Tech News Weekly Episode 293 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.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, it's me, Jason Howell. Starting off with an interview with Richard Lawler from The Verge. We talk all about threads that just launched. And I'm Micah Sargent and I bring on Christina Warren of GitHub to talk about what's new in the news regarding Apple's Game porting toolkit. And then my story of the week. You know, it's all about AI for me these days. Voice actors and how they're losing their voices to artificial intelligence. Oh, no. And last but not least, it is who killed Google Reader, the history of Google Reader and our reminiscence of such a wonderful app. Stay tuned. Protect weekly podcasts you love from people you trust.

TWIT Intro (00:00:45):
This is Tweet.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:00:50):
This is Tech News Weekly episode 293 recorded Thursday, July 6th, 2023. Cane's Thread. Replace Twitter. This episode, tech News Weekly is brought to you by Bit Warden. Get the password manager that offers a robust and cost-effective solution that drastically increases 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 at Bit warden.com/twit and by the AWS Insiders Podcast. Search for AWS Insiders in your podcast player. Or visit cloud fixx.oria.com/podcast. We'll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to AWS Insiders for their support and by Collide. Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Visit collide.com/tnw and book an on demand demo today. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news.

(00:01:59):
I am one of your hosts, Micah, Sergeant. I'm the other guy. Jason. How all the way over here? I feel like the camera was like especially distant today. Yeah, yeah. Didn't look bad. No. Just gave a lot more perspective. Ooh. And isn't that what we need more of in this world perspective? We do need perspective. Hold back and get the perspective. That's why we do Tech News Weekly every single week. And that's why you watch, hopefully. So let's get to the perspective, and I think the perspective today, this is Thursday July 6th is holy moly. We have another social media network to to track and <laugh> seems like it's a forever rotating door of Twitter replacements. At least that's defined at, at this point, 2023. For me, it's like, where are we going here? Are we just sticking with Twitter? Are we going to any of these number of different places? Now we have one more. It's called Threads Launched by this Scrappy upstart. You've never heard of <laugh> Meta behind, you know, via Instagram. So that might be a little confusing, but we'll talk about that. Joining me to talk all this is Richard Lawler from The Verge. Welcome back, Richard. It's good to see you.

Richard Lawler (00:03:05):
Hey, thank you so much for having me. Glad to be back.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:03:07):
Yeah. And I know you've been pretty busy because I think initially Threads was going to, well, initially nobody knew about Threads and then suddenly everybody knew about it and it was supposed to launch today, I think, and then very suddenly they said, no, actually we'll launch it yesterday, Wednesday at like 4:00 PM So things have just been kind of scrambling and, and moving fast. How <laugh>, how's it going for you covering this fast moving story?

Richard Lawler (00:03:33):
Tiring. yesterday became a much longer day very suddenly. Yes. I, I, at the beginning of the day I said, okay, on Thursday will be ready at 10:00 AM there'll be a new social network launching. We'll be all over it. And then suddenly right, right before seven, the countdowns changed and he said three hours. I was like that's not, that's not right. <Laugh>. It must be. Or is it it must be Bug <laugh>. It was, it was not a bug. That was when Threads launched in the App Store and then Google Play. You can also view the post kind of on the web, but you can't really use the site there. Yeah. But yes, it is, it is kind of built upon the bones of this small social media, social media site. You may have heard of Instagram with about 2 billion users, which is kind of an advantage when you're starting a new social network.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:04:14):
Yeah. And like initially, in order to even get to it, you had to go into Instagram, go into the search type in threads, and it opened up a little Easter egg button that you'd click and you'd be able to join through that. Now, I think you can just go to the, the app stores and find, find the app and, and install it and everything. My question though, is this like Fast Track suddenly Threads is here and moved up, you know, from their initial plan strategy that they did. If it is a strategy, does this have anything to do in your mind with the with the rate limiting kinda stuff that was happening this weekend? Like I, I imagine when you're launching a new social network to compete with something like Twitter, it works in your favor to have something very <laugh> very impactful and perhaps negative happening to that platform that you're trying to replace. And that did happen over the weekend. What's your thoughts there?

Richard Lawler (00:05:04):
That has been the, the last few days for Twitter, but really Twitter has been in chaos Yeah. For at least the last six months, if not its entire hi history. I think if you <laugh> depending on who you speak to. Sure. That has just been the state of things for Twitter. So I think that they were not specifically responding as much to the rate limiting and the controversy over the weekend, but just the overall just moments unease and everything that's been happening with, with Twitter over those last few months. It was a question that I think I asked myself, and I think a lot of other people asked, sort of, as soon as Elon Musk took over Twitter, they started laying people off. It was evident that things would change, but we weren't sure exactly how. I, I said to myself, if anyone can launch a site that is like Twitter, that can compete with Twitter, it seems like Meta could do it. They have obviously the engineering staff, they have the background, they have the built-in user base, they have everything that you need. They just have never done it. And eventually someone, someone said, you know what, why don't, why don't we try it?

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:06:00):
Yeah, indeed. Now you've had, as I have, I've, I've messed around with threads. You've had some time to mess around with it very suddenly. How would you describe your experience so far? Like what, what is it about threads that that maybe sets it apart from something like Twitter or even some of the other Twitter replacements or different avenues like Mastodon and Blue Sky? I mean, there's so many of 'em now. They're all very similar but different in their own unique ways. Where how would you categorize threads in that landscape

Richard Lawler (00:06:33):
Threads is it is at the same time extremely familiar. It's basically just like Twitter. If you've used Twitter, same buttons very same kind of outlook, but it's also very different, especially for something that's starting because there's so many people on it. It's everyone from Instagram. You press a button and you can follow everyone you follow on Instagram on threads. And the app is I think, very well designed kind of at the beginning, but it does not have a lot of features. You can repost things, you can quote post, but you don't have things like post editing. There. The search is very bare bones. There's no real like hashtags. There's so many features. Notifications is a thing that probably most people don't use as much as I do, but it doesn't really have those, so like, follow people and get notifications when they post.

