Leo [00:00:26]:
Hey, Gary.

Gary [00:00:27]:
Hey, Leo.

Leo [00:00:29]:
So of course we have to talk about AI. Yeah, I mean, it's become a requirement, but I think you made the suggestion last week, or somebody made the suggestion last week that one of the things we might do is just sort of mention some of the unique ways we've used AI in the previous week. And I think that's actually kind of interesting because I think it'll be a combination of things people didn't realize existed, which actually is going to be my first one and then just like pragmatic uses for AI, which is my number two. So I was watching one of the plethora of YouTube videos that covers, you need to use this AI tool and there's all these AI tools you don't know about. And Google has a bunch of AI tools that nobody's ever heard of that are really pretty cool. And actually for one of them was actually very true. I stumbled into Google Flow, which is actually in Google Labs now. I've been using Google's Gemini to do all of my image generation.

Leo [00:01:40]:
I do that for the hero images for all of my articles these days. And Google Flow actually does the image stuff, but it gives you a fair amount more control. It actually responds much better to. No, I meant this, not that kind of follow on to image generation, which actually has been quite helpful. It was one of those things where I discovered Flow said, oh, I wonder if I could make a better image than the one I made last week for a specific article. And this time I was able to get exactly, exactly what I was looking for with a couple of iterations. Was actually pretty cool. Flow actually does more than just images though.

Leo [00:02:20]:
It actually does video as well. It's. It does the standard 10 second video generation. So just for the heck of it, since everything these days seems to be Corgi related, I asked it to generate a Corgi in a spacesuit walking on the surface of Mars where he encounters the Curiosity rover. And indeed it came up with a very nicely. I mean, the concept was awesome, you know? Yep. Corgi space suit walking across, stumbles into. Into or into Curiosity.

Leo [00:02:59]:
They kind of look at each other and it comes to a stop, of course, because it's only 10 seconds now. I gotta say, it ain't perfect. The Corgi's ears stick out of his helmet, which is not something that would go very well. And the spacesuit actually only covers half his body, which on Mars I think would still be a problem. But nonetheless, it. It was just kind of fun to do that and. And just come up with something that good that easily. So, anyway, I thought I would mention that as one of my.

Leo [00:03:40]:
One of the. The things that people might want to be interested in investigating if this is their kind of thing to play with. Google flow. It's at labs, Google dot something or other. And like I said, it's another one of those things you can play around with and have some good times with.

Gary [00:04:00]:
Cool. Well, yeah, I might as well mention something I used AI For I completely forgot about. It happened so quickly, and it was so easy to do that. Yeah, I forgot that I used AI for it. So I spent the week vacationing with my family, as I do one week a year in Ocean City, New Jersey. And I've mentioned this before, usually having to do with, like, privacy stuff on the boardwalk or the. You know, all this because it's a. It's a bit of a whole surveillance privacy nightmare in Ocean City, New Jersey.

Gary [00:04:30]:
But this time we went to play a game of miniature golf, which is what you do in Ocean City, New Jersey. There's tons of miniature golf courses. And for years and years and years, I've been keeping score using an app. So no little tiny pencil for me, no little scorecard. I just bring up this app, and I remember more than 10, maybe 15 years ago when I was playing miniature golf or starting it, I thought, there has to be a better way. Somebody has to have made an app where you can just do this on your phone. It would be easier than adding it all up yourself and all that there was. I remember downloading it right there in Ocean City and using it in the very next game.

Gary [00:05:12]:
And year after year, I've used the same app. Not a change had been made to the app at all over all these years. Not an improvement, nothing. And then this time, when I went to bring it up, no dice. My phone is set to offload apps that I don't use. Of course, it has been a year since I've used this app.

Leo [00:05:32]:
It's a bit too long.

Gary [00:05:33]:
I use it for a week, I use it 10 times, and then I don't use it for a year. It's too long. So. So I was like, okay, download it again. It's small. And it said, nope, it is not in the app Store any longer. Ooh, I thought, oh, crap. So grabbed a little tiny pencil and a little scorecard, and I kept score.

Gary [00:05:53]:
And it sucked. It does. Human brain is not really good at adding up numbers like 2, 3, and 4 over and over again on a confusing list in multiple columns, quickly, while you have an ice cream cone in one hand and you're trying. You know, it's like, it just sucked. So I thought, well, okay, when I get back to the room, I'm going to have to look for a new app to do this with. And then it occurred to me, wait a minute, I could just make my own. So I fired up on my MacBook Neo. I fired up Claude Code, which, of course, I had the Claude app on there.

Gary [00:06:33]:
So, you know, I didn't think I'd be using it, but I fired up. Cloud code described in one long paragraph what I wanted. It knocked it out of the park on the first try, but there were a couple of little tweaks. I think I did two short prompts afterwards. It was a web app, of course. I didn't need anything more complex than that. I added it to my site. That's a collection of web apps.

Gary [00:06:54]:
I think the entire thing was 20 minutes most of the time, just me being like, oh, cool, and testing it out. It made it look good. It got that it's mini golf. It understood the assignment. It made it. You know, I told it I wanted this for the I'm going to use this on the iPhone. And it did it. And I used it for the rest of the week.

Gary [00:07:15]:
No problem. As a matter of fact, better than the app before because, you know, I asked for exactly what I wanted. Sure. And it just worked great. And I just used cloud code for that. And, yeah, I'll put a link to it because I put it up on my little site of, you know, vibe coded apps that I have. And so anybody can use it if they want. It doesn't store anything on the server.

