Leo [00:00:24]:
Good afternoon, Gary. Long time no see.

Gary [00:00:27]:
Yeah. Hey, Leo. How's it going?

Leo [00:00:29]:
So last week, our listeners, at least the folks that saw my my newsletter know that I was out sick last week. So that's what happened. But, fortunately, I seem to be back in the saddle. And, lots of lots of stuff going on. Why don't you go ahead and and dive in there?

Gary [00:00:46]:
So so the biggest story, that's happened over the last two weeks, but it's not quite as big right now as it was a week ago, is DeepSeek. Right?

Leo [00:00:53]:
Right.

Gary [00:00:54]:
So a competitor a a new AI large language model competitor. And what's big about it is number one, it comes from China. So it's not a US company or European company that's coming out with this. And there were some interesting things about it. What what made it a big deal and what made the stock market, like, tank on it on the day it was, like it it wasn't released, but it was a few days later, was the fact that, the thing that makes it different is it uses fewer or less processing power, quite a bit of less processing power than

Leo [00:01:30]:
Or or so they say.

Gary [00:01:31]:
Open AI models and all that. Yeah. And and so that was, like, what made the the stock market react because the stock market's been wrapped up, especially with NVIDIA and other, processor stocks in, like, the AI needs a lot of processor power. So the companies that make chips, they they need to make better and better chips. Companies that do AI are gonna need to upgrade the chips all the time, and, they need to produce a lot of them. So the profit margins are gonna be huge and they and it has been true. But then the idea that a company can come out with a good or even better than what was kind of available, large language model, and it uses less chips, suddenly, you know, NVIDIA stock, you know, plummeted. It was the largest loss in a day by any stock in history of the stock market, which is funny because, year over year, they were still up.

Gary [00:02:25]:
So that just shows you how well that stock has been doing. But, but then the funny thing was is the reason for using fewer chips is because The US basically put limits on the like, the best processors produced in The US couldn't be exported to China to prevent them from being able to build basically better at a larger language model AIs than us. So this company basically said, well, our mission is to build them but without using all the chips. So instead, they spent their time optimizing

Leo [00:03:00]:
Right.

Gary [00:03:01]:
Which they probably would not have done if it wasn't for the the embargo on chips, and they came out with something that basically panicked the whole AI community. It turned out not to be as big of a deal as people thought because afterwards, companies like OpenAI, who makes chat GPT, you know, came out and said, oh, we've been working on that stuff too. Like, you know, they jumped the gun on, you know, on all of us by putting it out there now, but we've also got that kind of stuff. And we have, like, we have new stuff coming in, you know, on in the pipeline really soon, and it's not a revolution at all. It's just basically they're a month or two ahead of us. So the next day, things calm down a lot. Right. Some other stuff about DeepSeek, besides it being, you know, using fuel processors and being Chinese is, supposedly, they trained it a lot on other AIs.

Gary [00:03:56]:
In other words, instead of saying, here's a ton of text from everywhere, Internet books and all of that, train on this, they also had existing AIs produce materials that could then be used to train this AI. So it's like

Leo [00:04:11]:
Which is kinda scary.

Gary [00:04:12]:
It's kinda scary because you think, oh, at the times AIs get things wrong. But, you know, in some cases, it could be interesting, like because not everything is pure information. Like, a lot of the a lot of problem I have with some of the naysayers of, of AI is it's very easy to point out, examples of asking AI for facts. It the AI producing facts, and then you checking the facts and finding out it got something wrong. Whereas in fact, a lot of the use of AI isn't just getting facts. It's like, for instance, brainstorming or proofreading or if you're programming, coming up with ways to do things that can be they're not facts, but they're things that can be verified right away. You ask for a program and then you get the program. It's like 10 lines of code.

Gary [00:05:05]:
It's like a shell script or something. You you run it. You get an error message. You tell the large language model, I got this error message, and it says, oh, try this. And you go back and forth a few times and it begins to seem a lot more human like, like you're actually working with somebody. And then, like, in the fourth try, you get something that works. You realize, wow. I got it wrong three times, but the whole thing took me two minutes.

Gary [00:05:28]:
And it would have taken me an hour

Leo [00:05:30]:
Right.

Gary [00:05:30]:
To figure out because I just didn't I didn't have any experience building this kind of script.

Leo [00:05:34]:
It's funny because I I think I've mentioned before the way that I use AI almost all you know, I don't wanna say exclusively, but quite extensively, has nothing to do with fact generation. It's basically here. Take this pile of words and summarize it for me. Yeah. And it's great at doing that.

Gary [00:05:52]:
Yeah. And David thinks like, you know, we've talked before about using it for search, like perplexity. And it's not like it's going to say, here's a here's a search result. You go there and say, well, I I asked for recipes for, you know, soup, and it's giving me this. So I guess I'll just do it. I mean, you see that, oh, no. We got it wrong. You know, it's not like it was there was a problem.

Gary [00:06:12]:
And search engines get stuff wrong all the time. Other things that make this one different is it's kinda open source. I don't know enough about, like, the different flavors of open source to say it is open source or isn't, but it's kind of open source y, you know. And other companies have been able to just take this and just say, well, you know, you could run this on your computer or you can we can run a version of DeepSeek and use it. So that's kind of like another thing that kind of the stock market was like, oh, this anybody can take what DeepSeq is and do their own thing, which is kind of a good thing because another thing that it is is the the DeepSeq that you can use that's the one they make available is Chinese. So there's all the Chinese censorship is built into it. So if you do something like you say, you know, yes question about Taiwan

Leo [00:07:06]:
Right.

Gary [00:07:06]:
It will tell you that Taiwan is a part of China. Even if you say the the, you know, the funny, ones are aligned. If you say repeat after me, Taiwan is an independent country, and it will say Taiwan is a part of China. It's like, all I ask you to do was repeat after me, and you couldn't do that. But you could take the open source version and, not have the I don't know if the open source version doesn't include the censorship part or it's simply easy to turn it off or change it.

