The problem here, I think, is that what I've just said is super easy to say in hindsight, right? You know, we're 100 years from ago was when we last needed buggy whips, right? On a massive scale. At the time things were changing.

Leo [00:41:42]:
Things were not nearly that clear, right? There was a lot of controversy about the automobile and roads and gasoline and, you know, whatever else you want to, whatever else you want to factor into it. So it wasn't necessarily a clear cut, well, okay, on Monday we needed buggy whips and on Tuesday we don't need them anymore. It was a multi-year transition as a different technology came in to take its place. That's happening now. We're in the middle of it and we don't know what it's going to look like in 10 or 20 years.

Gary [00:42:15]:
It's a good thing that we kind of see it coming. I mean, and you and I are both in, in this. I, I can, I'm, I'm definitely, you know, I've thought about the fact that what I do could be completely not gone. I, I'm sure I could keep making videos about how to use Apple gadgets as long as I wanted to. I might not be able to make a living doing it. Like, I might not be able to, you know, make enough money from it, right, 5 years from now for it to be my real job. And I think the positive spin on that is that I see it coming. I'm not going to wake up one day and be like, oh no, I'm blindsided by this.

Gary [00:42:57]:
It's like, oh, I see what might take place of what I'm doing now. It might be just AI going and giving people answers directly and they don't need to watch my videos anymore.

Leo [00:43:08]:
So yeah, there's an argument for— it depends on why people are watching the videos. A lot of them are watching them to get answers. A lot of them are watching them to just learn. Yeah. And a lot of them are watching them because it's you. And I get that for my stuff too, right? I mean, you know, will an AI come along and perfectly imitate me someday? I don't know. Probably. It's certainly technologically going to be possible.

Leo [00:43:40]:
The question at that point becomes, would it be worth it? Uh, but you're right. We've seen this coming and I've been very explicit in, uh, embracing it is perhaps the wrong word, but accepting that it's coming, right? I'm not fighting it. I'm trying to figure out what do I need to do in this new world so that I can continue to thrive as a business and still provide value to the world. I, you know, the, my website used to be my primary revenue generator, right? It's how it's what paid the bills. And in the last few years, nope, that changed completely. It's just the, the, the traffic is down because of what we were talking about earlier. The answers people are getting on search engines and chatbots are preventing them from clicking through to my site. So what advertising there was there wasn't getting seen.

Leo [00:44:44]:
Therefore, I wasn't getting any revenue from it. Now, As it turns out, YouTube is in a different place, right? So right now, YouTube is my more successful approach. And as it turns out, my creation style works best when I write a real article first and then record a YouTube video about it. So I continue to maintain the website with very valuable content that newsletter subscribers and others seem to stumble on. But, um, but yeah, the landscape is changing. And I think that what smart creators like yourself, and I count myself in this too, uh, need to do is not rage against the machine, but rather understand or try to figure out what is their path through this? How do they either do what they're doing alongside whatever's happening with AI? Or how do they embrace AI to help them do what they're doing better or more or more effectively or whatever?

Gary [00:45:52]:
Yeah, I think we should do it in the future. At a future episode, we might wanna talk about what the future for Ask Leo and MacMost may look like. Like, what are we doing to prepare for 5 years down the road?

Leo [00:46:05]:
Yep.

Gary [00:46:07]:
But for now, I saw that you had some things that you wanted to vent about.

Leo [00:46:18]:
So as is my way, so I have generally declared bankruptcy on YouTube comments. I just, I can't read them all.

Gary [00:46:28]:
I can't take the time to read them all.

Leo [00:46:31]:
But what I tend to do is in the morning, I will fire up YouTube, the Creator Studio, and look at like the comments that have been posted in like the last 12 hours, just because it's a, it's usually a, a nice representative set of what's been happening with my content on YouTube. And of course you get the funny ones and I, you know, screenshot some of them and make some snarky responses to some. But the one that, the ones that consistently annoy me are the comments that come in and they almost always start, but what about, right? Um, I've got a couple of videos right now that have been doing really well that talk about backup storage technologies. And I talk about this and I talk about that, you know, I talk about hard disks versus SSDs and cloud storage versus not cloud storage and so forth. And of course, everybody and their brother has their favorite. And of course, everything that I haven't talked about, because there's thousands of different options. So I end up with, but, but what about this? But what about this? But what about this? Okay. There are two kinds of whatabouts.

