Leo [00:00:28]:
Hey Gary, how's today in Denver?

Gary [00:00:32]:
Oh, it's fine. How are things in the Pacific Northwest?

Leo [00:00:35]:
We are just getting over being very cold and we're getting ready to transition to being very wet once again our, our more normal state of affairs. So I, of course we need to talk about AI. We always need to talk about AI. It's the discussion now, it's the, it's the topic that won't die. I have been playing with an open source tool called Jan and please forgive me if I refer to it as Yan, sounding as if it were spelled with a Y. And that's because Jan is actually a very common Dutch name but you pronounce it Yan. Anyway, Jan AI. And it is a AI tool, large language model that you install and run on your PC.

Leo [00:01:33]:
It's completely independent, doesn't require the Internet unless it's doing some searching, I suppose. And I've just, I've been having some fun with it, especially with I mentioned last week that I have this new desktop PC with the high end gpu which what that means is of course that things like LLMs, they work better, right? They've got more resources to play with. So I'm actually loading some of the larger LLMs into jam and just sort of having some fun with it. It's funny because right now there are so many AI available. I mean, we tend to talk about the top four, I suppose, Chat, GPT, Co Pilot, Claude, Gemini, and I use them all at different times. I've got shortcuts to all four of them and there's probably others that we haven't talked about. And you know, some are free, some are not, some are in your face like Co Pilot, some are not, but they're all offered by large corporations. And one of the things that Jan tries to give you of course, is the ultimate in privacy.

Leo [00:02:55]:
It's running on your PC. You're downloading a large language model but nothing that you're typing in is getting sent anywhere for anybody to look at or refine their large language models or whatever. It does remind me of another one that I use from time to time. I think I've told you before that I'm. I don't want to say all in, but I'm quite in on the Proton ecosystem. My personal email addresses, for example, are all being run through Proton. I use Proton Drive for a few things. I've been disappointed by their Word and Excel equivalents, but they're playing in that pool too.

Leo [00:03:36]:
They introduced a, an LLM, a, a Chat GPT equivalent It's called Lumo. It has a very nice little kitten for an icon. But its big thing is that since it is part of the Proton ecosystem, again, while things might get uploaded, it's never uploaded in an unencrypted form. In other words, what you see on your machine is on your machine, but before it goes anywhere, it gets encrypted with your personal private key and even the Proton people can't get at it, right? So there's privacy there. It's been an interesting one to play with as well, but I don't know. The biggest problem I have with with using Jan is there's a website called Hugging Face, which, again, I don't understand the name where that came from, but that's where you can find all sorts of different large language models that you can, most of which you can install and run in jam. The hardest part is finding one. The hardest part is figuring out which one you want to use for the.

Leo [00:04:50]:
For the task you have at hand. And while it has been a lot of fun to play with and like I said on this new machine, see it operate fast, I still find myself going back to Chat GPT when I'm doing something for Ask Leo. And what I don't know is if it's just the different large language model just fits my needs better, or because I've been using Chat GPT for, gosh, probably a couple years now, it's learned all about me. In other words, it's tailoring its response in style, in content, to basically be based off what I've been getting from it for the past couple of years. But anyway, to be clear, you can run Jan on pretty much any PC. I suspect that the Mac version will run a lot better because you've got, you know, AI hardware. Oh yeah, right. Which I'm sure it'll take use of or make use of, just like it's making use of the, the GPU on my machine.

Leo [00:06:06]:
But you can put it on any machine. The only real difference is how quickly it'll run. It'll do all the things, but anyway, I just thought it was fun to, to look at and to play with and to see where things are going. It's a great way to play with AI without, without any cost, to be honest. It's all free, it's all downloadable, and it's a great way to dip your toe in it to see what kinds of things it can do without having to pay a monthly subscription or deal with the new ads that you're apparently finding on Chatgpt Yeah, I'll have to.

Gary [00:06:36]:
Play around with that. I use ChatGPT's their app, which actually is like one of the things I like most about it that's kept me from going to other places like Claude or Gemini is the app. It's not doing anything brilliant, but it's just very well designed just to get out of the way. But also have here my past conversations. Easy to search for stuff. Just the other day, boy, I was convinced that I had found an article on some topic a while ago and I needed to remember that I was looking all over to find that article again. Then it occurred to me, I think this was a chatgpt conversation. Wait a minute.

Gary [00:07:16]:
And I searched and it was. It wasn't an article at all. But it was nice that it keeps that, you know, that history there local to me in the app.

Leo [00:07:25]:
That does seem to be a feature of most of the ChatGPT. I know Gemini does that. Jan does that even on my local machine. Right. I mean it's just on this machine, but it's got that list of conversations that I've had with it over time.

Gary [00:07:39]:
Yeah. It's just the niceness of how the app works because Gemini's got that. But it's just like it feels like there's a little bit of pain there just getting to it. And even, I mean there's no app for me, at least on the Mac. I don't know if there is on the PC. You have to do it through the web browser, which makes kind of sense seeing that in Google.

Leo [00:07:56]:
The Chat GPT app is almost every app that I've seen for these guys is really just a webpage wrapped in a wrapper.

Gary [00:08:06]:
Yeah, it's not the, it's not the. I mean it, it. I don't think there's anything super unique about what it does, but it's just really nice how it feels like a real app. Like it doesn't feel the same as use. I've had to go a few times and just put. I'll just go to the Chat GPT webpage, do this and like ew, I don't like this, the experience. And it's the same feeling I get when I go to Gemini because it's like a web based experience. And then the app, I just feel so.