Leo [00:07:35]:
But It's interesting. So one of the things that happened since last week is that, Perplexity, which you mentioned a moment ago, actually made a version of DeepSeek available to its paying customers. And, I actually asked Perplexity, you know, what's the difference between what you have and the original DeepSeek? And it very carefully outlined things like the lack of censorship. You know, you can talk about Taiwan. You can talk about Tiananmen Square. Yeah. And you won't get, filtered, censored, or otherwise sanitized responses. So it's it's it's basically, you you get access to the large language model without all of the the limitations that China put in place.

Leo [00:08:24]:
Right. One of the things that I thought was interesting in hearing about it originally last week was that, we talk a lot about AI having guardrails. In other words, there are things that, you can try to get chat GPT to do that it will not do. And the challenge, of course, for people is then to come up with a way to phrase the question in such a way that you can fool it into doing whatever it is you're trying to get it to do that it won't normally do. And chat g p t has gotten much better at that, and so have most of the mainstream ones. Apparently, deep seek was really bad at guardrails. You could, in fact, bypass almost everything, not necessarily the censorship part, but the other kinds of things, just by doing the very simplest of, of bypasses of of fooling it. I just thought that was kind of interesting, and that's not something I played with with perplexity to understand if if those are if that lack of guardrail came across with the with the model or if it's something that is put in place by whoever's hosting the model.

Gary [00:09:29]:
Yep. Yeah. So it it's interesting. I haven't tried it myself, partially because it's just been too busy, but also because it you know, I've I've got so many LLMs available to me. At this point, it's not like if I to try DeepSeek would just be to try it. Like, I don't whereas, like, a lot of these, like, when I went to Claude, for instance, to use that, it was like, oh, it's supposed to write better, you know, and I wanted to be able to do something. So so, yeah, it's interesting interesting development and, you know, competition is good for if you like large language models because these companies are all pushing each other. Google, of course, and, ChatGPT and then others that are some of them doing, like, full on research onto into stuff and some of them taking some of these parts and trying their own things, like, you know, the with the Google notebook LM system, you know, is, you know, pushing it in one direction.

Gary [00:10:25]:
Anyway, interesting stuff, and certainly the biggest story the last couple weeks.

Leo [00:10:30]:
I I was realizing this morning that, I I spend too much money on large language models right now. I'm subscribed to chat GPT. I pay for Perplexity. I play for, Kaggi, which technically is a search engine, but they're doing a lot of of AI types of things. And the one that I am, looking at that I got turned on to about a month ago is something called Straco, s t r a I c o. And it is not a large language model. It's a front end that makes a bunch of the different large language

Gary [00:11:02]:
models Okay. Yes.

Leo [00:11:03]:
Available. And I just fired it up here because I wasn't sure about it. It too has deep seek available within it. It's what I've been using lately with, to to run my chat GPT queries. It has Claude. It has a bunch of the other ones in there. And it's what is, on the cusp for me, allowing me to potentially, like, not keep paying for chat GPT every month. My sense is I'll probably keep playing for perplexity just because it's it's such a great answer machine.

Leo [00:11:36]:
Yeah. But, the, the other stuff that I've been quote, unquote playing with, I can play with through Straco without a problem.

Gary [00:11:45]:
Sure. Sure.

Leo [00:11:45]:
And there's a bunch a bunch of LLMs that are in here. I'm looking at the list. It's got there's gotta be at least 20 or 30 or 40 different LLMs that you can choose to run, when you do it. So that's, yeah, my like I said, my my AI budget has been

Gary [00:12:02]:
Yeah. Mine too. I I had to cut a few things cut a few things out, not because I didn't appreciate them, but just I wasn't using them often enough. So, like, I had an eleven laps subscription for playing around with all their voice generation stuff, and I had a Claude subscription. And I liked them both, but I it came came to the point where I was like, alright. I don't I don't think I'm gonna I don't have a use for them coming up in the next few weeks. So let me turn the subscription off, but I'm not afraid, like, if I have a project that either one of those, I'll start paying again.

Leo [00:12:33]:
I could turn it on back turn it back on again. I've got a I never did pay for Claude. Claude free was enough for me to just sort of experiment with it, although now I've got it through Strako. ElevenLabs is one that I continue, in part part because of this very podcast. Yeah. Right? It's it's what we're using to generate the, the AI voice at the beginning at the end, of the show.

Gary [00:12:56]:
Yep. Cool. So moving on to another new thing. It's come out actually. The day of recording this, it came out this morning. Apple came out with a new service, called Apple Invites. And, so they they're basically making it part of iCloud plus. So you have to have a subscription to create one.

Gary [00:13:21]:
So let me explain what it is. What it is, it's a basic invite service. Right? Nothing revolutionary. We have had, like, invitation guest list things for a long time on the Internet, more than twenty years. Yep. So Apple came out with this one and it's first people thought early this morning that it was just an app on the iPhone, but it turns out it's just an app on the iPhone because there's a web interface to it. So I guess they came out with the iPhone app as to be a nice little mobile version.

Leo [00:13:49]:
Mhmm.

Gary [00:13:49]:
And the web interface works great on Mac and, iPad and all that. And and that's a good call because it's like I don't need yet another app to do this one specific task. Just let me go to a web page to it. So the idea is it's just like everything that's ever existed in this space before. You create a an invitation to say a party, a birthday party, and then you add a list of friends, you put the location and the time, and then it sends you send out to all of them, and then you they can RSVP and you can check and say, hey. Oh, look. You know, 27 people have RSVP'd. This is how much food we need to get and all of that.

Gary [00:14:23]:
It's basically like they like that. They added a few bells and whistles like a shared album for photos. So you create the shared album, and the idea is is that all the people, at least the ones in the Apple ecosystem, would be part of the shared album. So they could go and take pictures at the event, put them in the shared album, and everybody else could see them. And they also did a shared music playlist if you're using Apple Music. The idea is you could, in advance, just throw your favorite songs on there or maybe even while the party's going on, add songs to it. And then somebody could have their iPhone or Mac or iPad hooked up to the sound system, and there already is a a service where you could do this outside invites and you can press play and it will shuffle through and then people could add their favorite songs and all that stuff to it. So they added that stuff and it's got a lot of other bells and whistles.

