FLOSS Weekly 711 Transcript

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

Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is FLOSS Weekly. I'm Doc Searls. This week, Sean Powers and Jonathan Bennett join me in a round table talking about all kinds of things, the Fedaverse Twitter chat, g p t. And the fun titled for this show is may or may not be notable, which is what it says. Now, if you're verified on Twitter, you've kind of been demoted to you, or may or may not be notable, and that's just kind of a theme through the whole thing, but it's a lot of fun. And that is coming up next.

Announcer (00:00:31):
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWiT

Doc Searls (00:00:37):
This is FLOSS Weekly, episode 711, recorded Wednesday, December 14th, 2022. May or may not be notable. This episode of FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by Code comments, and original podcast from Red Hat that lets you listen in on two experienced technologists as they describe their building process and what they've learned from their experiences. Search for code comments in your podcast player and by bit Warden. Get the password manager that offers a robust and cost-effective solution that can drastically increase your chances of staying safe online. Get started with a free trial of a teams or enterprise plan, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user@bitwarden.com slash twi. And by Kollide, that's Kollide with a K Kolide is an endpoint security solution that gives it teams a single dashboard for all devices regardless of their operating system. Visit Kolide.com/FLOSS to learn more and activate a free 14 day trial today. No credit card required. Hello again, everybody, everywhere. I am Doc Searls. This is FLOSS Weekly, and this week our guests are each other, <laugh> in this case Sean Powers and Jonathan Bennett, all of us here, I realize in flattish states, in the American Midwest, in flyover country, <laugh>. Here we are <laugh> what I used to do. So since since Jonathan's drinking, what, what are you doing, Sean? I <laugh>.

Shawn Powers (00:02:18):
I just, I like way to build us up. Like today, our guests are from the most boring places, <laugh>, and

Doc Searls (00:02:24):
Not really, it's

Shawn Powers (00:02:27):
Not doing much prepping for snow. That's about it. And yeah. Yeah. Green is

Doc Searls (00:02:34):
Not throwing salt out on the on the driveway or you do that. You do. Yeah. Prophylactic salt, like preventative salt to stop it from happening.

Shawn Powers (00:02:47):
No, I mean, it doesn't stop it from happening. The, it's really the ice that's more, that is more dangerous, though. If it snows, it's fine. It packs, it can, you know, like you get up and down the stairs, it's when it, like flirts at right around the freezing point. And so, oh, look it rained. Shoot. Boom. Nope, that was ice. So yeah, that's, that's where the salt comes in handy.

Doc Searls (00:03:08):
And, and you don't get that much snow in Oklahoma, do you? I think it's, that's a, that's a job for the Dakotas in Kansas and Nebraska. Yeah,

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:16):
Snow is, snow is pretty rare. We do get the ice storm down here too, though. And really that's when it gets bad. You know, you, you get a a half inch of ice on everything and tree limbs break and power goes out. And Southern Oklahoma, north Texas, it gets really bad every once in a while. Every couple of years we get a really bad one.

Doc Searls (00:03:34):
So, so we, so we're, we got our own stories this morning. So why, why don't we start with your sh Jonathan, you have, I'm, I'm just, because on my cheat sheet, you're first

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:47):
Okay. <Laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:03:49):
So talk about what's happening. I'm gonna talk as the year comes down.

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:51):
We're, we're a little behind the curve. Yeah. We're a little behind the curve on this. I wanna talk about Twitter, and we try really hard to not get political here on FLOSS Weekly. One of the reasons being that we all come from different political backgrounds and we don't wanna have a political fight on camera. And I was talking yesterday in, in the Slack, and I think there is an open source, a political tack that we can take on this that might be really interesting to talk about. And that is, of course, Elon Musk paid 44 billion for Twitter. And some people are very concerned about that. Just the idea of someone with a different ideology than theirs and different value system from theirs, suddenly controlling the platform on which they do a lot of communication. And of course, a lot of people have moved to Mastodon and, and other platforms as a result.

(00:04:45):
And the thought that comes to mind that I wanna run past you guys is whether or not you like Elon Musk, where you think he's evil incarnate, it's a good thing that people are now thinking about, should I be trusting this big centralized platform that one person or a group of people have control over? Or should I go to something that is open source like Macedon? Because it actually gives people control over their own conversations. And I think that's putting aside all of the political junk and all of the, you know, the really toxicity that's out there from all over the place. I think that's a good thing. And yay, maybe this is finally the thing we needed to get our foot in the door with Mastodon and other platforms.

Doc Searls (00:05:30):
Well, well, to me it's and logic. I've, you know, I'm en Mastodon. I'm in two different MAs in instances. One from the TWiT one and another one for called jona.host, which is nothing but journalists. You have to kind of apply to get in there. I might haven't left Twitter either, you know, and frankly, I'm also on Facebook and I'm on my own blogs mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and I'm all over the place. I, I use eight browsers. There's no, I think, and logic applies here. An interesting thing to me about Twitter is that, and people don't talk about this that much. It's like, it's all about who you follow and who follows you. And, you know, I have like 25,000 followers, which I, I, I say again, is meaningless. It's kind of like a parking spaces, 21,000 cars going by and it engages 10 a day mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.

(00:06:19):
But I, I follow thousands of people, but none of them are political. I go outta my way to like, not follow anything political and, and or remarket anything political. And if you, or that's disagreeable or contentious in some other way. So algorithmically, it doesn't look like a trash heep to me. It looks about the same as it ever did. I, I'm seeing none of the problems with it, but I love the fact that Masin is there and that Mastin is growing and, and all of that. I, it's, to me, it's just the beginning of whatever it will become. And it is part of the pendulum swing from centralized to decentralized. I think we kind of go back and forth with this. But I, I also think it's, it's just, it's just a really interesting thing. And I don't have a problem with Twitter, frankly.

Shawn Powers (00:07:06):
Yeah, I was gonna say the pendulum thing, and, and I don't, you know, we're on so many podcasts. I don't remember where we talked about it with Kyle Rankin though talking about, you know, the, there was a time not too long ago where things like Jabber, the Jabber protocol was starting to be this decentralized way that we talk instead of using you know, AOL's chat. And it seems like we kind of started to congregate on a single monolithic, you know, company owned platforms again. And maybe this is going to, you know, nudge things the other way. Like, you know, Jonathan's point where it's good if we have some sort of decentralized control, like individual control over things. And I mean, as far as Twitter itself, I mean, you know, there, I think that it's been talked about ad nauseum, you know, political or not political, but, you know, it is weird. Like, like yesterday, you know, I'm, I'm verified on Twitter, and now my, if you click on a debt now says this is a legacy verified account. This person may or may not be notable <laugh> funny dig.

Doc Searls (00:08:09):
Like, you vote, have a vote, approve vote

Shawn Powers (00:08:13):
Me there may, you know, narrator

Doc Searls (00:08:15):
<Laugh>

Shawn Powers (00:08:15):
Narrator says it was not notable. He's not. Yeah.

Doc Searls (00:08:19):
Still.

