Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat is here. Richard Campbell, of course we're going to talk about Patch Tuesday. It was yesterday. Windows 10 gets a little bit more life in it and a lot of AI, including a bunch of AI browsers. Microsoft will not be left behind in this one either. All of that and a return of two of the best games of all time coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is, this is windows weekly, with paul thurot and richard campbell. Episode 945, recorded wednesday, august 13th 2025, vermont. Seriously, it's time for windows weekly. Hello winners, hello dozers. Wake up. Paul thurot and richard campbell are here to entertain you. Hello, mr paul thurot, from thurotcom and leanpubcom. How, how the heck, are you today? Pretty good, nice to hear. And you, you, mr Richard Campbell, how are you today, sir, hi?

01:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm doing very well. I am in Kansas City, kc. What are you doing in KC? The Kansas City Developers Conference is this week's workshop day today, so I'm in my hotel room, carefully positioned to not show you the bed. You know as I do, but I was able to tour today's whiskey distillery this morning, oh so, fresh off the still, fresh off the stills, having a great conversation with a couple of the folks there. We had a good time and I'm excited to talk about it. It's a great product.

01:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice group of people, nice to see you. I'm excited to talk about. It's great, it's a great product. Nice group of people, nice to see you. Somebody was asking in the chat room, uh, if my kitty returned, of course that later that day, last. Oh good, yes, the kitty comes and goes now as she doesn't matter how much you shake the treats. Yeah, yeah, the shaking of the treats isn't really the most effective anymore. Uh, she's discovered another kitty out there, a male, and so she's, uh, she's kind of anxious to get out there and have some fun. She's got some new priorities, new priorities in her life. Uh, anyway, you know. So, yes, she's fine, she's doing great, she's out there right now. As a matter of fact, uh, all right, well, patch tuesday was yesterday, just in the of time, because apparently there was another zero day with the exchange. So, you know, I don't know if they fixed it, but these things happen, you know.

02:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's up? I mean, if you're a conspiracy theorist fan, maybe this is happening on purpose, because they want to get everyone into the cloud.

02:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because they're on prem problems with SharePoint and exchange right.

02:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are the yeah, If you would dare run it yourself.

02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't think that's no, that's a conspiracy theory. We know those are never true.

02:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, we. The more obvious theory is that Microsoft's inept, and I think we all you know like yeah, no, that actually makes tons of sense.

03:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, there's also a schism between the folks that are working on the online product, which is the primary product. So the best of the best are there. That's probably true, right, and the on-prem product is a different group of people.

03:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is a historic problem in all uh tech companies. Google has this problem. Nobody good wants to work on maintenance. They want to work on the next big thing.

03:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's God's work. Though, guys, come on.

03:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's maybe the most important thing. So, don't you know, give us a, give us a break man.

03:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it's not in the spotlight, it's not interesting.

03:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not fun, but making stuff actually work.

03:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now you're talking crazy talk. It's not so bad, it's not so bad, all right.

03:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, what happened?

03:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's the summary? I'll tell you what happens. Patch Tuesday happens and every time it happens I'm like wait, it's Patch Tuesday, how come I didn't remember this? And then you have to kind of scramble a little bit to figure out what the heck's going on. And you know, I kind of beaten this drum all year, but it's been a big year for updates and I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but it seems like there's a world of halves and have knots now, and the halves of the people with copilot plus pcs who get all these additional features and they have knots. Are you lowly peons that just have normal windows 11 like losers and you get a few things you get just a, just the the, the cast-offs, the leaving, yeah right, the stuff that kind of made it through the net.

04:36
Um, although, to be honest, uh, some of the, some of the stuff that everyone's getting is, uh, some of that stuff is worthwhile for sure. Anyway, nothing major. Major or nothing new, I guess, if you've been paying attention for the past few months or weeks or whatever. But if you do have a Copilot Plus PC and you live in the EU, you finally get to have recall. United States tech companies like to punish the EU for their draconian and totally logical rules, and that's you know. You'll get it eventually. It's fine. There is a recall feature for everybody. That's new. It's just reset and this is like a one button reset Reset all of your settings. All of your data is reset etc.

05:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So let's see, I'm afraid my wife is going to go through my recall. Make this all go away right now. Button. Is that what that button is?

05:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, you actually hit it and it goes to excel. You know, um, yeah, maybe I don't know um, there's some uh click to do uh functionality. I should have put this in the notes now that I'm thinking about it, but I'll remember this when we get to the AI stuff. This is we've talked about this stuff, so it's like the, the practice in reading, coach the read with immersive reader draft, with co-pilot and word send, a team's message schedule, a team's meeting, like you know, all the stuff we've talked about and then the AI agent in settings, which actually ties into that thing I was just not saying earlier, which is that one of the little themes this week and then for the rest of our lives is going to be how AI becomes kind of programmable, if that makes sense, or there'll be programmable interfaces in apps, in websites, in online services, so that AI can control those things.

06:28
This is one of the dumber but maybe one of the simpler examples of that where Microsoft has actually been doing this work behind the scenes in the settings app for a long time. Each of the settings in the app is, in fact, accessible to a programmer through code and now accessible to AI as well, and so they have an AI model that has been grounded in the data that is accessible inside of the settings app, which I think we can all agree is pretty limited, so now you can use natural language to talk to it and say you know, I want to make the screen dark, I want to do whatever, and it will try to get that going for you. That particular feature is Snapdragon X only and it's only in the English language for now, but that obviously looks good, wow, so not even just Copilot Plus PCs, but just one particular flavor of Copilot Plus.

07:15
Yeah, so next month you can assume it will come to ARM and Intel.

07:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I just haven't finished testing it yet.

07:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they seem to do these in that kind of stutter step fashion. The best new feature for the rest of us well, there's two features really that are tied together is the quick machine recovery feature. This is available in windows. Well, it's in the settings app, but if you go into the windows update or the restore area, you'll see it in there, and this is just a way to kind of do like an in-place reinstall of Windows, if that makes sense.

07:44
So we'll look at what version you have, but we'll put everything back the way it was. It won't touch your data, it won't touch anything that isn't part of the operating system. And you reboot and come back and hopefully it fixes it. And, by the way, for whatever it's worth, what PC was this? I just used this and it worked really well and I can't remember what it was. But it will also automatically come on if you want it to right. So you reboot, something's wrong, it will go into the Windows recovery environment and ask you if you want to use it to fix the problem. This is when you're going to see the other new feature, which is the new black screen of death, which we're not calling the black screen of death, but it is a new Windows 11 style version of the blue screen of death, but in black. Because wow, yeah, it's fine, it's okay, um, so that's fine and then that's, but that's still.

08:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These are still in insider builds, right? Or is this actually now? No, this is deployed. Patch it's deploying so if you have the current version of windows, you have a black screen of death now potentially.

08:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You got to remember, this is windows, so nothing is definitive. Um, you now have the possibility of getting the black screen without having to be an insider. Yeah, it will roll out over time to you. It might have, aren't we lucky, isn't? I love the way I have to talk now like I have to now. I just get to talk like an idiot all the time. It's like can he answer a question? No, he covers microsoft it could be.

09:07
Maybe I don't know, possibly I don't know. What do you see? Is what you see? What you see is fine. Whatever you see is exactly what's supposed to be there.

09:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate this so much, okay, somebody just asked in the youtube channel is paul giving up on uh windows? No, this is just paul.

09:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I am I, I belong in a padded cell. This is your happy place. You're comfortable. This is normal for me. It's getting to be. No, I don't know. They put all of the settings for search, which used to be split between privacy and just a search area in settings, into the one place, so it's all under privacy security. Now that's fine. Um, there's this feature. I cannot stand. But, um, snap, layouts is useful.

09:51
This is the thing where you mouse over the maximize button on a window and it gives you some suggested layout excuse me, layouts. Or you drag a window around and a little panel comes down at the top and I guess people, this wasn't obvious for people or something. So now there's a little I don't know, like a little text. Well, actually, maybe I can make it happen here. What am I doing here? I think I turn it off. Yeah, I always turn this thing off, I hate it so much. So there's this text, uh, that appears that explains to you this is what's happening. So you know that needed to be called out. Um, and then, if you use the windows touch keyboard, for some reason there is a new layout for game pads. So this is almost certainly related to these handheld gaming machines that are coming, where you might actually just be holding the thing and want to be able to interact with the onscreen controls, and so that's in there too Cool Fun.

10:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, nice, very nice. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Cool fun. Yeah, nice, very nice. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Anything else you want to talk about? Or should we just go home, you know?

10:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
what so there are two up this week.

10:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a yes, there's a lot of windows 11 on arm news this week, which is amazing it's all good, that's exciting, yeah there is a lot of kind of xbox gaming news and interestingly these two things are related in many cases. So this is actually a pretty good one.

11:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The AI story is spicing up too, it sure is yeah, okay.

11:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'm saving the gaming stuff for the Xbox segment at the end, but for now, I will just leave it at Blender, which is an open source. It's a 3D app, isn't it? I don't use Blender, yeah. Yeah, it's a 3D design app.

11:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a commonly used in place of other commercial tools, a little harder to learn but very powerful, it is appearing on the iPad at the same time, which I have a feeling is a related development.

11:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, okay.

11:44
In other words arm is arm yeah so it's now native on windows 11 on arm it's. There's more work to be done. Um, the folks that make this are talking about how. I don't know how this app works, but they're right now the the native. The back the graphics back end is supports the adreno GPU now in Snapdragon X, so dramatically improved performance, both playback and rendering, and like 4.5 to 6X, like really good. But there's going to be future optimizations occurring here. So sometime before the end of the year you'll see hardware-accelerated ray tracing for a feature called Cycles, which, again, I'm not familiar with the app, but this is moving full steam ahead, so that's good.

12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cool. Yeah, it's kind of amazing. Ray tracing was just a couple of years ago, I know. Oh my God, nvidia is doing ray tracing.

12:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And now it's like integrated graphics.

12:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we do that too.

12:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yep, yeah, it's just out there, right yeah, it's just out there, right yeah. Apple will probably use it for the next version of their operating system.

12:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Windows will copy it three years later, and then we'll just give up on it two years later. I do not want a ray-traced operating system.

12:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you very much. Nobody does no. But then we had this rare instance I think it was Friday or whenever it was, it doesn't matter but we had three new builds in the Insider program all in the same day. Um, dev and beta were the same again, although there is one dev feature that is unique to dev which is interesting because that's 25h2. And then the only change they made to canary was that um, search settings, cons, uh, consolidation that I just mentioned, which is now shipping and you know uh to the whole world. So that's where canary's at, I guess. Um.

13:23
But the big deal here to me is just that the no one seems to be able to get like give the official name for this.

13:30
But when you bring up the start menu, you get that panel by default and aside for the phone link thing and they're they're changing the ui. I think it has something to do with the new version of the link to windows mobile app that they're updating right now as well, and these things are going to line up like the way they look and feel, and so it's probably just related to that. So they're just doing some UI tweaks there. You can toggle it off if you don't want it, you don't have to use it, but it is there if you do like it. And then I know this is going to be a huge deal for people. I don't know why everyone has such a a bug up there, whatever about this. But one of the the big complaints or concerns in our little community is like when are they going to get rid of control panel? Like there's always this stuff there that's still not in settings and blah, blah, blah, whatever there's still vendors who only put controls for their.

14:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't think we ever including microsoft.

14:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I might add.

14:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, right, there's reasons for that, but those reasons are probably that this modern UI, winui 3, slash, windows app SDK thing is nonsense. But whatever, I guess in this beta sorry, in this dev build, which is 25H2, they have moved more of the settings from the control panel into settings. So these are related to time language keyboard, right, so now you can actually change the time server, which, by the way, used to require an admin approval, but you can do that from the settings app now, which is a first. So if you go to settings time and language and then probably date and time, whatever additional setting, it won't take it to the control panel, it would just do it right there. So, yeah, um, that's the kind of consistency we look forward to. Um, so kind of partial. Some settings are here, some are there. Welcome to windows. What do you want me to say?

15:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so that's that and it's been true for a long time though it is and it gives uh people like us a chance to show off by saying well, you just open a command line and you type, slash, whatever.

15:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Did you right click it? You should right click it. Does that solve it? It doesn't, I can't, then I don't know, that's all.

15:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know Call text support. How do you feel about the command line?

15:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is there any? You got to get it exactly right. You don't want to script your computer, but no. But if you don't, if you can, if you feel like you can type.

15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yesterday Steve was talking about malware that injected the command RM dash RF star into uh systems, and it would. They would just remove the whole everything, just like pave the partition yeah, pave it systems, and it would.

16:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They would just remove the whole everything delete everything, just like pave the partition, yeah, pave it. Yeah, that is amazing, yeah that's malware, man that's. I was gonna say that is the ultimate in malicious software, when you think about it used to be that's kind of.

16:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was more malware, was more that like. That was like more like vandalism. Yeah, then like state-sponsored extortion.

16:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, yep, yeah. Eventually nation states were like wait, can we use this? Hey?

16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is pretty good yeah all right now you're moving along here. I don't. This is gonna be. This is gonna be a short show.

16:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not gonna be a short show. I there's so much, okay, so don't you worry um I'm just trying to figure out where to put the ads Getting past the frosting here.

16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, this is the frosty layer. Let's get to the new beauty center.

16:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We don't usually get Windows 10 in the news, but there are two Windows 10 stories that are both very interesting. Well, what? No, I'm sorry, why would I say that there are two Windows 10 stories? So one of them is good news, right? So both of them is actually it's good news, right? So both of these are good news essentially.

17:11
But you know, microsoft we knew, we've known for a long time. So Windows 10 is hitting end of support. In October they are, for the first time, offering a extended support or extended security updates program for consumers. They've done this before for businesses with XP and with Windows 7, at least I guess probably other releases too. I have no idea, but this is the first time for consumers.

17:29
And then the question was going to be well, how much does it cost? I don't know what's going on. So technically it costs $30. But remember, a month or two ago, they were like, honestly, if you just back up and really sync your settings through the backup app that's now there in windows 10 and 11, we'll just give it to you for free, like all you got to do is just back up the computer, which is not backing up the whole computer, right, it's just backing it's. It's a teeny thing, it's just a list of settings. So you're like nice, I mean. So they, you know, they made it better. And now they're saying actually, if you do this, you will be able to get extended security support on Windows 10 on up to 10 PCs. What Just back?

18:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
up one and you get 10?.

18:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, just back up one and you get 10. Such a deal, yeah.

18:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is clearly a legal maneuver. Yes, they have their answer.

18:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, which you know, someone is trying to launch a class action lawsuit against microsoft for ending the support of windows 10, and it's like I, I'm sorry, other than the fact that what you're asking is ludicrous, um, this is the type of stuff where they're gonna it's gonna be like, look, they've done everything they can to give this to you. It's, it's fine, you know, um, so that's good. And then I guess this isn't really a, but officially now they have said that they will support Microsoft, will support Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 through October 2028. So that's when the extended security updates program ends, right? So 2025 end of support, but three years of extended support if businesses pay for it, one year for consumers. So 2028 would be that three-year point.

19:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, as edge is improved and updated over the next three years, presumably users on windows 10 will still get all those and actually technically, my experience has been you don't have to really give up on our operating system until you can't get browsers for it.

19:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that seems to be right. So that's happened multiple times. Chrome, firefox both have said you know, we're going to support whatever the version of Windows is for whatever amount of time, and they always support longer than Microsoft. So I don't know. 2028, you're still running Edge on Windows 10. I like okay, you deserve what you get, buddy, yeah, you, buddy, yeah, you get right. Exactly, you're lucky you have a browser um so I suppose.

19:47
Yeah, maybe if firefox is still around or google still owns chrome. There's a lot of stuff going on here, but um, if man is still alive if women can survive, yeah, yeah.

20:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So fall in love, yes, in the words of the great, of the poet zager and evans nice, all right, we're gonna. Uh, I think, now that you have done so much wonderful things, so many, wonderful things, so many so quickly. We're so deeply into the show now I think I could probably do a commercial break. If you don't mind, richard, can we hear you? You disappeared momentarily.

20:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it looked like a weird bonk. Oh, I've been there.

20:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what she said. Yeah, sorry, paul, I shouldn't do that when you're drinking. That was just mean. Come on man.

20:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do appreciate it. A 25-minute Windows segment segment.

20:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he's like wait for it, wait for it, he's gonna drink. Okay, now launch launch the five minute windows segment.