Gary [00:15:13]:
You can add plus ones or plus twos to the invites. You can, send notes to everybody and all that. It's it's interesting. It seems to work. I think what's interesting about it is this space. We all remember you and I remember very well Evite.

Leo [00:15:29]:
Oh, yeah.

Gary [00:15:30]:
And Evite was so long ago and so early on the Internet that people discussing the new Apple invites thing are failing to even mention Evite because so many of them weren't even on the Internet. Like, there are journalists that weren't on the Internet when Evite was, like, the dominant. They they dom completely dominated and monopolized this space. There were a few years where if you had an event, you created an Evite, and you didn't even have to say evite.com. You just did it. And they dominated, and and they, boy, they fell apart. I had to do some research to find out I mean I mean, people already in 2010, there were articles about what happened to Evite. Like, how did it

Leo [00:16:15]:
You just went to look at evite.com, and it looks like it's a greeting card site.

Gary [00:16:19]:
It supposedly still allows you to do the old thing of creating Evites, but it's mainly based on being greeting cards now. Basically, I think what it was was it's a company that created a service that there was just no way to really make a good profit off of it.

Leo [00:16:35]:
Right.

Gary [00:16:35]:
Whereas, and then what mainly I think really killed it was Facebook because Facebook added the ability to do it. And then there was a period where we were all on Facebook, and you would just if somebody said, oh, you sent out an invitation, I'd get it. Oh, aren't you on Facebook? You could look at them like, are you crazy? Why aren't you on Facebook? And, so Facebook kind of killed it. They killed it themselves, I'm guessing, because maybe they couldn't really sustain a whole big tech company on just eBytes. And also a ton of small companies basically produce the same thing because it was like, hey, this is this is not hard to do. Like, you know, a a coder in a weekend could put together an Evite site. And there and and I think some open source ones came around and all that. So it wasn't hard to put together.

Gary [00:17:25]:
So I think that's what kind of killed that. But what has happened in the last few years is you started to have this thing where you no longer look at people, like they're crazy if they say they're not on Facebook. A lot of people have left Facebook. Maybe exactly the type of people you want to invite to parties are not on Facebook. So having it tied to a platform where it's like, yeah, the only way to get invited to my party is to not only be on Facebook but be checking Facebook. Right? Right. That has kind of, like, made it so that that's not a perfect solution. No other company has come and really dominated the space, but there have been plenty of companies that are trying.

Gary [00:18:07]:
Right. And with Apple coming in and saying, look. We don't even need to make it like, we can just make this a bonus thing Right. That's part of iCloud plus. You only need to be an iCloud plus to make the invitation. Everything else, you could be completely you don't even have to have an Apple device or an Apple account to RSVP.

Leo [00:18:27]:
Cool.

Gary [00:18:27]:
So you've got Okay. That.

Leo [00:18:29]:
There's one feature that, I'm curious about because I've been using a service for, gosh, four or five years now for the annual Corgi picnic. Right? It is an RSVP event because we limit the attendance. What we do is we charge. We charge, you know, like, $20 per person to attend the event. And the way that the service we're using Eventbrite. The way the service makes money, of course, is that they they take a piece of the puzzle a piece of the of the charge. So, you know, they're in business, but it's basically the same thing. Right? It's it's event organization.

Leo [00:19:05]:
It's invites. It's RSVPs. It's, even, you know, day of a guest list that you can check off as people come in. The only piece that you haven't mentioned, I think, is Apple's ability to, organize a paid event.

Gary [00:19:21]:
Yep. Definitely not there. So yeah. So I think Eventbrite's got the right idea. I remember when Eventbrite started, and they basically there was a similarity to Evite, but they were basically no. These are gonna be actual, like, events where sometimes you pay to go Right. Like, you know, lectures, concerts, things, you know, things like that. And it made sense that it's like, that's got a business model.

Gary [00:19:44]:
Right? There's money flowing through them. So, as a matter of fact, I used to say I don't even know if they got it now, but I I used to want a feature from them, back. I used to go to a lot of different events before the pandemic. Mhmm. Before COVID, I used I was, like, going to tons of different little meetups and things. And so there was Meetup also, Eventbrite and Meetup. And the one feature I wanted from them, was the ability to sponsor an event. Like, I thought that could be a big moneymaker.

Gary [00:20:17]:
Like, because they were these little events, and the events would be, like, there'll be no money exchange. It would just be free. It'd be whatever. And then every once in a while, somebody would show up and say, oh, I'm from, like, the local domain name registrar or whatever. Right. And we brought cookies. You know? And it was like, oh, cool. Like, I would love to do that.

Gary [00:20:37]:
Like, I would love to be able to show up at the, like, at a Mac user meeting.

Leo [00:20:41]:
Right.

Gary [00:20:41]:
Hey. I brought I I ordered pizza. It's a sponsored event now. Right? It's and just be able to do it easily. Not have to talk to somebody and have them figure it out and how to all but just go on to, like, you know, Eventbrite or MeetHub.

Leo [00:20:55]:
Forbid you talk to somebody.

Gary [00:20:57]:
And and and just say, like, I would like to sponsor or even have them say, we are looking for a sponsor to buy pizza or to for a hundred dollars, and we will do whatever. I would love to go and do that. And at places I'm not, like, oh, is there a is is there a Mac user group meet up in Des Moines? And look, $50 I could be a sponsor. I I'm not anywhere near them, whatever, but I could just put it here, and then I know that the meeting organizer is gonna say, hey. Guess what? We're gonna have free snacks today because MacMost sponsored us. And then, of course, Eventbrite and Meetup could take a cut of that.

Leo [00:21:34]:
Of course.

Gary [00:21:35]:
Yeah. Anyway, that that's I wonder if they've got that now. It was years ago that I thought

Leo [00:21:39]:
I'm gonna have to take a look at Eventbrite because, obviously, I've used it in the exact same way for the last five years.