Gary [00:08:33]:
Oh, there's some keyboard shortcuts going on here. The sidebar is super reactive and it's super fast to get around and then I know where all my settings are and it feels really good. But I mean, Jan, looking at Jan, it looks like it's kind of similar but then allowing you to explore using different models, not just chatgpt. So I'm going to have to look into that, of course. I was just reading about one that I have not tried but it used to be called the claudebot but they just changed the name to like the Mult Bot I think or something like that. Yeah, Multbot. So Claudbot Clawdbot was Claude, but that was like their mascot's name and then it's open source project for an app and they used the name and now they had to change the name because they got upset over that. But it's the kind of thing where it's an app or maybe it's not an app.

Gary [00:09:31]:
It might be web based, that's probably an app. But you can give it things like here's my Gmail account and then it could do things like send email, look at your email and do stuff. So yeah, it's a step beyond what we're talking about. And that's the point of it. And that's also the point why people like you or me like, oh, hold on, don't hit the install button on that. It does give too much power right now to things. But it's like you recognize it as that first step. It's like, okay, people can do this.

Gary [00:10:07]:
They can say, okay, you have my email account and a few other kinds of accounts as well and you can get access to stuff that I'm doing, like calendar and all of that and actually take actions.

Leo [00:10:23]:
It's. It's interesting that the term I keep hearing thrown around is this concept of an agent. Right, Having. Yeah, agent, AI agent as an agent on your behalf doing multiple, you know, different things like that. And honestly, I mean, I don't get me wrong, I love AI. I love playing with AI. But I've seen enough to know that there is no way I'm going to turn it loose and have it start taking actions on my behalf. Be it on in email or I think I've heard it like booking vacations for example.

Leo [00:10:57]:
Right. So you know, apparently there's a scenario where you can say, yeah, you know, I want to go to so and so this summer, you know, go find me a hotel with these characteristics and I want to book around these dates and all of a sudden you've got reservations.

Gary [00:11:12]:
Yeah, I mean, I think obviously there's steps in between. I could definitely see a big step in between is like it will not send the mail, but it's like just here it Is here's the email, draft it. Should I send this, that kind of thing, should I make this reservation? Here's a summary. This place, this amount, this whatever, should I do this? And then just to get you used to it and getting a bigger level of trust, but also maybe even a step after that where like for reservations I already see now it used to be you made an airline reservation and 30 seconds later you're like, oh no, wrong month. And now you're like, oh this is going to cost a lot. But now pretty much every place you book that I see, it's always saying 24 hour free cancellation. So you could be like, okay, I think everything looks okay, I'll book, I'll take a coffee break and when I come back I just will, I will get all the emails, I will double check and if there's a problem I can cancel. Same thing with AI stuff.

Gary [00:12:13]:
Like I could see having AI say okay, I booked you all of this but you've got, you know, 24 hours to look this over to confirm and maybe even hitting you back like 22 hours later. Oh by the way, in two hours it'll be too late to cancel this. Did you get a chance? You know, so there's a lot of steps. I mean it's all, I think all this stuff is coming, but just like with cars, how we have backup cameras and then automatic parking and then the big and everything just slowly you get cruise control. All of that solely leads you into self driving cars. This AI stuff will have all these training wheel things that we do and eventually we get there.

Leo [00:12:57]:
The scary part is that I suppose it's true for any emergent technology, but there are people that are just going to be too trusting too soon.

Gary [00:13:06]:
Oh yeah, and it'll be fun stories coming out of that, like what they, you know, like I'm sure it'll be the first story of somebody booking something through AI never checking all the way up to the point that they're actually on the plane, right? And then they'll be like, I thought I was flying to Australia, right. And I'm flying to Austria, you know that old thing.

Leo [00:13:28]:
So it's funny, there's a classic classic local equivalent to that. You know, obviously I'm in the Seattle area. Seattle sits roughly halfway between two different Vancouvers. Oh right, yes, there's Vancouver, Canada and Vancouver, Washington at the very south. And yes, that's a, it's, it's not uncommon for people leaving the airport to turn the wrong way and then not realize it for many, many Hours. So I could see the AI equivalent of that saying, well, no, I'm. I meant that other Vancouver.

Gary [00:14:05]:
Oh, sure. Oh, for like the first year I lived in Colorado, people would ask me what college I went to and I would say, UNC for University of North Carolina. And people say, oh, cool, I went there too. And I was like, wow, a lot of people went to University of North Carolina. Then I live in Colorado before I realized that there's University of Northern Colorado here.

Leo [00:14:27]:
Right.

Gary [00:14:27]:
So, yeah, so, yeah, I mean, for.

Leo [00:14:32]:
For folks that are interested in just sort of playing around with AI and at a really, like, you know, there's no barrier to entry other than a large download. Give it a shot. It's fun to play with.

Gary [00:14:43]:
Yep. Cool. Let's see. So, yeah, I think a big story this week that has just been ongoing, but a milestone was hit this last week is TikTok, the ownership of TikTok. So now officially there is a. A U.S. tikTok. There actually always was a U.S.

Gary [00:15:03]:
tikTok. Right. But it was just owned fully by ByteDance in China.

Leo [00:15:09]:
Right.

Gary [00:15:09]:
But they had a separate corporate structure and home office and all that for the US Version. As a matter of fact, for a while now, they even had a deal where all the Data from the US version of TikTok was stored by Oracle here in the United States.

Leo [00:15:24]:
I was expecting it to be in a US Data center somewhere.

Gary [00:15:26]:
Yeah, yeah. So that was already. And. And that was because there were concerns over, like, where's the data for. For it is in China. And then there's laws in China saying the Chinese government can access it. So TikTok's like, nope, all the data for the US stuff is in the US but then there's like, well. But still technically owned by China.

Gary [00:15:43]:
Right. So there's all this technicality. So the pressure, of course, to break TikTok into two pieces officially, and it's now done. The US TikTok is now 80% owned by several investors or investor groups in the United States. Doesn't change the fact that Oracle still houses the data. Matter of fact, Oracle is one of those big owners there. Then of course, it's like, well, if you use TikTok, what does this mean? Because if you think about it, okay, so all these investors, some of whom you've never heard of, some of whom kind of are related to various tech companies and all that, they have various political affiliations and leanings, number one being Larry Ellison and the Ellison family, the owners of Oracle, are the main controllers of Oracle. Right.