20:52
It's a new feature of windows. Weekly I drank it with my windpipe, ai xbox and an american whiskey, not a bourbon, not a bourbon interesting, get you thinking, I'm sorry, drinking caps on. We'll be doing that later in the show, but first he's already been to the distillery. Kids, it's been a. It's been a productive day, uh, but first a word from our sponsor, sponsor. I'm always super happy to talk about the good folks at Bitwarden.

21:33
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22:19
Another well-known password manager just the other day took back its free version. Well-known password manager just the other day took back its free version. I asked I once when, before Bitwarden started advertising years ago, I said now you're not going to, like that other guy, take away your free version. They said we can't, we never will, and we, we promise, but we also we couldn't because we're open source and if we took away the free version, they just fork it and we'd be done. So you've got a free version for individuals, but there's also a very strong enterprise offering. In fact, that's probably why 50,000 businesses now use Bitwarden. There's another reason why, maybe more to the point, 19 billion passwords 19 billion passwords are now available on the dark web, and this is the really scary thing about it 94% of those almost all of them have been reused on multiple accounts. Now we know this is, from a security point of view, always a bad thing to do, but it's why InfoStealer malware threats surged 500% last year. See smart hackers these days they don't try to hack into an account like they used to do in war games. They simply get some of these breached passwords and the associated emails and then they just try them. It's called credential stuffing across a variety of sites. If you reuse passwords and one site that you used it on gets breached, which is almost an inevitability nowadays you're now vulnerable on every other site you use that password with. That's something that's really kind of a key driver in using Bitwarden.

23:59
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24:43
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25:14
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26:19
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26:57
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28:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're all users. You use it too. Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's fantastic. Yep God, she who must be obeyed, using it in the family plan.

28:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, that's the trick. Yeah Is getting family members who probably aren't as savvy as we are Well and house accounts right that we both have access to long passwords, house accounts. Yeah, anyway, thank you, bitwarden, for supporting Windows Weekly, for supporting windows weekly. You're are you're? You're a mcconjie are you going?

28:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
when are?

28:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you going back to mexico city? Any uh, probably mid mid-september I saw the fantastic picture of your daughter graduating. Yes, oh yeah, so great so she was doing the.

28:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My son, you know, my son and my daughter get along so great. It's one of the things I'm so happy about. But, um, that's the sign language for I love you, I love you, I love you yeah.

28:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So she was signing to your son.

28:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, how nice is that.

28:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's pretty sweet.

28:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And boy, that smile on her face and that beautiful cap and gown. Unc Charlotte. Was that where it was? Yeah, congratulations.

28:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's she going to?

29:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do now? Move back home.

29:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, she's's gonna stay down there for now. She's she's probably gonna continue school, but part-time while she works. Um, what does she want to do? It's kind of like physical therapy, basically nice.

29:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very good, very good. We need more physical therapists and you know nice thing about pt. Ai can't do that yeah, yeah's so true.

29:23
This is lucky for her Kids pick a profession that will not be stolen by the machine, all right. Speaking of which, let's talk about AI. I have to say I know you're going to talk about GPT-5, or I figure you will, because that's the newest model from OpenAI and it's been very back and very back and forth mixed reaction. I know I've been pretty happy. I have an Obsidian plugin that I so I, you know I had this wild hair.

29:53
I said I wonder if I can somehow write it so that in my daily note, before you know, as it starts up, it puts in the sunrise and sunset time, because I like to take a walk at sun just before sunset. I don't want to go in the dark, so I. So I asked it, and then I got fancy and I said, oh, can you do the high and low temperature? Yes, can you do the phase of the moon? Yes, how about this? What if you ask me where I am? I tell you and you give me the weather for that. So I've just been playing with it. Nice, and this is all vibe coded, almost one-shotted. I mean I, it wasn't because I kept adding things, but I, this is chat gpt5 did this.

30:40
You created a like a dashboard, basically um, it's a javascript, so I'll show you the uh, the code. It's a JavaScript, so I'll show you the code. Actually, it's a JavaScript plugin. It's in my scripts folder so it wrote it completely in JavaScript. It's kind of small, you can't really see it, but it wrote all this JavaScript. It went out and tried different APIs. I I said well, this, this I first. I said national weather service. Finally, we came up with open mateo, which is a api. You don't need a key for it. It does everything but the moon. So it wrote a I guess it's a well-known moon phase calculation that does a very good job. I then said oh yeah, instead of putting this in text, why don't you give me moon phases in an emoji? It figured all of that out. I didn't tell it any of that. Same thing with the weather and emojis.

31:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It wrote all of this beautifully. This is cool. I will say. Every time I see JavaScript code, I'm reminded of why I don't write JavaScript.

31:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I mean I could tell what it's doing, but I would not want to write this. No, it looks terrible.

31:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry, JavaScript's terrible. The script they wrote is Well, it did it beautifully.

31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it exported the main function so that I could run it in a certain way, and it just did everything beautifully. Couldn't be happier. I'll show you how it works. Should we find out what the weather is in Charlotte, control W, let's see. Oh, maybe I haven't turned it on here. I haven't Shoot, you could see. I tried a lot of locations. That's cool though, but see, I was thinking so by default. It does where I am petaluma.

32:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that you bowed down to your ai overlord. At the end you were like complimentary to it thank you.

32:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chat gpt I do, I thank you I'm not sucking up.

32:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love you I love you.

32:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You did a nice job, beautiful.

32:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me know if you need anything.

32:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Beautiful, any cpu cycles, whatever but it's kind of empowering because now I know I can easily add little javascript. Doohickeys features, yeah sure, without knowing any javas. Well, I know a little javascript, but I don't want to write it as you say, without knowing any JavaScript. Well, I know a little JavaScript, but I don't want to write it as you say. If I had a program that didn't common list, I'd do that, but I don't. And JavaScript is a lingua franca for everything.

33:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I get it, that's an electron app, I think. But it's like drying in the sand with a stick. You know, it's like I don't know.

33:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Picking up the electrons with your chromium tip tweezers and stacking them.

33:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will do a blog post on my blog, leofm, with all the code and how it works and all that stuff, so people can see the process. But I just say this in defense of ChatGBT5, because it's been getting a lot of heat. What's been your experience?

33:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have not even looked at it. What's wrong with experience? I have not even looked at it. What's wrong with you? I've been looking at. So we're going to get to this because I've been looking at other stuff. The truth is, I use ChatGPT behind the scenes in things like GitHub, copilot or whatever, but no, I've not. Well, okay, maybe I have actually seen it, but if I have, it's only been circumstance. I would busy, right. So we went away. We did the thing with it.

34:08
But I have been looking at these AI-powered browsers which we'll talk about, and, of course, I've been following the story. So to me, one of the weird I'm going to call it a weakness or whatever one of the stupidity things about OpenAI, chatgptpt, whatever whatever these things are is that, like you pick the model, it's like you go to it, you're like, oh, use this if you know you need like a longer time thinking. And it's like guys like you do that. Like I don't understand why I'm doing I'm picking that.

34:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's silly well, at first it didn't do that. I don't know what copilot's doing, but if you had the chat gpt app and it was to people's dismay, it just picked five.

34:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That that was the thing so yeah, so that, but see, but it's supposed to. They have a term for this. That's not um orchestration, but it means orchestration like what it's supposed to do is use the because there's actually multiple models, right, like it's supposed to do the right thing, depending on what you ask, which is basically orchestrate. It's one form of orchestration and is the way I think it should work. So the day that this was announced, of course, was a weird day. You know, sam Altman tweets a picture of like the Death Star over. That was so weird and it's like, with no explanation.

35:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do not understand that the Death Star shortly thereafter was destroyed by the Rebel Alliance and also who are you?

35:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are you the death star? Like what are we talking? It's your role here, exactly. The messaging on this is so bizarre. But but then they announced this. Okay, so microsoft is like oh my god, we're doing this right now, like so that microsoft is quickly rolling us out everywhere they can. Um, and then yeah, within two seconds, people like oh, I want g GPT-4-0. What's going?

35:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on what happened to the sycophantic GPT-4-0?. I don't like the one that loved me. I was in love with it.

35:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't like different things. Like you got to bring it back. So they actually, over the course of just a few days, I guess, have kind of stepped this thing back. They brought now it's temporary. I mean the goal is to, you know, make chat gpt5 acceptable for everybody, or whatever.

36:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But uh, yeah, this one this didn't go great, like you know well.

36:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The updates for more obsequiousness, right yeah right, right I would I think what they dial up the fawning I mean, what do I? You know, we talked about this on sunday and twit and wes faulkner's suggested I think he's right that they did this because they thought gT-5 would take all the GPUs, so they just allocated all the resources to 5. They didn't expect people would miss the sycophantic. I know that's the thing, though.

36:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, this company is not run by human beings. It's not surprising. They don't understand human beings. And the central thing you need to understand about human beings is they like to complain. So when you were doing it that way, they complained about that yeah, now that you're doing it this way you did what they wanted. Now they're complaining about that. So welcome to users.

36:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's normal you know this is, there are a lot of different types. Yep, so the other thing that we covered we streamed the announcement last week, as you know, and it was right before the show, right, or maybe it was, was it? It might?

37:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
have been. Yeah, I remember this, but yeah.

37:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I didn't notice because you know there's a lot going on, but many people did that the graphs they showed were apparently designed by were nonsensical and they were completely yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

37:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They were wrong. It's so good, it's so good.

37:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like, didn't they like? Even a cursory examination would have showed that they were terrible.

37:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you presume there was a big test suite, right? Apparently there wasn't even a human.

37:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are. This is. This is where it all ties into so much of my life. I I hate my industry. I hate everyone who works in it. I think they're all terrible and the writing I see out there is awful. It's mostly just ads now. It's like uh, don't pay for Microsoft 365 every month, you can get this lifetime. You know payment one time only, and it's office 2019 or something that kind of nonsense, right?

38:07
So I had one of we're going to talk about AI browsers in a bit and one of the many things I've done on each of them to try see how they work is, like you know, make a, make a price tracker, and the example I've used every time is a product I am never going to buy, but it doesn't really matter. It's like a Sonos Aero 100 speaker. So we'll get to this. We'll just say Microsoft Edge did not do so good, but the point of this was, after I was done with all that, I'm going through the headlines and the Sonos Aero 100 speaker is 40% off, and I was like, really that's interesting, because I was just trying to do a is 40% off, and I was like, really that's interesting Because I was just trying to do a price target for that.

38:47
So I just looked at it, see what it was, and so the price had gone down from $199 to $179. And I was like you know I'm not good at math, but I can tell you that's not 40%. And I have to wonder if AI was writing this headline, because that is so far off, not even close. It's not even close. It's like I wish it was 40% off. That would actually be a significant savings on a $200 product. But that was not what happened. It was $20 off, which is 10%. But you know, again, I'm not great at math, but I guess I'm better than AI, so it's like whatever. But yeah, this is the world we live in, so we're all it's it's. It's fortunate that humans are so detail-oriented, because we're going to catch these things and uh what I'm talking about.

39:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's being. He's being sarcastic, I know, yeah, just I'm surprised I saw that.

39:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think I only saw it, because I was just looking at it like I don't think I would have even noticed it. I was like yeah, 40 off.

39:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the problem, is you put a lot of trust. The computer says and you just go yeah, I'm not going to check that.

39:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the computer it knows like you're a trivia. We were at trivia the week, actually wednesday night before after the show, and one of the questions was what are the two states that border rhode island? Now, okay, I grew up in massachusetts, you know the answer to this, but this guy older than me looks like a smart guy. His wife was a former healthcare worker. We've known for a long time and he goes Vermont and I'm like Delaware, I was literally.

40:17
I was just about to blurt out. If you don't know the answer to this one, you might not be an American, which I have to say in rural Pennsylvania, maybe isn't the smartest thing to say out loud. No, and I was like Vermont.

40:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Seriously, I mean like at least it is in the Northeast, it is a state Roughly in a direction.

40:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will give you that yes, come on man Like I don't Look my kids, not knowing that I would get it. You know, young people, whatever, but like this guy, like you've been alive too long not to know the answer to this question. It's bizarre to me, but it's the type of thing again, like a reminder. It's like ai, I'm like this is what I he's like looking at, co-pilot or something like it vermont, you know it's a good skill and it will be rarer and rarer.

41:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But kids, your daughter, every my kids, learn how to question authority, learn how to question these confident errors.

41:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know question everything, okay first of all, I love you've just triggered a memory again the, the guy who got me into writing gary I was. The first book we wrote together was a visual basic book. This guy's a genius. I'm not a genius and he knows this thing back and forth and I do not, and I'm doing most of the writing on it somehow. But now I'm sitting across from him and at the time you would write, print it out, take the paper and he, you know he sits there and he goes over every line and you can see him.

41:42
He's going and then he stops and he goes back and he looks at me and he goes and he goes. This is what he said he goes. You sure about this? And I was like I was, but now, but now I am not and I was incorrect. Not, no, no, shocker there, right, not trusting yourself or not trusting the answer or whatever, whatever you want to call that. I'm not saying it's a skill, but it is an important thing to what do we call it?

42:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a humility to that.

42:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I could be wrong or they could be wrong. I mean, what do we call that in coding? We call it a sanity check. Right, yeah, where you just look at the roughly.

42:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, show it to someone and be like can you just look at this for a second? Are you seeing what I'm seeing here? You know, is this right? 40% Is it 40% Vermont Really.

42:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We all have to develop that muscle more because we're going to be in a world of AI slop.

42:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, right now you could doubt yourself too much. This is a problem I absolutely have, like I doubt myself too quickly, so like I didn't do this yourself, but that, everybody else but that guy with Vermont. You know, like I'm, like I lived in new England my entire life, almost. That's the 40, 50 years, whatever. Maybe Vermont is next to Rhode Island. I mean maybe I'm, despite the fact that we got engaged there and have driven there like literally dozens of times. Maybe it's me.

43:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All I know is a long way from Rhode Island to Vermont. That's all I know. That's a long drive.

43:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can tell you there are no major roads that go directly from those two places to the other.

43:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We used to do that on vacation and it's not easy, yeah, yeah.

43:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, anywho, I don't even know what we're talking about. I'm just complaining about things. Um, so okay, where are we? Oh yeah, so gpt5, whatever gpt, gpt40 is back for a little while. Uh, apple is like yeah, we're gonna do it. Apple is remember the meme. They used to be a meme. It was like the little browser icons with legs and arms and everything, and it was. I don't remember exactly the thing, but it was like. Firefox was like I invented tabs, you know. And then the next panel. It's like chrome is like I was built for performance. And then safari is like I protect your privacy. And then the next one is like they're all looking, no one's saying anything, and internet explorers over there they're all kind of looking at him.

44:01
He goes yay, internet and like I feel like, I feel like that's where we're at with copilot. You know, it's like what are they doing? Gpt5 yay, ai like we're like now we have it too, like I. They just do it right away. Maybe apple is maybe a better example of this, I don't know. Um, anyway, microsoft is rolling this out. I, I think, you will. I think it's already in. I could be wrong, but I think it's already in Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot, so it's pretty much their day of.

44:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They did it very quickly.

44:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
OK, there you go. So, yeah, good for them, and that's good. And then I think it was the day before which this is kind of messed up. I believe it was one day before before, but it could have been two days before. But bing announced that they were using gpto for gpt40, for image creation at bing dot slash, bingcom slash create, which is their image creator. Yeah, uh, so maybe they're on. I meant to look at this, it's possible. Well, they don't even. Yeah, no, it's still GPTO 4.0. Yeah, so there's still.

45:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, I do blame OpenAI for some of this, because the numbering scheme is nonsense. It's terrible. It's worse than Microsoft. It's crazy. Right, right, right right. Is 3.0 better than 4.0? Yes, but it shouldn't be. Yeah, I don't know. And what's 4.1 in relation?

45:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is why this company is perfect for Microsoft. This is the company that version 3.1 is the biggest thing in the world, and then version 6. We're stuck on for the rest of our lives. Somehow it's crazy. It's just unbelievable. Oh, what a world.

45:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what? It's good that this world is is flawed, because what would you and I have to complain about, paul?

45:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
otherwise, well, I always find something. But, um, yeah, I, I like the uh, the kind of positive outlook on life thing. It's like look at the wonderful career microsoft has given me. There you go but. I also look at like that. Look at the mental problems I have now because of Microsoft. It's kind of hard. It's kind of a yin and a yang. I guess I don't know If you like predictability and reliability and consistency and things like that, you might be in the wrong business.

46:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, yeah, the word you're looking for is non-deterministic. Yes, oh, I like it.

46:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I meant to talk to you about that. Uh, you guys, you talked to billy hollis on uh runners radio recently. Again, I love this guy, it's so great. The the talk turned to kind of non-deterministic and, um, I don't remember which one of you finally said it. You're like, to be honest, it's always been like it's always been non-deterministic, really, like right, like when you talk about programming, like I mean, I mean let's just you assume, I always assume.

46:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, you know what it is deterministic, if you knew all the variables.

46:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, but this is in my, but we operate in enough layers these days that you simply don't know.

46:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's some unknowns. I've always said this, though like zeros and ones.

46:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Zeros and ones, so this software could and should be perfect, it is deterministic Should be perfect.

47:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just don't know all of the things that are happening. See, the thing is, I programmed it enough to realize it's magic and I refuse to believe there's any science involved. It's things like race conditions where you think, oh, you know, I said, if this, then that.

47:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why is full car happening?

47:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I could this morning in the car, my wife and I traded off driving.

47:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We drove back this morning in the car. My wife and I traded off driving. We drove back this morning, right, and so my time in the car. I there was not much going on with work stuff, so I was popped open visual studio and I'm literally stepping in the car. Yeah, in the car, which works fine. On a highway it's not great. Back roads Get car sick. Yeah, no, it was fine. No-transcript.

47:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why you doubt yourself, paul, because.

48:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've been wrong so much. Yes, you know how many times do you get hit in the face before all you do is flinch, you know?

48:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, we're gonna take a little break now, I think, because we got to get richard synchronized. I'll bop it in out. He's come, come out. He's come. Unstuck in time, uh, but then I think we should talk. There's so so much AI.

48:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a lot of AI.

48:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is a good time to take a nap before to get ready to prepare.

48:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Gear up, gear up your loins or whatever it is you do the big AI segment.

48:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think one of the my my you know we do a show about AI. That's the next show Intelligent machines. Yeah, uh, in fact we've got the, the product director for Google's models, coming up, an interview with Tulsi Doshi, so that'll be very interesting. But one of the things I've realized from kind of focusing so much on this and because of it I try it more than I would probably Like I had to try GPT-5 in a variety of settings is it's silly to expect general intelligence from these things.

49:06
You have to kind of know what they can and cannot do and have normal expectations, just like anything else, like a human.

49:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just said a non-joking version of what I said earlier, which is that you're right, but the truth is that's not how people work, right. So even my, even myself like I doubt this stuff, I don't trust it. Like I doubt this stuff, I don't trust it. But when it's right enough times in a row, like with a programming thing, you do, whether you mean to or not, like you start, you fall into it. And so the problem for me, for mainstream users, is that they could be looking up, like a health topic or a money thing, and it looks like good advice, maybe, or it looks like it's giving good information, and then they don't really know any better, necessarily, and they're like like, yeah, this is a super intelligence, obviously I'm going to trust it and it's like, uh, don't.

49:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a story we covered on sunday, yeah, a guy who wanted to get all the chlorine out of his diet. He was kind of a health crackpot the chlorine yeah out of his diet. So he asked ai what he didn't want to. He realized he had learned or maybe the ai told him that salt is sodium chloride and he said, oh, I don't want to do that, can I? So the ai apparently told him, oh, use sodium bromide. And about six months he had a psychotic break. I was going to say he poisoned himself.

50:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
God. Now this person was probably that might have been a mistake Probably pretty smart. No, I think he was. It sounds idiotic, yeah, no, but this is the problem. Like people aren't educated on these topics and so they're seeking our advice. They were used to, you know, the computer Like the computer, like the computer knows, like the computer is going to be right all the time. Like you know, we got to be careful.

50:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We were warned about this. In fact, this is that famous. I don't even like recommending a laptop.

50:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what goes wrong. What goes wrong if the laptop isn't exactly what you want. You're like, oh, I spent a thousand bucks, this isn't perfect. You're like, oh, I spent a thousand bucks, this isn't perfect, it's Paul Thorat's fault. What a jerk, you know. But I didn't like kill anybody, hopefully, or whatever, like I don't know this stuff makes me nervous.

51:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Imagine, for 19 years I did a national radio show where all I did was dispense spying advice.

51:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, and then you get off the mic at the end and you must have been like God. Dear God, I hope I never hear from these people again.

51:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the worst thing is when a call begins. You know, leo, you told me to do this and I was like oh, Leo, I feel like you've transferred that blame to me nicely.

51:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh God, you're like. Paul told me to install this browser. I'm like. I literally just mentioned a browser.

51:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's what I would say. I would say oh no, I heard this on Windows address. I actually have his phone number. I don't know if you want to. This is a good laptop. Yeah, no, I took responsibility but for and unfortunately that didn't happen that often. Yeah, but uh, people want answers. I understand, uh, and we're, and kind of mentally we're maybe a little lazy, we're all a little lazy, and if something comes along and it seems like the voice of reason, we take it.

52:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and this is the dream. The point of this is it's supposed to save you money. Yeah, well.

52:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the point of it is we don't want to think. It's hard work, right?

52:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it uses up a lot of yeah, if I wanted to think I'd be watching nova at night. Think about it. I'm you know like what is this pbs? Yeah, exactly right, listen, brainiac.

52:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to like wind down a little bit here all right, let's uh, let's take a little break and we will get back to the ai topic at hand. You're watching windows weekly with paul thurot the brainiac. Actually, we got two brainiacs richard campbell, who is pretty much an autodidact on any subject, right, you could look it up and then the illegitimate, over here, the other one, no, no who he's the self-deprecating smart guy okay he lacks confidence, but he really knows.

52:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I like confidence I'm entering the dating pool. I don't know. Look at, I got here. Ladies, the genetics are absolute lack of confidence.

53:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But who? What is genetics? Anyway, it's all made up.

53:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's what's going to kill me, leo, that's what it is, but it's okay.

53:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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56:10
Right now you'll get 20% off site-wide during their Labor Day sale, early access. Helixsleepcom slash twit 20% off site-wide. But I got to tell you the offer ends August 14th, 2025. That's tomorrow, right? Make sure after you check out, you put our show name in. When they say, oh, how'd you find out about us? Say we heard it on Windows Weekly. That way they'll know we sent you. If you're listening. After the sale ends August 14th, check them out. Helixsleepcom slash twit. Start with a sleep quiz. H-e-l-i-x. Helix sleep dot com slash twit of our new mattress. Love it all. Right, let's talk. Oh, this perplexity. Do you want to talk about this perplexity story? I love this. Oh, my god, you know what I think. I find I really was in a perplexity fanatic I still am.

57:03
I still. There's been so much in the news. Steve Gibson was just railing on him yesterday.

57:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So what happened? Because they're stealing content and stuff. Yeah, I mean, I want my AI to be as good as it can be. Leo, I don't understand the complaint. Well, that's the trade-off, isn't it?

57:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, right, yeah.

57:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I don't stop ais from uh scraping us in any way. Do you want the rot? Do you use robots? And no, and I'm not sure I could do anything that would be effective, honestly well that's what cloudflare was saying is yeah, we tried everything and we couldn't.

57:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We couldn't stop them.

57:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep yep, ai is the terminator robot of technology, I guess so you're gonna still use perplexity.

57:44
Well, I have, so you know we'll see perplexity. Well, I haven't, so you know we'll see. This is this. Stuff is all fluid, I would say, at the moment. But yeah, we'll get to that. But so perplexity is one of a couple of companies that has expressed interest in buying chrome, if google is forced to sell it off because of the antitrust case in the us and we'll see what happens there but out of nowhere, they went to google with a 34.5 billion dollar bid. What to purchase? 18 billion, right, so they're probably going to finance it. Um, they must have some investors yeah, they do they.

58:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They said they do.

58:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, um, we're waiting for judge meta's decision which, by the way, was due a week. He said it was going to take a year. It's been a year, so it could be any day. It could happen while we're doing this. We'll see. That'll be interesting. Google is going to appeal, so it's not going to happen immediately and they don't want to sell Chrome.

58:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perplexity is probably counting on that. No, they very much do not want to sell Chrome At this point they're stirring the pot, yeah, so, uh the look.

58:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No one really knows what google chrome is worth, but the estimates ranged from 20 to 50 billion, and 34.5 is pretty much right in the middle.

58:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like right in the middle um, it feels a little like a publicity stunt, to be honest yeah, yeah, that's fair right. I mean, look, I but that's the next big thing is these agentic browsers right?

59:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and they have their own, obviously based on Chromium, as it would be, which is very good Perplexity has one Yep Called Comet.

59:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's right, I've been using it.

59:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Duh yeah, Okay yeah. So you could kind at Chrome, which I think is kind of a long shot that they would use Chrome instead of Chromium or whatever.

59:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Obviously they want the users. I don't think it's the technology They've pledged to keep updating Chromium, to keep.

59:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they talked about $3 billion in investments over the next two years in updating the browsers and whatever. I don't know. I don't know this company, company from adam. All I know is they stole from me and now I pay the money. But the point is, who's this google you're talking about? I know well google too, but um no, actually I don't pay perplexity, but I do get their pro plan for free, right per that tip a couple weeks ago, if you, because you, uh, I got it through the samsung store.

01:00:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I've been paying for it for a couple of years.

01:00:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah um yeah, no, we're both part of the problem.

01:00:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um so, well, I stopped, I canceled my subscription, I just decided. You know, one of the reasons is I found, um, we had the ceo of kagi, which is the search, the weird paid search engine I use right on last week on intelligent machines, yeah, and it turns out they have a very similar product to perplexity. It's called kagi assistant. Okay, that could choose a much broader range of models and I tried it out and it's, it does everything for me and it's in the browser, right, it does everything for me that perplexity does. So, yeah, so until I found out there it's doing something shady, I don't know there's there's not much in this space.

01:00:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yet right, we have Dia, which is Mac only, which is the successor to Arc, from the browser. I know Microsoft Edge last week announced something called Copilot Mode for Microsoft Edge, which is maybe the most evolutionary, if you will, of the updates. Not a big deal yet, although that could be changing, by the way. We'll see Um and then Comet. Um, which you know, I think is Comet and Dia, very similar to me in many ways, but it's a. What it is is a familiar browser experience.

01:01:17
All three of these things, um, take over in windows. What is the control L keyboard shortcut, right? So remember arc. The big thing was ctrl t would bring up that kind of command box and you could do stuff. And one of those things is, yeah, you could open something in a new tab, but it wasn't it kind of overrode new tab. So what these browsers are all doing now is they have a new tab page which is the chat interface, and if you ctrl l it, it goes to the chat, not to the address bar. So maybe that's an innovation, I don't know, but to me it's like what you do from there.

01:01:54
And this is the thing I alluded to, this earlier. I'm going to write about this, so I don't want to get too deep into it yet because I just haven't looked into it too much, but it's very clear to me that the future of this stuff meaning AI interacting with online, like either with websites or web pages or online services, or in windows or on a phone or whatever, with whatever apps you might have is this programmability thing Right. And I have compared this to the work Microsoft did 30 plus years ago on DDE, and then Olay, and then Calm and whatever has come since then. And the idea is that you have an app in that case, back in the day would be an app running in Windows, but today maybe it's an online service or a website and there's a way to you know it exposes its functionality via these kind of like public interfaces, whatever they are. And now in with the AI stuff. Ai can use those interfaces to control those things. Right, um, but we're not there yet.

01:02:52
So with um comet, for example, I used it to say I want to. I want a walking route from my apartment in Mexico city to whatever location, and it literally moved the cursor over to the thing and Google uh, it well loaded Google maps. It added text to it. When it got it wrong, it fixed it. It went back. You know, it did this thing. It went through the whole thing. It controlled the browser. So I sat there watching it and I could have done it myself. It was no big deal, but it was kind of an interesting early peak at that kind of thing.

01:03:24
Microsoft edge and co-pilot mode does something similar, except that it happens in what's very clearly a remote session, so it's a remote view of the browser in a uh, like a form or whatever you want to call it. What do you call it? Like a inset, whatever in the web page and it's moving a cursor around, it's typing, it's doing stuff. It went, it went through a captcha and it was like hey, can you just click that box and let it know it's a human doing this and I'm like, okay, and I did it.

01:03:51
And it didn't work. And it was like it's okay, I'll do it for you. And it was like, really, but it never actually got by the captcha and I don't follow. It was the whatever it was. Uh, camel, camel, camel or whatever service was. They could just tell this is like this is not a human. They were like this is not a human. Yeah, so they were kind of preventing that, but but both of those things are examples of uh, an ai powered web browser, in this case, being used to control web pages like a web browser or whatever. And um, interesting, but I think that's the. That's the first step, like, eventually it's going to be, we're not going to see the browser, we're not going to do it, it's just going to, it's going to work in the background.

01:04:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Most part of you doing searches now. Ai gets the first crack at it anyway.

01:04:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and that's kind of the other thing, right. So with these things, like if you look, if you go to copilotmicrosoftcom for some reason and you type in a query, you would expect copilot is going to answer the query. Right, it's not going to go to search. But when you do it through the browser you have maybe a different expectation and so each of the browsers has a different way of handling that. But in some cases they're doing a light form of orchestration where, depending on the question you ask, it might give you a search, whether, whatever your default search is, it might give you a chat experience and then you can converse and kind of go in and do that kind of thing.

01:05:13
Um, each of them is I was gonna say each of them is good at something, but I'm not actually sure edge is good at anything yet. But, um, let me think about that for a second before I just rag on it entirely. But yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, yeah, I mean, comet to me is in some ways the well it's on windows for one thing that helps a lot. Um, dia, to their credit, they've already set up a page or a site for a skills gallery, and skills are basically a a way to kind of customize or not script exactly, although it's kind of scripting because there is a you can control, like the template use for the output it it produces, um, but it's like they have skills, like one of the skills that they they provide and then you can make your own or edit them is something called. Explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old that's literally what it's called.

01:06:02
Yeah, which I love it's actually great although maybe can I get a 10 year old yeah, oh yeah, well, I mean your trader might be better. So I used it for a couple of different things but, um, like, one of my big struggling points is like quantum computing and I'm like, all right, so I'll use this and they, they use, uh, they have, uh, I'm gonna I'm forgetting which is which in a way here now, but uh, dia, yeah, has at mentions, for example, something, something I think a lot of Microsoft guys are kind of familiar with now from um Outlook. Typically you can do that mention, make sure they're emailing a group of people, but the individual you're involved here he sees, or they see that thing that you're highlighting, whatever that might be. So they have at mentions for tabs, which is kind of cool. So as you type a query you can type at sign and then it will drop down with all the tabs that are there, so we can reference those in kind of a grounding sense.

01:06:48
So that's one of the things I did for like the brow, the um, the smart speaker comparison was like I had two tabs with speakers and asked them to compare it and actually that one was really smart because it it did it compared them and said this is good for this, this is good for the other one. But then it gave me like this advice at the end and said actually, if you want to save some money, buy two of the smaller one and get a little sub and it'll be less money, but it will sound better than one big speaker that costs more. And it was like yeah, actually, that's true, like that's. What site did it steal that from?

01:07:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't, I have to go back. Probably a direct quote from, like a review on an amazon thing it could be. It was good, but it was good information oh yeah, absolutely, except that if you were the guy who had the site that that took it from, you might not yeah, I mean, having been that guy, I I would.

01:07:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do understand the complaint.

01:07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I'm just, uh, my, the way I cope with things is to forget, so, um, you there are two constituencies here because, as an ai user right, you wanted to be smart, that's right. It did you a big favor that was like that.

01:07:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, this is a million years ago. It was probably xbox one time frame. My son texted me one day and he goes yeah, I read this thing about whatever something, something xbox. And I was just about there right back and be like, yeah, I wrote about this today on my site and he goes.

01:08:03
And I know it's bs because this jackass named paul thorat wrote the story and I was like oh, he's teasing me all right, kid, but anyway, um, explain it to me like I am a five-year-old, which is, you know they use slash commands for these things, right? Um, for the skills. Um, you know, you type in whatever the it's like eil5 or something, and then whatever the it's like E, I, l, five or something, and then whatever the thing is. And so I asked her about quantum computing and it. It spit out more than I expected and my my knee jerk reaction was like okay, this is going to be lower level than I wanted. But then, as I read it, I thought you know what that's exactly what I needed.

01:08:40
It's pretty good Like it's pretty good, I like. And, by the way, talking about deterministic, it's pretty good, like it's pretty good, um, I like. And, by the way, talking about deterministic, it's like you know I just said this like zeros and ones. It's like we do have zeros and ones, but zeros can be ones and ones can be zeros.

01:08:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And nobody knows what anything is, and it's like what is happening?