(00:07:18):
So it's not necessarily ready to entirely replace Twitter, but you can see the very basics of, of what it has. And it has all, all of those. And most importantly, it has people. That's the thing that I think every other platform that is trying to take over for Twitter doesn't have. You look at it and you start to think who is not on there. Mm-Hmm. But like I go on Threads and I see my colleagues posting on there. I see other people in the industry. I see Adrian Roski play posting n b a trade trade news. So that's what I come to Twitter for. So if it has all that stuff, it has the content and the people, then that really is the main thing and everything else can kind of come later.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:07:53):
Yeah. It's funny you mentioned the notifications, not having notifications. I mean, it does have notifications, it doesn't have notifications like what you're pointing out, but I have to say my notifications of like, so and so followed you so and so liked your, like, I mean, they come right outta the gate without full activated, of course, as most apps these days do, trying to make sure that you get maximum integration. So a little pro tip, it probably behooves you to go into the settings and make some changes, otherwise you'll be notified about everything that's happening as far as follower count and all that. You, but you won't be notified when a particular account is posting something that you want to be notified about. I'm sure all of these things coming at some point. And obviously, you know, threads kind of approaching this from a very different perspective than something like Blue Sky, I would say in all of the, all of these apps, blue Sky's the one that I've had the least like interaction with yet. And, and part of that is because, you know, it's, it's more of like a closed invite system by comparison threads really seems to open things up. I dunno, I'm seeing, I, I guess any of these services when they first launched seem pretty positive right out of the gate. But part of me feels like I'm seeing more positivity about this than I've seen about the other ones is, is that your assessment, are people like generally pretty jazzed about this out of the gate?

Richard Lawler (00:09:11):
I think that's mostly consistent with what I've seen that people have, have been very positive because it, it feels like something that can actually work. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I, I use Mastodon, I use Blue Sky. Those have their own communities and they have their own kind of vibe, but they also feel very bootstrapped very startup. You're, you're kind of always waiting to see if it's gonna go down or if it's gonna not be able to handle the flood of users when Twitter does something strange. And while Threads has been slightly unstable at times over these last, I don't know what, 20, nearly 20 hours that existed,

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:09:43):
24

Richard Lawler (00:09:43):
Hours, you, you can, you can understand that they would have some, some strain, but you know that they can, they can survive millions or even billions of people using it because of who's running it. You know that the company will exist tomorrow. And so that, that gives you something. I think that that's part of why people have responded so positively, even if they don't feel normally feel that way about Mark Zuckerberg. But if your your choice is Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook versus what you've seen happen with Twitter, I think that changes the equation. And also, kind of on the media side one of the things that we talk about when, when you talk about things that threats doesn't have, it doesn't have replacement for Tweet deck, which a lot of media people use, and a lot of normal people probably don't. But over the weekend, Twitter broke tweet deck, they broke the, they broke the version of tweet deck that everyone in the media likes to use, replace it with a one, another one that's worse and said that you'll have to pay for it. Hmm. So, I, I think there are a lot of people who are very loud and very online who are looking for something new right now.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:10:36):
Yeah. I, I want to touch on something that you just mentioned, this kind of the, the, I guess the, the, the personality drama behind the scenes, right? You've got Elon Musk and his involvement with Twitter over the last year. Here we've got Mark Zuckerberg, who's behind Meta, and I would say the, the air quotes evil social media person, you know, of a couple of years ago, like primarily in the spotlight, everybody was like, and, and I can throw myself into that ring as well, you know, kind of anti Zuck felt yucky using Facebook products. Like, it just didn't feel good. And then things have shifted around and you know, now you've got Zuck Zuckerberg maybe taking a step out of that Spotlight Musk coming to fill the role. And I think what really struck me about this is, and I've talked about it actually on Threads.

(00:11:27):
I had a post about this that, you know, Zuck used Zuck used to be the person that everybody hated, so they moved away from Facebook. Then Ma Musk becomes the person everybody hates. So they move away from Twitter back to Facebook essentially, you know, meta Instagram company they're back on threads. And I'm just wondering your, your opinion on this. Do people actually really care? Are we just saying that we care? But then at the end of the day, like our desire to have a platform to share on is so strong, or we've just kind of given up, like, I'm trying to figure it out because I feel like I see a lot of people, and I, again, I include myself kind of conflicted where this is concerned. It's like, I hate this, but I want this. What do you think?

Richard Lawler (00:12:10):
I think it's a struggle that all of us have. We all have questions and concerns about how these platforms are run, what their priorities are, what the moderation is, like, what they're really pushing, what they're doing to, to us and to others around us, and, and the kind of the way that we connect to people mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But at the same time, we would like to be where the people are. If if there's a party going on, you, you want to be in it. And if you hear that everyone's joining threads, then well, you gotta click the button and create an account and kind of figure out everything else later. And we know exactly how bad this can be in the end. We've seen it <laugh>, we've seen it with Meta, we've seen it with Mark Zuckerberg. But yes, we will fall for it again and again and again. Apparently, I I, I don't have a better explanation, unfortunately.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:12:48):
Yeah. And I don't know that there is really an explanation other than to point, you know, point it out for what it is. We we just continue to jump even, even when we say we're not going to I'm again, yeah, I'm pointing at myself when I say that. Final question is Activity Pub. I know there are, apparently there are plans to kind of integrate threads with Activity Pub. What do we know as far as specifics around how or when or is that just kind of mentioned in passing and we'll see it somewhere down the line? But not, you know, not a huge priority right now?

Richard Lawler (00:13:21):
Right now, we really haven't heard anything as far as a timeline. And as it's launching, it does not support Activity Pub. It doesn't integrate with, you know, these decentralized services. But from the leadership to I think kind of on, on down with the people making it, I think there is a focus on integrating it with Activity Pub. They've talked about it internally, they've talked about it externally, how much they want to do this. And I think it's something that Meta and Instagram would like to do. They have self-interest, they have reasons to wanna do this themselves so that they can say, Hey, you know, maybe we banned these people for this reason, but they have another place to go. You can't just say that because we kicked them off. They have no access. They, they can go to another server and still connect with people and do whatever they want. And that removes some of the burden from them. And I think that, you know, you mentioned Blue Sky earlier, that's a major issue for Blue Skies. That Blue Sky wants to create a system where they don't necessarily have to be the moderators. You can pick whatever type of moderation you have. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And this is sort of a way for Meta and Instagram to get access to that.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:14:19):
Interesting. Well, we are at the beginning of the Grand Threads experience the experiment from the folks at Meta and Instagram. And you're following it closely. So I really appreciate you taking out some time to join us today. Richard Lawler, of course, writes for the verge@theverge.com. Richard what's your threads handle if people wanna find you? There

Richard Lawler (00:14:42):
It is. Richard Lawler first and last, unfortunately not rj. C c someone got that. Oh, <laugh>.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:14:50):
Well, you know, it's, it's bound to happen. I, I'm half ways Jason Howell and on the other ways that I can't get it, that Jason Howell. So, you know, you take what you can get. Thank you so much, Richard. It's a pleasure. And we'll talk to you soon. Thank you. See you later. All right. See you later. All right. Coming up next, Christina Warren is gonna join us on the show and actually talk with Micah all about Apple's game porting tool for Mac Os. I'm really looking forward to this. She knows a lot about it, but first, let's take a moment to thank the sponsor of this episode of Tech News Weekly. And that is bit warden, my chosen password manager, and hopefully yours too. Bit Warden is the only open source cross platform password manager that can be used at home, at work, on the go.

