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Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast — CodeGen, Agents, Computer Vision, Data Science, AI UX and all things Software 3.0

All speakers are announced at AIE EU, schedule coming soon. Join us there or in Miami with the renowned organizers of React Miami! Singapore CFP also open!We've called this out a few times over in AINews, but the overwhelming consensus in the Valley is that “the IDE is Dead”. In November it was just a gut feeling, but now we actually have data: even at the canonical “VSCode Fork” company, people are officially using more agents than tab autocomplete (the first wave of AI coding):Cursor has launched cloud agents for a few months now, and this specific launch is around Computer Use, which has come a long way since we first talked with Anthropic about it in 2024, and which Jonas productized as Autotab:We also take the opportunity to do a live demo, talk about slash commands and subagents, and the future of continual learning and personalized coding models, something that Sam previously worked on at New Computer. (The fact that both of these folks are top tier CEOs of their own startups that have now joined the insane talent density gathering at Cursor should also not be overlooked).Full Episode on YouTube!please like and subscribe!Timestamps00:00 Agentic Code Experiments00:53 Why Cloud Agents Matter02:08 Testing First Pillar03:36 Video Reviews Second Pillar04:29 Remote Control Third Pillar06:17 Meta Demos and Bug Repro13:36 Slash Commands and MCPs18:19 From Tab to Team Workflow31:41 Minimal Web UI Philosophy32:40 Why No File Editor34:38 Full Stack Cursor Debate36:34 Model Choice and Auto Routing38:34 Parallel Agents and Best Of N41:41 Subagents and Context Management44:48 Grind Mode and Throughput Future01:00:24 Cloud Agent Onboarding and MemoryTranscriptEP 77 - CURSOR - Audio version[00:00:00]Agentic Code ExperimentsSamantha: This is another experiment that we ran last year and didn't decide to ship at that time, but may come back to LM Judge, but one that was also agentic and could write code. So it wasn't just picking but also taking the learnings from two models or and models that it was looking at and writing a new diff.And what we found was that there were strengths to using models from different model providers as the base level of this process. Basically you could get almost like a synergistic output that was better than having a very unified like bottom model tier.Jonas: We think that over the coming months, the big unlock is not going to be one person with a model getting more done, like the water flowing faster and we'll be making the pipe much wider and so paralyzing more, whether that's swarms of agents or parallel agents, both of those are things that contribute to getting much more done in the same amount of time.Why Cloud Agents Matterswyx: This week, one of the biggest launches that Cursor's ever done is cloud agents. I think you, you had [00:01:00] cloud agents before, but this was like, you give cursor a computer, right? Yeah. So it's just basically they bought auto tab and then they repackaged it. Is that what's going on, or,Jonas: that's a big part of it.Yeah. Cloud agents already ran in their own computers, but they were sort of site reading code. Yeah. And those computers were not, they were like blank VMs typically that were not set up for the Devrel X for whatever repo the agents working on. One of the things that we talk about is if you put yourself in the model shoes and you were seeing tokens stream by and all you could do was cite read code and spit out tokens and hope that you had done the right thing,swyx: no chanceJonas: I'd be so bad.Like you obviously you need to run the code. And so that I think also is probably not that contrarian of a take, but no one has done that yet. And so giving the model the tools to onboard itself and then use full computer use end-to-end pixels in coordinates out and have the cloud computer with different apps in it is the big unlock that we've seen internally in terms of use usage of this going from, oh, we use it for little copy changes [00:02:00] to no.We're really like driving new features with this kind of new type of entech workflow. Alright, let's see it. Cool.Live Demo TourJonas: So this is what it looks like in cursor.com/agents. So this is one I kicked off a while ago. So on the left hand side is the chat. Very classic sort of agentic thing. The big new thing here is that the agent will test its changes.So you can see here it worked for half an hour. That is because it not only took time to write the tokens of code, it also took time to test them end to end. So it started Devrel servers iterate when needed. And so that's one part of it is like model works for longer and doesn't come back with a, I tried some things pr, but a I tested at pr that's ready for your review.One of the other intuition pumps we use there is if a human gave you a PR asked you to review it and you hadn't, they hadn't tested it, you'd also be annoyed because you'd be like, only ask me for a review once it's actually ready. So that's what we've done withTesting Defaults and Controlsswyx: simple question I wanted to gather out front.Some prs are way smaller, [00:03:00] like just copy change. Does it always do the video or is it sometimes,Jonas: Sometimes.swyx: Okay. So what's the judgment?Jonas: The model does it? So we we do some default prompting with sort. What types of changes to test? There's a slash command that people can do called slash no test, where if you do that, the model will not test,swyx: but the default is test.Jonas: The default is to be calibrated. So we tell it don't test, very simple copy changes, but test like more complex things. And then users can also write their agents.md and specify like this type of, if you're editing this subpart of my mono repo, never tested ‘cause that won't work or whatever.Videos and Remote ControlJonas: So pillar one is the model actually testing Pillar two is the model coming back with a video of what it did.We have found that in this new world where agents can end-to-end, write much more code, reviewing the code is one of these new bottlenecks that crop up. And so reviewing a video is not a substitute for reviewing code, but it is an entry point that is much, much easier to start with than glancing at [00:04:00] some giant diff.And so typically you kick one off you, it's done you come back and the first thing that you would do is watch this video. So this is a, video of it. In this case I wanted a tool tip over this button. And so it went and showed me what that looks like in, in this video that I think here, it actually used a gallery.So sometimes it will build storybook type galleries where you can see like that component in action. And so that's pillar two is like these demo videos of what it built. And then pillar number three is I have full remote control access to this vm. So I can go heat in here. I can hover things, I can type, I have full control.And same thing for the terminal. I have full access. And so that is also really useful because sometimes the video is like all you need to see. And oftentimes by the way, the video's not perfect, the video will show you, is this worth either merging immediately or oftentimes is this worth iterating with to get it to that final stage where I am ready to merge in.So I can go through some other examples where the first video [00:05:00] wasn't perfect, but it gave me confidence that we were on the right track and two or three follow-ups later, it was good to go. And then I also have full access here where some things you just wanna play around with. You wanna get a feel for what is this and there's no substitute to a live preview.And the VNC kind of VM remote access gives you that.swyx: Amazing What, sorry? What is VN. AndJonas: just the remote desktop. Remote desktop. Yeah.swyx: Sam, any other details that you always wanna call out?Samantha: Yeah, for me the videos have been super helpful. I would say, especially in cases where a common problem for me with agents and cloud agents beforehand was almost like under specification in my requests where our plan mode and going really back and forth and getting detailed implementation spec is a way to reduce the risk of under specification, but then similar to how human communication breaks down over time, I feel like you have this risk where it's okay, when I pull down, go to the triple of pulling down and like running this branch locally, I'm gonna see that, like I said, this should be a toggle and you have a checkbox and like, why didn't you get that detail?And having the video up front just [00:06:00] has that makes that alignment like you're talking about a shared artifact with the agent. Very clear, which has been just super helpful for me.Jonas: I can quickly run through some other Yes. Examples.Meta Agents and More DemosJonas: So this is a very front end heavy one. So one question I wasswyx: gonna say, is this only for frontJonas: end?Exactly. One question you might have is this only for front end? So this is another example where the thing I wanted it to implement was a better error message for saving secrets. So the cloud agents support adding secrets, that's part of what it needs to access certain systems. Part of onboarding that is giving access.This is cloud is working onswyx: cloud agents. Yes.Jonas: So this is a fun thing isSamantha: it can get super meta. ItJonas: can get super meta, it can start its own cloud agents, it can talk to its own cloud agents. Sometimes it's hard to wrap your mind around that. We have disabled, it's cloud agents starting more cloud agents. So we currently disallow that.Someday you might. Someday we might. Someday we might. So this actually was mostly a backend change in terms of the error handling here, where if the [00:07:00] secret is far too large, it would oh, this is actually really cool. Wow. That's the Devrel tools. That's the Devrel tools. So if the secret is far too large, we.Allow secrets above a certain size. We have a size limit on them. And the error message there was really bad. It was just some generic failed to save message. So I was like, Hey, we wanted an error message. So first cool thing it did here, zero prompting on how to test this. Instead of typing out the, like a character 5,000 times to hit the limit, it opens Devrel tools, writes js, or to paste into the input 5,000 characters of the letter A and then hit save, closes the Devrel tools, hit save and gets this new gets the new error message.So that looks like the video actually cut off, but here you can see the, here you can see the screenshot of the of the error message. What, so that is like frontend backend end-to-end feature to, to get that,swyx: yeah.Jonas: Andswyx: And you just need a full vm, full computer run everything.Okay. Yeah.Jonas: Yeah. So we've had versions of this. This is one of the auto tab lessons where we started that in 2022. [00:08:00] No, in 2023. And at the time it was like browser use, DOM, like all these different things. And I think we ended up very sort of a GI pilled in the sense that just give the model pixels, give it a box, a brain in a box is what you want and you want to remove limitations around context and capabilities such that the bottleneck should be the intelligence.And given how smart models are today, that's a very far out bottleneck. And so giving it its full VM and having it be onboarded with Devrel X set up like a human would is just been for us internally a really big step change in capability.swyx: Yeah I would say, let's call it a year ago the models weren't even good enough to do any of this stuff.SoSamantha: even six months ago. Yeah.swyx: So yeah what people have told me is like round about Sonder four fire is when this started being good enough to just automate fully by pixel.Jonas: Yeah, I think it's always a question of when is good enough. I think we found in particular with Opus 4 5, 4, 6, and Codex five three, that those were additional step [00:09:00] changes in the autonomy grade capabilities of the model to just.Go off and figure out the details and come back when it's done.swyx: I wanna appreciate a couple details. One 10 Stack Router. I see it. Yeah. I'm a big fan. Do you know any, I have to name the 10 Stack.Jonas: No.swyx: This just a random lore. Some buddy Sue Tanner. My and then the other thing if you switch back to the video.Jonas: Yeah.swyx: I wanna shout out this thing. Probably Sam did it. I don't knowJonas: the chapters.swyx: What is this called? Yeah, this is called Chapters. Yeah. It's like a Vimeo thing. I don't know. But it's so nice the design details, like the, and obviously a company called Cursor has to have a beautiful cursorSamantha: and it isswyx: the cursor.Samantha: Cursor.swyx: You see it branded? It's the cursor. Cursor, yeah. Okay, cool. And then I was like, I complained to Evan. I was like, okay, but you guys branded everything but the wallpaper. And he was like, no, that's a cursor wallpaper. I was like, what?Samantha: Yeah. Rio picked the wallpaper, I think. Yeah. The video.That's probably Alexi and yeah, a few others on the team with the chapters on the video. Matthew Frederico. There's been a lot of teamwork on this. It's a huge effort.swyx: I just, I like design details.Samantha: Yeah.swyx: And and then when you download it adds like a little cursor. Kind of TikTok clip. [00:10:00] Yes. Yes.So it's to make it really obvious is from Cursor,Jonas: we did the TikTok branding at the end. This was actually in our launch video. Alexi demoed the cloud agent that built that feature. Which was funny because that was an instance where one of the things that's been a consequence of having these videos is we use best of event where you run head to head different models on the same prompt.We use that a lot more because one of the complications with doing that before was you'd run four models and they would come back with some giant diff, like 700 lines of code times four. It's what are you gonna do? You're gonna review all that's horrible. But if you come back with four 22nd videos, yeah, I'll watch four 22nd videos.And then even if none of them is perfect, you can figure out like, which one of those do you want to iterate with, to get it over the line. Yeah. And so that's really been really fun.Bug Repro WorkflowJonas: Here's another example. That's we found really cool, which is we've actually turned since into a slash command as well slash [00:11:00] repro, where for bugs in particular, the model of having full access to the to its own vm, it can first reproduce the bug, make a video of the bug reproducing, fix the bug, make a video of the bug being fixed, like doing the same pattern workflow with obviously the bug not reproducing.And that has been the single category that has gone from like these types of bugs, really hard to reproduce and pick two tons of time locally, even if you try a cloud agent on it. Are you confident it actually fixed it to when this happens? You'll merge it in 90 seconds or something like that.So this is an example where, let me see if this is the broken one or the, okay, this is the fixed one. Okay. So we had a bug on cursor.com/agents where if you would attach images where remove them. Then still submit your prompt. They would actually still get attached to the prompt. Okay. And so here you can see Cursor is using, its full desktop by the way.This is one of the cases where if you just do, browse [00:12:00] use type stuff, you'll have a bad time. ‘cause now it needs to upload files. Like it just uses its native file viewer to do that. And so you can see here it's uploading files. It's going to submit a prompt and then it will go and open up. So this is the meta, this is cursor agent, prompting cursor agent inside its own environment.And so you can see here bug, there's five images attached, whereas when it's submitted, it only had one image.swyx: I see. Yeah. But you gotta enable that if you're gonna use cur agent inside cur.Jonas: Exactly. And so here, this is then the after video where it went, it does the same thing. It attaches images, removes, some of them hit send.And you can see here, once this agent is up, only one of the images is left in the attachments. Yeah.swyx: Beautiful.Jonas: Okay. So easy merge.swyx: So yeah. When does it choose to do this? Because this is an extra step.Jonas: Yes. I think I've not done a great job yet of calibrating the model on when to reproduce these things.Yeah. Sometimes it will do it of its own accord. Yeah. We've been conservative where we try to have it only do it when it's [00:13:00] quite sure because it does add some amount of time to how long it takes it to work on it. But we also have added things like the slash repro command where you can just do, fix this bug slash repro and then it will know that it should first make you a video of it actually finding and making sure it can reproduce the bug.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. One sort of ML topic this ties into is reward hacking, where while you write test that you update only pass. So first write test, it shows me it fails, then make you test pass, which is a classic like red green.Jonas: Yep.swyx: LikeJonas: A-T-D-D-T-D-Dswyx: thing.No, very cool. Was that the last demo? Is thereJonas: Yeah.Anything I missed on the demos or points that you think? I think thatSamantha: covers it well. Yeah.swyx: Cool. Before we stop the screen share, can you gimme like a, just a tour of the slash commands ‘cause I so God ready. Huh, what? What are the good ones?Samantha: Yeah, we wanna increase discoverability around this too.I think that'll be like a future thing we work on. Yeah. But there's definitely a lot of good stuff nowJonas: we have a lot of internal ones that I think will not be that interesting. Here's an internal one that I've made. I don't know if anyone else at Cursor uses this one. Fix bb.Samantha: I've never heard of it.Jonas: Yeah.[00:14:00]Fix Bug Bot. So this is a thing that we want to integrate more tightly on. So you made it forswyx: yourself.Jonas: I made this for myself. It's actually available to everyone in the team, but yeah, no one knows about it. But yeah, there will be Bug bot comments and so Bug Bot has a lot of cool things. We actually just launched Bug Bot Auto Fix, where you can click a button and or change a setting and it will automatically fix its own things, and that works great in a bunch of cases.There are some cases where having the context of the original agent that created the PR is really helpful for fixing the bugs, because it might be like, oh, the bug here is that this, is a regression and actually you meant to do something more like that. And so having the original prompt and all of the context of the agent that worked on it, and so here I could just do, fix or we used to be able to do fixed PB and it would do that.No test is another one that we've had. Slash repro is in here. We mentioned that one.Samantha: One of my favorites is cloud agent diagnosis. This is one that makes heavy use of the Datadog MCP. Okay. And I [00:15:00] think Nick and David on our team wrote, and basically if there is a problem with a cloud agent we'll spin up a bunch of subs.Like a singleswyx: instance.Samantha: Yeah. We'll take the ideas and argument and spin up a bunch of subagents using the Datadog MCP to explore the logs and find like all of the problems that could have happened with that. It takes the debugging time, like from potentially you can do quick stuff quickly with the Datadog ui, but it takes it down to, again, like a single agent call as opposed to trolling through logs yourself.Jonas: You should also talk about the stuff we've done with transcripts.Samantha: Yes. Also so basically we've also done some things internally. There'll be some versions of this as we ship publicly soon, where you can spit up an agent and give it access to another agent's transcript to either basically debug something that happened.So act as an external debugger. I see. Or continue the conversation. Almost like forking it.swyx: A transcript includes all the chain of thought for the 11 minutes here. 45 minutes there.Samantha: Yeah. That way. Exactly. So basically acting as a like secondary agent that debugs the first, so we've started to push more andswyx: they're all the same [00:16:00] code.It is just the different prompts, but the sa the same.Samantha: Yeah. So basically same cloud agent infrastructure and then same harness. And then like when we do things like include, there's some extra infrastructure that goes into piping in like an external transcript if we include it as an attachment.But for things like the cloud agent diagnosis, that's mostly just using the Datadog MCP. ‘Cause we also launched CPS along with along with this cloud agent launch, launch support for cloud agent cps.swyx: Oh, that was drawn out.Jonas: We won't, we'll be doing a bigger marketing moment for it next week, but, and you can now use CPS andswyx: People will listen to it as well.Yeah,Jonas: they'llSamantha: be ahead of the third. They'll be ahead. And I would I actually don't know if the Datadog CP is like publicly available yet. I realize this not sure beta testing it, but it's been one of my favorites to use. Soswyx: I think that one's interesting for Datadog. ‘cause Datadog wants to own that site.Interesting with Bits. I don't know if you've tried bits.Samantha: I haven't tried bits.swyx: Yeah.Jonas: That's their cloud agentswyx: product. Yeah. Yeah. They want to be like we own your logs and give us our, some part of the, [00:17:00] self-healing software that everyone wants. Yeah. But obviously Cursor has a strong opinion on coding agents and you, you like taking away from the which like obviously you're going to do, and not every company's like Cursor, but it's interesting if you're a Datadog, like what do you do here?Do you expose your logs to FDP and let other people do it? Or do you try to own that it because it's extra business for you? Yeah. It's like an interesting one.Samantha: It's a good question. All I know is that I love the Datadog MCP,Jonas: And yeah, it is gonna be no, no surprise that people like will demand it, right?Samantha: Yeah.swyx: It's, it's like anysystemswyx: of record company like this, it's like how much do you give away? Cool. I think that's that for the sort of cloud agents tour. Cool. And we just talk about like cloud agents have been when did Kirsten loves cloud agents? Do you know, in JuneJonas: last year.swyx: June last year. So it's been slowly develop the thing you did, like a bunch of, like Michael did a post where himself, where he like showed this chart of like ages overtaking tap. And I'm like, wow, this is like the biggest transition in code.Jonas: Yeah.swyx: Like in, in [00:18:00] like the last,Jonas: yeah. I think that kind of got turned out.Yeah. I think it's a very interest,swyx: not at all. I think it's been highlighted by our friend Andre Kati today.Jonas: Okay.swyx: Talk more about it. What does it mean? Yeah. Is I just got given like the cursor tab key.Jonas: Yes. Yes.swyx: That's that'sSamantha: cool.swyx: I know, but it's gonna be like put in a museum.Jonas: It is.Samantha: I have to say I haven't used tab a little bit myself.Jonas: Yeah. I think that what it looks like to code with AI code generally creates software, even if you want to go higher level. Is changing very rapidly. No, not a hot take, but I think from our vendor's point at Cursor, I think one of the things that is probably underappreciated from the outside is that we are extremely self-aware about that fact and Kerscher, got its start in phase one, era one of like tab and auto complete.And that was really useful in its time. But a lot of people start looking at text files and editing code, like we call it hand coding. Now when you like type out the actual letters, it'sswyx: oh that's cute.Jonas: Yeah.swyx: Oh that's cute.Jonas: You're so boomer. So boomer. [00:19:00] And so that I think has been a slowly accelerating and now in the last few months, rapidly accelerating shift.And we think that's going to happen again with the next thing where the, I think some of the pains around tab of it's great, but I actually just want to give more to the agent and I don't want to do one tab at a time. I want to just give it a task and it goes off and does a larger unit of work and I can.Lean back a little bit more and operate at that higher level of abstraction that's going to happen again, where it goes from agents handing you back diffs and you're like in the weeds and giving it, 32nd to three minute tasks, to, you're giving it, three minute to 30 minute to three hour tasks and you're getting back videos and trying out previews rather than immediately looking at diffs every single time.swyx: Yeah. Anything to add?Samantha: One other shift that I've noticed as our cloud agents have really taken off internally has been a shift from primarily individually driven development to almost this collaborative nature of development for us, slack is actually almost like a development on [00:20:00] Id basically.So Iswyx: like maybe don't even build a custom ui, like maybe that's like a debugging thing, but actually it's that.Samantha: I feel like, yeah, there's still so much to left to explore there, but basically for us, like Slack is where a lot of development happens. Like we will have these issue channels or just like this product discussion channels where people are always at cursing and that kicks off a cloud agent.And for us at least, we have team follow-ups enabled. So if Jonas kicks off at Cursor in a thread, I can follow up with it and add more context. And so it turns into almost like a discussion service where people can like collaborate on ui. Oftentimes I will kick off an investigation and then sometimes I even ask it to get blame and then tag people who should be brought in. ‘cause it can tag people in Slack and then other people will comeswyx: in, can tag other people who are not involved in conversation. Yes. Can just do at Jonas if say, was talking to,Samantha: yeah.swyx: That's cool. You should, you guys should make a big good deal outta that.Samantha: I know. It's a lot to, I feel like there's a lot more to do with our slack surface area to show people externally. But yeah, basically like it [00:21:00] can bring other people in and then other people can also contribute to that thread and you can end up with a PR again, with the artifacts visible and then people can be like, okay, cool, we can merge this.So for us it's like the ID is almost like moving into Slack in some ways as well.swyx: I have the same experience with, but it's not developers, it's me. Designer salespeople.Samantha: Yeah.swyx: So me on like technical marketing, vision, designer on design and then salespeople on here's the legal source of what we agreed on.And then they all just collaborate and correct. The agents,Jonas: I think that we found when these threads is. The work that is left, that the humans are discussing in these threads is the nugget of what is actually interesting and relevant. It's not the boring details of where does this if statement go?It's do we wanna ship this? Is this the right ux? Is this the right form factor? Yeah. How do we make this more obvious to the user? It's like those really interesting kind of higher order questions that are so easy to collaborate with and leave the implementation to the cloud agent.Samantha: Totally. And no more discussion of am I gonna do this? Are you [00:22:00] gonna do this cursor's doing it? You just have to decide. You like it.swyx: Sometimes the, I don't know if there's a, this probably, you guys probably figured this out already, but since I, you need like a mute button. So like cursor, like we're going to take this offline, but still online.But like we need to talk among the humans first. Before you like could stop responding to everything.Jonas: Yeah. This is a design decision where currently cursor won't chime in unless you explicitly add Mention it. Yeah. Yeah.Samantha: So it's not always listening.Yeah.Jonas: I can see all the intermediate messages.swyx: Have you done the recursive, can cursor add another cursor or spawn another cursor?Samantha: Oh,Jonas: we've done some versions of this.swyx: Because, ‘cause it can add humans.Jonas: Yes. One of the other things we've been working on that's like an implication of generating the code is so easy is getting it to production is still harder than it should be.And broadly, you solve one bottleneck and three new ones pop up. Yeah. And so one of the new bottlenecks is getting into production and we have a like joke internally where you'll be talking about some feature and someone says, I have a PR for that. Which is it's so easy [00:23:00] to get to, I a PR for that, but it's hard still relatively to get from I a PR for that to, I'm confident and ready to merge this.And so I think that over the coming weeks and months, that's a thing that we think a lot about is how do we scale up compute to that pipeline of getting things from a first draft An agent did.swyx: Isn't that what Merge isn't know what graphite's for, likeJonas: graphite is a big part of that. The cloud agent testingswyx: Is it fully integrated or still different companiesJonas: working on I think we'll have more to share there in the future, but the goal is to have great end-to-end experience where Cursor doesn't just help you generate code tokens, it helps you create software end-to-end.And so review is a big part of that, that I think especially as models have gotten much better at writing code, generating code, we've felt that relatively crop up more,swyx: sorry this is completely unplanned, but like there I have people arguing one to you need ai. To review ai and then there is another approach, thought school of thought where it's no, [00:24:00] reviews are dead.Like just show me the video. It's it like,Samantha: yeah. I feel again, for me, the video is often like alignment and then I often still wanna go through a code review process.swyx: Like still look at the files andSamantha: everything. Yeah. There's a spectrum of course. Like the video, if it's really well done and it does like fully like test everything, you can feel pretty competent, but it's still helpful to, to look at the code.I make hep pay a lot of attention to bug bot. I feel like Bug Bot has been a great really highly adopted internally. We often like, won't we tell people like, don't leave bug bot comments unaddressed. ‘cause we have such high confidence in it. So people always address their bug bot comments.Jonas: Once you've had two cases where you merged something and then you went back later, there was a bug in it, you merged, you went back later and you were like, ah, bug Bot had found that I should have listened to Bug Bot.Once that happens two or three times, you learn to wait for bug bot.Samantha: Yeah. So I think for us there's like that code level review where like it's looking at the actual code and then there's like the like feature level review where you're looking at the features. There's like a whole number of different like areas.There'll probably eventually be things like performance level review, security [00:25:00] review, things like that where it's like more more different aspects of how this feature might affect your code base that you want to potentially leverage an agent to help with.Jonas: And some of those like bug bot will be synchronous and you'll typically want to wait on before you merge.But I think another thing that we're starting to see is. As with cloud agents, you scale up this parallelism and how much code you generate. 10 person startups become, need the Devrel X and pipelines that a 10,000 person company used to need. And that looks like a lot of the things I think that 10,000 person companies invented in order to get that volume of software to production safely.So that's things like, release frequently or release slowly, have different stages where you release, have checkpoints, automated ways of detecting regressions. And so I think we're gonna need stacks merg stack diffs merge queues. Exactly. A lot of those things are going to be importantswyx: forward with.I think the majority of people still don't know what stack stacks are. And I like, I have many friends in Facebook and like I, I'm pretty friendly with graphite. I've just, [00:26:00] I've never needed it ‘cause I don't work on that larger team and it's just like democratization of no, only here's what we've already worked out at very large scale and here's how you can, it benefits you too.Like I think to me, one of the beautiful things about GitHub is that. It's actually useful to me as an individual solo developer, even though it's like actually collaboration software.Jonas: Yep.swyx: And I don't think a lot of Devrel tools have figured that out yet. That transition from like large down to small.Jonas: Yeah. Kers is probably an inverse story.swyx: This is small down toJonas: Yeah. Where historically Kers share, part of why we grew so quickly was anyone on the team could pick it up and in fact people would pick it up, on the weekend for their side project and then bring it into work. ‘cause they loved using it so much.swyx: Yeah.Jonas: And I think a thing that we've started working on a lot more, not us specifically, but as a company and other folks at Cursor, is making it really great for teams and making it the, the 10th person that starts using Cursor in a team. Is immediately set up with things like, we launched Marketplace recently so other people can [00:27:00] configure what CPS and skills like plugins.So skills and cps, other people can configure that. So that my cursor is ready to go and set up. Sam loves the Datadog, MCP and Slack, MCP you've also been using a lot butSamantha: also pre-launch, but I feel like it's so good.Jonas: Yeah, my cursor should be configured if Sam feels strongly that's just amazing and required.swyx: Is it automatically shared or you have to go and.Jonas: It depends on the MCP. So some are obviously off per user. Yeah. And so Sam can't off my cursor with my Slack MCP, but some are team off and those can be set up by admins.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, I think, we had a man on the pod when cursor was five people, and like everyone was like, okay, what's the thing?And then it's usually something teams and org and enterprise, but it's actually working. But like usually at that stage when you're five, when you're just a vs. Code fork it's like how do you get there? Yeah. Will people pay for this? People do pay for it.Jonas: Yeah. And I think for cloud agents, we expect.[00:28:00]To have similar kind of PLG things where I think off the bat we've seen a lot of adoption with kind of smaller teams where the code bases are not quite as complex to set up. Yes. If you need some insane docker layer caching thing for builds not to take two hours, that's going to take a little bit longer for us to be able to support that kind of infrastructure.Whereas if you have front end backend, like one click agents can install everything that they need themselves.swyx: This is a good chance for me to just ask some technical sort of check the box questions. Can I choose the size of the vm?Jonas: Not yet. We are planning on adding that. Weswyx: have, this is obviously you want like LXXL, whatever, right?Like it's like the Amazon like sort menu.Jonas: Yes, exactly. We'll add that.swyx: Yeah. In some ways you have to basically become like a EC2, almost like you rent a box.Jonas: You rent a box. Yes. We talk a lot about brain in a box. Yeah. So cursor, we want to be a brain in a box,swyx: but is the mental model different? Is it more serverless?Is it more persistent? Is. Something else.Samantha: We want it to be a bit persistent. The desktop should be [00:29:00] something you can return to af even after some days. Like maybe you go back, they're like still thinking about a feature for some period of time. So theswyx: full like sus like suspend the memory and bring it back and then keep going.Samantha: Exactly.swyx: That's an interesting one because what I actually do want, like from a manna and open crawl, whatever, is like I want to be able to log in with my credentials to the thing, but not actually store it in any like secret store, whatever. ‘cause it's like this is the, my most sensitive stuff.Yeah. This is like my email, whatever. And just have it like, persist to the image. I don't know how it was hood, but like to rehydrate and then just keep going from there. But I don't think a lot of infra works that way. A lot of it's stateless where like you save it to a docker image and then it's only whatever you can describe in a Docker file and that's it.That's the only thing you can cl multiple times in parallel.Jonas: Yeah. We have a bunch of different ways of setting them up. So there's a dockerfile based approach. The main default way is actually snapshottingswyx: like a Linux vmJonas: like vm, right? You run a bunch of install commands and then you snapshot more or less the file system.And so that gets you set up for everything [00:30:00] that you would want to bring a new VM up from that template basically.swyx: Yeah.Jonas: And that's a bit distinct from what Sam was talking about with the hibernating and re rehydrating where that is a full memory snapshot as well. So there, if I had like the browser open to a specific page and we bring that back, that page will still be there.swyx: Was there any discussion internally and just building this stuff about every time you shoot a video it's actually you show a little bit of the desktop and the browser and it's not necessary if you just show the browser. If, if you know you're just demoing a front end application.Why not just show the browser, right? Like it Yeah,Samantha: we do have some panning and zooming. Yeah. Like it can decide that when it's actually recording and cutting the video to highlight different things. I think we've played around with different ways of segmenting it and yeah. There's been some different revs on it for sure.Jonas: Yeah. I think one of the interesting things is the version that you see now in cursor.com actually is like half of what we had at peak where we decided to unshift or unshipped quite a few things. So two of the interesting things to talk about, one is directly an answer to your [00:31:00] question where we had native browser that you would have locally, it was basically an iframe that via port forwarding could load the URL could talk to local host in the vm.So that gets you basically, so inswyx: your machine's browser,likeJonas: in your local browser? Yeah. You would go to local host 4,000 and that would get forwarded to local host 4,000 in the VM via port forward. We unshift that like atswyx: Eng Rock.Jonas: Like an Eng Rock. Exactly. We unshift that because we felt that the remote desktop was sufficiently low latency and more general purpose.So we build Cursor web, but we also build Cursor desktop. And so it's really useful to be able to have the full spectrum of things. And even for Cursor Web, as you saw in one of the examples, the agent was uploading files and like I couldn't upload files and open the file viewer if I only had access to the browser.And we've thought a lot about, this might seem funny coming from Cursor where we started as this, vs. Code Fork and I think inherited a lot of amazing things, but also a lot [00:32:00] of legacy UI from VS Code.Minimal Web UI SurfacesJonas: And so with the web UI we wanted to be very intentional about keeping that very minimal and exposing the right sum of set of primitive sort of app surfaces we call them, that are shared features of that cloud.Environment that you and the agent both use. So agent uses desktop and controls it. I can use desktop and controlled agent runs terminal commands. I can run terminal commands. So that's how our philosophy around it. The other thing that is maybe interesting to talk about that we unshipped is and we may, both of these things we may reship and decide at some point in the future that we've changed our minds on the trade offs or gotten it to a point where, putswyx: it out there.Let users tell you they want it. Exactly. Alright, fine.Why No File EditorJonas: So one of the other things is actually a files app. And so we used to have the ability at one point during the process of testing this internally to see next to, I had GID desktop and terminal on the right hand side of the tab there earlier to also have a files app where you could see and edit files.And we actually felt that in some [00:33:00] ways, by restricting and limiting what you could do there, people would naturally leave more to the agent and fall into this new pattern of delegating, which we thought was really valuable. And there's currently no way in Cursor web to edit these files.swyx: Yeah. Except you like open up the PR and go into GitHub and do the thing.Jonas: Yeah.swyx: Which is annoying.Jonas: Just tell the agent,swyx: I have criticized open AI for this. Because Open AI is Codex app doesn't have a file editor, like it has file viewer, but isn't a file editor.Jonas: Do you use the file viewer a lot?swyx: No. I understand, but like sometimes I want it, the one way to do it is like freaking going to no, they have a open in cursor button or open an antigravity or, opening whatever and people pointed that.So I was, I was part of the early testers group people pointed that and they were like, this is like a design smell. It's like you actually want a VS. Code fork that has all these things, but also a file editor. And they were like, no, just trust us.Jonas: Yeah. I think we as Cursor will want to, as a product, offer the [00:34:00] whole spectrum and so you want to be able to.Work at really high levels of abstraction and double click and see the lowest level. That's important. But I also think that like you won't be doing that in Slack. And so there are surfaces and ways of interacting where in some cases limiting the UX capabilities makes for a cleaner experience that's more simple and drives people into these new patterns where even locally we kicked off joking about this.People like don't really edit files, hand code anymore. And so we want to build for where that's going and not where it's beenswyx: a lot of cool stuff. And Okay. I have a couple more.Full Stack Hosting Debateswyx: So observations about the design elements about these things. One of the things that I'm always thinking about is cursor and other peers of cursor start from like the Devrel tools and work their way towards cloud agents.Other people, like the lovable and bolts of the world start with here's like the vibe code. Full cloud thing. They were already cloud edges before anyone else cloud edges and we will give you the full deploy platform. So we own the whole loop. We own all the infrastructure, we own, we, we have the logs, we have the the live site, [00:35:00] whatever.And you can do that cycle cursor doesn't own that cycle even today. You don't have the versal, you don't have the, you whatever deploy infrastructure that, that you're gonna have, which gives you powers because anyone can use it. And any enterprise who, whatever you infra, I don't care. But then also gives you limitations as to how much you can actually fully debug end to end.I guess I'm just putting out there that like is there a future where there's like full stack cursor where like cursor apps.com where like I host my cursor site this, which is basically a verse clone, right? I don't know.Jonas: I think that's a interesting question to be asking, and I think like the logic that you laid out for how you would get there is logic that I largely agree with.swyx: Yeah. Yeah.Jonas: I think right now we're really focused on what we see as the next big bottleneck and because things like the Datadog MCP exist, yeah. I don't think that the best way we can help our customers ship more software. Is by building a hosting solution right now,swyx: by the way, these are things I've actually discussed with some of the companies I just named.Jonas: Yeah, for sure. Right now, just this big bottleneck is getting the code out there and also [00:36:00] unlike a lovable in the bolt, we focus much more on existing software. And the zero to one greenfield is just a very different problem. Imagine going to a Shopify and convincing them to deploy on your deployment solution.That's very different and I think will take much longer to see how that works. May never happen relative to, oh, it's like a zero to one app.swyx: I'll say. It's tempting because look like 50% of your apps are versal, superb base tailwind react it's the stack. It's what everyone does.So I it's kinda interesting.Jonas: Yeah.Model Choice and Auto Routingswyx: The other thing is the model select dying. Right now in cloud agents, it's stuck down, bottom left. Sure it's Codex High today, but do I care if it's suddenly switched to Opus? Probably not.Samantha: We definitely wanna give people a choice across models because I feel like it, the meta change is very frequently.I was a big like Opus 4.5 Maximalist, and when codex 5.3 came out, I hard, hard switch. So that's all I use now.swyx: Yeah. Agreed. I don't know if, but basically like when I use it in Slack, [00:37:00] right? Cursor does a very good job of exposing yeah. Cursors. If people go use it, here's the model we're using.Yeah. Here's how you switch if you want. But otherwise it's like extracted away, which is like beautiful because then you actually, you should decide.Jonas: Yeah, I think we want to be doing more with defaults.swyx: Yeah.Jonas: Where we can suggest things to people. A thing that we have in the editor, the desktop app is auto, which will route your request and do things there.So I think we will want to do something like that for cloud agents as well. We haven't done it yet. And so I think. We have both people like Sam, who are very savvy and want know exactly what model they want, and we also have people that want us to pick the best model for them because we have amazing people like Sam and we, we are the experts.Yeah. We have both the traffic and the internal taste and experience to know what we think is best.swyx: Yeah. I have this ongoing pieces of agent lab versus model lab. And to me, cursor and other companies are example of an agent lab that is, building a new playbook that is different from a model lab where it's like very GP heavy Olo.So obviously has a research [00:38:00] team. And my thesis is like you just, every agent lab is going to have a router because you're going to be asked like, what's what. I don't keep up to every day. I'm not a Sam, I don't keep up every day for using you as sample the arm arbitrator of taste. Put me on CRI Auto.Is it free? It's not free.Jonas: Auto's not free, but there's different pricing tiers. Yeah.swyx: Put me on Chris. You decide from me based on all the other people you know better than me. And I think every agent lab should basically end up doing this because that actually gives you extra power because you like people stop carrying or having loyalty with one lab.Jonas: Yeah.Best Of N and Model CouncilsJonas: Two other maybe interesting things that I don't know how much they're on your radar are one the best event thing we mentioned where running different models head to head is actually quite interesting becauseswyx: which exists in cursor.Jonas: That exists in cur ID and web. So the problem is where do you run them?swyx: Okay.Jonas: And so I, I can share my screen if that's interesting. Yeahinteresting.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Obviously parallel agents, very popal.Jonas: Yes, exactly. Parallel agentsswyx: in you mind. Are they the same thing? Best event and parallel agents? I don't want to [00:39:00] put words in your mouth.Jonas: Best event is a subset of parallel agents where they're running on the same prompt.That would be my answer. So this is what that looks like. And so here in this dropdown picker, I can just select multiple models.swyx: Yeah.Jonas: And now if I do a prompt, I'm going to do something silly. I am running these five models.swyx: Okay. This is this fake clone, of course. The 2.0 yeah.Jonas: Yes, exactly. But they're running so the cursor 2.0, you can do desktop or cloud.So this is cloud specifically where the benefit over work trees is that they have their own VMs and can run commands and won't try to kill ports that the other one is running. Which are some of the pains. These are allswyx: called work trees?Jonas: No, these are all cloud agents with their own VMs.swyx: Okay. ButJonas: When you do it locally, sometimes people do work trees and that's been the main way that people have set out parallel so far.I've gotta say.swyx: That's so confusing for folks.Jonas: Yeah.swyx: No one knows what work trees are.Jonas: Exactly. I think we're phasing out work trees.swyx: Really.Jonas: Yeah.swyx: Okay.Samantha: But yeah. And one other thing I would say though on the multimodel choice, [00:40:00] so this is another experiment that we ran last year and the decide to ship at that time but may come back to, and there was an interesting learning that's relevant for, these different model providers. It was something that would run a bunch of best of ends but then synthesize and basically run like a synthesizer layer of models. And that was other agents that would take LM Judge, but one that was also agentic and could write code. So it wasn't just picking but also taking the learnings from two models or, and models that it was looking at and writing a new diff.And what we found was that at the time at least, there were strengths to using models from different model providers as the base level of this process. Like basically you could get almost like a synergistic output that was better than having a very unified, like bottom model tier. So it was really interesting ‘cause it's like potentially, even though even in the future when you have like maybe one model as ahead of the other for a little bit, there could be some benefit from having like multiple top tier models involved in like a [00:41:00] model swarm or whatever agent Swarm that you're doing, that they each have strengths and weaknesses.Yeah.Jonas: Andre called this the council, right?Samantha: Yeah, exactly. We actually, oh, that's another internal command we have that Ian wrote slash council. Oh, and they some, yeah.swyx: Yes. This idea is in various forms everywhere. And I think for me, like for me, the productization of it, you guys have done yeah, like this is very flexible, but.If I were to add another Yeah, what your thing is on here it would be too much. I what, let's say,Samantha: Ideally it's all, it's something that the user can just choose and it all happens under the hood in a way where like you just get the benefit of that process at the end and better output basically, but don't have to get too lost in the complexity of judging along the way.Jonas: Okay.Subagents for ContextJonas: Another thing on the many agents, on different parallel agents that's interesting is an idea that's been around for a while as well that has started working recently is subagents. And so this is one other way to get agents of the different prompts and different goals and different models, [00:42:00] different vintages to work together.Collaborate and delegate.swyx: Yeah. I'm very like I like one of my, I always looking for this is the year of the blah, right? Yeah. I think one of the things on the blahs is subs. I think this is of but I haven't used them in cursor. Are they fully formed or how do I honestly like an intro because do I form them from new every time?Do I have fixed subagents? How are they different for slash commands? There's all these like really basic questions that no one stops to answer for people because everyone's just like too busy launching. We have toSamantha: honestly, you could, you can see them in cursor now if you just say spin up like 50 subagents to, so cursor definesswyx: what Subagents.Yeah.Samantha: Yeah. So basically I think I shouldn't speak for the whole subagents team. This is like a different team that's been working on this, but our thesis or thing that we saw internally is that like they're great for context management for kind of long running threads, or if you're trying to just throw more compute at something.We have strongly used, almost like a generic task interface where then the main agent can define [00:43:00] like what goes into the subagent. So if I say explore my code base, it might decide to spin up an explore subagent and or might decide to spin up five explore subagent.swyx: But I don't get to set what those subagent are, right?It's all defined by a model.Samantha: I think. I actually would have to refresh myself on the sub agent interface.Jonas: There are some built-in ones like the explore subagent is free pre-built. But you can also instruct the model to use other subagents and then it will. And one other example of a built-in subagent is I actually just kicked one off in cursor and I can show you what that looks like.swyx: Yes. Because I tried to do this in pure prompt space.Jonas: So this is the desktop app? Yeah. Yeah. And that'sswyx: all you need to do, right? Yeah.Jonas: That's all you need to do. So I said use a sub agent to explore and I think, yeah, so I can even click in and see what the subagent is working on here. It ran some fine command and this is a composer under the hood.Even though my main model is Opus, it does smart routing to take, like in this instance the explorer sort of requires reading a ton of things. And so a faster model is really useful to get an [00:44:00] answer quickly, but that this is what subagent look like. And I think we wanted to do a lot more to expose hooks and ways for people to configure these.Another example of a cus sort of builtin subagent is the computer use subagent in the cloud agents, where we found that those trajectories can be long and involve a lot of images obviously, and execution of some testing verification task. We wanted to use that models that are particularly good at that.So that's one reason to use subagents. And then the other reason to use subagents is we want contexts to be summarized reduced down at a subagent level. That's a really neat boundary at which to compress that rollout and testing into a final message that agent writes that then gets passed into the parent rather than having to do some global compaction or something like that.swyx: Awesome. Cool. While we're in the subagents conversation, I can't do a cursor conversation and not talk about listen stuff. What is that? What is what? He built a browser. He built an os. Yes. And he [00:45:00] experimented with a lot of different architectures and basically ended up reinventing the software engineer org chart.This is all cool, but what's your take? What's, is there any hole behind the side? The scenes stories about that kind of, that whole adventure.Samantha: Some of those experiments have found their way into a feature that's available in cloud agents now, the long running agent mode internally, we call it grind mode.And I think there's like some hint of grind mode accessible in the picker today. ‘cause you can do choose grind until done. And so that was really the result of experiments that Wilson started in this vein where he I think the Ralph Wigga loop was like floating around at the time, but it was something he also independently found and he was experimenting with.And that was what led to this product surface.swyx: And it is just simple idea of have criteria for completion and do not. Until you complete,Samantha: there's a bit more complexity as well in, in our implementation. Like there's a specific, you have to start out by aligning and there's like a planning stage where it will work with you and it will not get like start grind execution mode until it's decided that the [00:46:00] plan is amenable to both of you.Basically,swyx: I refuse to work until you make me happy.Jonas: We found that it's really important where people would give like very underspecified prompt and then expect it to come back with magic. And if it's gonna go off and work for three minutes, that's one thing. When it's gonna go off and work for three days, probably should spend like a few hours upfront making sure that you have communicated what you actually want.swyx: Yeah. And just to like really drive from the point. We really mean three days that No, noJonas: human. Oh yeah. We've had three day months innovation whatsoever.Samantha: I don't know what the record is, but there's been a long time with the grantsJonas: and so the thing that is available in cursor. The long running agent is if you wanna think about it, very abstractly that is like one worker node.Whereas what built the browser is a society of workers and planners and different agents collaborating. Because we started building the browser with one worker node at the time, that was just the agent. And it became one worker node when we realized that the throughput of the system was not where it needed to be [00:47:00] to get something as large of a scale as the browser done.swyx: Yeah.Jonas: And so this has also become a really big mental model for us with cloud, cloud agents is there's the classic engineering latency throughput trade-offs. And so you know, the code is water flowing through a pipe. The, we think that over the coming months, the big unlock is not going to be one person with a model getting more done, like the water flowing faster and we'll be making the pipe much wider and so ing more, whether that's swarms of agents or parallel agents, both of those are things that contribute to getting.Much more done in the same amount of time, but any one of those tasks doesn't necessarily need to get done that quickly. And throughput is this really big thing where if you see the system of a hundred concurrent agents outputting thousands of tokens a second, you can't go back like that.Just you see a glimpse of the future where obviously there are many caveats. Like no one is using this browser. IRL. There's like a bunch of things not quite right yet, but we are going to get to systems that produce real production [00:48:00] code at the scale much sooner than people think. And it forces you to think what even happens to production systems. Like we've broken our GitHub actions recently because we have so many agents like producing and pushing code that like CICD is just overloaded. ‘cause suddenly it's like effectively weg grew, cursor's growing very quickly anyway, but you grow head count, 10 x when people run 10 x as many agents.And so a lot of these systems, exactly, a lot of these systems will need to adapt.swyx: It also reminds me, we, we all, the three of us live in the app layer, but if you talk to the researchers who are doing RL infrastructure, it's the same thing. It's like all these parallel rollouts and scheduling them and making sure as much throughput as possible goes through them.Yeah, it's the same thing.Jonas: We were talking briefly before we started recording. You were mentioning memory chips and some of the shortages there. The other thing that I think is just like hard to wrap your head around the scale of the system that was building the browser, the concurrency there.If Sam and I both have a system like that running for us, [00:49:00] shipping our software. The amount of inference that we're going to need per developer is just really mind-boggling. And that makes, sometimes when I think about that, I think that even with, the most optimistic projections for what we're going to need in terms of buildout, our underestimating, the extent to which these swarm systems can like churn at scale to produce code that is valuable to the economy.And,swyx: yeah, you can cut this if it's sensitive, but I was just Do you have estimates of how much your token consumption is?Jonas: Like per developer?swyx: Yeah. Or yourself. I don't need like comfy average. I just curious. ISamantha: feel like I, for a while I wasn't an admin on the usage dashboard, so I like wasn't able to actually see, but it was a,swyx: mine has gone up.Samantha: Oh yeah.swyx: But I thinkSamantha: it's in terms of how much work I'm doing, it's more like I have no worries about developers losing their jobs, at least in the near term. ‘cause I feel like that's a more broad discussion.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. You went there. I didn't go, I wasn't going there.I was just like how much more are you using?Samantha: There's so much stuff to be built. And so I feel like I'm basically just [00:50:00] trying to constantly I have more ambitions than I did before. Yes. Personally. Yes. So can't speak to the broader thing. But for me it's like I'm busier than ever before.I'm using more tokens and I am also doing more things.Jonas: Yeah. Yeah. I don't have the stats for myself, but I think broadly a thing that we've seen, that we expect to continue is J'S paradox. Whereswyx: you can't do it in our podcast without seeingJonas: it. Exactly. We've done it. Now we can wrap. We've done, we said the words.Phase one tab auto complete people paid like 20 bucks a month. And that was great. Phase two where you were iterating with these local models. Today people pay like hundreds of dollars a month. I think as we think about these highly parallel kind of agents running off for a long times in their own VM system, we are already at that point where people will be spending thousands of dollars a month per human, and I think potentially tens of thousands and beyond, where it's not like we are greedy for like capturing more money, but what happens is just individuals get that much more leverage.And if one person can do as much as 10 people, yeah. That tool that allows ‘em to do that is going to be tremendously valuable [00:51:00] and worth investing in and taking the best thing that exists.swyx: One more question on just the cursor in general and then open-ended for you guys to plug whatever you wanna put.How is Cursor hiring these days?Samantha: What do you mean by how?swyx: So obviously lead code is dead. Oh,Samantha: okay.swyx: Everyone says work trial. Different people have different levels of adoption of agents. Some people can really adopt can be much more productive. But other people, you just need to give them a little bit of time.And sometimes they've never lived in a token rich place like cursor.And once you live in a token rich place, you're you just work differently. But you need to have done that. And a lot of people anyway, it was just open-ended. Like how has agentic engineering, agentic coding changed your opinions on hiring?Is there any like broad like insights? Yeah.Jonas: Basically I'm asking this for other people, right? Yeah, totally. Totally. To hear Sam's opinion, we haven't talked about this the two of us. I think that we don't see necessarily being great at the latest thing with AI coding as a prerequisite.I do think that's a sign that people are keeping up and [00:52:00] curious and willing to upscale themselves in what's happening because. As we were talking about the last three months, the game has completely changed. It's like what I do all day is very different.swyx: Like it's my job and I can't,Jonas: Yeah, totally.I do think that still as Sam was saying, the fundamentals remain important in the current age and being able to go and double click down. And models today do still have weaknesses where if you let them run for too long without cleaning up and refactoring, the coke will get sloppy and there'll be bad abstractions.And so you still do need humans that like have built systems before, no good patterns when they see them and know where to steer things.Samantha: I would agree with that. I would say again, cursor also operates very quickly and leveraging ag agentic engineering is probably one reason why that's possible in this current moment.I think in the past it was just like people coding quickly and now there's like people who use agents to move faster as well. So it's part of our process will always look for we'll select for kind of that ability to make good decisions quickly and move well in this environment.And so I think being able to [00:53:00] figure out how to use agents to help you do that is an important part of it too.swyx: Yeah. Okay. The fork in the road, either predictions for the end of the year, if you have any, or PUDs.Jonas: Evictions are not going to go well.Samantha: I know it's hard.swyx: They're so hard. Get it wrong.It's okay. Just, yeah.Jonas: One other plug that may be interesting that I feel like we touched on but haven't talked a ton about is a thing that the kind of these new interfaces and this parallelism enables is the ability to hop back and forth between threads really quickly. And so a thing that we have,swyx: you wanna show something or,Jonas: yeah, I can show something.A thing that we have felt with local agents is this pain around contact switching. And you have one agent that went off and did some work and another agent that, that did something else. And so here by having, I just have three tabs open, let's say, but I can very quickly, hop in here.This is an example I showed earlier, but the actual workflow here I think is really different in a way that may not be obvious, where, I start t

