the bed. So it's these casual games instead. Do you remember, does anybody remember a game called Major Havoc? Nope. It's a pretty beautiful game. It's one of those, um, vector games like Asteroids and Like, uh… Um… There was that one with the spinner in the center, uh. Ugh, what's it called? And the Graviton, Gravitas, gravity, Graviton something. Gradius. No, but that's like, that's more like Zaxamon. Tempest, thank you, thank you, Tempest. So… so… It's very much in the vein of Tempest and, uh. It's got the color gels on the vector lines and stuff. But it's a super complicated game.

It has… It has, uh… for… it has constantly changing modes. And it has three different games inside of one. The first screen you get is, like, a console. And there's a… and if you're looking at a graphic of this. On the bottom right-hand corner, there's a tiny little game of Breakout. And then it just plays without you even having an awareness of it, and then it. It then switches, Once that ball gets dropped, It switches to a lander. You know, one of those, like, dock the lander on the platform kind of games, right? It switches to that, which You have this kind of thrusting. slash breaking slash left-right drift that you're trying to manage.

And it's you landing the spaceship in the place that you're about to have your adventure. And then you land it, And then you get out and then you, then you go into this maze. And the maze is full of really interesting things, like Uh, oxygen, because the maze is underground. And ammunition, I think, and you have to jump and drift and Could not zero-G, but like. Definitely minus something G. um, atmosphere, which means that the physics are a little bit wonky and. It's really actually quite fun. It's the only reason I can think of to get, like, an emulator for my computer.

And it would be to play, like… That game… Or something really wacky like Galaxian III, which, or Galaga 3, which was insane. You know, but now you talk about games, you really, you know. I'm in my longing. Yeah, I mean, every once in a while you find something that is really nice. A couple of years ago, me and my partner, we played the return of Obra Din. It's by Alexander Pope, the same guy who did the Papers, Please. Yeah. Uh, and he did a… it's like a puzzle detective thing, but with really original mechanics and a fantastic one-bit dithered 3D look.

And I can't recommend the game enough, but the replay value is zero because, of course, once you solved all the puzzles. It's not, it's all written, it's not generated. I've been… I'm gonna try to scratch that itch ever since. This was, I think, four years ago. The return of the Obra-Din. What's the name of the game again? There is also quite an interest. If you just do OBRA, yeah, sorry. Uh, if you're into things like, uh, Papers, please, or like, you know, those serious games, there is this thing called, um, This War of Mine, which basically pictures war.

But from the perspective of civilians. So basically, you're taking care of, you know, all those people trying to survive major conflict. And this game is used in schools in Poland. It is like a part of the An official curriculum, curriculum. And it is quite interesting. It is also available on iOS and Android, and it's based on… all those statements from the witnesses of the siege of Sarajevo. However, if you're looking for something slightly more casual, There is this absolutely fantastic gem called, um… is this seat taken? And it is like, you know, very nice, whimsical, super sweet.

I'm kind of a thing where you're just placing characters in different configurations. And each of those, uh, like, you know, strange entities. have certain preferences. They don't want to sit, you know, next to people eating popcorn in a cinema, or, you know, to smelly people in a bus, you know, stuff like that. So it's a Oh, yeah. I'm not a huge fan of the style of drawing at the is this seat taken? It's too cute. But the concept is probably going to be pretty fun. You know, it's very cute. Yeah, I'm curious, like, this war of mind, I played it for a bit.

Is it used, like, for ethics and moral philosophy? course or…? Oh, your mic is off. logic was always like a super cute one. So let me just share the link as well. Are you talking about the Uberdeen one? Sorry. No, this war of mine. Of this war of life. Yeah, so the official curriculum, I'm pretty sure, uses it in the… in, like, history. Um, so it is, like, treated at the very same level as, you know, like, uh, official list of books you should read, um, during, like, your school years. Oh, okay. Um, so yeah, it is, it is quite an interesting thing, and there is even, like, an official, uh, government page, like, recommending games, uh, to use in the educational process, so it is quite a serious thing.

It won multiple awards, like 12 years ago. I believe. And there were, like, you know, multiple heartbreaking DLCs, like, you know, they added children at some point and stuff like that. And I still remember playing it on a plane. Uh, like, 10 years ago or something like that, and I, you know, I got tears in my eyes for the whole flight, so it's quite an quite an emotional experience as well. Yeah. I remember trying to, like, when, it's, it's so difficult for me to, because I, whenever I play a game, I always approach it as a game and the mechanics on, okay, what's, what are the win conditions and so on.

You know, it doesn't exist so much in SimCity and so on, but… So the story just becomes, okay, should I care about the story or am I trying to min maxing? Yeah, okay, let's kill the two kids and we'll have enough to eat over winter. You know, it's like what are called the froze. Uh, there was like this. City building, city building and management, Frozen Empire, Age of Ice, something like that, right? Like some frost, no, Frostpunk. Was that the name of the game? prospect. Yeah, because that was sort of, you had the similar, slightly more abstract, but still, like, these moral conundrums, right?

So do we lower the heat, risking people's health, or do we force people to relocate, or do we bury people? Do we eat them, and so on? Yeah, like Polish game dev scene is, like, exploring a lot of those really strange. I was, uh, when I was, when I had this warehouse job for a couple of months this summer and spring, It's fantastically boring, uh, work. But in my, in the back of my head, I was thinking, okay, how can I, could this be modeled into a game? So, you know, so you do a… You can, you can become a much more efficient warehouse manager, but it's going to be detrimental to the health of your workers.

And how can you play that out? Not just as a. like a resource management game, but how can you incorporate some of those? critiques or discussions or thoughts into the game model. Never got very far with it, but it's Because it's so easy when you get, when you, when you think about these things and you go like, yeah, we can optimize this, so many games are about optimizing the strategy, right? But if you actually want to tell a story and get people engaged, it's That's the difficult part. A friend of mine is a game maker.

He makes physical games, so it brings me on whenever he wants to do alpha tests and playthroughs. And he… I'm good because I'm annoying because I always try to min-max the games and see where does the mechanic break so someone can just, you know. Make it not fun for anyone, but win. And then he has to patch. that. But yeah, PGA Golf, don't download it. It's addictive. And it's not even good. It's just like… I get eagles all the time. I mean, how realistic is that? It's, it's your thumb that's getting the eagle. Yeah. You know, like… There's other things to do with thumbs.

Genres.

And Rick, if you're interested in, like, you know, games with strange aesthetics or, you know, design, this is a game that my younger sister put together a while ago. It's called Inkolinati And it's basically about medieval marginalia, and all those monsters fighting. on the pages of, um, you know, medieval manuscripts. And, like, you know, the visuals are, uh, well. One of a kind. Oh, that's great. Yeah, I hear that the Magna Carta is about to be, um, re-presented for the world. It's kind of an interesting… It's an interesting time to have… A contract of sorts like that.

Put out there, you know, it's a historical document, so it's all, it's all interesting, but I hear they're pulling it out of storage. What's up with, uh… Dr. Bleecker. Off-camera cleaning the office. Probably a burrito run. It's true. Oh yeah, the burrito run now. I am kind of cleaning up. That's what I was about to start cleaning up too, I'm like, okay, this, uh, envelope needs the Yeah, it's good. It's all good. Ah, what's new in the world, doc? Anybody, anybody need any yellow bins? About 40. Oh shit. Yes, look at that! Man, even blurry, I can see it.

It's wild. Damn, that's a lot. What? What do you mean? You don't need any bins. Like, storage is… You can never have enough storage, right? Sorry, all I'm hearing is static. Are you… am I hearing… am I staticky? Nope. No. No, you're not staticky. Weird. Well, what's happening in Sweden? Sweden is going to a general election in two days. I went voting today. I'm happy I'm going to be so happy when it's over. Oh, no. No. It can't be as brutal as the American campaigns. They go on forever. Over here. It's like. We got the midterms in November, everyone's getting excited and fucked up about that, and then the.

We have a municipal election in. March or April of next year. That people are just starting to jump in the race for. Hmm. And you're just like, oh, good God. Yeah, it never ends, right? Well, I just always, I've always sort of had a suspicion of people who want the job. Because they always find them, find opportunities to give themselves more power. And it doesn't matter, like, I've heard Dre say, you know. I've heard… I've heard, um… You know, Dr. Bleecker say this a number of times. You know, like the right-left thing is boring. And I agree to the extent where we talk about just politics as a job.

The politicians who want the job, I'm like, ugh. Who wants to be in charge of that much ? Who wants that? That's crazy. That's a stupid job to want. It's a stupid job. Yeah, I mean, the old thing about whoever wants it wants it shouldn't have it. I mean, that's true, but… Totally. As far as election cycles go, I'm happy that Sweden only has like one election cycle every four years where we do like both municipal, regional and national at the same time. Then there is the EU Parliament every five years, but that's about it.

Otherwise, the, the discussion, the news cycles are just. Yeah. I can imagine. I can imagine. I don't know how to keep it any further away from me, so I'm just doing my best to keep the ick. off of me. Yeah, sorry for bringing it up, but in use. It's all right. Next week it's going to be over. So Yes. Possibly. You know, then you've got, I mean, the news, I don't know if the news cycles are this way all over the world, but The news cycle here is. Um… It's… It's terrible. No. It's just terrible.