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And it's 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 individual user at Bit warden.com/twit, that is bit warden.com/twit. We thank them for their support of Tech News Weekly. All right, let's learn about Apple and gaming. Yeah, so back in June, apple had its Worldwide Developers Conference, the event where Apple reveals a lot of its new software and sometimes new hardware. At this one they did, they revealed the Apple Vision Pro goggles. But while we did see on stage at the event Apple briefly talk about some games or a game rather that was coming to the Mac, which we've seen Apple do in the past what we didn't see mentioned on that stage, but what quickly kind of took the internet by storm. In fact, the executive in charge of Apple's marketing quite literally said, I hear that's breaking the internet later. In the week was Apple's game porting tool. Someone who picked up on the fact that it was something worth talking about was Christina Warren senior developer advocate at GitHub, but also a longtime journalist who wrote for Inverse about the game porting tool. So Christina, I first of course went to welcome you to the show.

Christina Warren (00:19:42):
Hello. Happy to be here. How are you?

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:19:44):
I am doing Peach Keen and so glad to have you here to talk about this. So before we dig into this being back in the news, because it is back in the news. Yes. let's talk about the Game porting toolkit in the first place. Like, I wanna hear your, your sort of lead up to this. Where did you find it and kind of learn about it and what led you to go, oh my gosh, I've gotta write about this thing.

Christina Warren (00:20:07):
Okay, so during the WWDC keynote they did mention like, it was a passing comment, like it was one, maybe half a sentence where it was like talking about gaming on the Mac. And I think I even tweeted at the time, I was like, stop trying to, you know, make gaming on the Mac happen, <laugh>, it's never gonna happen. But, but they mentioned that you would be able to convert Direct X 12, which is the most popular you know I guess like framework that people use to build games like AAA games. I'm, I'm talking about you would be able to bring like there'd be a toolkit to Port Direct X 12 to metal. And in my mind I was thinking, okay, well this is going to be complicated. This is not going to be something that any developer is going to.

(00:20:47):
Because there is a literally like 30 plus years of history of, of failed attempts to make gaming on the Mace thing. And, and the third party developers just haven't done it. But both because I think Apple has made it too difficult and because the audience just hasn't necessarily been there and, and the the hardware constraints have have been a thing. And so I kind of ignored it. And then the next day I happened to see a video. It was very early in terms of its, of its views from, I think it's one, one of the big YouTubers who's been covering all this reporting toolkit stuff mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and, and said, oh, this is, this is really interesting. And then I looked into it and I realized, oh, this is actually a thing that is on GitHub. A lot of it is.

(00:21:31):
Anyway. And I looked into what the patch actually was and I realized, oh, apple has made a patch to wine, which is the open source translation layer that has traditionally allowed like 32 or 64, but Windows apps to work on other platforms. They've patched this so that it will convert direct X 12 calls into metal calls. This is really interesting. And so when I looked into that, and then I looked into, you know, how you could download it in the fact that even though it's not really a user facing tool mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, this is something that developers could actually just shoot the E X C file into the game boarding toolkit and they would be able to play it natively on an Apple, Silicon Mac. I went, okay, this is interesting. This is something that I wanna write about and learn more about.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:22:20):
Awesome. Okay. So yeah, let's, let's kind of break this down now because it is a little perplexing the way that you hear Yes. About this being discussed from different YouTubers from different blogs. It is as if tomorrow a game developer, a game publisher could release Cyberpunk 2077 on a Mac in and sort of have this as, as, as the way that it does it. But that's not how this works, right? This is, this is more for the developers to kind ofs kick the tires. Right. Can you explain kind of what Apple is hoping people will use this tool for?

Christina Warren (00:23:02):
Sure. Well, and, and, and it's interesting cuz there are two things here. There's how Apple is hoping people will use it, and then there's how the enthusiasts are already using it. And I think both of these are interesting. So what Apple is hoping people will do is that they will take this game importing toolkit, which as I said is, is largely kind of a, a patch to wine, which is open source software that's been around for a long time to convert these direct X 12 calls into calls that can run on metal, which is Apple's you know, gaming or, or I guess graphics framework. And this is something that a lot of companies have tried to do for a long time. And this is very similar to what valve does with, with Proton, which is, which is how a lot of games on the Steam deck work.

(00:23:44):
Mm-Hmm. But what they're hoping that developers will do is that they will use the Game Porting toolkit. They will install the home files, they will download the, the game porting toolkit off of Apple's website, and then they will see, okay, this is what the performance looks like without any modifications, just using the translation layer that that Apple and others have worked on worked. How, how does this play? How does this run? And then what they're hoping they will do is they will take the next step and go, okay, if I make a few modifications, maybe to my shaders, maybe to some other parts of my code, I could optimize this even more so, and really start to have a, a really fast and, and great experience bringing this game to the Mac. So that's what Apple wants developers to do. They want them to use this as kind of a test to see how much work would actually be required.

(00:24:31):
If I wanted to bring this title, which, you know, currently only works on X 86 you know, windows machines to Apple, Silicon Max mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and, and so that's where it starts. But what's interesting about this is that much like valve did with Proton, where Valve has done a tremendous amount of work patching, you know, those open source tools and adding in compatibility layers and, and making patches frankly to games without developers even needing to lift a hand. A lot of developers don't have to do anything and it just works on, on Proton. They can optimize things to work better, but many older games, for instance, just work great. What's interesting about this is that Apple is very clearly made modifications and made updates to games that didn't know are going to be popular. So if you are taking a game like Diplo four, for instance, which, you know, was, was just released, does not have a Mac version that is gonna run at over 60 frames per second on M two max.

(00:25:30):
And, and so, you know, very good frame rates and, and at very good resolutions and without any interference at all without, you know Activision Blizzard having to, to lift a finger. And so to me it's clear that Apple has gone out of their way to really tweak things and, and work with what some of the most popular games are. Obviously future games, you know, it'll be determinant on those developers either you know, porting things making modifications or, or Apple continuing to update the toolkit and, and the more popular games are going to bear better, but out of the box. It's a pretty impressive experience, I think, especially for those really popular games because even if the developers never do anything, there is a way, granted not the way that Apple's gonna, you know, maybe tell you about, but there is a way for end users to play those games without the developers having to make any modifications. But if they do make those modifications, it'll be even better. And so I think what their ultimate hope is, is that developers will make the modifications knowing that most of the work is done from the Game porting toolkit, and then they will, you know, zip that up and ship it to the Mac App store where Apple will get a 30% cut of, of all the sales.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:26:39):
Yeah. So that last part is, is really what I want to drill in on here for a moment, because what was to me in the beginning was because, so I'm a, I'm a developer and I make Diablo four. Yes. Thank you. Yep. For the congratulations. I know. It was a it's a great game. I'm so happy you love it. Anyway, so I make Diablo four and I can do one thing for sure. I can take this game and I can completely do all of the rewriting that I need to do to make it Mac native. I can make it so that it's, it's, it runs on metal, it works beautifully. It's released in the Mac app store and then there, this is what I'm, I'm asking for clarification from you on the other option is to sort of pack in this translation layer or I, I can't remember exactly what terms you used to describe it, but pack in what's in this toolkit and take my current game with just a few modifications, so not completely rewritten for metal and then release it for the Mac.