Gary [00:07:39]:
It just stores it locally. Even if you refresh the page or close your browser, you know, it saves it in a cookie. So it just keeps going like, you can't. Can't mess it up. Anyway, it was really, really cool.

Leo [00:07:51]:
That's pretty funny. Yeah, I like that. What I ended up doing this week, in terms of something a little bit more practical, as I was mentioning earlier, you kind of bridge that gap, right. From, you know, just having fun with it to actually coming up with a practical solution to a problem you were facing. I was investigating an app. An app that was going to cost me like, A couple hundred bucks. And I, you know, was like right there before, I mean, I hadn't pushed the Buy button yet.

Gary [00:08:23]:
Right.

Leo [00:08:24]:
And it dawned on me that, that, you know, I would love to use this app on more than one machine. I want it on my desktop and I want it on my laptop at a minimum so that I have it with me at all times. And nowhere in their marketing material could I find whether or not that was technically allowed. Right. Was it a, you know, one machine only or something more than that. And then it dawned on me that it was probably buried in the eula, but I didn't want to spend any time reading the eula. Heaven forbid we read the eula. And so what I did instead was I copy pasted the EULA into Claude.

Leo [00:09:08]:
And I asked Claude, does this EULA restrict the number of machines I can install the product on? And a few seconds later I have my answer. I could install it on actually three machines. Which was then followed by my hitting the Buy now button. I just thought that was a really good example of a practical use of AI. So much information is buried in EULA's and terms of service. I mean, we've talked about using it on terms of service and privacy policies before, I think with respect to Microsoft, but even as part of a purchase decision, there's so many bizarre things that are sometimes hidden in eula's. It's a really nice way to ask the questions that you care about against the EULA that you are, you know, of whatever it is you're considering buying or using or whatever. So that actually went really well.

Leo [00:10:09]:
And like I said, I've, I've now, you know, I. Like I said, the product itself is, is immaterial to the discussion, but I hit the Buy now button and I'm actually quite pleased, quite happy with it.

Gary [00:10:20]:
Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm surprised. Well, not, I guess it's not here yet, but I would imagine we're going to have little web plugin things that will, you know, when you click on, oh, here's the user agreement for whether it's a piece of software you're installing or it's on the webpage or whatever where you can actually ask questions about it. Amazon kind of has this on their product pages. You could go. There is like an AI thing they've got there where you can ask a question.

Leo [00:10:50]:
Yeah. It's usually not against the license agreement though. You're actually asking questions about the product.

Gary [00:10:55]:
Yeah, yeah. So it's using the product information, it's using user reviews to figure out like an answer to it. And I see this as being something even more common in the future. You know, you have a EULA up on the website and you just have a read or ask a question about it and it's just something that just goes through and takes your question about how many computers can I install this on, and then it tells you the answer and points you to the thing and just having that as being a matter of course. In the future, for all sorts of

Leo [00:11:32]:
different cases, we'll probably say that that's actually already a thing because most of our browsers already have AI built in, in one or another, like Gemini's in Chrome and Copilot's in Edge and that kind of stuff. And in theory, if you've got it fully enabled, you can ask it questions against the page that you're looking at.

Gary [00:11:53]:
Yeah, and I wonder if it'll change, like thinking beyond eula's onto just instructions. Right. Technical documentation I was thinking about because my use of. One of my main uses, especially in cloud code, is to not never have to read API documentation, which is notoriously the worst documentation. And. But so if you can, if it's like you're not going to read instructions anymore, but instead you're going to have AI interpret instructions for you and get right to what you want, then the writers of those instructions don't necessarily need to have the instructions made for people to read them. Like instead of being readable. Right.

Gary [00:12:39]:
Just be complete would be the goal. All the details, put it all in there and let AI be the interpreter for you. It could be just a very different thing and maybe easier to write the documentation. Maybe you can actually have the engineer write the documentation and not have a writer then come in and say, well, I need to clean it up because people need to be able to learn how to use the product. No, you don't have to do that at all. Just have the engineer include all the information that's needed and then have the AI figure it out and tell the person or provide how tos provide useful tips. You could do all sorts of things. I would love to be able to for documentation, for products, whether it's a physical product or software product or whatever.

Gary [00:13:31]:
Not only how do I do this, but tell me, tell me a cool, useful way to use this that I'm not using it, or I don't know, give me 10 tips or something. Explain it like I'm five or I'm highly technically proficient. Give me some advanced things that I could do.

Leo [00:13:50]:
Right, right. I will say that I. One of the. The more or less common uses I have for usually Claude is I'm doing something with a product, like a technical product, a complicated product like Photoshop or DaVinci Resolve or any of those kinds of things. And I'll basically decide, you know, I want to do something, but I really don't know how to do this or I don't know the best way to do this. Right. What's the. What's the quote, unquote, right way to do something in this product.

Leo [00:14:26]:
And absolutely, I will throw that at Claude and it'll come back with a description, the steps I need to take. The only problem I have with AI right now is that because these products are always evolving, the instructions don't always necessarily match the version of the product that I actually have.

Gary [00:14:45]:
Yes.