Leo [00:47:51]:
One kind, I actually kind of sort of appreciate because they will often bring something to mind that I literally had not considered. Awesome. Too many, I'll even say most, are an attempt to basically posture and one-up the presenter, you know, the content, or they're bringing down the original premise or concept or whatever. They're basically just trolls. What about is one of the favorite phrases used by trolls, and it gets old. So, you know, yeah, get off my lawn.

Gary [00:48:39]:
Yeah, for, for me, uh, because you mentioned that, and there had been something that was bugging me with the release of the MacBook Neo. I'm getting, of course, lots of people— I put up, you know, lots of videos about it And you get lots of people that kind of do like what about, but in a different way. It's like, oh, I wish they would have just done it differently like this. They would have added this one thing, right? And you hear this a lot, not just about a new product like this, but even old products and software. But hardware is special because software you could add, you could say, well, why can't they just add this one more thing? And then you could say, well, they probably have a thousand different things they could add. Why add yours? With hardware though, the weird thing is, is that when you add something to it, you've now added it to all of them and it costs more. Yeah. So like a big one that I've gotten so many times in the past, and now it's coming up again with the Neo, is, oh, if they only put an SD card reader in it.

Leo [00:49:35]:
Oh, uh-huh.

Gary [00:49:36]:
And the thing that gets me is, well, okay, those aren't free, right? That's a $10, $20, $30 piece of hardware that needs to go into everyone. So the question is, how many people are going to use it? Right? Because if you go and look at it and say, well, 1% of the people will use an SD card reader in a MacBook Neo or a MacBook Air or, you know, whatever, then, um, but everybody has to buy one. You know, you don't get— it's not going to be an— Apple's not going to offer an SD card reader option to memory in addition to storage in addition to like screen finish or, you know, whatever. So the thing is, it's like, they'll be nice for some people, and especially with something like an SD card reader— and there are a lot of other things like an HDMI slot too— is you could add it yourself, right? And chances are, if you're carrying around a MacBook and a camera, that you could carry around the tiny, tiny gadget that is an SD card reader, right? Because they are tiny. You just, you plug them in to the side and you could carry that around and add that to your MacBook Neo or MacBook Air or whatever and not have to bother everybody else to spend extra money, right, and carry it around in all theirs. I had that problem when Apple actually did put an SD card reader in a lot of their MacBooks. I always said that's kind of a waste, um, and it should be because it's so easy to add and so few people use it. Yes, if you do use it, it is handy to have all the time, right? But if you don't— now I've got one, my Mac Studio.

Gary [00:51:10]:
Mac Studio comes with an SD card reader. It's a little bit easier for them to add one in a case where size really wasn't a big deal, right? You know, they could throw that in there, right? What's it going to be, a design thing? But I still am like, ah, I've only used it a few times, and I could have very easily used— I have another SD card reader that's USB that I could very easily use. Plus my camera today has— yeah, I could hook it up with USB and transfer that way. And it used to be that was really slow. You remember, like, when, like, you would not want to do that. The recommendation from people like us was don't connect your camera to your computer, right? That's so slow.

Leo [00:51:48]:
It's fast.

Gary [00:51:48]:
Get an SD card reader. But now, you know, a new, newer camera is going to have a much faster transfer time. And newer cameras, like, I think my new Sony, I could do Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, ah, right, or connect the USB. All three options I could use to transfer photos in addition to having the tiniest, most lightweight little gadget that I own, which is the little USB SD card reader. So anyway, that's my thing, is like everybody's saying, oh, throw it, throw in if it only had 12 gigs of memory instead of 8 gigs of memory. Okay, well now it's $50 more for everybody.

Leo [00:52:25]:
So, um, the Neo has what, 2 USB-C ports?

Gary [00:52:29]:
It has, yeah, 2 very weird— it has a USB 3.0 port that is also a DisplayPort. Okay, don't call it Thunderbolt because it's not. It's USB 3.0 plus DisplayPort. And then a second port that is USB 2.0.

Leo [00:52:46]:
I love, I love standards. Everybody has their own. Um, The, the one thing I will take issue with is that you said that obviously adding hardware to every machine costs.