It's just terrible. The news that you sometimes will choose to trust, or whatever. Cycles… Every hour or something. You know, like every hour you hear the same stories over and over again, just amplified over and over again. And the stuff you don't trust. The stuff that's ridiculous, the stuff you don't need shows up all the time in the spaces, it's too much. It's too much bullshit. Too much nonsense. Trey, what have you been up to? I feel like I haven't seen you in a couple of cycles.

. Yeah, it's been… it's been a couple of cycles. I, I, so my mom hasn't been doing really well Oh, sorry. Thanks. So I've been heading up north quite a bit And, so, you know, it's, you know, you're, you know, you're at the age where your parents start to need you more and you have this, you know, this responsibility to help take care of them, because they did a whole bunch of that to you in your early years. So I've been doing a lot of that. A lot of distraction, but at the same time any moment that I have to, like, hyperfixate on something has been welcome.

It's my escape from my daily my daily things. So yeah, this week it's been this Astra thing that I've been spending time hyperfixating with and running all kinds of experiments And Tell me, how do you… how do you, uh… Like a new model comes out or whatever, like, but how do you treat it differently to… I understand its edges and contours and that kind of thing. Like, is it… Like, I Like, are you trying to solve, like, millennium math problems? No, no, you know what's funny? I did ask, I think I did ask Fable, I said, hey, are there any famous conjectures that haven't been solved yet that we can jam on?

Yeah, I've got about, like, 600 million tokens left before I time out for the week. What do you got? Yeah, exactly. So So, I did… I did ask that out of curiosity. I thought, that'd be kind of cool, I'd like to… to go down in history to be somebody solve like some you know 800-year-old math problem like no problem, that's what one afternoon, you know, few tokens. I might have to use a couple resets. But what I do whenever a new model comes out is, I don't… I… I… I look at, like, the benchmark stuff first to just see the people who are doing you know, structured analysis and just see where it nets out to give me an idea of, like, how might I use this model And then the regular kind of YouTube and podcast people that I'll follow will often start talking about it within the first day.

And because, well, you're comfy guy as well, but like, you know, when you're on Banadoko. Comfy is like a zero day. All the models tend to happen the day that it happens, and there's some really smart people doing some fun stuff in there. So I'll do that and get an idea of what needs to do. And I understood that Astra What I took away from that was that Astro was really good at controlling a computer And that was its strong suit. So I've been doing MCP stuff specifically. It's the only thing I've been using Astra for is to basically like use MCP to do things.

So the first thing I did was I went in Blender, I turned on the MCP server for Blender, and I said, Astra, can you make me a A car, like a sedan, and I want you to do a clay render of the sedan, and I want a 360 degree orbit, and I want the camera to start high in the front three-quarter and go all the way down low in the rear three-quarter and back to the beginning to make a perfect loop. And it did it in 30 minutes. Like, but it rendered a car, it made wheels, it did this, and in the folder that it was working from, it was saving out screenshots of different angles, and it was doing things to check whether things were touching, and I could read in the terminal that Oh, I noticed some imperfections on the side of the door.

Let me go back and fix that. So I just set up Astra, put it in YOLO mode and let it run and it made a car and it rendered it out, made an MP4, and then I used that inside of Comfy UI to map to style transfer, and because I'm working on an automotive company right now And it was able to superimpose an actual vehicle, like, on salt flats and did the 360, and I changed the color of the vehicle and put it on a frozen lake So that was kind of mind-blowing that I was able to use Blender to do that.

And then I made it do a Galton board in Blender. And So all the… the… whatever the balls, because now it's part of… so, testing, like, particle simulation So it basically set up a particle sim, and you can see all the nodes that it set up, and it rendered it out, and I said, I want you to run through the simulation and then make all the colors of each section different And then rerun the simulation so that all the balls end up landing in the proper area, so… and then I asked it to do edits as well, so I wanted, like, a nice frenetic dynamic editing style, and it did all the editing inside of Blender, and it rendered an actual 3D render, not a Not an AI render.

And then so I've been playing around with that and then I'm playing around with, and we were talking about games earlier, but I hooked at the MCP server to Unreal Engine And I just said, I want you to make me a game. Like, show me what you can do, let's have some fun. And it said, okay, I'll make you a game called Crystal Quest. And it just went and made a game and it runs, you double-click on it, it runs, it's a dumb little game. It's kind of like that balance board thing, and you're a ball, and you're avoiding these crystals like Pac-Man and collecting things But, you know, those 20 minutes of effort there.

So Now, what I'm doing is I asked to do a pixel, like a 2D pixel platformer game, because I was inspired by what we were just talking about Here with this, and It said, oh, you should use Godot or Godot or whatever Godot or whatever the name of that game engine And I said, yeah, make me a pixel platformer, so that's what it's doing right now. It's making it, like, a 2D pixel… pixelated platformer game In the side. So, yeah, Astra is an amazing tool to use with MCP servers to control your applications, to, like, build models, to run animations, to create edits.

Oh, and I used Astro with, DaVinci Resolve, I had to edit something together for me It takes all your transcripts And it understands things, and it will make decisions as to like what goes on the editing timeline. And it does cuts and it's got it It makes good decisions.

Does DaVinci have an MCP, or is it just Astra? Oh, it does, okay. Yeah, DaVinci has an MCP, so you can use Astra or Fable or whatever to control it, but Astra is just understands applications. Yeah. That's interesting because I was just writing my late newsletter and I was one of the One of the things that I did, I can't remember if I did it with Astro or Fable, who knows, was, hey, I want a better summary page for office hours, for the website. Like, I try to be consistent with posting. At least what happened, and I usually don't just because it's too much.

And, um… And we kind of worked on that, I was like, okay, this actually works, so it indexed. Last week's as a test, last week's office hours. Like, okay, fine, that sounds like the eight or nine main things that were discussed. you know, it aggregates the links and all that, and you could click to each one, and it was… the first thing it did is, like, it had the whole transcript. It was like, it's too much. Um, And so why am I saying that? Oh, because then I was like, I was like, can you put the audio there?

Like, could you cut up the audio? So I don't… so someone… doesn't, you know, Rick doesn't have to listen to the whole thing. He's like, there's that one part, Rick always says, there's that one part where I said something, and then Matthias said, like, yeah, that's really good. And then I go away, and uh… and I forget what it was. What did I say that was so good? Where am I going to find that? And so I was like, okay, and so you can go… to each section and said, like, just play this seven minute.

So, you know, we'll see what happens, like, it'll be like, oh, Dre talked about what he did with Astra and Fable, and you can just, like, I just want to listen to those four and a half minutes. So I was like, okay, that's great, that's a little bit more contained. And I was writing in my newsletter, it's like, oh, you know, Check it out. The seven people who read the newsletter. And, you know, let me know if this works, because I don't think I'm going to do the YouTube thing anymore. It's just such a slog between… you know, putting a bumper in front just to… so it doesn't just start cold, etc.

And so. So that was just like, I don't want to every, you know, I can't do that. It's too much. I don't have a PA to deal with this. But now I'm wondering, it's like, could you just be like, Astra, could you just, here's the bumper that I use in front. Here's my little intro music. If you write a skill Here is the nature of the art I use for the social card, you know, for the main card. And then at the end, just fade the shit out or whatever. So, all right, so whatever I'll be back, I'll be back in 20 minutes.

Yeah. That's what I want for my radio show, by the way. It's 100% what I want to do. It's like, it's a slog. I lost my audio again. I can't believe this. It's a slog to archive my radio show. And, and I'm super bummed out, like, ugh. Oh. Like this. Yeah, that's totally doable. I could see that it will for Julian's case, you know, you get all your assets put together, you write a skill, you tell The agent, what the rules are for your thing, you know, trim the dead air at the beginning and the end, you throw your bumper, you throw your overlay, you edit it, you save it as an MP4 master, upload it directly to YouTube, because you can do that inside of DaVinci And you just tell it to monitor a folder, and that would be the folder that Zoom saves your video in and you literally never have to do

anything. Just hit the end video or end call button And anything that shows up in that folder will automatically just get treated and uploaded, and you never have to think about it. And so, Rick, for your case, I'm curious to what your workflow is, but that's a… that's a similar thing, it's just whatever your human Workflow is, you just describe it in a note, give it to an agent, and pick your poison, pick your tool, and it'll probably be able to just do it for you. Yeah, I mean, I really feel like this is. This is, like, um… I really feel like what you're teaching right now is, like, Long-haul trucking to a person who owns.

A basically a Mini Cooper, you know? Like. Like, I am so good at driving a Mini Cooper. But what you're talking is long haul trucking, my friend. I need, I need. I need sit-down context lessons from you. on this. Yeah, you need the truck driving lessons. I'm so it sounds perfect. And in fact, I just I I just got… I took a break from, from, uh all my AI stuff, because it can really. It can really take away my… My dexterity down at the letterpress joint, you know, it can really kind of pull me away.

Um… But I got back into it yesterday just to wrap up this book, and I realized. something about my workflow, And I was giving it, like, larger chunks of things to try and solve instead of smaller stuff, and be like. Give me a test. Let me see one. Let me… Okay, yeah, I approve that, now let's make, you know, 20 of them, or 10, you know, like, whatever. So, breaking down the task into smaller stuff makes for less error, for sure, but… but. Yeah, it feels like I'm back in… do you remember when Photoshop had actions?