(00:27:37):
So does is, is Apple, from what we can tell, is Apple's goal with this to get them to do those little modifications? Or was it more of a like, look what happens if you just make small modifications how great it runs, why not take it all the way and make it run on metal natively because that's going to make you soar to the next level? Like, what is Apple's motivation there? And then secondarily, could I, as the creator of Diablo for just pack in the stuff from this toolkit and then suddenly I've got a game that can run on the Mac as we're seeing here?

Christina Warren (00:28:14):
Yeah. So I think that I'll, I'll, I'll take the, the first part first. Okay. What, what is their goal? I think that the goal that they will publicly say mm-hmm <affirmative> is that they want to convince developers to go all in on, on bringing native ports to the Mac. Having said that, I I, I think that to me, releasing this toolkit was a very clear kind of like, admission that that's not going to happen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they've been trying to do that for a really long time, and that if they wanna actually get games on the platform, and also I think it's also a reflective of the fact that Apple, silicon and the, you know translation technology that they use, you know, first with Rosetta. Cause what's interesting about this, just to back up for a second, this is literally a translation of a translation.

(00:28:55):
So you're literally taking X 86 code and you're translating it into Arm 64 code, which is already kind of bonkers. And, and that's using Apple's native Rosetta translation layer mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But then on top of that, you are taking, you know, windows Direct X 12 code and converting that into something that runs on Mac Os Wow. Under Metal. So it's like a tra it, it, it's, it's completely bananas that it works as well as it does. And I think that's a real testament to Apple's, silicon. And I think that that right there is what Apple is maybe hoping to accomplish. If they can say, Hey, look, developers, we know that you are not going to invest the resources and the manpower to rewrite your game for medal. We know that's not going to happen. And, and maybe it doesn't even need to happen.

(00:29:37):
And I think the success of the Steam deck and the fact that many games run better through Proton than they did if they were written natively for Lennox shows, that sometimes you don't even need to do that, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So, but if instead they can say, look, if you make some modifications, you don't even have to make a lot of them. You could get a real boost of performance and, you know, potentially another revenue stream if you wanted to, to put this in the Mac app store. Now, to answer your second question, could they just literally run it through the translation layer and then package it and put in the Mac App store without having to do anything else? I don't think so. The terms of service are a little bit iffy here. I think that they, I think Apple would want them to make more than than one modification.

(00:30:17):
I, I don't think that they could just like rename the, the XE file <laugh>, you know and, and put it and put and put it, put it in a.app, right? Like, I think they would have to do a tiny bit more how much more I'm not real clear on. But I, I think that the goal is, if this is going to work, would be for this to be as low friction for the, the developers as possible. Mm-Hmm. And valve makes it even less friction because they literally, developers don't have to do anything, but, but I think, you know, Apple's gonna want them to put it in the Mac App store. And you might have to make a few modifications, but it would definitely be, it might be the difference between like a day of work versus months, right?

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:30:57):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That, that's, that helps me out a lot to kind of understand where this is. It would be great now to see a publisher or a developer, you know, if it's an indie, indie developer, actually go through this process so we can kind of see what it looks like on the end. Now the last thing that I wanna ask you about, because that was kind of the lay in the base there is about this new update, because that's why Yeah, I wanted to bring you on. Of course, this happened back in June when it was first announced, but now there's an update. What are we seeing in the update? And does this make you as a person who, you know, was pretty excited about it? Happy to see that they're continuing to work on the toolkit.

Christina Warren (00:31:38):
Yeah, so I, I'm definitely, I think this is a great sign that they are continuing to iterate and update. I, I wasn't expecting them to update things quite this quickly. I don't think anyone was, which is why it's really great to see these performance improvements. And so basically the new version. And, and, and just to be clear, even though Apple is not telling end users use this tool, there are a ton of people in the community who are building launchers and building ways for people to be able to literally just take an EXC file that they have from Steam or someplace else and run it on their Mac. And, and that I think is awesome, even if Apple doesn't officially sanction that, I think that's how a ton of enthusiasts are going to be playing games. And that's great. And what, what is great is that in these tests, and again, this is still a developer tool with the new version, you're, you're seeing a really big frame rate improvement.

(00:32:22):
Like Eldon Ring, I think, you know, has gone from like 26 frames a second to 32 on, on a, on an M one max Mac. Look, these are still not gonna be great frame rates for any PC gamer, but for Mac gamers who've never been able to play Elden ring on Apple hardware, that's exciting. And it's also Addison better support for the, the M one and M two Ultras mm-hmm. So that they can work as well as the, the lower powered ships are. So I think that what's neat about this is that we're already starting to see some improvements happening to the way this is tuned, which ultimately means the developers have to do even less work if they do wanna go through the entire process. What I'm curious about, and I think this is the thing I'm, I'm, I'm going to watch and see how successful this will be, will be if over time Apple continues to kind of silently and subtly behind the scenes add tweaks and add, you know, maybe improvements targeted towards certain games, because that's what Valve does.

(00:33:23):
And I think that if that's something that continues to happen over the, you know, coming months or, or even years where, where Apple is, is doing a lot of this work that would be, that I think that would play a really big role in convincing the, you know AAA gaming community to actually look at, okay, when we're doing our builds for games, we can do the one that we're doing right now for, for Direct XL for Windows. We might have one if we're making a few modifications for Proton, but, but we might just leave that alone. And we might also have a build that is while we're doing the, the gain building process, making some modifications to the shaders and some other things for the Mac version too, where, you know, we're able to make basically have, you know, one, one code base, but make some modifications in the build process that will let us ship to, to another platform more, more seamlessly. And, and I think if Apple continues to update this over the months and years, then that'll be a, a good sign that they can do that without the developers themselves necessarily having to, you know, make all, all of the, the tweaks for every bit of performance.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:34:29):
Yeah. I mean, that's more, more potential customers for these, these developers, which would be fantastic and, you know, yeah. At the talk show John Gruber's, the talk show that took place the week of ww d c one of the things that the head of Mac at Apple was talking about was the fact that Apple does see even something as small as this M two MacBook Air as a, they, a quote great gaming machine. And to have the potential for that to be the case that I could just have this very thin and light laptop, that I don't have to have one that looks like it could take off into space. Right. Suddenly, that's mind blowing. That would be amazing. I'd love to be able to play some of these games that I hear people talking about on this Mac. Right. That'd be awesome. So my fingers are crossed that apple continues to work on this in the background, and that we start to see some developers making use of this more regularly so we can see where this goes. Christina Warren, I wanna thank you so much for your time today. Of course folks should have head over to inverse.com to check out that article. But how do folks stay up to date with what you're doing?