Shawn Powers (00:08:19):
So but yeah, I, I do, I think it's great. And I, I think that even being conscious of how centralized control can be detrimental for whatever reason, for political reasons, for, but just for whatever reason, I mean, Elon could say, you know what? This sucks. I don't wanna do it anymore. Everybody's fired, you know, twitter.com now redirects to SpaceX and there is no more Twitter <laugh> <laugh>, he owns it. I mean, that, that would be, that would be detrimental to lots of people's, you know, big forms of communication. You know, a lot of my livelihood is based on social interactions on the internet and having all of my three eggs, again, I'm not a big person online in somebody else's basket's, a little unsettling. So, yeah, I think it's a good thing that we, we have that,

Doc Searls (00:09:07):
Here's a way to look at it. Everything.

Shawn Powers (00:09:10):
There you go. Yeah. May or May

Doc Searls (00:09:12):
Is verify

Shawn Powers (00:09:13):
<Laugh>

Doc Searls (00:09:14):
Does it, does it say may or may not be verified? I can't read it. I,

Shawn Powers (00:09:18):
I've, no, no. It says I'm a legacy verified account. It may or may not be Noble

Doc Searls (00:09:22):
<Laugh>. That's Wow. That is great. Yeah. Oh, man, what a demotion is this.

Shawn Powers (00:09:29):
I know, I know. I

Doc Searls (00:09:30):
Kind of used to maybe matter.

Shawn Powers (00:09:32):
Wow. And now there's like yellow check marks. I I, I saw somebody with a yellow check mark. I don't even know what that means. And there's also like the, the verification badge and then an official under, you know, badge underneath the verified check mark <laugh>. It's crazy. Well,

Doc Searls (00:09:48):
They're, they're, they're experimenting. They're, they're still

Jonathan Bennett (00:09:50):
Trying to figure Twitter's, Twitter's still trying to figure out how it's gonna work. All of those under, under the new, everybody pays $8, which, yeah. Yeah. You know, that's fascinating in, in and of itself. So they, there there's this, this saying, when it comes to things online, you know, if it's free and there's advertisements, then you are no longer the consumer. You are the product. And is it maybe a good thing that Twitter is exploring this idea of making the consumers, the consumers again? I don't know that there are some

Doc Searls (00:10:22):
Making customers

Jonathan Bennett (00:10:23):
A lot of that.

Doc Searls (00:10:25):
I, I actually would not have a problem with that. I would not, I I don't know if I'd pay eight bucks a month. That's what he wants. Eight bucks a month is a lot. Yeah. and, but I, I do like the idea that, that, you know, and we have Club to it here. You know, it's <laugh>, it's cheaper to that kind of thing. It's a little bit cheaper. It's <laugh> one seven or eighths cheaper. But, you know, I mean, but value for value, there's nothing wrong with having a marketplace there. It, it is weird in the sense that you know, it's just a, it's a big change. And I, I, I was about to say is that, you know, in Hollywood, every movie is a project. They call it a project, and it kind of, a lot of people come together, a lot of money gets spent, it gets made, and then it goes away, or it sits around as some kind of legacy. But I think almost everything that happens on the internet is a project of some sort, some last longer, some la some don't. I mean, Twitter was a project of od o and it was a side thing that they did that kind of took off. I mean, it got big and it got infrastructural, but there's nothing that says it has to be what it's been. And that's, you know, to me, that's a, a grace of business on the net, not necessarily a problem, or, you know, a failing of some sort.

Shawn Powers (00:11:49):
So it's the Roman empire of, of

Doc Searls (00:11:52):
Yeah. Communication. Well, it's, it, it's more like you ever, this is kind of an interesting thing, that there are a lot of places on the web that that are, you know, the history of Europe or the history of the world, you know, year by year from 2000 BC or something like that. And you just look at a map of the world. And Europe is especially interesting because there are all these little city states that come up and go down and, and parts of countries that come up and go down. It's all, it's all a project. It's all a project. Each of us is a project. You know, it's, it's okay if it, if it, if it doesn't work out, you know? I mean,

Jonathan Bennett (00:12:28):
You know, that's, that's kind of an interesting interesting pivot point to talk a little bit more about, maam, because I've seen people create Mastodon accounts and go over to Maidan, you know, they're various servers, and then walk away and go, oh my goodness, this is not ready for primetime. What, what is y'all's thoughts on that? What have you found

Doc Searls (00:12:49):
It? It isn't, but what's, what, what's primetime there? You know, I mean, was Linux ready for primetime? You know, well, it, it became that Lennox is probably not, not a very good comparison, but, but the sort of bu I mean, if you, if you did a visual of all of Masden in all the instances, there'll be some bigger ones and some smaller ones. And it's kind of like it reproduces by budding, you know, but nothing breaks off. It's just like when a bunch of bubbles is very effervescent. I, I think it's very hard to port one's habits over from Twitter over to Masden mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But you know, it, but it's cool. I mean, it, I think it, there, there's a lot of experimentation happening there, and the fact that it's open means it can, and it's fun and cool. You know, I shrink my screen. I, I screen my, strip my windows. So I'm looking at the, at the, at the camera <laugh>. Now I have to expand it to see whatever it was that answer up there that I can't read. <Laugh>, it's already scrolled by <laugh>

Jonathan Bennett (00:13:55):
Sean, there are a couple of well, there's things tied in to Maidan. It's not an island done unto itself. And you had some notes here about some of those what Pier Tube and Casta pod. What, what, what are those?

Doc Searls (00:14:11):
You're on mute, dude.

Jonathan Bennett (00:14:12):
I think Sean's muted.

Doc Searls (00:14:14):
<Laugh>

Jonathan Bennett (00:14:16):
Scourge, sorry. Or, or maybe

Doc Searls (00:14:19):
<Laugh>. There were dogs barking. I

Shawn Powers (00:14:21):
Thought for a second there that maybe you were,

Doc Searls (00:14:22):
Those are your,

Jonathan Bennett (00:14:23):
But for a second, your Linnux desktop is not ready for prime time <laugh>.

Shawn Powers (00:14:26):
No, no, no. Just, just my professionalism is not ready for Prime time

Jonathan Bennett (00:14:30):
<Laugh>. 

Shawn Powers (00:14:31):
So yeah, the, you know, the, the piece that makes Mastodon work across instances with decentralization is Activity Pub. And, and I am not a developer, however using Activity Pub, there's a whole bunch of other things that are then compatible. Things like peer Tube, which is like a, no, I'll be honest, peer Tube is a little even more complicated than that. They communicate with Activity Pub, but then there's like some Web Torrance going on. It's, it's supposedly to, if not replace augment in some way, the idea that YouTube has where it's, you know, like videos, but then it's distributed and distributed among peers. I, I don't know, I haven't looked into it too much, but it uses Activity Pub, and then casta pod.org is a, it's a device about, or it's a, it's a program to host podcast episodes, but in a way that they're activity pub compatible.

(00:15:27):
The, the big question that I have is, I mean, this is all great, that there's like different technologies that are starting to use Activity. Bub, you know, years ago, I, I had the the notion that why, why do we have all these different things? Why can't there just be like some, some big, the feed and whatever your particular thing that you want to contribute to the feed is, you know, people can subscribe to. And maybe that's Activity Pub, but it also seems like it's RSS or Atom, or it feels a little bit like some of, some of activity Pub is, is reinventing the wheel. I realize that there's more to it than that, you know, the decentralization where like things are cashed on instance to instance and stuff. But I, my concern is that we're gonna go so far into the Activity pub is awesome thing that we're, we'll start doing things with an activity pub that maybe don't even require Activity Pub, because it's far more complicated to administer spoken from a guy who, you know, manages his own Mastodon instance than something like, you know, static like RSS or Adam.

