Liminal AI - RTX Spark, Project Solara, Scout, & Much More!

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell are here, and we have lots to talk about. Of course, Microsoft Build is on. They love Stevie Batish's explanation of what Microsoft Solera is all about. I think you'll love it, too. Jensen Wong's amazing keynote at Computex announced some new Windows machines. There is a ton of Windows news, and it's next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell. Episode 986. Recorded Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026. Liminal AI. It's time for Windows Weekly. Yes, you Microsoft lovers, all you winners and dozers. This is the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft with two of the smartest whip-smart folks in the... [00:01:05] Speaker 2: I'm not that smart, Leo. I just engage with co-pilot by mistake. Whoops! It's not hard to do. I feel like it's how much people interact with it. Like, oh, what are you doing? What? How did you get here? [00:01:17] Speaker 1: Oh, you pressed the co-pilot key, Paul. That's Paul Thorat. [00:01:20] Speaker 2: Is that a co-pilot? [00:01:21] Speaker 1: T-H-U-R-R-O-doublegood.com. He is also the author of so many fabulous books, including D&Shittify Windows, The Field Guide to Windows 11, and Windows Everywhere. Hello, Paulie. Hello, Leo. And how are you, Mr. Richard Campbell in Copenhagen? [00:01:40] Speaker 3: I'm doing very well. It was a busy day-to-day. I opened the conference with a keynote called After the AI Hype, and I did the last talk today on building data centers in space. Oh, wow. [00:01:53] Speaker 1: Yeah. And do you know, you used to do these geek talks as kind of part of your, you know, .NET Rocks with Carl Franklin. You'd have these geek talks. [00:02:02] Speaker 3: Are you going to do either of those in your .NET Rocks? Yeah, I think the data center one will end up being a DNR at some point. So if it fits the genre well, it's fun. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. [00:02:15] Speaker 1: Do we still need data centers? Record the AI Hype thing, because who knows from day-to-day where the hype flies. [00:02:22] Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a version. The one I did this morning was streamed to YouTube. It's already up. [00:02:27] Speaker 1: Oh, nice. Oh, we can see that on YouTube. [00:02:30] Speaker 3: Yeah. [00:02:31] Speaker 1: Under, what's the? At NDC Copenhagen. NDC Copenhagen. And you have to say it just like that. That's it. Just like that. Well, this was a busy, busy week for you, gentlemen. Microsoft Build is going on. I know that because Christina Warren wasn't on the show yesterday. She is at GitHub and she was at Build. And then. She was building. And then that's in San Francisco. And then in a completely different time zone, in a land far, far away, Computex in Taipei. Wow. And both had big announcements. Or to put it in the words of Paul on the show notes. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my Gerd. [00:03:12] Speaker 2: I get overwhelmed easily. What happened? There's a lot going on. Monday was a lot of ranting. Yeah. Jensen Huang's keynote at 6 a.m. My time. Wow. Yeah. So Jensen and the CEO of Qualcomm, geez, I'm driving up. I'm losing my mind. We're both in at Computex, so they could not appear at Microsoft's conference, you know, unfortunately, time for the same day. So they did have stuff to say that was relevant, however. [00:03:45] Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Time relevant. Although I thought it was interesting. Jensen's big announcement was actually not a Qualcomm chip. Well, no. [00:03:54] Speaker 2: It's an idiot tech chip. So which we knew. Well, right. OK. I mean, we knew this was coming, right? This has been rumored and there have been leaks and, you know, whatever. We still, I got to say, I'm not super excited about the lack of detail here, but from what I can tell, and this makes sense given the nature of NVIDIA, obviously these things are going to be GPU heavy, right? Which is kind of a first for, you know, the Windows on ARM space, I guess, if that makes sense. So, you know, we'll see. I don't know what to make of this. It's so strange. So, three nanometer process, I should say, sorry, the rumors were that there were two levels of chip, N1 and N1X. The thing they announced is N1X, which we know because Jensen said it by mistake a couple of times. Oh, really? [00:04:47] Speaker 1: Yes. [00:04:47] Speaker 2: Nice. But it's called the NVIDIA RTX Spark is the marketing name or the go-to market name. TSMC, three nanometer, a 20-core Grace CPU connected to a Blackwell RTX GPU. Which, in my brain, is more workstation than gaming, right? Horsepower, for sure. It's definitely powerful. 