Leo [00:14:46]:
Yeah, and that can be kind of a problem. Sometimes it's corrected by saying, nope, I'm not finding that control that you pointed me at. And they'll say, oh, yeah, that was removed in this perversion, that kind of. And stuff. Or if I tell it explicitly, hey, I'm using version, you know, 21 of DaVinci resolve or something like that, then it'll actually refine the result. But that's actually super useful, and it typically comes back more readable than whatever I might have found in the actual product documentation. Or it'll come back more targeted to my specific situation because that's what I gave it. So, yeah, that's been pretty interesting.

Gary [00:15:29]:
Yeah, I've been using it for. I've been doing a lot of work with my travel videos in Final Cut Pro, which I'm not used to doing because I use screenflow for my MacMost stuff. And final Cut Pro's companion is Motion, which is the equivalent to Adobe After Effects. And there's a lot out there on Final Cut Pro, and I've used it many times before, so I'm pretty proficient at it at this point. But sometimes I do hit a wall. And it's useful to ask ChatGPT or Claude how to do something. And sometimes it gets me there, sometimes it just confirms the negative. It's like, I don't think there's a way to do this in Final Cut Pro, but trying to find.

Gary [00:16:07]:
Nobody's going to make a tutorial on how you can't do this because you can't do it. Nobody makes a tutorial. So having ChatGPT say, oh, yeah, Final Cut Pro doesn't do that, or whatever. Here's an alternative or whatever. But Motion is Of course, it's a subset of Final Cut Pro users, small subset. So trying to actually figure out how to do things, you're not going to find as much online. And there's a ton of controls. Like, it's the type of app where they don't hold back and say, well, let's just give the user three choices to make it simple.

Gary [00:16:39]:
No, it's like, this is for experts. There are going to be 72 choices for this. Working with ChatGPT has got me quickly to solutions. It's not always right because it doesn't have. It just has the documentation and it has some sparse information out there. But it likes to work with me to be like, well, let's try this, let's try that. And it'll quickly get me to figure things out much quicker than if I was just on my own trying all the different options and controls and menus and everything. So, yeah, really useful.

Gary [00:17:12]:
And Apple, I know, is going to be building a lot of this in with Siri AI. Basically, instead of having to get you to have that aha moment where it's like, I'll go to ChatGPT and I'll ask ChatGPT, Siri AI is going to be like right there in your face, like, how can I help you? Kind of thing. And I expect it to be trained on the right stuff too. Apple saying, hey, here's documentation. Maybe even going back to what I said earlier, providing more documentation to the AI, right, than to a human. Because this is like, this is just a huge reference of stuff. The AI can use it. But humans are just going to be confused by this.

Leo [00:17:49]:
Your comment about confirming a negative actually struck home because that happened to me literally yesterday. I think I've mentioned before that I manage a server for former Microsoft folks where they can get an email address. You know, it makes them a little bit more discoverable. And there have been some. They had a voluntary retirement program this last month. So I've had an influx of people. I use a product called VirtualMin to manage that particular server and it's how I manage the individual email addresses. The problem is that there are now, I think approaching 1200 email addresses.

Leo [00:18:30]:
And the page on which you manage them doesn't appear to be pageable, which means that every time you display that page, it displays all 1200 email addresses. Oh, yeah, that, you know, the browser kind of starts to choke on it and I can hear the fans on my CPU kick up when I'm just displaying a fricking page. Right. So I said, you know, VirtualMin is kind of obscure. It's kind of, it, it has settings at odd places. Is there a way to change this to be page based so that I can display, you know, I don't know, 100 at a time instead of all 1200? And the answer turned out to be no. It's a common request, apparently, but there's actually no way to do it. However, it also suggested, you know, the other approach for people that are dealing with this is to use the command line and by here's the syntax to do what it is you want to do so that you don't even have to display that page.

Leo [00:19:34]:
You can just enter this command on the command line and you're done. And yeah, this morning when I created an account for somebody, that's what I did. And much, much, much easier that way. One of the things I read this morning had to do with Google Image search. It's one of those features that's coming. So I don't, you know, I can't really talk about it in detail because I haven't seen it, I haven't used it. But the idea is that if you're going to search for something in Google Image Search, if you can't find it, it may offer to fire up AI for you right then and there to create whatever it is you're looking for.

Gary [00:20:14]:
Oh, okay.

Leo [00:20:14]:
I thought that was kind of interesting. We'll see how that turns out. Supposedly it's going to be rolling out in the next couple of weeks, but in my experiment to just sort of see how Google Image Search is working these days, I fired up a, what I figured would be a fairly obscure request, something that might actually trigger this kind of an AI response. I asked Google Images for Corgi playing a guitar. So I learned a couple things. One is there are way, way more pictures of corgis and guitars for real than I had ever imagined there would be. I mean, people like to pose their dog with their musical instruments, I guess, and then, you know, do things with it. But, but the other thing I noticed about the search results is that a healthy number of the images that were displayed were in fact AI generated already.

Leo [00:21:14]:
So these would be images that say, you know, heck, you know, I'm using corgis in a lot of my images for Ask Leo. So it's these kind of images that have been AI generated that are now searching or showing up in image search results. And on one hand I get kind of, sort of makes sense, you're asking for images of a Corgi playing guitar. And here are images of a Corgi playing guitar irregardless of the source or how they were created, which is pretty much the way it's always been. But I know that that's going to strike some people as, I don't know, inappropriate. Right. The anti AI crowd is going to dislike that. Now, what a lot of people didn't realize, and I learned this last couple of weeks ago, is that on a normal Google search, if you add dash AI, it removes Google's AI generated summary and any other AI features from your search results, which is actually something people do appreciate.