Doc Searls (00:16:36):
Yeah. So, so just tell me quick, because I'm gonna, I'm gonna appear stupid here, but I don't mind doing that. What is activity, Bob?

Shawn Powers (00:16:44):
Yeah, it's it's the way that instances like Mastodon instances whole updates from each other. It, it's like, like R rss, but mutated into something a a little more decentralized so that other people can distribute stuff for you. It's, it's what puts the federation in the Federation.

Jonathan Bennett (00:17:07):
Yeah. It's, it's basically a protocol for, okay, so sending data back and forth but you can do more than just mask it on on it. There's a, there's a whole bunch of different services that can sit on top of it. So you, you mentioned Pier Two, which is sort of, kind of a YouTube replacement. There's oh, I forget the name of it. But there, there's like an Instagram replacement, there's a replacement for sharing photos,

Shawn Powers (00:17:27):
Pixel, something. There's

Jonathan Bennett (00:17:28):
Mult. Yeah, there's multiple different services that you could do on top of Activity Pub, which is, you know, geeks likes us, like us. That's one of the things we find so exciting about it, is that there's so much flexibility and you can make all of these services talk to each other and just work, work together. It, you know, once you get all the stuff set up. Right.

Doc Searls (00:17:48):
I wanted Simon last week or the week before, this was the week before wanted to make a distinction between Masin and the Fedi. Like everybody was talking about Masin, he says, but don't forget the whole FEI verse. Was he talking, do you know about something completely different? Or just masin within the context of the Federer verse as everything that can possibly be federated in that kind of way.

Shawn Powers (00:18:13):
Probab probably talking about, at least conceptually something like Activity Pub, a way that the different things can communicate behind the scenes. It's like, I mean, Mastodon uses activity pub, activity Pub doesn't use Mastodon, if that makes sense. You know, it's, it's just the Yeah. Underlying communication protocol.

Doc Searls (00:18:30):
Yeah. That, that makes sense. Well, I want to get to where this bleeds over into blogging because I think there's a risk that blogging will make a comeback especially giving what's going on with Twitter. But first I have to say that this episode of FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by Code Comments. That's an original podcast from Red Hat, you know, when you're working on a project and you leave behind a small reminder in the code, a code comment to help others learn from your work. While this podcast takes that idea by letting you listen in on two experienced technologist as they describe their building process, there's a lot of work required to bring a project from whiteboard to development, and none of us can do it alone. The host Burr Sutter is a Red Hatter and a lifelong developer advocate and a community organizer.

(00:19:23):
In each episode, Burr sits down with experienced technologists from across the industry to trade stories and talk about what they've learned from their experiences and one on deep learning. He talks to a, a technologist from Intel about what, how Intel uses deep learning inside the company has become quite dependent on it. It's an interesting episode. I recommend it. Episodes of all kinds are available anywhere you listen to podcast and at Red hat.com/code comments podcast, search for code comments in your podcast player will also include a link in the show notes. My thanks to code comments for their support.

(00:20:04):
So before there was Twitter and before there was the Fed averse, and before there was all this other stuff. There was blogging and and there was writing on the web. There was plenty of writing on the web. I started writing on the web in the early nineties, I guess, or writing online. But then on the web, really after 95, and it got called blogging really starting around 1999. And I had a very successful blog. I mean, thousands, maybe like many has 50,000 readers a day. And then, wow, Facebook came along and Twitter came along, and they all left, and all the writers went over there. But there's a, I, I sense, especially thanks to the early work Dave Warner's doing now and kind of re a revival of RSS as a thing and recognizing RSS never went away. It's still the way lots and lots of stuff gets syndicated on the web.

(00:21:02):
 But the interesting thing to me is that the way I wrote in a blog was very tweet like for a long time. But I could go along if I wanted to, and I could have headlines if I wanted to. Didn't have to have headlines if I didn't want it, want to. But Twitter kind of shaped the way we work another way. And, and WordPress basically wants a headline, wants you to write a column every time. And that's happening now with CK and with newsletters in general. TCK is yet another centralized platform, by the way. And it's acting like one, and I'm sure it's a good thing in many ways, but it's closed and has its own way of doing things. But what do you guys think about, I do you guys, I mean, you, you're right on on on Hackaday and other places, Jonathan, do you see that as blogging? Do you think of that as blogging, or do you, what's your thinking about where blogging goes?

Jonathan Bennett (00:21:53):
It's pretty similar. I mean, you can do a lot with blogging, like a lot of different things could fall under the category of blogging. There, there's been a thing that people have observed about Twitter even, even before it changed hands. And it's something I've noticed too, and I think it ties in here. Twitter tends to make people snarky, <laugh>, and it tends to make a snipe at each other. And I think it's just because of the format and the limitation on how long your tweets can be. So back a few months ago, I did something I very rarely do, and I waited into a political discussion on Twitter and it, it happened to be with Simon, one of our co-hosts. And after a couple of exchanges, I immediately said, all right, look, this is why I don't like discussing political things on Twitter.

(00:22:46):
And Simon came back with, no, no, we need to discuss these things. I'm like, you're right. We need to discuss these things. But I hate doing it on Twitter because I am I am brought to the point of just making snide remarks at people rather than having a meaningful conversation about it. And one of the things I like about Hackaday and blogging in general, there's kind of this idea of, of of long form expression as opposed to Little Chi tiny messages, is that you can get into the complexities and the nuances of things. And so when you take a, you know, a hot button political issue, certainly you find out if you dive into those nuances, that it's more complicated than you thought it is. And the polarized viewpoints, the, the false dichotomy there's more to it than that. And <laugh>, and I think maybe blogging needs to come back back. I'm not sure Twitter is a good thing for us as a species the, the what it, what it has become or what it did become. But yeah, blogging, blogging is super interesting because you can, if the topic requires it, you can get into nuances and then, you know, hopefully you have a good comment section and people can come back and correct you or have their own comments to make their, you know, their own viewpoints to share. Yeah, it, it's interesting. It's, it needs to come back. I, I think,

Shawn Powers (00:24:15):
I think that you just nailed it there. I think that Twitter is the comments section without anything <laugh> to

Jonathan Bennett (00:24:21):
Mind

Shawn Powers (00:24:22):
Any basis for conversation. Right. You know, I mean, every, every Twitter or every comment thread that has devolved into anarchy at least has some basis for like a, a starting point. But Twitter is just the horrible comment section. So yeah, that's a, I think that's a, an unintentional great analogy that you made there. <Laugh>, Jonathan, I,

Jonathan Bennett (00:24:41):
I love that Sean. Twitter is the Internet's horrible comment section without any of the concepts,

Doc Searls (00:24:46):
<Laugh>. It's, it's it, it's funny cuz I, I, I'm a snar. I, I mean, I snarky is probably, probably the right, right way to put it, but I love one liners and I love zingers and I love puns and I like but, but mostly the way I've always done it is to more or less say amen to something that I liked rather than, that's wrong and you're wrong. And, and all that stuff. I think making people wrong is like an easy sport that doesn't really do much good <laugh> and but, you know, but, but I'm, I'm an outlier in that, in in that sense. To me there's, I mean, in the long run, I think maybe this is an interesting way to look at it. I mean, we had blogging before that we had just play in writing. You just write a page, you're an author of a page, which you built <laugh> as if, as if with blocks.