Exploit Brokers - Hacking News
600 Firewalls Breached by AI in 5 Weeks — Plus Chrome Zero-Day, CVSS 9.9 RCE & AI-Powered Malware | HN63

Exploit Brokers - Hacking News

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2026 28:52


AI is reshaping both sides of the cybersecurity battlefield — and fast. In this episode, we break down five stories that prove it: the first Chrome zero-day of 2026 (CVE-2026-2441), a near-perfect CVSS 9.9 in Microsoft's Semantic Kernel SDK (CVE-2026-26030), a supply chain attack on AI coding assistant Cline that silently installed autonomous agents on thousands of developer machines, the first-ever Android malware using Google's Gemini AI at runtime (PromptSpy), and a Russian-speaking threat actor who used commercial AI tools to breach over 600 FortiGate firewalls across 55 countries in just five weeks. Whether you're a developer, security professional, or just someone who uses a browser — this one's worth your time.

Choses à Savoir TECH
Un malware parle à une IA pour survivre sur téléphone ?

Choses à Savoir TECH

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2026 2:57


On pensait l'intelligence artificielle générative cantonnée aux assistants virtuels et aux outils de productivité. Mais elle intéresse aussi les cybercriminels. Le 19 février 2026, les chercheurs d'ESET ont révélé l'existence de PromptSpy, un malware Android qui s'appuie sur le modèle Gemini de Google pour s'adapter aux téléphones de ses victimes. Et ce n'est peut-être qu'un avant-goût de ce qui arrive. Pour comprendre ce qui rend PromptSpy inédit, il faut revenir aux limites des malwares classiques. Habituellement, ces logiciels malveillants fonctionnent avec des scripts rigides : des coordonnées de clics prédéfinies, des boutons identifiés à l'avance. Problème : Android n'est pas uniforme. Chaque constructeur modifie l'interface, chaque mise à jour peut déplacer les menus. Résultat, les scripts se retrouvent vite obsolètes.PromptSpy contourne cette faiblesse grâce à l'IA. Concrètement, il capture une image de l'écran de la victime et l'envoie à Gemini. Le modèle analyse les éléments visibles — boutons, textes, icônes — et renvoie des instructions personnalisées, comme « appuie ici » ou « fais glisser là ». Selon Lukas Stefanko, chercheur chez ESET, cette approche permet au malware de s'adapter automatiquement à n'importe quel smartphone ou version d'Android. Une souplesse inédite. L'objectif principal est la persistance : rester installé quoi qu'il arrive. PromptSpy se verrouille dans la liste des applications récentes d'Android, en s'épinglant avec un cadenas virtuel. Impossible alors de le fermer d'un simple geste. Le dialogue avec l'IA continue jusqu'à confirmation que le verrouillage est effectif.Mais le cœur du danger réside ailleurs : dans un module VNC. Cette technologie permet aux attaquants de voir l'écran en temps réel et de contrôler le téléphone à distance, comme s'ils le tenaient en main. Le malware abuse aussi des services d'accessibilité — des fonctions prévues à l'origine pour aider les personnes en situation de handicap — afin d'empêcher la désinstallation grâce à des superpositions invisibles. Les chercheurs ont découvert ces zones cachées en activant un mode de débogage laissé dans le code. PromptSpy peut enregistrer l'écran, récupérer des codes PIN, lister les applications installées et transmettre ces données via des communications chiffrées. Pour le supprimer, il faut redémarrer en mode sans échec — un mode qui désactive les applications tierces — puis effacer l'application frauduleuse, baptisée MorganArg, qui imite une banque. Pour l'instant, aucune infection massive n'a été détectée. Mais pour ESET, le signal est clair : après PromptLock en 2025, l'IA devient un outil d'adaptation pour les malwares. Google a été alerté et Play Protect bloque les versions identifiées Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien
From Quantum Physics to Quarkus

airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2026 67:10


An airhacks.fm conversation with Holly Cummins (@holly_cummins) about: first computer experience with her dad's Kaypro CPM machine and ASCII platform games, learning Basic programming on an IBM PC clone to build a recipe management system, studying physics at university with a doctorate in quantum computing, self-teaching Java to create 3D visualizations of error correction on spheres during PhD research, joining IBM as a self-taught programmer without formal computer science education, working on Business Event Infrastructure (BDI) at IBM, brief unhappy experience porting JMS to .net with Linux and VNC, moving to IBM's JVM performance team working on garbage collection analysis, creating Health Center visualization tooling for J9 as an alternative to JDK Mission Control, innovative low-overhead always-on profiling by leveraging JIT compiler's existing method hotness data, transitioning to WebSphere Liberty team during its early development, Liberty's architectural advantage of OSGi-based modular core enabling small fast startup while maintaining application compatibility, working on Apache Aries enterprise OSGi project and writing a book about it, discussion of OSGi's strengths in protecting internal APIs versus complexity costs for application developers, the famous OSGi saying about making the impossible possible and the possible hard, microservices solving modularity problems through network barriers versus class loader barriers, five years as IBM consultant helping customers adopt cloud-native technologies, critique of cloud-native terminology becoming meaningless when everything required the native suffix, detailed analysis of 12-factor app principles and how most were already standard Java practices, stateless processes as the main paradigm shift from JavaServer Faces session-based applications, joining Red Hat's quarkus team three and a half years ago through Erin Schnabel's recommendation, working on Quarkiverse community aspects and ecosystem development, leading energy efficiency measurements confirming Quarkus's sustainability advantages, current role as cross-portfolio sustainability architect for Red Hat middleware, writing Pact contract testing extension for Quarkiverse to understand extension author experience, re-architecting Quarkus test framework class loading to enable deeper extension integration, recent work on Dev Services lazy initialization to prevent eager startup of multiple database instances across test profiles, fixing LGTM Dev Services port configuration bugs for multi-microservice observability setups, upcoming JPMS integration work by colleague David Lloyd requiring class loader simplification, the double win of saving money while also reducing environmental impact, comparison of sustainability benefits to accessibility benefits for power users, mystery solved about the blue-haired speaker at European Java User Groups years ago Holly Cummins on twitter: @holly_cummins

Hacker Public Radio
HPR4527: Overly Complicated Media Ripping setup

Hacker Public Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2025


This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Hello, this is your host Archer72 for Hacker Public Radio. In this episode, I share my overly complicated media ripping setup, and hope it helps someone. First of all, I have revised my media ripping setup since HPR3294 - Update to MakeMKV to back up media I've changed my mind about only using a terminal for ripping media, and it was time to make a change. Now, I start both MakeMKV and Handbrake from a remote GUI, either on my laptop or phone. VNC server for remote GUI virt-manager server sudo apt install tigervnc-common Remmina VNC viewer, tabbed viewing Debian desktop VNC Client for Android AVNC client on F-Droid NFS server on Raspberry Pi Remote for Intel mini PC Server mark-hpprodesk600g2dm description: Space-saving Computer product: HP ProDesk 600 G2 DM (Y0E36UP#ABA) vendor: HP serial: xxxxxxxx width: 64 bits sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server Added symbolic links to /srv/ for ease of use Oct 28 05:34 dvdrip -> /mnt/USBdrive-12Tb/DVDrip/ Oct 28 05:30 movies -> /mnt/USBdrive-12Tb/Movies/ Oct 30 05:20 tv -> /mnt/USBdrive-12Tb/TV 192.168.50.20:/mnt/USBdrive-12Tb/DVDrip /mnt/dvdrip nfs users,defaults,_netdev,nofail 0 0 192.168.50.20:/mnt/USBdrive-12Tb/TV /mnt/tv nfs users,defaults,_netdev,nofail Blu Ray writer *-cdrom description: DVD-RAM writer product: BDDVDRW CH20L vendor: hp physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@9:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sr1 version: BC33 capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram MakeMKV Discs won't stop loading MakeMKV above v1.17.7 still broken on Linux Downgraded version Old versions of MakeMKV makemkv-bin-1.17.7.tar.gz makemkv-oss-1.17.7.tar.gz Tailscale on Debian trixie Tailscale on F-droid MakeMKV via Remmina Handbrake via Remmina Provide feedback on this episode.

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast — CodeGen, Agents, Computer Vision, Data Science, AI UX and all things Software 3.0