Gary [00:16:38]:
Leaning. And yeah, so they owned the data centers for a long time, but now they officially have a big say in TikTok itself as real owners of it. So since TikTok's a place where a lot of political content is uploaded, what does this mean?

Leo [00:16:55]:
Now?

Gary [00:16:55]:
This isn't new because previously it was China, it was a Chinese company. And so you already had that concern. Just your concern now is pointed in a slightly different direction. You'd be concerned about how does Chinese politics influence TikTok and now you're concerned about how does right wing American politics influence TikTok. So just a different influencer on there and I really don't know what to do. I use TikTok a lot less than I used to, but I haven't completely abandoned the platform. I don't post new things there.

Leo [00:17:35]:
Right.

Gary [00:17:35]:
But I do enjoy watching comedians, for instance, and music bands and stuff like that. I don't get too political on TikTok, but, but I still, I, if I'm convinced that there definitely is like a political slant to it, like there's basically it's being used for propaganda that I'll leave.

Leo [00:17:55]:
Right.

Gary [00:17:56]:
Because even if I'm, you know, I'll just, I just watched indie bands and comedians. I will still leave because I don't want to support the platform by being there and watching stuff on it. But I really don't know. I mean, if I really wanted to leave because of it being a propaganda machine, I probably should never have joined in the first place. So, so I, yeah, I, I, it's really hard to, to gather like what it is you should do if you're invested in the Tick Tock ecosystem.

Leo [00:18:26]:
It's funny, I, I've not left Tick Tock. Yeah. But I'm not using it nearly as much as I once did. And that's a decision not based on its content or its ownership or anything. I removed the app from my phone simply because it was too easy to just get lost, to be in there for way too long. And yeah, like you, you know, there's comedians on there. There's certain individuals that I enjoy following because I appreciate what they have to say and a message perhaps that they're trying to promote and not spending as much time on TikTok. I kind of sort of miss seeing some of them.

Gary [00:19:08]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:19:09]:
Which, you know, it kind of interesting my claim. So two things I did hear about the actual transition happening. I read that in the, the Tech news. It was last week, I think, if I'm not mistaken. But it wasn't nearly as big a story, as I was expecting, given, like, last year's, like, oh, my gosh, TikTok is shutting down. I mean, that was like, major headline stuff. And now here's what resulted from that. And it almost went under most people's radar.

Leo [00:19:41]:
My claim is that the actual TikTok users, the folks that are using it and using it heavily, they've got no clue. And if they do have a clue, they don't care. They just want the platform to keep doing what, you know, they're allowed to do on the platform. And they don't really pay attention to who's owning it, which, when you think about it, is in fact, kind of scary. I mean, yes, we all should have been paying attention to it being owned by the Chinese, if that's what we're concerned about. We should be concerned about, you know, we should be paying attention to who owns it now based on the potential for influence. But like I said, the average TikToker, I don't think they know or care.

Gary [00:20:24]:
No. And, yeah, and I'm trying to figure out the, the, the harm personally, to myself or whether I still recommend that people do it as a form of entertainment. Like, if I feel there's propaganda, I mean, I'm definitely keeping an eye out for it. But the type of stuff I watch, I don't. You know, when I hear the term doom scrolling, it's like, well, actually, for me, TikTok has been more joy scrolling, relaxing. It's been constant. Like, if I see something that's not fun or interesting or makes me smile or laugh, it's like, no, you know, I go, I scroll right past it or hit the, you know, hit a button to say, I don't want to see stuff like this anymore. So I end up actually doing it because I kind of enjoy doing it.

Gary [00:21:06]:
Now, I have been exploring alternatives. Of course, the biggest alternative, it's Instagram Reels, which has its own issues, right? You know, being owned by meta Facebook.

Leo [00:21:19]:
And there's another agenda, that whole other thing.

Gary [00:21:23]:
So there's that. The other one is. And there's no escaping any of that. But the third option is YouTube Shorts, which of course is owned by. Is completely owned by Google. So, you know, and Google is, you know, has good and bad as well. I'm completely invested in Google because obviously I post my videos to YouTube and that's an important part of what I do. So I almost kind of feel like, you know, in for a dime, in for a dollar kind of thing.

Gary [00:21:51]:
It's like, if I'm going to Go and be critical of YouTube or Google's ecosystem and get away from it. Yeah, I've got to basically undo most of my life, so might as well if I go in with YouTube Shorts now. When YouTube Shorts initially launched, I was very disappointed in it because the algorithm was obviously horrible. It was almost just seemed like random videos they just showed you and it didn't matter what you liked or didn't like. It just kept showing you random stuff and you didn't feel that kind of harmony between the things you were seeing like you did on TikTok. But now I think that's gotten better. Possibly because the algorithm's gotten better. Who knows? Nobody knows outside of Google.

Gary [00:22:30]:
But also maybe because the amount of content has gotten better. I've also noticed plenty of cross posting. So people that I have seen on TikTok in the past, I see it YouTube shorts probably because you're just using tools to post to both places. So I have actually been enjoying using YouTube shorts and I'm basically on a thing where I'm just trying to use YouTube shorts as much as I can. And when I kind of feel like, oh, I've hit the bottom of the barrel after 15 minutes on YouTube shorts of like, you know, what's new today or whatever, then I go over to TikTok, if I had more time later in the day to the other place.