Leo [00:22:17]:
However, that's different and it's unclear whether it's actually effective at removing images that it discovers as part of its normal search that happened to be AI generated. So I'm just kind of the way I'm phrasing this is AI poisoning search results in what we would now consider to be a different way, by having AI generated images show up in traditional image searches. And should it. Right. Should it filter them out? Should it not filter them out? I'm not really sure. I just thought it was an interesting, an interesting observation on where things seem to be headed with AI.

Gary [00:23:01]:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, and then of course you're going to have the problems of AI training itself on AI images.

Leo [00:23:08]:
Yep.

Gary [00:23:09]:
Yeah. And not realizing it.

Leo [00:23:12]:
I gotta believe though, that at least at the training level, I mean, they have the ability for most of these images to flag. Flag. In fact, I had, what was it? I posted something. Oh, I used AI to create a banner image for the Pacific Northwest Corgi Picnic, which is happening in a few weeks. And I posted that on Facebook and sure enough, there was a little, little subtitle or a little note under the image that says it was AI generated. And if you click the information, it says, yep, the image itself has whatever watermarking that's hidden in there that says this is an AI generated image. So that kind of stuff I would hope that the training tools are paying attention to.

Gary [00:23:56]:
Yeah, I hope so. So, so a non AI topic.

Leo [00:24:01]:
Check this out. Oh my goodness.

Gary [00:24:03]:
I, I, so I think, I think I talked about this when it originally happened to me. Maybe.

Leo [00:24:08]:
Yes.

Gary [00:24:09]:
A lot of transit systems now have a NFC tap to ride payment system. So use your phone or card or credit card and you could tap to ride. The first time I used this, I got really confused about how it worked. It was here in Denver and it's one of these things we talk about how people always complain. Oh, I'm getting old. So technology is hard for me. Both of us are like, that's nonsense. Right? But then, you know, you're.

Gary [00:24:40]:
You know, something happens to you, and you're like, oh, crap, is it happening to me? Am I getting old? But. So the first time I tried to use it here in Denver, they had recently switched our light rail system over to including a. They called it Tap to Ride. Okay. So I was excited. I was going to use this thing. So I assumed when you walked up to the machine, it said, tap to ride. I tap my phone and it gives me the ticket.

Gary [00:25:03]:
Or actually, what I. What I really thought would happen was there was already an app, and if I paid on the app, which I'd been doing for years, the app shows your ticket. You can actually my current ride or whatever. You tap on it and there it is. And this is what you show somebody if they come and check to see if you've got a ticket on the train. So I tapped and I. Nothing came out. No paper came out.

Gary [00:25:25]:
Okay. I look in the app. No mention anywhere in my app that I had a ticket. How do I show them that I have it? I looked for instructions. No instructions, nothing. Just tap to ride. That's it. Okay.

Gary [00:25:42]:
So I pulled out my credit card and thought maybe it didn't work. I tapped my credit card again. Nothing happened. So actually, no, wait, that's not right. On that case, I didn't take my credit card. I just went to the app and I said, buy a ticket on the app. And there it goes. Hey, there's my ticket.

Gary [00:25:58]:
It shows it and all that. Great. I get on the train, I ride the train, I show my ticket on the app, everything works fine. Then a day later, I get charged a second time because the way Tap to Ride worked is great and I love it, but a little three step sign would have cleared it up. Now it's nfc. Just like I've done this on subway systems like the London Underground. You tap, it registers that you started your ride here.

Leo [00:26:29]:
Yep.

Gary [00:26:30]:
Then you tap when you get off, and it registers that the ride is over and charges you appropriately.

Leo [00:26:36]:
Right.

Gary [00:26:37]:
And the middle step. The step that's weird because you're on a train instead of a subway, is that sometimes a ticket taker comes around to check. There's nothing to show. You tap your phone to their device.

Leo [00:26:49]:
Right.

Gary [00:26:50]:
And it says, oh, yeah, this device is a known device that we know is now in the middle of a ride. You're good. Now, I think there should be a way to check to see if your device has that. Like, can't I check if somebody else that works for a company I don't know of can check, why can't I check? Why can't it show me in the wallet app or wherever? So I don't like that. But I do like the way it generally works. Once you understand a quick little sign above the tap drive, at least for the first year, that the thing is available saying tap, ride, tap your phone. And it will prove that you, you know, if somebody asks, tap again and ride easy. Now I thought, okay, am I, am I losing it? Am I? But this week I witnessed my 24 year old daughter do exactly the same thing in the Philadelphia area getting on a train.

Gary [00:27:47]:
I dropped her off, she tapped her phone and it wasn't called tap to ride, of course, because we can't have standards. So it was called tap in, tap out. Okay, okay, so tap in, tap out. Only instructions are the name of the service. Tap and tap out. She tapped her phone, it gave her a green check mark on the screen.

Leo [00:28:07]:
Okay.

Gary [00:28:08]:
And then she's like looking for where the ticket comes out. Because the last time she did this, she tapped on a machine and a ticket came out. No ticket. So she tapped her phone again. This time a red X comes up on the screen. Uh oh, red X means something's wrong, right? Tap the phone again, red X. She calls me over, do you know how to use this? And she chose me. Tap red X.