(00:25:42):
And, and then blogging came along. There were several platforms for doing that. And then, but basically WordPress one, but it knocked off something called Movable Type. And it basically embodied what movable type did, which was essays. It wrote essays, it was kind of optimized for essays. And then it turned into this big content management way of doing things that, that became kind of a standard. But the future's gone a long time. <Laugh> coming. And, and I think that the modalities are really what matter, you know, there's the Twitter modality, there's the master in one, which I think we're just starting to work out there. There are some length limits, what is it, 500 characters or something like that, or 500 words. There was some, there seems to be some kind of a limit there. It

Shawn Powers (00:26:30):
Depends on, again, that's not dictated by, depends

Doc Searls (00:26:33):
On the

Shawn Powers (00:26:33):
Instance that's dictated by Mastodon, I think. And even then, I think some, you, you, you definitely can change the software. I don't know if there's options to change it without changing code, but I think, think Macon's default is 500 characters.

Doc Searls (00:26:45):
Yeah. So it's kind of like, you know, different coffee shops, you know, this one's got six chairs, and that one's got, that one's enormous. You know, I mean, I, I just went into a coffee shop here at, at, at on off of the side of Indiana University, which I hadn't seen, hadn't paid attention to before. And it's like, oh my God, there must be a hundred people in here. And it's still very cozy somehow. And, and it has a, a feel to it. Oh, this one you order at the counter that when you don't, they come out. There's just lots of opportunities here. And the whole idea of needing platforms, I think is kind of may go out. That may even be the big thing that you, you have code that you can use to build lots of different stuff. And some things will perform as platforms in the sense that they host and other things will give you ways to DIY whatever you're doing. I think that's something that needs to come back that's sort of off the table right now, but really, really, really does. I mean, I really miss having servers under my desk, even though I was an expert at running them. I mean, the fact that they were were there made a difference.

Shawn Powers (00:27:48):
Yeah. And, and I want that, the whole idea of, of, of decentralized stuff. And here's the thing, my, my observations on Mastodon is that Mastodon is a little more boring. Oh, what a hot take. Sean. I thought you were open source guy. No, but in, in the best possible way, right? Because tweet

(00:28:06):
That somebody, Twitter has an algorithm that is designed to get engagement at all costs, even if that cost is the downfall of humanity, right? So, I mean, you know, Twitter, <laugh>, the algorithm will you know, show more people the, the juicy stuff. And since Mastodon and, you know, activity pub in general, whatever, you know, client you're using to communicate in that way since it doesn't have that <laugh> that in ingrained need to boost engagement at all costs, you, you just get a, a better sense of the people that you follow, you know, and to the point where there's a, I don't, I'd call him out because it, it's a great guy. I don't remember who it was, but he tends to boost things, which is the master on term for retweeting boost things that I find very interesting. And he's almost become my, my meat version of an algorithm of showing me interesting things. And so, you know, I, I use it to follow stuff, but I, I have noticed that it, like, it's not as it doesn't feel like I'm an addict when I'm on Mastodon, whereas on Twitter it's sometimes like, oh, oh, what's happening? Oh, what's going on? What's going on? And it just keeps feeding me more and more. Mm-Hmm. And I think it's ultimately a very good thing if we don't have that feeling towards our social media. Rather, it's just a, an exchange of ideas and such. So

Jonathan Bennett (00:29:26):
Something I've wanted for a long time, and I've talked about this here before, I would love to see open source curation algorithms. Yeah. and the ability to control which algorithm you're seeing on your timeline. I think that would be a game changer. Oh, that would be right. Be interesting. Yeah. So Twitter and Facebook does it too. Yeah. Facebook does it a little differently, but it has, has the same problem. They have an algorithm that shows you things that's going to make you interact with it. That's the, that's the whole idea, because then their ads make more money. Right. That's, that's generally how this product has come to work. Yeah. So what if you had a service, and maybe Macedon could be this, I don't think they have the hooks for this yet, but maybe Macedon could eventually be this. You had a service where, you know, you had all of these.

(00:30:14):
So the, the way with Macedon it works is once someone from your server follows someone on a different server, your server also follows that server. And so when you go to the thing called the Federated Feed, it's just every toot the equivalent of which there's a hilarious story about that that maybe we should talk about. But every, every toot that has happened on all of those followed servers you get in your federated feed. Well, the problem with that is it's the fire hose. I mean, you just, there, there's just so many of them there. And then, you know, your list of people that you follow, if you're me particularly, is pretty small because you've not been on Macedon very long. Exactly. And it would be lovely if there was a middle ground where you said, Hey, here's, here's my algorithm. You know, maybe it's complex, but it's open source and I kind of understand what it's going to do.

(00:31:06):
I want to see the federated feed, but run through this algorithm so that I only get the things that, you know, this algorithm think I'm going to be interested in. And maybe you could have an algorithm that is not just the things that are gonna make you interact, which, you know, in a lot of cases, I think is just that list of things that'll make you angry <laugh>, which is not great. Yeah. but to, to be able to tailor that to something hopefully healthier, man, I think that would make a huge difference to the way we interact with the internet.

Shawn Powers (00:31:38):
And there's a pretty pretty simple way to hook something like that in cuz right now Mastodon tries to do that with the idea of following hashtags, right? You can follow individual users and you can also follow hashtags. If there was some sort of ai slash algorithmic way to have a, a smart hashtag, if you will, it seems like that would be able to fit into the, you know, the infrastructure without too much pain and have some third party like curated smart

(00:32:07):
Hashtag sort of thing to try to make it a, you know, the, the type of feed that you want. Because yes, the, the federated timeline, once there's a lot of servers that your server or your instances talking to, it's, I mean, it's crazy to see. And some instances don't share their federated timeline at all. So, and you know, again, with great power comes great responsibility. So, you know, not all instances do the same thing. There's configuration things. But yeah, I, I think that would be a wonderful way, it'd be nice to see some positive excitement in my MAs on feed. And like I said, I, there are a couple people who have taken it upon themselves to almost become, you know meat algorithms and I, I appreciate them. So

Jonathan Bennett (00:32:51):
I, I'm, I'm very humored by that. It's, it's a time is a flat circle sort of thing, because very early in the internet there were curated lists of links and some of, some of the things we take for granted now started as just somebody's really boring webpage with a whole bunch of links on it. <Laugh>.

Shawn Powers (00:33:10):
Yeah. And, okay, this is full circle to my, this is everything that I have to offer to the, to the show. But, you know, I talked about the R s s versus Adam versus now Activity Pub. And I think that we're going super far into the, everything needs to have activity, pub connectivity to be cool. You know, like there's, you know, WordPresses and Tumblr is, and all of these things are going to do it. Whereas I, I think that possibly just using some other client to share links to those sites is just as, as fine. I, I don't necessarily think they have to be native activity pub conscious platforms in order to benefit from the Fed averse. So do that what you will and yeah,

Jonathan Bennett (00:33:52):
Sure.