When they first introduced actions, It feels like I'm right back there again. Recording… recording keystrokes. But but different, but slightly different. And, and yesterday I got it to successfully sort of like. hack its way into. Um… some data that I have on a remote, on another server, I found a way of it, like kind of parsing the wall that it didn't want to parse before. And that was kind of interesting, like I was like, yeah, try this on. This is a… this is a widget that's been published by this app. Can you get in and pull my data through that?

And it was like, I can. And here I go, and here's your, and here's all your fields populated. I'm like, whoa. Whoa. Yeah. And I, you know, like that was just a widget, man. That's just like some published code widget that is for display purposes, but it… it just was like, yeah, I can get this. So… And what is your experience with hitting limits? Um, on Astra, because, like, for most of my workflows, they are basically, like, you know, each task hits the weekly limit. So, um, I'm trying to figure out I don Well, you know, slightly more advanced experience looks like.

Yeah, I don't know if… like, I haven't hit a limit on Astra yet Oh, Yeah, which is… and I'm… and I've done I don't think I've ever… I've never hit a limit on anything. Maybe is it what I'm doing? Yeah. I don't… okay, this is where I… Yeah, I'm not doing well Sometimes you hear people complaining, like, oh my god, it's just… they're nerfing us again, or something like that. I'm like, I'm not feeling it. Maybe I'm just so simple. I'm not solving for something. Okay, it's fine. I'm doing… okay, so I'm doing like I feel like I'm doing a lot.

Like, I have a lot to show for, and I'm… and there's always a machine running, doing something, and with the Astra stuff. I was just waiting to get a limit because I don't have a usage meter on my computer yet. And so I haven't hit anything. So I think there's a few things at play. I think one is I'm usually pretty good with managing context windows and… or context length to make sure that I'm being more efficient. Maybe I'm asking it to do smaller, more precise things, because I have a very clear understanding of technically what needs to get done, so maybe what I'm doing might be more efficient in some cases I'm not… because I don't repeat myself very often, I usually just, like, go do the thing, and then it does the thing, and there's minor revisions, so maybe it's because I'm clear to begin with, but I know some people who are,

like, hitting the limits all the time. Like, I do have the, whatever, the $100 plan, the more expensive one, on both Claude and, you know, I come close on Claude because I have a usage meter, and I've only hit limits on Claude a couple of times But Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's, if it's a If it's about being advanced or more efficient or whatever, but I'm seeing people who are like hitting limits all the time, they have to get multiple sessions, but, like, my brain bandwidth can't even handle hitting the limits on one coding agent that I really don't know if I… I would, you know, I'm happy to walk away and not… and let it reset for a while if that's the case.

Yeah, I also heard about people who have like multiple accounts with Claude and OpenAI and basically they have like those Max accounts contributing to the same GitHub. Or something like that, but it still sounds quite exotic to me. Well, I often have two or three tabs open in a terminal And maybe an IDE, so I might have 3, maybe 4 agents just kind of randomly doing things, but that That really, I love the the… the variety, this, you know, the AD… ADHD style, you know, flipping from one thing to another all the time, but, like, anything beyond 3 or 4, it's just too confusing When I hear people saying they have 16 agents running, what are you doing exactly?

What exactly are you making with 16 agents? Yeah, Dre, you just gave me an idea of it like with you know with my undiagnosed official ADHD, maybe I need to make an agent to remind me what the hell I was supposed to be doing. That would help. And then, you know, remind me which of the other things to get back into. So I unlocked a thing this week, which speaks to this, reminding me of stuff, because I have… I'll have, you know, with 3 or 4, I'll lose track of what's going on. So I discovered a tool called Notify, it's N-T-F-Y dot S-H And all you do is you create a unique URL.

That's all you're doing. You're creating a unique URL, something that nobody else would ever guess, but that you know, and then you just basically give your agent a curl command And you say, hey, when you're done your task, can you just issue this command? And it's just a curl command with a message to that URL. And so I have all my agents set up now that whenever they're done any type of long form task to just ping me and it will And I have the Notify app on my phone, so I can go take a walk, or go work in the yard, or just watch TV, and I'll just get a message being like, hey, I just wrapped up the thing, come check it, or I need your attention, I need you to click OK for me somewhere, and That has been a bit of a game changer, because now I don't have to worry

about it running out. Maybe I will start using up my… I'll start token maxing because of that, but I can step away knowing that 's being done, and I'm not gonna come back knowing that it's been idle for you know, two hours or something But yeah, it's that's a fun little tool more of a long-haul driver addition

That's cool. Also, one aspect I like I just met up with a friend earlier this week that I hadn't… I used to work with, or friendly with, you know, like 18 years ago, right? It feels like it's been a month, but he's like an executive of some agency now, and he kept saying my team a lot, the phrase, he's like, oh, my team does my team And I was like, I'm just one person, like, I don't have a team. Now, maybe if I do these things, I can start saying, like, my team, like the royal we Yeah Well, we'll look at this, the, um… I mean, you guys probably track this guy, Steve, I don't know how you pronounce his last name, Yegi or whatever.

There's some phrases where he's kind of like, I gave the team the week off, or something like that, and he's referring to his battalion of agents. I think the guy's a little bit… Netty personally but it's one of those interesting edge cases where you start meeting posts like, I'm going to give you a glimpse of the future, and it's just like, dude, I don't know. I don't know. Did they get vacation days? Like, what kind of how's it work Yeah, like, like, something like that. I'm not sure what he's referring to, or if he's just being cheeky, or if he's like… maybe that's his way… his translation of, I maxed out.

You know… Yeah, he. They're burned out. It turns out the tokens are all used. They're burned out because they gotta go outside, touch grass, and have a long weekend. So, like, I'm at 97% with Fable, so I'm gonna… going to give give give them. And he writes, he writes that he spends 122K per month. On a… Yeah, I think, which might be true, but it also might be like. equivalents, or maybe he's, um… You know, he has, he has, uh… Once a week, he has scones with, uh, with Dario Amade, and he's like, you need more tokens?

Keep it up, keep it up, dude. Your posts are great. the language layer of all this is quite interesting, because a lot of people refers to their agents as agents, some others as a computer is doing something while I sleep, and others are referring to machines. And I remember that dinner party when there was this, when Anthropic entered this conflict with the US administration. And basically, at some point, Fable, which was, like, super hyped up, stopped working. And I remember all the people, like, you know, looking at their phones, like, my machine stopped working. You know, what is happening?

The world stands still for a moment for a lot of people, apparently. Well, I mean… Lots of US rails, lots of US infrastructures, and I think anybody outside of that border is getting pretty nervous. and switching away as fast as we possibly can. So… Say more? Oh, I mean, we're working on a… We're working on a sovereign infrastructure stack so that we We're actively removing any reliance we have on any piping that goes through the US. Basically, given that, you know, We don't want to, we don't want to talk politics, but Yeah, yeah. That we've seen enough posts of flags that. involve Canada being part of the US.

We've been attacked by the administration. Project 2025 is explicitly says that they want to destroy the Canadian economy. I think everybody is who's smart is looking for ways around. That piping. Yeah. I don't know, Dre, I mean, you're running stuff locally, aren't you? Yeah, I have a bunch of stuff that I'm running locally. I'm still using the frontier models because they're literally the best models for the stuff that I'm experimenting with now. There was that that all model outage last week Earlier in the week, I forget when it was exactly, but it's like like Claude and OpenAI And Grok all went down for like a few hours, which was really interesting.

I missed it, I was, I don't know, I was busy living life, but yeah, it turns out it was because they all rent from the SpaceX data center and it was the SpaceX data center that went down So you're like, oh, all the frontier models are, like, literally burning tokens at the same place. Understood. Thank you. Does anybody. Didn't mean to, uh, didn't mean to bring the conversation down. I just… it's it. It's all good. What's that? What's that? So depressing, dude. So depressing. So depressing. I'm looking for anything else to look at right now.

I know, no, I know, I know, I didn't, I didn't mean to, I just… It is scary how…

Like, should I show this? Should I show this fun picture that I just rendered? Should I? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's all, it's all good, you know. It is. I was interested in, you know I don't know, again, I don't know I'm interested. I'm interested in like the implications that you're seeing or others are seeing or what that means, you know what I mean? Because, like, all the way from like my one son just started ninth grade. It's like Chromebook, like, all the everything's like We have a new AI policy at the… in our school district of what they're allowed to do, not allowed.

I don't know. Like, my son, it's interestingly, now he has to lock his phone up. It's a New Jersey law, or policy or something When my son goes into school now, at least at the high school, he has to lock his phone into this plastic case and they unlock it for him at the end of the day And so it's like, it's interesting. This is like a really interesting year, I think, for like students because of like the intersection of all these things and the realities and people trying to create policies Hmm. So I'm very interested, Mark, like, implications.

What does it mean for different like small businesses, medium business, large businesses, and those of us that are trying to, like, serve those as clients, right? Like Yeah. I would call the Department of Education a large enterprise, for sure. And I would think about like. It's. It's always interesting what they decide is good and bad for sure. But I think it's more interesting just to know where the power to get something on that ballot comes from, right? to decide that that's the conversation that gets to happen at that level. You know, because, cause checking that for I… we could say sobriety, if you like that word.