Gary [00:28:30]:
And I'm like, oh, this is kind of like. And she pulls out her debit card and before I can say anything, she taps the debit card to it and it shows a green check mark. And I said, did it show a green check mark before when you did your phone? She said, yeah, the first time. Then it just shows red X. And I'm like, oh, no, the same thing. You just did the same thing. So yeah, got charged.

Leo [00:28:50]:
Like father, like daughter sent a support,

Gary [00:28:52]:
a support email saying this is what happened. But a sign above where it says tap in, tap out. Saying tap in here, tap out at the location. It just allow the, you know, conductor, whatever they want to call the ticket taker to, to tap your phone and it will prove that you're riding. No, no paper ticket needed. I like, like, you know, I like

Leo [00:29:20]:
the idea of your app. I mean, I would want something that gave me some confidence that I had a ticket.

Gary [00:29:26]:
What if you weren't paying attention, right? You, you're walking up, you walk past, you do it and you're like, oh, I forgot the screen was right there. Right. Did it show the green, the check, green Check mark was only there momentarily. Right now all you can do is red X's and I guess you could assume, well, the red X probably means that I tapped already, but it also could mean that I, maybe I've selected a different payment card and you don't

Leo [00:29:49]:
take that card or is expired or who knows, not working.

Gary [00:29:52]:
Who knows? I'm not going to know until I get on the train and then the ticket taker there is going to tell me that, oh, it looks like you are legally boarded the train. You'd be like, no, I didn't, you know, so. Yeah, but it's, it's weird because we live in a world where conveniences like this pop up and usually they're really good instructions. Usually sign makers rejoice in the opportunity to put little icons on the sign and say, here's how to do it. And this is a very clear, like step one, step two, step three, easy little icons that could show exactly what to do. No paper ticket is issued. Very simple. But yet two places, Denver and Philadelphia, both said, nah, no sign.

Gary [00:30:36]:
We're just going to call this tapter ride and people will get it.

Leo [00:30:39]:
Thinking back to. Because I think when we talked about this before, I also mentioned my experience in the Netherlands where that is the normal way to use the train. It is tap in, tap out. There aren't any instructions. So the thing is, after a while it becomes the norm. Right?

Gary [00:30:58]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:30:58]:
It's this transition period from paperless app. I'm sorry, from paper and apps and all that kind of stuff to this completely magical. Just everybody assumes that it works kind of scenario. That's the trouble. But in the Netherlands, like I said, it's the norm out there. And I guess you just don't need the instructions because they can't think of. They no longer think of doing it any other way.

Gary [00:31:21]:
Well, for me, the one thing that tripped me up and it was the same for my daughter, was the idea that somebody may check on the train. So when I did this years before on the London Underground, that was not a problem. Like, I did not think for a minute riding from stop to stop in the London Underground, anybody was going to check. Right. That's why they have turnstiles. You need to use the turnstile. So of course, you're just used to that on a subway system. And I would have assumed the same thing on a train had it not been for the fact that I know that on these trains, both of them, there are ticket takers that come by and check.

Gary [00:31:59]:
And that's exactly where my Mind went. And where her mind went is we needed some way to show this. And the disconnect was that, oh, you just tap your phone. Yeah. So I don't know, maybe. Yeah, there's a lot that could be done. Instructions. There's definitely a way at some point to be able to tell that you are on a ride.

Gary [00:32:19]:
And I think actually come to think about underground, I think those you do have a way. I kind of remember. I mean there's no real way for me to test it. Although they actually offer that now. My local transit here in Denver. You can do it. I just haven't used it yet because I'm a local. So I walk everywhere and I've got a car and stuff like that.

Gary [00:32:43]:
But um. But yeah, I mean just some way where it just indicates ride in progress. You know, you could check and then you'd be like, oh, okay. Even if the ticket taker does not use that, they do a tap. It makes me feel, you know, make you feel better. Give you confirmation.

Leo [00:32:59]:
Yep, absolutely.

Gary [00:33:00]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:33:01]:
It's funny because this reminded me. So we in Seattle, I'm sure you've got FIFA games in Denver, right?

Gary [00:33:07]:
No, no, Denver was not a FIFA city.

Leo [00:33:10]:
Oh, okay. Well, Seattle was.

Gary [00:33:12]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:33:12]:
And we also have our new light RA system, new being the last couple years. And as it turns out we set records for using our light rail system in Seattle when the FIFA games were were played here at our local stadium. Which is actually kind of cool. But you mentioned turnstiles. We have no turnstiles. It's all this same honor system.

Gary [00:33:40]:
Yeah, right, sure.

Leo [00:33:42]:
You can walk on the train without paying or you can walk on the train with paying. And they actually looked at it and said during this record stuff, data shows that between 58 and 74% of riders actually paid. Which means of course that upwards of a third did not. Which is kind of interesting. I looked a little further and the data for the pre FIFA period is actually pretty similar. It looks like about 61% of our writers are paying and they're actually considering putting in turnstiles in a couple of the. The hub or the high volume stations simply because so many people aren't paying their fare. So.

Leo [00:34:30]:
And that's regard. I don't even know which payment options are available. I think they, they now have tap to pay, but I think they also will sell tickets and all that kind of stuff.

Gary [00:34:39]:
Yeah, they never have.