01:08:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
like I can't, even, like I can't, my brain can't handle this. It's like it could be true, false, or it could be true and false, nope, uh, you know, it's like it's hard for me, but let's talk eigenstates, you'll be happy. Yes, so I thought that was pretty good and I used it on one of my own articles. That wasn't particularly technical, I just want it, but it was something along and I wanted to kind of see how it handled it and I was like, yeah, no, it's, it's pretty good. So, and none of the M&A on a on Google, on a Chrome, didn't get mentioned here. No, because I'm working my way through these things. So what I've started with are the more radical ones and I'm waiting. I keep hearing back from like Opera has this Opera Neon browser that's coming.

01:09:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kagi has Orion, by the way, okay, yeah, which also has the Kagi Assistant. So I'm really curious about this stuff.

01:09:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, so the next step is actually going to be Google Chrome, right? So if you open Chrome today, it puts a Gemini icon like way up at the top in the title bar, which is new, and there's also like a well, search tabs is nothing but like. I feel like the major platform makers Google, apple, microsoft are going to be the least aggressive because they don't want to turn off a mainstream audience, like. One of the problems that the browser company ran into with Arc was it was just too much Like. Power users were like oh my God, this is amazing, and 98% of the world, who was just normal, was like what is this? And for DIA, you can see that they really scaled it back, although they're going to add some of those features later, of course, but these are well Edge, I'm not sure yet, but Comet and Dia for sure, and probably Opera Neon to some degree. There is an explicit understanding that this is going to change web browsing forever, that we're not really going to be browsing for the most part anymore. We're going to change web browsing forever, that we're not really going to be browsing for the most part anymore. You know we're going to be getting questions to answers, but answers to questions. But we're also going to be using it to send it off to do things for us, right, you know, like I bought a, like a NAS over the weekend and ordered things, I researched and did all the stuff. It's, you know it's going to handle that kind of stuff for the flight tracking, you know, the kind of common example, whatever.

01:11:06
Um, you know, the price tracker thing was kind of interesting. Like microsoft edge has a price tracker feature built in. Yeah, you have to. Yeah, yep, it's been there for a long time. You have to go find it, you have to click on it, but it's not hard to use like it's. It's not hard, but it's easier.

01:11:22
I think and maybe more, I don't know obvious for many people just to talk to the thing and say I would like, I want to buy one of these things, let me know when it gets below whatever 150 bucks or whatever it is, and then you go off and in that case you're not going to hear back in two minutes probably, because that speaker is usually a little more expensive. But one day, you know, black Friday, maybe this thing's going to be on sale and your browser is going to be like hey, here we go let's you want it, let's click here, let's do it, you know, and I do think that's useful. I mean, I think you know, I think people are going to use this stuff. So it's I'm. I've been kind of on this for a while, like I always felt like, or long felt, that web browsers most important apps we all use, mobile or desktop. They haven't changed much in 20 years. Yeah, um ai, I think this is finally going to do it.

01:12:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, even the browser looks the same. What it's talking to is different, and that's already happened.

01:12:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Search isn't search anymore I know, yeah, right, but that's the thing I mean. A lot of the times we didn't really want search, you know?

01:12:25
no, we just wanted answers we've turned ourselves into, like these um automatons that, like you know, control, click. Like you go down the list, you're like click, click, click, click, and then you tab over to each brought and you're like no, no, maybe, and then you spend time in there and you're like no, and then you know, like I mean again in it with the theory that ultimately, what this thing is doing is saving you time if what you're looking for is the answer to something, whether you're a programmer looking for some coding, uh issue or whatever, searching for a product, a flight or whatever. I mean it's even stupid things like um comet right, which is named after you know, comet. Like what's the difference between a comet and a meteorite? A meteorite? And I asked my wife this question and she's like she started on some path and I was like no wrong, oh God, that's mean I said. I said you don't answer that question. We have AI for this. Nobody cares what you think is the difference. The difference is out there and we can find it out.

01:13:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would you have used a Google search in the past to do that? Yeah, of course, and probably you would have gotten a source that you said, oh, this one's reliable, this one's not, and chosen the reliable one and then felt comfortable about the answer.

01:13:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So search has changed because now, depending on the service you use, you get some kind of a summary at the top and in this case, that summary is usually what you're going to want. Now the question is whether you trust the thing. How do you vet it? Yeah, yeah, but this is a simple one. I mean, I feel like most of us are on the cusp of knowing exactly what the difference is. But, or we do literally just know.

01:13:55
But when you, when I read that, you know I did, I did do this in the car. I literally brought this up on something, I don't remember which AI but, and I was like, yeah, this is the answer. And so, like, in that case, like asking questions that you already know the answers to is not really a good future, but you know, it's how we get started on these things. I think it's going to be used for that kind of stuff. You know my son not to keep bringing him up for some reason, but like a million years ago when he was he had been three, five for some reason, but like a million years ago when he was he had been three, five, something really young he said someone should invent this thing where you ask it any question, it gives you the answer. And I'm like, oh, you're going to be delighted to know that google search exists and, uh, it might have even been altavista at that point. I have no idea, it was a long time ago, but, um, and today that thing is these ais right that we this is where we're going to turn for answers, these AIs right that we this is where we're going to turn for answers. God help us all. But yeah, so I think making something familiar makes sense, but I also think these things are going to change pretty dramatically.

01:14:58
And then there's a link in the notes here I don't know. It says some bigger UI changes are on on the way. There's a guy on x slash, twitter, whatever, who discovered that microsoft is potentially screwing around with the ui for edge and it's probably for this a. What do you call the co-pilot mode, which is just going to be the mode? Right, it's going to be. And I'm actually I'm looking at this now. I might even have the wrong. This might be the wrong link, but maybe it's further down. Yeah, it's the olympia windows and edge. So, um, again, it's recognizable as a web browser. It's uh, you know, the ui is definitely a little different, a little more centered and whatever, but maybe so this is them doing the same thing as these other guys are doing, which is an ai first, I feel like it's inevitable, right so richard, yeah,

01:15:47
richard asked me about chrome. I'm actually going to look at that one next. But, like, like I said, if you look at chrome right now, you get this kind of button at the top, which makes it somewhat. You see it so you might click on it and if you do, it gives you some info. It's like hey, gemini's in chrome, it's your AI assistant. All of these things have like keyboard shortcuts now. So if you're using Chrome, see what this does. Yeah, you type yeah.

01:16:10
This is very much like whatever they call it an edge, quick assist or whatever. So, like you know, an edge today, if you're not in copilot mode, you get like a sidebar for copilot. In copilotilot mode it's. I think it's called what is it called edge assist or something or whatever it's. It's basically the, the pain, but it's like a little pop down thing that comes over on the side and the gemini panel or whatever this thing is called looks exactly like this, like it's, it's, so it's, it's. They've, they've added the some kind of gemini capabilities here. It's over the thing you're looking at a little bit, but not too bad. So it's not side by side. I think side by side would be a little better. Um, but it asks. It gives you some little prompts like, um, what you know? Like, ask me about the page. Like you you're going to like, I want a summary of this thing. I want, if it long, throw up premium article, whatever it is you're like, could we just cut this thing?

01:17:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to the chase like what, what is?

01:17:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this about, and that's you know what's looking for an answer here, right um?

01:17:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so yeah, I mean, it's fine you just got to figure out if you trust that answer and how you're going to validate that answer.

01:17:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, well, leo's about to talk to the guy who's in charge of the models for google or whatever I would ask it, but later, excuse me, woman, so ask them how do we trust? Yeah, you know, um, how do we trust these things? I don't know, but but I think for most of us it what happens is you get enough in the way of good answers where you're like all right, yeah, I don't think you even think it explicitly.

01:17:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think trust is something you build over time and it just happens and is it just stepping up what we already really need to do in the internet era, which is kind of being kind of what I was talking about before, kind of critical thinking like? You know, being more careful about vetting the information we're getting.

01:17:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just that I, I you know, this has been an overall problem with the internet. Now that we have far more information available to us, it really matters that that information is accurate.

01:18:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You see what half of our country believes you can see the impact of not vetting sources and just trusting what you hear from a so-called expert or whatever. Yeah, this is going to continue to be a problem and probably be a worse problem. I don't know, I don't know. I definitely, you know, I haven't been bit enough that I'm like I've just stopped trusting totally.

01:18:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's funny because I see like estimates that you're getting 20% hallucination or whatever and I don't get that. It doesn't feel like I'm getting that.

01:18:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I got 40% from my wife when I asked her what a comet was so you?

01:18:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, like I don't ask people for directions on the street because I know they'll be wrong, right and you've got a tool that will give you accurate answers for that.

01:18:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yep I'm working with devs now that are using ai coding modes at incredible speeds produce huge amounts of applications and the proof is in the pudding that they're deployed and doing what the users wanted.

01:19:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, right. That's the thing Leo just showed. A really good example of this. The thing Leo wanted that was in. He may have only had half an idea, or whatever the notion was.

01:19:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did, I had half an idea, but then you, well, but maybe well, and then I iterated it, meaning you didn't start with what you ended up with.

01:19:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You weren't like I want to get there. As you started doing it, you were like, oh, this is kind of cool, Can I do this?

01:19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I can iterate right, and it's a conversation with the AI.

01:19:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so this is exciting. Now, in your case, you actually know how to write programs and things like that. But this is something people can do now that they were just never going to do before you know well I wouldn't.

01:19:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can write code, but I wouldn't have done this either yeah, and, and, and this is too trivial to spend any energy on right.

01:19:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But well, okay, yeah, okay, but it still gives you make every day you turn it, you come on, it comes on you.

01:19:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I will now have the weather and you're like this. Is you like it? Like it's nice?

01:19:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, and it's. There is no thing like this out in the world that you could have just gotten. You created something completely unique that you wanted, that you like and now you can use every day, and that's a. I mean, is there a better example of democratization of technology? It's remarkable, I think it's great.

01:20:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:20:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you're getting Now, if the phase of the moon is wrong in your little grid there, it's not a problem, no one dies. If you're asking it about, I have like a red bump on my arm, or you know, should I put all of my 401k money into like a bitcoin or whatever? Excellent point you want to. You know you got to be careful there, but I don't.

01:20:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm disturbed by some of the questions people are asking these ai. Can you read my coffee grounds to tell me if my husband is cheating on me? Why are you asking that question?

01:20:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
go to the door immediately. He is cheating on you and you get up and you're like wait what the hell's happening? Like what, like what would make you? But I mean, but if someone is asking a question like that and god help us, they probably are I mean you found your audience. I mean, like there, I'm sure this thing is talking to those people in a way that they enjoy and without the sidelong as soon as they change it.

01:21:12
They freaked out, right, right, I don't know. I don't have to say to something like that, but I don't know. I'm going to ask it for relationship advice. I'll be on the street in two seconds, um, which is actually kind of a miracle it hasn't happened yet. Um, yeah, so I don't know, I look, I'll. I I'm going to look at Google next. Like I said, now that I have this kind of background with these other things and I've seen, like some of the stuff, like I really the skills thing in um Dia to me, comet already just works with public websites, you can do things like I want to need, like you have your morning summary. Like one of the things you could do with regards to that is like here's the email, here's the most important emails you got overnight. Like you've got 17 emails, but two of them are actually really important.

01:22:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's actually a really good comment is very good at that.

01:22:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I could start to think about okay, well, now I could do that, maybe I could add more to that. Yeah, the problem is, you know well, not the problem, a problem like. One problem like, and especially with my audience, is, like um, I I've told the story about back in the day when microsoft added um cortana to windows 10 some guy emailed me or whatever, and he said, yeah, he's like, this damn thing asked me to give it permission to my calendar, my contacts, my blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, it's your personal assistant. Like, look, this is the relationship. If you don't want that, you can't not do that. Like you Right?

01:22:38
So when I did this, like, for example, I had to sign in with my Google account and give it access to my email and my calendar yeah, my email, and so it could do those things. And some guy, sure enough, in comments is like I mean, do you trust perplexity with your information in your Google account? I'm like trust is a strong word. I knew what I was doing. When I said yes, I mean I wanted to see if it would work or how it would work and what that looked like. And you know, I do. I trust that when I get in the car, it's not going to explode when I drive out to the mailbox, or you know like there's different levels of trust. I guess I don't know, but I look, you're going to, if you, if you're going to do this, you have to trust something, unfortunately, I mean you have, but you're also pressing into.

01:23:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The larger issue is why do all these companies want a browser? Why did perplexity even make that offer? Because they need the front-end data feed. This is not about serving the customer.

01:23:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is about collecting data you know, even for me, man, that's kind of cynical. But yeah, no, I I mean, yes, you're of course, 100 right, but you know, in a good bartering situation you should get something. That as the bartering situation you should get something as a customer. You should get some benefit from it as well.

01:23:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, you're going to be part of the robotic overflow.

01:23:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's great, that's right. You will be suctioned into the matrix machine just like every other meat bag. Yeah, but I don't know what to say to this. I mean, you're right, Like you're a hundred percent right. But the way, the less cynical way to look at that and I'm not denying what you said, Like you're you're correct Is when Google made Chrome. The reason was we can't trust Microsoft, Google, Apple to make a browser that meets our needs. Our business is web-based. This thing has to work, and so we finally realized we're gonna have to do this ourself, and the first thing anyone would have said about Chrome when I first came out was like this thing is really fast, Like it's really. They were really good at that. They were like we're gonna get that part of it right now. Today, Chrome is it's still fast, I guess, but it's now. It's you know whatever data collecting monster whatever, and and a software proxy monster.

01:24:48
you know you've got 60 instances of chrome, whether you knew it or not. Yes, right. So I, when I look at these ai companies, whether it's uh, perplexity or anthropic open ai who's rumored to be doing a browser as well. You know what? What's there? What, aside from what rich said, which is true, like, what's the dynamic here? And I think it's similar it's like look, we're looking at a world that's going to be different than the world today. We can't trust these big browser makers to change the world because they have their business models and they're stuck. And you don't I mean, honestly, comet or Dia, they're not so radical that they're like oh my God, this is a different thing, you know, but the goal is to kind of get it there, and I feel like you know Microsoft, google, apple, maybe we'll get there. They'll kind of limp along in the background a little bit and they'll get there on their own schedule.

01:25:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've tried to. They've tried to buy. They even made the offer to buy. You know Chromium is open source. Get to work. I bet you can use an AI to help you build a browser in pretty short order.

01:25:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they did. I mean, that's what Comet is right. So they did, they did and they do in fact have it. I actually, for the most part, I mean I've comet every day since I got it, you know whenever. That was a week, 10 days ago. Um, you know it, there is a bar that it meets.

01:26:09
That, I think, is really important, because my wife has also been using it and she's, you know, she uses chrome. She doesn't think about this stuff, she doesn't care. And you know she adopted, adopted. I gave her a laptop that windows 11 on it and she used it and then, like a month later, I was like so everyone I know complains about Windows 11. Do you have anything to say? And she's like I didn't. What are you talking about? I'm like it's running Windows 11. She's like, ok, didn't even notice, so she doesn't care. Nope.

01:26:33
And her commentary on Comet was kind of similar. She's like it looks like Chrome, like it's, say, but on the new tab page, whatever you can, from the dropdown, choose to go to Google search if that's what you want, but if you just hit enter, it's going to go through the AI. And she's like, you know, depending on what I'm doing like she's like she's already picked this up. She's like I know, sometimes I do want to Google search for whatever reason, but sometimes I'm looking for an answer to something, whatever it might be, whatever she's doing, and she's like, yeah, no, this works, she likes it, she's normal, she's not a technical person.

01:27:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's how normal people react. I'm just trying to get my work done. I don't care about the rest.

01:27:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah trying to get my work done. I don't care about the rest. Yeah, it's like don't look, don't, don't try to help.

01:27:27
But, dear god, do not get in the way like just let me do what I'm doing and and I think that's the, that's where arc, I think, failed a lot of people and why they're rethinking things with dia and when you, that product is, like I said, it's very similar, but it's just not on windows yet so it's a little harder, uh, to use. But or you know, unless you have a mac, then it's a little harder to use, but or you know, unless you have a Mac, then it's fine, but but yeah, I think these things they're interesting, they're, they're half steps, they're not, they're, they're recognizable as browsers. But I think that was part of the agreement. Like we know no one's going to do this and like, like we can't just throw up this thing that's all spiky and weird, looking Like it has to look like a browser, do the browser stuff, it does tabs, it does everything, everything you need. That all just works.