Today's episode is with Paul Klein, founder of Browserbase. We talked about building browser infrastructure for AI agents, the future of agent authentication, and their open source framework Stagehand.* [00:00:00] Introductions* [00:04:46] AI-specific challenges in browser infrastructure* [00:07:05] Multimodality in AI-Powered Browsing* [00:12:26] Running headless browsers at scale* [00:18:46] Geolocation when proxying* [00:21:25] CAPTCHAs and Agent Auth* [00:28:21] Building “User take over” functionality* [00:33:43] Stagehand: AI web browsing framework* [00:38:58] OpenAI's Operator and computer use agents* [00:44:44] Surprising use cases of Browserbase* [00:47:18] Future of browser automation and market competition* [00:53:11] Being a solo founderTranscriptAlessio [00:00:04]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we are very blessed to have our friends, Paul Klein, for the fourth, the fourth, CEO of Browserbase. Welcome.Paul [00:00:21]: Thanks guys. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I've been lucky to know both of you for like a couple of years now, I think. So it's just like we're hanging out, you know, with three ginormous microphones in front of our face. It's totally normal hangout.swyx [00:00:34]: Yeah. We've actually mentioned you on the podcast, I think, more often than any other Solaris tenant. Just because like you're one of the, you know, best performing, I think, LLM tool companies that have started up in the last couple of years.Paul [00:00:50]: Yeah, I mean, it's been a whirlwind of a year, like Browserbase is actually pretty close to our first birthday. So we are one years old. And going from, you know, starting a company as a solo founder to... To, you know, having a team of 20 people, you know, a series A, but also being able to support hundreds of AI companies that are building AI applications that go out and automate the web. It's just been like, really cool. It's been happening a little too fast. I think like collectively as an AI industry, let's just take a week off together. I took my first vacation actually two weeks ago, and Operator came out on the first day, and then a week later, DeepSeat came out. And I'm like on vacation trying to chill. I'm like, we got to build with this stuff, right? So it's been a breakneck year. But I'm super happy to be here and like talk more about all the stuff we're seeing. And I'd love to hear kind of what you guys are excited about too, and share with it, you know?swyx [00:01:39]: Where to start? So people, you've done a bunch of podcasts. I think I strongly recommend Jack Bridger's Scaling DevTools, as well as Turner Novak's The Peel. And, you know, I'm sure there's others. So you covered your Twilio story in the past, talked about StreamClub, you got acquired to Mux, and then you left to start Browserbase. So maybe we just start with what is Browserbase? Yeah.Paul [00:02:02]: Browserbase is the web browser for your AI. We're building headless browser infrastructure, which are browsers that run in a server environment that's accessible to developers via APIs and SDKs. It's really hard to run a web browser in the cloud. You guys are probably running Chrome on your computers, and that's using a lot of resources, right? So if you want to run a web browser or thousands of web browsers, you can't just spin up a bunch of lambdas. You actually need to use a secure containerized environment. You have to scale it up and down. It's a stateful system. And that infrastructure is, like, super painful. And I know that firsthand, because at my last company, StreamClub, I was CTO, and I was building our own internal headless browser infrastructure. That's actually why we sold the company, is because Mux really wanted to buy our headless browser infrastructure that we'd built. And it's just a super hard problem. And I actually told my co-founders, I would never start another company unless it was a browser infrastructure company. And it turns out that's really necessary in the age of AI, when AI can actually go out and interact with websites, click on buttons, fill in forms. You need AI to do all of that work in an actual browser running somewhere on a server. And BrowserBase powers that.swyx [00:03:08]: While you're talking about it, it occurred to me, not that you're going to be acquired or anything, but it occurred to me that it would be really funny if you became the Nikita Beer of headless browser companies. You just have one trick, and you make browser companies that get acquired.Paul [00:03:23]: I truly do only have one trick. I'm screwed if it's not for headless browsers. I'm not a Go programmer. You know, I'm in AI grant. You know, browsers is an AI grant. But we were the only company in that AI grant batch that used zero dollars on AI spend. You know, we're purely an infrastructure company. So as much as people want to ask me about reinforcement learning, I might not be the best guy to talk about that. But if you want to ask about headless browser infrastructure at scale, I can talk your ear off. So that's really my area of expertise. And it's a pretty niche thing. Like, nobody has done what we're doing at scale before. So we're happy to be the experts.swyx [00:03:59]: You do have an AI thing, stagehand. We can talk about the sort of core of browser-based first, and then maybe stagehand. Yeah, stagehand is kind of the web browsing framework. Yeah.What is Browserbase? Headless Browser Infrastructure ExplainedAlessio [00:04:10]: Yeah. Yeah. And maybe how you got to browser-based and what problems you saw. So one of the first things I worked on as a software engineer was integration testing. Sauce Labs was kind of like the main thing at the time. And then we had Selenium, we had Playbrite, we had all these different browser things. But it's always been super hard to do. So obviously you've worked on this before. When you started browser-based, what were the challenges? What were the AI-specific challenges that you saw versus, there's kind of like all the usual running browser at scale in the cloud, which has been a problem for years. What are like the AI unique things that you saw that like traditional purchase just didn't cover? Yeah.AI-specific challenges in browser infrastructurePaul [00:04:46]: First and foremost, I think back to like the first thing I did as a developer, like as a kid when I was writing code, I wanted to write code that did stuff for me. You know, I wanted to write code to automate my life. And I do that probably by using curl or beautiful soup to fetch data from a web browser. And I think I still do that now that I'm in the cloud. And the other thing that I think is a huge challenge for me is that you can't just create a web site and parse that data. And we all know that now like, you know, taking HTML and plugging that into an LLM, you can extract insights, you can summarize. So it was very clear that now like dynamic web scraping became very possible with the rise of large language models or a lot easier. And that was like a clear reason why there's been more usage of headless browsers, which are necessary because a lot of modern websites don't expose all of their page content via a simple HTTP request. You know, they actually do require you to run this type of code for a specific time. JavaScript on the page to hydrate this. Airbnb is a great example. You go to airbnb.com. A lot of that content on the page isn't there until after they run the initial hydration. So you can't just scrape it with a curl. You need to have some JavaScript run. And a browser is that JavaScript engine that's going to actually run all those requests on the page. So web data retrieval was definitely one driver of starting BrowserBase and the rise of being able to summarize that within LLM. Also, I was familiar with if I wanted to automate a website, I could write one script and that would work for one website. It was very static and deterministic. But the web is non-deterministic. The web is always changing. And until we had LLMs, there was no way to write scripts that you could write once that would run on any website. That would change with the structure of the website. Click the login button. It could mean something different on many different websites. And LLMs allow us to generate code on the fly to actually control that. So I think that rise of writing the generic automation scripts that can work on many different websites, to me, made it clear that browsers are going to be a lot more useful because now you can automate a lot more things without writing. If you wanted to write a script to book a demo call on 100 websites, previously, you had to write 100 scripts. Now you write one script that uses LLMs to generate that script. That's why we built our web browsing framework, StageHand, which does a lot of that work for you. But those two things, web data collection and then enhanced automation of many different websites, it just felt like big drivers for more browser infrastructure that would be required to power these kinds of features.Alessio [00:07:05]: And was multimodality also a big thing?Paul [00:07:08]: Now you can use the LLMs to look, even though the text in the dome might not be as friendly. Maybe my hot take is I was always kind of like, I didn't think vision would be as big of a driver. For UI automation, I felt like, you know, HTML is structured text and large language models are good with structured text. But it's clear that these computer use models are often vision driven, and they've been really pushing things forward. So definitely being multimodal, like rendering the page is required to take a screenshot to give that to a computer use model to take actions on a website. And it's just another win for browser. But I'll be honest, that wasn't what I was thinking early on. I didn't even think that we'd get here so fast with multimodality. I think we're going to have to get back to multimodal and vision models.swyx [00:07:50]: This is one of those things where I forgot to mention in my intro that I'm an investor in Browserbase. And I remember that when you pitched to me, like a lot of the stuff that we have today, we like wasn't on the original conversation. But I did have my original thesis was something that we've talked about on the podcast before, which is take the GPT store, the custom GPT store, all the every single checkbox and plugin is effectively a startup. And this was the browser one. I think the main hesitation, I think I actually took a while to get back to you. The main hesitation was that there were others. Like you're not the first hit list browser startup. It's not even your first hit list browser startup. There's always a question of like, will you be the category winner in a place where there's a bunch of incumbents, to be honest, that are bigger than you? They're just not targeted at the AI space. They don't have the backing of Nat Friedman. And there's a bunch of like, you're here in Silicon Valley. They're not. I don't know.Paul [00:08:47]: I don't know if that's, that was it, but like, there was a, yeah, I mean, like, I think I tried all the other ones and I was like, really disappointed. Like my background is from working at great developer tools, companies, and nothing had like the Vercel like experience. Um, like our biggest competitor actually is partly owned by private equity and they just jacked up their prices quite a bit. And the dashboard hasn't changed in five years. And I actually used them at my last company and tried them and I was like, oh man, like there really just needs to be something that's like the experience of these great infrastructure companies, like Stripe, like clerk, like Vercel that I use in love, but oriented towards this kind of like more specific category, which is browser infrastructure, which is really technically complex. Like a lot of stuff can go wrong on the internet when you're running a browser. The internet is very vast. There's a lot of different configurations. Like there's still websites that only work with internet explorer out there. How do you handle that when you're running your own browser infrastructure? These are the problems that we have to think about and solve at BrowserBase. And it's, it's certainly a labor of love, but I built this for me, first and foremost, I know it's super cheesy and everyone says that for like their startups, but it really, truly was for me. If you look at like the talks I've done even before BrowserBase, and I'm just like really excited to try and build a category defining infrastructure company. And it's, it's rare to have a new category of infrastructure exists. We're here in the Chroma offices and like, you know, vector databases is a new category of infrastructure. Is it, is it, I mean, we can, we're in their office, so, you know, we can, we can debate that one later. That is one.Multimodality in AI-Powered Browsingswyx [00:10:16]: That's one of the industry debates.Paul [00:10:17]: I guess we go back to the LLMOS talk that Karpathy gave way long ago. And like the browser box was very clearly there and it seemed like the people who were building in this space also agreed that browsers are a core primitive of infrastructure for the LLMOS that's going to exist in the future. And nobody was building something there that I wanted to use. So I had to go build it myself.swyx [00:10:38]: Yeah. I mean, exactly that talk that, that honestly, that diagram, every box is a startup and there's the code box and then there's the. The browser box. I think at some point they will start clashing there. There's always the question of the, are you a point solution or are you the sort of all in one? And I think the point solutions tend to win quickly, but then the only ones have a very tight cohesive experience. Yeah. Let's talk about just the hard problems of browser base you have on your website, which is beautiful. Thank you. Was there an agency that you used for that? Yeah. Herb.paris.Paul [00:11:11]: They're amazing. Herb.paris. Yeah. It's H-E-R-V-E. I highly recommend for developers. Developer tools, founders to work with consumer agencies because they end up building beautiful things and the Parisians know how to build beautiful interfaces. So I got to give prep.swyx [00:11:24]: And chat apps, apparently are, they are very fast. Oh yeah. The Mistral chat. Yeah. Mistral. Yeah.Paul [00:11:31]: Late chat.swyx [00:11:31]: Late chat. And then your videos as well, it was professionally shot, right? The series A video. Yeah.Alessio [00:11:36]: Nico did the videos. He's amazing. Not the initial video that you shot at the new one. First one was Austin.Paul [00:11:41]: Another, another video pretty surprised. But yeah, I mean, like, I think when you think about how you talk about your company. You have to think about the way you present yourself. It's, you know, as a developer, you think you evaluate a company based on like the API reliability and the P 95, but a lot of developers say, is the website good? Is the message clear? Do I like trust this founder? I'm building my whole feature on. So I've tried to nail that as well as like the reliability of the infrastructure. You're right. It's very hard. And there's a lot of kind of foot guns that you run into when running headless browsers at scale. Right.Competing with Existing Headless Browser Solutionsswyx [00:12:10]: So let's pick one. You have eight features here. Seamless integration. Scalability. Fast or speed. Secure. Observable. Stealth. That's interesting. Extensible and developer first. What comes to your mind as like the top two, three hardest ones? Yeah.Running headless browsers at scalePaul [00:12:26]: I think just running headless browsers at scale is like the hardest one. And maybe can I nerd out for a second? Is that okay? I heard this is a technical audience, so I'll talk to the other nerds. Whoa. They were listening. Yeah. They're upset. They're ready. The AGI is angry. Okay. So. So how do you run a browser in the cloud? Let's start with that, right? So let's say you're using a popular browser automation framework like Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium. Maybe you've written a code, some code locally on your computer that opens up Google. It finds the search bar and then types in, you know, search for Latent Space and hits the search button. That script works great locally. You can see the little browser open up. You want to take that to production. You want to run the script in a cloud environment. So when your laptop is closed, your browser is doing something. The browser is doing something. Well, I, we use Amazon. You can see the little browser open up. You know, the first thing I'd reach for is probably like some sort of serverless infrastructure. I would probably try and deploy on a Lambda. But Chrome itself is too big to run on a Lambda. It's over 250 megabytes. So you can't easily start it on a Lambda. So you maybe have to use something like Lambda layers to squeeze it in there. Maybe use a different Chromium build that's lighter. And you get it on the Lambda. Great. It works. But it runs super slowly. It's because Lambdas are very like resource limited. They only run like with one vCPU. You can run one process at a time. Remember, Chromium is super beefy. It's barely running on my MacBook Air. I'm still downloading it from a pre-run. Yeah, from the test earlier, right? I'm joking. But it's big, you know? So like Lambda, it just won't work really well. Maybe it'll work, but you need something faster. Your users want something faster. Okay. Well, let's put it on a beefier instance. Let's get an EC2 server running. Let's throw Chromium on there. Great. Okay. I can, that works well with one user. But what if I want to run like 10 Chromium instances, one for each of my users? Okay. Well, I might need two EC2 instances. Maybe 10. All of a sudden, you have multiple EC2 instances. This sounds like a problem for Kubernetes and Docker, right? Now, all of a sudden, you're using ECS or EKS, the Kubernetes or container solutions by Amazon. You're spending up and down containers, and you're spending a whole engineer's time on kind of maintaining this stateful distributed system. Those are some of the worst systems to run because when it's a stateful distributed system, it means that you are bound by the connections to that thing. You have to keep the browser open while someone is working with it, right? That's just a painful architecture to run. And there's all this other little gotchas with Chromium, like Chromium, which is the open source version of Chrome, by the way. You have to install all these fonts. You want emojis working in your browsers because your vision model is looking for the emoji. You need to make sure you have the emoji fonts. You need to make sure you have all the right extensions configured, like, oh, do you want ad blocking? How do you configure that? How do you actually record all these browser sessions? Like it's a headless browser. You can't look at it. So you need to have some sort of observability. Maybe you're recording videos and storing those somewhere. It all kind of adds up to be this just giant monster piece of your project when all you wanted to do was run a lot of browsers in production for this little script to go to google.com and search. And when I see a complex distributed system, I see an opportunity to build a great infrastructure company. And we really abstract that away with Browserbase where our customers can use these existing frameworks, Playwright, Publisher, Selenium, or our own stagehand and connect to our browsers in a serverless-like way. And control them, and then just disconnect when they're done. And they don't have to think about the complex distributed system behind all of that. They just get a browser running anywhere, anytime. Really easy to connect to.swyx [00:15:55]: I'm sure you have questions. My standard question with anything, so essentially you're a serverless browser company, and there's been other serverless things that I'm familiar with in the past, serverless GPUs, serverless website hosting. That's where I come from with Netlify. One question is just like, you promised to spin up thousands of servers. You promised to spin up thousands of browsers in milliseconds. I feel like there's no real solution that does that yet. And I'm just kind of curious how. The only solution I know, which is to kind of keep a kind of warm pool of servers around, which is expensive, but maybe not so expensive because it's just CPUs. So I'm just like, you know. Yeah.Browsers as a Core Primitive in AI InfrastructurePaul [00:16:36]: You nailed it, right? I mean, how do you offer a serverless-like experience with something that is clearly not serverless, right? And the answer is, you need to be able to run... We run many browsers on single nodes. We use Kubernetes at browser base. So we have many pods that are being scheduled. We have to predictably schedule them up or down. Yes, thousands of browsers in milliseconds is the best case scenario. If you hit us with 10,000 requests, you may hit a slower cold start, right? So we've done a lot of work on predictive scaling and being able to kind of route stuff to different regions where we have multiple regions of browser base where we have different pools available. You can also pick the region you want to go to based on like lower latency, round trip, time latency. It's very important with these types of things. There's a lot of requests going over the wire. So for us, like having a VM like Firecracker powering everything under the hood allows us to be super nimble and spin things up or down really quickly with strong multi-tenancy. But in the end, this is like the complex infrastructural challenges that we have to kind of deal with at browser base. And we have a lot more stuff on our roadmap to allow customers to have more levers to pull to exchange, do you want really fast browser startup times or do you want really low costs? And if you're willing to be more flexible on that, we may be able to kind of like work better for your use cases.swyx [00:17:44]: Since you used Firecracker, shouldn't Fargate do that for you or did you have to go lower level than that? We had to go lower level than that.Paul [00:17:51]: I find this a lot with Fargate customers, which is alarming for Fargate. We used to be a giant Fargate customer. Actually, the first version of browser base was ECS and Fargate. And unfortunately, it's a great product. I think we were actually the largest Fargate customer in our region for a little while. No, what? Yeah, seriously. And unfortunately, it's a great product, but I think if you're an infrastructure company, you actually have to have a deeper level of control over these primitives. I think it's the same thing is true with databases. We've used other database providers and I think-swyx [00:18:21]: Yeah, serverless Postgres.Paul [00:18:23]: Shocker. When you're an infrastructure company, you're on the hook if any provider has an outage. And I can't tell my customers like, hey, we went down because so-and-so went down. That's not acceptable. So for us, we've really moved to bringing things internally. It's kind of opposite of what we preach. We tell our customers, don't build this in-house, but then we're like, we build a lot of stuff in-house. But I think it just really depends on what is in the critical path. We try and have deep ownership of that.Alessio [00:18:46]: On the distributed location side, how does that work for the web where you might get sort of different content in different locations, but the customer is expecting, you know, if you're in the US, I'm expecting the US version. But if you're spinning up my browser in France, I might get the French version. Yeah.Paul [00:19:02]: Yeah. That's a good question. Well, generally, like on the localization, there is a thing called locale in the browser. You can set like what your locale is. If you're like in the ENUS browser or not, but some things do IP, IP based routing. And in that case, you may want to have a proxy. Like let's say you're running something in the, in Europe, but you want to make sure you're showing up from the US. You may want to use one of our proxy features so you can turn on proxies to say like, make sure these connections always come from the United States, which is necessary too, because when you're browsing the web, you're coming from like a, you know, data center IP, and that can make things a lot harder to browse web. So we do have kind of like this proxy super network. Yeah. We have a proxy for you based on where you're going, so you can reliably automate the web. But if you get scheduled in Europe, that doesn't happen as much. We try and schedule you as close to, you know, your origin that you're trying to go to. But generally you have control over the regions you can put your browsers in. So you can specify West one or East one or Europe. We only have one region of Europe right now, actually. Yeah.Alessio [00:19:55]: What's harder, the browser or the proxy? I feel like to me, it feels like actually proxying reliably at scale. It's much harder than spending up browsers at scale. I'm curious. It's all hard.Paul [00:20:06]: It's layers of hard, right? Yeah. I think it's different levels of hard. I think the thing with the proxy infrastructure is that we work with many different web proxy providers and some are better than others. Some have good days, some have bad days. And our customers who've built browser infrastructure on their own, they have to go and deal with sketchy actors. Like first they figure out their own browser infrastructure and then they got to go buy a proxy. And it's like you can pay in Bitcoin and it just kind of feels a little sus, right? It's like you're buying drugs when you're trying to get a proxy online. We have like deep relationships with these counterparties. We're able to audit them and say, is this proxy being sourced ethically? Like it's not running on someone's TV somewhere. Is it free range? Yeah. Free range organic proxies, right? Right. We do a level of diligence. We're SOC 2. So we have to understand what is going on here. But then we're able to make sure that like we route around proxy providers not working. There's proxy providers who will just, the proxy will stop working all of a sudden. And then if you don't have redundant proxying on your own browsers, that's hard down for you or you may get some serious impacts there. With us, like we intelligently know, hey, this proxy is not working. Let's go to this one. And you can kind of build a network of multiple providers to really guarantee the best uptime for our customers. Yeah. So you don't own any proxies? We don't own any proxies. You're right. The team has been saying who wants to like take home a little proxy server, but not yet. We're not there yet. You know?swyx [00:21:25]: It's a very mature market. I don't think you should build that yourself. Like you should just be a super customer of them. Yeah. Scraping, I think, is the main use case for that. I guess. Well, that leads us into CAPTCHAs and also off, but let's talk about CAPTCHAs. You had a little spiel that you wanted to talk about CAPTCHA stuff.Challenges of Scaling Browser InfrastructurePaul [00:21:43]: Oh, yeah. I was just, I think a lot of people ask, if you're thinking about proxies, you're thinking about CAPTCHAs too. I think it's the same thing. You can go buy CAPTCHA solvers online, but it's the same buying experience. It's some sketchy website, you have to integrate it. It's not fun to buy these things and you can't really trust that the docs are bad. What Browserbase does is we integrate a bunch of different CAPTCHAs. We do some stuff in-house, but generally we just integrate with a bunch of known vendors and continually monitor and maintain these things and say, is this working or not? Can we route around it or not? These are CAPTCHA solvers. CAPTCHA solvers, yeah. Not CAPTCHA providers, CAPTCHA solvers. Yeah, sorry. CAPTCHA solvers. We really try and make sure all of that works for you. I think as a dev, if I'm buying infrastructure, I want it all to work all the time and it's important for us to provide that experience by making sure everything does work and monitoring it on our own. Yeah. Right now, the world of CAPTCHAs is tricky. I think AI agents in particular are very much ahead of the internet infrastructure. CAPTCHAs are designed to block all types of bots, but there are now good bots and bad bots. I think in the future, CAPTCHAs will be able to identify who a good bot is, hopefully via some sort of KYC. For us, we've been very lucky. We have very little to no known abuse of Browserbase because we really look into who we work with. And for certain types of CAPTCHA solving, we only allow them on certain types of plans because we want to make sure that we can know what people are doing, what their use cases are. And that's really allowed us to try and be an arbiter of good bots, which is our long term goal. I want to build great relationships with people like Cloudflare so we can agree, hey, here are these acceptable bots. We'll identify them for you and make sure we flag when they come to your website. This is a good bot, you know?Alessio [00:23:23]: I see. And Cloudflare said they want to do more of this. So they're going to set by default, if they think you're an AI bot, they're going to reject. I'm curious if you think this is something that is going to be at the browser level or I mean, the DNS level with Cloudflare seems more where it should belong. But I'm curious how you think about it.Paul [00:23:40]: I think the web's going to change. You know, I think that the Internet as we have it right now is going to change. And we all need to just accept that the cat is out of the bag. And instead of kind of like wishing the Internet was like it was in the 2000s, we can have free content line that wouldn't be scraped. It's just it's not going to happen. And instead, we should think about like, one, how can we change? How can we change the models of, you know, information being published online so people can adequately commercialize it? But two, how do we rebuild applications that expect that AI agents are going to log in on their behalf? Those are the things that are going to allow us to kind of like identify good and bad bots. And I think the team at Clerk has been doing a really good job with this on the authentication side. I actually think that auth is the biggest thing that will prevent agents from accessing stuff, not captchas. And I think there will be agent auth in the future. I don't know if it's going to happen from an individual company, but actually authentication providers that have a, you know, hidden login as agent feature, which will then you put in your email, you'll get a push notification, say like, hey, your browser-based agent wants to log into your Airbnb. You can approve that and then the agent can proceed. That really circumvents the need for captchas or logging in as you and sharing your password. I think agent auth is going to be one way we identify good bots going forward. And I think a lot of this captcha solving stuff is really short-term problems as the internet kind of reorients itself around how it's going to work with agents browsing the web, just like people do. Yeah.Managing Distributed Browser Locations and Proxiesswyx [00:24:59]: Stitch recently was on Hacker News for talking about agent experience, AX, which is a thing that Netlify is also trying to clone and coin and talk about. And we've talked about this on our previous episodes before in a sense that I actually think that's like maybe the only part of the tech stack that needs to be kind of reinvented for agents. Everything else can stay the same, CLIs, APIs, whatever. But auth, yeah, we need agent auth. And it's mostly like short-lived, like it should not, it should be a distinct, identity from the human, but paired. I almost think like in the same way that every social network should have your main profile and then your alt accounts or your Finsta, it's almost like, you know, every, every human token should be paired with the agent token and the agent token can go and do stuff on behalf of the human token, but not be presumed to be the human. Yeah.Paul [00:25:48]: It's like, it's, it's actually very similar to OAuth is what I'm thinking. And, you know, Thread from Stitch is an investor, Colin from Clerk, Octaventures, all investors in browser-based because like, I hope they solve this because they'll make browser-based submission more possible. So we don't have to overcome all these hurdles, but I think it will be an OAuth-like flow where an agent will ask to log in as you, you'll approve the scopes. Like it can book an apartment on Airbnb, but it can't like message anybody. And then, you know, the agent will have some sort of like role-based access control within an application. Yeah. I'm excited for that.swyx [00:26:16]: The tricky part is just, there's one, one layer of delegation here, which is like, you're authoring my user's user or something like that. I don't know if that's tricky or not. Does that make sense? Yeah.Paul [00:26:25]: You know, actually at Twilio, I worked on the login identity and access. Management teams, right? So like I built Twilio's login page.swyx [00:26:31]: You were an intern on that team and then you became the lead in two years? Yeah.Paul [00:26:34]: Yeah. I started as an intern in 2016 and then I was the tech lead of that team. How? That's not normal. I didn't have a life. He's not normal. Look at this guy. I didn't have a girlfriend. I just loved my job. I don't know. I applied to 500 internships for my first job and I got rejected from every single one of them except for Twilio and then eventually Amazon. And they took a shot on me and like, I was getting paid money to write code, which was my dream. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very lucky that like this coding thing worked out because I was going to be doing it regardless. And yeah, I was able to kind of spend a lot of time on a team that was growing at a company that was growing. So it informed a lot of this stuff here. I think these are problems that have been solved with like the SAML protocol with SSO. I think it's a really interesting stuff with like WebAuthn, like these different types of authentication, like schemes that you can use to authenticate people. The tooling is all there. It just needs to be tweaked a little bit to work for agents. And I think the fact that there are companies that are already. Providing authentication as a service really sets it up. Well, the thing that's hard is like reinventing the internet for agents. We don't want to rebuild the internet. That's an impossible task. And I think people often say like, well, we'll have this second layer of APIs built for agents. I'm like, we will for the top use cases, but instead of we can just tweak the internet as is, which is on the authentication side, I think we're going to be the dumb ones going forward. Unfortunately, I think AI is going to be able to do a lot of the tasks that we do online, which means that it will be able to go to websites, click buttons on our behalf and log in on our behalf too. So with this kind of like web agent future happening, I think with some small structural changes, like you said, it feels like it could all slot in really nicely with the existing internet.Handling CAPTCHAs and Agent Authenticationswyx [00:28:08]: There's one more thing, which is the, your live view iframe, which lets you take, take control. Yeah. Obviously very key for operator now, but like, was, is there anything interesting technically there or that the people like, well, people always want this.Paul [00:28:21]: It was really hard to build, you know, like, so, okay. Headless browsers, you don't see them, right. They're running. They're running in a cloud somewhere. You can't like look at them. And I just want to really make, it's a weird name. I wish we came up with a better name for this thing, but you can't see them. Right. But customers don't trust AI agents, right. At least the first pass. So what we do with our live view is that, you know, when you use browser base, you can actually embed a live view of the browser running in the cloud for your customer to see it working. And that's what the first reason is the build trust, like, okay, so I have this script. That's going to go automate a website. I can embed it into my web application via an iframe and my customer can watch. I think. And then we added two way communication. So now not only can you watch the browser kind of being operated by AI, if you want to pause and actually click around type within this iframe that's controlling a browser, that's also possible. And this is all thanks to some of the lower level protocol, which is called the Chrome DevTools protocol. It has a API called start screencast, and you can also send mouse clicks and button clicks to a remote browser. And this is all embeddable within iframes. You have a browser within a browser, yo. And then you simulate the screen, the click on the other side. Exactly. And this is really nice often for, like, let's say, a capture that can't be solved. You saw this with Operator, you know, Operator actually uses a different approach. They use VNC. So, you know, you're able to see, like, you're seeing the whole window here. What we're doing is something a little lower level with the Chrome DevTools protocol. It's just PNGs being streamed over the wire. But the same thing is true, right? Like, hey, I'm running a window. Pause. Can you do something in this window? Human. Okay, great. Resume. Like sometimes 2FA tokens. Like if you get that text message, you might need a person to type that in. Web agents need human-in-the-loop type workflows still. You still need a person to interact with the browser. And building a UI to proxy that is kind of hard. You may as well just show them the whole browser and say, hey, can you finish this up for me? And then let the AI proceed on afterwards. Is there a future where I stream my current desktop to browser base? I don't think so. I think we're very much cloud infrastructure. Yeah. You know, but I think a lot of the stuff we're doing, we do want to, like, build tools. Like, you know, we'll talk about the stage and, you know, web agent framework in a second. But, like, there's a case where a lot of people are going desktop first for, you know, consumer use. And I think cloud is doing a lot of this, where I expect to see, you know, MCPs really oriented around the cloud desktop app for a reason, right? Like, I think a lot of these tools are going to run on your computer because it makes... I think it's breaking out. People are putting it on a server. Oh, really? Okay. Well, sweet. We'll see. We'll see that. I was surprised, though, wasn't I? I think that the browser company, too, with Dia Browser, it runs on your machine. You know, it's going to be...swyx [00:30:50]: What is it?Paul [00:30:51]: So, Dia Browser, as far as I understand... I used to use Arc. Yeah. I haven't used Arc. But I'm a big fan of the browser company. I think they're doing a lot of cool stuff in consumer. As far as I understand, it's a browser where you have a sidebar where you can, like, chat with it and it can control the local browser on your machine. So, if you imagine, like, what a consumer web agent is, which it lives alongside your browser, I think Google Chrome has Project Marina, I think. I almost call it Project Marinara for some reason. I don't know why. It's...swyx [00:31:17]: No, I think it's someone really likes the Waterworld. Oh, I see. The classic Kevin Costner. Yeah.Paul [00:31:22]: Okay. Project Marinara is a similar thing to the Dia Browser, in my mind, as far as I understand it. You have a browser that has an AI interface that will take over your mouse and keyboard and control the browser for you. Great for consumer use cases. But if you're building applications that rely on a browser and it's more part of a greater, like, AI app experience, you probably need something that's more like infrastructure, not a consumer app.swyx [00:31:44]: Just because I have explored a little bit in this area, do people want branching? So, I have the state. Of whatever my browser's in. And then I want, like, 100 clones of this state. Do people do that? Or...Paul [00:31:56]: People don't do it currently. Yeah. But it's definitely something we're thinking about. I think the idea of forking a browser is really cool. Technically, kind of hard. We're starting to see this in code execution, where people are, like, forking some, like, code execution, like, processes or forking some tool calls or branching tool calls. Haven't seen it at the browser level yet. But it makes sense. Like, if an AI agent is, like, using a website and it's not sure what path it wants to take to crawl this website. To find the information it's looking for. It would make sense for it to explore both paths in parallel. And that'd be a very, like... A road not taken. Yeah. And hopefully find the right answer. And then say, okay, this was actually the right one. And memorize that. And go there in the future. On the roadmap. For sure. Don't make my roadmap, please. You know?Alessio [00:32:37]: How do you actually do that? Yeah. How do you fork? I feel like the browser is so stateful for so many things.swyx [00:32:42]: Serialize the state. Restore the state. I don't know.Paul [00:32:44]: So, it's one of the reasons why we haven't done it yet. It's hard. You know? Like, to truly fork, it's actually quite difficult. The naive way is to open the same page in a new tab and then, like, hope that it's at the same thing. But if you have a form halfway filled, you may have to, like, take the whole, you know, container. Pause it. All the memory. Duplicate it. Restart it from there. It could be very slow. So, we haven't found a thing. Like, the easy thing to fork is just, like, copy the page object. You know? But I think there needs to be something a little bit more robust there. Yeah.swyx [00:33:12]: So, MorphLabs has this infinite branch thing. Like, wrote a custom fork of Linux or something that let them save the system state and clone it. MorphLabs, hit me up. I'll be a customer. Yeah. That's the only. I think that's the only way to do it. Yeah. Like, unless Chrome has some special API for you. Yeah.Paul [00:33:29]: There's probably something we'll reverse engineer one day. I don't know. Yeah.Alessio [00:33:32]: Let's talk about StageHand, the AI web browsing framework. You have three core components, Observe, Extract, and Act. Pretty clean landing page. What was the idea behind making a framework? Yeah.Stagehand: AI web browsing frameworkPaul [00:33:43]: So, there's three frameworks that are very popular or already exist, right? Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium. Those are for building hard-coded scripts to control websites. And as soon as I started to play with LLMs plus browsing, I caught myself, you know, code-genning Playwright code to control a website. I would, like, take the DOM. I'd pass it to an LLM. I'd say, can you generate the Playwright code to click the appropriate button here? And it would do that. And I was like, this really should be part of the frameworks themselves. And I became really obsessed with SDKs that take natural language as part of, like, the API input. And that's what StageHand is. StageHand exposes three APIs, and it's a super set of Playwright. So, if you go to a page, you may want to take an action, click on the button, fill in the form, etc. That's what the act command is for. You may want to extract some data. This one takes a natural language, like, extract the winner of the Super Bowl from this page. You can give it a Zod schema, so it returns a structured output. And then maybe you're building an API. You can do an agent loop, and you want to kind of see what actions are possible on this page before taking one. You can do observe. So, you can observe the actions on the page, and it will generate a list of actions. You can guide it, like, give me actions on this page related to buying an item. And you can, like, buy it now, add to cart, view shipping options, and pass that to an LLM, an agent loop, to say, what's the appropriate action given this high-level goal? So, StageHand isn't a web agent. It's a framework for building web agents. And we think that agent loops are actually pretty close to the application layer because every application probably has different goals or different ways it wants to take steps. I don't think I've seen a generic. Maybe you guys are the experts here. I haven't seen, like, a really good AI agent framework here. Everyone kind of has their own special sauce, right? I see a lot of developers building their own agent loops, and they're using tools. And I view StageHand as the browser tool. So, we expose act, extract, observe. Your agent can call these tools. And from that, you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about generating playwright code performantly. You don't have to worry about running it. You can kind of just integrate these three tool calls into your agent loop and reliably automate the web.swyx [00:35:48]: A special shout-out to Anirudh, who I met at your dinner, who I think listens to the pod. Yeah. Hey, Anirudh.Paul [00:35:54]: Anirudh's a man. He's a StageHand guy.swyx [00:35:56]: I mean, the interesting thing about each of these APIs is they're kind of each startup. Like, specifically extract, you know, Firecrawler is extract. There's, like, Expand AI. There's a whole bunch of, like, extract companies. They just focus on extract. I'm curious. Like, I feel like you guys are going to collide at some point. Like, right now, it's friendly. Everyone's in a blue ocean. At some point, it's going to be valuable enough that there's some turf battle here. I don't think you have a dog in a fight. I think you can mock extract to use an external service if they're better at it than you. But it's just an observation that, like, in the same way that I see each option, each checkbox in the side of custom GBTs becoming a startup or each box in the Karpathy chart being a startup. Like, this is also becoming a thing. Yeah.Paul [00:36:41]: I mean, like, so the way StageHand works is that it's MIT-licensed, completely open source. You bring your own API key to your LLM of choice. You could choose your LLM. We don't make any money off of the extract or really. We only really make money if you choose to run it with our browser. You don't have to. You can actually use your own browser, a local browser. You know, StageHand is completely open source for that reason. And, yeah, like, I think if you're building really complex web scraping workflows, I don't know if StageHand is the tool for you. I think it's really more if you're building an AI agent that needs a few general tools or if it's doing a lot of, like, web automation-intensive work. But if you're building a scraping company, StageHand is not your thing. You probably want something that's going to, like, get HTML content, you know, convert that to Markdown, query it. That's not what StageHand does. StageHand is more about reliability. I think we focus a lot on reliability and less so on cost optimization and speed at this point.swyx [00:37:33]: I actually feel like StageHand, so the way that StageHand works, it's like, you know, page.act, click on the quick start. Yeah. It's kind of the integration test for the code that you would have to write anyway, like the Puppeteer code that you have to write anyway. And when the page structure changes, because it always does, then this is still the test. This is still the test that I would have to write. Yeah. So it's kind of like a testing framework that doesn't need implementation detail.Paul [00:37:56]: Well, yeah. I mean, Puppeteer, Playwright, and Slenderman were all designed as testing frameworks, right? Yeah. And now people are, like, hacking them together to automate the web. I would say, and, like, maybe this is, like, me being too specific. But, like, when I write tests, if the page structure changes. Without me knowing, I want that test to fail. So I don't know if, like, AI, like, regenerating that. Like, people are using StageHand for testing. But it's more for, like, usability testing, not, like, testing of, like, does the front end, like, has it changed or not. Okay. But generally where we've seen people, like, really, like, take off is, like, if they're using, you know, something. If they want to build a feature in their application that's kind of like Operator or Deep Research, they're using StageHand to kind of power that tool calling in their own agent loop. Okay. Cool.swyx [00:38:37]: So let's go into Operator, the first big agent launch of the year from OpenAI. Seems like they have a whole bunch scheduled. You were on break and your phone blew up. What's your just general view of computer use agents is what they're calling it. The overall category before we go into Open Operator, just the overall promise of Operator. I will observe that I tried it once. It was okay. And I never tried it again.OpenAI's Operator and computer use agentsPaul [00:38:58]: That tracks with my experience, too. Like, I'm a huge fan of the OpenAI team. Like, I think that I do not view Operator as the company. I'm not a company killer for browser base at all. I think it actually shows people what's possible. I think, like, computer use models make a lot of sense. And I'm actually most excited about computer use models is, like, their ability to, like, really take screenshots and reasoning and output steps. I think that using mouse click or mouse coordinates, I've seen that proved to be less reliable than I would like. And I just wonder if that's the right form factor. What we've done with our framework is anchor it to the DOM itself, anchor it to the actual item. So, like, if it's clicking on something, it's clicking on that thing, you know? Like, it's more accurate. No matter where it is. Yeah, exactly. Because it really ties in nicely. And it can handle, like, the whole viewport in one go, whereas, like, Operator can only handle what it sees. Can you hover? Is hovering a thing that you can do? I don't know if we expose it as a tool directly, but I'm sure there's, like, an API for hovering. Like, move mouse to this position. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you can trigger hover, like, via, like, the JavaScript on the DOM itself. But, no, I think, like, when we saw computer use, everyone's eyes lit up because they realized, like, wow, like, AI is going to actually automate work for people. And I think seeing that kind of happen from both of the labs, and I'm sure we're going to see more labs launch computer use models, I'm excited to see all the stuff that people build with it. I think that I'd love to see computer use power, like, controlling a browser on browser base. And I think, like, Open Operator, which was, like, our open source version of OpenAI's Operator, was our first take on, like, how can we integrate these models into browser base? And we handle the infrastructure and let the labs do the models. I don't have a sense that Operator will be released as an API. I don't know. Maybe it will. I'm curious to see how well that works because I think it's going to be really hard for a company like OpenAI to do things like support CAPTCHA solving or, like, have proxies. Like, I think it's hard for them structurally. Imagine this New York Times headline, OpenAI CAPTCHA solving. Like, that would be a pretty bad headline, this New York Times headline. Browser base solves CAPTCHAs. No one cares. No one cares. And, like, our investors are bored. Like, we're all okay with this, you know? We're building this company knowing that the CAPTCHA solving is short-lived until we figure out how to authenticate good bots. I think it's really hard for a company like OpenAI, who has this brand that's so, so good, to balance with, like, the icky parts of web automation, which it can be kind of complex to solve. I'm sure OpenAI knows who to call whenever they need you. Yeah, right. I'm sure they'll have a great partnership.Alessio [00:41:23]: And is Open Operator just, like, a marketing thing for you? Like, how do you think about resource allocation? So, you can spin this up very quickly. And now there's all this, like, open deep research, just open all these things that people are building. We started it, you know. You're the original Open. We're the original Open operator, you know? Is it just, hey, look, this is a demo, but, like, we'll help you build out an actual product for yourself? Like, are you interested in going more of a product route? That's kind of the OpenAI way, right? They started as a model provider and then…Paul [00:41:53]: Yeah, we're not interested in going the product route yet. I view Open Operator as a model provider. It's a reference project, you know? Let's show people how to build these things using the infrastructure and models that are out there. And that's what it is. It's, like, Open Operator is very simple. It's an agent loop. It says, like, take a high-level goal, break it down into steps, use tool calling to accomplish those steps. It takes screenshots and feeds those screenshots into an LLM with the step to generate the right action. It uses stagehand under the hood to actually execute this action. It doesn't use a computer use model. And it, like, has a nice interface using the live view that we talked about, the iframe, to embed that into an application. So I felt like people on launch day wanted to figure out how to build their own version of this. And we turned that around really quickly to show them. And I hope we do that with other things like deep research. We don't have a deep research launch yet. I think David from AOMNI actually has an amazing open deep research that he launched. It has, like, 10K GitHub stars now. So he's crushing that. But I think if people want to build these features natively into their application, they need good reference projects. And I think Open Operator is a good example of that.swyx [00:42:52]: I don't know. Actually, I'm actually pretty bullish on API-driven operator. Because that's the only way that you can sort of, like, once it's reliable enough, obviously. And now we're nowhere near. But, like, give it five years. It'll happen, you know. And then you can sort of spin this up and browsers are working in the background and you don't necessarily have to know. And it just is booking restaurants for you, whatever. I can definitely see that future happening. I had this on the landing page here. This might be a slightly out of order. But, you know, you have, like, sort of three use cases for browser base. Open Operator. Or this is the operator sort of use case. It's kind of like the workflow automation use case. And it completes with UiPath in the sort of RPA category. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would agree with that. And then there's Agents we talked about already. And web scraping, which I imagine would be the bulk of your workload right now, right?Paul [00:43:40]: No, not at all. I'd say actually, like, the majority is browser automation. We're kind of expensive for web scraping. Like, I think that if you're building a web scraping product, if you need to do occasional web scraping or you have to do web scraping that works every single time, you want to use browser automation. Yeah. You want to use browser-based. But if you're building web scraping workflows, what you should do is have a waterfall. You should have the first request is a curl to the website. See if you can get it without even using a browser. And then the second request may be, like, a scraping-specific API. There's, like, a thousand scraping APIs out there that you can use to try and get data. Scraping B. Scraping B is a great example, right? Yeah. And then, like, if those two don't work, bring out the heavy hitter. Like, browser-based will 100% work, right? It will load the page in a real browser, hydrate it. I see.swyx [00:44:21]: Because a lot of people don't render to JS.swyx [00:44:25]: Yeah, exactly.Paul [00:44:26]: So, I mean, the three big use cases, right? Like, you know, automation, web data collection, and then, you know, if you're building anything agentic that needs, like, a browser tool, you want to use browser-based.Alessio [00:44:35]: Is there any use case that, like, you were super surprised by that people might not even think about? Oh, yeah. Or is it, yeah, anything that you can share? The long tail is crazy. Yeah.Surprising use cases of BrowserbasePaul [00:44:44]: One of the case studies on our website that I think is the most interesting is this company called Benny. So, the way that it works is if you're on food stamps in the United States, you can actually get rebates if you buy certain things. Yeah. You buy some vegetables. You submit your receipt to the government. They'll give you a little rebate back. Say, hey, thanks for buying vegetables. It's good for you. That process of submitting that receipt is very painful. And the way Benny works is you use their app to take a photo of your receipt, and then Benny will go submit that receipt for you and then deposit the money into your account. That's actually using no AI at all. It's all, like, hard-coded scripts. They maintain the scripts. They've been doing a great job. And they build this amazing consumer app. But it's an example of, like, all these, like, tedious workflows that people have to do to kind of go about their business. And they're doing it for the sake of their day-to-day lives. And I had never known about, like, food stamp rebates or the complex forms you have to do to fill them. But the world is powered by millions and millions of tedious forms, visas. You know, Emirate Lighthouse is a customer, right? You know, they do the O1 visa. Millions and millions of forms are taking away humans' time. And I hope that Browserbase can help power software that automates away the web forms that we don't need anymore. Yeah.swyx [00:45:49]: I mean, I'm very supportive of that. I mean, forms. I do think, like, government itself is a big part of it. I think the government itself should embrace AI more to do more sort of human-friendly form filling. Mm-hmm. But I'm not optimistic. I'm not holding my breath. Yeah. We'll see. Okay. I think I'm about to zoom out. I have a little brief thing on computer use, and then we can talk about founder stuff, which is, I tend to think of developer tooling markets in impossible triangles, where everyone starts in a niche, and then they start to branch out. So I already hinted at a little bit of this, right? We mentioned more. We mentioned E2B. We mentioned Firecrawl. And then there's Browserbase. So there's, like, all this stuff of, like, have serverless virtual computer that you give to an agent and let them do stuff with it. And there's various ways of connecting it to the internet. You can just connect to a search API, like SERP API, whatever other, like, EXA is another one. That's what you're searching. You can also have a JSON markdown extractor, which is Firecrawl. Or you can have a virtual browser like Browserbase, or you can have a virtual machine like Morph. And then there's also maybe, like, a virtual sort of code environment, like Code Interpreter. So, like, there's just, like, a bunch of different ways to tackle the problem of give a computer to an agent. And I'm just kind of wondering if you see, like, everyone's just, like, happily coexisting in their respective niches. And as a developer, I just go and pick, like, a shopping basket of one of each. Or do you think that you eventually, people will collide?Future of browser automation and market competitionPaul [00:47:18]: I think that currently it's not a zero-sum market. Like, I think we're talking about... I think we're talking about all of knowledge work that people do that can be automated online. All of these, like, trillions of hours that happen online where people are working. And I think that there's so much software to be built that, like, I tend not to think about how these companies will collide. I just try to solve the problem as best as I can and make this specific piece of infrastructure, which I think is an important primitive, the best I possibly can. And yeah. I think there's players that are actually going to like it. I think there's players that are going to launch, like, over-the-top, you know, platforms, like agent platforms that have all these tools built in, right? Like, who's building the rippling for agent tools that has the search tool, the browser tool, the operating system tool, right? There are some. There are some. There are some, right? And I think in the end, what I have seen as my time as a developer, and I look at all the favorite tools that I have, is that, like, for tools and primitives with sufficient levels of complexity, you need to have a solution that's really bespoke to that primitive, you know? And I am sufficiently convinced that the browser is complex enough to deserve a primitive. Obviously, I have to. I'm the founder of BrowserBase, right? I'm talking my book. But, like, I think maybe I can give you one spicy take against, like, maybe just whole OS running. I think that when I look at computer use when it first came out, I saw that the majority of use cases for computer use were controlling a browser. And do we really need to run an entire operating system just to control a browser? I don't think so. I don't think that's necessary. You know, BrowserBase can run browsers for way cheaper than you can if you're running a full-fledged OS with a GUI, you know, operating system. And I think that's just an advantage of the browser. It is, like, browsers are little OSs, and you can run them very efficiently if you orchestrate it well. And I think that allows us to offer 90% of the, you know, functionality in the platform needed at 10% of the cost of running a full OS. Yeah.Open Operator: Browserbase's Open-Source Alternativeswyx [00:49:16]: I definitely see the logic in that. There's a Mark Andreessen quote. I don't know if you know this one. Where he basically observed that the browser is turning the operating system into a poorly debugged set of device drivers, because most of the apps are moved from the OS to the browser. So you can just run browsers.Paul [00:49:31]: There's a place for OSs, too. Like, I think that there are some applications that only run on Windows operating systems. And Eric from pig.dev in this upcoming YC batch, or last YC batch, like, he's building all run tons of Windows operating systems for you to control with your agent. And like, there's some legacy EHR systems that only run on Internet-controlled systems. Yeah.Paul [00:49:54]: I think that's it. I think, like, there are use cases for specific operating systems for specific legacy software. And like, I'm excited to see what he does with that. I just wanted to give a shout out to the pig.dev website.swyx [00:50:06]: The pigs jump when you click on them. Yeah. That's great.Paul [00:50:08]: Eric, he's the former co-founder of banana.dev, too.swyx [00:50:11]: Oh, that Eric. Yeah. That Eric. Okay. Well, he abandoned bananas for pigs. I hope he doesn't start going around with pigs now.Alessio [00:50:18]: Like he was going around with bananas. A little toy pig. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. What else are we missing? I think we covered a lot of, like, the browser-based product history, but. What do you wish people asked you? Yeah.Paul [00:50:29]: I wish people asked me more about, like, what will the future of software look like? Because I think that's really where I've spent a lot of time about why do browser-based. Like, for me, starting a company is like a means of last resort. Like, you shouldn't start a company unless you absolutely have to. And I remain convinced that the future of software is software that you're going to click a button and it's going to do stuff on your behalf. Right now, software. You click a button and it maybe, like, calls it back an API and, like, computes some numbers. It, like, modifies some text, whatever. But the future of software is software using software. So, I may log into my accounting website for my business, click a button, and it's going to go load up my Gmail, search my emails, find the thing, upload the receipt, and then comment it for me. Right? And it may use it using APIs, maybe a browser. I don't know. I think it's a little bit of both. But that's completely different from how we've built software so far. And that's. I think that future of software has different infrastructure requirements. It's going to require different UIs. It's going to require different pieces of infrastructure. I think the browser infrastructure is one piece that fits into that, along with all the other categories you mentioned. So, I think that it's going to require developers to think differently about how they've built software for, you know