Leo [00:34:40]:
Nonetheless, you don't need to show anything to get on the. Get to get on the train.

Gary [00:34:44]:
And there's no turnstiles. Here for light rail either. But the previous system using the app, right. I mean, I guess pre that you did buy tickets, but previous system using the app had the issue where you could kind of like people would sneak on and have the app ready. They could buy a ticket and if they notice a ticket taker come around, you could just buy one right there. Quickly buy the ticket, Quickly buy the ticket. And actually the way the app worked is you charged up the app so you put like $20 on it or something.

Leo [00:35:17]:
Sure.

Gary [00:35:19]:
And then you could buy a ticket, but then you had to activate the ticket so you could actually buy a ticket, not activate it and just have your have bring the app up and hit activate or even. And I'm sure people did this. Buy the ticket and don't activate it. Then if the ticket taker comes around, you don't even have to pay attention. They come up and say, oh, here you go. And be like, oh, there's another step I didn't realize. And they could see that you bought the ticket, you just didn't activate. It's like, well, were you not going to activate it today? And then keep it for a few days and activate it on another day when you notice the NFC system fixes that because you can only tap in before you get on the train or with the ticket taker, I assume, right? I assume if they come up, said, oh, you haven't paid and oh, I'm sorry, I don't know.

Gary [00:36:10]:
And then you could do it, but there is no way to just do it like while you're sitting on the train. So yeah, maybe it'll increase that percentage of people that pay. But you know, there's, there's arguments. We talk a lot about, you know, in community forums and stuff here in Denver about public transit. And I'm sure they do in Seattle as well about like, you know, there are many ways that you pay. I mean, first of all, I'm sure Seattle's is somewhat government subsidized as is ours, right. So everybody's paying a little bit in taxes, right. So first you've paid some even if you don't actually buy the ticket.

Gary [00:36:45]:
The second thing of course is that the city infrastructure is getting a benefit from having public transportation rather than cars on the highways and parking and all of that. So that's why some systems around the world are actually free or that some systems are free sometimes or in some situations, like for instance, students get it, you have a student id, you're free. Here in Denver, it's like, well, there's a benefit. The city's benefiting not only from your taxes that you're paid, but it's worth it for the city somewhat to have you take public transportation than some other method. After all, you drive your car and you park in a private lot, the city gets nothing. So riding public transportation, if you don't pay, the city gets nothing still. But it's probably better that you wrote the public transportation for free, then you drove for free, that kind of thing. Anyway, interesting.

Leo [00:37:36]:
Some years ago, Seattle had a ride free zone. So the actual core of the downtown area, you could just get on the bus, get off the bus, do whatever you needed to do. They stopped that for some reason. And I actually don't know why, because it seems like. I mean, I don't know, it's been a while since I've been in Denver. I know that they were working on refurbishing the downtown area in a number of different ways. Yeah, Seattle's not there. Seattle's downtown is.

Leo [00:38:06]:
I don't want to say deteriorating because it makes me sound like a grumpy old timer, which I am. But it's one of those things where the downtown is just not nearly as vibrant as it once was. And it seems like having. Having like, you know, free transit in and around the downtown area would be a really neat thing. But whatever they did.

Gary [00:38:26]:
Yeah, we. We've got two free buses downtown, one

Leo [00:38:31]:
that used one of those.

Gary [00:38:32]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:38:33]:
16th Street.

Gary [00:38:34]:
And then there's a. There's a kind of an adjacent one that's a little more business oriented and it acts as a, you know, for. For visitors. It's great. They don't have to do anything. And it makes it really quick because you could jump on and jump off, you know, so. And plus it extends. There's like a.

Gary [00:38:52]:
There's one station, the Union Station, that's at one end of it. And there's another station that's, you know, that's at the other end near the Capitol. And it basically links the two of those together. So it feels like an extended zone of like, you can get off light rail in one, but if your bus leaves from the other, you just have a free way to get between them.

Leo [00:39:12]:
Right, right. I use the free bus. I remember how to go from my hotel down to Union Station. And it was Union Station where the light rail to the airport took off.

Gary [00:39:21]:
Yep, exactly. So I don't. I don't have convenient light rail where I am, but I'm very convenient to one end of that free ride bus, which then takes me to Union Station, which then I can take the. The train. But of course, also, when you buy that ticket on the. For the light rail to the airport, it. It's a full fare, which gets you full fare for the entire day anywhere.

Leo [00:39:47]:
Oh, right.

Gary [00:39:48]:
So I can actually just take the bus that's close to me to another light rail station that's closer and not have to take the free one.

Leo [00:39:57]:
Oh. Huh.

Gary [00:39:57]:
So, yeah. Which is. It does. It's designed on purpose that way. Anyway. Yeah. So one last topic here that's also not AI But I thought it was interesting because it is a complicated topic and it's not one that I'm going to be like, this is great or this is bad, we need to stop it. But I'm not sure where it is.

Gary [00:40:17]:
But a company is launching the first satellite of its kind which will do one thing. It'll reflect sunlight from the sun to the dark side of the Earth to a specific spot on the dark side of the Earth.

Leo [00:40:33]:
Interesting.

Gary [00:40:34]:
So it's a mirror, basically.

Leo [00:40:36]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:40:36]:
And it, when it's nighttime, it can be positioned so it can reflect the sun onto a small. I think it's like a square mile area. They call it like a neighborhood or whatever. And light up that neighborhood not with a full day sunlight, you know, a full strength sunlight.