01:28:09
I hate these phrases like table stakes or whatever. It's a browser, oh, but it does these other things, so I don't know We'll see, mostly provides telemetry to the host company.

01:28:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to pause for a little bit. There is so much more to talk about, but we need to take it.

01:28:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to talk about how cynical Richard is, because, my God, no, I'm sorry.

01:28:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unbelievable. Can you believe this guy?

01:28:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's not true. No, he's absolutely true, he's right.

01:28:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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01:32:46
All right, richard's back and synchronized. For the moment I'm going to show you because I got the little key working. Let's just see. I hit control W. Where are we today? So the idea was I want to have this as a diary of my travels, right? But let's say today I'm in Madeira Park. Let's see what the weather is where richard is. Oh, it's very nice. It is 80 degrees, the high 64, the low partly sunny. Sunset 605 am, sun sunrise sunset 680, 8, 36 pm and the moon is a waning gibbous oh right, so we were in the an uber last night driving toward the sunset and I was like, oh, I'm like it looks like the sun setting.

01:33:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm like, what time does sunset? And stephanie's like I, you know I'm not really sure. I'm like, oh, this is a question for ai. I could ask ai this thing. So I asked and it was like 5, 41, which was the time at the time, and I'm like nope, nope, nope, wrong, it was like $6.50.

01:33:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the way this does this. This queries an API for a weather system which is OpenMeteo. It's called or Meteo, but you can use the National Weather Service, a variety of if you have an API key. There's open weather. So it queries and gets it from a reliable source, so you don't have to worry about it. You know it's accurate, that's always a challenge.

01:34:09
I mentioned the moon phase was a problem. It couldn't. I don't know, maybe the server wasn't working right or whatever. It's supposed to give you that information? It couldn't, but it figured out how to calculate it. It's a little rougher, it's good enough for me. And it's a little rougher, it's good enough for me and it's been accurate. So it is waxing gibbous. We just had a full moon.

01:34:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We had orcas swim right by the boathouse while I was away, so I have video clips of that yeah.

01:34:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's 836. It's the correct sunset time. For me it seems a little. Well, you're farther north than me, 836? It's later than that. Okay, so maybe that is incorrect or maybe it's not. Madera park bc, maybe, I don't know. Are there other madera parks in the world? I didn't put bc there are there are. Oh well, that's maybe it's some other material.

01:34:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was just thinking. Actually, the actual sunset time was probably not 6 50, but whatever.

01:35:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever time it was, it was not the time it was yeah, yeah, come on man, come on man. Anyway, I just thought I'd show off my code that I did not write that one is great, but it's so nice to have that in my diary.

01:35:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I checked it, it said 8, 36, so I second source it for you it all yeah, oh, all right, there you go.

01:35:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And is it 80 degrees this afternoon easily? Yeah, it's very nice there. Nice, I mean, that's the one thing that you know weather forecasts. There's no authoritative source for the actual forecast. It's all a guess. Yeah, right it is a forecast?

01:35:41
uh, that is local time. Somebody's asking yeah, it's local time. Is a forecast, uh, that is local time. Somebody's asking yeah, it's local time because what it does is it takes the place. I looked and it figures out, gps coordinates and then goes by, gps coordinates and gets local time I think mine did a random number generator and turned it into like a clock format.

01:35:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what the heck that was but it was useless um, anyway, is it raining?

01:36:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
anyway, we have there's a little more ai news. Yeah, it's a couple of quick, but it was useless Anyway.

01:36:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it raining? Anyway, there's a little more AI news. Yeah, just a couple of quick things. Two Microsoft things. So Copilot 3D is a feature of Copilot where you can turn a still image into a 3D model. How does that work? Well, magic, magic computing, I don't know. No, I know how.

01:36:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, but does it work? Well, is more like what I was. I've never will.

01:36:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, no, I'm sorry, I should never say never will, but I've not done this and I don't this. This is eerily reminiscent of that. Creators update nonsense. That's where that 3d stuff came from. Yeah, it's like we have this around. Can we use this for anything? Put it in copilot. Yeah, copilot will eat anything. Yeah, it's an experimental tool.

01:36:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
At this point I'm gonna yeah, I'll map. I think they were trying to be important in the 3d printing space, but by the time they got there it was a solved problem. Right, there's a set of software that everybody uses, and they're not just changing right, right, oh, that's right.

01:37:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They did that whole. What was it? The educators update or no? They create creators update.

01:37:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they had paints 3d and 3d remix Remember it was a website or remix 3d I guess? Um, I don't know. Uh, they try. I've never. I've never understood anything that they do. All right, let me get rid of that. I almost signed into that thing. And then this is a great example of what the audience is like too. Microsoft is killing its Lens app. So Lens app. Microsoft Lens started as Office Lens. It was for Windows Phone, that's how far back that is. But within a year they brought a version to android and ios, renamed it at some point to microsoft lens. The key use case for me for this was to photograph a receipt, like when you were doing business travel and you wanted to send in the expense because you could just take it. You know it's sitting around the whatever surface you take a picture, it's like at an angle and it straightens it out, you know, makes it perfect, like yeah, it's really neat, very legible.

01:38:11
Yeah, I've done it on whiteboards and it even got rid of a light bloom off the whiteboard right see this was like the piece of software yeah, um, back in the day, I remember I was in a meeting I think it was actually at microsoft on the campus, but whatever, it was someone they're drawing on the whiteboard and some guys like this is why I have a tablet pc, I can recreate the whiteboard experience and I was like, oh, that's great, click you know like you, but keep drawing there rembrandt.

01:38:38
I'm sure that's smart. Um, yeah, I think like just it was the ocr stuff you know it could take, it would take the text, bring in it. You know it was the OCR stuff, it would take the text, bring in it. It was nice. So this functionality is pretty much all available in the Copilot app or the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. So they're going to just consolidate it down.

01:38:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's also part of a push by Satcha to retire out-of-date software. As much as it annoys us it, it's even worse. They were keeping a lot of this stuff around yeah, for far too long.

01:39:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, a lot of fans of this app, though, I mean, and I think I've heard from all of them yep, so that's good um curious about any way to do it but this one, so github is a, am I right, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, but it's independently operated.

01:39:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not so much, not so fast, paulie, it's like the mom and pop of software development shops on the internet.

01:39:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've made the case. Microsoft's a good steward, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

01:39:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And Thomas Demke took over from Matt Nat Friedman back in the day Right and now free when went where went off to an AI startup Okay, a while ago.

01:39:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, not a big company that we've all heard of, but no, no, and he went off to make something new.

01:39:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But he so he I mean he got, he was part of the Xamarin acquisition. He formed created Xamarin in the first place with with Miguel and they both joined Microsoft. But they went in immediately different directions inside of Microsoft. Right, miguel went off to the Distinguished Engineer path and dealt with a bunch of interesting things, eventually got frustrated and left and Matt went down the Medicare path.

01:40:15
I did too. Matt went down the VP path and was involved really on the Azure DevOps side, like those kinds of things, yeah. And then, as Brian Harry stepped away for a leave which was just about the time that they bought GitHub and then Nat was installed as the CEO down there reporting it to Julia Lucent through DevDiv, and then, when Nat moved on, Thomas Demke took over.

01:40:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's an important point. By the way, it is GitHub, you know, independent in whatever ways, but the ceo reported someone from dev div yes, so the head of dev div the head of divot.

01:40:52
Yeah, so the um, the person who replaced not is thomas demke. He's the guy who's leaving, or believe he'll be leaving later this year. Yeah and yeah, there's some troubling language in this announcement. One of them is we have decided not to replace him. They're not going to have a CEO of GitHub. Apparently, I guess AI will be the CEO of GitHub or what's happening Well.

01:41:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Their director of operations should be. The number two is now reporting up through asha, who's the head of ops for ai under jay uh peric, which is the new organization. Yeah, the new core ai, which also owns devtiv.

01:41:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's no way to make sense of this, but I'll do my best. Uh, about a year and a half ago, microsoft hired Suleiman what's his first name? Mustafa Mustafa Suleiman. Away from, I'm losing my mind with all these AI company names. I bet I almost have it, it doesn't matter Anyway and brought most of the team with him. What the fuck is the name of that company? Anyway, started what was described as a new ai microsoft ai organization. That was kind of outside of other stuff, right?

01:42:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
um, yeah, it was the goal. It was satch's first attempt to how to do consumer ai because we suck at consumer ai, yes and also basically got a deep mind to do this right.

01:42:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you took all the deep mind was like an aqua hire thing. Um the the interesting. Well, one of the many interesting things there was the sam altman. Stuff had just happened at open ai and there was that moment where microsoft was like we have invested tens. You know, that's when we saw dark satya yep, and that's when this started right. And so the first big overt move was um wasuleiman and what's called Microsoft AI In October of last year. So six months later they hired Jay I'm terrible with these names. What's the guy's name? Harik Harik. So he looks like a little mini Saja.

01:42:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He came, I believe from Meta yes, he was CEO of a company called Lo lace. I think, yeah, that sounds like laceworks lacework.

01:43:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's not I was gonna say security company that failed brutally, and he's you know microsoft is since this time is engaged in the kind of activities you know meta's been accused of, where this throwing a lot of money, like big money, at ai experts from different companies. They've apparently hired a bunch of people from like google, d-mind actually, um, but at that time anyway, they hired him, and that's this, another new ai organization. Uh, which is what? Ai, core core, ai, core ai. So that's the part of the company that github is now under. So it used to be under DevDiv. Well, devdiv is in Core AI as well.

01:43:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, but now it's okay. So my guess here is that they told Thomas Demke he'd now be reporting to Jay and he said how about no Interesting?

01:43:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't. That's curious. I'm curious why he would even feel strongly about that.

01:44:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, here's the logical thing you can reasonably hang your hat on. I was the CEO when we created GitHub co-pilot. I want my billion dollars please. And he's basically said, point blank I'm going to go set up a startup.

01:44:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, interesting.

01:44:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So things are going the way you like you want to do. You're thinking about something else and it's like there's. I would argue it's almost too late to set up an ai startup now, like we're kind of at the end of that. This would be the last chance.

01:44:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's probably waited a bit too long, okay what my sense of it maybe the way I read it was microsoft is absorbing github into their larger yeah they want one overall ai strategy or, as we would describe it, the blob from the movie, the blob that just it grows bigger as it absorbs everything around it

01:44:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that kind of thing well, you have that classic crazy belief that if I pile enough stuff in the heat maybe it'll turn into something oh, man, that was part of the, the, the deterministic um conversation, which is, which is one of the weirdisms of ai, which is you ask it a question, it gives you an answer, and you ask it again, it gives you a different answer. Because it's never the same, you know. I mean, hopefully it's in the ballpark or something, but it's never exactly the same, like it's not, like. Oh, I've answered this, this is the answer. It's. It's like it works on it every single time.

01:45:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Well, see, there was a lot in the early days of LLMs. There was a couple of papers that really focused on this idea of if we just get the data set big enough, it'll get really great. And then, as we actually got the data set big enough, what we found out is there's just too many symmetrical probabilities, and so you can get all kinds of results Like there's not enough granularity in the probability stack to actually get that, and so now we're kind of pushing the other way and getting into much more specific sets of data so that it's very consistent on its specialty.

01:45:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A series of smaller LLMs may be orchestrated together by something that you're just grounded in whatever data set, and that tends to be a good way to make sure.

01:46:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Which also tends to be how technology is mature. You grow, grow, grow. Okay, this is a bit too big. Now you refine, and we seem to be getting into this refining interesting point yeah, so, yeah.

01:46:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So in your view, richard, did microsoft just just absorb github, because that that is what I've. Yeah, I think that's the intent.

01:46:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see what happens. A they're down in the silicon valley, they're not in seattle or redmond, uh. B they have been. I'm not gonna say a thorn in the side, but they're very much aware that they aren't all microsoft right, that they're part of the larger open source community, that there's hugely a number of other communities that are tightly associated with them, that many perceive microsoft as a threat and that hands off like putting nat freeman in the first place was all about because he was also from the valley keeping that same culture in place and demke was background and yeah, and demke was hockey app.

01:47:01
He was also from that area. Like that's the way things have been Now. Nominally, so is Jay, but I don't know that anybody feels that way about Jay. Yeah.

01:47:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like he's kind of an unknown, frankly.

01:47:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What I'm hearing is he's hired a lot of his meta buddies and they're trying to do meta things inside of the company and folks are like because those guys are wildly successful.

01:47:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you could argue what Microsoft needs is more tech bros. There you go.

01:47:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You could, but that would be stupid you know what this Redmond area needs A little more value, more bro yeah, we need more bro. There we go Extra bro, can we?

01:47:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
get some more flip-flops up here.

01:47:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:47:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, yeah, I don't know, I don't know what to think of this personally.

01:47:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I have held my judgment on Jay because I did feel like DevNiv needed a shakeup and the fact that they were going to focus it around AI to do that. Fine, but in the end we needed to move forward on some things that weren't happening, and maybe this is the way to move forward. I have a sneaky suspicion he's feeling the fire hose right now is the polite term, because he's been dealing with companies to do one thing, or maybe five things is a multi-headed hydra welcome to the 200 things right like I can't even imagine it's, and it's part of the problem, right like?

01:48:19
one of the ways that microsoft has moved so quickly in the cloud is to give their teams an awful lot of freedom to build things. The byproduct of that is they've all built them differently and now, as you expect reliability from the cloud, they're conflicting with each other, and so there needs to be more governance, they need to rein things in, and Jay also has that air about him. He's the heavyweight that's going to straighten stuff out. I just don't know he's in the right job like. I would have been really interested to see that guy own the azure infrastructure problem, not the ai problem right that I don't know.

01:48:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not, it's not up to me and they didn't ask right, okay, well, we'll see what happens there I yeah, I think most people, even people that don't trust microsoft, would say they've done a good job with github so far I keep basing hands off, so now they're not going to, by all accounts.

01:49:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
what does this mean, right? So I think I think it's worth taking a breath and watching what happens, rather than just hauling all your stuff and running off to get lab, which, of course, still runs on Azure anyway, but whatever, right.

01:49:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, okay, uh, this is not a big deal, but I mentioned it because I have one of these computers and I'm glad to see this happen. And finally, uh, so surface laptop seven, which is the the year ago surface laptop, right, the first gen snapdragon x, whatever. And surface pro 11, which is essentially the same computer but in a different body. Uh, get the same firmware updates, just like you know, 24, 25 h, to get the same monthly updates or whatever. Um, and this one is I can't. I don't have it here in front of me.

01:50:02
This is a hard thing to describe, but there's a battery saver feature that's in Windows 11. You'll never see it because it doesn't get exposed in settings anywhere and you can't configure it. But if your computer supports it, the OEM that makes it will have their own software that provides some interface to it. And in the Microsoft world, the Surface app was that app. And so if you went into the Surface app, you may or may not see something called I think it's called smart power or smart battery or whatever the battery saver or whatever the term is, and you don't see it all the time. So it's just, it's a weird feature.

01:50:38
So you get a brand new Surface laptop, maybe, in my case, use it. For a month. This feature is not there, but then one day you've used it enough and it says all right, we got some data here. We know how you're using the computer. We're going to turn this thing on and you can't do anything about it. All you can do is turn it off temporarily, and so what it does is it's like intelligence charging intelligent charging. So if you're in a hotel and you're going to fly at four o'clock in the morning the next day, you do not want intelligent charging, you want you want a full battery yeah, you don't want it to think about it, you want it just to do it and in.

01:51:11
If you had a surface and you were thinking about that, you could go into the app and say, today I'm turning it off and it would be okay. Today it would go back to the way it was before later. So they just change that so that you have three choices now, and so it can do that. It can do nothing or it can always charge to 80%, which for some reason is the accepted industry standard for this is one of the.

01:51:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This almost feels like fallout from EVs, right that? Hey, batteries last a lot longer if you only charge them to 80%.

01:51:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yep, so you can now, as an individual, determine what you want. So, basically, what they did was they had this stupid windows 11 feature and now they're not using it anymore. So good, so that's good, okay.

01:51:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh, I guess we're ready for games we're not going to talk about the, the game assistant in edge and just how much love I'm getting on the it spaces for this god, I mean, would be the time where we could throw it into the, because it's kind of game related.

01:52:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is game related, yeah, yeah. So what Richard is describing as the type of thing we've seen in this space with Microsoft for a long, long time? One of the earliest versions of this to me was when they put IIS in early I think it was the first or second version into some, into a feature pack for windows nt 4.0, the nt option pack, yeah, option pack. And you, you had to get internet explorer, sorry. So you get this bulletproof, bulletproof operating system and we're gonna screw it up bad, you know, um, and so what's the latest? What is what's happening with game?