Christina Warren (00:35:38):
Yeah, so you can find me at github.com/bloom. Girl, you can find all the projects that I, that I star. I was, I'm very proud of this. I think I was one of the first 50 people to, to star the home brew definition that Apple updated for the game boarding toolkit. Nice. So if you are looking for cool open source projects, follow me on GitHub, not for my code, follow me for my projects, and then I'm film underscore girl on Twitter threads and and Macon, so that, that's where you can find me.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:36:06):
Awesome. Thanks so much.

Christina Warren (00:36:08):
Thank you Micah.

Jason Howell & Mikah Sargent (00:36:09):
Alrighty, folks, up next, we have our stories of the week, but first, let's take a quick break so I can tell you about our sponsor. It's the AWS Insiders podcast, AWS Insiders. It's a fast-paced, entertaining, and insightful look behind the scenes of AWS and cloud computing. And look, this is not your typical Talking Heads Tech podcast. It's high production value, high energy, and high entertainment with lots of laughs. It's full of captivating stories from the early days of a w s to today and beyond. Host Rahul Supermanium and Hillary Doyle dig into the current state and the future of a w s by talking with the people and the companies that know it best. Rahul is a veteran, a w s pro with more than 15 years of experience managing more than 45,000 a w s instances. He's known for pushing AWS products to their limits and for believing AWS is truly the operating system of the future.

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AWS Insiders is a show that's full of opinions of takeaways and untold stories about the challenges, innovations, and the mind blowing promise of cloud computing. In this second season, there's an episode called The Price Is Wrong, how to Save on A w S, and in It they talk about how people can, basically, when they're working in a w s there are lots of ways that you can end up spending way more money than you should. And in code when there's an error or an issue when code is not working as it's supposed to, they call it code smell, like your code smells bad. So, with AWS usage, they have this thing called thin ops smell. And so they play a game on this episode called The Price Is Wrong, which is, as you might imagine inspired by the price is Right, and they go over kind of how you can end up saving money and avoiding that finops smell.

(00:38:01):
But I do love that there's a moment at the very beginning where Hillary accuses Rahul Superman's grandma of making very bad smelling, baking <laugh> <laugh>. And it's, it's just a delight. So yeah, when you're, when you're going and you're listening to these episodes, it's, again, that high entertainment thing is not just a thing we're saying. There's a lot of fun, there's a lot of humor along with these very deeply technical topics. So yeah, please do check out season two. I'll give you a quick little rundown. Season two episode one is called Filling the Cloud Talent Gap. And then season two, episode three very popular episode, Moderna mRNA and a w s where they talk about Moderna being a cloud first company, and how a lot of the research that led to the vaccines that have saved so many lives were all part of that cloud process.

(00:38:53):
So search for AWS Insiders in your podcast player, or visit cloud fixx.oria.com/podcast. That's cloud fixx dot A u r e a.com/podcast. And of course, we'll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to AWS Insiders for their support and for the laughs. Alright, back from the break and it's time for Jason's topic. So anyone who's listening to the podcast, not watching, but listening, I have a question for you. Are you sure that Micah Sergeant was actually just talking then? Could it have been an AI replica of Micah Sargent? Maybe if you weren't watching <laugh>, how would you know for sure? Okay, so that's a little, little bit of a tease here. Our voices belong to us, right? Like, it's, it's what I did. It's our signature, it's our sign, it's our, possibly one of our most obvious signatures is when we speak, we recognize that voice.

(00:39:50):
Like, okay, I know that's Micah, I know that's Jason or any, any, you know, anyone, they're very identifiable. But it kind of seems like we're taking that for granted in this day and age of ai because we've got these replica AI voices and this technology around re rebuilding a voice around a data set, which is just kind of how how modern AI systems work. They take the, the source and they, you know, use that as, as kind of research to build the data set, and then they can replicate it. And so we find ourselves in a situation where this assumption that we've made about our voices is is becoming a little bit of a mess. And actually there's a financial time story that looks at the voice acting industry and how quickly it's being directly impacted by voice generation systems that are powered by ai.

(00:40:45):
The source for the story is Greg Marson. He noted how as a voice actor for 20 years. So he is been doing this for a long time. He was actually surprised to find his voice offered up on the AI voice site revoice, which is just one of many of these sites that do this. It's a site that's designed to convert text to speech into a number of preset voices, and it translates between languages. It integrates emotion into spoken words. It's all run within the website. Turns out that Marston, or Marston, sorry, offered his voice to a satin nav system by IBM back in 2005. And of course, as you can imagine, when he did that, he signed a contract. It was actually a very standard contract for voice for voice work like this that gave his rights to his voice in perpetuity.

(00:41:37):
Okay, whatever that means. What did, what did in perpetuity mean in 2005? We certainly were never thinking about something like this. Yeah, I think if I was in 2005 and I did my voice for an ad for IBM and I signed over in perpetuity, it would be like, oh yeah, the things that I say here for you and my representation of these things that I say here for you are yours to use however you want forever. Yeah. You could take the words that I say and cut them up and rearrange them or whatever. That would be my assumption. This, yeah, this little package here is yours. Right? But not me. But as we know, contracts are, are can be Lucy, you know? Yeah. <laugh>, they can be interpreted in different names. Well, IBM can now sell his voice to third parties like Revoice her, because they own the rights to that voice in perpetuity.

(00:42:21):
And actually they own the rights to that recording. So they can really do whatever they want with that recording of his voice per that contract. So essentially it means for him, a voice actor today, 20 years later, he's competing with himself in the marketplace, which is, wow, that's kinda weird, right? That's unfortunate. Very unfortunate. He's not alone. That standard contract is, I mean, it's standard. It's been signed by many of other people who have given their voices to different projects and now face those voices being given a new life. With AI technology now, many voice actors, many voiceover artists, they're finding their voices in all kinds of places as a result. Now that includes things like phone scams, fake insurance calls, AI generated ads, and that sort of stuff as well as, you know, let's say a more legitimate destinations.