6,144 CUDA cores. Wow. And then whatever this means, fifth generation TENS, of course. It's like, there's going to be 128 gigabytes of integrated unified memory, as they say. Yep. Microsoft has been working with NVIDIA to adapt Windows to this. And this is going to, I'm going to talk more about this a little bit later as we talk about build. But, you know, in the back of your brain, just keep this idea in place, which is, we've talked about this notion that two years ago, Microsoft introduced CoPilot Plus PC, which is MPU-based on-device AI. Lots of people have GPUs, whether it's an integrated GPU, dedicated GPU, laptop, desktop, doesn't matter, that are adequately powerful, or more so, even to run those CoPilot Plus PC local AI tasks. But they do not. You're kind of wondering when or if that would ever change. They did not announce that, but there are some changes that if you, I don't know if I got this in the session or for something I read, but are basically being described as bringing CoPilot Plus PC capabilities to other PCs, in particular this thing, right, which does have an MPU. I don't know how powerful it is, but Microsoft is adapting Windows so that those local AI things will run on the GPU in this case. And we'll, again, like, we'll get to that. So we've been waiting for this, right? I mean, NVIDIA is... It's black. It looks shiny. Yep. Oh, I'm sorry. I should say, too, Microsoft also announced for their part a laptop that will run this system. They're calling it Surface Laptop Ultra. It's not expected until the second half of the year, along with all the other PC makers, you know, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Dell, etc. Everybody's making one offer off of this Spark. [00:07:06] Speaker 1: Just like the DJX Spark desktop, right? [00:07:08] Speaker 2: It's just a laptop version, basically. Is that right? Yeah. Although I think the chipset in this is new-ish. I mean, you know, a new design. But yes, I mean, I think that's fair to say. Well, it has to be, because you can't put a desktop chip in a laptop. I mean, Castell, of course you can. But so, like I said, they announced this. Microsoft announced their Surface Laptop Ultra. Between the two of them announcements, there's a little bit of information about the technical aspects of this. So I was thinking, well, build's going to happen. And of course, they're going to talk about this at Build. And they have a little bit. But again, very vague. Like, we don't really know exactly. And I think they're just waiting until we get, you know, closer. Pricing? Who knows? Availability? Who knows? I think it's going to be several thousand dollars. [00:08:07] Speaker 1: More than that, because didn't they say it's going to have a lot of RAM? Yeah, 128. [00:08:12] Speaker 3: Yeah. My gut said 10,000 bucks easy. [00:08:16] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking. Yeah, I was like north of four. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. How can you, who would pay 10 grand for a laptop? [00:08:23] Speaker 3: Uh, you know, former next customers. The AI hype is real and they're going to keep going. [00:08:29] Speaker 1: Well, Apple's going to have a similar device probably end of the year. I don't know how much RAM they'll put in there, but more RAM is good. [00:08:37] Speaker 2: The way this was described was almost like it's, you have a data center on your desk. You know, in other words, this thing can run AI to the degree that right now requires cloud AI, right? Too bad we don't have the models. Well, I mean, that might, that might be part of the delay here, right? Yeah, maybe this fall. Yeah. We'll see. If, well, like I said, I'm going to talk about the, the kind of back end, the software part of this in a bit, but it's, this is very interesting. Um, yeah, I will, the part of the leak. And it's definitely this push towards local model running. Right. Which honestly is a major theme of build, even though they didn't really position it that way. Right. [00:09:22] Speaker 3: If you say that out loud, it's like, why would you want this much horsepower on your desk? If you weren't just going to run the model local. [00:09:29] Speaker 2: Most people don't need or want this much power in the desk, but as local models evolve and get better. And as the software on top of it, especially windows evolves, you know, they become more capable and, and yeah, we're going to get there. There's no doubt about it, but, um, let me see if I can find the language in here. Cause I did, I put this in, I just threw it in the notes as a little reminder to myself and now I can't find it. Cause that's how my brain works. Um, yeah, they call it, so when you think about on-device AI, um, we're talking about what I would call small language models as opposed to large language models that run up in the cloud. Just as an easy differentiator, I think these lines are going to, you know, blend together or whatever, but, um, in more than one place, Microsoft referred to this as unmetered AI. Meaning it's locally machine, so you're not paying for the token thing and you know, whatever your usage costs paid for the compute yourself. You get to run it as hard as you want to