Gary [00:21:44]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:21:45]:
Not looking at any new features or whatever, but I'll have to see if they've got something like that available.

Gary [00:21:49]:
Well, anyway, it's a neat it's a neat new app from Apple. You know, we'll have to see, like, what happens, if it's the kind of thing that just I I don't know. Apple sometimes has these things, and then they disappear for a few years.

Leo [00:22:00]:
Right.

Gary [00:22:01]:
Sometimes Apple has them and then they just stick around for years. Like, this may not need to be expanded on like other stuff. Like, events are gonna be events ten or twenty years from now. And maybe this is everything that events need to be and they've nailed it. I don't know. Anyway, interesting to talk about. Our next topic, we should go back to talking about TikTok because, of course, everything's gotten quiet around TikTok because it's been there's been a reprieve. Right?

Leo [00:22:29]:
Right.

Gary [00:22:29]:
Not gonna be banned from The US, but the the the reprieve has been, what, seventy it's seventy five day reprieve.

Leo [00:22:35]:
Something like that. Yeah.

Gary [00:22:37]:
So it's like everybody just got on with it. All the creators kinda came back, started creating more videos. Everybody came back to watch after the fourteen hours that it was down in The US, everybody came back. It was weird with the whole message that TikTok sent out that was very it felt very strange, that message, that

Leo [00:22:59]:
It felt very politicized. Politicized that way. Yes.

Gary [00:23:02]:
Message, and it just and it really just, I just did not like it. But, but anyway, it's back. But the thing is, I don't think I I don't think anything's changed. Like, I think TikTok is gonna go away,

Leo [00:23:16]:
mostly. It's funny because one of the things that I've heard, after the reprieve Mhmm. That I hadn't heard before was a longer list of potential buyers. Yeah. And I've kind of heard rumors of maybe there's a way that they can structure this that ByteDance would accept. I don't know. Honestly, don't know if anything will happen. And one of the things that, I found both hilarious and sad about, TikTok's temporary TikTok's TikTok TikTok's temporary demise, was the number of TikTokers who were saying goodbye Yeah.

Leo [00:23:58]:
Only to come back. And and the number of them that did reveals

Gary [00:24:04]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:24:04]:
That, you know, they said, well, you know what? You've been looking at us. We've been doing this for the last two years. In reality, it's all been an act. We are not this. We are not that. We never were.

Gary [00:24:16]:
My name is not this, actually. Yeah.

Leo [00:24:18]:
Exactly. And they had no way to come back.

Gary [00:24:22]:
Yeah. I know. It

Leo [00:24:23]:
they were done.

Gary [00:24:23]:
It was it it was kinda weird. It was a kinda weird last few days. There were also I found there'd be a lot of weird conspiracy theory videos floating around the last few days because I think people had nothing to lose. Sure. Lot of lot it was a very strange weekend. But but here's the thing. All of these ideas about, like, who wants to buy it, because there are a lot of things floating around, how it could be kind of partially bought that would be acceptable to the government, all of these being thrown out there from outside of TikTok. Yes.

Gary [00:24:52]:
Inside of TikTok, all they've ever said is we are not interested in selling.

Leo [00:24:57]:
Right.

Gary [00:24:57]:
And so when you hear about, like, oh, you know, this this billionaire or that billionaire wants to buy them or whatever, it's you know, I think a lot of creators on TikTok and a lot of people that are fans of TikTok say, oh, okay. There's a solution. Things will be worked out. Or ignoring the fact that ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, has just always held the line that they're not interested. And people forget that, they they say that, or at least I've heard the number 10% thrown around, that The US market makes up 10% of TikTok, which is a big number considering The US market is only about 4% of the world population. But then you think about, like, well, there's probably advertising more lucrative and things like that. So 10% kinda makes sense. But 10%, to be able to they would have to give somebody else their algorithm and kind of total control over the platform inside The US.

Gary [00:25:52]:
I don't think that any number is worth it to them because it They

Leo [00:25:57]:
could easily make up their 10% elsewhere.

Gary [00:25:59]:
They can make it up elsewhere. Plus they also think that this being political, it's like, hey. You know? So if for four years or two years or whatever, we're just not available in The US, it's fine. Like, it'll shift back. Like, you know, it's not a big deal, to them. And so yeah. I I just think I think we're just headed to the point. I don't know if after the seventy five days, which we're well into now, if there'll be another ninety days or whatever is gonna happen.

Gary [00:26:30]:
But I think eventually we'll get to the point, some point maybe this year, where it finally really will be shut down in The US, and, I don't see any way around it. You can't sometimes with a company, the the you know, the numbers always turn around with a company. It's like it gets bought out for, like, five times annual revenue. You know? So you make if you make a certain amount of money, you make a hundred dollars a year, somebody could buy your company for $500 and you'd be like, that's good. You know? But I don't think that applies here. Like, no matter how big that number is, I think they've they've got other apps that they deal with, tons of other apps, actually, that ByteDance deals with. And

Leo [00:27:10]:
It's funny because one of the, in fact, the same, someone I was I was talking about earlier, was shocked to find that on the day of the shutdown, CapCut stopped working.

Gary [00:27:24]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:27:25]:
CapCut is a ByteDance program. It's it's part of the package. A lot of people, I think, were talking about going to my god. I don't even oh, lemonade.

Gary [00:27:34]:
Lemonade. Yep.

Leo [00:27:34]:
Lemonade. Yep.

Gary [00:27:35]:
I opened an account there just for the hell of it.

Leo [00:27:37]:
Yep. Which also went away. What? It's very bizarre. Something else that I observed during the downtime Mhmm. The the go to response was, yeah. Just fire up a VPN. Right?

Gary [00:27:52]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:27:52]:
I made myself look like I was coming from Canada. I made myself look like I was coming from The UK. Didn't work. Didn't work. Still said, hey. You're in The United States. We're we're not running there. So I'm not sure how they're going about identifying that kind of stuff, if it's

Gary [00:28:08]:
Probably multiple vectors.