(00:43:15):
When it comes to collecting the voice data. Some VO artists have responded to what ends up being fake casting calls. And this is kind of crazy, right? They do a fake, they do a casting call, they think it's real, they say all the words that they need to say at the casting call, they give them their audio. What's actually happening is that audio is being recorded on the other end. It's being captured and then it's being re synthesized. So it's essentially a way of stealing the voice by getting enough source audio data from them. I, I know. It's crazy. It really is. And when I read this article, I will admit Micah, last week it, it's super relevant to a conversation that you and I had last week, cuz you had shown me you had played for me an AI replica of your voice mm-hmm.

(00:44:01):
<Affirmative>. And I thought the way you played it for me was incredibly convincing. Now you played it through your laptop mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, so I didn't have it in headphones. I think it's probably different if you've got it in headphones. You hear a lot more of the imperfections and stuff. But I asked you before the show, if you could run some audio through so we can hear your voice in ai. And actually John, I do have a link to that. Let's play that if you have that all queued up and see how it compares to something you're very used to hearing right now.

(00:44:32):
Oh, hold on. That's okay. We can, we can snip and edit. No. Cause I had the, oh, I see people making and break the show where every week we, hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. I am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent, you're sounding a little subdued there, you're like a little more serious. I am one of your hosts, Mica Sergeant <laugh>. I am running low on adrenaline today. Yeah. It's interesting as I hear, yes. That's, that's kind of what it sounded like. But I hear the registers a little bit lower. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's like, hello, you know, it's, it's just a tiny bit lower versus what I hear you in real life, but I mean, it sounds more monotone really sounds a little more monotone.

(00:45:14):
It's more monotone. There's some emotion, there's some realistic kind of flare in there. Like the breaths in between Yes. The breath that really impresses me that they're kind of getting to the point to where there's a breath in between, you know, and that makes it sound more humid. It's not perfect. No, no. Isn't perfect. What's kind of cool, I, so I generated this several times with 11 labs, you've got kind of two sliders and there's one slider that is kind of add variations or keep it as close to the model that it is perceiving. Oh, okay. And then the second slider is the second slider. It's more basically pulled directly from the sounds that it is processed Yeah. Or add in some of its own stuff to make it sound more high quality, if that makes sense. A little bit more, a little bit more natural, little more whatever, a little natural.

(00:46:09):
And so I define it as I, I kind of change those around. And even if you don't change those around and you just click generate, it's gonna be different every time. Yeah. Because it's, it's doing this generative AI work. Right. so I did, I had three different versions and also, and I apologize, I didn't move all three of them, them No, that's in here. I, I, you picked the one interpreted that as like, oh, pick one of these. And I, and I went with one. That's okay. I, but it was interesting because there were some variations mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the one that I picked definitely was a little bit lower, but I don't know why I picked it. It is just the one I decided to choose. But yeah. And it's still, yeah, it's hearing it myself. It's this, yeah. This lower register that I sometimes have mm-hmm.

(00:46:47):
<Affirmative>. and so at some point in the, cuz I, I uploaded two clips to it and it, you know, found those different things. What I found kind of wild is that it does pick up on some unique, almost ticks so to speak, that I have in my, in, in my speaking that I was not expecting to hear played back to me. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I'm not used to that kind of thing. And so there was a time where there was a comma and the sort of pause that took place in that comma was very, I mean, it was not similar. It was exactly what I would do in that moment. <Laugh> and you know, I'm caught a little off guard. Yeah. but overall, yes, in hearing that back, perhaps if you were not primed for knowing that you were about to listen to an AI clip and you don't listen to my voice semi-regularly.

(00:47:43):
Right. You could be convinced that was me. Yeah. And I mean, that was part of the reason why I had you read that because I figured, you know, everybody who watches and listens to the show are very used to hearing you say those words at the top of the show. Right. So it would be a very direct comparison and like, okay, so that's not perfect, but dang, it's close. And that's 11 labs. That's the tool that you showed me. They actually raised 19 million last month. Significant capital funding for systems that drive this. Of course the folks behind 11 Labs, they're sharing that they wanna work through issues like these. They say quote, we believe AI companies and creative communities can work together to ensure these technologies create new roots to revenue whilst enabling content creators to produce even better and more globally accessible content.

(00:48:29):
I never say whilst in my life what, just a little side point there anyways, you do, once I get your voice into this 11 labs thing. Yes. <laugh>. Dang it. Now I'm saying it all the time. But that's just to say that, you know, these companies, they got a lot of money and they got a lot of interest in making, you know, making a place for this. And I don't, you know, I'm, I don't read that and instantly go to Yeah. Right. They don't care about creators. I think they do authentically care about creators, but I think they also care about their system and Yeah. And aren't as what is you know, what is the phrase that I'm looking for, aren't as critical on the potential impacts of their system as it is when compared to the voice actors who are suddenly finding their voices on these places and realizing that they are really outta control.

(00:49:21):
I mean, the rights to protect artists in this age of AI don't necessarily exist. Right. We're at the beginning stages of these things. And this rapid development of the impact of ai missing pieces of, of legislation that, that could possibly help craft a fair marketplace for these things to coexist. I mean, it doesn't exist yet. So I think in reading this, I felt kind of conflicted because it's like, I don't, I don't want to slow down technology and the development of technology. Right. Just for the sake of like, oh, I'm afraid of where it might go. At the same time, I, you know, I think voice actors deserve to have the right to do what they do for a living. And if a system like this suddenly comes along and literally does the take your jobs thing Yes. Which everybody points to as a risk, but then sometimes can be kind of elusive to really see the results.

(00:50:13):
I mean, this is one direct impact, you know, I'm sure they're, they're, they're very smart people. They'll come up with other avenues and, you know, it's not doom and gloom 100%, but boy, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be figured out. Yeah. I don't, I, and I don't know how it's hard. Yeah. I don't know what the right choice is. I don't know how to fix this problem. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. But but nonetheless, I read this article, it reminded me of our pre-show or post-show kind of preview of the audio. And I found it very interesting. So, yeah, it's, there you go. You should go to let's see here. What is it? It's financial Times, sorry, I wanted to say Fast Company. You can go to Financial Times and you can find the article and check it out for yourself.

(00:50:57):
And yeah, it's interesting stuff. Cool. There we go. Let us take a break and then we will remember our dear friend Google Reader, we have not had you for 10 years. How has our life been in the last 10 years? Things have changed a little bit. Too much has changed. Too much has changed. Yes. Everything has changed. We'll talk about that in a moment. But first, this episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by Collide. Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta. And they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Plain and simple, if you work in security or it, and your company has Okta, well, this message is speaking to you. Have you noticed that for the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks that you read about have something in common?