Avvocati e Mac: Compendium
47. Far entrare un Mac in un ufficio Windows

Avvocati e Mac: Compendium

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2025 40:43


In questa puntata monotematica, ti parlo di come integrare Mac e Windows in un ufficio usando un Mac Mini, sincronizzazione dati con Syncthing, backup  dei dati con Time Machine e di accesso remoto tramite VNC ed da fuori ufficio con Tailscale.

Hacker Public Radio
HPR4286: HPR Community News for December 2024

Hacker Public Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 6, 2025


This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. table td.shrink { white-space:nowrap } hr.thin { border: 0; height: 0; border-top: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3); } New hosts Welcome to our new hosts: Paulj, Jon The Nice Guy. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4261 Mon 2024-12-02 HPR Community News for November 2024 HPR Volunteers 4262 Tue 2024-12-03 DIY C02 operat0r 4263 Wed 2024-12-04 An interview with Adam Matthews about the Disco Pigeon Ken Fallon 4264 Thu 2024-12-05 Mintcast, high crimes and misdemeanors. Some Guy On The Internet 4265 Fri 2024-12-06 Drivecasting: arm sleeves, glasses and more. Some Guy On The Internet 4266 Mon 2024-12-09 What's the weather? Lee 4267 Tue 2024-12-10 Borderlands Movie Review Kevie 4268 Wed 2024-12-11 Book review and an Emacs rabbit-hole enistello 4269 Thu 2024-12-12 What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 2 Ahuka 4270 Fri 2024-12-13 Playing Civilization IV, Part 4 Ahuka 4271 Mon 2024-12-16 Beginners guide to Proxmox Al 4272 Tue 2024-12-17 Embed Mastodon Threads hairylarry 4273 Wed 2024-12-18 Improving videography with basic manual settings Trixter 4274 Thu 2024-12-19 The Wreck - I'm alright! Archer72 4275 Fri 2024-12-20 What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 3 Ahuka 4276 Mon 2024-12-23 PWNED operat0r 4277 Tue 2024-12-24 Introduction episode by Paul Paulj 4278 Wed 2024-12-25 Pi powered Christmas Tree Kevie 4279 Thu 2024-12-26 What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 4 Ahuka 4280 Fri 2024-12-27 Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Ahuka 4281 Mon 2024-12-30 My ridiculously complicated DHCP setup at home Jon The Nice Guy 4282 Tue 2024-12-31 Backup Power for my Gas Furnace Trey Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 26 comments in total. Past shows There are 7 comments on 4 previous shows: hpr3531 (2022-02-14) "Barrier: Software KVM" by Windigo. Comment 3: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-12-01: "Fellow user of Barrier, and also InputLeap." hpr4070 (2024-03-08) "Civilization III" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Red Orm on 2025-01-01: "hpr4070 :: Civilization III" Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2025-01-02: "Thank you" hpr4258 (2024-11-27) "Introduction and History of Using Computers" by SolusSpider. Comment 5: Spartan Minter on 2024-12-02: "Linux Mint " Comment 6: ClaudioM on 2024-12-03: "Hey Solusspider! Great First Episode!" hpr4260 (2024-11-29) "The Golden Age" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Moss Bliss on 2025-01-01: "Penguicon" Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2025-01-01: "Sorry to hear it" This month's shows There are 19 comments on 10 of this month's shows: hpr4264 (2024-12-05) "Mintcast, high crimes and misdemeanors." by Some Guy On The Internet. Comment 1: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-12-06: "Thunderbird"Comment 2: Majid on 2024-12-07: "Mintcast and Thunderbird"Comment 3: Dave Morriss on 2024-12-14: "Thunderbird and email management" hpr4266 (2024-12-09) "What's the weather?" by Lee. Comment 1: Lee on 2024-10-21: "Errata" hpr4268 (2024-12-11) "Book review and an Emacs rabbit-hole" by enistello. Comment 1: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-12-15: "Thanks for the book tip" hpr4269 (2024-12-12) "What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 2" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Random listener on 2024-12-13: "Request for a bit more info in show notes" hpr4272 (2024-12-17) "Embed Mastodon Threads" by hairylarry. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-28: "Wayne Myers ?? Where did I hear that name before ?"Comment 2: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-12-18: "How is the post behaviour on Mastodon reflected on the web site?"Comment 3: Reto on 2024-12-25: "Plain text is not" hpr4274 (2024-12-19) "The Wreck - I'm alright!" by Archer72. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-12-19: "I'm Mark's hospital room stalker!"Comment 2: Paulj on 2024-12-30: "Thanks for Sharing!" hpr4276 (2024-12-23) "PWNED" by operat0r. Comment 1: JonTheNiceGuy on 2024-12-28: "Exposed RDP, at least it wasn't VNC (which I did!), and VPN" hpr4277 (2024-12-24) "Introduction episode by Paul" by Paulj. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-12-24: "Welcome Paul to HPR"Comment 2: Trey on 2024-12-24: "Welcome"Comment 3: Paul on 2024-12-25: "Thanks Peter"Comment 4: Paulj on 2024-12-26: "Thanks Trey!" hpr4280 (2024-12-27) "Isaac Asimov: The Foundation" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Red Orm on 2025-01-01: "hpr4280 :: Isaac Asimov: The Foundation"Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2025-01-02: "Thank you" hpr4281 (2024-12-30) "My ridiculously complicated DHCP setup at home" by Jon The Nice Guy. Comment 1: Paulj on 2024-12-30: "Welcome, and thanks!" Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mailing List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2024-December/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page. Any other business Thanks to all 59 HPR contributors in 2024! Ahuka, Al, Andrew Conway, Archer72, Beeza, Beto, Bob, Brian in Ohio. Cedric De Vroey, Celeste, Claudio Miranda, Clinton Roy, Cov, crvs, Daniel Persson, Dave Hingley. Dave Morriss, Deltaray, dnt, dodddummy, enistello, Fred Black, gemlog, geospart. hairylarry, Henrik Hemrin, hobs, Honkeymagoo, HPR Volunteers, Jeroen Baten, Jon The Nice Guy, Ken Fallon. Kevie, Kinghezy, knightwise, Lee, Lochyboy, mnw, Moss Bliss, Mr. Young. MrX, Ne01sfree, Noodlez, norrist, operat0r, Paulj, Quvmoh, Rho`n. SolusSpider, Some Guy On The Internet, Stache_AF, Swift110, Thaj Sara, thelovebug, thompsgj, Trey. Trixter, Trollercoaster, Windigo. Provide feedback on this episode.