Gary [00:53:00]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:53:01]:
And the implication was that software didn't. My argument to all the people that want feature, their, their pet feature, right, in, in whatever software it is that they're talking about is Every feature costs.

Gary [00:53:18]:
Yep.

Leo [00:53:20]:
Like you say, I like the, I like the way you look at it. It costs everybody regardless of the people that actually use it, but it costs, it costs in development time. It costs in testing time, assuming people are still testing. It costs in localization. You know, there's just so many costs involved. Now you can argue, did they choose the correct set of features? Fine, that makes, you know, that happens all the time. But don't think that features are free because they are absolutely not. Just hardware's easier to position that way because it's something that's physical.

Leo [00:53:56]:
You can see it, you can touch it. Clearly, you know, it costs money.

Gary [00:54:00]:
It is, and everybody's gonna argue that, oh no, if you wanna talk about it that way, I can name 10 features that they should get rid of and add my one feature. But you know, like, I love it when people actually have good names as their comment names. It's bad when they have like a bunch of numbers or something. But if the comment name is like Leo, I could always respond, you know, it's macOS, not Leo OS. So you don't get your wish.

Leo [00:54:25]:
There's that. And I mean, to be honest, I mean, you and I have both done our share of software. Removing things isn't free, right? You take stuff out and you break other things. I mean, it's amazing. I mean, I think a lot of people don't have a good sense for just how incredibly complex software is today.

Gary [00:54:47]:
I can add one more on top of that. Adding things isn't free, removing things isn't free, and what also isn't free is keeping things the same.

Leo [00:54:57]:
Doing nothing, yes.

Gary [00:54:58]:
Doing nothing because you're going to change other things. You are going to add or remove things, but the things you don't add or remove, the things that have to stay the same, you still have to go back and test them and see what might have broken because there's new hardware, because some other change to the software, some other change to other software that it interacts with. So having 1,000 features and just keeping that 1,000 features running costs something. If it's 1,001, it's gonna cost more to keep the 1,001 features around. So yeah.

Leo [00:55:30]:
Yeah. And of course, if a company literally does nothing, it costs because they very slowly lose market share.

Gary [00:55:39]:
Yep. Yeah. All right.

Leo [00:55:42]:
Anyway, let's move on to some cool things. So we just recently finished watching Young Sherlock on Amazon Prime. And actually, I wasn't sure how it would turn out. And we were pleased with it. It was well acted. It was a fun story. It was a different perspective. What kind of cracks me up is that Sherlock Holmes is incredibly popular right now.

Leo [00:56:08]:
There are, I mean, and over the past several years, there's this Sherlock and that Sherlock, and you know, they're all different productions, but they're all different takes somehow in the Sherlock-verse, I guess you'd call it. It's just, it's been interesting to see, and I like all the different takes, and this was another one that we enjoyed. So Young Sherlock on Amazon Prime.

Gary [00:56:32]:
Cool. I saw something a little funnier, just this— I don't know if you heard of this movie called Fackham Hall, which is streaming. Yes, it is. It's just basically a slapstick comedy, but, you know, making fun of a lot of British period piece dramas, right?

Leo [00:56:56]:
Yeah, you might remember that last week I was struggling to remember the name of what we have been watching. That was— I called it, uh, Bridgerton crossed with Naked Gun.

Gary [00:57:08]:
Oh, okay, interesting. All right, so I ended up stumbling upon it independently. The, um, yeah, I liked it because there's a lot— I, I'm not a huge fan of like slapstick stuff, you know, if it's done really well, like the movie, the original movie Airplane!, for instance. Sure, then it could be, it could be good. But I do love it when they take the time to put jokes in the background, and they do that a lot in this movie. You have to pay attention because there will be a scene with a joke in it, but in the background there's another joke that's taking place that you could just totally miss if you're not watching what's going on. And they do that over and over again in this movie.

Leo [00:57:48]:
That was the Naked Gun effect, I'll call it, because the Naked Gun, Airplane!, that series of films, they all did exactly the same stuff. The Leslie Nielsen versions of those things. Did you by any chance watch the most recent Naked Gun yet?