Leo [00:23:07]:
I spend time these days is Facebook of all things. Mostly because Facebook is to me it's almost a communications platform. I'm using it to stay in contact with lots of individuals, both through what they and I are posting on Facebook. But also Facebook Instant messenger is probably the messaging app that and I and our friends use the most. But what's interesting about it is that Instagram reels are showing up on Facebook. They get inserted into your feed periodically and sure enough, like you noted, a lot of the folks that I've been used to seeing on TikTok are showing up in multiple places, both Instagram reels and YouTube shorts. And yeah, it's, it's kind, I mean like, like I said a little while ago, a year ago when everybody was worried about TikTok just going away, I think a lot of TikTok posters, a lot of creators got plans together for jumping ship to some of these other platforms. Now that that wasn't quite as imminent a threat.

Leo [00:24:23]:
They're taking their time and still learning the multi posting tools or doing it manually or finding out what works for their specific content the best. So it is, I think it's great for everyone to see them cross posting. I know it's convenient for me because like I said, the fact that I don't have TikTok on my phone doesn't hurt me as much because I do have Facebook and I can't just fire up, you know, Facebook, go to the reels or whatever to see a lot of the content providers that I, that I was missing on TikTok.

Gary [00:24:55]:
Yeah, definitely. And I also, you know, a funny thing, as a side note, as the sale date was coming up, TikTok or ByteDance owns Lemonade, which is another one. And there's another one they own too. I can't remember the name escapes me right now, but the number of ads I saw on TikTok, not like ads in between the videos, regular stuff, but just little notification ads that came up on the bottom saying, have you tried like Lemonade? And it just seemed to be like the last week they were just hitting hard. They were like, okay, we are not going to be able to put these ads up there anymore, right, for free or, you know, we'll have to pay for them after that day. Just let's see how many people we can get to jump over to our platform.

Leo [00:25:38]:
Right, right, yeah, I remember Lemonade. And again, I don't remember the name of that third one, but if I remember correctly, that's the one that was mostly Chinese based in the sense that most of the users were Chinese. And at one point when TikTok was threatened with being shut down, a number of non Chinese TikTok users went and created accounts over there and it was quite an interesting, I'll call it a cross cultural exchange.

Gary [00:26:08]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean I like experiments like that, like more like I would love to see companies, small companies come up and say, you know, we're just, we're going to do something weird where we're only going to allow people onto our platform from like two completely different places.

Leo [00:26:24]:
Right.

Gary [00:26:24]:
Like we're just, and we're just, and they're going to have to interact, you know, and just be kind of an interesting thing. But anyway, cool. So let's say the next topic here, there's no good segue for this, is thinking about mobile journalism. So mobile journalism, that term can mean a couple things. One is a journalist who, you know, goes out into the field and collects the story, interviews, photos, video, all that stuff. But what I'm talking about is basically, I guess it's citizen journalism, right? When, when you're, you're out there doing something and you notice something going on and you use the Fact that we now all have not just cameras, but video recorders, high resolution, high quality video recorders in our pockets and we start recording things, which of course is a big part of everything going on today. And of course, these big stories coming out of Minnesota have this element of not just one, but multiple angle cell phone recording video coming out, which is helping to bring the truth out there about stuff that's going on because you've got these recordings and all. And it got me.

Gary [00:27:51]:
There's the tech angle, right? The tech angle comes in for us people using technology now and becoming on the spot journalists. Because you don't have to write a story, you don't have to report it, you don't have to comment on it, you have to do any of that. If you are just taking a picture or recording a video and then that ends up part of the news. Now you're participating in journalism and that's something anybody could do. You don't need to be a good writer, you don't need to know how to cover the story correctly or anything like that. You're just basically providing media or evidence or something to go into that. And from the technology standpoint, I was thinking about how bad I am at getting my phone out and recording something in a situation where something is going on. I actually probably only take seconds to get my camera, my phone out and, and take a picture of something.

Gary [00:28:51]:
If there's no pressure. Like if I'm, you know, I just took this trip to Hawaii, right? And if I'm walking along and I'm like, oh, that's a pretty flower. Like, the phone will come out of my pocket, I'll go to the camera app, I'll pick the zoom amount I want, you know, the lens, in other words, I want and take a picture. And the entire thing probably takes me four seconds. I'm not rushing, it's just, oh, okay. Hmm. Camera phone, click. And I got it.

Gary [00:29:20]:
But if something's going on and maybe not something newsworthy, maybe it's something really cool. Like a cool bird lands right in front of me, right? It's like, oh, no. You know, then I'm just, I seem to be fumbling with my camera, get it out, hit the button, and then, you know, it's like, oh. And then the strap that's on the camera kind of bangs against me and then it makes a noise and the bird flies away, you know, and it's just like, I can't believe how clumsy I am when I feel rushed, but how fast I am when there's no rush at all. And I just want to capture a picture. And it made me think that because it's becoming important to be able to capture video of things going on even when you're not expecting anything right just at a moment's notice, that I was thinking of instituting a practice routine, a quick draw practice routine where I just go through the motions of, like, grabbing my phone out of my pocket and starting to record. Maybe even having something where I set something up, my phone that randomly gives me a notification. And the idea, yeah, yeah, record now and then.

Gary [00:30:28]:
And then it actually times, like, how long until I start recording video or something. That would be interesting if. I don't know if that's possible, but at least I could. Even without the timing, it would still be good to have like once a day have it do that. Because I think just with a little practice, you could get good at it. I think that's something that everybody kind of needs to do even. It's just. Even a matter of being flustered.

Gary [00:30:50]:
I had a friend the other like a month or two ago who said that they had somebody come and harass them in their car while they were at a red light, just knock on their window and start cursing them out. And they felt scared and threatened and were like, come on, light change, change, change. And the light changed to green and they took off. And I thought, well, why didn't you take your phone out and record? And they were like, I just. I was panicked. I was just like, focused. Come on, light change and all that. It never occurred to me to get my phone out and record what was going on.

Gary [00:31:20]:
And then I said, well, you should have. But on the other hand, I probably would have reacted the same way. Like, I probably would have drove off and been like, oh, I never took my phone out and recorded. But maybe with some practice, then I would have. In that situation or in any other situation.