Breaking Change
v26 - Luigi's Mansion

Breaking Change

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2024 204:11


I'd write more here, but I've got places to be. Becky, Jeremy, and I are going to engage in some holiday festivities. We have a couple gingerbread houses to make and a tree to trim. And no nog to speak of. Really, that's all you get by way of show notes this time as a result, deal with it. Send your complaints to podcast@searls.co and they will be read on air. Some bullet points below the fold: My 90-minute, outdated guide to setting up a Mac Aaron's puns, ranked Jim Carrey is 62 and can't even retire I bought my 8 year old a switch and didn't realize how much games cost Teen creates memecoin, dumps it, earns $50,000 Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds Install the Mozi app (manifesto here | app here) Vision Pro getting PSVR2 controllers The 2024 Game Awards news roundup Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet looks badass, but is it too inclusive for The Gamers? We don't talk about Luigi An invisible desktop app for cheating on technical interviews (HN comments) Sora is out, but it's not good yet Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is out, and it is good yet Emudeck is so great it shouldn't be legal, and some people probably think it isn't Pikmin Stay tuned to my YouTube channel for upcoming LIVE streams Transcript: [00:00:00] Thank you. [00:00:29] Good morning, internet. [00:00:32] I started speaking before I realized, as an asynchronous audio production, it's actually pretty unlikely that it's the morning where you are. [00:00:43] Although, if it is the morning, coincidentally, please feel free to be creeped out, check over your shoulder. [00:00:51] Today was, I woke up with Vim and Vigor this morning, super excited to take on the day, thinking maybe I've got what it takes to record an audio production today. [00:01:07] And then we have an elderly coffee pot. [00:01:11] I don't want to completely put the blame on it because we were using it wrong for several years. [00:01:24] And it's a long story that I will shorten to say, any piece of consumer electronics or appliances in America, the half-life keeps decreasing. [00:01:37] And so when I say elderly coffee pot, I mean that we bought this coffee pot post-COVID. [00:01:42] And it's already feeling like, oh, we should probably get a new coffee pot, huh? [00:01:45] What happens is, from time to time, heat will build up in the grounds dingus. [00:01:55] I'm just realizing now that I'm like, you know, I'm not a coffee engineer. [00:01:58] Some of you are. [00:02:00] But, you know, of course, we all know that the dingus is connected to the water spigot, which is above the craft. [00:02:09] And what happens, as far as I can tell, is once in a while, you get all that hot water and grounds swirling around. [00:02:20] And if it clogs at all, like if it doesn't release just so, the whole little undercarriage, again, this is a technical term, just stay with me. [00:02:30] And we'll pop forward like three millimeters, which is just enough for the water to kind of miss its target on the craft and then spray all who's he what's it's, as well as for the spigot to start just kind of like splurring, you know, this water coffee slurry everywhere. [00:02:49] And so I went after, you know, but then you still get the triumphant ding dong sound that the coffee is ready. [00:02:56] So I walked over to the coffee expecting like, yes, it's the best, best way to start my day or whatever. [00:03:06] Pull out the coffee. [00:03:07] And the pot is too light. [00:03:10] And I had a familiarity of like what that means. [00:03:13] It means like there is water somewhere. [00:03:17] And it's not in this pot. [00:03:19] And so it's just like, you know, this big, big machine we actually have we've put because of our Mr. [00:03:26] Coffee's, you know, elderly onset incontinence. [00:03:33] We have we have put the entire coffee pot on a tray, like a rimmed silicone tray that you would use for like, I guess, a dog feeding bowl, right? [00:03:45] A dog, you know, messily eats food and slaps water around and stuff. [00:03:49] And you don't want it all over your hardwood. [00:03:50] Like you'd put this underneath that and it would catch some of the water. [00:03:53] So we I spent the first 30 minutes of my waking life today getting my hopes up that I was going to have coffee, followed by, you know, painstakingly carrying this entire cradle of of of coffee pot full of hot brown liquid. [00:04:10] That would stay in all of my clothes and, you know, get on the cabinets and stuff with a silicone underbelly thing. [00:04:18] And just kind of like, you know, we've got one of those big we're very fortunate to have one of those big farmers, farmer house, farmhouse. [00:04:25] I never know what to call it. [00:04:27] Steel, basically a double wide sink. [00:04:30] So what's nice about a double wide sink is that if you've got a problem in your kitchen and you're only a few steps away, whether it's the coffee pot part of the kitchen or the fridge or the freezer or the God forbid, the range or the oven, you can just sort of strategically hurl whatever it is you're holding just about into the into the sink. [00:04:51] And then once it hits the sink, it's, you know, the the the potential damage is limited. [00:04:57] So I gently hurled my coffee apparatus. [00:05:02] Is that the plural of apparatus? [00:05:04] One wonders into the into the into the sink and then spent the next 20 minutes, you know, scrubbing them and all to make another pot. [00:05:13] And Becky, of course, walks down the minute that the second pot is about to be finished. [00:05:18] And I'm like, I've already seen some shit and I'm going to go record a podcast now. [00:05:22] And that swallow you just heard was me having a sip of coffee that was not disgusting, but not great. [00:05:31] But I'll take it over where I was an hour ago. [00:05:39] Thank you for for subscribing as a as a true believer in breaking change. [00:05:47] We're coming up on one year now. [00:05:49] It's hard to believe that it's already been a year, not because this has been a lot of work or a big accomplishment, but just because the the the agony of existence seems to accelerate as you get older. [00:06:03] It's one of the few kindnesses in life and so as we whipsaw around the sun yet again, we're about to do that. [00:06:11] This is the 26th edition version 26 of the podcast. [00:06:17] I've got two names here to release titles and I haven't picked one yet. [00:06:22] So as a special. [00:06:24] Nearing the end of the year treat. [00:06:29] I'm going to pitch them both to you now, right? [00:06:31] So so we're in this together. [00:06:33] I like to think this is a highly collaborative one person show. [00:06:37] Version 26 rich nanotexture. [00:06:42] And that's a nod to the MacBook Pro has a nanotexture anti-glare screen coding option. [00:06:52] It's a reference to the rich Corinthian leather that was actually it's a Chrysler reference. [00:06:58] It's a made up thing. [00:06:59] There is no such thing as Corinthian leather, but like that's what they called their their seating. [00:07:03] And Steve Jobs referenced that as being the inspiration for I think it was the iPad calendar app. [00:07:13] With the rich Corinthian leather up at the top during the era of skeuomorphic designs back in 2010, 2009, maybe I can't remember exactly when they I think it's 2010 when he had his famous actually leather chair demonstration of the iPad. [00:07:28] Maybe the reason that that stood out to me was the car reference because it is it is an upsell. [00:07:34] The nanotexture $150 if you want to have a don't call it matte finish. [00:07:41] The other one, so that's option one, rich nanotexture. [00:07:46] And I didn't love it because I couldn't get texture. [00:07:49] I couldn't get the same Corinthian, right? [00:07:53] Like you want that bite, the multisyllabic bite that adds the extra, you know, the gravitas of a luxury good. [00:08:04] Yeah, texture just didn't have it for me. [00:08:06] But then if you change that word, it doesn't make sense. [00:08:08] So I mean, the other option two that came to mind version 26 don't don't by the way, don't think I'm going to edit this in post and fix it. [00:08:19] I will not. [00:08:20] I will ultimately land on one of these and that will be the title that you saw on your podcast player. [00:08:25] Or maybe some third thing will come to mind and then this conversation will be moot. [00:08:29] I do not think of this collaborative exercise. [00:08:32] Just imagine it's a it's a it's a quantum collaboration. [00:08:37] So by observing it, that's you actually took part. [00:08:41] You opened your podcast player and then the yeah, the entangled, you know, bits just they coalesced around one of these two names or some third name. [00:08:58] It's all just statistics version 26 Luigi's Mansion, which is a nod to two things at once. [00:09:05] I'm going to talk a little bit about GameCube, but also I'll probably not escape mentioning Luigi Manjoni Manjoni man. [00:09:15] You know, I haven't been watching the news. [00:09:17] I don't know how to pronounce his name, but it looks enough like mansion that I was like, oh, man. [00:09:21] I bet you there's a Nintendo PR guy whose day just got fucking ruined by the fella who is a overnight folk hero. [00:09:30] More attractive than most assassins, I would say. [00:09:35] Great hair. [00:09:36] Good skin. [00:09:37] Apparently, skincare Reddit is all about this fella who murdered in cold blood the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. [00:09:45] If you haven't caught the news, if you're even less online than I am. [00:09:51] And yeah, so I'm trying to decide. [00:09:53] I think Luigi's Mansion is probably going to win. [00:09:56] It's more timely. [00:09:57] It's the first time the name Luigi has come up in the last year. [00:10:00] And I may have mentioned nanotexture before when discussing Apple's very compromised studio display. [00:10:11] So I'm leaning Luigi's Mansion, but, you know, don't tempt me. [00:10:15] I might switch. [00:10:18] I'm going to just keep drinking coffee because I got to power through this. [00:10:21] Let's talk about some life stuff. [00:10:24] I so when we last talked that way back in the heady days of version 25, I had just gotten off a plane from Japan. [00:10:34] I was still a little bit jet lagged. [00:10:36] I recorded later in the evening. [00:10:38] I was tired. [00:10:39] You know, I was still overcoming. [00:10:41] I listened to the episode, realized I was overcoming a cold. [00:10:44] You know, then Becky shortly thereafter, after recording, she developed a pretty bad cough. [00:10:51] And so we've both been sleeping relatively poorly. [00:10:53] And I can't complain about this cough because her having a cough for four nights is nothing like me snoring on and off for over a year. [00:11:02] And I think the fact that her cough is consistent is actually a kindness compared to the sporadic nature of my snoring, where it's like I might go a week without it. [00:11:11] And then all of a sudden there's like, bam. [00:11:14] So she doesn't, you know, it's like sneaks up on her and that's not fair. [00:11:17] So so she's got a cough and I haven't been sleeping particularly well. [00:11:20] Maybe that's it. [00:11:22] I also, you know, I wanted to dry out because I was living on shoe highs, you know, canned cocktails in Japan for way too long. [00:11:30] Just drinking, you know, five whole dollars of alcohol every day, which is an irresponsible amount of alcohol. [00:11:36] It turns out. [00:11:40] Yeah, that's one nice thing about living in Orlando and theme park Orlando is that the average price of a cocktail here is seriously $20. [00:11:49] I think it is. [00:11:51] I am delighted and surprised when I find a cocktail under $20. [00:11:55] That's any good. [00:11:55] In fact, the four seasons right around the corner, their lobby bar has a some of the best bartenders in the state of Florida. [00:12:05] Like they went all kinds of awards. [00:12:06] And so when you say a lobby bar, you think it sucks. [00:12:09] But it's actually it's like it's a it's a restaurant with a room if you're ever around and they still do a happy hour with like $4. [00:12:18] It was $4 beers. [00:12:19] I think they finally increased to $5 beers draft beer. [00:12:23] And it's all craft. [00:12:25] You know, it's all fancy people stuff. [00:12:27] And they do it's I think it's $10 margaritas, French 75s, and they got some other happy hour cocktail. [00:12:37] It was highballs for a while. [00:12:39] Whiskey highballs was like probably centauri toki or something. [00:12:43] I gotta say like that $10 margarita. [00:12:47] They'll throw some jalapeno in there if you want some tahini rim, you know, they do it up. [00:12:52] They do it well. [00:12:54] But that might be the cheapest cocktail I've had in all of Orlando is at the Four Seasons. [00:13:01] Famous for that TikTok meme of the Four Seasons baby, if you're a TikTok person. [00:13:06] Anyway, all that all all this drinking talk back to the point. [00:13:11] I've been not drinking for a week. [00:13:12] And I, you know, I'm back to tracking my nutrients every day. [00:13:17] The things that I consume and adding up all of the protein and carbohydrate and realizing [00:13:21] if you don't drink, it's actually really easy to blow past one's protein goals. [00:13:25] And so I had one day where I had like 240 grams of protein, which is [00:13:28] enough protein that you'll feel it the next morning if you're not used to it. [00:13:34] And I still was losing weight. [00:13:38] I lost like five or six pounds in the last week. [00:13:43] And to the point where it was like, you know, I was feeling a little lightheaded, [00:13:47] a little bit woozy because I wasn't drinking enough is the takeaway. [00:13:52] So so thank God we got to go to a Christmas party last night. [00:13:57] It was it was great Gatsby themed. [00:13:58] And I dressed up like a man who wanted to do the bare minimum to not get made fun of at the party. [00:14:05] So I had some some suspenders on instead of a belt, which was the first time I ever put on suspenders. [00:14:13] They were not period appropriate suspenders simply because they had the, you know, the [00:14:18] little class B dues instead of how they had some other system for I don't I don't fucking know. [00:14:25] Like I, I had chat GPT basically helped me through this. [00:14:28] And it's like, hey, you want these kinds of suspenders? [00:14:30] I'm like, that sounds like an ordeal. [00:14:31] How about I just get some universal one size fits all fit and clip them in? [00:14:36] I also had a clip on bow tie. [00:14:37] So that worked. [00:14:39] When you think clip on bow tie, I guess I'd never used one before, but like it, I always [00:14:45] assumed it would just be like, you know, like a barrette clip that would go in front of the [00:14:49] front button and look silly for that reason. [00:14:51] And maybe that's how they used to be. [00:14:53] But it seems these days, if you want to spend $3 on a fancy clip on bow tie with a nice texturing, [00:14:58] I'll say, uh, it's just pre it's a pre tied bow with a still wraps around your neck. [00:15:04] It's just, it has a class mechanism, which seems smart to me, right? [00:15:08] I don't know what. [00:15:09] Look, if you're really into men's fashion, uh, there's this weird intersection or this tension [00:15:19] between I'm a manly man who, who ties my own shoes and, you know, kills my own dinner and [00:15:25] stuff. [00:15:25] And I, I, for fuck's sake, tie my own bow tie from scratch every day. [00:15:29] Right? [00:15:29] Like there's a toxically masculine approach to bow ties, but at the same time, it is such [00:15:35] a foofy accoutrement. [00:15:37] It's like an ascot, um, that the idea of like a manly man, like a man trying to demonstrate [00:15:43] his manliness by the fact that he doesn't use a clip on bow tie, uh, came to mind yesterday [00:15:50] when I was, uh, struggling even with the clasping kind. [00:15:54] I was like, man, I wish I could just get this to anyway. [00:15:58] Um, I had a vest at a gray vest. [00:16:03] This is all brand new territory for me. [00:16:05] Uh, yeah, I, I've, I've leaned pretty hard into the t-shirt and shorts and or jeans life [00:16:10] for so long. [00:16:12] Uh, the, the fella in front of us when we, when we were checking in, cause they took little [00:16:16] photos of you, uh, all of the women had the same exact flapper dress from Amazon, you know, [00:16:22] with the, the, the, the hairband thing with the, you know, fake, the polyester peacock tail. [00:16:28] Becky's looked the best. [00:16:29] I'm not gonna, I'm not even lying. [00:16:32] Uh, uh, her dress actually fit. [00:16:35] He had some, uh, very ill fitting flapper costumes that these women couldn't even move in. [00:16:40] Um, it was interesting. [00:16:42] Uh, but the, the fella in front of us at check-in was wearing a, a, a full blown, you know, tuxedo [00:16:48] get up that he brought from home. [00:16:50] And he was talking about, Oh yeah, well he's got two of them and his wife, you know, ribbed [00:16:54] him a little bit that he could only fit in one. [00:16:55] I was like, man, owning a tuxedo, that's nuts. [00:16:58] Like, and then it like turns out he's like got all these suits and these fancy clothes and [00:17:02] he's an older gentleman. [00:17:05] Uh, but my entire career only the first few years did I have to think about what I was [00:17:10] wearing and, and it never really got beyond pleated, you know, khakis and a starched shirt. [00:17:18] And, and I had, I had to wear a suit maybe on two sales calls. [00:17:22] Um, and they were always the sales calls that were just, uh, there were certain sales demos [00:17:30] when I was a, a, a baby consultant, these really complex bids. [00:17:39] I remember we were at cook County once, uh, uh, the, the county that wraps Chicago and it [00:17:44] has a lot of functions and facilities that operate at the county level. [00:17:48] So, but of course we're in Chicago in some, you know, uh, dystopian office building. [00:17:54] That's very Gothic, I should say. [00:17:57] And the, the solution that we were selling was a response to a bid around some kind of [00:18:05] document, electronic document ingestion and, and, and routing solution. [00:18:09] And so what, what that meant was it was like a 12 person team. [00:18:14] It was a big project working on this pitch. [00:18:18] And most of the work and most of the money came from the software side at the end of the [00:18:23] process. [00:18:23] It's like, you're going to get IBM file net and you're going to get all these different, [00:18:26] uh, enterprise tools. [00:18:28] And we're going to integrate, uh, with all your systems and, and build these custom integrations [00:18:32] that you've asked for here and here and here. [00:18:33] But the, the, the hard part is the human logistics of how do you get all of their paper documents [00:18:41] into the system. [00:18:42] Uh, and that was my job was I had to get paper and then scan it, uh, with a production, big [00:18:50] Kodak funkin fucking scanner. [00:18:52] Uh, and then use, what was it? [00:18:54] Kofax capture or something like a, like an OCR tool of the era. [00:18:59] And the thing about it is that scanning is not, was not ever a science and neither is [00:19:07] OCR, the OCR stuff and OCR stands for optical character recognition. [00:19:10] So you'd have a form and you'd write on the form, like, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, some, [00:19:15] some demo address and name and all this. [00:19:19] I spent. [00:19:22] So like the people doing the software, like they, they could just like click a button and [00:19:26] like, they could even just use fakery, right? [00:19:29] Like, Oh, the API is not really there, but I'll always return this particular, like, let's [00:19:33] call it an XML soap message. [00:19:34] And so the, the software guys clocked in, clocked out, got back to their billable work. [00:19:39] I, because the stakes were so high in this particular, uh, and I'm here right now explaining [00:19:46] all of this nonsense because I had to wear a suit and that was also really bad, but I [00:19:51] was in Chicago late at night with a group of like, at that point it was like 9 PM and it [00:19:54] was just me and two partners. [00:19:56] Cause the partners had a sickness called avoid family, stay at work. [00:20:02] And, uh, I, I was just running over and over and over again where I'd like, you know, [00:20:09] I'd take the paper, I'd put it through the scanner and it would get 90% of the OCR stuff [00:20:13] done, or I'd get it perfect. [00:20:15] And it would scan everything just right, which would result in the downstream, you know, after [00:20:21] the capture, like all of my integrations, like would route it to the right thing. [00:20:24] So that like, it was basically a game of mousetrap or dominoes where like my task was both [00:20:29] the most important to being able to demonstrate, but also the most error prone, but also the [00:20:37] least, uh, financially like, um, valuable to, to our services company. [00:20:42] And so I had no support, uh, on top of that, they, the, our fucking it people pushed out some [00:20:49] kind of, um, you know, involuntary security update security and bunny quotes that, that [00:20:57] slowed my system down dramatically in the course of just like a day. [00:21:01] And I had, I had no way to test for this. [00:21:04] So I remember I was up at like 11 PM at that point, trying to make this work consistently [00:21:10] and realizing that the only way to get it to run it all required me to, um, install a virtual [00:21:16] machine, put windows in the virtual machine, install all this software inside that virtual [00:21:22] machine, and then run it there because only in the black box of an encrypted virtual machine [00:21:27] image or, uh, you know, a virtual machine, like disc image, could I evade all of the accountant [00:21:33] bullshit that was trying to track and encrypt and, and, and muck with files and flight and [00:21:38] so forth. [00:21:39] And so it was only around like probably one 30 or two that I got to bed and our, our demo [00:21:46] was like at seven in the morning and I had to wear a suit. [00:21:47] So if you ever wonder, Hey, why is Justin always just in a, a t-shirt and shorts? [00:21:54] Uh, I would say childhood trauma, fuck suits. [00:21:59] The only, the only time I associate like nice clothes, you know, having a lot of [00:22:03] having to dress up is church shit. [00:22:05] I didn't want to go to. [00:22:06] And usually it's like the worst church shit. [00:22:09] Like there's some cool church shit out there, you know, youth group where everyone's a horny, [00:22:14] right. [00:22:15] And singing pop songs to try to get people in. [00:22:17] That's as church shit goes, that's above average. [00:22:21] But when you're talking about like, Hey, you know, this aunt you've never heard of died and [00:22:27] we got to go all the way to goddamn Dearborn to sit in a Catholic mass, that's going to [00:22:32] be in Latin. [00:22:33] And they're going to, you know, one of those, you know, you should feel bad for him because [00:22:39] he's abused. [00:22:39] But one of the altar boys, he's going to be waving that little like incense thingy, [00:22:43] the jigger back and forth and back and forth like a metronome. [00:22:46] And, uh, you're going to get all this soot in your face, all of that, you know, frankincense [00:22:51] and myrrh and whatever the fuck they burn. [00:22:52] And, uh, yeah, then they're going to play some songs, but they're not going to be songs you [00:22:57] want to hear. [00:22:57] And you're going to be uncomfortable because I bought you this suit at JC Penny when you [00:23:01] were like nine and you're 12, you're 12 now, and you've gained a lot of weight, but [00:23:06] here we are. [00:23:07] And then you got to go and, you know, like, don't worry because after the service, there's [00:23:12] a big meal, but it's mostly just going to be, you know, styrofoam plates and plastic forks [00:23:16] and, uh, cold rubbery chicken. [00:23:19] And then a whole lot of family members who want to pinch your cheeks, uh, had an aunt that [00:23:24] always wanted to, um, put on a bunch of red lipstick and kiss me and leave kiss marks. [00:23:30] And she thought that was adorable and everyone else thought it was funny. [00:23:33] And for whatever reason, I wasn't a fan, uh, that's the kind of, uh, yeah, so anyway, moving [00:23:45] right along the, uh, the, the other than having to dress up, the, the Christmas party was really [00:23:50] nice because it had an all you can drink martini bar. [00:23:52] So that, that helped that took the edge off a little bit since I hadn't been drinking for [00:23:57] the previous week. [00:23:57] Uh, and it was, you know, uh, they, they had a great bartender, the, the, I assume that [00:24:07] that people drank gin martinis back in the day of Gatsby, but it seemed to be a vodka forward [00:24:12] martini bar, which I appreciated. [00:24:15] Uh, as I get older and my taste buds start dying, uh, I found myself going from dry martinis [00:24:23] to martinis with an olive to martinis with two olives to me asking for like a little bit of [00:24:30] olive juice and then drinking the martini and realizing that wasn't quite enough olive juice. [00:24:34] So that's just disgusting, but, um, it's where, uh, it's one of the signs of age, I guess. [00:24:43] Uh, so the martini bar was good. [00:24:46] Uh, they also had an aged old fashion that they'd made, you know, homemade, um, with like nutmeg [00:24:51] and cinnamon in there. [00:24:52] That was impressive. [00:24:53] Uh, so yeah, had a, had a big old Christmas party last night, had a couple of drinks, uh, [00:25:00] and, and, uh, because of the contrast, whenever I go, you know, go a week without any alcohol [00:25:06] and then I have some alcohol and then I wake up the next morning and I'm like, oh yes, I [00:25:11] know what people mean now that alcohol is poison. [00:25:13] And it's a mildly poisonous thing because I feel mildly poisoned. [00:25:19] Um, and, and I just usually feel that most days until I forget about it. [00:25:23] So it's a data point, uh, to think about, uh, uh, I, I, I had a good, good run for, [00:25:30] for a while there, just cause like when you live in a fucking theme park and there's nowadays [00:25:34] alcohol everywhere that I go and every outing, I had a good run for a few months. [00:25:40] Um, not last year, the year before where I just didn't drink at home as a rule to myself. [00:25:46] I was like, you know, I'm not going to pour any liquor for myself at home unless I'm entertaining [00:25:49] guests. [00:25:50] And, uh, even then go easy on it because I I'm, I'm, I'm going to just the background radiation [00:25:56] of existence in when you live in a bunch of resorts. [00:25:59] Uh, I'll, I'll get, I'll get, I'll get plenty of alcohol subcutaneously. [00:26:05] Um, a contact tie. [00:26:07] So maybe I'll, maybe I'll try that again. [00:26:10] I don't know. [00:26:11] It's the stuff you think about in mid December when you're just inundated with specialty food [00:26:17] and drink options, uh, do other life stuff that isn't alcohol or religion or clothing [00:26:27] related. [00:26:28] Oh, uh, uh, I've been on a quest to not necessarily save a bunch of money, not necessarily. [00:26:35] Uh, I was going to say, uh, tighten my belt, but, uh, I don't know what the suspender equivalent [00:26:43] is because I did not wear a belt last night. [00:26:45] I just wore suspenders. [00:26:46] Uh, I've been interested in, in not budgeting either. [00:26:52] Just, I think awareness. [00:26:54] Like I want, I know that a lot of money flies through my pockets every month in the form of, [00:27:01] um, SAS software subscriptions and streaming services. [00:27:05] I mentioned this last, uh, last go round that I was recommending, Hey, let's say, go take a [00:27:11] look at like our unused streaming subscriptions of those. [00:27:14] Uh, yesterday I did cancel max. [00:27:16] Cause I realized that, uh, if I'm not watching a lot of news, I'm not going to watch John Oliver [00:27:20] and, and they frankly, a lot of HBO's prestige shows haven't been besides they cut a Sesame [00:27:28] street and it just so happened that I canceled that day. [00:27:31] So maybe there's a, some data engineer at HBO who's like, Oh man, people are canceling because [00:27:37] we got rid of Sesame street. [00:27:38] Uh, that would be good. [00:27:40] That would be good for America to get that feedback. [00:27:43] Uh, yeah. [00:27:44] I just want awareness of like, where's the money going and in what proportion and does that sound [00:27:50] right to me? [00:27:50] Uh, and I've, there are software tools for this. [00:27:53] Uh, they are all compromised in some way. [00:27:57] For example, we just, uh, we'd used lunch money in the past, which is a cool app. [00:28:02] And it has the kind of, you know, basic integrations you would expect. [00:28:06] I don't know if it uses plaid or whatever behind the covers, but like you, you connect your, your, [00:28:11] your checking accounts, your credit card accounts. [00:28:14] It lists all your transactions is very, um, customizable in terms of rules that you can [00:28:21] set. [00:28:21] It has an API. [00:28:22] Jen is a solo co-founder and she seems really, really competent and lovely and responsive, [00:28:27] which are all great things. [00:28:29] But the UI is a little clunky for me. [00:28:32] I don't like how it handled URLs. [00:28:33] It was like, once you got all the transactions in there and, and set up, it didn't feel informative [00:28:41] because there wasn't like a good reporting or graphs that just kind of at a glance would [00:28:45] tell you, this is where your money's going. [00:28:46] At least for me. [00:28:47] Uh, additionally, like it, it can't do the Apple card. [00:28:51] That's the, that's become the crux for a lot of these services is that, um, Apple card [00:28:55] only added support for reading. [00:28:59] Uh, well now you can read, uh, uh, so I, Apple added away on iOS and specifically iPhone [00:29:07] OS to read, uh, transactions from Apple card, Apple savings and Apple cash. [00:29:14] And this was like nine months ago, if that, but copilot, uh, money is one of two apps maybe [00:29:22] that supports this. [00:29:23] And so if you, if you have, we have, we each have an Apple card and we use it for kind of [00:29:29] our silly stuff whenever we're, you know, using a tap to pay. [00:29:33] So, so if, if you want to track transactions and you don't want to manually export CSVs [00:29:40] from your wife's phone every 30 days, which is the process that I'd fallen into with, with [00:29:44] lunch money, then you, you basically have copilot money. [00:29:50] And then there's another one, maybe Monarch, uh, the copilot money. [00:29:53] People are always talking about this other app called Monarch. [00:29:55] I haven't checked it out. [00:29:55] I don't know if that's why they like it or if it's just the other one that's being developed [00:29:59] right now in this post mint apocalypse, as we all grapple with the fact that mint was [00:30:04] always bad, uh, but people got into it and I don't copilot money is like nice, but like [00:30:11] it, like, for example, like if I'm, uh, if I buy a, uh, if I put $10, the equivalent of [00:30:19] $10, so 1000 yen on my Starbucks card in Japan, which is totally separate because of course it [00:30:25] is there's two Starbucks cards. [00:30:27] There's the one in Japan and then the one in the rest of the world. [00:30:30] So you open the Japanese only app, you put a thousand yen on it. [00:30:33] Uh, you pay for that with Apple pay. [00:30:36] So which goes to my Apple card and copilot money will read that transaction. [00:30:40] But if you read like the text in the merchant description, it's literally like [00:30:44] staba day and it's like all no spaces. [00:30:47] It's just like 40 characters in a row to, and if you really squint, you can kind of see [00:30:52] Starbucks, Japan, um, you know, app store payment, which is, you know, like I want to [00:31:00] change that to Starbucks, Japan, and then set up a rule to just like always change that. [00:31:05] So I don't have to like memorize these random ass merchant names. [00:31:08] Uh, apparently like after, after two hours of setting up copilot money yesterday, I realized [00:31:13] that there's like both no way to set up that kind of rule. [00:31:16] The only rule that it supports is categorization of, of spending fine, but then if you set [00:31:22] up a rule and you don't like it, there's no way to edit the rules cause there's no UI for [00:31:25] rule editing. [00:31:26] And so then, you know, where do you go, but read it and you're like, okay, well there's [00:31:30] a subreddit. [00:31:30] And then like, what's half the post in the subreddit? [00:31:32] It's about, Oh, of course it's a bunch of dads who are like, I can't see my rules and I have [00:31:36] to contact support. [00:31:37] And it's been nine months. [00:31:38] And I was like, Oh God. [00:31:39] So that's, uh, if anyone's got any great budgeting software that supports Apple card, you let me [00:31:46] know. [00:31:47] Uh, and also isn't a part-time job. [00:31:50] I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna spend all day on this. [00:31:52] I'm not, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna check in on this, uh, the four times a year that I, that [00:31:58] I wake up in a cold sweat wondering, Oh my God, how many subscriptions do I have? [00:32:02] Which is, uh, I, I really missed my calling by not being a dad, I guess. [00:32:07] But it did land me on looking at rocket money. [00:32:11] Uh, so, so, so there was an app called true bill that marketed heavily with like a lot of [00:32:19] other DTC apps where the pitch was, we will negotiate your bills for you. [00:32:26] And by bills, I think that one of the reasons why this, this, this business probably struggled [00:32:31] is that there's really only two that they could reasonably negotiate on your behalf. [00:32:37] You know, you, you imagine they've got a call center or they've got people who've, who [00:32:40] are trained, who have scripts that they follow, who, who will doggedly keep calling back until [00:32:44] they get what, you know, the discount, the, just the steps that you would have to go through [00:32:48] if you wanted to call Comcast or Verizon, they, they, they, they can basically could basically [00:32:57] only really negotiate your ISP and your cell phone carrier. [00:33:01] Cause those are the two sort of, you know, that are, that are transactional enough that [00:33:08] are regionalized or nationalized enough that they, that they could train on. [00:33:11] And then of course, like they, they're the ones that like get you in with a teaser rate and [00:33:15] then gradually turn up the heat over the course of a couple of years. [00:33:19] Well, Quicken Loans bought, they rebranded as rocket and then rocket fill in the blank [00:33:26] with other products. [00:33:26] And they bought true bill around the same time. [00:33:29] And I, my understanding from a distance is that true bill, uh, uh, that became rocket money [00:33:36] in order to be an entree into other rocket star services. [00:33:41] So like you, you now, when you install rocket money, it's still got the negotiation thing. [00:33:46] Cause that's what they market it on, but you have to slog through so much like, no, I'm actually [00:33:52] all set with credit and, and, and, and debt repayment services. [00:33:57] And I'm, I'm already all set with financial advisors and retirement goals. [00:34:00] I just get me to the, to the thing where I can pay you 35% of whatever you save me on [00:34:06] my ISP bill. [00:34:07] And so of course, you know, like I, I, I signed up for the first time, went through the app [00:34:12] onboarding. [00:34:13] I was not impressed with the bugginess of the app, but I was able to soldier on through [00:34:19] it. [00:34:19] And where I landed was I was, uh, following its little setup wizard for first. [00:34:27] Spectrum, which is my internet provider. [00:34:28] And I was, I'd initially paid a hundred dollars when I moved here in 2021, uh, a month for, [00:34:36] for one gig down, call it 30 megabits per second up. [00:34:40] And I can't get a, another ISP here. [00:34:43] They had an exclusive agreement. [00:34:44] They're building neighborhoods bullshit. [00:34:47] Uh, and I, I, so I can't get higher upstream and that really gets in my crawl. [00:34:53] Nevertheless, they have increased prices about $15 a year. [00:34:59] Each time I'm here to the point now where I think my monthly, you know, debit is like $150, [00:35:05] $145 and you fill it out and you give them your pin number. [00:35:11] You got this customer pin that like, you know, is secures your account. [00:35:14] I'm like, eh, all right, well, that's four digits, you know? [00:35:17] And besides I'm already on like this one dead simple plan. [00:35:20] It's just their normal plan. [00:35:22] And it's, you know, like I'm paying top dollar for it. [00:35:26] So what's the worst that they could do if they, if somebody else were to call and change [00:35:30] my plan up, you know, like it, it wouldn't cause that much lasting damage. [00:35:34] Cause it's not like I'm on some teaser rate. [00:35:36] It's not like I've got a great deal as it is. [00:35:38] So I let them do it. [00:35:39] And three days later, I had low expectations, right? [00:35:42] Cause you go on Reddit, speaking of Reddit, you go on and you, you search other people's [00:35:46] experiences and people will say, oh yeah, well like the, you know, I, some of them are [00:35:52] pretty hyperbolic. [00:35:53] It's like, you know, like they, they changed my plan to this and now I'm stuck with this, [00:35:57] you know, TV subscription for the next four years. [00:35:59] And then they charged me a thousand dollars in imagined savings that never materialized. [00:36:03] I'm like, shit. [00:36:04] All right. [00:36:04] Well, that's, that's not good. [00:36:06] But I, I gave them a shot. [00:36:08] They came back three days later and they said, congratulations. [00:36:12] We saved you $859. [00:36:14] I was like, what the, excuse me over the next 12 months. [00:36:18] And it turned out that they got me from $142, $145 down to 70 flat. [00:36:25] You multiply that by 12 and then indeed comes out to eight something. [00:36:28] And I was like, damn. [00:36:29] All right. [00:36:30] And so I've been, I've been looking for the other shoe to drop like ever since, like something [00:36:36] is fishy here. [00:36:37] Like I, they didn't sign me up for other services. [00:36:39] I did receive, I'm looking over at it now. [00:36:43] I did receive a relatively large box that has a, you know, one of those wifi modem router [00:36:50] combo units in it. [00:36:51] That was partly like apparently part of the deal. [00:36:54] I don't know if they canceled my service and then in one fell swoop also signed me up for [00:36:58] service. [00:36:58] But now I've got this gigantic fucking wifi thing that wouldn't even fit in my patch box [00:37:02] if I wanted it, which I don't. [00:37:04] So I'm, I'm, I'm currently in this ether of like, well, if my modem that I rent is still [00:37:11] going to work, I rent for $0. [00:37:14] It's one nice thing about spectrum. [00:37:15] If my modem that I rent is still going to work, uh, maybe I can just keep this wifi thing in [00:37:20] the box and not call anyone. [00:37:22] And maybe everything will keep working and I'll pay the $70 a month, or maybe I should send [00:37:27] the other one back, but then that might trigger some other thing. [00:37:30] Right. [00:37:30] I, so look like, do I recommend the service? [00:37:36] I don't really, I don't, we'll see. [00:37:38] Right. [00:37:39] Like call me in a year. [00:37:40] I should set a reminder. [00:37:41] Oh, I'm sure if something bad happens, I'll, I'll be right on the airwaves screaming about [00:37:47] it. [00:37:47] Like I, like I do, but even after this experience, saving me a lot of money, like what I trust [00:37:53] them with my T-Mobile account, right. [00:37:54] Where I have been grandfathered in on what was called the one choice plus plan in 2014 [00:38:01] or whatever. [00:38:02] And it's genuine, honest to God, unlimited data without any real throttling. [00:38:08] As far as I can tell, until you get to some absurdly high number where you can watch your [00:38:12] videos in HD on your, you know, like, like it's, it's, it's a good one. [00:38:16] It's better than their magenta crap. [00:38:18] Um, and a lower price than their magenta max thing. [00:38:21] Well, we got three lines. [00:38:22] You got, you know, the watches and I would love to pay less for that, but I just don't [00:38:27] try like you, you, you fill out the rocket money form, uh, with the, uh, the, the, it wants [00:38:34] your T-Mobile, like login information. [00:38:36] And that's, that was a bridge too far for me. [00:38:40] I got there and I was like, you know, I could just imagine this going poorly. [00:38:44] You know, these plans are so complicated and feels like even when I call T-Mobile and I [00:38:48] ask, Hey, how's the weather? [00:38:49] Like they click a button and it fucks up my shit for two weeks. [00:38:52] So I'm, I'm, I'm good. [00:38:55] I can probably afford a cell phone bill. [00:38:57] Uh, I just, I just would prefer not to have to pay it. [00:39:01] Only one other life item in the last week, I was given a special opportunity. [00:39:11] Um, I've talked about massages a couple of times on this program and the, uh, I mentioned, [00:39:15] uh, the one I went, uh, the one I had most recently in a previous episode, I, I, I was, I was wrapping [00:39:29] up my massage with a human like you do. [00:39:31] And the human said, have you, have you tried our robot massage? [00:39:36] And, uh, I didn't know how to take that. [00:39:38] And I said, I, I've heard of it. [00:39:41] I know Becky tried it. [00:39:43] If you check Becky's, um, Becky Graham, you'll see, uh, there's a video of her, uh, getting [00:39:48] felt up by a robot. [00:39:50] Uh, I forget the name of the company, but it's, it's, uh, it's like a robot that tries to simulate [00:39:59] the experience of a human massaging you. [00:40:02] So it's, uh, you're on a bed, you're face down. [00:40:06] It's, uh, got arms that kind of go back and forth, uh, on a track and they, they push and [00:40:13] whatnot. [00:40:13] And it kind of reminds me of the white birthing robot from star Wars episode three at the end [00:40:21] when, when Luke and Leah are being born, it does everything short of make the cooing [00:40:26] sounds to get the babies to calm down. [00:40:28] You know, like I, you do have a tablet and you can, you can pick out these pre-baked Spotify [00:40:34] playlists while it's pushing on you. [00:40:36] Anyway, all that to say, I signed up, um, mostly cause it was free. [00:40:41] So I had a 30 minute trial and, uh, the fact is trying to imitate humans was really interesting [00:40:49] to me because I had just spent a month in Japan, uh, getting, uh, what'd you call it? [00:40:54] Uh, massage chairs, our hotel chain that we stay at has always has massage chairs and even [00:41:01] bad massage chairs in Japan are pretty intense. [00:41:03] Uh, uh, but, but good ones are just like, you know, you go in there and it's just like, [00:41:09] I'm sure there's been, you've probably seen a horror movie image, right? [00:41:13] Where it's like, you sit in a chair and then like 25 hands grab all the parts of your body [00:41:18] simultaneously and that is meant to be horrific. [00:41:20] But if those hands, if there was some nice music playing and it was illuminated and those [00:41:25] hands were massaging you simultaneously all over your body, maybe it would be pretty, pretty [00:41:29] great. [00:41:29] And so that's what a Japanese massage chair is like. [00:41:33] Cause they, they don't have this arbitrary conceit that a massage must happen in a format [00:41:39] that resembles how it would happen if a single human on a bed surface was rubbing your tiddly [00:41:45] bits, which is what this robot is. [00:41:49] Right. [00:41:49] And so it's trying to think of another analog, right? [00:41:55] Like where we, we kind of retain the artifice of the way that it used to be before we automated [00:42:00] it. [00:42:00] And, and in some, sometimes we do that to keep people being comfortable like that rich [00:42:05] Corinthian leather. [00:42:06] It's like, we wanted to look like a traditional calendar. [00:42:08] So people know what they're looking at instead of just a bunch of boxes. [00:42:11] It's like, Oh yeah, this looks like a placemat style calendar that I would have had on my desk. [00:42:15] And then eventually that ages out. [00:42:16] And the younger people are like, I've never seen a calendar on a desk, even though my dad [00:42:20] grew up with one, you know? [00:42:24] So maybe that's it, right? [00:42:25] Like, like sometimes that's why we would have a robo massage that like, you know, pressures [00:42:31] and needs you, you know, kind of with just the two arms up and down in particular points, [00:42:35] sometimes at the same time, sometimes just one arm, you know, it's, it's, it's less efficient [00:42:41] is my immediate frustration. [00:42:43] Cause it's like, you could have 45 fucking arms going to town all over my body and I'd [00:42:49] get way more work done in 30 minutes. [00:42:52] Right. [00:42:52] Cause I'm just trying to min max my existence, but instead by, by, by, by imitating a human [00:42:59] massage, like nothing is really gained because I can't see it. [00:43:03] I'm facedown. [00:43:04] I'm looking at a silly tablet and watching imagery, imagery of forests and, and, and ocean waves [00:43:10] and whatnot, and I'm kind of getting a, you can look at a weird overhead view of what [00:43:14] your body is looking at, looking like right then, you know, like it scans your body and [00:43:19] then has like a little illustration of like, here's where I'm pushing you. [00:43:21] Here I go. [00:43:22] It's, it seems more to me like they designed this, you look at this unit and it's just like, [00:43:31] this has got to cost at least 15 grand. [00:43:34] This is an expensive, complicated piece of equipment. [00:43:38] It feels like a lack of imagination, uh, to, to somebody had the idea, let's take human [00:43:47] masseuses out of the equation and just make a robo masseuse thing that we could put in spas [00:43:53] when, uh, you'd actually have a better experience. [00:43:56] It would be cheaper. [00:43:57] And there's like more prior art at Panasonic or these other companies in Japan. [00:44:01] If you just made a, you know, massage chair, but that would be boring, I guess. [00:44:08] Uh, and massage chairs, like you, you hear the word massage chair right now as you're listening. [00:44:13] And if you haven't had like a real one, you know, at a Japanese Denki-yasan on the third [00:44:17] floor, where all the salary men on their way home tell their wives, oh, I got a, I got a big meeting [00:44:24] with the boss and then they go to, they go to Yamada Denki or they go to Yodabashi camera. [00:44:28] And then they just, you know, they take their briefcase and they set it down next to one of the [00:44:33] trial units of the massage chair. [00:44:34] And then they, they, they, they, they go into this little like sensory deprivation pod and [00:44:39] they get all their bits smushed simultaneously and they got a remote control and they can [00:44:45] say, just do it hard. [00:44:46] And then they can forget their worries for, for 15 minutes until, uh, one of the staff has [00:44:52] to remind them that, uh, they don't live there and that they have to go home now. [00:44:56] If you haven't had that experience, uh, you probably, when you hear a massage chair, think [00:45:02] of like those $2, you know, leather chairs that are, you know, just like our just normal [00:45:08] fucking chairs that may be vibrate, like the vibrating bed equivalent that you see at an [00:45:12] airport. [00:45:12] Um, this is not what I'm talking about. [00:45:15] So get your head out of there and, and go Google, you know, for high end Japanese massage [00:45:22] chair, and you might get some idea. [00:45:24] Uh, also I, uh, in the course of a 30 minute massage, I encountered so many fucking Android [00:45:32] tablet bugs. [00:45:33] I, I didn't, I gave them a lot of feedback cause they, this is sort of a trial that they're [00:45:37] doing. [00:45:37] They wanted to want to know how, what I thought. [00:45:40] And I gave them a lot of this perspective and feedback about like, well, you know, this [00:45:44] skeuomorphic design, yada, yada. [00:45:45] But I didn't even touch any of the software stuff. [00:45:49] Cause like there's an absolutely nothing that they're going to be able to do with that much [00:45:52] less like they won't even be able to communicate this back to the company in a way that's helpful, [00:45:55] but it was, you know, it would freeze or the display would become non-responsive. [00:46:01] One time I had the music just turn itself all the way up. [00:46:05] The, um, the, so many things about this design are meant to make you feel comfortable are [00:46:13] meant to make you feel safe. [00:46:14] Like if, if you, it moves at all, or if it detects anything is off at all, it basically [00:46:20] like will, will disengage entirely and reposition itself. [00:46:23] And then you have to actively resume the massage. [00:46:26] And then it's got to put the little flappy doos back over you. [00:46:30] Like it's really worried about people flipping out about this robot pressing up against them. [00:46:36] And it extends to, to like, you know, you pick your firmness, like light, medium firm. [00:46:41] And I clicked firm. [00:46:42] And then there, you could see there was like a little like pressure bar on the right. [00:46:47] And that even though I'd clicked the firm preset, I wasn't at a hundred percent pressure. [00:46:52] And I was like, well, that, that won't do. [00:46:54] And so I jacked it up to a hundred percent right out of the gate. [00:46:56] And the whole time, 30 minutes, like you could, uh, [00:46:59] Hmm. [00:47:01] It, I knew that a massage was happening. [00:47:05] Like I knew when contact was being made, but like, it was not a massage. [00:47:08] It was, it was somebody kind of like, like, like back rub would be generous. [00:47:14] It was like somebody like took an open palm hand and just pressed it. [00:47:18] Just, just, just an obnoxiously against different parts of my body and no firmness beyond that. [00:47:26] So you got a robo massage. [00:47:29] It's limited in what it can do. [00:47:33] Cause it's trying to imitate a human. [00:47:34] It's very worried about liability, which is why I imagine the max firmness is light pressure. [00:47:39] Uh, and it's fussy and it's buggy. [00:47:42] And of course it can only do very limited regions of the body. [00:47:45] Like if I was a massage therapist, I'd be like, Hey, sweet. [00:47:49] You know, I'm going to keep having a job longer than all these programmer juckle fucks. [00:47:52] You're going to get replaced by a Claude and open AI. [00:47:56] So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm confident that a massage therapist is going to be a, a lucrative, you [00:48:03] know, going concern as a career for a little while programming. [00:48:08] I'm not so sure of, but most of us listening have already made our choice, whether we're [00:48:14] going to be massage therapists or programmers. [00:48:16] So we're just going to have to see how this, how this plays out. [00:48:19] All right. [00:48:20] Well, that's all, that's everything going on in my life. [00:48:23] So let's, uh, well, let's follow up on stuff that had been going on in my life and is now [00:48:30] continuing or is once again, I started to realize that there's a, there's a certain theme to this [00:48:37] show. [00:48:37] Hmm. [00:48:38] All right. [00:48:46] There's basically two major areas of follow-up today. [00:48:51] Um, but somehow the two of them take up 11 bullet points in my notes. [00:48:59] So I'll try to be expeditious. [00:49:02] The first is I bought a, uh, M4 pro MacBook pro, I guess an Apple nomenclature, a MacBook pro [00:49:13] left parentheses, 2024, right parentheses with M4 pro. [00:49:19] I think is probably maybe the 2024 is at the end. [00:49:22] Maybe they don't put the date now that they have the chip name. [00:49:25] In any case, I needed a computer that was built for Apple intelligence, which is how they also, [00:49:32] they crammed that in the fucking name. [00:49:34] Um, and like the, every subheader says Apple intelligence on it, which, you know, I mean, [00:49:40] if you're, if you're a marketing dude, it's the thing that, you know, like you gotta, every [00:49:48] year is a struggle to goose people into, to buying computers. [00:49:51] And, uh, it's been a while since they've had anything new to say that your computer can do. [00:49:56] So it makes sense, but come on. [00:49:59] It can't even make Genmoji yet. [00:50:02] Uh, just if you've, if you've downloaded it, used 18.2 iOS or iPadOS, uh, go turn on the, [00:50:13] um, you know, the AI feature, if it's available in your region and language, and then you open [00:50:19] the image playground app and you click through there and let it download all of the image [00:50:24] playground shit, uh, in particular, the image playground itself, where you can take a person [00:50:30] and a place and kind of like, you know, create sort of a, uh, a witch's brew of bad imagery [00:50:35] and then, and then have a keep swiping to the right as, as they just all look bad that I have [00:50:43] no, no need for, but Genmoji, or at least the promise of Genmoji, I like quite a lot. [00:50:49] I enjoy, you know, um, typing in little like name, like, so we were at the parks, uh, with [00:50:57] our friends last week and it was a Jollywood Knights event, which is also Gatsby themed. [00:51:06] There's a reason why ordering 1920s era costumes on Amazon in Orlando was like not an overnight. [00:51:13] It was like a two, three day leg because this, this Jollywood Knights 1920s era themed, uh, [00:51:21] ticketed event at Hollywood studios has been going on. And it was one of those nights. And so some [00:51:26] flapper lady in line, she had a purse that had a phone handle on it. And her husband, who now that [00:51:34] I think back on this was dressed very similarly to how I dressed myself last night. So something tells [00:51:39] me he was sort of a long for the ride in this, she picked up the phone handle off of her purse and [00:51:46] handed it to Becky. And then he, you could sort of see him on the phone being a bad ventriloquist [00:51:53] and talking to her on the phone. So like his cell phone was somehow communicating to the purse phone. [00:51:59] It was very, it reminded me of get smart, you know, like that spy TV show from the sixties that was on [00:52:05] Nick at night in the eighties or nineties when I would have watched it. Uh, of course it didn't [00:52:10] work. And then we were just in line and it was like, sorry, we're in line. It didn't work. And then, [00:52:14] and then of course the way that lines work, right. As you turn left, turn right. And now it's up, [00:52:18] here's the same people again. And so they're like, all right, try again. So she picks up the purse [00:52:23] phone and here's the guy talk. And she's like, yes, this is indeed a telephone. That is a purse. [00:52:28] My reaction, my contribution to this experience was to try to generate a Genmoji for the group [00:52:35] that I was with. That was like purse phone. And, uh, wouldn't you know it, uh, it struggled to like, [00:52:43] I was like purse with a phone handle on top. And it was, it gave me like one with like a, [00:52:49] like a locker combination lock instead of a rotary dial in the middle. It was all, it was not, [00:52:54] not good. And, and I think like a lot of these Genmoji, in addition to being bad and not good, [00:53:01] they are when they, there's, they have to be so detailed because usually it's people mashing up [00:53:07] different concepts. They have to be so detailed that when in line with texts, you have to squint [00:53:12] and you can barely see what they are. And then if they're as a tap back, you have no hope of knowing [00:53:16] what they are. Like if it's of a person, for example, like it's, you're going to get like 80% shirt [00:53:21] and then like 10% head. So you're not going to be able to tell who's what. Uh, so those need work [00:53:27] and no one wants my Genmoji. My, my brother has formally requested. I stopped sending them and, [00:53:32] uh, I will, I will take that request under advisement. Anyway, uh, bought a MacBook pro. Um, [00:53:42] Oh, I've got a, I've got a parenthetical as a C notes. All right, well, here's eight more bullet [00:53:50] points. I'm going to rattle through these. So Becky, actually, it was her idea. She wanted to [00:53:54] get me this. We were in Japan. She's like, Hey, you know, I heard you talking about the nanotexture [00:53:57] display. And like, of course, you know, the, the, the brighter screen and us being in Orlando, [00:54:01] you never use a computer outside or out of the house. So she wanted to buy it. And she said, [00:54:06] it was just really complicated. I didn't want to fuck up. I didn't want to get you the wrong set of [00:54:09] options. I asked Aaron and Aaron didn't know either. He said he hadn't really been on top of it. [00:54:16] Uh, and I was like, honey, that's so I didn't say like, bless your heart. I, it was a such a sweet [00:54:23] gesture. And it is true that I've been curious about it. Um, but I didn't feel like, uh, I had [00:54:30] to get one right this minute. Uh, and, and honestly, the, the, the 14 inch MacBook pro is still too heavy. [00:54:36] I, I, I, I lifted tonal my, my weightlifting robot, uh, reported in my tonal wrapped because [00:54:46] everything has to do a goddamn wrapped dingus to try to share in social media as if like, you know, [00:54:52] one assumes that all these wrapped posts just go to the goddamn bottom of every algorithm because [00:54:57] they're all the same. But in any case, it showed me a little wrapped video and it said, I wait, [00:55:02] I, I lifted one and a half million pounds last year or over the course of 2024. And I was like, [00:55:07] that's a lot of weight that I lifted. I, yesterday I did the equivalent of like, you know, 250, [00:55:12] 275 pound deadlift barbell deadlift. And that was hard, but not too hard. It's the max weight that, [00:55:20] that tonal can do. Um, I, I, I, I like to think I'm pretty strong now. Uh, that four pound fucking [00:55:31] MacBook pro is backbreakingly heavy, no matter where I am, I'll pick it up and like, that is denser than [00:55:40] it looks. It's a, it's like when you pick up a baby, that's like a little bit too dense, you know, [00:55:46] and you're just like, Oh wow. I was expecting this to be more fun. This is just going to give [00:55:51] me pelvic floor problems. If I do this for more than exactly 30 seconds and then hand it back to [00:55:57] its mother who surely has pelvic floor issues. Um, I don't want to be carrying around this MacBook pro. [00:56:05] I don't want to carry it with my arms. I don't want to carry it in a bag. I don't want to carry it [00:56:09] into the car. I don't want to carry it, you know, uh, in a Starbucks. I want to hire a Porter to [00:56:16] bring it around to me, you know, from place to place. Maybe, maybe they could also saddle up and [00:56:23] have a, uh, vision pro. So that's what I really want. Uh, at least until, and unless Apple releases [00:56:30] the 12 inch MacBook pro, uh, that we were promised in our early years. [00:56:34] Anyway, when Becky said that it was hard to configure and figure out what she'd want to order [00:56:43] or what I would want her to order. And as a result would have made a pretty lousy gift because [00:56:49] the likelihood of her getting it right. Where if you look at the number of configurations for these [00:56:53] seeing this thing, like astronomically small, I actually spent, I sat down, I look, I, I said, [00:57:01] I didn't need the thing. And then I come home and then within a day and a half, uh, my MacBook air is [00:57:07] crying because it's out of storage to the point where like I composed an email and I hit send on the email [00:57:12] and then Apple mail reported, yo, we just barfed on all this and just deleted all your shit. Cause we [00:57:17] ran out of disk space, no warning. And in modern day Mac OS, you don't get to know how much disk space [00:57:23] you have because all of it is like optimized storage. So like whether it's your iCloud drive [00:57:29] or it's your Apple photos, once the system is under any sort of, um, storage stress, it'll, [00:57:35] it's supposed to detect that and start deleting shit. Your phone does this too. So sometimes like [00:57:41] you're like, like I was importing a bunch of raw images on the phone and it said, Oh, you're out of [00:57:45] storage. And then I knew, because I know how it works under the hood, even though it exposes zero [00:57:49] controls or visibility as to what is going the fuck on. I knew that when it ran out of storage, [00:57:54] the right solution was sit and wait for 30 seconds while it deletes shit in the background and then [00:57:59] just hit import again. Right. Well, I, that didn't work in this case. Like I actually went and deleted [00:58:05] like a hundred gigabytes of garbage. It's a small SSD. It's a 512 gigabyte MacBook air. I deleted all this [00:58:11] stuff, but, um, from my iCloud drive on another computer, because this one was finder was completely [00:58:17] unresponsive. Uh, and it never got better because it had suspended all iCloud drive syncing as a, [00:58:24] probably like some sort of like memory safeguard or storage safeguard to like make sure I didn't, [00:58:27] it didn't fuck up anything in the cloud. And so like even going, I'm not going to, [00:58:33] most of that storage was in my iCloud drive, which is how it got full while I was overseas. [00:58:38] And when I came back, I, I didn't have like, I could, I could have gone through and like run [00:58:47] RM dash RF from the terminal and deleted stuff from the iCloud drive to like as a, as an emergency break, [00:58:52] like get, get this SSD empty enough that the operating system can run and then figure it out. [00:59:00] But then of course it would have synced all of those deletions up to the cloud and deleted the [00:59:03] same things off of my other computers. So this is a tractable problem. And I, I, I ultimately did solve [00:59:10] it, but I, I realize now why Apple markets so much of its pro devices to photos and video people, [00:59:20] because photos and videos take up a shit ton of space. Uh, they have different performance [00:59:26] characteristics than programming and, and the, their needs in many ways are higher than what you need. [00:59:33] If you're just writing Ruby code, right? Uh, it just so happens that Swift, the programming language [00:59:38] that they wrote is also like, we'll, we'll take advantage of all of these cores during compilation [00:59:42] in a way that like a lot of local development in other languages won't. [00:59:45] But in my last year of doing a lot more video work, doing a lot more audio work, I can definitely [00:59:52] understand now like, Oh yeah, like the, the MacBook air actually is inappropriate for a lot of the [00:59:57] workflows of the things that I do. So that experience, I came to Becky and I was like, look, I know I said [01:00:05] I didn't need this, but I think I might need this. Um, where need is in very, you know, very gentle [01:00:12] text. It's, it's a thin font variant to say, I need this. What I mean to say is like, I, it would save [01:00:19] me a lot of time and stress and headache and, uh, uh, rework to have a better computer, a more [01:00:26] capacious computer. And of course you can't upgrade the storage and your existing max. So here we are. [01:00:32] Um, but anyway, I was in the configurator for the new MacBook pro. And the first decision you got to [01:00:36] make is do I want a regular M4 chip, which I did not, or one of the pro ones, which is a, you know, [01:00:43] 12 or 14 core. I want to say a chip, uh, which is a huge upgrade over the M3 pro the M3 pro had a way [01:00:53] more efficiency cores and the M4 pro has more performance score. So it's like a, it's doing [01:00:57] much better in synthetic benchmarking that that's impressive. It's a big year over year change or the [01:01:02] M4 max, which is, you know, uh, an incremental improvement over the M3 max, but to the extent [01:01:10] that it's better than the pro it's like, you know, got another meat and quote unquote media [01:01:14] e