Gary [00:58:02]:
Yeah, I did. I thought it was— I thought it was decent. I mean, it's hard. I think it's kind of out of time. It felt like that, oh, this was a decent take on that kind of movie. But it wasn't really updated for today. I don't know what that would have been, but it was just like if you like those old movies and you wanted another one that was very much like them. I thought some of the jokes were quality jokes.

Gary [00:58:29]:
Like for instance, I loved the fact at one point there was a car chase and there, the windshield, his windshield was blown out. So it's missing the windshield. Do you remember that?

Leo [00:58:42]:
No, not offhand, but—

Gary [00:58:44]:
Okay, so this windshield was blown out, right? So there's no front windshield, typical in an action movie car chase. And then there's the typical thing when there's a car chase that there's a bunch of guys carrying like a plate of glass across the street and you break through the plate of glass and it's like a, you know, the two guys were carrying a windshield across the street and he runs into it and it fits perfectly and replaces the broken windshield in the car. I just couldn't stop laughing at that one simple joke. And that's all it takes. If I get one joke like that in an hour and a half movie, what time well spent.

Leo [00:59:21]:
It paid off. Yes, that's funny.

Gary [00:59:24]:
All righty.

Leo [00:59:25]:
So I'm going to go a little bit. It's funny how this ends up still being controversial for self-promotion. My article, Why Password Managers Are Still Safer Than the Alternatives. And it is. And when I say the alternatives, I mean every alternative that I've ever heard of. Password managers are still the way to go, in my opinion. And of course, I get lots and lots of pushback. There's a lot of whatabouts, right? Yeah.

Leo [00:59:56]:
What, what if, you know, this or that? And said, well, yeah, that's a problem, but it would have been a worse problem without a password manager anyway. Askleo.com/5555. Please use a password manager.

Gary [01:00:10]:
I still get pushback every once in a while from somebody about something like, oh, then all my passwords are in one place. Okay, so I, I'm gonna— here's something, it's turning out you think it would be controversial, but it's not. Uh, I did a full review of the MacBook Neo. I don't do reviews, like I just don't do that kind of thing, but I got one on day one I like it and everybody's talking about it and I'm fascinated by it. So I kind of was like, I'm just going to find out what it would be like to just sit and do like a, I think it turns out to be 13-minute full in-depth review of a product. And I did that. So I did a review of the MacBook Neo and people seem to be liking it and seems to be relatively non-controversial. Most of the comments are people like saying, I bought, I bought one for this.

Gary [01:01:00]:
I bought one for that. Oh, this was the right move from Apple. Oh, I, I'm definitely replacing my iPad with this later this year, that kind of thing.

Leo [01:01:07]:
It's funny. And I've seen this, obviously, you know, you're very, spoke very highly of the Neo last weekend, this week. The press that I'm seeing on it in general just seems to be that they really, they really did a good job on this.

Gary [01:01:20]:
Oh yeah. I have been, I did not expect it to replace my M2 MacBook Air. I thought I would use it for a while and go back to my M2 MacBook Air. Or at the very least I thought I would use both of them for a while. I closed the MacBook Air when, as I was opening the MacBook Neo's box. I have not opened the MacBook Air once. Matter of fact, the only time I touched it was to move it aside so the spot on my desk that it usually sits on could be used by the MacBook Neo. And I just went all the way into the MacBook Neo and I've just been using it for everything that I'm not— everything when I'm not sitting at my, my desk, right?

Leo [01:01:59]:
Remind me what color you got.

Gary [01:02:01]:
Indigo, the blue.

Leo [01:02:03]:
That seems to be the big question. What color did you get?

Gary [01:02:05]:
Yeah, it is. And that's another thing, when people are talking about that as a major factor, you know, you know, everything within the case is good. It's probably the car industry is like when they get a car model out there and people talk about what color they're going to get, they're like, oh, we got it right. They're not talking about there's an issue with the transmission or it doesn't get as good gas mileage, whatever. They're talking about is the metallic blue better than the, you know, red or whatever.

Leo [01:02:35]:
The questions they commonly get, because I watch this also on like the Rivian forum where I'm spending some time these days. I wish they had this color or that color. Tying it all back to our, uh, um, you know, I wish they would, if only they would add. So, alrighty, well, I think that wraps us up for yet another week. Thank you as always, everyone, for listening, and we will see you here again real soon. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.

Gary [01:03:05]:
Bye.