Leo [00:31:37]:
The issue that I have is that, like, you, I mean, you know, my. My camera is a shortcut on my home screen. That much at least is there. But if I suddenly decide that I want to take a video, not only do I have to fire up the camera, I have to suddenly say, okay, where's the button to make it do video instead of stills? And now I have to turn it. Now I have to push the record. What I would love, and I'm actually going to see if I can't make this happen on a pixel. It's an Android phone, is see if I can't just come up with a shortcut. That I could put somewhere that would make as many of those steps just happen automatically.

Leo [00:32:19]:
Ideally, it would be a single button that would start recording video without any other interaction. That would be ideal. I think it's unlikely. Other than that. Yeah, it's a bit of a hassle to grab the phone, find the button, find the other button. You know, all that kind of stuff.

Gary [00:32:35]:
Do all that. Yeah. And you're in a situation where you're trying to pay attention to what's going on and you're rushed and all of that. So, yeah, I'm going to be looking into that. And of course, I can do buttons like that, too. The newer iPhones have something called an action button, which is exactly for this, but what you set it to. Because right now I've got my action button set, or I had it set to actually take a picture because that's usually what I wanted to do. Oh, I see a pretty bird.

Gary [00:33:03]:
Take a picture. Right. So it wouldn't help in that situation because I'd need to switch to recording. The latest iPhone I got not only has an action button, but has a camera button. And that camera button, unfortunately, it's two presses, but kind of unfortunately, but fortunately, because the idea is the first press or you just touch it and it brings the camera up. Because the idea is you want the camera on and now you want to be able to get ready to take that shot. But we're still talking camera. We're not talking recording.

Gary [00:33:35]:
So I need to figure out, oh, maybe do I make the action button record? I certainly would do that if I thought a situation might happen around me that I wanted to start recording. But the point is that that may not be. I live in a downtown area, and it may just be like, oh, walking the dog or going to pick up my, you know, my food order or something like that, where I'm totally not even thinking. And then stuff could happen. And I want to practice. I want to practice. I want to be ready. And I also want to think about, like, what happens when I'm recording.

Gary [00:34:18]:
For instance, I checked this the other day, and you would think because I'm using a cloud service, I'm using icloud photos that, oh, I could record and then stop recording. And then doesn't matter what happens to my phone, it's going to go to the cloud. Except that it absolutely wouldn't. The reason being that, number one, I had it set for. Don't do that if you're not on wi fi because you're going to use up all my mobile Bandwidth, right. For normal stuff. And also don't do that if the battery is not fully charged. Well, chances are I'm walking around and I'm not on wi fi and the battery isn't fully charged.

Gary [00:34:55]:
So I did test out. Okay, I could set it to not only do it if you're on mobile, but also use 5G, particularly use as much bandwidth on 5G as you want. There's a setting for that, I forget what it's called, but the regular setting is be conservative about using mobile. And the other setting is don't. If you have 5G, go for it, upload, download, whatever, and then the. Then also not have it go into low power mode at a certain point and stop syncing. It's still iffy. My phone, I found it will work.

Gary [00:35:30]:
I tested it. Like I recorded some video, I put the phone away immediately without doing anything else and it did upload. But I think there are still situations where my phone will be like, oh, I'm going to save you battery or I'm going to save you mobile bandwidth by not uploading this. And it's like, no, I want you to do it. So I want to, I want to work with that. I also want to work with, I want to find a good app to stream live. Not stream live. Like anybody needs to watch it.

Gary [00:35:59]:
Like that's the thing. You could use stuff like Twitch or other, you know, YouTube blog if you really want. Like I want people watching now. It's like, well, what if you don't care if anybody's watching now? Or maybe you don't want anybody watching. You just want it to actually stream live to a server that's not your phone. So that if your phone suddenly breaks or runs out of battery or anything at that moment, it just cuts it off. But everything you've recorded has already gone somewhere online. That's another thing I want to investigate.

Gary [00:36:33]:
Then a bunch of other stuff. Like just in conversation with a friend of mine about this, just things like my go to if I were with a bunch of friends and something interesting was happening would be whoever got their phone out first. If somebody else started to record, I think I would go and say, oh, they've got it. Like, I don't need to record, right? No, that's not. I should fight that instinct and I should be telling them, fight that instinct. Even if I'm just three feet to the left, right? The difference in angle, the difference in my lens and the light, how the angle of the sun and the light and to, you know, to the objects and to the lens, everything is a little bit different. And having two recordings, even if they seem similar but from different phones, is extremely useful. Matter of fact, if you're with a group of five people, all five people should recording and even consider like, the other thing is, if a friend were to get a phone out and start recording, I should start recording and then maybe I should take three steps back and not just be recording the scene, but them recording the scene.

Leo [00:37:40]:
Right. Which ultimately later could add some validity to whatever it is they produce.

Gary [00:37:45]:
Exactly, exactly. Or if they, or. Or if something happens to them.

Leo [00:37:50]:
Right.

Gary [00:37:51]:
Then you've got that. Right, right. So there's a lot of reasons, you know, that's another thing fight that the. The go to which is, oh, one of our group is recording. That's good enough.

Leo [00:38:02]:
No, everybody, we saw this last week. Multiple angles made a huge difference.

Gary [00:38:07]:
Huge difference. Especially because not only were there was people refuting what actually happened, but there started to be AI fakes, right. Like we talked about last week, more subtle AI fakes that didn't say, oh, this didn't happen, or this was completely different. But here we're just going to change a tiny little bit just to push the narrative in one direction or another. And fortunately, because there were so many angles, they were able to look at those AI fakes and say, no, this is wrong, this is wrong. This one's real, this is wrong. And Snopes had a good write up on that, actually pointing out, like, look at this AI fake. What's even different about this? Well, there's a couple minor differences.