covid-19 christmas america god tv jesus christ ceo spotify amazon tiktok ai chicago google hollywood apple pr japan americans french speaking games story chinese japanese elon musk microsoft italian coffee iphone detroit hbo oscars harvard indiana tesla bitcoin nazis mcdonald ceos exclusive os sony catholic pc reddit wars android starbucks vr singapore ps switzerland nintendo mac cd avengers shit latin playstation ios xbox ipads raiders combat indiana jones ibm sonic apple tv mark zuckerberg e3 whiskey sort gamers steel clinton playstation 5 bloomberg ram call of duty aka swift paramount openai mccarthy bill clinton spectrum playstation 4 ups witcher bethesda grinch vatican atlantis api sonic the hedgehog hawk davos mad max jim carrey porsche gta luigi uncharted ubisoft watts harrison ford verizon god of war sega bluetooth sink mansion hilton gpt game awards naughty ui airpods astro comcast technically nes gothic snoop vanguard iso indigo monarch sas yakuza t mobile lost ark macbook grand theft auto goodreads mayan wwdc playstation 3 kodak four seasons llm truman dogecoin ultron sora macos wii adp googling goldeneye silicon steam deck toys r us macbook pro bioshock gpu corinthian cpu macs john oliver nearing dtc tom clancy u s venn gerd ssd oled naughty dog imac icloud dali gamecube united healthcare solves oh god panasonic rf dreamcast rm gatsby psvr eb rivian kratos urls chris farley ocr sony playstation installing byzantine isp wolfenstein hdr ipados playstation vr m3 pikmin geralt ace ventura tabasco deus ex dearborn vigor lucasarts sesame astrobot furby irr m4 insufficient sarah mclachlan james spader xml quantic dream ars technica great circle pmc ciri vim robotnik searle sergey brin chris hayes batman arkham msrp hn eggman apple silicon troy baker jc penny mco postgres dmg quicken loans daxter gordon gekko keighley swiftui mark gurman mozi uhc gurman o1 adorama vnc ev williams vr vr moom searls izotope rx kofax joel baker csvs nintendo pr
BSD Now
576: The Forever Workaround

BSD Now

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 12, 2024 61:49


From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency, August 2024 Foundation Update, Email encryption at rest on OpenBSD using dovecot and GPG, Workarounds are often forever (unless you work to make them otherwise), Remote Desktop using RDP and VNC, Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple, Plan 9 is a Uniquely Complete Operating System, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency (https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/07/04/from-cloud-chaos-to-freebsd-efficiency/) August 2024 Foundation Update (https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/august-2024-foundation-update/) News Roundup Emails encryption at rest on OpenBSD using dovecot and GPG (https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-08-14-automatic-emails-gpg-encryption-at-rest.html) Workarounds are often forever (unless you work to make them otherwise) (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/WorkaroundsAreForeverByDefault) Remote Desktop using RDP and VNC (https://www.tumfatig.net/2024/remote-desktop-using-rdp-and-vnc/) Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple (https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipple.html) Plan 9 is a Uniquely Complete Operating System (https://posixcafe.org/blogs/2024/07/27/0/) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

iPad Pros
M1 MacPad with Tim Chaten (iPad Pros - 0200)

iPad Pros

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2024 80:40


Devon Dundee is host this week and is interviewing Tim Chaten, the host of iPad Pros and Vision Pros, about his experiences so far creating and using a M1 MacPad based on the M1 MacBook Air. We also touch a bit on iPadOS 18 that was released in beta just a few days ago as of recording.For a full breakdown of WWDC 2024 make sure to check out Vision Pros episode 17 with Matt Birchler. In that episode we spent two and a half hours breaking down all of the announcements from the keynote: https://visionpros.fm/2024/06/11/episode-17-visionos-2-and-wwdc-2024-with-matt-birchler/This episode of iPad Pros is sponsored by Agenda, the award winning app that seamlessly integrates calendar events into your note taking. Learn more at www.agenda.com. Agenda 19 is now available as a free download on visionOS, iPadOS, iOS, and macOS. Early episodes with chapter markers are available by supporting the podcast at www.patreon.com/ipadpros. Early episodes are also now available in Apple Podcasts!Show notes are available at www.iPadPros.net. Feedback is welcomed at iPadProsPodcast@gmail.com.Links:- https://devondundee.com- https://www.macstories.net/magic-rays-of-light/- https://www.macstories.net/stories/macpad-how-i-created-the-hybrid-mac-ipad-laptop-and-tablet-that-apple-wont-make/- https://www.macstories.net/stories/i-turned-the-new-13-ipad-pro-into-a-macpad-and-portable-gaming-display/- Mobile Router: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPSGJN7T- Sony Inzone M9 Monitor: https://www.amazon.com/Sony-INZONE-Gaming-Monitor-Dimming/dp/B0B3SHR8TF/- USB-C WebCam: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KKZZKD5- Capture Card: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRZ1ZCYW- USB-C to HDMI cable: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJTXVT4R- Magnet Mounting System: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C654376B- Finpac Laptop Shoulder Bag: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089W8124Z- Magnetic Mat: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B012CT1XVGChapter Markers:00:00:00: Opening00:01:40: Support the Podcast00:02:11: Tim Chaten00:03:21: iPadOS 1800:06:29: The MacPad00:09:25: What inspired the creation of it?00:12:37: The specs00:18:40: Creating the MacPad00:21:37: Any other issues getting it setup?00:22:41: Using the MacPad00:28:32: Sponsor - Agenda 1900:31:33: Using multiple operating systems?00:35:23: Using the Mac more? 00:40:38: Apple Vision Pro 00:43:32: Deciding what OS to use?00:47:28: Multiple iPads at the Same time00:48:19: Touching the Mac00:49:22: Devon's approach00:50:34: Why is this better than VNC?00:54:33: iPad as a tablet00:57:17: Using the MacPad with an external monitor01:01:08: On the go 01:03:51: Any issues day to day? 01:05:32: Would you recommend doing this?01:09:51: Should Apple offer this? 01:14:20: Will you create one Devon? 01:17:27: Where can you find Tim?01:18:40: Follow Devon Dundee01:19:48: Closing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Desde el reloj
E0849: Raspberry Pi Connect

Desde el reloj

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2024 10:28


Conectarse al entorno de escritorio de nuestra Raspberry Pi es muy sencillo utilizando una conexión VNC, pero la gente de la fundación quiere hacerlo todavía más fácil. Por eso han presentado este servicio del que os hablo hoy.

Geeks in Space
Vampire Facials, Botwars, Spacewars, Russian Wikipedia, BASIC Birthday, Robot Nightmare Fuel GIS835

Geeks in Space

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2024 37:58


RobChrisRob linked up their pretend orbiting space station communications arrays to talk about matters of urgency including the unlicensed spa that gave 3 women HIV through a procedure known as a 'Vampire Facial' which is grosser than you might think, evidence that someone or somethign is cloning threads on reddit fake engagement, Chris played a little bit of Spacewar! running in a browser emulator, the Psyche Probe managed to sustain 25mb/s data streaming to earth from 140 million miles, Russia cloned wikipedia, edited it, and banned the original, the Rabbit R1 is mostly just VNC, BASIC turned 69, Sony/Apollo might buy out Paramount, Sparkles the most terrifying robot, and experimental puppetry if you happen to be in Atlanta... Join our discord to talk along or the Subreddit where you will find all the links https://discord.gg/YZMTgpyhB https://www.reddit.com/r/TacoZone/

Self-Hosted
121: Forbidden Fruit

Self-Hosted

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 19, 2024 50:43


Special guest Casey Liss from the Accidental Tech Podcast joins the show to discuss his homelab, how he uses HomeBridge, and his delightfully complex garage door sensor system. Then Alex and Casey do their "best" to convince Chris the Apple Vision Pro is an excellent remote admin tool. Special Guest: Casey Liss.

Self-Hosted
120: Can a VPS Replace a Homelab?