Um, checking that for sobriety. is what I find the most interesting part of it, right? Like, do these people know what they're talking about? Uh, do they… do they have, um… proper arguments. Not just… fear, but proper arguments. and proper data, and proper ideas about, like, how not just to remove something, but how to actively say. That there's a plan to make education better. And we're examining not just this aspect of technology, but we're also examining this. super top-down pedagogy. We're also examining these, you know, these attitudes that live in American education. or North American education.

Overall, and just the whole system of high schools or middle schools and things like that, like, I'd love to. I'd love to spark the conversation about change there cause. Whatever it is that people are doing. doesn't seem sexy enough for anybody, even the people with the most at stake, meaning, you know, industrialists. It doesn't even seem sexy enough for them to want to fund it. Yeah, I mean, in terms of anecdata, um, I don't know exactly how widespread this is, but what I've observed is that. The decision-making is really at the state level. And not the federal level, but a lot of the research seems to be at the federal level.

Right, so you have a kind of a split between I'd say it's definitely not at the state level. It's… there's like… But the decision-making? This school, this school districts that have their own boards. Oh, yeah, yeah. you know, like, I would say it's… I would say to get something into the conversation. it… it could live at the… Theoretically, it could look at, it could live at the school district level and then it could migrate up to the state level pretty fast. Right, but… Here. I mean, that policy I mentioned is a New Jersey thing because our school district told us like it came out of nowhere that and like I was actually also worried if my son loses the plastic thing, it's 30 bucks So I was telling them, don't lose the stupid plastic thing, because they're going to make me keep buying them for 30 bucks.

Don't break it, don't crack it, whatever. You know, that was a New Jersey thing. And, like, I think our district is pretty… like, we don't take much money. Our school district, our town doesn't take much money from the state, so we don't have to abide by as many policies As compared to towns that are right next to us, seems to be kind of a thing. But we've been seeing a couple of things like this that are at the state level. Hmm. Yeah. That's that old funding model where, like, uh, if you… if you decide you don't want to follow the rules, you can just not have the money.

Which is what Louisiana did when. It was to change the drinking age from 18 to 21. Remember how, like, all their roads turned to because they just turned down all this federal highway money? And said, now we're leaving the drinking age exactly where it is. Thank you very much. So they kept it at 18? They kept it at 18 and Now, it's still 18 if you have your parent with you. It seems this, from somebody who grew up in Montreal, this seems totally reasonable. But while you could get something on a… in a discussion from the municipal level.

It's really a question of who's funding. who needs funding has to abide by whatever comes down from the Fed or the state. Hmm. So it's basically a money… it's a money grab all day. Yeah. Yeah, the stuff that we've worked on is funded at the state level. So anything that involves Yeah, there you go. Sharing data between districts or between schools, or creating common repositories or anything like that. is generally state-level stuff. Yeah, oh, sorry. I… oh, yeah, I did say, yes, yes, I did say anecdata, which is the Portmonto for things observed locally. Nice.

Yeah. One last thing I'll throw in with my son, so not going into ninth grade or he's now this week, ninth grade, he had an algebra textbook on his bed the other night, and I was like, hot diggity. And the thing is, he has a 504 plan for ADHD, so I've always kept in this one accommodation Modification or accommodation line. They always try to take it every year and I'm like, I say, if, if it exists, I want physical textbook for whatever class if it exists, because it's all these Chromebook like digital only cloud textbooks.

And I just have a thing about like Yeah. I don't want him at, you know, late at night or whenever, like, I'd rather him be with a book for part of the embodied cognition. They don't like when I say like that at the meetings we have, but so I was like, hey, did you get this? I said to my wife, is that because of the 504 plan? And he heard me, he's like, no, they gave it to everyone I'm like, wow, there's a textbook and it's like 15 years old because it's just math, you know, I was so excited I haven't seen a textbook with my kids in a while Yeah, my daughter's going into eighth and, uh Even though, uh… We use an electronic version of the textbook.

It is just the It is just a website of the paper text, and we saw the paper book in the classroom. And General, going into… It's in the same school as she was in seventh last year. There was there's a much more physicalist turn. to what the work is doing and how they're, kind of, Uh, uh… thinking about source materials and where people are taking action, and it was… Really interesting to see without even being explicitly, kind of, acknowledged as a sort of, um, A renunciation of a lot of the technologizing that had. been happening prior.

Yeah, oh. I mentioned that there's a general election coming up in two days in Sweden, right? And the piece are… sorry, the PISA results came in, like, a week ago. This was a big thing here, because… Everything is pointing down and all the politicians are now scrambling to try to find, okay, what's the reason, right? So is it too much? Social media? Is it too much screen time? Short attention spans, whatever. And the whole one thing which struck me was the reading comprehension is really going down. reading and math and reasoning skills are going down.

And this is like a global trend I understand, but it's been really big here. So now there are schools that are doing exactly the same thing that Joel that you mentioned, right? No devices in school have to be locked out, no. to remove computers that might act distracting. The re-evaluation of the gamification of education, those kind of things? Uh, I don't know how big the piece of discussion has been in the US or Canada, but it's been quite a big, big here, especially because it's an election season, right?

Hey, Dre, how did your workshop go? Oh, that workshop was a little while ago, but it went well. We had a full house and It was a beginner workshop. So I got a lot of I got a lot of Dumb question. A lot of positive… no, well, I got… no, no, there's no dumb questions, there's dumb people asking questions. The I got a lot of praise for finding a nice balance between keeping it understandable, but getting into higher level ideas, and what's funny, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a, like, consultant in the AI space yesterday, and I was telling him the story that, you know, part of my talk is I talk about, like, you have to think in families and not models So, it's like you've got your OpenAI family, and you've got your Claude family, and you've got your Grok family, and I talk about… and Gemini, so some

are good for long context, and some are spicier, and some are better at coding, and then I talk about the family of of of open-weighted models and the idea is that you need to flip-flop between all these different models, and then what if the person says, what about Microsoft Copilot? And I just said. I'm sorry, it doesn't enter the conversation. It literally no one talks about it, it makes no… and there's so many companies out there, enterprise-level companies, that are, like, bound to, like, Microsoft Copilot as As their AI tool. And if you follow any of the AI news, any of the YouTubers or podcasters or journalists, Microsoft Copilot has not been mentioned, like, once in the past two years Which was funny because these are people who are like, that's their model.

That's they have to, they're being told to be AI first and innovative And they're being given, like. something that isn't even recognized as anywhere close to a frontier model. So that was just a funny thing that I'm seeing in a lot of enterprise companies, like, they just bought into the the enterprise license to the point where they can't use anything else, anything that will actually help them. But yeah, it went well. It was a good thing. The worst part about the entire thing is I left my my scroll wheel mouse at the, event space. I forgot to pack it up when I left, so I had to go back, like, two weeks later to go pick it up, which is a bit of a pain in the ass, but But aside from that, it went well.

Thanks for asking. And it was one day or two days? It was one day, it was an afternoon Okay, one afternoon, like a 4-5 hour joint. Yeah. It was two to five yeah it was a two o'clock to five o'clock type of thing Okay. And then, and then a bit of, like, social hangout afterward, but But, yeah, it was a good curriculum that I, you know, just a really, really kind of, like, thoughtfully planned and paced out and gave myself hard stops, and And I'm good at paying attention to the clock when I'm presenting. I, you know, I lose myself in the conversation, but my mind is still looking at the clock, so I know when to speed it up and stop So, what exactly was the audience?

Like, what kind of folks? The audience was, so there was a lot of, it happened at a place called the Mars Discovery District and a really big chunk of it were I guess you could, like, healthcare and medical startup type of audience, because that's what the Mars Discovery District it's more or less like a startup incubating compound So there's a lot of people like that that have interests in technology and health, and there were a lot of bank people There were people representing like half of the big banks in Canada So I thought that was interesting that they somehow caught wind of it So it was Yeah, and most, I would say half were probably executive level.

Dre, did you see any like patterns that seemed interesting or surprising to you in like either uncertainties or like obstacles or questions? It came up They weren't as engaged. They weren't asking a lot of questions until later in the end but the a lot of what I do is debunk a lot of the patterns from like a lot of the things that you hear. Like there's a lot of doomer stuff and then there's a lot of booster stuff that you hear, and I just try to nip that in the bud right away before I get into the meat of the presentation and just basically present it as, like, you know, this is a tool that does really, really cool things, but also it's like, it's not the tool for everything, and you know, understanding, you know, deterministic versus, you know cognitive tasks And then sometimes it's just a good old-fashioned workflow is all you like,

like an N8N automated thing is more what you need for deterministic stuff. Like, you don't need to do that, like, you know, a… you don't need to ask You know, you can still go to Google and ask it for recommendations on things. You don't have to use it all the time. So it's just knowing when to use the tool And how to more effectively use the tool, but, no, I didn't see any patterns in terms of anything specific that they were asking I feel like I probably have a better answer if I had a meeting transcript from the presentation that I could run through an AI and make it think for me.

You need Apple Watch Series 12? that, oh, is Apple Watch Series 12 doing that? I missed the keynote, so I missed the… I saw the clamshell phone, or the folding phone, which is like, that's interesting, not sure how that's gonna go over But yeah, the… the… with the, like, whatever friend and, the… I have the clip, the one that you clip on your Limitless, I have the Limitless Pendant, and it's like, yeah, of course, your watch is the perfect place to do conversational transcription I hope I can fold that phone up to watch size as well.