Leo [00:40:55]:
Right.

Gary [00:40:56]:
But with something equivalent to two to four times the light of a full moon.

Leo [00:41:01]:
Okay.

Gary [00:41:02]:
Which is significant. As somebody who's hiked by full moons before, I adjust a little bit. It's not bad. And if it's twice as much as that, that's pretty good. So the idea is, of course, right away you could see there's a problem with it in that maybe you don't want your nighttime sky to be lit up. Right. So, of course, you know, at the forefront of protesting this are astronomers and scientists that are like, this is not good. Right.

Gary [00:41:31]:
And the other side of it is, well, this is only a very small area and it's only for a short period of time. A satellite that was positioned perfectly to do this would only be able to do it for about three minutes, and then it would fall away over the horizon and fall too far away. So that leads to the terrifying idea that this is the first of 50,000 of these satellites that the company wants to put in orbit. The idea being that as this network of satellites goes overhead, much like with Starlink, with providing WI fi, this network could basically, one satellite could be pinpointing a spot where of course, the obvious thing is it could be a solar power plant. So a bunch of solar panels in a field and it's nighttime and now it's turned off. Except that this satellite reflects the sunlight onto the solar panels. So you have a field with solar panels. The whole field is lit up and it only gets it for three minutes.

Gary [00:42:31]:
But if there's a network of them, by the time that three minutes is gone, another satellite is in position and the sunlight remains constant and perhaps even is doubled or tripled. So instead of two to four times the moon, they sort of overlap even closer. So you could keep a solar power plant going all night with this network of satellites that was shining light over it. The 50,000 is, it's pretty scary. But you know, if you think of, oh, just illuminating the whole side of the planet that's dark and we don't have night anymore, you know, that seems ridiculous. But the idea of having like a solar power plant in the middle of the desert or well off into a side of the city where there's no people living and just having it constantly get sunlight all night long to continue its power, that's interesting. Of course, it's still not great for astronomers. And what's worse is that regular satellites will sometimes obscure something.

Gary [00:43:33]:
So a telescope is doing a four hour exposure of something and now a satellite gets in the way and there's like a blink in that. These satellites will be reflecting sunlight.

Leo [00:43:43]:
Yes.

Gary [00:43:44]:
So the satellite is all like, I'm trying to eke out every photon I can, and all of a sudden a blindingly hot mirror is in my way and it could damage the telescope. So there's that. And also the fact that the light isn't a, it's not a hard edge. Right. It's like, okay, so you're not where the mirror is targeting, but you're close to it. Now your nighttime sky isn't as dark as it was before. Even though you're not getting the full light, it's not as good. There's a lot of downsides to it.

Gary [00:44:20]:
The plus sides were interesting. Trying to read the case studies. Obviously, solar farms, that's a big one. They keep pushing on their website emergency response, which sounds like one of those things, like when these surveillance cameras are always talking about, oh, they could solve crimes and stuff like that, it's like, all right, we already do solve crimes, this is another tool. But does it? And having like, oh, should we have a network of 50,000 satellites? Just so when somebody goes missing in a field or something, we could suddenly call in an emergency, like shine the sunlight down here type of thing. But they also Talk about industrial zones and construction zones. Not, you know, being able to light up a port where a ship is unloading or light up a construction site, you know, where somebody's building some infrastructure or highway or whatever. And not having to have all these lights strung all over the place.

Gary [00:45:20]:
Or maybe not being able to even continue in darkness. But you can do it and say, oh, we want to buy a month's worth of light onto this spot where we're building a bridge. You know, that's interesting. That's an interesting.

Leo [00:45:34]:
Seems like a really expensive approach.

Gary [00:45:38]:
Maybe. I mean, I mean we already have the, I mean, you know, Starlink and Amazon are already figuring out how to like launch tons of small satellites, right? And these don't even have to have that much technology on them. They're basically mirrors that need to be able to swivel a bit. So, you know, and obviously they'd be launched in, in groups and spread out and stuff like that. So there's that another. And they also talk about agricultural stuff. You can light up a field. I don't know.

Gary [00:46:06]:
That sounds a little bit like. I know even you talk about, oh, the sun being a little less because of pollution. It's now 90% of the sunlight is getting through to these crops because of pollution in some area. And now you're talking about getting 5% of sunlight. That sounds far fetched, but another one that was interesting is replacing street lights. So the idea is, okay, your downtown area is already not an astronomical observatory, right? It's downtown. You've got streetlights everywhere, huge network of lights, lots of power, lots of lights to maintain and replace. Lots of alleys and streets that aren't getting it because you haven't done a good job of providing street lights.

Gary [00:46:49]:
So forget that. Your town could go without and just pay us. And we will illuminate the streets between sunset and midnight. And you pay them for that illumination, which is kind of a. More of a general kind of illumination. You're not getting, you know, the spots under the street lights, well illuminated and then there's dark corners and all that stuff. You just get this general kind of illumination. Maybe in a special occasion.

Gary [00:47:17]:
Is there a festival? Oh, we can go to 2:00am tonight, you know, do you want to have a special astronomy night? We'll turn it off tonight, that kind of thing.

Leo [00:47:26]:
It's a new definition of the acronym SaaS, right. Sunlight as a service.