Doc Searls (00:33:53):
I think the world is averse. Basically I'm thinking about the physical world. You know, we have all these overlapping, these are

Shawn Powers (00:34:01):
The Voya,

Doc Searls (00:34:01):
The Star <laugh>. Yeah. <laugh>,

Shawn Powers (00:34:05):
You might the Star

Doc Searls (00:34:07):
Fe. Yeah. There's a look at show.

Shawn Powers (00:34:12):
I told you that was all I had to offer to the show. Know everything here is Fluff, <laugh>,

Doc Searls (00:34:17):
<Laugh>, everything here is, that's another, well this is actually probably a good, a, a good point for me to say that this episode of FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by Bit Warden. Bit Warden is the only open source cross platform password manager that can be used at home, at work on the go and is trusted by millions. With Bit Warden, you can securely store credentials across personal and business worlds. Bit Warden recently rolled out a bunch of stuff, for example, passwordless login for the web vault. Now you can authenticate into the Bit Warden web vault using your Bit Warden mobile app. Instead of entering your master password, you have organization Vault and login flow updates. Some organization functions have moved to improve the Web Vault UI and to accommodate new login options. The login process has been separated into two screens, skim updates, skim triggered events will now log from Skim instead of Unknown.

(00:35:16):
And the Skim a API I Key will now be obfuscated by default. There's generate username and password from iOS app extension on the fly generation of usernames and passwords can now be done from the iOS app extension, accessible from the share menu while using apps such as browsers. New theme theme for mobile, the popular Solarized dark theme has been brought to mobile. There's directory connector query parameters can be used in group filters for Google Workspace performance optimization, bid Warden has improved web vault load times and experience for accounts with access to thousands of vault items. Bit Warden is also a must need for your business. It's fully customizable and adapts to your business needs. Their team's organization option is $3 a month per user, and their enterprise organization plan is $5 a month per user share private data securely with coworkers across departments or the entire company.

(00:36:18):
Individuals can use their basic free account forever for an unlimited number of passwords or upgrade any time to their premium account for less than $1 a month. The Family Organization option gives up to six users premium features for only $3 and 33 cents a month. At TWiT, where fans of password, a managers bit warden is the only open source cross platform password manager that can be used at home on the go or at work and is trusted by millions of individuals, teams, and organizations worldwide. Get started with a free trial of a teams or enterprise plan or get started for free across all devices as an individually user at Bit warden.com/TWiT. That's bit warden.com/TWiT. <Laugh> for what it's worth?

Shawn Powers (00:37:06):
Yeah, for what it's worth, whenever anybody asks me about password managers bit Warden is always the one that I recommend, not because they're a sponsor or anything, but just because when I was doing research for an article I wrote on different password managers they were the one that seemed the least creepy and offered the, the best options for the, you know, for, for the needs, including all the things that right now I'm currently using last pass and I'm using it only because I've been using it forever. But yeah, when anyone, whenever anybody asks but Warden seems like the the one to go to, especially if you don't have one already.

Doc Searls (00:37:42):
Yeah. For those of you on Club Twitter or something, or haven't seen the ad <laugh> or, or the ad there. We still have a testimonial there. I like it. <Laugh>. So

Shawn Powers (00:37:51):
Was that, how's that for some out

Doc Searls (00:37:52):
Context

Shawn Powers (00:37:53):
Weird sponsorship stuff.

Doc Searls (00:37:56):
The, the ad was long enough, which is should be that I forget where we were. Exactly.

Shawn Powers (00:38:02):
Yeah. So like, let's do an awkward cuss. So anyway, more about wet socks, right? What is up with that

Doc Searls (00:38:06):
<Laugh>?

Shawn Powers (00:38:07):
I just like to really mess with Club TWiT people thinking they missed. Awesome.

Doc Searls (00:38:10):
What was it about a wet bird that replies at night? What was that? <Laugh>?

Jonathan Bennett (00:38:17):
So I, I I wanted to cover something else and there was an awesome segue from Sean talking to you about creepiness. But it's gone now. So <laugh>

Shawn Powers (00:38:27):
<Laugh>. So you want me to talk, I wanna talk about creepy things. All right.

Doc Searls (00:38:30):
There's the lawsuit.

Jonathan Bennett (00:38:31):
No, that may not be a good idea. I I wanna talk about cameras for a second and it's Oh, great. That's good. It's in gentle to the whole Macedon and Twitter discussion. So, Ooh. The, the FCC just recently banned devices made by oh, I'm not gonna be able to pronounce these correctly. The Hick vision, dha and a couple of other Chinese companies. And I've made the observation that this is something that both political parties in the United States seem to support which to me says that there's probably some classified documents that people have looked at and gone, oh, well, okay, we actually do need to ban those companies. That's, that's my take on it. That could be wrong. I think in probably 10 or 20 years we'll be able to do a freedom of information request and actually get the rest of the story.

(00:39:22):
All that said, what people are suspecting is that some of these cameras in certain circumstances will actually send back information to the company that made them, and then the government of China can say, Hey, we need to be able to see this camera feed right now. Which is really, really creepy if you're using one of these cameras in your house, <laugh> as a, as a baby monitor you know, things like that. And so I want to give a quick little plug for setting up your own camera system with Zone Minder and then, but also talk about this idea that Open Source zone Minder is an open source camera system, gives you the ability to get away from all of this creepy stuff, whether it's Twitter or, you know, the closed source firmware on your camera that you don't know what it does, or the closed Force source firmware on your, you know, your camera aggregator the thing that records all of your camera feeds.

(00:40:23):
You don't know what that's doing with, with that data. And the thing that I also wanted to get in is zone Minder is actually kind of in the need for some financial support right now. The Isaac Connor, the guy that's that's heading it up is really having to think seriously about finding a different job just because he's, he's having trouble making ends meet on, on Zone Minder. So I wanted to get that in, but also just, man, it's, it's really cool that these projects exists outside of Masson, outside of the Metaverse, things like Zone Minder and, and a bunch of other projects that let you get off the train. They let you get away from the potentially really creepy things that happen, you know, whether it be because of government influence or because of the need for advertising revenue. And I understand that it's not in everybody's wheelhouse to set up their own zone minder server, but I just love that the opportunity is there, that if you really want to, and you're really, you know, just a little bit paranoid, kinda like I am, that you can make your own private network with no internet access, put all of your cameras on that, and then just have it talk to your own minder server mm-hmm. <Affirmative>

(00:41:30):
And know that nobody else is spying on your cameras. That's one of the, one of the most powerful things about open Source is you can actually get to the point where you can trust your software.

Shawn Powers (00:41:39):
And you just stepped on my rebuttal, not rebuttal, but my, my addition there because I have, I have some aah, whatever, I don't know how to say it either, but, and the hack vision stuff, I have a few of those cameras because if anybody follows me on mine for any stretch of time, you know, that I have like cameras set up on bird feeders and birdhouses over the years in multiple different, like recording mechanisms and posting automatically to YouTube. And bird Topia is, has been several iterations now. But even if you use those cameras in a, in a non, like their environment, you know, like all of them have cloud-based stuff, which I'm sure is what's, you know, where the creepiness takes place. You, you can use them locally and pull that video feed locally from your network using, you know, R T S P or something like that.