Gary [00:38:53]:
Why did somebody even bother to make this AI fake that just has a few minor differences? Well, I don't know. It depends. There's a lot of reasons people may want to do it, but somebody definitely did tried were definitely things where there were subtle AI differences and then there was the real deal.

Leo [00:39:12]:
So I do want to reiterate one aspect that you, you did talk about in that, you know, you're uploading to icloud on my Pixel. I've got everything going up to Google Photos. Yeah, my photos, my videos. But those settings that you mentioned, the default is to save you bandwidth, to save you battery, whatever. It is well worth explicitly going into those apps, whatever apps you happen to use for this and double checking that you've got it set to, yes, use my mobile data, please. Like you said, use as much of it as possible. And yes, please upload videos because that is an option in many of these apps to only upload photos and save the videos for later you want the videos to be uploaded right away. And same.

Leo [00:40:08]:
The battery is a tougher one only because, I mean, you know, set the threshold, if you can, to something low, but at some point you're going to run out of battery and you're making a choice here. Do you record until the end, do you upload until the end? Or do you give yourself a buffer of some percentage that. Where the phone will at least continue to work for a while and let you, I don't know, record a little bit more without draining it further to transmit it somewhere? That's a harder decision to make.

Gary [00:40:39]:
And there's also video quality settings too. I mean, you and I, we probably both have our phone set to 4K, whatever the best is because, you know, whenever you're a hobbyist in video and photos and all that, of course. But I have to remember that there are a lot of people out there that don't simply because they're like, I just take pictures and record video of my friends and I goofing around having fun. I don't need massive video files. But you may want to consider, if you think you're going to a situation where you may want to record events to change that. Because having 4k turned on can make a huge difference, right? Especially if your video needs to be used for evidence of something going on.

Leo [00:41:27]:
The level of detail is honestly pretty amazing at times.

Gary [00:41:31]:
Oh, it is. And that is the funny thing is right now, and this is going to go away, but right now, one of the main ways people tell AI from real video is a lot of the AI video doesn't look that good. Because first of all, a lot of AI video doesn't go to 4K. Like the standard stuff is 720 or 1080 or whatever, but also it's made to look blurry. It's made to look like it's not shot as well. Because our brains still think of like 10 years ago. Like, if we see a video like that, we'll think, oh, yeah, it wasn't that long ago. That was pretty standard.

Gary [00:42:00]:
So you see it and then you're like, well, wait a minute, this is supposed to be a video of like, I don't know, an ostrich jumping on a car or whatever it is, whatever ridiculous AI video it is. This is supposed to be a video of that taken now, why does it look so bad, right? Like, take your phone out and just record your cat running across the room. And then look at the quality of that video and then look at the. And then look at the Video just watched of some animal, you know, a fake AI animal video and say why was this recorded on such a bad video? It wasn't, it's AI and they, they made it low res and blurry to, to hide the fact that it's AI.

Leo [00:42:34]:
That's also one of the signs of an AI manipulated video is that you'll have a fairly high resolution video but the thing you want to look at for some reason is just allowed to focus.

Gary [00:42:46]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they say, you know, I watch a lot of those videos or like, you know how they tell and stuff and you start to spot things like the, like fur, like trees, like the leaves on trees and stuff. And you could say, oh yeah, my eye is focused on this person doing this thing. But why is the tree next to them? Like the leaves are so blurry. Like film that. Go outside and film that right now in front of your house and look at the video and you're like, oh, the leaves are like crystal clear. Because that's how real video looks right now. That's going to change a year from now.

Gary [00:43:17]:
We won't have that.

Leo [00:43:18]:
The advantages of cell phone, mobile phone videos is that by and large, I know that there are advanced cameras in your phone and mine, but by and large the default lens is a, a fixed focus lens where everything is pretty much in focus.

Gary [00:43:40]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:43:40]:
Within the, the distance that you're typically videoing. If there's something out of focus that's worth your attention, if everything around it is in focus because that's what your camera does and there's something that isn't. Maybe take a look at that a little bit more closely.

Gary [00:43:57]:
It's a, it's a sign. Yep.

Leo [00:43:59]:
So, but yeah, I need to, like I said, I need to make that shortcut. So one of the things that I did while I was off, I don't want to say offline, but basically while I was recovering from my fall over the last couple of months is I made a fairly massive change to my email infrastructure last year. Well, towards the end of last year we got notification from Google that the feature of checking email from other accounts was going to go away this month. Frustrating because Gmail was my primary email interface. Not just for my Gmail address, but for my personal address for askleo.com email for Puget, you know, my company email, all that kind of stuff. I just went to a Google account and that's where those things showed up. And I could send and receive using those email addresses and if you didn't know to look in the Headers. As a recipient of one of these messages, you wouldn't realize that in fact it was being processed by Gmail.

Leo [00:45:07]:
That's going away. Last year I moved a number of my email domains to protonmail, which was kind of interesting. In fact, my personal email still runs through Proton. I use their web interface because their connector for desktop email programs is iffy. It has some issues but you know, that worked well. But then as I was investigating this for a non profit that I'm having to support that has this exact same problem and a couple of other situations, I ran into Fast Mail. Fast Mail has been around for a very long time as it turns out.

Gary [00:45:49]:
Yes, I, I know this personally.

Leo [00:45:52]:
You have Fast Mail account.

Gary [00:45:54]:
I had Fast Mail as my primary email provider in 2004. I looked it up when I saw it was on the thing here. But anyway, you go, I'll talk about my.

Leo [00:46:05]:
Sure. So I ended up trying it out with one of my domains and I liked their interface. I saw that they had capabilities that I liked. It felt really good. So now I've got my personal email still going through Proton because I'm also a big believer in not putting all of your eggs in one basket when it comes to email delivery. But now askleo.com email it's all running through Fast Mail they still have. And what's interesting about it is they've got both approaches to dealing with custom domains. AskLeo.com fast mail is the mail server for AskLeo.com to get geeky for a second.