Self-Hosted

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2024 45:33


Alex goes head-to-head with budget VPS providers, which gets us into a classic debate. Plus we sit down with Adam Morales from Unraid to get the inside scoop on recent changes and exciting upcoming features.

nas amd providers vps latency chris fisher vnc proxmox hetzner jupiter broadcasting unraid iptables self-hosting
Vision Pros
Television with Adam Lisagor (Vision Pros - 0012)

Vision Pros

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2024 107:19


Adam Lisagor is the founder of Sandwich, a creative advertising studio and production company. In this episode we discuss visionOS, Apple Vision Pro, and dive deep into Television. Bonus content and early episodes with chapter markers are available by supporting the podcast at www.visionpros.fm/patreon. Bonus content and early episodes are also now available in Apple Podcasts!Show notes are available at www.VisionPros.fm. Feedback is welcomed at tim@visionpros.fm.Links: https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/02/13/ep-395https://sandwich.cohttps://sandwich.visionhttps://mastodon.social/@adamlisagorhttps://twitter.com/adamlisagorChapter Markers:00:00:00: Opening00:01:09: Support the Podcast00:01:33: Adam Lisagor00:08:45: Sandwich00:11:01: 1 Month In00:14:19: New Top Strap00:17:33: Apps?00:23:49: Audio00:24:25: Early Oculus00:26:22: Battery Pack vs iPhone 2G00:26:48: Synology apps00:27:41: Final general thoughts 00:28:39: Favorite Video app?00:32:51: VFX work in visionOS?00:35:55: Final Cut Pro for visionOS00:40:15: 180 degree video?00:46:52: Locking in place00:47:35: Television00:54:17: Aspect Fill vs Stretch00:56:47: Television 1.1 and 1.201:00:50: Using the YouTube approach for other services?01:05:16: The different TVs01:12:46: Get info?01:18:18: VNC app01:18:48: Weirdest TV01:20:54: Queue?01:22:50: Modern TVs01:24:50: More models?01:26:41: Filters for the video?01:29:01: Your lighting on the TVs?01:30:25: Interactions01:32:40: Wonderwall01:35:11: Switching between TVs01:35:43: 3D content01:38:14: Flow vs Standard mode01:42:36: File management01:44:12: Anything else?01:45:07: Where can people learn more?01:46:48: Closing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

DekNet
Google y Apple. VNC

DekNet

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 19, 2024 24:25


TECNOLOGIA y LIBERTAD--------------------------PODCAST: https://www.spreaker.com/user/dekkartwitter.com/D3kkaRtwitter.com/Dek_Netmastodon.social/@DekkaRCódigo referido Crypto.com: https://crypto.com/app/hhsww88jd4#Bitcoin BTC: dekkar$paystring.crypt

LINUX Unplugged
525: Beating Apple to the Sauce

LINUX Unplugged

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2023 72:20


We daily drive Asahi Linux on a MacBook, chat about how the team beat Apple to a major GPU milestone, and an easy way to self-host open-source ChatGPT alternatives. Special Guest: Neal Gompa.

The CyberWire
From cryptostealers to CCTV exploits, from Magecart enhancements to coronation phishbait, cybercriminals have been active. (But so have law enforcement agencies.)

The CyberWire

Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2023 31:15


LOBSHOT is a cryptowallet stealer abusing Google Ads. Coronation phishbait. A known CCTV vulnerability is currently being exploited. T-Mobile discloses another, smaller data breach. New Magecart exploits. Preliminary lessons from cyber operations during Russia's war. Rob Boyce from Accenture shares insights from RSA Conference. Our special guest is NSA Director of Cybersecurity Rob Joyce. And Europol announces a major dark web market takedown. For links to all of today's stories check out our CyberWire daily news briefing: https://thecyberwire.com/newsletters/daily-briefing/12/84 Selected reading. New LOBSHOT malware gives hackers hidden VNC access to Windows devices (BleepingComputer) New 'Lobshot' hVNC Malware Used by Russian Cybercriminals (SecurityWeek) Elastic Security Labs discovers the LOBSHOT malware (Elastic Blog) Researchers see surge in scam websites linked to coronation (Computer Weekly)  TBK DVR Authentication Bypass Attack (FortiGuard)  T-Mobile discloses second data breach since the start of 2023 (BleepingComputer)  T-Mobile discloses 2nd data breach of 2023, this one leaking account PINs and more (Ars Technica)  T-Mobile Announces Another Data Breach (CNET) Magecart threat actor rolls out convincing modal forms (Malwarebytes) Cyber lessons from Ukraine: Prepare for prolonged conflict, not a knockout blow (Breaking Defense) 288 dark web vendors arrested in major marketplace seizure (Europol)

LINUX Unplugged
498: Rolling Papercuts

LINUX Unplugged

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2023 63:53


Sometimes running the latest and greatest means you have to pave your own path. This week two examples from living on the edge.

Hacker Public Radio
HPR3769: Crouching laptop, hidden server (part 0).

Hacker Public Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2023


Crouching laptop, hidden server (part 0). Virtualized battlegrounds. Archer72's system: Acer Aspire 5750-6866 CPU: Intel Core i3 2350M (2.3 GHz max, 2 cores, 3MB cache). RAM: 4GB DDR3-1600 SODIMM (2 x 2GB currently, 2 x 4GB upgrade planned). Video: Integrated Intel GMA HD 3000. DISK: 120GB SATA SSD. NIC: Integrated 1000 mbps. 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi. Bluetooth not installed. SGOTI's system: HP Notebook 14-ck0052cl CPU: Intel Core i3-8130U (2.2 GHz - 4 GHz max, 2 cores, 4MB cache). RAM: 16GB DDR4-2400 SDRAM (2 x 8GB, upgraded). Video: Integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620. DISK: 1TB 5400 rpm SATA HDD (with empty m.2 SATA slot). NIC: Integrated 10/100/1000 GbE LAN. 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi & Bluetooth 4.2 combo. Software and documumentation mentioned during the show. Running Laptop, server style, with the Lid closed. Edit logind.conf sudo vim /etc/systemd/logind.conf. Remove the # from these lines then set values to ignore: HandleSuspendkey=ignore HandleLidSwitch=ignore HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore Save then quit. I'm not going to tell you how ;) Finally, restart systemd-logind. sudo systemctl restart systemd-logind.service Way of the Archer72. Proxmox Homepage. Proxmox VE is a complete open-source platform for enterprise virtualization. With the built-in web interface you can easily manage VMs and containers, software-defined storage and networking, high-availability clustering, and multiple out-of-the-box tools on a single solution. Proxmox backup documentation. Proxmox backup documentation .pdf download. Proxmox video tutorials Proxmox wiki. Proxmox vLAN networking information. Proxmox NAT config information. Youtube video: install/config Proxmox. Duck DNS hosted on AWS, with no upfront cost to the user. Dynamic DNS service; dynamically update DNS records without the need for human interaction. Connect to your home/local network from a remote network using a domain name instead of an IP address. Way of the SGOTI. RHEL Documentation: Creating guests with virt-install RHEL 9 product documentation list You can use the virt-install command to create virtual machines and install operating system on those virtual machines from the command line. virt-install can be used either interactively or as part of a script to automate the creation of virtual machines. virt-manager The virt-manager application is a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines through libvirt. It primarily targets KVM VMs, but also manages Xen and LXC (linux containers). virt-install is a command line tool which provides an easy way to provision operating systems into virtual machines. virt-viewer is a lightweight UI interface for interacting with the graphical display of virtualized guest OS. It can display VNC or SPICE, and uses libvirt to lookup the graphical connection details. virt-clone is a command line tool for cloning existing inactive guests. It copies the disk images, and defines a config with new name, UUID and MAC address pointing to the copied disks. virt-xml is a command line tool for easily editing libvirt domain XML using virt-install’s command line options. virt-bootstrap is a command line tool providing an easy way to setup the root file system for libvirt-based containers. qemu documentation qemu wiki: User documentation qemu wiki: KVM KVM homepage KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko. Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc. Cockpit Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers, intended for everyone. RHEL 9: web console/cockpit documentation Cockpit Deployment Guide RHEL intro to Cockpit guide. Youtube video: Fedora server on a Laptop. 14:45, editing /etc/systemd/logind.conf Youtube video: Deploying Nextcloud AIO containers. Additional Information. What is an IP address? What's my IP address? What is DDNS? Cloudflare DDNS glossary How To Forward a Port. A port forward is a way of making a computer on your home or business network accessible to computers on the internet, even though they are behind a router or firewall. It is commonly used in gaming, security cameras, home automation, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Port forwards are setup in your router. A forwarded port is also known as open. After you have forwarded a port you have an open port. List of DDNS solutions (with no upfront cost to the user). Duck Duck Go Search for Dynamic DNS

Hack és Lángos
HnL241 - Pipiskedünk

Hack és Lángos

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2022 60:47


Mai menü:Github: Github: 35,000 kódtárat NEM törtek felA Google növeli a Linux Kernel sebezhetőségekért járó jutalmakat | SecurityWeek.ComTOP támadás: hitelesítő adatok ellopásaRTL eCOS SDK sérülékenységFényt hozva a sötét webre - IT Security GuruPyPI cryptominerTwitter Exposes Personal Information of 5+ Million usersOver 8000 VNC instances left exposed, researchers find - IT Security GuruElérhetőségeink:TelegramTwitterInstagramFacebookMail: info@hackeslangos.show

SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast

Monster Libra -> IcedID -> Cobalt Strike and DarkVNC https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/VNC/28974/ Is Tox the New C&C Method for Coinminers? https://www.uptycs.com/blog/is-tox-the-new-cc-method-for-coinminers Carbon Black Blue Screens https://community.carbonblack.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Endpoint-Standard-Sudden-Blue-Screens-on-Windows-Devices-23rd/ta-p/114369 Gitlab Vulnerability https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/08/22/critical-security-release-gitlab-15-3-1-released/#Remote%20Command%20Execution%20via%20Github%20import

SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast

Monster Libra -> IcedID -> Cobalt Strike and DarkVNC https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/VNC/28974/ Is Tox the New C&C Method for Coinminers? https://www.uptycs.com/blog/is-tox-the-new-cc-method-for-coinminers Carbon Black Blue Screens https://community.carbonblack.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Endpoint-Standard-Sudden-Blue-Screens-on-Windows-Devices-23rd/ta-p/114369 Gitlab Vulnerability https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/08/22/critical-security-release-gitlab-15-3-1-released/#Remote%20Command%20Execution%20via%20Github%20import

TWiT Bits (MP3)
SN Clip: VNC's Inherent Insecurity

TWiT Bits (MP3)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2022 7:20


On Security Now, Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discuss the puzzling result of a recent scan of the Internet for completely exposed VNC servers. Full episode at twit.tv/sn884 Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our podcasts at https://podcasts.twit.tv/

TWiT Bits (Video HD)
SN Clip: VNC's Inherent Insecurity

TWiT Bits (Video HD)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2022 7:22


On Security Now, Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discuss the puzzling result of a recent scan of the Internet for completely exposed VNC servers. Full episode at twit.tv/sn884 Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our podcasts at https://podcasts.twit.tv/

TWiT Bits (Video HI)
SN Clip: VNC's Inherent Insecurity

TWiT Bits (Video HI)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2022 7:22


On Security Now, Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discuss the puzzling result of a recent scan of the Internet for completely exposed VNC servers. Full episode at twit.tv/sn884 Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our podcasts at https://podcasts.twit.tv/

Security Now (MP3)
SN 884: TLS Private Key Leakage - BIG patch Tuesday, Facebook E2E encryption, VNC insecurity, Cyotek WebCopy

Security Now (MP3)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 113:15


Picture of the Week.  Patch Flashback Tuesday.  Facebook is cautiously creeping toward default E2E encryption.  VNC's inherent insecurity.  The need to control domain names.  And speaking of backup: Cyotek WebCopy.  Google's Ryan Sleevi Retweeted Jens Axboe.  SandSara Update from Ed Cano.  Closing The Loop.  SpinRite.  TLS Private Key Leakage.    We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-883-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit newrelic.com/securitynow Secureworks.com/twit

Security Now (Video HI)
SN 884: TLS Private Key Leakage - BIG patch Tuesday, Facebook E2E encryption, VNC insecurity, Cyotek WebCopy

Security Now (Video HI)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 113:15


Picture of the Week. Patch Flashback Tuesday. Facebook is cautiously creeping toward default E2E encryption. VNC's inherent insecurity. The need to control domain names. And speaking of backup: Cyotek WebCopy. Google's Ryan Sleevi Retweeted Jens Axboe. SandSara Update from Ed Cano. Closing The Loop. SpinRite. TLS Private Key Leakage. We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-884-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit newrelic.com/securitynow Secureworks.com/twit

All TWiT.tv Shows (MP3)
Security Now 884: TLS Private Key Leakage

All TWiT.tv Shows (MP3)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 113:15


Picture of the Week.  Patch Flashback Tuesday.  Facebook is cautiously creeping toward default E2E encryption.  VNC's inherent insecurity.  The need to control domain names.  And speaking of backup: Cyotek WebCopy.  Google's Ryan Sleevi Retweeted Jens Axboe.  SandSara Update from Ed Cano.  Closing The Loop.  SpinRite.  TLS Private Key Leakage.    We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-883-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit newrelic.com/securitynow Secureworks.com/twit

Security Now (Video HD)
SN 884: TLS Private Key Leakage - BIG patch Tuesday, Facebook E2E encryption, VNC insecurity, Cyotek WebCopy

Security Now (Video HD)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 113:15


Picture of the Week.  Patch Flashback Tuesday.  Facebook is cautiously creeping toward default E2E encryption.  VNC's inherent insecurity.  The need to control domain names.  And speaking of backup: Cyotek WebCopy.  Google's Ryan Sleevi Retweeted Jens Axboe.  SandSara Update from Ed Cano.  Closing The Loop.  SpinRite.  TLS Private Key Leakage.    We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-883-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit newrelic.com/securitynow Secureworks.com/twit

Radio Leo (Audio)
Security Now 884: TLS Private Key Leakage

Radio Leo (Audio)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 113:15


Picture of the Week.  Patch Flashback Tuesday.  Facebook is cautiously creeping toward default E2E encryption.  VNC's inherent insecurity.  The need to control domain names.  And speaking of backup: Cyotek WebCopy.  Google's Ryan Sleevi Retweeted Jens Axboe.  SandSara Update from Ed Cano.  Closing The Loop.  SpinRite.  TLS Private Key Leakage.    We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-883-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit newrelic.com/securitynow Secureworks.com/twit

Security Now (Video LO)
SN 884: TLS Private Key Leakage - BIG patch Tuesday, Facebook E2E encryption, VNC insecurity, Cyotek WebCopy

Security Now (Video LO)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 113:15


Picture of the Week. Patch Flashback Tuesday. Facebook is cautiously creeping toward default E2E encryption. VNC's inherent insecurity. The need to control domain names. And speaking of backup: Cyotek WebCopy. Google's Ryan Sleevi Retweeted Jens Axboe. SandSara Update from Ed Cano. Closing The Loop. SpinRite. TLS Private Key Leakage. We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-884-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit newrelic.com/securitynow Secureworks.com/twit

All TWiT.tv Shows (Video LO)
Security Now 884: TLS Private Key Leakage

All TWiT.tv Shows (Video LO)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 113:15


Picture of the Week.  Patch Flashback Tuesday.  Facebook is cautiously creeping toward default E2E encryption.  VNC's inherent insecurity.  The need to control domain names.  And speaking of backup: Cyotek WebCopy.  Google's Ryan Sleevi Retweeted Jens Axboe.  SandSara Update from Ed Cano.  Closing The Loop.  SpinRite.  TLS Private Key Leakage.    We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-883-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit newrelic.com/securitynow Secureworks.com/twit

Radio Leo (Video HD)
Security Now 884: TLS Private Key Leakage

Radio Leo (Video HD)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 113:15


Picture of the Week. Patch Flashback Tuesday. Facebook is cautiously creeping toward default E2E encryption. VNC's inherent insecurity. The need to control domain names. And speaking of backup: Cyotek WebCopy. Google's Ryan Sleevi Retweeted Jens Axboe. SandSara Update from Ed Cano. Closing The Loop. SpinRite. TLS Private Key Leakage. We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-884-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit newrelic.com/securitynow Secureworks.com/twit

Paul's Security Weekly
SWN #232 - UEFI, PyPI, Vishing, VNC, Sova, DOOM Deere, Mailchimp, & Hiding Photos

Paul's Security Weekly

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2022 32:10


This week Dr. Doug talks: UEFI, PyPI, vishing, VNC, Sova, Doom, Mailchimp, hiding photos, and is joined by Jason Wood on this episode of Security Weekly News!   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly   Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn232

Hack Naked News (Audio)
SWN #232 - UEFI, PyPI, Vishing, VNC, Sova, DOOM Deere, Mailchimp, & Hiding Photos

Hack Naked News (Audio)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2022 32:10


This week Dr. Doug talks: UEFI, PyPI, vishing, VNC, Sova, Doom, Mailchimp, hiding photos, and is joined by Jason Wood on this episode of Security Weekly News!   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly   Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn232

Hack Naked News (Video)
UEFI, PyPI, Vishing, VNC, Sova, DOOM Deere, Mailchimp, & Hiding Photos - SWN #232

Hack Naked News (Video)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2022 32:13


This week Dr. Doug talks: UEFI, PyPI, vishing, VNC, Sova, Doom, Mailchimp, hiding photos, and is joined by Jason Wood on this episode of Security Weekly News!   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn232

LINUX Unplugged
463: Humble Beginnings

LINUX Unplugged

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2022 53:07


One of the pioneers of the web, VNC, Webcams, and more joins us; plus we'll update you on a few projects we love. Special Guest: Quentin Stafford-Fraser.

All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
Humble Beginnings | LINUX Unplugged 463

All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2022


One of the pioneers of the web, VNC, Webcams, and more joins us; plus we'll update you on a few projects we love. Special Guest: Quentin Stafford-Fraser.

humble beginnings webcams vnc jupiter broadcasting linux unplugged
iOS Today (Video HI)
iOS 600: MAC-ximise Your Multi-Device Usage - Universal Control, Luna Display, Camo Studio

iOS Today (Video HI)

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2022 88:37


Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard share ways to get the most out of your Apple devices by making them work together. Universal Control Sidecar Luna Display Jump Desktop (RDP, VNC, Fluid) Alfred Remote Elgato Stream Deck Mobile iTunes Remote Transloader Camo – webcam for Mac and PC EpocCam Webcam for Mac and PC News Apple has released a new firmware version for AirTag Apple's Self Service Repair is now available Belkin now says 'it's too early' to talk about truly wireless chargers Shortcuts Corner Mack wants to know more about using NFC stickers in HomeKit automations Brianna is trying to add a shortcut to the Share Sheet from one browser (Brave) to open the current URL in Safari Feedback T-Bone needs help getting the Photos app to export JPEG images instead of HEIC App Caps Rosemary: Zones: Organize your life Mikah: Outlanders Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can contribute to iOS Today by leaving us a voicemail at 757-504-iPad (757-504-4723) or sending an email to iOSToday@TWiT.tv. Sponsors: eightsleep.com/ios wealthfront.com/iostoday

apple iphone universal mac brave ipads apple tv photos nfc apple watches device usage camo jpeg homekit ios 15 belkin universal control siri shortcuts vnc mikah sargent club twit rosemary orchard luna display iphone tips ios today ios tips ios 15.4 rosemary orchard download camo studio shortcuts tips iostoday twit shortcuts tricks iphone app recommendations ipados tips ios 15.4 beta
iOS Today (MP3)
iOS 600: MAC-ximise Your Multi-Device Usage - Universal Control, Luna Display, Camo Studio

iOS Today (MP3)

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2022 88:12


Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard share ways to get the most out of your Apple devices by making them work together. Universal Control Sidecar Luna Display Jump Desktop (RDP, VNC, Fluid) Alfred Remote Elgato Stream Deck Mobile iTunes Remote Transloader Camo – webcam for Mac and PC EpocCam Webcam for Mac and PC News Apple has released a new firmware version for AirTag Apple's Self Service Repair is now available Belkin now says 'it's too early' to talk about truly wireless chargers Shortcuts Corner Mack wants to know more about using NFC stickers in HomeKit automations Brianna is trying to add a shortcut to the Share Sheet from one browser (Brave) to open the current URL in Safari Feedback T-Bone needs help getting the Photos app to export JPEG images instead of HEIC App Caps Rosemary: Zones: Organize your life Mikah: Outlanders Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can contribute to iOS Today by leaving us a voicemail at 757-504-iPad (757-504-4723) or sending an email to iOSToday@TWiT.tv. Sponsors: eightsleep.com/ios wealthfront.com/iostoday

apple iphone universal mac brave ipads apple tv photos nfc apple watches device usage camo jpeg homekit ios 15 belkin universal control siri shortcuts vnc mikah sargent club twit rosemary orchard luna display iphone tips ios today ios tips ios 15.4 rosemary orchard download camo studio shortcuts tips iostoday twit shortcuts tricks iphone app recommendations ipados tips ios 15.4 beta
All TWiT.tv Shows (MP3)
iOS Today 600: MAC-ximise Your Multi-Device Usage

All TWiT.tv Shows (MP3)

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2022 88:12


Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard share ways to get the most out of your Apple devices by making them work together. Universal Control Sidecar Luna Display Jump Desktop (RDP, VNC, Fluid) Alfred Remote Elgato Stream Deck Mobile iTunes Remote Transloader Camo – webcam for Mac and PC EpocCam Webcam for Mac and PC News Apple has released a new firmware version for AirTag Apple's Self Service Repair is now available Belkin now says 'it's too early' to talk about truly wireless chargers Shortcuts Corner Mack wants to know more about using NFC stickers in HomeKit automations Brianna is trying to add a shortcut to the Share Sheet from one browser (Brave) to open the current URL in Safari Feedback T-Bone needs help getting the Photos app to export JPEG images instead of HEIC App Caps Rosemary: Zones: Organize your life Mikah: Outlanders Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can contribute to iOS Today by leaving us a voicemail at 757-504-iPad (757-504-4723) or sending an email to iOSToday@TWiT.tv. Sponsors: eightsleep.com/ios wealthfront.com/iostoday

apple iphone mac brave ipads apple tv photos nfc apple watches device usage jpeg homekit ios 15 belkin siri shortcuts vnc mikah sargent club twit rosemary orchard iphone tips ios today ios tips ios 15.4 rosemary orchard download shortcuts tips iostoday twit shortcuts tricks ipados tips ios 15.4 beta iphone app recommendations
iOS Today (Video)
iOS 600: MAC-ximise Your Multi-Device Usage - Universal Control, Luna Display, Camo Studio

iOS Today (Video)

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2022 88:37


Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard share ways to get the most out of your Apple devices by making them work together. Universal Control Sidecar Luna Display Jump Desktop (RDP, VNC, Fluid) Alfred Remote Elgato Stream Deck Mobile iTunes Remote Transloader Camo – webcam for Mac and PC EpocCam Webcam for Mac and PC News Apple has released a new firmware version for AirTag Apple's Self Service Repair is now available Belkin now says 'it's too early' to talk about truly wireless chargers Shortcuts Corner Mack wants to know more about using NFC stickers in HomeKit automations Brianna is trying to add a shortcut to the Share Sheet from one browser (Brave) to open the current URL in Safari Feedback T-Bone needs help getting the Photos app to export JPEG images instead of HEIC App Caps Rosemary: Zones: Organize your life Mikah: Outlanders Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can contribute to iOS Today by leaving us a voicemail at 757-504-iPad (757-504-4723) or sending an email to iOSToday@TWiT.tv. Sponsors: eightsleep.com/ios wealthfront.com/iostoday

apple iphone universal mac brave ipads apple tv photos nfc apple watches device usage camo jpeg homekit ios 15 belkin universal control siri shortcuts vnc mikah sargent club twit rosemary orchard luna display iphone tips ios today ios tips ios 15.4 rosemary orchard download camo studio shortcuts tips iostoday twit shortcuts tricks iphone app recommendations ipados tips ios 15.4 beta
All TWiT.tv Shows (Video LO)
iOS Today 600: MAC-ximise Your Multi-Device Usage

All TWiT.tv Shows (Video LO)

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2022 88:37


Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard share ways to get the most out of your Apple devices by making them work together. Universal Control Sidecar Luna Display Jump Desktop (RDP, VNC, Fluid) Alfred Remote Elgato Stream Deck Mobile iTunes Remote Transloader Camo – webcam for Mac and PC EpocCam Webcam for Mac and PC News Apple has released a new firmware version for AirTag Apple's Self Service Repair is now available Belkin now says 'it's too early' to talk about truly wireless chargers Shortcuts Corner Mack wants to know more about using NFC stickers in HomeKit automations Brianna is trying to add a shortcut to the Share Sheet from one browser (Brave) to open the current URL in Safari Feedback T-Bone needs help getting the Photos app to export JPEG images instead of HEIC App Caps Rosemary: Zones: Organize your life Mikah: Outlanders Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can contribute to iOS Today by leaving us a voicemail at 757-504-iPad (757-504-4723) or sending an email to iOSToday@TWiT.tv. Sponsors: eightsleep.com/ios wealthfront.com/iostoday

apple iphone mac brave ipads apple tv photos nfc apple watches device usage jpeg homekit ios 15 belkin siri shortcuts vnc mikah sargent club twit rosemary orchard iphone tips ios today ios tips ios 15.4 rosemary orchard download shortcuts tips iostoday twit shortcuts tricks ipados tips ios 15.4 beta iphone app recommendations
DekNet
Acceso Remoto con Emmanuel

DekNet

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2022 90:58


https://www.spreaker.com/show/inhttps://t.me/DekNet

DekNet
Acceso remoto

DekNet

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2022 37:22


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSH3nVGLtSEhttps://edovia.com/en/screens-mac/https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/

SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast

Qakbot Infection With Cobalt Strike and VNC Activity https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Qakbot+infection+with+Cobalt+Strike+and+VNC+activity/28448/ Gh0stCringe RAT Being Distributed to Vulnerable Database Servers https://asec.ahnlab.com/en/32572/ dompdf 0 day https://positive.security/blog/dompdf-rce OpenSSL DoS Vulnerability https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20220315.txt

SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast

Qakbot Infection With Cobalt Strike and VNC Activity https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Qakbot+infection+with+Cobalt+Strike+and+VNC+activity/28448/ Gh0stCringe RAT Being Distributed to Vulnerable Database Servers https://asec.ahnlab.com/en/32572/ dompdf 0 day https://positive.security/blog/dompdf-rce OpenSSL DoS Vulnerability https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20220315.txt

SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast

Web Filter Misconfiguration Abused for Recognisance https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Abusing+Web+Filters+Misconfiguration+for+Reconnaissance/25538/ Local Malware Analysis with Malice https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Local+Malware+Analysis+with+Malice/25544/ Multiple Vulnerabilities in VNC https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/vnc-vulnerabilities/31462/