run it. It's private. [00:10:28] Speaker 1: It's on your device. I mean, I love this idea. If, if I can get a model that's going to be comparable to a frontier model. Yeah. Right. [00:10:35] Speaker 2: Um, so, uh, I mean, it's interesting to compare what we do know to what we found, what we think we found out through leaks and assuming that stuff's correct. Right. So like a typical laptop CPU these days is actually kind of hard to pin down, honestly, but, um, uh, in the old days, meaning before the core ultra chips, like on the Intel side, they would have the U series core, whatever generation. And those things U series would typically like be 15 Watts. Right now we have a multiple, not just multiple cores, but multiple kinds of cores. And so there's kind of a range of power, um, that we used to describe, uh, their power consumption, essentially. So I would say a typical laptop today probably is somewhere, you know, 10 to 30 Watts, maybe somewhere in there. Um, the lower end chip that they did not announce was supposed to run at 18 to 45 Watts, the N1 X, which is the one they did announce runs at 45 to 80 Watts. So without, but I took from that before you run the rest of the machine, you've already need a power supply right now. Oh yeah. That's a lot of power, but that's gaming laptops. That's portal walkstations. That's desktop PCs. I mean, this is, you know, it's not a thin and light, although they were talking thin and light, you know, so we'll see. I, um, the Ram range could be 16 to one 28. They came to market with one 28, the, the Ram on the lower end, one is eight to 16. Supposedly they did not even announce that. So I don't know, you know, I, I feel like we are going to see the other one too. There'll be a lower end solution for cheaper computers. I think we're going to see lower end configurations of this thing, but I think the go-to-market is very much to, um, attract those people who are heavy, really heavy users. Like, uh, yeah, engineers, maybe craters, developers. [00:12:21] Speaker ?: Yeah. [00:12:22] Speaker 1: Because NVIDIA already offers a, basically a raspberry PI with CUDA cores on it. This is cheap and can't run diddly basically. Yeah. [00:12:32] Speaker 3: I mean, so cause you can run it. Doesn't mean it's usable. [00:12:36] Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, they have a new model. It's okay. I mean, they have a very small model and Google has Gemma. [00:12:44] Speaker 2: I think this is just about getting people on CUDA, frankly. I mean, I, you know, which is, it's totally what this is about completely. This is CUDA lock in. This is like, if we can just own the whole market. Yeah, like eventually this surging market thing that we're part of, which is insanity is going to slow down or whatever. And, but now we have the market, you know, so we'll, and this is why I'm kind of resistant to it. [00:13:07] Speaker 3: Cause I, uh, yeah, well, we, and we've seen PCL sales drop across the board. I think it's exactly that. And now you're going to ship arguably the most expensive laptop ever made, right? Your timing couldn't be much worse, except, well, except for that part where it's that message about local AI. [00:13:24] Speaker 2: But unless the goal isn't, I mean, look, the goal can't be volume. It's the PC market. They're going to sell 200 million ish computers this year. And only a tiny percentage are going to be these kinds of things. So this is the same situation. We had a call come two years ago where at, you know, at that time, a smartphone market that was over a billion devices a year. And you're like, why, why even bother? Like, why would you even try to go to the PC market at your, if you got 10% somehow, and I don't think they have really, but let's say they did. So you're selling like 20 million of these things a year compared to a billion, like. Right. It's what Apple used to call the pro line. [00:14:02] Speaker 1: This is for, but that's why I agree with you, Richard, that this is more about CUDA. It's about mindshare, not market share. [00:14:11] Speaker 3: Sure. Well, and it's about, you know, the big aspect here is investors are worrying that these investments in AI aren't going to last. And you've got to show motion. So the idea that we're pushing on new machines that are going to open more doors for more users. Yeah. Anything to keep the investors engaged and not running for the hills. Well, and enterprise is starting to say, holy cow, look at our token bill. [00:14:35] Speaker 2: Yeah. Right. Well, yeah. So the timing in that sense is actually pretty good because all the major AIs are switching to that consumption model and they, and bills are going to go up, not exponentially, but a lot. But, and we, I think that a lot of the people, companies, whatever, who are using AI today and paying 20 bucks a month or 200 bucks a month or whatever they're paying, don't understand the true cost. And they're about to, you know, they're about to find