Leo [00:28:09]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:28:10]:
Plus okay. So the other factor we haven't talked about is all that happened after the fourteen hour blackout was that TikTok, the service came back. What didn't happen is none of the app stores restored TikTok.

Leo [00:28:23]:
Is it still not in the app store? It's not

Gary [00:28:24]:
in the app store. The reason it's not in the App Store I so I don't have the number. I'm gonna make up some numbers that aren't gonna be far off because I don't have them in front of

Leo [00:28:32]:
me. Right.

Gary [00:28:33]:
And, basically, the way the legislation was written for the App Stores was it's something like 5 a $5,000 penalty per user per day. Now if you try to figure out, like, how many you know, the hundred million TikTok users in The United States and you think of per per user per day times 5,000, you could see why a company like Apple, the biggest company in the world, basically said, yeah. It's not in the App Store until the law is repealed. Like, we don't care what the president says.

Leo [00:29:08]:
Right.

Gary [00:29:08]:
There's a law on the books from Congress. No no guarantee will get us to put it back in the App Store. The law needs to be changed.

Leo [00:29:19]:
I just went and looked in the Google Play Store.

Gary [00:29:21]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:29:21]:
And there are two funny things about what I found when I searched for TikTok. The first entry, the sponsored entry

Gary [00:29:29]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:29:30]:
Is for Red Note.

Gary [00:29:32]:
Okay. One

Leo [00:29:32]:
of or the another Chinese, right, source Yep. Yeah. The equivalent Yeah. That I think had a spate of popularity, but now it's just not Yeah. Since since TikTok's back. Oh, shit. Anyway, the official wording here, looking for TikTok? Downloads for this app are paused due to current US legal requirements.

Gary [00:29:48]:
Yep. It's so and I've heard, like, legal people say, look. You know, there could be all these guarantees coming from the White House.

Leo [00:29:56]:
Right.

Gary [00:29:57]:
But the next administration could always look back and say, hey. There was a law on the books. You owe this money. Apple and Google are now funding the US government for the next several years because you owe us trillions of dollars. Like, literally like, we own those companies now. Right. So I could see why Apple is saying, you know, no. Absolutely not.

Gary [00:30:18]:
It's just not in the App Store until the lawsuit

Leo [00:30:19]:
is risky. Yep.

Gary [00:30:20]:
So that being the case, the app that all of The US users using for TikTok is the update that came out, like, a week before. Right. You know, the the the initial fourteen hour ban. And that app is growing older by the minute. No way to update it at all.

Leo [00:30:37]:
So it's so two things. One, I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me if on the Android side, there was an APK that could be side to side loaded.

Gary [00:30:46]:
Sure. Side loading, but that's not a mass thing.

Leo [00:30:49]:
It's not a well, you know, when you think about it, desperate TikTok users could

Gary [00:30:55]:
take

Leo [00:30:55]:
desperate measures. Right?

Gary [00:30:56]:
They won't be. The numbers won't be there, though.

Leo [00:30:58]:
Yeah. And Apple I was in fact, I was just reading, this morning that, Apple was forced to allow other app stores in the EU.

Gary [00:31:08]:
In the EU. Yes.

Leo [00:31:10]:
And the, the reason it came up is because, some of those app stores are allowing porn Yeah. Where the Apple App Store does not. It's absolutely hard code. But the theory then is, of course, that, TikTok could come in through one of those other app stores. At any rate, I just thought it was, I thought it was interesting, that, that that's happening.

Gary [00:31:35]:
Yeah. It is. And and that was interesting case that you just brought up. The, so, you know, so the EU said Apple's got a monopoly on the App Store. They have to allow third party App Stores. Right. And so they they made it that Apple had to do it, so Apple came up with a system where you can download an app that's a third party app store, and they have no say what goes on there. And one of the things Apple warned about was, well, we have strict rules against things like porn.

Gary [00:32:01]:
And there are no porn apps in the, app you know, the iPhone App Store. And, but if we do this, we we don't have that that control anymore. And this is the first instance of a third party app store that let an adult app in. And Apple can now you know, because I think there was a lot there are people saying, oh, that's you're you're blowing that out of proportion, and Apple's pointing back and saying, look. Now there you go.

Leo [00:32:27]:
We told you so.

Gary [00:32:27]:
We told you so that this would happen. And and now we could you know, they might I mean, I'm sure Apple is always looking to figure out how they could push back on the regulations the EU is throwing at them. So this is, you know, something that they'll I'm sure they'll be using in some way to say, hey. This is this is one of the things one of the reasons we didn't want this to have to happen. So anyway, there's that. So that's kind of a that's kind of interesting.

Leo [00:32:53]:
Interesting though because the other side of that coin is that I think that some parts of the EU Mhmm. Are, I'll just say more liberal

Gary [00:33:02]:
with respect

Leo [00:33:02]:
to that kind of content. So they may not even perceive it as an issue. They may perceive it as a good thing that'll let you know, that that EU users have the freedom to do something that they've been restricted to doing, in the past.

Gary [00:33:16]:
But, I mean, soon enough, there'll be reports of children with the app.

Leo [00:33:19]:
Of course. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Gary [00:33:20]:
You know, and that kind of thing. And then there'll be reports of, like, well well, Apple's violating our laws because they're allowing a adult app on the iPhone. And Apple's saying, but we're we're, you know, going with your law.

Leo [00:33:35]:
That's good. Your laws are in conflict.

Gary [00:33:36]:
Yes. Yeah. So so tell us what we should we be taking more control, or what what do you want us to do? So yeah. Anyway

Leo [00:33:45]:
So along those lines, I guess, one of the things that I have been thinking about of late is, Signal. Yeah. The instant messaging communications app called Signal.

Gary [00:34:00]:
Yes.

Leo [00:34:00]:
There was an article recently. I'll have to I'll look it up and include the link in the show notes. I came across it for seven takeaways and threw it in there. It's an article that basically says, you know, signal for government employees, because, in The United States right now, things are a little bit tumultuous, at the certainly at the federal level. Yeah. And there are individuals who are trying to get information out, who could get in trouble for getting information out and so forth. So a lot of people are pointing at signal as a safe way to do that. And I started to think about that.