(00:42:28):
 But, but you still have to be careful because if they're on your network and they have access to the internet and they have a gateway and, and all of that stuff, they could still send stuff over the network and you know, to the, to the internet. So you still have to be careful when you said you could put it on a private network that's not connected to the internet and just send this stuff to his zone minder, boom, chef kiss. That's, that's an a, a perfect example of how to get around those things without worrying about, you know, monitoring your network for outgoing packets and that sort of a thing. So yeah, just using Zone Minder in and of itself doesn't offer you complete safety from creepiness, but it gives you the ability to stop creepiness even if you're using some of those cameras that might have less than trustworthy firmware. So yeah, that was my, my addendum. That's it. Not a rebuttal. An addendum.

Jonathan Bennett (00:43:19):
<Laugh> an addendum,

Doc Searls (00:43:20):
A yes. And yeah.

Shawn Powers (00:43:22):
Yes. And yeah, it's clearly an improv show, so

Doc Searls (00:43:25):
<Laugh> Yeah. An an improv show. You can't step on anybody. So, so when you brought up cameras Jonathan immediately thought of the cameras in every tv it's a different thing. Of course, you can't use own miner to get on top of those. I mean, every television now buy has a camera for looking at you. They're all made in China.

Shawn Powers (00:43:44):
<Laugh>. I don't think that's true.

Doc Searls (00:43:46):
I think

Jonathan Bennett (00:43:47):
It's, I don't think mine has a camera in it. A lot of 'em do. Yeah, a lot of 'em do in the,

Doc Searls (00:43:50):
A lot of 'em do. And they're not necessarily visible. Okay. Sha shaking his head for those of you on the radio. I

Shawn Powers (00:43:54):
Mean, I'm looking at, yeah, I'm

Doc Searls (00:43:55):
Looking, look into

Shawn Powers (00:43:56):
This. The TV I just monitored on the wall, there's no camera in there that I know of, but now I'm all like, is it maybe I should have pants on? I don't know. But I,

Jonathan Bennett (00:44:02):
I <laugh> I will tell you, doc, what pretty much all of them have, and that is a microphone built into 'em. And so I think that concern is pretty valid just for the microphone, not necessarily the camera. And yeah, so a list, one of the other things that I've called for, for the longest time, and there's some technical hurdles for this, is open source firmware, something, you know, the equivalent of of what open w r t is for cheap routers. We need an open source firm or replacement for cheap smart TVs, because you cannot

Doc Searls (00:44:34):
Buy

Jonathan Bennett (00:44:35):
A TV that is not a smart TV anymore, unless you go off into the commercial market and pay twice what you would pay for a, a, a resident, you know, a a consumer television. But they're all smart tv. There's no way to look into what's going on in the firmware. And they do all have a microphone either in the TV itself or into the remote. And that is creepy

Shawn Powers (00:44:54):
<Laugh>. Yeah, a lot of 'em do. Anyway. And, and that's the thing too. I unfortunately, I think a lot of television manufacturers get some sort of a kickback for whatever smart firmware they put on there. And so, you know, just like when you used to buy computers and they came crammed, packed with crap wear or whatever, you, you know, the politically correct version of crap wear is, but shovel, shovel

Jonathan Bennett (00:45:13):
Wear

Shawn Powers (00:45:14):
<Laugh>. Yeah. It same thing with TVs. I think that's why they come that way, but, oh man, if there was like an open W r t version of like a a TV stuff Oh, that'd be so sweet. Like yeah, like Jelly Finn os on your tv. Oh, oh, oh, that'd be so cool.

Jonathan Bennett (00:45:31):
<Laugh>. I think, I think probably the, the big technical hurdle to that is that there's so many different models of TVs and the installation process would be different for each of them, and Sure. Well, you'd run into the same problem that open W r T has. You have a thousand different pro, you know, individual models that you'd have to support Open

Shawn Powers (00:45:48):
A hundred times.

Jonathan Bennett (00:45:49):
Yeah, yeah. So come on guys, let's start writing those. Open GL request letters to TV manufacturers. You, you use open source products inside of this firm where you've gotta give us the sources, let's make it happen. <Laugh>,

Doc Searls (00:46:01):
There's a, he actually just put something in our own little private chat here about the, the secret divisio success is actually a story from 2007. That's how far back it goes. 

Shawn Powers (00:46:11):
It's actually on the screen now,

Doc Searls (00:46:13):
Doc. So yeah, I mean the, the, the reason these things are cheap, is it a lot of them are cheap is because there's an advertising business in it, and they're all in the ad tech world where they're busy selling your attention on a, on a piece by piece basis based on your viewing,

Jonathan Bennett (00:46:29):
Which probably means that they're sending your viewing

Doc Searls (00:46:32):
The OBT too, whatever, most guess,

Jonathan Bennett (00:46:34):
Whatever head server is.

Doc Searls (00:46:36):
Yeah, exactly. Yep, yep. That's the idea.

Jonathan Bennett (00:46:39):
And of course,

Doc Searls (00:46:40):
Personalize. He as,

Jonathan Bennett (00:46:43):
Of course, all of those are obfuscated, right? So that, oh, there's no personally identify identifiable information in there, except it's not, well, for, for a lot of services, it's not actually that hard to de obfuscate and pick out an individual person. And, you know, if you have GPS data, well, you can figure out pretty easily where somebody lives and where somebody works. And then if you can, you know, associate that GPS data with their browsing data, oh my goodness, you can f you can figure out a lot about, you know, anonymous person number 1, 7 73, and pretty quickly figure out what their name is and where they work and where they live and what their telephone number is. It's, it's creepy.

Shawn Powers (00:47:21):
Yeah. They watched the great British Bake Off and Old Star Trek reruns. Oh, that's Sean. Yeah, we know him.

Doc Searls (00:47:27):
<Laugh> <laugh>. That's all of a show. Yeah. And goes from there to he needs a what? I don't know. It's a, it's entirely, you know, but it gets auctioned off somewhere. I think it's actually a, we know what happens on computers. That's actually not hard, not hard to do. Page X-ray, if you go to just look up page x-ray, it's really crazily interesting and spooky what is actually happening when your unprotected browser goes to a website. I was like, I like Boeing. Boeing, but I was looking at Boeing, Boeing this morning. It's just covered with ads and those things are all your attention's being auctioned off all over the place. I I, I want to get to what I think is a really big topic, which is the, the whole JA Chat G P T coming from open ai, which is incredibly interesting. And Guy is getting hose now because the whole world is demanding access to it, <laugh>.

(00:48:19):
So, but first I have to let everybody know that this episode of False Weekly is brought to you by Kolide, as Kolide with the K The challenge with device security has always been that it's difficult to scale. The bigger you are, the more edge cases you introduce and the easier it is for significant issues to escape. Your notice when remote work took over, that challenge got exponentially harder. Whether you're a fast growing startup that needs to graduate from managing device inventory in Google Sheets or an enterprise trying to speed up service desk issues, you need visibility into your fleet of devices in order to meet security goals and keep everything running smoothly. But how do you achieve that visibility when your design team uses Max and accounting is on Windows and your most talented developers are on Linux? Well, you get Kolide. Kolide is an end point security solution that gives it teams a single dashboard for all devices regardless of their operating system.