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You can just start using collide. There you go. Plain and simple. Done. Visit collide.com/tnw. You can book an on-demand demo today and you'll see how it works for yourself. That's K O L I D e collide.com/tnw. We thank them for their support of Tech News Weekly and for keeping everybody safe. All right. It's time for your story of the week. Yeah, so this is a really awesome piece over on the Verge. So David Pierce basically looked at the history of the downfall of Google Reader which existed from 2005 to 2013, I believe. Last week I had made a joke about Google Reader and we kind of briefly talked about how we, you know, had missed Google Reader. You mentioned that it was coming up on its anniversary of its death. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or Sunset setting. And honestly, looking back like that tool was so awesome.

(00:53:45):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> for me, I loved, I I had basically I would, I would open up my computer and I would go to Google Reader and I would just see so many different tech headlines. And at the time, graphic design headlines, this was they were all just presented for you in an nice list. Yes. And, and I had my little anything, little keyboard short, you know, I think it was J for the next one, K to go back. And so you could see the, the headline. And at the time blogs were not limiting what was being s served via rss. So you could see, or Adam, so you could see the whole article right there mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And so I would read dozens of articles a day throughout the day. Anytime, you know, I was on a break or what have you, anytime there was some downtime, I was not playing a game or doing something else.

(00:54:35):
I was on Google Reader looking at my feets. And I just remember so fondly the experience that I had there. And I've never, after Google Reader died or was sunsetted in 2013, <laugh>. It's okay, we can humanize Google Reader, <laugh>. I don't know. People get mad about humanizing tech. I never picked up RSS again after that. I've tried a bunch of different RSS apps. Feedly, did you try the Feedly thing? Yeah, I've done Net Newswire. I've done there was one that has like a sunshine, a sun icon. I, I've just, I've tried them all. I've done them all or many of them. And I just don't do RSS anymore. And a lot of that comes from the fact that most blogs these days do not send the whole article through mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So it's not as valuable anymore because they want you to go to their pages.

(00:55:28):
And some apps do try to solve for that, but they don't necessarily always do a great job. And when they do, then it takes forever for the page. I mean, it's just a mess. So let's go back though, because Reader was a tool that was not supposed to be or was not created from the get go as reader. Okay. So this tool created by Chris Weatherall basically was trying to figure out how to display and pull different types of feats. So at the time, there were two kind of common feeds. There was rss, which has long existed, really simple syndication. And then there was Adam, a t o M, Adam and Adam had come along hoping to be the next generation of r s s that really sim simple syndication had some issues and Adam was supposed to come along and have stuff built into it that was gonna make it better.

(00:56:36):
Well and I'm, I'm quoting from the Verge article here Jason Sheen, who was a product manager at Google working on Adam in late 2004, went to Weatherall and said, Hey, I need you to create an app that would look at Adam and find those atom feeds and then parse it and display the text. Right? And so what Weatherall did was made it so that RSS feeds could be converted into Adam and then displayed in a JavaScript app that was available in the browser. So it was kind of originally created as a way to try to push forward Adam over R Ss. But what happened was Weatherall was creating this app that he ended up calling Fusion. And as he was, you know, creating this thing over the course of a few weeks or whatever, he's like, holy cow, I'm regularly launching this web app and I'm reading through these feeds all the time.

(00:57:50):
This is wild. Like how much I'm using this. And so he, he reportedly turned to his partner and said, I think I built a thing <laugh> <laugh>. You absolutely did build a thing. You did a glorious thing. So Weatherall sent the prototype to Shelan. Shelan was like, holy cow, this is great. And then they started working on it. And I'm not gonna go into detail because I want everyone to go read this. I don't wanna pull value from the Verge piece, but Yeah. Basically the team was like, wow, we've got something here. You know, instead of having to go, cuz at the time people were going into their U R L bar, typing in the website, reading the website, hitting refresh to see more. There was not a bunch of tweets. There were not a bunch of tweets, there was not a bunch of Facebook posts.

(00:58:36):
There was, all of that stuff was not as popular. So there wasn't anything bringing those website URLs to you. You had to go to them. And this was the first thing that was going, no, no, no, no, we'll bring it to you. You can sit back, you find the places that you like the most and we'll bring that content to you. And when they started to make it, they were like, this should not just be a website pulling app. It shouldn't just pull RSS feeds from websites. It should be a tool that aggregates all sorts of feeds. You've got video on YouTube, you've got podcasts, which we know rss. You've got flicker photos, you've got all of these different types of content that exist on the web and these different versions of feeds. Let's make it so that all of that content gets pulled in.

(00:59:29):
And then they realize suddenly that there was an extra sort of feature they could add to it, which was a social feature. What would I want? But to get to see what my friends are looking at in their feeds. So they introduced this sort of sharing functionality where you could find out what your friends' feeds looked like, you could see your own feeds. And then also kind of a re-log feature too, where you could share something from your feed and add a comment to it. And then other people would see that from there they continued to work on Fusion and it came time to announce Fusion. But a certain individual Marissa Meyer who at that point worked at Google. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> not yet at, at Yahoo, said, hold up. We or I, somebody am working on a product called Fusion. And so you can't call this Fusion because I already have something that I want to come into existence called Fusion.

(01:00:31):
So you've gotta give it a different name. According to the piece, no one remembers what that product even was. It never launched, it never came around <laugh>, but they had to change the name anyway, <laugh>. And they had so many different names, but they chose reader. And to this day they're still mad about the fact that they ended up calling it reader. There's one more quote that I wanna pull from this. They said, quote, if Google made the iPod, they would've called it the Google hardware MP3 player for music <laugh> because basically didn't like that. We're just gonna break it down to its base form, which is that it's a reader because it was so much more than an SS reader. And I think anytime you have something that's not successful or that you know that you care about, that, that doesn't go where you expect it to, you do look for reasons why it failed.

(01:01:24):
And sometimes it can be logical and sometimes it can be a little illogical or based it emotion. I would argue that just because it was called Google Reader is not why it failed. No, I don't think so. But that is one of the things that Shelan was talking about. It's like they just had to call it reader and that just limited it from the get go. But I didn't know this. When Google Reader first launched, it was overall a flop. There were, of course, first of all, it crashed whenever it first first launched. And so they had to do a bunch of, you know, behind the scenes stuff to get the structure rebuilt and have it all work properly. But even after that, in the first versions of the publicly released app or service there were a lot of features missing that they added later on.

(01:02:17):
But over time it became more and even outpaced some of the tools that Google was sort of officially sanctioned to be working on because this was kind of an internal project a little bit. It started out as one of that 20% time projects and kind of continued to be a thing that people worked on, on the side. And what people, what internally they're realizing is, holy cow, when we're talking about not daily active users as much as daily active time spent mm-hmm. <Affirmative> using this thing Interaction. Yeah. Interaction. Yeah. Whatever the, the metric is for that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it was so high. Cuz you might spend a few seconds on Google's main homepage to type in a search, but then you go away, this you're spending hours. Yeah. You lived in reader. You lived in reader. Yeah, for sure. Unfortunately, though, and I, I didn't, I've never conceptualized this before but one of the things I talked about in the piece is Google Scale and they're talking about a product needing to be at a certain level of success.