out. [00:15:03] Speaker 3: If my business is coming in. And so. Yeah. You had to have the alternative in your hand. So you don't abandon the tech. Just as a way you're using it. [00:15:11] Speaker 2: Just as a little bit of commentary that I'm kind of still pushing through my brain, you know, Microsoft doesn't get a lot of credit for this kind of thing because they actually don't do this kind of thing a lot, especially recently. But they were kind of out early on this. If you think about it, I mean, when they announced Copilot plus BC two years ago, my evaluation of at the time was like you, what you should be pushing because it's arm and it's Snapdragon is efficiency, reliability, power management, battery life, you know, and then just general. Well, excellent performance, but whatever. But they were very much pushing local AI. And it's tough because I, no matter what you do on a computer, you sit there all day long or you just use it occasionally, whatever use web browsers, email and whatever applications you might have some one to seven little tasks within individual apps that might be better or more efficient because of an MPU, especially if you're a creator. There are certain features and windows you only get from a Copilot plus BC. So you either do or do not know that that's the case, whatever it's, but it's not a reason to buy it. Right. I, it, it's still to this day is not the reason to buy the thing. So this is another, you know, here it is two years later, this will be a lot more powerful, apparently be a lot more consumer, a lot more power, but two years have gone by. It had a Copilot plus PC. I don't think you can say it could has moved the Neil per se on like a local AI usage or awareness or PC sales or however you want to say it. Um, and so this is, it's like, Oh, we're going to try this again, sort of, but I mean, you know, Microsoft, look, we're going to talk about Stevie Batiste again in a little while. And, uh, he was the guy, you know, three, five years ago, whatever it was, who gave that very eloquent description of those three AI app models or a app structures. But the following year, he talked about MPUs versus GPUs and for, for a laptop, when you can offload a certain AI tasks to an MPU, you get better performance, but you also don't impact the battery at all, which is not something that happens with a CPU or a GPU. So it's still important, but if you do have the big GPU, you bought it for a reason, you want to use it. This is the argument we've always made, like you should, yeah, you should be able to use it for anything you want. Why a laptop? It's, I mean, because that's what people, that's the mass, that's the mass market. [00:17:35] Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So this is to put a local AI into the hands of the masses. Yeah. I think it's, well, I wouldn't say, I don't know. Yeah. [00:17:45] Speaker 2: Not, not at the top of the line machine. [00:17:47] Speaker 3: Developers want laptops. [00:17:48] Speaker 2: This is for the classes, not the masses, Leo, um, to riff on, uh, what's his face? Jack Trammell. Um, right. I mean, but, but it will come down. I mean, I, I think this is to jumpstart. Uh, more adoption of local AI across the board from developers, um, and. Well, to developers pretty much front of the developer space, but, but not just developers that want to use it locally for their own needs, but, uh, developers who are creating apps that may use local AI features instead of just relying on. [00:18:21] Speaker 1: So the Microsoft Surface laptop ultra, which Microsoft said will be the fat best, fastest laptop we've ever made is arm, right? Arm. It's not Qualcomm. Right. [00:18:34] Speaker 2: So, um, that's interesting. Well, I mean, there's Intel and AMD and the x86 space. There are, have been other. But this is their first non-Qualcomm surface. Right. Yeah. [00:18:48] Speaker 1: So, I mean, one of the non-Qualcomm arm surface, I guess. [00:18:52] Speaker 2: Uh, yeah. In the modern it for Windows 11. I mean, the, the original surface RT, which was arm was in video by the way, but, um, oh, but yes. Yeah. [00:19:04] Speaker 1: Way back when, like the Tegra X or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is, yeah. I mean, look, the thing is they had, we thought they had a Qualcomm exclusive deal for a long [00:19:13] Speaker 2: time. Yeah. This has never been con, you know, confirmed, but the, the story is that there's not X amount of months or years. They had this exclusivity thing. Right. Um, in return for that, of course, I, Qualcomm has done an incredible job, right? It's for Snapdragon X, X2, unbelievable. Um, and they're addressing what I would call like kind of the, the right part of the marketplace for the mainstream. Like they're, you know, uh, the first devices were often for at the time. It's funny because they, these would be cheap, but kind of premium thin and light laptops. You know, they, it was designed to be attractive to people who might