(00:49:19):
Kolide can answer questions, MDMs can't questions like you have production data being stored on devices. Are your developers SSH keys encrypted and a host of other data points that you'd have to write a custom shell script in order to learn about? Think about it. If a Linux vulnerability is exposed tomorrow, how will you figure out how many machines are at risk? File a ticket with a team that manages your M D M and wait days to get a report back. Send a mass email and hope the Linux users open it with Kolide. You have real time access to your fleet's data and instead of installing intrusive agents or logging down devices, Kolide takes a user focused approach that communicates security recommendations to your employees directly on Slack. You can answer every question you have about your fleet without intruding on your workforce. Visit Kolide.com/FLOSS and find out how. If you follow that link, they'll hook you up with a goodie bag, including a t-shirt just for activating a free trial. That's K O L I D e.com/FLOSS. So if the, I, you guys tried open, open G PT yet and I would've saved first. Well, we

Shawn Powers (00:50:37):
Were just talking about that's the problem with jello and scissors and staple guns, and I really wanted to mess up the Club to,

Doc Searls (00:50:46):
What was the ad A that saw patrol, you can guess if you're paying for, for the TWiT the Club TWiT, you have to guess what the ad happened to be. <Laugh>

Shawn Powers (00:50:54):
People are gonna quit Club TWiT now and its gonna be

Doc Searls (00:50:56):
My fault. It's follow up. You mis said <laugh>.

Jonathan Bennett (00:51:01):
So I've got, I've got two anecdotes about chat G P T that I think are both pretty interesting and both of them highlights some pretty important things about it. So the first one is in the, in the private Hackaday Discord. One of our writers said I asked chat g p t to write an article for me with the prompt, and then it's a, a Reddit r l about a 3D printed film video camera. And he said, the prompt is that url and then write an article about the project in the style of hackaday.com. And then he told us the output and the output is great, it looks really good. It is actually in the style of hackaday.com. And we all looked at it and went, wow, if this gets much better, we're gonna be out of a job.

Doc Searls (00:51:49):
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett (00:51:49):
And then another, so we all said that, and then the guy that posted it said, yeah, it sounds good. The writing is good, but the facts are all wrong. <Laugh> what it did chat g p t is not connected to the internet. Like it can't go get new information. It has a snapshot of the, of the internet. It, it made facts up just based on the url.

Doc Searls (00:52:15):
Oh,

Jonathan Bennett (00:52:15):
That's great. It took what was in the URL and

(00:52:18):
Created out of its cloud of, you know, of training data, everything else. And that's one of the really interesting things about chat G p t. It has come to the point to where it can write in such a way that sounds good. Sort of good. It's not amazing yet, obviously it will, it'll get better. But it doesn't yet understand the facts. Like it doesn't understand what it's writing, it just knows how to put it together in a way that, that sounds good. And then the other story, the, the other one that just really blew my mind engraved.blog/building a virtual machine inside the guy put together a prompt and said, I want you to act like a Lennox terminal. I will type command as a new reply with what the terminal should show. He set this up and then he had a command line prompt.

(00:53:09):
He could run the LS command and it would show him things inside of it. He could run the CD command and change directories. He could use touch and create new files. He could even ping and it would give him back to the correct ping responses. But when you started actually digging into it, it was a snapshot of the internet from several months ago. So he did things like, you know, show me the latest version of this library and it would pretend that it went off and talked to, you know, the, the Python library site the Pipi or whatever, and it would respond with, here's the library version that was current when our trading data was created. So, and I, so here's

Doc Searls (00:53:52):
Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Bennett (00:53:53):
Well let me, let me, lemme finish this. I don't think so. This was a surprise to the people that wrote, that put together chat G p T and put it on the internet. They did not know you could do this. And in fact, pretty quickly thereafter, they went in and made changes so that you can no longer do it. Like this is no longer an allowed thing. We don't actually understand what we've created here. This, this is, this is doing things that are surprising to the people that created it, which is really

Doc Searls (00:54:22):
Fascinating. Yeah, yeah. Like this is a little like the SORs Apprentice, like, oh, look what I can do now. And and then this happens. There's a I mean I'm, I'm, I'm wondering, so remember when this is going back, you guys might to be old enough for this, but, but again, the, when, early on in Google time, like even up till like 2004, 2005, if, if you wrote something on the web, Google didn't know about it sometimes for like a month because it was kind of combing the static web. But now it indexes everything almost in real time. What happens in open, open AI is doing something like Google does now where it's indexing, it is not just indexing, it's learning, not just indexing a difference in kind. And now I am assume the open AI people are gonna have to get a few billion dollars in investment and put up giant data centers or, or take over the ones that they Googled abandoned because they became obsolete. But I mean, it's, it's an interesting question when an intelligence and not just a record keeping system is not just indexing but trying to understand what people are writing and what people are doing and can actually do, like, do a ping for me, right? Do a ping for me. Cuz you not only know how you can come over here and <laugh> do do it for me. It's an interesting question. I mean I, you know, put in a funny behind that thing and maybe some really extra creepy or good or both things happen.

Jonathan Bennett (00:55:48):
Yeah. So I, it's a, it's a valid question. Are you ever going to be able to throw enough data and processing power at this that you're going to get a true generalized artificial intelligence? Yeah. Or is this always just going be close enough machine learning? Right. Yeah, I know close enough is is different. Yeah,

Doc Searls (00:56:06):
Yeah, because

Jonathan Bennett (00:56:06):
It's really close to being close enough already. It, depending upon what prompt you give it, it's close enough. But to actually make the leap to generalize artificial intelligence that's actually, you know, active and Yeah. And approaching, you know, the kind of the, the sci-fi thought of self-aware. I, I don't know. That's a, that's a big leap between close enough

Doc Searls (00:56:28):
And it's a, it's a big leap, but I'm, I'm not sure it, I, I think for some things it's just like, so my main dialogue with it, and it was quite funny for, so my, my wife has a new MacBook Air and sorry about that, but that's for Scott and it has the new MagSafe connector. And I asked it, I said, are there any adapters from MagSafe three? Cuz it's called MagSafe three. And it said there is no MagSafe three <laugh>, there's only MagSafe one and two <laugh> that everything Apple is made since MagSafe two is a U US BBC connector. I said, no, that's not true. <Laugh> said, if, if you look here, here's a link. And it's said back to me. He said, look, I only have, I I'm only good till about April of 2021. I don't know anything since then. Yep. <laugh>.

(00:57:14):
Yep. And I thought, wow, that was, that's really interesting. That's, that's historic in, in a really wrong way. <Laugh>, you know, it's like history ended then. I don't know anything since then and it's really live stuff. But up to that point I was having an argument with it. Like it says, you don't know what you're talking about. I happen to know, I happen to know. They went to us U SBC <laugh> and, and there is no max save three <laugh>. And, and I didn't get a sense that it was learning from that in a similar funny way, by the way. And I put it in our little chat here. Somebody on Twitter said, I'm sorry, I simply cannot be cynical about his technology. They could accomplish this. Which was write a biblical verse in this style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a V C R <laugh> and it's perfect. Oh, that's

Jonathan Bennett (00:58:00):
Hilarious. It is pretty great. Yeah.