Shit, for $2,000. Great. It's a great question. You can, it won't, it won't unfold again if you fold it that far. Okay. It'll just look like a flavor flavor size watch like bling, you know? Yeah. You have to wait for the you need the eye origami. watch that's coming that you can fold into a swan or whatever. Apple ARM clock It's Apple policy now to comment on future product launch outside of professional press releases. So this is nothing I can say about that. Yeah. So it keeps a rolling buffer of, uh, what is that? Whatever is said, um… For the last 15 seconds.

No matter what, as well. So, if you can go, like, wait, what was that? And it will tell you. But a lot of really, um… I think we have a lot more explaining to do about when is a recording device not a recording device, because it is not a… It's not a, I believe the people who, um… working on it hard, trying to make it so that it's not just arbitrary recording. So it's a secure enclave in the same way that, like You know, Touch ID had your fingerprint. Vision Pro has your iris. But nobody can get them out, and that same way, Apple Watch has the audio, but you're not getting that out.

What you could get out is, if you elect to, what happened recently. Um, as a transcript of it, but you're not getting the wave data out. And so that's… That's a really interesting, sort of, Is it with recording media? that, you know, I think it would be relevant in a future where people take a more skeptical eye to what is okay to record with With cameras and camera-like devices as well. You know, like, I think I've talked a lot in the past before about Um, wanting to take… photos at a scouting event, but not caring at all about the specific scouts.

Just wanting to go, like, here's everybody getting an award, and like, I don't care who these people are. And it would be nice to be able to record that without, you know, jeopardizing their, like, college applications. 20… in 10 years, or whatever. So, um, I think, like, sort of getting into the silicon. some sort of ethical and legal distinctions about what these things can possibly.

be destined towards would be a really interesting thing. And this looks like a genuine start. to that sort of, um, process. Yeah, and this is such an, like, I've been interviewed twice over the past two days about the Ban Ray campaign. Uh, about the Meta smart glasses. . One of the points, I guess, is so many people are hung up on On the specific abuses that especially women are experiencing when they're being harassed by guys wearing these smart glasses, right? But if there's enough backlash, and I know Norway, for example, are considering an outright ban on smart glasses.

But I mean, if that would become bigger, then of course, then you have the Apple watches, you know, then you have Samsung's device, then you have the pendants, then you have the… Whatever the next thing where you can cram in that kind of technology into and to have that discussion of who owns, like, again, who owns the data, where does it go, who controls it, all that stuff, and it ties into this. much bigger discussion about so whom do we trust? Should we have the kind of tech oligarchies that we have, or should we break them up?

What, you know, as a society, how what are the social conventions around this? You mentioned like, how can I take a picture of a scale without carrying? The answer is a regular pocket camera, right? But because… You know, but because we… won't be more efficient and have stuff that's more useful, then of course, if I can have my watch recorded and store it safely, then okay, but how do we build social conventions and norms? around this thing, and how can I know that I can trust Apple, Samsung, UOA, Meta, whatever. Or maybe the answer is that we can't, and then we need to look at, okay, so Apple provides the hardware, but it's offloaded to a local repo where we have.

Local control, no more than 50,000 users or, you know, whatever. And that whole discussion is really interesting. So in the interviews, the interviews has focused mostly on the. high-profile cases of harassment of women. But the bigger discussion is, I think, so how does this look in 10 years time? If we want to have some sort of societal control over this thing, and how will it develop, right? Uh, so I know that with the glasses, most people still don't know that they're a thing. So when I talk to people, Uh, and this… and I have these stickers and the signs and stuff you can buy and download.

Um, people put these up. third parties, because they don't want to have guests who… Use the meta infrastructure to document things. Okay, but Would it be okay if this was a… Like, if the results are locally stored on your phone or to your server or to a… you know, registered municipal backup service or whatever, I don't know. There's an interesting question because there's so much happening in the space. And as a society, we're… Total being not run over, but I mean the monetary incentives are what is driving the technology right now. Not so much use or societal good, basically.

This is an interesting, interesting topic. And I think that like the year ago when I did the like 15-minute Let's talk about smart wearables. If we did much more of that, then, you know, okay, so we know We know in what context it's okay or not to take up a camera and point it at someone's face and take a picture, because we've had cameras for 100 years. Um, we haven't had this stuff for more than a few years, so it really takes a long time to develop, right? Yeah, with the pictures of the scouts, I would push back a little bit that I could, so a point and shoot camera, a film camera. is going to resolve details of a kind that would, in combination with a digital system, be able to be uniquely identifiable.

Um, and that's as much a property of the digital system as it is of the camera. What I'm suggesting is that you could also devise an image capture system that Refuses to, or is otherwise incapable of taking those. individually identifiable pictures. Uh, so that, you know, like, we all know, like, Diane Arbus is, like, Grenade Boy picture. But like, you know, you could put a different face on the kid and it would still be the same picture to us, but not to that kid. And so we could do things like… take-off faces, or anonymized faces, of people we don't know in a way that would be really interesting.

Have you heard of… so you… I'm not sure if you saw. or heard of, like, uh, Apple reference image. And the C2PA content sort of validation. Movement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember reading about when it was flagged like two years ago, right? Yeah, it's sort of brewing. Can you, can you say that is? Hmm. What was that, Julia? Oh, just to ask, could you say what that is? I'm not familiar with it. So, I thought iPhone Pro, part of the, uh, announce on Wednesday was that When you take a picture, no matter What, like, fancy you do to it.

It's going to store a copy of what's understood to be the cryptographically signed Apple reference image of it. Which will say, you know, this was taken by this phone in this way. Gotcha. But also, by consequence, it will also say, like, By this person, you know, and in most cases when that matters, it's because the person wants to sort of A test that they took it. But, you know, in the case of, like, non-consensual imagery, Like, that would also be… Um, you know, this, the kind of thing that would… I abhor it and used in that fashion, is that what you mean?

No, no, it would be, uh, it would be, you know, um. Evidence of criminal liability, of a, of a. Yeah, sure. of a kind that means that, you know, like, if that stuff with an Apple reference image floats around, and uh… Goodbye. and emerges, then you just go like, okay, we'll just, we'll put that person in jail, and because this is a… this is a… you know, open and shot indicated that this person was responsible for this image at this time. So, like, you know, it… In that context, it's kind of a threat rather than a sales pitch, but it is an interesting sort of development to say, like, You know, we'll know… It will be knowable what this photo was at this time.

People can doctor and change, you know, color highlighting or whatever, but… there's gonna be this notion that a reference image for this thing exists. And with the sort of the… the expectation that, um… Anything without a reference image necessarily. is probably missing. Uh, or, uh, you know, uh… Lacking in some way the, the legitimacy to be understood as an image. And that's kind of an interesting development. Yeah.

Can I… can I swerve this for a second? Because you just kind of, uh, generatively triggered a bunch of things. Not the bad trigger, the good trigger. Um… Which is, uh, so we're kind of fans of, um, of Reacher, the show. Like, um, it's just fun, it's just a fun watch and The, uh… This won't be a spoiler for anyone who's modestly technically minded as you guys are who watch the show. So in case I'm spoiling something, I'm actually not because the show gets so didactic where they just, they spend like maybe 20 minutes. 90% of each episode explaining why he just broke that guy's neck or something like that.

And so it comes down to a moment. where it's like there was an image taken, and everyone, what's this picture mean? Why is there people killing for the picture? It turns out that the picture had a blurry formula in the back of it, which now with AI, it can be deconvolved so that you can actually read the formula. You know, it's the MacGuffin. We can get the MacGuffin because we have AI and there are these wonderfully, um, you know, wonderful. semi-bad kind of IT guy scenes, IT guy with a… if you don't do this, we'll kill your family and all your family's families kind of thing.

And the IT guy is doing the thing where they have the screen. It's like, and it's like, okay, yeah, this is going to take a few hours to run. And so there's a little bit of a ticking clock, and they… and then finally, they explained it. Reacher explains it. Or no, maybe the scientist whose neck he's going to break in a few moments explains it. With AI, we can deconvolve the image so that that out of focus thing in the background can resolve and we can read the formula. That's basically the deal. And they're dropping AI bombs.

And then I started thinking, it's like, man, there are a lot of very contemporary, like, right-this-minute shows that are talking about AI. It's the, you know, it's the new whatever red button or whatever. Or what was… and even going back to, I guess, Mission Impossible, wasn't there? It was like the AI and the submarine or something like that. Why am I saying that? I'm saying that because we kind of do things… Matthias, you were just talking about the Ray-Ban Band stuff and And people's kind of new… there's new social protocols that you might experience, which is like, please take your shoes off before you come in the house, no smoking in the house.

Um… . you know, whatever. And this becomes one of them. Why am I saying all this? I'm saying this because there are all these different ways in which we're trying to do what I think you first started saying, Matthias. And I almost wanted to interrupt you to say like, but this is what you do. This is what you need to be doing. And you, I mean, you are doing it. I'm not saying you're not. When you say, like, what is this going to look like in the future? I wonder what this will look like. I don't know what I'm saying.