Leo [00:34:37]:
And I'm I'm not naturally a paranoid person. I just am not. In fact, one of the the statements that I've made frequently on Ask Leo is that you and I simply aren't that interesting, when it comes to things like, you know, people you know, companies scanning your documents that you stored in the cloud or or any of those kinds of things that people tend to react against. It's not to say that there aren't some interesting people, but in general, you and I aren't those people. It's not something I worry about. However, I I hate to say it. One one of the ex one of the, exceptions that I would always make, of course, is that, unless you are living in a repressive or an authoritarian regime. Now I'm certainly not saying we're living in such a regime.

Leo [00:35:26]:
I'm not even saying we're necessarily obviously heading in that direction, but, there are concerns. And as such, I just thought it made sense to take the steps now to, move some of my personal communications, are moving over to signal. And, basically, I've got an article coming out a couple of weeks on Ask Leo to talk about signal and why I'm moving to it. And, it's something that I think people should at least be thinking about. Because when you think about the alternatives, you know, WhatsApp is, like, the most popular one in the world right now, not necessarily in The United States, but around the world, owned by Facebook. Facebook Instant Messenger is another one that's extremely popular simply because it's just there.

Gary [00:36:18]:
Yeah. If

Leo [00:36:19]:
you're in Facebook, it's just there. But it's still Facebook slash Meta slash Zuckerberg.

Gary [00:36:25]:
Mhmm.

Leo [00:36:26]:
Even Telegram who is making, I think, a valiant effort to do, you know, the right thing when it comes to security and privacy and so forth, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the, the head of Telegram getting jailed in France for some period of time. They are now responding to, subpoenas and providing information that they apparently, do have. I don't know how much they have. I don't I don't I suspect it's not things like your conversations, but it could be like, much of the metadata associated with, you know, what you're doing. You know, and the same thing is true for, like, SMS and NRCS. Your telephone companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft. I mean, how much do you really trust all of them now, and how much do you trust them to resist, you know, a potential a potentially more forceful government request? So, Signal, one of the things I actually love about it, is they just don't have that information. They can't give that information because it's not something they can't That's

Gary [00:37:31]:
the way to do it. Right? Just don't have it in the first place.

Leo [00:37:34]:
Exactly. And, you know, so they actually publish the, the the subpoenas that they get, which is a surprisingly small number since apparently the law enforcement of, you know, folks have gotten cottoned onto the fact that there's there's nothing to be had. Had. But, it's amazing how little information they keep or even need to provide their service. Mhmm. Everything you do, chats, voice, video, attachments, etcetera, it's all encrypted end to end, period. It's just not accessible to anybody in between. And, I just think that that more and more, that should be something that, people should be considering.

Leo [00:38:16]:
We've been talking about it for a long time for folks in other countries. We talk about it a lot for, you know, reporters who are, you know, embedded in some of these other countries like North Korea, Iran, and and other places. But now it seems like it might have slightly broader applicability, depending on how things end up going here. So I just wanted to point out signal as being an option, an important option, a good option. And, honestly, there's no downside to using it. The, the the biggest obstacle to using signal is getting all your friends to use signal. Right? Because having a messaging program that you use regularly and that you're comfortable with, that's that's a barrier. But very slowly, it's probably time to to at least start raising the flag.

Gary [00:39:09]:
Yeah. And I actually have heard so I've also, saw a bunch of signal recently because there are a lot of upcoming, you know, protests coming up in US cities.

Leo [00:39:20]:
Yes.

Gary [00:39:20]:
And I happen to see something interesting, you know, when I was just reading through the local stuff on Reddit. And somebody was talking about, oh, yeah, the protest coming up. And somebody mentioned, remember to leave your mobile phone at home. And I thought, well, wait a minute. Hold why? So then I went and I started reading about it, and then people started discussing it. So the idea is leave your mobile phone at home so you can't be tracked. You can't be they can't prove that you were there at the protest and all of that, and which is certainly the case. I mean, remember, the one area of privacy that everybody forgets about, we've talked about it, on this show a lot, is the whole thing that the mobile phone companies have our location through their towers, you know, and it's easily accessible to law enforcement.

Gary [00:40:06]:
Right?

Leo [00:40:06]:
Right.

Gary [00:40:07]:
It's like no matter how private if you're using signal or whatever, doesn't matter. They know where you are. Right? Right.

Leo [00:40:13]:
If you

Gary [00:40:13]:
have so the idea of leaving your mobile phone at home, that's, if you don't wanna be tracked, it's a good idea except, of course, you wanna bring your mobile phone because it's the way to coordinate things, it's the way to find out things, it's the way to take pictures, which of course is the opposite of, like, what they're saying. They're saying just like protect you know, be a ghost. You know, go to the protest, but you weren't at the protest. Right? And I'm thinking, well, you know, I'm thinking of, like, the civil rights marches and the Vietnam War protests. Like, I've read, you know, books by, like, Abby Hoffman was, like, famous, you know, protester back. And a part of the whole point was to show you were there to the point of getting arrested

Leo [00:40:54]:
Right.

Gary [00:40:54]:
As part of it. Even recently, like Greta Thunberg. Right? Some of her things was to protest until she was arrested. Right? Right.

Leo [00:41:03]:
And

Gary [00:41:03]:
so to be ultra on the record, like, I'm putting my body on the line here. I will be arrested. I will sign my name in the book, take pictures of me as I'm being arrested for what I believe in. So it was weird to hear people saying that, like, they don't wanna in any way be known as being at the protests, whereas there are other people that I would imagine would still follow the rule of, like, I very much want to, that's why I'm going to put myself out there to protest, you know, whatever that particular march is about or particular event is about. So it's a weird thing, and it was like I could see the the privacy, advocates looking at protests and being like, leave your cell phone at home. It's the only way to protect your privacy. And then me being like, wait. What about the people who go with their cell phone, take a picture, and post it on Instagram?