Leo [00:46:54]:
If you take a look at the NX records that tell servers where to send email. If it's an askleo.com email address, it's Fast Mail. But they also still have the very feature that Google is about to remove, which means that the email can be hosted on a different server like my server and Fast Mail can come in with. I don't know if they're doing it with POP3 or IMAP, but it doesn't really matter. They come in like an email client, fetch the email, and make it all available. In my Fast Mail interface, those two things sold me. So I've got like three email domains that are natively hosted there and then six or seven other email accounts that I'm remotely fetching through Fast Mail. Like I said, the interface is comfortable.

Leo [00:47:51]:
They have their own POP3 and IMAP access so I can back up everything with like an instance of Thunderbird on a machine in a corner. Anyway, that's. This is. It was a little bit bigger than it Ain't it cool? But this is actually kind of cool. The only downside for people that are considering this kind of stuff is that Fast Mail is not free. You end up paying a certain amount. And because I'm supporting a couple of different people as well, I've actually got a family account. So I'm managing in a couple of way, different ways.

Leo [00:48:26]:
But, but yeah, especially if you end up relying on email if it's important to you, your business, for example. Yeah. As a four pay. As a paid email provider, Fast Mail is a good choice and I'm very, very pleased with it. The one thing I, I heard a, a summary. I don't know if I mentioned it here before, but Proton is what you want to use if you want to protect your email from the prying eyes of the government or other third parties. Fast Mail is what you want to use if you want to protect yourself from capitalism. Because they're not selling your data, they're not putting ads on there, they're relying on what you're paying to provide the service.

Leo [00:49:10]:
Are you still using Fast Mail?

Gary [00:49:12]:
Well, no. So my journey with email was before Fast Mail. So before around 2003, around there I had my own server, co hosted server, and I had email configured through that, as a lot of us did back in the 90s and stuff. You know, if you had your own domain and all. And it was such a pain, it almost seemed like every year once or twice there'd be some sort of thing and I would stop getting my email and some crisis that would have to, you know, come up or whatever. And so I really was sick of it. So when Fast Mail first started and you know, offering email service, you could just set it up so that you can just get your email sent there and you could have your web stuff in another place. I was like, this is great, I want a company that's going to take care of this.

Gary [00:49:58]:
So I went with them. And at that time, what was interesting about them was how they got their name. Well, I don't know if it's how they got their name, but at least it's what I associated with it was the fact that email was pretty slow back then. I mean, pop was the standard. IMAP was kind of like around and it was still like a slow process to fetch your email and all this stuff. We were soon to become acquainted with Gmail, which was like really when Gmail first came out, going on the web to look at your. And it was so fast and everybody was blown away. Well, that was the experience With Fast Mail first, right? Fast Mail had that for me first.

Gary [00:50:36]:
It was like, oh, wow, this web interface for email so much. Everything's just there. It's like lightning fast. And then I could still use it with an email client and all that. So I switched to it. And then what happened is then Gmail had come out and it was like, oh, they're doing the same thing here. And then like the Gmail like for like business, you know, which changed. Now it's like workspace or whatever came out and it was like, oh, it looks like you could do the same thing with Google now, but it's free, right? Which is a trap and became a whole lawsuit, which I think I'm getting 30 bucks for at some point here because there was like a class action lawsuit.

Gary [00:51:15]:
But anyway, so yeah, the thing was that they said, oh, we're offering this email service, it's free for life. And you know, so I just said, well, why am I paying Fast Mail, however much it is? Probably more back then actually because it was such like a niche like business professional email service and now it's probably much bigger. And so I just switched to Google to do it and then had my domain there. And then I would, you know, people wouldn't believe. It's like you don't have your email through Google because it's not a Gmail address. I'm like, you could do that if you know where to go, you know. And then I stuck with Google and then, then they started charging. But it's so cheap now when you don't get a ton.

Gary [00:51:54]:
It's cheap if you don't have a whole organization under it. I just have one email address. So I, you know, if I was, it was the kind of thing where I had set up. I'd still had like a bunch of people working for me and I had all these email addresses. It would actually be rather expensive and I might already be back on Fast Mail or protonmail or something. But because it's just one email address, I fall into this thing where it's ridiculously cheap, but it's still there. You know.

Leo [00:52:21]:
Other scenarios that I haven't talked about. One is I think, you know, that I maintain slash Caretake, an email service for ex Microsoft employees, right?

Gary [00:52:33]:
Yes.

Leo [00:52:35]:
And so I have a dedicated server, like we had dedicated servers that hosts. It's just basically its job is to host a very, very small WordPress site that gives people information about how to get their email on this service. So I've got 1100 email accounts on there and Almost all of the paid options alternatives are just non starters because even you know, at a few bucks per account, it adds up so quickly. So that's one where I tell people, hey, you can have the email address, just don't expect anything. Right. This is not a fully supported great spam filter etc email service. This is just a way to quickly fetch email that is sent to the specific email address that people may realize is associated, associated with you to which you can then migrate them to a real email address and have your conversation. So there's that one, the other so that I can't change and it will always be on its own little server because the costs for that many accounts would just be too high.

Leo [00:53:49]:
However, I've also mentioned that I am the IT person for a local nonprofit and for the last couple of years I had been advising several people in that nonprofit. Hey, this Gmail feature to fetch email from other accounts, it's awesome. And that's what you should be doing for the email addresses that we have on this nonprofit's domain. Well, of course that's going away. But what we discovered is Google Workspace for non profits. It's free, so it's exactly, I assume it's pretty much exactly what you're using, Google Workspace. But because we've got non profit status and we did have to jump through a few hoops to make sure that they understood it was a non profit, we now have all the accounts we need and a bunch of other stuff that we could be using because of course it includes, you know, Google Drive, all the, all the apps, all the everything's. We're just focused on the, the email side of things.