01:52:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
assist. So game assist is deployed as part of an edge update and it deployed to anywhere that edge exists, including, like domain controller, pcs running server 2022. But why do you hate gaming?

01:52:57
so much don't do a lot of gaming. I'm like get my domain controller. But the real issue is that not only is it installed automatically with the edge update, which happens automatically, but it runs automatically, and on many of these lockdown machines which is what you normally do with a domain controller it crashes automatically. And then your SIEM software, your security management software, notices that you have a piece of software repeatedly crashing on servers that wasn't there before and flags it as malware, which actually it is. So then you go and say, well, where the hell did this come from? And you uninstall it and guess what happens next week? Edge updates again and puts it back. Puts it back. Yeah, so they're a little growly, and this has been going on for about two months now. That is amazing, it's really a thing, yay internet.

01:53:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yay, we win again. I yeah, they try.

01:53:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't do they try, I don't know um, yeah, but I mean, ultimately, the answer is you can't run edge on a server anymore until it fixes this right, and that creates a whole other host of problems. Yep, you know, often those are the machines that still. They're not only still running Edge, but they're running Edge in IE9 mode. Right, they set the flags to support some internal piece of software that still doesn't work in conventional browser configuration. Like heaven help them. They're running it in IE7 mode, but that's possible. So you really can't get it out. Yep, apparently, if you actually truly run core editions of 2025, which basically is I, is ux less, it's not a problem there, because you don't.

01:54:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I, I know microsoft well enough to know exactly how this is going to play out. Um, microsoft later this year will create something called microsoft edge and edge mode. And edge and edge mode will not do any of those end-user things. It will just provide like a really basic browser and then, as soon as they announce this because it's only going to be for servers and it's only going to be for public-facing servers, especially whatever there are going to be people like us, people watching the show, who are like oh, that's the version of Edge I want.

01:55:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, and it's like I mean it's not that hard to detect. Hey, this is a server version of of the os.

01:55:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I should just not install this piece on it on edge again, you speak logic, and I don't understand why, because it's just not the world we live in but, yeah, no, you're right. I mean you're right, yeah it's. This is something that never should have happened.

01:55:22
So no sure they'll get there, or am I, I don't know? Okay, so, um, uh, we did a bunch of earning stuff, you know, past couple weeks. There's probably more coming, uh, but in the past week the big one was sony, and I only pay attention to, you know, not so much to their life insurance company but, um, to the video game stuff they do so, sony sold yeah well, that's actually their money.

01:55:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a lot of their, a lot of the revenue that comes out of life and shit.

01:55:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's bizarre, it's a bizarre company, um, but but you know they have media stuff, right, they have music and movies and whatever, but I don't really care about anything but video games in this case. So, 2.5 million ps5s in the quarter, they've've now sold over 80 million. Put this in perspective, the way they say it is like it's on a faster pace than the PS4. But the PS4 sold I think it was 123, something like that or 120, somewhere there 150, 120. They're probably never going to get there per se, but the Xbox 360 and the PS3, which were pretty much neck and neck for most of that generation, both sold somewhere in the 84 88 million units.

01:56:30
So, yeah, it's probably going to go by that and, honestly, given you know the pandemic launch and component shortages and yada, yada, yada, it's super expensive. Um, it's doing pretty good. Um, the problem is, as I looked into this, you know, of course we know nintendo is getting very close to this, the original switch being like the best-selling console of all time. They'll probably cost cross that milestone sometime this year. Um, you know how's microsoft doing and it's like you never see everything's an xbox.

01:57:03
In that sense they're doing great, uh, but if you actually look at xboxes, they're not doing great and it's like you never see, can you see everything's in Xbox? In that sense, they're doing great, but if you actually look at Xboxes, they're not doing great. So the estimate now and this is based on some combination of private and public data is that full generation Xbox Series X and S is sold somewhere in the 20 millions units. So 21 to 29 million units, wow, um, which is low, uh, which is bad, and and I, I think I made this comment like, in fact, I, yeah, I did, uh, I was talking about they finally provided some numbers on revenues and if you went back far enough, you could get down to zero. You know, like you know, because now we, now that we have a number, we can go back and look at, you know this quarter, it's up, this, you know percent, and we can just go back in time and see where we're at right.

01:57:51
Um, it's hard to do this with xbox because we never got a hard number. They stopped doing hard numbers in the xbox one generation, but the, the sheer number of quarters in a row where it's been like a double digit decline in revenue and hardware is a stock. Like I don't even understand how it could keep going like this. Like at some point you just did zero and we sold zero, so we're doing pretty good. You know, like it's not, but that's not what happens. It's like 22%, 40%. You know 13%, 22%, like it's bizarre to me. So 21, we'll call it 25 million-ish, somewhere in there. 25, 30, if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, that's not great.

01:58:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the worst ever really, and there's no sign of a new one, because they basically want to get out of the hardware biz.

01:58:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, but we do have two very interesting uh, windows 11 on arm related xbox gaming stories that are not just good news, but maybe, given the stuff we've talked about with coming consoles, whatever might point to that future right this notion that they really, really, really want to get this stuff on ARM One just happened. So this is kind of interesting. Like literally right before the show, microsoft announced something that I was actually just struggling with over the weekend, which is that if you have a Windows on ARM laptop, like a CoPilot Plus PC running Snapdragon X processor, the Xbox app is there, and if you don't have Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which is the version that gives you the PC side and the console side but also the game streaming side, this app doesn't do anything. There's nothing there. All you can do is stream games over the internet, and so my argument there was always like I don't understand this. There are games that do run okay on Windows 11. Why wouldn't it just show you the games that it knows would maybe run or whatever? At least give you the option, because if you're on a normal x64 PC and you go into the Xbox app, what it's supposed to do is say, like you're looking at Call of Duty maybe, and it's like this app or this game will run on your computer, that kind of thing. They have this kind of data like they, they know. So I never understood why they just never made it available, right?

02:00:13
And so, over the weekend, um, I wanted to download the thing that will be my eventual epic, so I won't discuss that quite yet. But, uh, there's no reason this shouldn't run on arm and it's not in the xbox app, of course, because they just don't put that stuff there. And I went to the store and I'm like, well, maybe I can get it here. And nope, doesn't show up because it's, you know, they're filtering the view, um. But then today, literally two days later, um, they announced they're bringing game downloading to the xbox app on windows 11, on arm, and I actually already have it. So I, you have to sign into the, you download the. I don't have it on this computer. I keep doing this, the Xbox Insider app from the store. If you're not signed into this already, you can go in through the various programs. You can maybe join, and one of them is the PC beta, and when you sign into that, you go to the store, check for updates, you get a new version of the Xbox app and it will give you this kind of pre-release version of the Xbox app.

02:01:05
And I looked, I like I said I think it was two days ago, three years ago, max for this game not there. I brought it up today and it came right up. It's there. All the not all of them, I haven't looked at thoroughly, but a lot of the games that I have available to me through game pass or maybe they're in my library because I purchased them are now there and that's good stuff Like this is. This is an important step. Again, like I can't quite understand why this wasn't there a year ago, but this is a big deal and it's really good. So I'm going to I'm going to be writing more about this after I can compare what's not there. You know, I'm kind of curious. Like I'm pretty sure, like Call of Duty, I probably couldn't put that on my base level. You know Snapdragon X laptop laptop over here, but it'd be kind of amazing if I could actually, but someday, someday.

02:01:49
Um, the other one was is a software incompatibility.

02:01:51
So, again, about a year ago, like one of the big complaints about snapdragon x and windows 11 on arm was that a lot of games wouldn't play because they require this anti-cheat software, which is very x64 specific and somehow very ring zero.

02:02:05
Yeah right, it's tied at a very low level to that architecture and so epic games makes the easy anti-cheat software that's, you know, fortnite, obviously, but a bunch of third-party software as well, and I think it was back in march they and qualcomm said we're, you know, we're partnering, we're going to bring this there and fortnite will be the first game. Like, when we get this going, we're going to bring this there and fortnight will be the first game. Like, when we get this going, we're going to do it. And uh, yesterday they announced it's available. So not fortnight fortnight's not there but the, the software. So if you're a developer, it literally involves just upgrading to the latest version of two system components that are part of this easy anti-cheat system and you get this instant compatibility with, uh, snapdragon X, windows 11 on ARM. So that's big. Both those things are really big.

02:02:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's really cool. It's a milestone that makes gaming the big complaint on ARM with gaming, so they probably should deal with a bunch of it. Yeah, they still should recompile the apps for ARM.

02:03:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, and that's part of why I'm kind of curious what's going on the xbox app, because I've downloaded a couple things already and I'm going to do some more and it's like okay, so this stuff was never available and now it's just there, and the one thing I've tried before the show, at the one time I had the chance to do because again it just happened like ran instantly and perfectly, and it's fine and it's like okay, why't we have this a year ago?

02:03:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like this it seems like it was there, but I so, yeah, I don't know if there was a huge piece of a huge lift of code or not, or you know, yeah, I literally have. No, I had to actually get those guys to focus long enough to go oh, just fix this and this.

02:03:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah but I do think, like you know, we've talked about this, I think I think this is tied to the future of the xbox, which is, you know, kind of a windows pc looking thing, but but it's also a simpler, more reliable windows pc thing which it's gonna be a lot easier to do on arm. So, and, and if you want to do portable devices and they do, putting making the platform arm is the best thing you could possibly do, um, across the board. But, obviously, efficiency, battery life, whatever, just general reliability, smart, so we'll see. But anyway, these are, these are big steps and they're really, really positive news. So that's good.

02:04:12
Um, speaking of fortnight, uh, fortnight is also coming to the iphone in australia, apparently because apple and in this case, google, keep losing all their app store monopoly trials. And, uh, they're like, yeah, no, this is a legal monopoly. Uh, you're gonna have to open up the store. So, uh, they're like, yeah, we're bringing, we're gonna bring the epic game store to the iphone there and, as they're doing, I think it's in europe, it's gonna be the united states any second. Now again, and uh, so that you know, good for them.

02:04:40
I guess that's good yeah, I wonder how much vpn action they're gonna to get exactly well, that's the thing like, as this gets chipped away in different you know regions, it's like at some point are we just going to just do this? Can we just do?

02:04:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this feels like the unraveling of music too. Yeah, you know like it's a 99 cent song effect. It's like bit by bit, it's just sort of on dissembles and it all seems silly in the end it's always seemed silly to me.

02:05:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've never understood how this has lasted so long but all seems silly at the end.

02:05:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're so world weary that's what it seems familiar, right?

02:05:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's like oh yeah, we've done this before we've done this silly in the end yeah, I'm gonna put the end.

02:05:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All we wanted was steam. We didn't want anything else my team.

02:05:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I was just gonna say I have made a huge mistake, um, which would probably be the cause of my demise, whatever that is, um, and then what else we guess, oh yeah. So, uh, this is kind of odd, it's kind of hard to explain in a way. But, um, the xbox app, which is like the xbox dashboard on the console, right, when you think about it's kind of a front end to your games and whatnot. Um, they're making a change to both where, if you're again, this is xbox insiders for now, but it will be eventually everyone. Um, I think this is actually related to the windows and arm thing, right, that they're opening up the number of games you're going to see on wherever you are, right, and so if you go to on the console, there's a my games interface and my games and apps, I guess, and it shows you can filter games, apps, and then it shows you everything that's in your library, and your library could be those things you bought, literally, obviously, the things you were installed in the console. But if you're on game pass, all your game pass stuff, and so they're going to start showing the things you get for free with xbox, which is like game trials or demos or um, you know these. It's like the stuff that would have been like you could have gone and found in the store but there was no real central place for it, like they're just going to add it to this. So I'm kind of bulking up the look of the library, whatever, which is fine, um, and then I guess we'll end it on two negative notes.

02:06:47
I guess we're not quite done with the layoff slash game studio cancellation stuff, because there is a report I don't know that Microsoft has confirmed this, but the game Contraband was one of the bigger Xbox exclusives that we were expecting and has apparently been paused, uh, the development of this title. So I don't know if that means, like when intel pauses construction of a data center in ohio that I think we all know they're never actually going to build. Um, there's a bunch of like construction guys walking around on a bunch of concrete with rebar sticking out of it or something. That's how I imagine what they're doing. I don't know what that means, but um, I don't know. I don't know if this is going to happen or not, but again, they haven't um confirmed it. But this is avalanche studios and these guys made what's the big game they had uh just cause, uh series of games just cause these guys might actually be behind for a reason.

02:07:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right there's, they're legitimate reasons to cancel game two.

02:07:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, this seems a bit random, so it might be this one milestones again, and you know we're gonna let this go yeah, I mean that we still have like 40 games in development. Don't worry, everything's fine. Nothing to see here. Um, speaking of nothing to see here, there was a two second time about two years ago, when we started talking about like gaming chromebooks. For some reason, yes, and you know, it's like both guys were really excited. Yeah, it's like a paper airplane is sort of like a model airplane.

02:08:16
Uh, so at some point I think it was two, three, almost two years ago now they made available something called, well, steam for Chromebook, which was always in beta. It never came out of beta. It's never coming out of beta. They're going to get rid of it. So I guess they're not doing it, and I would assume I shouldn't assume this. Maybe I'm wrong. Actually, I was going to say it must be streaming, but I guess it isn't, because if you have a good enough Chromebook, you basically have a Linux box here, and so Steam makes that Proton compatibility layer so you can play Windows games on Steam Deck. This should work on a.

02:08:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Chromebook. Even if it was a subset, you could at least play Plants vs Zombies right, it doesn't have to be an fps I mean, uh, but it could be like half-life 2.

02:09:05
Yeah right, I mean this game's 25 years old or whatever like chromebooks got plenty of clout, but I imagine they couldn't get enough game houses interested in doing a cross compile, and so it's just like we're not going to be able to fill the catalog out. We're wasting our time. Yeah, it's too bad. Steam guys make a lot of money and they run a very flat system where, yes, pretty much the folks that are working there decide what they're going to work on, right and so, and if they could see and in the end they all get compensated by how well the company does if they couldn't see a way for chromebooks to make the money they're not going to do it, yep yeah, uh.

02:09:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there was a random, a video interview with gabe new, who is the CEO or whatever, but they don't really have a title. One of the founders, anyway, major Domo. Yes, there you go. He's an enigmatic kind of guy, I think is what I would say you know what he is.

02:09:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's the billionaire you want.

02:10:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, he's made a huge amount of money.

02:10:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's completely changed the industry and he doesn't spout off yeah, he's.

02:10:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's like what brian wilson was like, minus the drug problem, I guess. Like I, you know, he walks around in a bathrobe all the time and he owns super yachts and he goes scuba diving.

02:10:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know but it, but it all will hope that billionaires were like Gabe Newell Yep, you know, just sticks to his knitting and lives happily ever after.

02:10:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, but finished Half-Life 3. But yes, other than that, let's not get crazy now.

02:10:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Other than that, yes, although there's new rumors again.

02:10:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know About what Half-Life 3?

02:10:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I know, I know three. Yeah, I know, I know, come on, it's a great franchise, right. And now you're really thinking about part three of half-life 2, which they made very clear they're never going to make but a half life 3, so coming off of alex would be a possible sounds like you. You can't wait I'd play it in a second. I would too, right now I want I want it to that first scene coming out of the tunnels, yeah, in half-life 2 suddenly into the open world.

02:11:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I so and it's beautifully oppressive. I just showed it to my wife because when they did the whatever anniversary edition and I was like this thing is as good today as it was when I first came out and it just does such a world building like nonchalantly, you immediately understand this world from just the voiceovers and what's going on and you see the guy kind of abusing one of the citizens and you go through the like it's like five minutes into the game you're like I completely understand this world. Yeah, like it's. It's. It is a I I almost said master class. I hate that, that's another term I can't stand, but but it is a. I almost said master class. I hate that, that's another term I can't stand, but it is a master class.

02:11:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was a beautiful piece of storytelling, storytelling and interactive fiction Like just excellent, yeah, and you know you are the. You're Gordon Freeman. You've been frozen and then brought back to deal with the new world and you need to understand that new world immediately. And they nailed it.

02:12:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then shortly after that, you're spiked with a stun rod. Exactly, yeah, exactly. That's great, it's really. This is really really fantastic. Yep, anyway, half-life 3 seriously, can we get on this place? Please, please, please, okay.

02:12:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have some more game stuff in the uh in the tips and picks in the back of the book. We'll get there. All we need is a break. We could have a break.