I guess what I'm saying it's like, a lot of people are wondering that. Some people are doing it in. Uh, you know, $60 million per episode. shows some people are doing it with little stickers. I think doing more of it is kind of… What we need to do. Not necessarily because we're anti, but maybe we're saying, like, but it could also look like this. I'm trying to find, like, the positive thing around the Ray-Ban glasses, but I think it's just too closely aligned with… you know, bad actors, I guess, maybe, to figure it out. But Brandon, you brought up the, you know, Diane Arbus, and when you were talking about When we were, you know, when the discussion was about the Ray-Ban and what you see, and it's like, my mind immediately went to, like, all the street photography I used to do.

And I'm not asking anyone for permission when I do that. Um, and… Yeah. And so like the… But I mean, they're, they're, you know, it's, and so I was trying to figure out, sorry, I was just trying to figure out materially, like an embodied way, like what is the difference between that? Well, one is, you know, you put the camera up, the other one is you're not capturing everything all the time in every direction. You're not capturing audio. There's a built-in kind of, I guess, texture to the, to the gesture and the kind of character, who is the one guy, um, the New York Times guy always wore the blue, uh, kind of the blue French chore coat.

So people get it, they understand what a street photographer is. Um… Bill Cunningham, yeah, Bill Cunningham. Amazing. Like I lived to like 460 years old or something. Bill Cunningham. He lived upstairs from Carnegie Hall. That's right, that's right. He was, like, one of the last people to have one of those studios, I think. I remember reading that. Um, so anyway, there's just so many layers of this. Like, what might be the world in which Wearing those. Is… normalize? Can it be divorced from? The, the, the, You know, the stale cheese smell of meta and, you know, all the other things.

Could it have been, you know, can you imagine a world in which it's like, now this is awesome. I know Meta tries to do that. Like, I saw the thing where it's like, we are giving one pair of these to every blind veteran. And it's like, oh, that's sweet, but that came from like marketing. That didn't come from engineering. And also, it's like, what the are they gonna do when the protocol changes? You know, these damn glasses that don't do anything for me now. I was much better with my stick and my dog. Anyway, that was a whole thing.

Yeah. Yeah, I think somebody got their eyes bricked at some point in the last couple of years because of uh. Because of a TOS update. Yeah, exactly, and in the middle of, like, trying to negotiate through a busy JFK terminal. Why is that guy just standing there? He's glitching. He's like, takes a step forward and takes a step back. Is he okay? I'm going to New York Comic-Con again this year for like all four days. Looking forward to it, but they have the thing on Facebook groups that I'm in that people like planning for For MICC are talking about they put out like the official policy is no meta glasses.

They called it that. I don't, I don't I didn't read the fine print if they mean like etc. You know, and there's some, I've seen at least one person go like, let me see them fucking try because I have my prescription You know, whatever, like, I'm just going to be interested as one of the 1001 things, you know, the next thing I want to look at is like, is are there going to be any situations or like something you can notice where like someone like tries to grab it off their face or whatever You know, years ago, like, I guess 16 or 17 years ago, I used a product called Livescribe, which I think it still exists as a pen, and it was great.

Like, with certain paper, it would record audio while you're writing, but I always used it for research Like, you know, when I would have consent from research participants or the company I was doing research with, but it would blink red. I remember one time I was at a client site and once they found out what it was, they're like, you can't use it in this one room. And then they gave me permission to use it in that room Because I said that you'll see the red light blanking. So you know I won't turn it on in this room.

And they're like, oh, okay. And then they all wanted to buy them. It was kind of funny. They went from being worried about it to like they're like, we just ordered 30 of those and I was like, all right but like that was that was like That's like a ubiquitous thing, a pen, right? So, but now it's funny that with the glasses, it's a little more obvious because it feels more obvious, like it's a picture taken But I wonder how many other things are just going to be imbued with this stuff. You know, and is there going to be some equivalent where a human wears a thing that says like no robots or whatever that tag is you put on your website to say like, don't Don't scrape me.

On the back-to-school night for my… daughter's school, we, uh… Uh, you know, sat in the classrooms for 10 minutes at a time listening to the teachers. And I was using my phone at the time, but my wife was sitting next to me and texting hilarious quips because that's just the way that we interact. But I didn't get them until we left the room. So, uh, you know, whether it was intentional or not, you know, the construction of the new building, wing of the building of the school. seems to have conveniently made them near Faraday cages.

And so that was very interesting. Um, and, uh, yeah, so, like, You know, I've talked before about how I, I… want to know what the new utilities are, like, in the sense of, like, literal. Like power, water, light as utilities that you, you plumb into a building. Um, maybe, maybe, like, uh… Yeah. Electronic interference or radio interference is an actual utility that you, you You plumb and you guarantee. It's like, oh, no, you're… You actually have to pipe it in in order to specifically jam things. There are adversarial utilities. Yeah, but if we brought the cables back, if we brought Cat 6 back. it would reauthorize a whole bunch of very specific uses.

Right. For computing devices, and then it… and then you could disable whatever is, um… You know, wireless, and that would be a… I mean, You know, like, disabling stuff is an art. And enabling stuff isn't art. Yeah. Like, creating excesses in art and creating and disabling accesses in art as well. I really felt like we let Cat5 and Cat 6 go a little bit too quickly for my for my. taste, because you had so many permissions. for high-bandwidth, um, action. With Cat5 and Cat6 that. You sort of have to negotiate and ask for. When you're dealing with wireless protocols.

Yeah, I recently… Is it like a 10 gigabit adapter? For the local network at work. Uh, because, you know, we have to download a new version of macOS or VisionOS or whatever every other day. They're 20 gigabytes. But it's just distressingly fast. And to your point, yeah, like the scale of what you can do on those connections is… incredible. And if you sort of provide the carerat of those things, then being able to kind of delineate specific regions and spaces where You can provide a stick of saying, like, And in return, we're going to completely nerf these other… sort of modes of connectivity is a really interesting thing to do.

Uh, you know, in the same way that people have made, sort of, Um, like, people say, like, you know, Russian oligarchy yachts have these, um, anti-auto-focus, um, guns attached to them, so that if they detect something is attempting to do autofocus, then they'll blast it with, like, CCD-destroying intensities of infrared light and things. Uh, so… Uh, yeah, like, I… Yeah, if you have, if you have a link about those, I'd love to read about it. All right. Wow. That's good stuff. Yeah, that sounds amazing. That's the thing, that's the hat that you need to wear at Comic-Con.

And, you know, like, uh, uh, is it ultrasound, right? Most, um. Most digital microphones will get pretty fucked up by ultrasound. of a kind that's outside of the audible human range, and so if you play sort of high-pass, like, ultra-high-pass band, uh, noise. then you can completely nerf people's audio recording abilities within a room, and so… Like, again, like those anti-utilities. of anti-visual, anti-audio recording, anti… wireless transmission, then you can sort of clean the slate and start to renegotiate on a more explicit terms. the basis on which those sort of digital interventions are allowed into a space.

Yeah, and I'm really fascinated by the like someone mentioned the antagonism, right? So we're not going to we're not going to arrive like as a society or, you know, whatever, into a compromise that everyone will be happy with. It's just going to be a. arms race where, or potentially it's going to be an arms race where we have these antagonistic devices, like the ultrasound thing, or the, you know, doing a dolphin attack on audio equipment or metaglasses, or what have you. . And that would be… Interesting. Because, I mean, going back to, like, Cat6 and Cat5 stuff.

That's good, but that also introduces again a very centrally controllable thing where the access to information, access to network is controlled through one switch. router and someone controls the access. to a space or to a service. And we might not want Like if you have a… and nerdy or hacky or libertarian attitude to it, you don't want to have those limitations because all my Raspberry Pi stuff that does IoT locally and so on. That's not going to work, right? But isn't that… isn't it the same? It's a tricky question, but I think the antagonistic stuff is good.

Isn't it the same with whether you're doing Wi-Fi or whether you're cabled, like… Isn't there always going to be a switch somewhere that's broadcasting? Isn't that? You know, like when people say the cloud, it's just someone else's computer, you know what I mean? Like, isn't it always the case that someone's at the switch? Yeah, but if you have a cable and you have like 5 Ethernet connectors in the room, those are much easier to monitor than if it's… if you're not in a Faraday cage and everything over Wi-Fi, because I can always record something and upload it somewhere else.

This is, this is just like the conversation about, um. Global Entry. Like, I've given them much more biometrics, they have much more data on me. And I spend less than a minute in any passport control line getting back into the U.S. But I gave them everything. Yeah, convenience versus, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So… So there's always a tyrant somewhere, it's just that whether or not you're receiving the beneficial. action, or whether you're doing it in a resistance mode. Yeah, and again, I mean, the transmetropolitan did a thing on this, just as an aside, in the 90s where there was a group, I forgot what they were called, but there were… In the city, they had these more than off an area, physical area, and then they had a device that killed everything, all the electronics, all communication in that space.

So there was some sort of like in the comic, they were presented as an ultra Luddite anti-technology group. But the technology is similar to what Brendel described, right? So you have something which has an extremely localized EMP, I think it was, in the comic, but you might as well do it with… green lasers or infrared or whatever. And just kill all devices. I'm surprised that I haven't seen any of those float around on, like, Hackaday and stuff. Yeah, I, I, I learned about it specifically from that actual yacht that Pavel linked. It moored in the harbor in Wellington, New Zealand, and And when I read about it, it was… I think it was, uh… Abramovich's yacht and Uh, and so it, it might be something that is so prohibitively difficult and expensive that only people with You know, that oligarch money. are really doing it right now, but, you know, Not to say… not to

say that there are, sort of, B-tier oligarchs waiting in the wings, sort of looking jealously over their shoulder at it.