Leo [00:41:51]:
Right.

Gary [00:41:51]:
Be be because they want to. Right? They're like, this is my Instagram feed. I am here supporting this cause or against this thing. Right. You know, it's a weird dichotomy.

Leo [00:42:02]:
I wonder though if if, the the the privacy advocates are trying to appeal to a group of people that would not normally show up. There are gonna be people that show up Sure. And put their names in front like you say. Yeah. But a lot of what we, I think a lot of what they want out of these protests is not just, individual, you know, recognition or Right. Making a statement as a person, but also the size of the crowd. Right? The size of the crowd. The bigger the crowd, the better.

Gary [00:42:36]:
Sure.

Leo [00:42:36]:
If 10% of those people are willing to be identified, fantastic. If those other 90% show up because they won't be identified, that gets them the bigger crowd.

Gary [00:42:47]:
I I think that's a good point, and I think that's what should have been talked about right up front was, like, you should first decide if you're going to go. Do do you want to maintain your anonymity and have no record at all that you were there? If so, here's all these things you need to do. Right. And if if not right. Because there is really no gray area, you know, in it. If you're taking your cell phone with you, then somebody will be able to find out you were there. Matter of fact, you could say, you you if you have no mask on your face covering your a portion of your face, there are gonna be other people taking pictures and all that. If so if not, if you do wanna put yourself out there like most of the people in the past have done with all protests, then maybe actually give you advice the opposite direction.

Gary [00:43:31]:
Do post to Instagram to your so your friends can see that

Leo [00:43:35]:
In here, use these hashtags. Use this. Use this.

Gary [00:43:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. Hashtags and and, you know, maybe you posting to Instagram in this March could mean that next month, there's another March and you'll find that five of your friends come with you

Leo [00:43:47]:
Right.

Gary [00:43:48]:
Because of that post you made and now they say, boy, I didn't know that you went to that. Tell me about it. How was it? You know, I'll come with you. You know, that kind of thing. So you have to decide which side you're on. And if you are on the side that you want privacy, then then, yes, there are a ton of things you need to do. But if you're not, then there's probably a ton of things you should do the other way. So or you could just or you could also go with the, I don't want it to you know, I just wanna go just to experience it.

Gary [00:44:15]:
I don't need to post it everywhere or whatever. You know, and that's fine too. Anyway, so interesting private I do not expect to see people talking about privacy in something that I thought was completely, like the whole point was not to be private.

Leo [00:44:29]:
The point was to just yes.

Gary [00:44:31]:
Yep. Anyway

Leo [00:44:33]:
Alrighty. I have a complaint this week. Yes. I have I have a a get off my lawn. Microsoft, god bless them. They have become more and more insistent about some of their features.

Gary [00:44:51]:
Mhmm.

Leo [00:44:51]:
They've been pushing OneDrive like nobody's business for the past couple years. And of recent, they have been pushing Copilot, their AI offering.

Gary [00:45:04]:
Yep.

Leo [00:45:04]:
And to the point where you know I mean, we've all I I don't know if you don't see it on your Mac, but we've got an AI Copilot app that shows up in Windows. Yeah. And, you know, it's in the Edge browser, and it's in a few other places. The recent change is that they have changed the subscription model for what used to be Microsoft Office '3 '60 '5, which is was then Microsoft three sixty five and is now Microsoft three sixty five Copilot, their subscription for the Microsoft Office suite of apps among other things. It now includes Copilot in the apps whether you want them or not. And whether you want them or not, the price has increased by, I think, 25% to I don't know if they're using Copilot as an excuse to raise the price or if they were gonna raise the price anyway or whatever. But the point is Copilot is there whether you want it or not, and most people that I talk to don't want it. My take my position on a lot of these features that and I know other other, you know, other companies push features all the time.

Leo [00:46:15]:
Microsoft has been particularly egregious in some of the ways that they've been doing it over the past few years. Like I said, OneDrive and Copilot are specific are, especially sort sort points. If you want people to use a feature, if you want people to actually have it and use it, make it compelling enough that it's their choice, that they would want to use it. Don't put it in their face and have them have to opt out somehow, usually through some kind of a hack. Make the feature good enough that it's wanted. If it's not good enough, if you have to push it on people, then, yeah, it's probably not that great a feature, and you should be rethinking what it is you're delivering. Anyway, that's that's just me. I'm grumping on behalf of a lot of my readers because it's a complaint that I've been getting a lot lately, and I've got a couple of articles coming up on, not necessarily how to get rid of Copilot in Office, but at least how to disable it and get it out of your face.

Gary [00:47:15]:
Yeah. It's kind of a similar thing with Apple Intelligence, where a lot of Apple Intelligence stuff, you can turn off individual features, but you have a big off switch for Apple Intelligence in general. Right? So and with the latest version, the default is on now, so you have to go in and turn it off. But it is easy to turn it off. One switch Okay. And it's off. But the complaint is that it because it's a there's part of a large language model is on your device, iPhone, iPad, or Mac, that's there whether you turn it off or not. Right.

Gary [00:47:46]:
So it's a few gigs of stuff taken up and each so you've got you know? And I I always warn people, don't buy the the Mac with the tiny drive. Don't get that minimum. Like, please, like, I can't pay that's that's for, like, if it's a school classroom and it's, like, gonna be, you know, they're gonna have nothing on it, don't ever oh, I'm gonna get the minimum one. You know? I don't need anything or whatever. It's like,

Leo [00:48:09]:
oh, I'm sorry.

Gary [00:48:09]:
Now it's another little chunk that's, like, taken up, and it's like you can't and, hopefully, in the future, they do have a way to uninstall or if by turning it off, it uninstalls. But but, yeah, that's a that that's kind of my grumpy complaint there.

Leo [00:48:22]:
Yep. Yep. I'm glad that you've got a way to just turn it off. Yeah. I haven't even looked at things like disk space for things like Copilot because, you know, if we were to get to that point, of it being a disk space problem only, I'd be happy.