02:12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you want a break. What the hell is a break? All right.

02:12:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got through that thing all the way.

02:12:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought I thought I had a minute or two left. Okay, good, Sorry. It seemed like there were a lot of things more and you just kind of went right through them. Okay, good, okay, okay, let me gather myself, not actively trying to get through it. I let me gather my wits about me. Let's gird your loins. I'm, my loins have been girded the whole show. Are you kidding you think I'd come to this show with ungirded loins?

02:13:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not insane man.

02:13:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This uh is the moment on the show where we uh beg for money. I don't do the pbs beg thing, although maybe I should. They seems to be very successful for them. They tell me they get about four to five percent of their audience as members, which is true. I mean I, you know, I support them. I'm a member of my local pbs station. I'm watching, I support him. Give him five bucks a month, we don't. I don't want to beg. I don't want to beg and you know, maybe that's why we only have about two percent of our audience. Uh, as club members. Maybe if I just told you how great the membership is. Now it is a little more expensive 10, 10 bucks a month.

02:13:42
Of course, you get many shows for that, not just Windows Weekly, all of our other shows, plus a lot of shows we only do in the club twit, discord, things like all the keynotes now Microsoft's Ignite build, the made, my Google's coming up in a couple of weeks, their pixel 10 announcement, the Apple announcements all of those are in the club only to avoid takedowns. We also do some special programming. Our ai users group, home theater, geeks paul does a great. Hands on windows. We have hands on apple um, the photo segment with chris marquardt, stacy's book club, micah's creative crafting corner, which is so much fun. I can go on. I mean we try to make it fun to be in the club and I think the Discord is a great place to hang out. It's my favorite social network because it's smart people right Talking about interesting things, not just our shows, but all the things geeks are interested in. Great place to go for information 10 bucks a month. The other thing that I think is a kind of subtle benefit is it's a vote. It's a vote for this content, if you like what we're doing and you want us to keep doing it. Right now, 25% of our operating expenses are paid by you club members and I suspect that percentage is going to go up, not because we're going to get more club members, necessarily, but because it's getting tougher in the current economy to get advertisers excited. So that means if you like this show, if you want our shows to continue, if you want new programming designed just for you, cast your vote by joining the club. Your vote by joining the club.

02:15:21
Twittv slash club twit. There's a two-week free trial. There are family memberships, there are enterprise memberships and, of course, there's the monthly and yearly membership for individuals. That's you. If you're not a member, I beg of you. All right, see, I did it. I begged. Go to twittv slash club twit, we would like to have you beloved back of the book. And when we do the back of the book, there's no better person to get back in the book and begin the back of the book, the mr back of the book himself. You're losing me, man. Hey, paulie, how you doing what's up?

02:16:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so, as you mentioned earlier, my daughter graduated from college this past weekend.

02:16:12
So the family got together in North Carolina and my son told us this story, which I just have to relate because it's so beautiful. But he, they had a power outage where he lives, so he's he's deaf and his roommates are deaf and they have, you know, they've cochlear implants, so they have these little batteries and they, you know, you got to keep these things charged and they were trying to figure out like where can we go to get our stuff charged up? And somehow they found out they could go to the library, which is a place we brought mark a bunch when he was a kid, a lot. He was love the library love it.

02:16:44
Apparently he has no idea what the library is. So he went to the library and they're charging their things for free, right? Nice, thank you, library. And they're because they have time to kill, so looking around like, look at this place it's got books and stuff.

02:16:58
So he's, mark's, looking around the library and he's like this place is pretty cool, I wonder if I could. He goes up to the desk, this little old lady with the glasses on the chain right, and he says, hey, uh, how much does it cost to get a library card? I love him. She's like, uh, she's like do you live in, I think, marietta or whatever the name of the town is? And he goes, yep, he goes. Well, good news, it's free. And he's like nice, I'm gonna get a library card. And then he says how much does it take to cost to take out a book? And this is a quote from the woman she said bless your little soul. I was like mark, you've been to a library you know how they work.

02:17:41
So here's the thing it. This was a reminder a of how idiotic anyone that comes from me is, but also that you know. Obviously the world's changed a lot, like I used to live in libraries when I was a kid but libraries, they're still there, they've had to.

02:17:55
Yeah, they've had to kind of change their what they do. Libraries have amazing things in um, at least in my area, some libraries like you can go and uh, borrow like a drill or a hammer. If you don't have tools, like they'll just let you take these things. If you want to try a product like, um, like a food processor or something, or like an air dryer air fryer rather um, you they'll. They'll let you take one and go try it at home and if you like it, you can go buy it at amazon or whatever like. But they also have all this digital stuff and so, for example, this in the united states this is the us specific. I'm sorry, but there's a service called libby which is overdrive, where you get free audiobooks through your library. So you know, like I went to the library here a couple years ago, got a card and now you can get free audiobooks. You can get free. They have periodicals in there. This like it's, it's um, like this is just free. Like you should just do this.

02:18:46
Like, if you live in the united states, you probably live near a library. It's still there. You'd be surprised. Maybe you'd probably grow up on one, like I did. I don't know, but these things are still around and they're way better than they used to be, like they were always awesome they were. They were always about books to me, you know at the time. But there's a whole thing going on there. They played. I was looking at like on the in the car right here. I was looking at like on the in the car right here. I was looking at our library locally Like they. They play D and D there. They have um reading clubs. Obviously. They have authors that come and give speeches and things and there's a whole thing. There's like a it's awesome, it's crazy.

02:19:20
So awesome so. I just you know, because my son reminded me that, despite the fact that he should know exactly what a library is, he has no idea. Um you, you, if you're out there and you're like I haven't even thought about the library. Think about it. I would just go take a look. I think you'd be surprised.

02:19:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hey, keith, in the discord hit on the important part and the library has air conditioning.

02:19:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, oh, yes, yes, it is delightfully cool in the summer, which was my big time at the library, actually when I was a kid, because I always did their little reading program thing where you would get a little sticker for every book you read or whatever, and had to read whatever number 10 or something.

02:19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. We belonged when I was a kid in Providence, rhode Island, to a library. It was a private library. I think you had to pay for it. It was where Edgar Allan Poe had hung out. Oh, that's great, it's called the Athenaeum. It was this beautiful library and they had a children's room. But I very quickly discovered that I liked some other books that weren't in the children's room. I would go to the reading room. I read the entire Count of Monte Cristo, which is like three volumes, practically without leaving the library I used to do things like model train, magazines, stuff.

02:20:32
I'd never seen before.

02:20:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the periodical section was so great, like the hardcover versions of the Lord of the Rings where there's like a fold up map in the back and I was like, oh my God, look at this thing Like I. Just, you know, I lived for the library when I was a kid.

02:20:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's Libby and there's another one, hoopla, yeah, what's yeah, what's the other one? I think is the name of it. But anyway, you check your library, they may support both. And for audio books, it's fantastic because my library here in Sonoma County has 30,000 titles and many libraries have interlibrary loans, right.

02:21:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So even if your library didn't have it. Here's a fun tip from my wife, which is like she does this a lot for e-books, like for Kindle books or whatever they are, and she won't be able to read the book in the amount of time she has, so she just puts her Kindle offline, so they can't take it back Then she finishes it and she sends it back.

02:21:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's sneaky. They do because they have deals with publishers. They have a limited number of issues. Look at this.

02:21:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could subscribe to new yorker for free yeah, so someone else might be watching it or something but when they're done, like, then you can read it. You know like it's like, it's like a library, yeah it's like the way it always was even with digital right.

02:21:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think you'd be crazy. Even if you have, I think you'll be shocked, like if you don't billionaire.

02:21:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think people would be shocked, like if you don't know this, and then you actually go look, I think you'd be shocked. And it's not just this stuff Like this is electronic, whatever. It's great, it's awesome. I don't mean anything. But you know, like I said, we could, like I said, you don't rent, you don't pay for it. They give you an air dryer.

02:22:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You bring it home, you use it Air fryer Although to be fair, that's about the same thing Could be a hairdryer. It's just in a different container. August in Phoenix.

02:22:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yeah, sorry, and then you bring it back and if you want one, you just go buy it. I love it. I love it. The whole tool thing is amazing too, because a lot of people will buy tools like when they need it for some job and then they never use it again, like they have some random Allen wrench set or whatever the heck it is, and like this is a way better way to do this. It's like you know, like when we got, we got to Mexico, I, we're going to, I have to drill a hole in the wall and so, like one of the last things I did before I left us, I saw one of our neighbors who I figured he's an american. I was like you have a drill, don't you? And he goes yeah, I'm gonna need it when I, when I come back, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be borrowing that I have, like I'm not buying, I want to.

02:22:58
Yes, yeah, yeah, I've been right. I just I'm gonna drill holes in the wall until I can see the view excuse me do you have a wood chipper I could borrow for?

02:23:07
a night. I think it was happy to go. More of the guy where he calls and apologizes Do we talk about this recently? He apologizes all his people abused when he was a kid and it's like Steve Buscemi when he calls and he's like, oh no problem, I didn't think anything of it, it's been 40 years, whatever. And then he hangs up and he goes.

02:23:25
He's got a thing that says people to kill and he uncrossed like he crosses out his name and it's like it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life, like uh, anyway, um so, yes, library, look at the library serious and get it.

02:23:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Put libby on your or hoopla on your phone.

02:23:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yep yeah, go ahead and get a card. You have to get a card first. Yeah, go get.

02:23:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The cards are free. Look, I have my card right, you don't have to pay for the card.

02:23:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My son just learned that um and uh, yep, and then you pick your local library and, in our case, like we can also, um, get stuff from philadelphia from here, which is kind of interesting, so we can have like two, yeah, and like that, that opens up a whole new thing, right, you know we're never going to go down there, but, uh, you know for the library, but, um, but you still have access to that because we're in, you know, I guess in a close enough area, whatever, but anyway, we just our local library, just had a like a four million dollar remodel, so it's beautiful.

02:24:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's gorgeous yeah the other thing.

02:24:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The library is like, uh, it's nice, like I even like in denham. It was like in denham it was like a historical building. It was old. The one I went to was like a smaller one, but also nice. But like, yeah, we go to the library down here and it's like what is happening here, like why is this place so nice? It's like the future, you know, inside. It's crazy.

02:24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In our library. We can get movies too. You can get free movies.

02:24:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it's crazy. I don't think many people know all this. There's so much there. I think people, like I said, people are going to be shocked. Yeah, you either know exactly what I'm talking about already and you've done it, or you're like wait what? What's happening? Yep, it's unbelievable.

02:25:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really incredible. Take advantage of it.

02:25:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm glad you mentioned this.

02:25:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul, don't be like my son yeah, I love it that he said well, how much bless your little heart. Oh, the card is free.

02:25:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's like he's like so excited to have a young person in there.

02:25:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you gotta explain the fundamentals I think he said it was like the nicest way anyone ever told him how stupid he was well I gotta tell you when you are in the South bless your heart, isn't exactly, it's a little bit of a, I don't know, it's a little.

02:25:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little shade, it's a little. It casts a little shade. It's passive, aggressive, it's passive. Well, bless your heart, you ignorant little punk, Exactly which I.

02:25:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I appreciate that.

02:25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can you try whiskey at the libraryard? I don't think so.

02:25:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think so, but there are whiskey libraries. You should find out about that.

02:25:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah all right, uh, and then. So I think when this happened, thursday, maybe late last week, so last week was quake con. This thing happens every august, never know what's coming and then last year, remember, they did those amazing remixes or remastered versions of the original two Doom games. This year they did it for Heretic and Hexen. So these are classic Doom engine games that came out by a company that created itself specifically to do this, and it's called Ravens, and so Doom was made. These are some of the first Doom engine games after Doom, yes, and some of the best too, like especially to me, heretic was like it was like having another Doom, you know, like different weapons, obviously, and different whatever, but it was just wonderful. And so those are available now Remastered, 4k, 120 frames a second. There's two new episodes, one for each game. They do cross play multiplayer. It's unbelievable.

02:26:55
All the game passes xbox one, series x and s, xbox, pc, meaning windows, ps4, ps5, switch, steam, gog every stream service. You know it's 15 bucks. If you already own the game, like if you bought it on steam 10 years ago or 20 years ago, whatever, on gog you just get this for free. This is awesome. So this was the game where I was like, look, I get it. You're trying to block games on windows and iron for some reason, but this is, this is gonna run, it's gonna run great. You know the the joke about this game and not a joke. But the funny thing in some ways about this game is like if you've ever, like, tried to play call of duty on a PC and you're not only using the game, like 125 gigabytes, whatever, but then there's like 70 gigabyte updates and you're like geez, like I just want to play the game, this entire these games together, all their updates and everything. It's a gigabyte. It's just like and it's.

02:27:50
And so I I tried over the weekend, failed. We drove home today, we just got home and they just announced this is available and I was like, okay, and they're like it's not going to come to everyone right away the ability to play games through xbox app on windows, on arm. But I was like I'm going to take a look at this because I've been doing this for a long time and I had it was it was full, it was full of all there. So I just installed Heretic, installed to say no, I'm not exaggerating. I think it installed in 25 seconds, like it was so fast and it played great. Of course it does Right, but maybe, but I don't know, I think Windows 11 on ARM, you think like it's and I mean I know it's 30, it is literally 30 years old now or something like that, almost 30 years old but, um, awesome, so I can't wait.

02:28:38
I, and it's like a muscle memory thing. Like you start playing the game and you're like, oh, I know where I have to go and I know, I remember this. And you're like it's just, that's excellent, it's such a great game, it's awesome. Yes, and then I haven't tried this one yet because it was kind of happening while I was away. But a week or two ago, uh, ea did a battlefield six single player kind of uh preview where they it was just a video, it looks amazing, but I don't really care about single player but then they did a multiplayer uh reveal as well and you know, call of duty type game, obviously, but super realistic looking and kind of the modern warfare type stuff um, it is on open beta now through august 17th, so that's only like four days away.

02:29:19
Um, I, you can get it through steam, I know, because that's how I got it, but probably elsewhere, maybe on xbox, I don't remember. I'm not really sure where it is, but it's. You know, for a little while you can play this thing for free. So I'm gonna try, I try. I haven't tried it yet.

02:29:33
Now that I'm home I'm going to probably not today, but maybe tomorrow I'm going to take a look at this. This is a contender. So I think I think it's coming out in November or October. I don't remember the exact release date. But if you look at the videos of these single end multiplayer, it looks like, it's like a it. Just it looks real like it looks amazing. So, you know, battlefield has disappointed me more than often than not. Uh, in the sense that it's not exactly call of duty, you know, which is not their fault, but um, but this one looks really good. So I definitely want to take a look at it and see, see what it's like, it's worth looking at, I played hexen way back, I mean a while ago, yeah, long time ago heretic and then heretic 2 was later and that one was like a it was probably a quake 2 engine game because it was like a third person thing.

02:30:25
Yeah yeah which was also pretty good. You know, I I wouldn't. I would think we'll get those eventually, because I think there was a hexen sequel as well. Hexen is more of a RPG, whereas the Heretic games. How does it?

02:30:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
look. Have you looked at it? Have you played it? Have you looked at it?

02:30:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so it looks like it looked To me it's like it's. So the laptop I played it on it's only 1080. It's like 1920 by 1200. So I played full res.

02:30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it does look very doom like I'm. Yeah, it looks like it's to do to me it looks like it did.

02:30:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Then the big thing like the doom games, like this too, like when you first run it, the um, like all the menu is, wow, it's beautiful, it's like it, it's like you know, it's not bit mapped and blocky looking right, it's gorgeous, um, and then they have actually the. The one big change that's really obvious is the soundtrack is unbelievable. Like there's a modern, you know redone, and it does like dolby atmos and all that stuff if you have it. But it's um, yes, this. These are just good games like they're. You know, half-life and half-life 2 took these, the this type of thing, to a completely different level like these are.

02:31:34
These are straight up well. Heretic is a straight up doom type game, you know, made with the doom engine, but obviously. But it's like meaning it's action and you find a key, open a door, you get into a new area, like it's you know it will be very familiar, but it's um, they're just good, you know they're good, they're just well done. Oh, I, they're good, they're just well done. Oh, I should say it. Sorry, just from. I got to get my money so Richie can have some time. I'm sorry, man, raven went on to be bought by Activision or Blizzard, but became part of Activision Blizzard. Id went on to be bought by Bethesda, which went on to be bought by ZeniMax, which went on to be bought by Microsoft. So Microsoft also owns Activision Blizzard, so Microsoft owns all this stuff. So it's kind of cool. Like last year they did Doom, which is straight up id software, which was Bethesda. This year they did Heretic and Hexen, which is Raven, which is what did I say, activision Blizzard. Yes, so cool, nice yeah.