Leo [00:55:04]:
So yes, I absolutely understand that Google Workspace would be, would be awesome. If you've only got a single email address, that's great. But it's another one of those things where if you're not a non profit and you've got multiple email addresses, it's another situation where the costs can start to add up. Anyway. Yeah, fast mail, if you're looking for something current, reliable, not terribly expensive current.

Gary [00:55:28]:
And it's been around, I mean it is nice to know I'm.

Leo [00:55:32]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:55:32]:
Been around for a long time. Right. You know, it's something that came up yesterday. Yeah.

Leo [00:55:38]:
If, if I understand it correctly, they are or were headquartered in Australia.

Gary [00:55:44]:
Yes. At the time that I use them at least it was one of the things about it was they were completely in Australia. So it was like how is it so fast.

Leo [00:55:54]:
For me because apparently they have a data center in Seattle.

Gary [00:55:57]:
Well, today, today's world, that's the. That you would expect that you wouldn't even, you know, ask the question. You would be like, well, of course they do. But back then I believe it was in Australia that I was getting my, you know, email that, you know, that was the server that the email went to, but it worked great. Cool.

Leo [00:56:19]:
So, yeah, that's kind of my.

Gary [00:56:21]:
I may go back. I don't know. Part of me is like email has become such a non issue for me. I don't have all that stuff like you just talked about. You maintain a lot. I have simplified things a great deal when it comes to email. So I don't even think about it. My email just comes in, I respond.

Gary [00:56:38]:
So why would I complicate things by making a change?

Leo [00:56:40]:
At this point, one of the reasons I didn't mention that I actually did both protonmail for my personal email and Fast Mail for these other domains is that it's separate from all of my infrastructure. In other words, when you send an email to my personal email address or leoskleo.com or any of these others, it actually doesn't touch any of my servers. That's important to me because as I discovered over the past couple of months, if something happens to me, honestly, my servers at Amazon Web Services, if they go down, that's one thing. But my wife needs her email, my friends need their email. They need that to continue. And the bottom line for those services is as long as the bill gets paid, that email keeps working without having to rely on any of the infrastructure that I may have set up or cobbled together on my own servers. Cool. Something to think about.

Leo [00:57:48]:
Anyway, that's kind of sort of my Ain't it Cool? Just because I'm having so much fun with it.

Gary [00:57:53]:
Oh yeah, no, definitely. And it is tempting for me, you know, as a geek, I'm like, ooh, they probably have all sorts of cool things I could play with. Maybe I can optimize and change out. What ha. It's like, oh, no, no, no. I've got plenty to do. I don't need more cool stuff to play with. But one day I probably will.

Gary [00:58:10]:
For my Ain't it Cool, I will. Have you seen the movie Sinners?

Leo [00:58:16]:
I have not.

Gary [00:58:18]:
I missed this movie because it came out a while ago and it, you know, kind of historical vampire movie kind of thing with like an art house feel to it is kind of, you know, I would enjoy that, I thought, but I somehow missed that it was a thing and. But then I got reminded of course. Of course. I got nominated for a ton of.

Leo [00:58:43]:
Academy awards, was getting Golden Globes and a few other things. I mean, yeah, so I was so.

Gary [00:58:49]:
Yeah, so watched it and certainly enjoyed it. So I mean, if you like horror movies or more. To me it felt more like an old fashioned horror movie. I know modern horror movies are like the old fashioned slasher or thrillers, you know, but this is more of, you know, monster movie. People trapped in a place, vampires surrounding them, that kind of thing really say.

Leo [00:59:12]:
That they were watching the movie, they were enjoying the movie and then all of a sudden there was a vampire and they realized vampire movie.

Gary [00:59:20]:
Yes. Although it is. Although knowing that it's there because everybody knows, you know, that it's there. There are. There's a little bit you can kind of see. You can kind of see the direction things are going. You know, that's something. But it does, it does definitely do that trope I guess where they don't introduce anything beyond anything supernatural for a while.

Leo [00:59:44]:
Right, right.

Gary [00:59:45]:
Which is kind of a neat way to make a film because far too often like the film just starts off right away where you see something supernatural and then it's like, okay, let's go back to, you know, this or let's not bring that in. You just have to think about what was that monster we saw. That's, you know, it doesn't do that. So anyway, it's a well, well made film, so I enjoyed it.

Leo [01:00:05]:
Good for blatant self promotion. I want more people to see the article. Why am I seeing so many captchas? You've probably experienced it. I know I experience it all the time. We are seeing captchas so often, so much more often, like in the last six months alone. And I have theories as to why that's happening. And you know, it's. It's frustrating.

Leo [01:00:33]:
One of the interesting things about the article are the comments because ultimately people hate captchas.

Gary [01:00:40]:
Oh yeah, I know. We keep getting stories about like, oh, we won't need them anymore thanks to this new technology. We won't need them anymore. And it's like, well, still we're 20, 26 still captchas.

Leo [01:00:53]:
And the article about that new technology is protected by a captcha.

Gary [01:00:57]:
So yeah, there you go.

Leo [01:00:59]:
Anyway. AskLeo.com 187517 why am I seeing so many captchas?

Gary [01:01:06]:
Cool. And the video that's today, the day we're recording this I've got is 10 secrets of the Mac dock and it's doing really well. It's getting a lot of traction, so I thought I'd mention it. Using the dock is a tool a lot of people take for granted, but there's a lot of hidden functionality in it. People are basically, oh, I know how to use it. But it's like, oh, no, there's more. There's more if you know where to look. So, anyway, that video is doing well, so I'll put a link to that.

Leo [01:01:34]:
Cool. Well, I think that wraps us up for yet another week. As always, thank you, everyone for listening, and we will see you here, or I guess speak at you here again real soon. Take care, everyone. Yeah, Bye. Bye.

Gary [01:01:50]:
Bye.