Gary [00:47:32]:
Sunlight as a service, exactly so. But it already is. I mean, the streetlights are already run by some something and sometimes they're public, sometimes they're private. There's all sorts of stuff. Sometimes there's inequities, you know, light up the rich people's streets nicely. And the poor people streets. Well, we don't have to worry too much about them though. They've been complaining about broken street lights for a month.

Gary [00:47:54]:
They'll be fine for another couple months. I don't know. So it's interesting.

Leo [00:47:59]:
Yeah. I agree with what you said to begin with. There's pros and there's cons. It'll be really interesting to see how it all shakes out.

Gary [00:48:05]:
Yeah, yeah, it will be. It's the kind of technology it's like, huh, okay, I'm glad I don't need to make these calls. And I'm not sure where this will, like how this will work out in terms of whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing or we'll even do it, you know?

Leo [00:48:24]:
Yep, yep. My biggest concern about all the satellites right now is that at some point we're going to reach critical mass.

Gary [00:48:31]:
Yes.

Leo [00:48:31]:
And something will happen. I don't know if it's a meteorite or a rogue satellite or whatever. There's a concern that it'll set off a chain reaction chamber action which is.

Gary [00:48:41]:
Yeah, I mean it's big one hand. It's a big area.

Leo [00:48:46]:
I'll say on one hand, space is really, really big. Bigger than most people can conceive of.

Gary [00:48:50]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:48:51]:
But I'm thinking more like at the, I forget exactly what the altitude of, say the Starlink satellites is, but you've got a lot of satellites at roughly the same altitude and those are the ones that have the biggest chance of potentially bumping into one another. Or, or if one of them, say, for lack of a better term, explodes, that all of a sudden you've got thousands of fragments of satellite at that altitude, potentially running into other ones. Hopefully we will never hear of that happening. Yeah. So what's cool? So I, I, we fired up the second season of Silo this week. I think we've mentioned Silo here before. It is a very, very interesting post apocalyptic science. F they took it in a direction that I wasn't expecting.

Leo [00:49:45]:
And it's very, very interesting. I guess technically it's AI related. Are you watching Silo?

Gary [00:49:52]:
I, I've not started the second season. I've read the books.

Leo [00:49:55]:
Oh, okay.

Gary [00:49:56]:
And I, and I watched the first season and enjoyed it very much.

Leo [00:49:59]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:49:59]:
So very technically this the third season.

Leo [00:50:01]:
I thought this was, you might be right. Yeah. This, this could be the third season. I forget. So Anyway, I'm just. We're enjoying it. It's fascinating. Like I said, they took it in a, in a direction I wasn't expecting.

Leo [00:50:12]:
So that's always cool.

Gary [00:50:13]:
I just started a book, but I could already tell I'm going to like it. I'm going on a trip to the Grand Canyon later this year for rafting. And the book that keeps coming up because I've already read Powell's book. You know, Powell was the guy that went down the river. He was the first guy to go down the river. And I've already read that. I read that years ago. So that's the main book.

Gary [00:50:30]:
Everybody says you got to read this as the original story of, you know, the first explorers. So what else do I read? Well, a book called the Emerald Mile kept getting recommended. It's about a boat, that recent one that ran the river faster than any other because it ran a wave basically of a big release from the dam from Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam. But I was like, well, what does this have to do with me? At my normal speed run of the canyon that I will be on. But it turns out that the author just take the time at the beginning and for a long period of time to go into the detailed history of the Grand Canyon in a way that I've never really heard presented before. Going into all sorts of different details, retelling Powell's story, but also what was known about it before and how unknown it was and then how the dams were built and how like the river works before and after the dams. Really fascinating geeky stuff so far. So I'll recommend that book.

Leo [00:51:36]:
That sounds good. Self promotion. I want more people to read my article stop spreading manure. AskLeo.com 9419 and it is exactly what it sounds like. As you know, as we've all experienced, there is so much stuff being shared online that is nowhere close to being accurate or true. And so many people are just are guilty of, you know. Yep, this sounds wonderful. I agree with it.

Leo [00:52:14]:
I'm going to share it with all my friends or post it on social media. And of course it all turns out to be manure. So yes, please stop spreading manure.

Gary [00:52:24]:
Cool. And I'll point people to a recent video I did on the Mac Stickies app which allows you to put little like notes on your screen on your desktop. Really handy app that has been around since before like oh God, it goes back so many years, 20, 30 years. But people, it's funny, people keep forgetting it's there because it seems like it's an old fashioned app. It is an old fashioned app and people, I guess different points assume it doesn't exist anymore. And it very much does and it's really handy. So every I love doing every few years I do a video on stickies because people are always like, either this is cool, I didn't know this was on my Mac, or I knew this was on my Mac, I didn't know it was still on my Mac. I need to get back to using it because it's very handy.

Leo [00:53:12]:
Cool. All righty. Well, that wraps us up here yet again for another week. As always, thank you everyone for listening and we will see you here again real soon. Take care everyone. Bye Bye bye.

Gary [00:53:27]:
The show notes for this week are@tehpodcast.com teh272. If you have a comment or question for us, be sure to leave it on the show notes page. The teh podcast is hosted hosted by Leo Notenboom of AskLeo.com and Gary Rosenzweig of MacMost.com and edited by Connie Delaney. I'm your synthetic announcer, Adam from elevenlabs. Com. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you here real soon.