02:32:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very nice. All right, Ricardo, it's time for you to give us some whiskey.

02:32:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh for that, let's do Ronny's Radio Well and you're going all Irish on me, which is funny because I was talking to Tony Redmond Yep, who happily lives in Ireland.

02:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wasn't making fun of him, honest, no.

02:32:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't know this.

02:32:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He would appreciate it. He's a happy Actually, my Irish is more like that. This isn't Irish, I was doing a Scottish, but that's okay, I don't mind. Does he talk like that, like a leprechaun? No, he sounds as bad.

02:33:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wouldn't say that to his face.

02:33:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not at all at all. May the road rise up to meet you as you're on your way down to run his radio. You're looking to get punched.

02:33:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This would be the response.

02:33:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is a kind of crazy old Irishman I meet on my walk every evening. He'll buttonhole you and he'll start telling you stories that make no sense at all. I think he's really lost his marbles. He said there was a donkey and another donkey and the donkey. Anyway it doesn't. It doesn't go anywhere.

02:33:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then you're like sorry, I have a call you're like hello, hello, I gotta go somebody, somebody call me, have someone call me immediately.

02:33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But his accent is so cute, he's very sweet, he's very sweet, Tony.

02:33:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know.

02:33:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know Tony's grumpy for a reason A he's maintaining a forever book, the Office 365 for IT Pros book. He's got a nice crowd of people around him. There's a new edition out. I think it's like the 12th edition already and it is, you know, keeping up with the reference material for folks who need to manage an M365 tenant.

02:34:15
But this time around in the conversation we went deep into the work they're doing.

02:34:19
In the graph he was really talking about how the contemporary IT pro manages all of the problems involved in a tenant of any substantial size, meaning you make changes to rights and controlling access and things like that. And it's this combination of PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph and a bunch of the other low-level tools working in coordination to be able to get to the info you need know how people are using things, put proper governance in place and so just you know. Many of these things are obvious and the graph is less so and it's a superpower when you get it figured, because you're really actually able to see what people in your organization are doing with m365, not just what apps they're using and what files they're touching, but how data moves around, and that really can help you to control rights and and keep track of what governances are needed. So a great conversation, as usual. He's a regular every year, uh, when there's a new update and and just try to help people to do more with the little time that they have. And we barely talked about co-pilot.

02:35:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank goodness I am not surprised both now I hear a little tired there is an American whiskey that is not bourbon.

02:35:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah weird huh.

02:35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean?

02:35:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
what would it be if it wasn't bourbon Blasphemy? That's what it would be. So I'm here in Kansas City for the Kansas City Developers Conference and I have a few dear friends here, one of which, my friend Heather, throws a big party ahead of the event. So I was helping her with the party and we were sampling her whiskey collection and she is a very strong advocate of all things kansas city, including this distillery, the union horse uh, distillery, uh, that makes this whiskey called the rivalists, and the rivalist is an american single malt whiskey, and american single malt is now an official standard by the alcohol, tobacco and tax and trade bureau. As of this past january 2025, they ratified a standard for american single malt that is 100 malted barley made from a single distillery that mashed, distilled and matured the product in the united states. You know casks no larger than 700 liters, the maximum ABV when distilled no higher than 80%. Can't be bottled lower than 40%. These are very similar to the bourbon rules and no additives, although caramel color is allowed but must be labeled on the bottle.

02:36:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These all seem sensible. Yeah, Is this comparable to Scottish whiskey?

02:36:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
rules Very comparable but maybe a little bit more flexible in some respects. They haven't put a ton of rules in place. They didn't put a minimum aging in place, although for the most part you'll find three plus years is normal and there have been companies making this since the 90s, just making barley mash whiskey in America. The standard helped push a sort of consistency around it. Some of the big players are doing it. There is a Jack Daniels ASM now, but mostly it's these little distilleries and Union Horse. We had a chance. This is a newer bottle of it because the older one somehow ended up empty.

02:37:30
I don't know how that happened, and I have one of Union Horse's to go with it to get another one take another one, and there's another one over there, because I don't travel with open bottles, so this will be consumed, uh, this week, with some help, I imagine. So that'll go just fine. The distillery itself, union horse, was formed by four siblings damian, patrick, eric and mary garcia in the around 20, around 2009, 2010,. Their family horse farm was being sold. They wanted to go into business with each other, which is an interesting choice, and I had a chance to meet with Damian and one of his co-workers, a fellow named Travis, who spent 90 minutes with us, taking us through the distillery and having a great conversation. And Damian made the point of you know, you've lived with your siblings, but you haven't worked with your siblings. It's a whole other dynamic, but they were looking for a business to get in on and the older brother, patrick, had been working in a brewery for some time and knew his way around that, so they were thinking about brewery until they actually toured a craft distillery right at the time when craft distillers were starting to emerge in that 2009-2010 time frame and they thought, okay, well, distilling is the thing we could do, and they live in a great grain part of the world that you know has a legacy of making spirits and so forth, although largely crushed by the prohibition at the time. Back in the day, the company was originally called dark Horse because of the heritage of their family being in the horse business. Turned out, gallo owns a wine line called Dark Horse Wines, so there was some cease and desist and so forth and by 2016, they changed the name to Union Horse, although you still see the Dark Horse here and there.

02:39:07
So this is wheat from Kansas, corn and barrels from Missouri. They got Midwest they call it Midwest grown rye, but it's up further north where the rye grows. And they also use malted barley, especially in the rival list, although a bit Italy. The barley comes pre-malted by the big guys that do it here in the US, mostly for breweries. Because they came to distilling new, they weren't hung up on traditional mash bills. They did get an expert involved Dave Pornoi or not Dave Pornoi, a different Dave who's the guy behind Whistlepig and went directly to enzyme fermentation for their rye and their corn. So that saves a lot of pain. You don't have to add the barley for the amylase and so forth, so they buy their product raw and grind it themselves All stainless steel equipment. So I got a chance to meet all these tanks for the washes and the fermenters and so forth. Of course we've talked about this before.

02:40:06
Making 100% rye is extremely difficult. Rye is a complicated grain. It has more proteins in it so it tends to be a very sticky mash. It's hard to clean, it's hard to manage, it tends to foam up. It's a challenge in the uh the still itself. But the new enzyme approaches have made it easier. They are a little more capable to manage and they have a very cool american still. It's made by a company called vendome out of st louis, a family owned. It's a 500 gallon combination pot column. Still they call chester copper pot. Oh, I love it.

02:40:41
And it's only only about a 500 gallon. But that combination gives them the copper reflux that takes that, that tunes the flavor as well as a calm to gout and get a high distillate. So they actually make a vodka that initial distillations are all the way to 90%, although of course they cut it to 40 to bottle it. But they don't need that combination still approach and sticking with the batch approach allows them to use sour mash approaches, which is traditional in the flavors of American whiskey, as much as this is a barley instead of a corn rye barley mash bill. So one of the challenges you have in a place you know. Here we are right on the junction of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, in a city called Kansas City, but mostly in Missouri. There is a portion of it in Kansas, but you know, be careful, Don't mix up the names.

02:41:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no.

02:41:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that it gets very hot here in the summertime and it gets very cold in the wintertime and that is tough conditions for aging whiskey. And this is one of those places where the alcohol level in the barrels can actually go up. What so? Because they lose water faster than they lose alcohol. Ah, and so so because they lose water faster they lose alcohol, is that because of the temperature, it's the low humidity. The low humidity pulls on the water, and remember that alcohol and water generally don't get along all that well. So if the water's in motion it'll pull the alcohol back and so you can actually lose water. So the interesting side of this is that they barrel at only 55%. So they're using American oak and they're charring it the traditional way. They use a char number three, which is a fairly standard char barrel.

02:42:17
They started out with 53-gallon barrels in the early days, then went down to smaller barrels to make faster production and now have gone back to the big barrels as they continue to run. But they go into the barrel at 55%, which is relatively low. Traditionally in bourbon country you'd go into the barrel at 62.5. But as I was talking to Travis, who works in the barrels, he says most of the time when they come out of the barrel they're higher than 55. They can be 60, up to 62.5. And that changes the flavor because those higher ABVs pull different compounds from the wood. And so we were walking around the rack house today four wide and maybe 10 wide and maybe four high and he talked about the honey pots, the little sweet spots in the center there that hold a little more humidity, so the temperature changes a bit slower and those come out differently. The barrels at the top of the stack, where they took the most heat and the lowest humidities, they're the ones that tend to come up with the higher ABVs and down lower the lower ABVs. So they're always pulling from different points of the stack.

02:43:22
When they make a batch and these guys only they'll take about six barrels down for a batch, 1,000 to 2,000 bottles at a go. So every single bottle, not not hand. I watched them doing it these little stickers all put in by hand, every bottle, written on it by the master distiller as to what batch nice, what abv and who did it, uh at that. So they were only at a certain scale as to what they're able to do here, and they typically go more than four years, up to five, six. They have a few olders now. They've only been running for a while, so there's a couple of 10 years that are laid up. But it's a real question when you have an uncontrolled rickhouse like this. It's taking those huge temperature swings. Is he not inevitably going to end up with problems with overproofing, overwooding, too much being pulled in and so those older barrels probably won't be bottled on their own? They never put an age statement on any of their bottles, they just have names.

02:44:19
They make about seven different versions. They make 100% rye. They make a cast-drink version of that. They've got a white dog, 51% corn, 49% wheat. But it's that mash bill only used for their white spirit. It's big in in in making cocktails because it's very bright and light flavors and they have a very traditional bourbon. They follow the bourbon rules for completely.

02:44:44
This experiment in barley took them some time because they actually were trying different toasts of barley and they use three different kinds of barley combined into the mash, although it's 100% barley. So those experiments started in 2015. They got their first production in 2017 and then needed to lay it out for at least three years, around 21, 22,. They finally got it out. Did their sample runs, entered the New York World Wine and Sp wine and spirits competition in 23 and won for best american single malt. Very good job.

02:45:18
So, uh, let's have a taste of this lovely thing. I'm you know, I know what I'm getting. I want you to get a good look at this sitting in a glen cairn, as you would with a scottish whiskey. This is done very much in a Scottish whiskey style A ton of color but no corn right, so really not a lot of sweet on the nose. It's straight up barley, like you're drinking a Scottish whiskey. Lots of wood, you know, got that little toasty flavor to it, but there was no peat in it. The heat's substantial but it's gentle on the mouth.

02:45:53
This is a really nice drink and it is now an emerging style for America to make a good barley whiskey, because we have those products available and this is a small distillery. It's in a suburb outside of Kansas City, on the Kansas side, and they are selling now only into about 12 states. So far they haven't left the US at all. And so Missouri, kansas, nebraska, illinois, colorado, oklahoma, all the ones you expect, then a couple of coastals like New York and New Jersey. It is in California, but you can only find it in Los Angeles and San Francisco and then in Tennessee, georgia, connecticut. They're expanding gradually over time as they win into other markets and get other opportunities here. But this is a small production whiskey and you can find it at a total wine for about $60. Oh, that's not bad. Not bad for this style of whiskey and especially made in such small quantities. So they're all very distinct.

02:46:53
And, uh, again my thanks to Damien and Travis. They took such good care of us and they spent more time than they originally said they were going to. I think we ended up there. We were supposed to get an hour, we got 90 minutes, but we really enjoyed each other's company. He had a lot of laughs and, uh, I and I think they're going to make Heather some kind of ambassador for their product because she loves it and takes it with her when she travels as well. So spreading the good word, that's really cool, that's really great. Yeah, we had a ton of fun with this one. But you know, it's great to see excellent distilled products made not just in Kentucky. You know not the places you expect, but there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be making good whiskey here. They've got all the ingredients. They just had to put in the work, and that's what they've done at Union. All you need is ship it to Canada.

02:47:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, I'm going to take one with me, though I'm going to covet it on my shelf From the Union horse distilling company, a rivalist American single Malt Whiskey, with two thumbs up from Paul and Richard. Thank you, guys. We do Windows Weekly, including the whiskey segment, every Wednesday. We start around 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. I say that because you can watch us do it live. We stream live. Of course, club members get behind the velvet rope access in the ClubTwit Discord, but there's also YouTube, tiktok, twitch, xcom, facebook, linkedin and Kik. So plenty of places you can watch live. And if those places have chats, which most of them do, I see the chat here on my screen.

02:48:33
We appreciate your participation in the show and I mentioned content from the channel all the time. I mostly steal your jokes, but hey, all's fair in love and podcasting. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show are available at our website, twittv slash. Www. There's audio and video. Watch the video on YouTube. There's a link there on that page to the youtube channel. That's a great way to share clips. If there's something you saw, you have a hexan fam in the family, uh, who said, oh, wow, hexan, something like that, whatever, or a whiskey fan, you could share little clips. Of course, we have a wonderful playlist that kevin king, our editor has put together. Producer has put together uh, of, of, uh. Well, we're not fully caught up, but many of the whiskey clips easy to find because rich has created a special domain. Things from what is it?

02:49:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
things from my closet something weird from my closetcom something weird from my closetcom.

02:49:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then, if you like these whiskey segments, there's a whole pass along in there and we're keeping that up to date. Yeah, we're almost up to a hundred. That's a man, it's amazing, whatever this is why I love you what a resource. Yeah, you put all that effort in and you do it pro bono, basically, uh, and then you know, kevin puts it together and we put it up on youtube and that becomes a great resource for people. I think it's fantastic.

02:49:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A lot of history. Damien took a copy of that link with him to catch up on what we've been up to.

02:49:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's fantastic and, incidentally, probably means a lot more free liquor for you, richard. I'm just saying.

02:50:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I have been invited back anytime.

02:50:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I thought so. You're now a whiskey influencer, or as some people call it, O-influencer.

02:50:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
More of an under the influencer. Under the influencer, Nice nice.

02:50:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
After the fact, you can subscribe to this show in your favorite podcast client as well. In fact, that's, I think, the best way to do it. Do us a favor, though, if that client whether it's a, you know, pocket Casts, overcasts, apple's Podcasts, google's Podcasts, whatever If that client has reviews, please leave us a strong endorsement, because that helps spread the word when you've been doing a show. How many years is it now? It's 15, 20 years, long time You're not the flavor of the months anymore, that's for sure.

02:50:52
Yeah, so a little help if you would promoting the broadcast More like the Shroud of Turin.

02:50:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like a shadow of something from the past. What is that? What is that guy Is?

02:51:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that a stain.

02:51:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh no, it's Paul.

02:51:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Theriot. I'm just going to scrub that out of there.

02:51:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First show was September 28, 2006. So we are going to be in our 19th year as of next month and, paul, you and I and richard will celebrate 20 years in a year. That's amazing 19 years, I know it's crazy, man.

02:51:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We've got the thousands of the run as radio coming up anytime. That one with uh, with tony, was 997. So we're doing the q a show and people have been sending me their questions. I've got a few audio clips so great we'll have some fun with that so great.

02:51:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this has been uh for us. Episode 945 44, no 945 so we're slowly getting there too we're slowly getting out of the porsche model number range actually, uh, it's gonna kind of 1000 might be close to coinciding with our 20th anniversary. Maybe a little before then should be interesting.

02:52:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That is kind of interesting yeah, they're gonna line up like the moon and venus.

02:52:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, or something or something it happens sometimes that's paul thurot the astronomer, uh, as he's the astrologer, uh, he, uh, the. The tide of his influence is best felt at thurotcom, thu double r o, double goodcom. His books are at leanpubcom, including the field guide to Windows 11. But you can get those for free if you sign up for the newsletter at Windows Intelligence. Now still not moved yet, but soon.

02:52:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Soon. I keep wanting it. He'll say something soon. I like his ideas for this are good Good.

02:52:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the good news is, if you subscribe now um you, it will follow you right like a stalker, I mean yes, forever.

02:52:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, yes, you'll be subscribed for the rest of your life.

02:53:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You are free to move along to the new newsletter, the windows intelligence newsletter. Subscribe today something different that I can't say and it will follow you to your new home or they'll follow you from, and you get paul thorat's windows 10 11 field guide as part of your subscription. Yes, thank you, sirs. I think that's all we have to say. Uh, club members next week.

02:53:25
Thank you, safe travels, richard. Yep, uh, we will see you all right here next wednesday on windows weekly. Bye, richard. We will see you all right here next Wednesday on Windows Weekly Bye-bye.