Doc Searls (00:58:02):
<Laugh>, it's, it's worth looking that up folks if you're, or just look, go to our, our our, our notes. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett (00:58:09):
So Doc, first off, you need to cat kidnap your wife's laptop and install a Sahi Lennox on it. And I'm sorry, but you just, you just need to do it. There's something else that really humors me about this. Yeah, she'll love it. 

Doc Searls (00:58:25):
I'll, I'll I'll kidnap her old one. That's what I'll do. I'll take her old one that that'll work there.

Jonathan Bennett (00:58:30):
Well, no, it's gotta have the, the, the new chip on it. It's gotta be a new M one or M two chip build install Sahi.

Doc Searls (00:58:35):
Yeah, this is an m no, that's right. Okay's. Interesting. There's

Jonathan Bennett (00:58:38):
Something about

Doc Searls (00:58:39):
Check yellow dog humor. Yellow dog. Yeah. Good.

Jonathan Bennett (00:58:42):
Really? It really humors me. So I used to, I used to read a lot of sci-fi and one of the things that some of these sci-fi authors talked about was the idea of interacting with ai. So Isaac Asimov is the robot series is one that had this, and it was the idea that there would be certain people that would be really skilled at telling an artificial intelligence something to do in a certain way. Like, and it, in retrospect, it's very, very similar to these prompts that people are now using with chat G p t. Like there is a certain art form to writing a really good prompt to getting AI to do what you want it to do.

Shawn Powers (00:59:24):
There are job listings now scripts for prompt offer offers. Yeah, yeah. We're talking about it in the reality 2.0 podcast where there's, yeah, there's no job titles for people who can write clever prompts. Cause that's something I suck at. I can't get the AI things to make cool art. I can't get it to respond to anything interesting. But there are some people who just like have the nuance of what to ask. So yeah, the, just to re highly, cuz I mean I, we almost blew over it a little bit. The whole idea that I think for some reason we expect what doc experienced, you know, like where the, where the Che G P T might argue. Like, no, no, this is, this is real, this is what, you know, this is the truth. I I I know this is absolutely correct, contrasted with the Hackaday story that was just full of nothing but lies.

Doc Searls (01:00:12):
<Laugh>,

Shawn Powers (01:00:12):
That's a weird dichotomy, right? Like, no, no, this is, this is what it is. It's plausible but

Doc Searls (01:00:16):
Also lies, right?

Shawn Powers (01:00:18):
Dragons fly. Not because of the way the air pressure works on their wings, but because of how the magic permeates the membranes between the bones. <Laugh>, I mean, you know, just make up crap. But also then argue about what's real and what's not real. That was, that's the part that's, that's weird for me is the ability for it to just make crap up and lie, you know, with abandon. That doesn't seem like a real computery thing to do. <Laugh>.

Jonathan Bennett (01:00:46):
Yeah. Well I think, I think going forward that's gonna be something important for people to keep in mind is the output of machine learning is <laugh> not a valid arbiter of truth. And you know, that, that may <laugh> that may prove to be an important point here pretty soon.

Doc Searls (01:01:03):
<Laugh>. Yeah. There gum be wrote in the back channel. Hey, AI, write a step by step plan for how we rid the world of ai. Totally. And completely <laugh>

Jonathan Bennett (01:01:12):
Because

Shawn Powers (01:01:12):
That'll be a hundred hundred percent accurate.

Doc Searls (01:01:15):
Yeah. That's where you eat it to thing your tail into,

Shawn Powers (01:01:18):
You get to the access to the internet, give all the CPU power you can to the existing ais <laugh>. That's the only way to get rid of ai. Trust me. Yeah.

Doc Searls (01:01:32):
So we, I think we're outta time <laugh>. We are. And we have no, no closing questions. So let's just go to, let's go straight to plugs. We'll, we'll go center to left or right. We're not sure which way it is there. Let's just start with you. Okay. Then there we've plugged Hack. I think I'm center. Let's keep, let's keep it up.

Jonathan Bennett (01:01:52):
<Laugh>. Yeah. So two things that I, I for sure. Well, I guess three things I wanna plug I mentioned Zone Minder like I said, Isaac over there is in need of some financial support to keep that going. So if that's something that you use, I'm sure he would be glad for you to either join Patreon or GitHub sponsorship. Follow my stuff over@hackaday.com. Particularly the security article goes live every Friday morning. And then Club Twitch. We do the Untitled Linux show there. We are looking at doing some improvements, trying to make the audio and maybe eventually video a little bit better there. But we go live with that every Saturday afternoon or evening depending upon what time zone you're in. And then so you can catch it live or if you're a member of Club Twit, you can get the, the RSS feed, the download feed, and that usually goes live on Mondays. So make sure and follow me in those places.

Doc Searls (01:02:49):
And Sean,

Shawn Powers (01:02:51):
Me, I'm next. All right. So for me, I mean the standard, you know, my, my website there, Sean powers.com with the Zero for the Owen Powers, but specifically if I had to plug one thing, it'd be the 90 days of mayhem.com. I haven't been pushing it enough and I should, cuz I bought the darn domain, but I basically, I'm making a video every day for 90 days and the, until the end of the year. So like, today is day 73 and yeah, 90 days of mayhem.com. If you wanna follow me, make a video every single day until the end of the year. That's where you can, where you can do it.

Doc Searls (01:03:25):
Well, I have a plug and my I'm one of those people who got, who is a victim of the attack on Rackspace, where my, my email was hosted into Rackspace Exchange server. I upgraded the exchange server from their regular, from their regular email thing because I ran out of room in imap and they would give me a hundred, a hundred gigabytes or something like that. And it's trashed. I can't get it out. It's done. I, unless until they fix it, I can't get it. And I'll have to work on, I've worked on that a lot, but I wanna plug Hover because I move my email to Hover and they answer the phone instantly and they've really helped me a lot. So I just wanna plug them. I know they've been a sponsor here, I don't know if they are now or not, but I want to say a good thing about 'em cuz they really were very helpful and cheaper by the way, <laugh> than Rackspace was. So there's that. And next week I think we're off. I always forget to look at the at the schedule, so I'm gonna do that now. But we, yeah, next week yeah, we have no, wait a minute, no. December 14th round table. Yeah. Okay. Next week is Liz Rice and Catherine will be the g co-host for that. So of, so surveillance and Sirium. So that's next week. Liz Rice, they're all good. And we'll be back then and I will see you then I'll be in New York. See you there.

Ant Pruitt (01:04:53):
Hey folks, I'm Ant Pruitt. I have a question for you. How do you think your hardworking team with the Club Twit corporate subscription plan? Of course, show your appreciation and reward your tech team with the subscription to Club Twi. Keep everyone informed and entertained with podcasts covering the latest in tech with the Club Twitch subscription. They get access to all of our podcasts at free and they also get access to our members-only Discord access to exclusive outtakes and behind the scenes footage and special content like the fireside chats that I enjoy hosting. Plus they also get shows like Hands-on Mac, hands-on Windows, and the Untitled Linux show. So go to TWiT tv slash Club TWiT and look for corporate plans for complete details.