want to upgrade and, um, spend a little bit money, a little bit more money, maybe, although they weren't actually more expensive than other things. Um, and then they've scaled it downward and we'll talk about this a little bit later because they scaled it downward yet again. And that's going to help out a lot this year with the component crisis. But, um, this, yeah, this fills, um, a need, I guess, at the high end of the arm side of [00:20:09] Speaker 1: the, yeah, I think we're going to talk more about, you know, these, um, other, you know, like Snapdragon C and stuff. Do you think that the market is now starting to be high-end Nvidia low and, uh, uh, snapdrag and C and Intel, and then kind of medium Intel AMD? I mean, is it starting to break this just happened? [00:20:33] Speaker 2: So I can't, I don't want to make any, it's too early actions or whatever. [00:20:37] Speaker 3: I, I, I, this is clearly on anybody's hands yet. They're just being announced. [00:20:40] Speaker 2: Yeah. This is September and we don't have detail. We don't have benchmarks. We don't have, you know, anything. So it's like, look, it looks great. [00:20:48] Speaker 3: Um, but what are you going to be the list? Paul? That's the question. Is an ultra going to show up at your door? Ooh, yeah. [00:20:55] Speaker 1: I dunno, somebody said it. I thought this was hysterical. Maybe it was the verge. This is a, this is a replacement for that snapdragon dev machine. [00:21:03] Speaker 2: Oh yeah. No, those things are totally related in the, in the same way that a Lamborghini is a replacement for model T, you know, like, I thought that was a very weird thing. I don't know. I mean, the dev box, all the dev box was, was like a Mac mini style, not all in one, uh, you know, mini form, mini form factor. It was essentially a laptop chipset, right? Like, so the goal of that was just to get people, uh, developers on arm, you know, obviously, I mean, this is, this is, uh, this is different. I mean, it's arm. Yes. But I arm is already established with, there are, there are no, there's no remaining problems there. They're scaling upward. [00:21:39] Speaker 1: Didn't Jensen say it will run every app that runs on windows, something like that. [00:21:45] Speaker 2: I mean, he, he really was at great pains to say, because you can't read a review of any Snapdragon laptop, even as recently as this week without someone saying, well, there's, you know, you have to deal with compatibility. No, you don't, no, you don't, you don't, that's ridiculous. That's the, I'm sorry, that's silly, but he has to say that because that's the perception, but the other half of that, by the way, is if you went to Computex, which I did not, they're showing demos of games running on this thing. And of course those things are emulated, right? He held it up. Oh, he showed it. Okay. Yeah. So that's, you know, interesting. I, I will, you know, you could run games on Snapdragon X. You can run a few more games or run games a little bit better on X2, but emulation is great for an app. It's not necessarily great for games, which is why we have all those other things like, you know, super resolution and, uh, you know, whatever else that they do to try to make these things just kind of run better and video is benefiting from all that work. It's just, you know, it's not like they're starting, it's not like they're not, it's not like a, I don't like a big block engine that just is super fast. So we can just run this thing. Like it has to, you know, work still has to occur under the covers in a house. We've had two years of that, two years plus really. Um, so they're going to benefit from that. So their GPU, like, uh, you know, on a normal x86 laptop with an RTX, whatever, uh, DGPU games run great, like call of duty runs great on those, uh, like really great, like a hundred something frames per second, full res, all the details on it's awesome. That's x86. So if you can get a game like that to run at like 60 frames a second on this thing, that's also awesome. So that would, you know, that's amazing, especially for something that's emulated. Right. [00:23:29] Speaker 1: Um, this feels like such a a big victory for, uh, Microsoft. They were front and center and it was very clear that these were windows machines. Yeah. Uh, that this was really, uh, I thought very interesting. [00:23:44] Speaker 2: I just, this is what, this is why I mentioned, you know, we don't usually give them credit for this cause they don't usually do this, but they actually came out very early and publicly about local AI and were ignored completely, you know, pretty much. Right. Um, and I dunno, that's maybe that they should, maybe they shouldn't have pushed that part of it so hard, but, um, but like, you know, and I mentioned Steven, we're going to talk about again, you know, a couple of three years ago, whatever that was when he talked about MPUs, he really made a real, a good case for why these, uh, types of chip