(01:03:23):
And if it doesn't get there, then Google's not gonna have it. Yeah. And so 30 million users sounds like a lot, but it's not Google scale. And they talk about that. That's why to this day, so many Google projects are closed down. So many Google products are shuttered. So many Google services are ended because they don't reach what they call Google scale. Right. So even though there was a h huge <laugh> by almost any other reckoning, huge appreciation for this service, it just was not that. And the other problem they faced was internally where other teams were not taking them seriously. This should just be part of our app. This should just be part of our app. This should just be part of this. Why does this need to exist on its own? Marissa Mayer is re reported to have continued to dislike the product and not understand why it needed to exist on its own, why engineers were spending their time on it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

(01:04:23):
And then roundabout the time that Google reader ended up being shuttered, same time that Google stopped doing the 20% time where people could spend 20% of their time working whatever they wanted to also. Yeah. Together also was around the same time that Google Plus kind of became a thing Yeah. And didn't just become a thing. If you remember at that time, Google Plus became everything for Google. Yeah. Google was like, no, we're going all in, all their eyes are on all these departments feeding into it. And so interesting that like when I think about Google Plus, like I wonder how much of the, the, the overlap of what Reader did with mm-hmm. <Affirmative> news stories and you know, kind of the, the, the what's happening in reader around all these stories, how that drove into the Google Plus. I don't know the, the knowledge share, you know?

(01:05:18):
Right, right, right, right. The environment. Yeah. really interesting. But I do think it was, you know, it was one of many victims of Google just really getting so distracted and so hyper-focused on making Google plus a thing a a really successful thing. And, you know, there were a lot of casualties as a result of that. It really did destroy a lot of things in the process. Yeah. Which is unfortunate. I also thought it was interesting in the article how they're talking about, you know, I think a lot of people would probably ask the question like, why can't this exist outside of Google? Why was it so popular? And so so, you know, worked perfect within Google, let's say, or maybe not perfect, but you know, worked well and gave people a lot of things that they, they were looking for in Google, but then the competitors outside of Google haven't been doing it.

(01:06:06):
Yeah. They kind reached addressed that the people, you know, working with the, with the service said, you know, something like this couldn't exist at the scale. And the, the depth that it did within Google, just because of all of Google's infrastructure, you know, they had their data centers, their web crawlers, their engineers they said reader existed and worked because of Google's search stack. You know, integration with Blogger and Burner Man, I used, I used to use Feed Burner like crazy for launching podcasts back then. All of that stuff fed the power of, of Reader at the time. And so, you know, they don't, they don't actually believe that a reader could exist in the same way outside of Google because of all those all sense actors. Makes sense. I I mean I I I see it. I see it. Yeah. But alas it's, it's gone.

(01:06:52):
It's poor one out. It's not really Yeah. Coming back. Cuz frankly at this point the RSS feeds again, they're not as valuable as they once were. Yeah. They don't put the whole article. So you end up having to go to the page and it's just, it's not, not what it once was. Not what it once was. No. It used to be such a time saver <laugh>. Yes. Yes it was. Alright, well goodbye Google Reader. We'll talk about you in another 10 years. Within 20 years. Yes, exactly. 20 years gone. We have reached the end of this episode, tech News Weekly. Thank you so much for watching and listening as you do each and every week. We couldn't do it without you. Make sure, if you aren't already subscribed, it is our lifeblood. Please go to twit tv slash tnw and subscribe to this show.

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So you get every single episode, you don't have to think about it, it just delivers to you like magic RSS is still around. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it turns out. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that's how you get your Pushed to you. It might not be in Google Reader anymore, but by God, it's how we run this show. So <laugh> subscribe and you'll get the episodes via the magic of rss. Another way you can help support the show, make sure we can continue bringing this content to you every week, is to become a member of Club Twit. You had to twit tv slash club twit starting at $7 a month or $84 a year. You can join the club and when you do, you get some great stuff. First, every single Twitch show is yours. Any ads. It's just the content. And then also you get access to some bonus goodies, TWIT plus bonus feed that is extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show outtakes special Club TWI events and access to the members only Discord server.

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There's the Untitled Linux Show, which has everything you could want to know about Linux. It is a Linux focus show. You also have HandsOn Windows with Paul Thora. There's Paul Thots program where he covers Windows tips and tricks, hands on Mac, which is my short format show that covers Apple tips and tricks currently working through how to take all of the files you have stored via iCloud and back those up elsewhere. Make sure you've got, you know, another archive somewhere else. There's also Home Theater Geeks, which recently relaunched in the club with Scott Wilkinson. And an upcoming show about artificial intelligence will make its way to the club as well. We continue to make the club all the more valuable. And we'd love to have you join us. There, and I can't stress this enough. It is massively, vastly, incredibly important that you join the club and or get folks to subscribe to the shows TWIT tv slash club twit.

(01:10:21):
If you wanna follow me online, I'm at Micah Sergeant on many a social media network, including Threads can't promise a ever tweet or, or toast or tw or thread or I dunno, th we'll find out in a couple of days what that actually ends up doing. Yeah, ANDW. So, so there you go. So the thread. That's good. That's good. And you can also add to chihuahua dot coffee's, c h i h oa H oa.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Check out Hands on Mac later today for you're Club Tip member. Check out ask the Tech guys on Sundays where Leo Laport and I take your questions live on air and do our best to answer them. And Tuesdays where I record iOS today with Rosemary Orchard, Jason Howell, what about you? Well, I mean, you can find me here, of course on Twitter at Jason Howell on Mastodon Twitter social slash Jason Howell on Threads at that Jason Howell.

(01:11:18):
I wish I had just one everywhere, but I, I, I don't know, there's a lot of other Jason Howells out there I guess, and I'm not quick enough to get them. But I am also working on an AI show for the club. So, you know, if you have any suggestions or ideas around that, I've actually gotten quite a few via the Discord or through email, but you can just send me an email cuz not all of you are club members Jason twit tv and let me know what your thoughts, there's something you're looking for cuz yeah, I'm deep in the trenches on that right now. So looking forward to playing around with that a little bit inside the club. As for this show, thanks to everybody in this room. We got a full room today. We got Aunt John, John everybody's in here helping us do this show, so we can't thank you enough and can't thank you at home watching and listening, or wherever you happen to be. Thank you so much for checking out t t and w every single week and we'll see you next time on Tech News Weekend. Bye buddy.