But just not with candles. Yeah, yeah. And speaking of things I'm, uh, people are going to, I'm gonna go to Meta Connect. So I'll be able to see pervert glasses 2.0. Uh, if anybody has any pointers or suggestions for what I should be looking out for while I'm there. Well, you could bring, you could print out 1 of my stencils and the stencil it somewhere. Uh… True. Yeah, I think we get to… we hang out on the, like, Facebook, uh, Metacampus has this sort of Main Street USA kind of cafeteria zone. And so we're going to spend all evening there, I think, on the first day.

So I could leave, I could look at the stickers out on the tables. Yeah, give, give me your address, if you promise to put up a sticker somewhere, take a picture of it, I'll send you 5 stickers, no problems. Okay, I'll do that. I mean, one of my, like, and this is just a very juvenile thing, but if someone would put up those stickers or stencil something at Menlo Park or somewhere, that would be. Oh, it would make me happy. In a very childish way, I realized, but still. Yeah, I can do that. I'm happy to do that.

Although I believe that that's… you mentioned this idea of anonymizing, like, faces in certain portals. It could also, like, lead to a new pastime, like a new hobby, where people will be just self-identifying themselves, using some kind of, like, a system. In a way, it's like, you know, your face was, like, ID'd and cross-matched with you. However, like in all those pictures taken of you, your face is anonymized, and you can, like, voluntarily self-identify. So this way, people could, you know, get to know about certain interesting angles or photos taken of them in certain situations, they were.

Previously not aware of, so… Maybe. Yeah, I, I, I believe that the, uh, the Find Bind Network. And the, uh… You know, ill-fated, uh, COVID contact tracing work that… Matt Bidolf actually did while he was at Apple. Uh, along with Google. Um… would be an amazing template. To expand the idea that instead of collecting information about contact events, You could collect, sort of, mesh network information about photographic events. And if there are cryptographic sort of signatures of faces, for example, you could broadcast out and say like. Who has this face? And then my phone could say, I have this face, and then… You know, I could have settings.

So it requires a whole bunch of agreements between the parties. But to say like, and if you don't know me, I don't consent for my face to be legible in your photograph. You know, or I could get a push notification saying somebody took a photo. Do you want… is this okay for your face to be in it? You know, and like, I don't think that's too hard, you know, in this, in the scope of all of the things that are hard to do with technology, this is not the hardest one. And it could be an incredible… learn to these conversations to… realize and remember that we can re-inject ideas like permission and consent and sort of… onward negotiation from an initial point.

Uh, back into these things, and it's just the vested interests that various people have in saying, like, oh, no, there's way too much here. We couldn't possibly moderate YouTube, whatever. Like, no, we have ways. There are ways of being able to collect signals. that act in the interests of the parties who are involved with it. So, you know, it may take, you know, a company that happens to sell incredibly expensive hardware. Uh, to be able to kind of advocate for them. That's not to say that it wouldn't be wrong when it does, but… Yeah, like, I, I look forward to people sort of.

Attempting to reopen the book on some of those things, because I believe that there would be ways to make glass is less perverted. If we, uh, um… Imagine what that technology is there, first and foremost to be in service of. Again, this idea of applying principles of differential privacy, like, on machine level, like, just randomizing your features by default, and then you can, you know, like, untangle all this, um, by providing consent, that would be a really interesting thing to consider. Sorry, Malias. Yeah, here, here, here, yeah. No, no. No, I was just saying that I really agree because there's so much cool and interesting and good things that could be made with this.

It's just that the incentive structures and the actors right now are don't have societies or my interests at heart, right? But which is so in I mean, being a, you know, geeky technologist, I can see all the potential for all good. The COVID tracking is such an obvious thing, and I haven thought about the consent automatic blurring, for example, or that kind of stuff. That would be really cool. And that could circumvent some of the bad stuff that comes out of this. Um, Matthias, but, you know, like, blurring the picture would basically destroy it for you, like, you know, you won't be able to hang in a gallery or something, like, you know, with blue faces.

The idea of, like, randomizing those faces so those people are, like, you know, they were never there because they are not real. that could, like, preserve the, like, artistic aspect of, like, whatever picture you're taking. So that could be quite an interesting thing. Uh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's another discussion to have, right? And this is something I would have liked to have this discussion in when I was taking my BA at art school and photography, right? So what does this make, how does this change the nature of what we consider art? Wherein lies the art in this work?

Is it about talking about what kind of phases are presented, because that's what we see with generative AI a lot, right? So how… The AIs can only model what they've been taught on and they've been mostly taught on Western materials. So you have all the prejudices from the web mimicked in the AI model. Then you could have a discussion, okay, but would it be better to have it blurred? Because then you don't impose… you know, uh, prejudices from the corpus, for example. But, I mean, that's a discussion worth having in the art community, or if you're doing street photography in that community, you know.

But as far as… as far as trying to mitigating public harms. I mean, there are different solutions, and I think Brendel's one is an interesting one. Yeah, I'm really glad that you brought up the photography, um, thing, and, like, you know, the art community, because it seems that all those gen AI tools will be reopened, the whole discussion that used to be between painters and photographers, because, um. I believe it with, like, French and British courts that in the 18th century, 19th century declared photography as an art. Because previously it was not recognized as art.

Because photographers were just machine operators. So, it took, like, multiple court decisions to acknowledge that photography is actually an arc. So, potentially, we will have a very similar. conversation very soon. Pavel Yeah, might be, and I know there are, I'm actually giving, I'm going on a lecture tour about AI and copyright in the next month. Um, and I'm going to talk about in big part about these things because there are a couple of interesting court cases, right? So who can be considered to be an artist or the originator of an AI work, whether written or, you know, illustration, blah, blah.

But I think the. An interesting aside is the… I think the only people or the only government governing body in Sweden that decides whether or not photography is art. are the, uh, what do you call them? Import, export customs, right? So the customs, they have like because there are tariffs, right? You need to tax stuff going in another country potentially or VAT or whatever. And they have very specific. categories for whether or not a piece of photography is considered an art, or is it the journalistic work, or is it a like a product image? You know?

How do you qualify this? Well, it needs to fulfill certain criteria and depending. So they have clear distinctions on whether or not it's art. But of course, the art community and the like the… regional and national institutions that hand out grants and so on, they can't really say. I don't want to get into the discussion whether or not something is art. They go with, if other artists think it's art, then it's art. If not, then it's not. Because otherwise this would be like government tampering or imposing their interpretation of what R is. And as a society, we've decided that That's not the role of government.

But the customs agents have to enforce it. So they are the only ones with the definition of whether or not it's art, which is kind of funny. Yeah, sorry, that was an insight. I need… That's so.

deciding what was art right and then from that we get impressionism one quick question so Pavel, when you first said the word hobby, I thought of like a stupid idea but I got to a question through it I was thinking like Imagine a game where like a hobby, like trying to be the most surveilled person on the planet. Like if you had a way of tracking like someone like you know how people go to Major League baseball stadiums and they try to go to all of them like imagine intentionally trying to be like tracked by every system or the largest number of systems.

But that led me to a real question of Is there currently a way to, like, find out, like, say I want to see a dashboard of, like, what systems know about me, or like which things have I been tracked or surveillance surveilled on? You know. Are people doing any work like that where you can put in something that uniquely identifies me, and then I can see who knows me Yeah. Certainly, like, you know, uh, companies that you have an account with, uh, I believe have a legal obligation to be able to furnish you with all of the information that they have, so.

Spotify will is required to tell you what it thinks you are. Uh, like Ditto, YouTube, Google, Meta even, and most of those keywords are hilariously Uh, ad hoc. I guess not even wrong. And, uh, so that's fun, but as to what flock thinks you are, I don't know. FICO? You like they. Because they don't necessarily have an agreement with you, I just heard about, and I don't think it's a tinfoil hat, an employee score. database that was started pre-internet that, um, that people are using, you know, more and more fidelity information in order to work out. want to stiff somebody on a 9-to-5… Or on a… An hourly wage kind of offer.

So, uh, in terms of the existing ones, uh, Those things exist as to whether somebody has either stitched those things together or found mechanisms for being able to say, like, Give me things from a place where I. End users ordinarily don't get any information at all, I don't know. Like, it's sort of adjacent to Incogni as a concept, you know, or DeleteMe or these services, but it's just like. Tell me what… tell me what you think I am. Rather than just, uh, tell me, uh, Delete anything you think I am, which is what those services currently are.

Cool. Yeah, I'd love to see a collage of all Yeah, most often, oh, sorry. Yeah. I'd love to see a collage of all the pictures ever taken from me from, like, security cameras I didn't know about as a piece of art. Hmm. I think one issue is that most companies, they bury those kind of things in terms of services. So you might actually not even know that you're in. database and if you don't know, then who are you going to ask, right? There are a couple of what I call those, like regular chain stores, foods, groceries, gross, what do you call those?

Where do you shop for food? Process? Yeah, grocery store. Grocery store. Yeah, grocery stores, yeah. Grocers, chains were grocers, yeah. Grocery store. Yeah, thank you. I had a brain fart. So anyway, and I've signed up so I can do, like, the… my own checkout, right? Oh, like, the… I check out the stuff. The way it works, as I understand it, reading some Reddit threads from people who work there, they track you in store, of course, to see where you spend more or less time. But also they build a profile on you, and if you diverge from the profile, you're much more likely to be flagged for a control.