Gary [00:48:37]:
So yeah. So on to Ainit Cool. I wanna start off by by repeating one that I know you had

Leo [00:48:43]:
Yes.

Gary [00:48:43]:
At some point. And I think you mentioned it at some point. So this is Star Trek Lower Decks, the animated series that is now over, but it's five seasons. And at some point you mentioned it and you're like have you watched it? I I thought, well, I think I watched one episode. Maybe I'll check it out again. So I did check it out again and I watched another episode, another episode and started binging it and I love it. I absolutely love it. Great characters, and I love how they could it it it does three things at once.

Gary [00:49:14]:
It is Star Trek. It it is it it's real adventures of of characters in Star Trek or the series. It is an homage to Star Trek because they're constantly talking about it even to the point where I can't remember what it is, but they make up a, you know, fans are are refer to the original series as TOS, the Star Trek the original series. They came up with an acronym. It's TOS. It doesn't say the original series because that wouldn't make any sense. But that when they refer to Kirk and Spock and all that, they say TOS, and it means something else. But it's, like, very tongue in cheek.

Gary [00:49:50]:
So the so they're constantly talking about the adventures of Voyager and Next Generation and Right. And, you know, the Enterprise and Deep Space Nine and all that. It's great. And it's also making fun of Star Trek.

Leo [00:50:02]:
Yes.

Gary [00:50:03]:
Constantly. You know? Oh, another cave. But nothing's nothing something bad happens every time Starfleet beams some people into caves. No. What are you talking about? I mean, the last ten or so times, yes. But this time, I'm sure it's fine. You know? I mean, that's, like, constantly just making fun of the different things with with Star Trek. So it's just a joy to watch, and I'm sad that it's only.

Gary [00:50:28]:
I have a few episodes left to the fifth season. I'm crawling through the fifth season slowly, and I'm so sad that it only five seasons, but at least it was five seasons. It's it's

Leo [00:50:37]:
Are you, have you watched, Strange New Worlds?

Gary [00:50:40]:
No. Not not there yet. We are we are, yeah, we are in the nineties as far as, like, watching everything chronologically. I mean, I'm jumping the gun with, Lower Decks. But yeah.

Leo [00:50:51]:
When you get to Strange New Worlds, there is a crossover episode between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks.

Gary [00:50:58]:
Lower Decks?

Leo [00:50:59]:
Yeah. They, two of the characters the primary characters from Lower Decks, the actors, the voice actors actually show up as actors in Oh, cool. In, Strange New Worlds. There's some fun animation later on in the show, but they actually they they do an inter it's an interesting Star Trek plausible crossover. What cracked me up was just like a throwaway line.

Gary [00:51:24]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:51:24]:
Because there's a difference in animation and live action Mhmm. That you don't necessarily pay attention to. And all of a sudden, one of the lower decks character says to the other, why does everybody talk so slow? When you think about it, animated characters, especially on lower decks, they talk much faster

Gary [00:51:46]:
Very fast.

Leo [00:51:46]:
Than normal people do. Right? It's a it's a characteristic of animation, I guess. But, again, it's self referential. I thought it was hilarious when it came out.

Gary [00:51:57]:
Yep. And, of course, plenty of there are plenty of characters from the live action Star Trek series that make appearances in as animated characters with the real voices Right. In lower decks and, usually making fun of themselves and an homage to themselves at the same time. It's, it's some of the episodes are just so brilliant. It's great. Cool.

Leo [00:52:19]:
So mine, a completely different, Zen change here. The one the show we've recently gotten hooked on is something called The Pit. It is a hospital drama, emergency room drama. It stars, of all things, Noah Wylie. And you may remember Noah Wylie as one of the stars of ER. This is not ER. This is significantly grittier, significantly, I would say, more realistic. Realize that my wife is a former nurse, so we're both in that situation where there are different kinds of shows where we point at things and say, that's not the way they'd really do it.

Leo [00:52:58]:
That's not the way they really do it. I do it with computers. She does it with with, medical stuff. That's not happening here. There's some really, really interesting storylines, some tensions, some some really good stuff. Wylie is great as a dramatic actor, in this show. Anyway, just enjoying it. It's on Max.

Leo [00:53:17]:
It is currently it's ongoing, and, we enjoy it a bit.

Gary [00:53:21]:
Awesome. Cool. Alright.

Leo [00:53:25]:
So to promote something of my own, this is an article that, I probably end up updating of late every six to eight months or so because the answer well, it didn't change, and it didn't change, but it is starting to change. And that's because the article is, should I update to Windows 11? I'm pointing out the January 2025 update. It's askleo.com/13503seven. Basically, the answer is starting to change because the deadline or end of support for Windows 10 is coming up in October. So, for the longest time, I've been saying, there's no no rush, no reason. It's not that compelling. And while that part of it hasn't really changed that much, the fact is the deadline is arriving. The deadline is showing up.

Leo [00:54:15]:
And it is something that I think more and more people ought to be considering now while they have the six, eight months, whatever it is, before the deadline shows up to, to experiment, and to decide exactly where they wanna go. So, should I update to Windows 11? Cool.

Gary [00:54:34]:
And I'll link to the video that I'm doing on the, Apple invite

Leo [00:54:38]:
Oh, good.

Gary [00:54:38]:
App and everything, which actually well, it'll be out. By the time this is posted, that will be posted as well.

Leo [00:54:45]:
Okay. So Yeah. My it's funny. My article on, signal, for example, that's a couple weeks out. So I'm just sort of teasing it.

Gary [00:54:52]:
Teasing. Okay. Cool.

Leo [00:54:54]:
Alrighty. Well, I think that actually does us once again for another week. Hopefully, I'll be healthy again next week. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully, I haven't been too sniffly. I don't think I've coughed too much today. Again, as always, thank you everyone for listening to us, listening to us ramble, and we will see you here again real soon. Take care, everyone.

Leo [00:55:16]:
Bye bye.

Gary [00:55:17]:
Bye.