Which I, which I noticed, so if I, if I and my partner go out and I take the scanner thingy and I walk to an aisle and I wait for her because she, she's off somewhere picking something up, then I'm going to be flagged for the extra check because it suspicious that I've stood in the same spot for 2 minutes and not pinged anything. The idea, I guess, being that perhaps I'm hiding. on my person or something, I don't know. But I'm sure there's a profile. If I go to like ICA, which is the name of the chain.

Maybe I could, that's a good idea. Maybe I could ask them for my profile. See what they have on me. How suspicious am I? How do I rank? Because most people… it seems to be a black box. People are like… As long as you're walking, you're not going to be checked, but if you stand still, you're going to be checked. If you go to areas that you're not usually in, then you're going to get checked. So let's like the Spotify thing. It's fun to download. It's probably, probably a third-party company. Like, the grocery store doesn't want that data.

You know what I mean? Like… Yeah, might be, but my agreement is with them, right? So at least in Sweden, they are the other party in this agreement. Yeah, no, if you've got the patience to pull on that thread, then I think that there would be a whole series… a whole cascade of technical-legal obligations that should flow. Ultimately, to you getting quite a lot of data that would be very expensive for them to be able to collate and collect. So that would be really funny, please do. Yeah, so I'll know what my weekend is full of.

Yeah, excellent. I'd love to hear it. Yeah, I would also, I would also like to do the option. I'd like to buy the option from you to publish that. Well, give… And then basically have you, like, the most popular person on the internet, I think you should, I think you should. Excellent, yeah, good. Relatively. Give me an offer, and I'll consider it. Oh, no, like, like 1, €1 for sure. If you know what I mean, the the the The juicy part of it is that. Then you start then you start competing. Like Joel sort of suggests, Then you start competing to be the most. archetypal person.

In the world, like you're the most you that you can possibly be because all these people are like, oh yeah, no, I'm gonna go ahead and put Mateus on the server. Because that's like, you know, like, you always jump into Facebook with one friend, his name is Tom, right? And… and… the same thing could be true of you. You could make yourself, with this data, you could make yourself the most. Available profile of anybody on Earth. You know what, uh, But coming back to… Yeah, I was thinking of, like, it's a weird variation of the Truman Show with Jim Carrey, but it's like, is it lose because he didn't know, but it's like a narcissistic marketable version of that Yeah.

Coming back to this hobby scenario that you all mentioned, it could be really interesting if you would be able to get all that CCTV footage. Let's say you're going on a road trip and then like suddenly all the footage from CCTV cameras, like, you know, from all those gas stations you're passing by. is something you can enrich your, like, you know, showreel from your, like, video highlights of the trip with. That would be a really interesting thing to consider. Yeah, or… I went as far as checking with people who work on or with Predator MQ-9 drones to be like, Could we deploy these over Yosemite National Park so that they can just take pictures for me, and I just, like… go like this, and it'll take a picture of the thing.

They're like, yeah, it's too far away, but… I do like the idea. I mean, going back to what Brendel suggested, right? So if we ha- if we, if I can get a… instead of taking pictures, I don't want to take pictures myself, right? But if I'm touristy spots probably I'm gonna appear in the background of a lot of people's photos. So can I just option for like two cents per picture to get a copy of each picture in which I'm appearing? I mean, as a one-off art project, that would be good, and the next time it would be less good, but, you know.

Time to make dinner. Have a nice weekend, guys. Does anybody here use windy.com as their weather tool Peace. No. So Wendy.com is the best weather tool. It's amazing. It's just got every single overlay, but one of the overlays that it has is it has a webcam Overlay. So I was up in Sudbury last week and there was this big rainstorm in Toronto and I just wanted to see how bad it was. So you just open up wendy.com. There's a map, you hit the webcam thing and it shows you all the various webcams out there and some of them are Most of them are, like, traffic cams, official cameras that you would see along expressways and highways, and then there are People who have webcams that just share them, publicly And it's a nice way to peek into things.

So, like, we're in any… any… wherever you are everyone in the room, I can probably find a webcam near-ish you and get an idea of what the weather's like, and so love that. And just thinking about this whole meta glasses thing, it's like, I kind of wish Like if they're all like if there was like millions of people Wearing Metaglasses around the world and instead of just like tapping into a webcam, I could just be like Show me Times Square right now, or show me some part of Brooklyn right now, and it'll just tap into anybody wearing meta glasses nearby, and now I get a… I get a real-time stream.

Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, this guy's wearing meta glasses. But then to steer towards the more optimistic side of things, it's like, okay, let's pretend, yeah, obviously the bad actors are shitty. So let's pretend we have some kind of like notary type of situation where you you're bonded when you buy Metaglasses. Like, you're officially a cool person. You've been bonded, you're gonna go about your day like a normal human being and not do anything stupid. or creepy, and you become part of the network, and you're compensated for doing this thing, and there's algorithms that automatically blur faces and license plates, which is cool, because I don't… I personally don't care about faces and license plates, I just want to know what the weather's like.

I want to see how many people are at the festival. I want to see you know, if the grocery store is very busy right now You know, I'm not looking to extract artistic captures from anyone's face or and then you enhance it to, like people who need assistive Yeah, yeah, exactly. Is that Bemiize, what is that, Pavel? Be in my eyes. That'd be nice. Yeah. Oh, be my eyes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I thought it was, yeah, so you can help people who need Who need assistance, you know, what you know what color is this thing?

that I'm holding, and someone will kind of help out. Anyways, I think there's some interesting kind of positive, more optimistic things that we can imagine Where it makes sense, and I just think of, like, Wendy as the closest analog to, how can I see a real-time picture anywhere in the world right now, and it's the webcam feature instead of inside of that weather app. And it'd be much cooler if I could do more. Yeah. Well, totally. Well, so one of the things, I don't know if people are. I think I've talked about it before, like, Um, um, Phone optics, light field rendering, where, like, the reality of a picture is that it's just a collection of rays.

You know, you take a picture from a vantage point, and it's a collection of, like, This rate from this point, In that direction at this time. is red. This one is slightly pinkier red, and this one is pink. Um, you know, the consequence of knowing all of those together is what an image is. But if you have multiple images from multiple vantage points, then You can make determinations about what things were at that given surface. Even if you, you know, don't have an image from it. So, like, if you take a… A whole bunch of videos of just forward-facing like this.

Um, then you can derive a reasonable. idea of what it would look like. as a plan view straight down, even though you never took that picture. You know, and so if you have… so, like, I did this with… we did this with robots, where you took up, you know, The pictures every, uh… inch or so in a room, a 360 photo, but then that means that you get just every single ray from every single point. It's a lot of data, but it's cool. What that means is that if you have enough data that you can correlate, you can create synthetic views that are the views from nobody, or the views from nowhere.

And, uh, you know, Uh, they're only good when they have multiple, sort of, reporters from those different vantage points. But by virtue of composing them, You're not getting any one person's view. And so it's not disclosing of the fact any more than the fact that there are enough people in a space to kind of construct these composite fields. So, I sort of… What was the Plan Optics, life. Oh, sorry, I was going to say Sea Dragon, right? What was the Microsoft technology from a while back that took multiple photos See, I think there was… With Snapdragon, I remember I was thinking of that too.

There was some No, well, because I remember back AI stitching thing Back in the day, it was it would collect a whole bunch of different images taken inside of the same location and it can reconstruct a 3D model and back then Flickr was still a thing, so they were using Flickr. The idea was like you could basically say, go to like, you know, the pyramids in Egypt. And then it would look at all the photos that were posted of the pyramids in Egypt, and it would start to reconstruct It I'm feeling like this is, like, a 20 years ago or so, but nowadays, you know, we have Gaussian splatting, we have neural render fields, we have all these other similar type of things where it's like, you're right, it's like you're taking photos from everyone.

Yeah, photosynth, that's it You're taking A bunch of images from people and you're creating an image from no one like an anonymized, yeah, objective point of view of a place, now it would be like in a high 3D detail and possibly, you know, real-time-ish Yeah, or if… even if it's sparse, even if it's poor, it's not any one person's, and it's constructed simply because this space is implicitly in the public, to Julian's earlier point about being able to take street photography and having kind of a kind of a plausible deniability about it. Yeah Um, like, I think that there's… There are real benefits to being able to do that, and, you know. these images only emerged because there are multiple people taking them.

It's an interesting idea, but it does need to have that sort of digital Brokerage of information to be able to kind of reason and reconcile. Uh, like, multiple people's data together in order to turn something into something that is sort of nominally sort of publicly safe. Um, again, you know, hard, not the hardest thing we're doing in technology today. Well, this has been really fun. I'm sorry that I missed what was the real downer at the beginning of the… when I just joined, uh, and, uh. I don't necessarily want people to remind themselves of it, but everything that I've heard here so far has been really awesome.

Yeah, we pulled it back from the break. Yeah, we averted a lateral collapse. Well, I appreciate that. My force is thinking about the thing. Today. Today, today we did, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Now, it's much better, much better. I'm going to bounce. Me too. These guys I'm Yeah, I gotta jump on a call. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy your weekend. Thanks, everyone. See you guys. Bye, everyone Right.