or, um, whatever they are, I guess their chips inside of an SOC, um, are so important in the portable space, but you know, that's that thing we keep talking about. You have a desktop computer or a laptop with a dedicated GP or a GP on a card. It's got dedicated Ram, it's hundreds of tops, not 40 or 85 tops, um, several hundred tops. In many cases should be able to blur the background and paint or whatever. You know, imagine. Yeah. [00:24:40] Speaker 1: The model I have in my mind and we, Steve Gibson, uh, talked about this yesterday too, is a home server, a NAS maybe, or what I have for the framework desktop, which you then use the language device. Yeah. And, and that's, what's running them. You know, that has all the horsepower. It is, has all the electrical power. [00:24:58] Speaker 2: You know, some microsystems called and said, the network is the computer Leo. [00:25:02] Speaker 1: Um, and no, I look, I, that's just the model in my mind. I mean, I don't know why you would want it on a laptop. I, if I have a laptop, I'm going to SSH in to my big machine or something. [00:25:14] Speaker 2: You wouldn't want this, right? Unless you were a developer, but I would want it as a desktop. But the reason you want local AI on a laptop, just in general. Right. And, and even today it works offline. It's private. It's your data. Right. It's not going up to the cloud. [00:25:29] Speaker 1: It's, there's reasons, right? So that means you want the biggest machine you can possibly get to run that local model. Right. And that's really not well. [00:25:37] Speaker 2: You're considering how limited information. Well, but that was the point. The point of the MPU was you don't need that super high. I mean, even though there's a good computers, but. [00:25:46] Speaker 1: Well, you're going to demonstrate that to me, because that ain't the case today. Right. You need a lot of RAM. You need a lot of horsepower. You need a lot of electricity to run. [00:25:54] Speaker 2: Well, no. Yeah. To do the thing you're doing in the cloud, but that's not all that AI is. Right. It's not, you know, you're, if you're going to fire up a bunch of agents and have them go off and do whatever they do. Yeah. I mean, you're going to need more power, but, or a cloud-based thing. But I think this is just the market evolving to the, you know, I think these things are converging. The local AI is getting better. The local hardware is getting better. I mean, I think our makes a huge difference just in general. [00:26:23] Speaker 1: This is primarily for inference and I would say primarily for coding. Is that right or no? Your place games. No, I don't. Yeah. I mean, yes. Oh yeah. It's a, it's a general general purpose computer. Not going to deny that, but the market is selling this expensive. You can get a cheaper gaming machine. The market they're selling this to is I would think coders, but I don't know. Yeah. And I would call it engineering, science, engineering. [00:26:51] Speaker 2: Yeah. Maybe you're right. Maybe CAD, but, but developers, of course, it's not going to be something on someone's, you know, desk at American express, you know, taking calls from customers. [00:27:01] Speaker 1: I mean, did they talk about, because I think this is under estimated and I haven't seen a lot of numbers, but, but it turns out throughput, RAM throughput is really, really important. Yeah. And there is a big, in fact, some people have complained that the DGX spark just doesn't have very good RAM throughput. [00:27:20] Speaker 2: So I'd have to go and even look at that to figure out what the architecture is there, but it's probably just a standard. It's probably, you know, so, so dim. [00:27:27] Speaker 1: That's really important. And actually Apple has a pretty good story on that with its unified RAM. So yeah. [00:27:33] Speaker 2: And I like to see throughput numbers is what I guess I'm saying. Yep. Yeah. And that we don't have a lot of the details. Yeah. That's part of the point. Yeah. Right. We're just talking. So on, I know on Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, which is where the RAM is integrated into the die, the RAM throughput is not double, but it's close to double. Right. You know, that's how important that is. [00:27:55] Speaker 1: It's huge. It's everything. Yeah. Yep. Let me take a little break. And we have so much more to talk about. We're just scratching the surface of Computex build. And Richard Campbell came and went like a ghost. He's like the wind. But we will have more in just a moment. You're watching the windows weekly with Richard Campbell in Copenhagen, Paul Therot and McCungie and Leo Laporte in my attic. Attica, no, not that attic. This episode of our fabulous show brought to you by our fabulous sponsor, Delete Me. And man, you need this today. You need this today. Have you ever wondered how much of your personal information is out there on the internet for anyone to see? I think nowadays we're kind of more aware of this than ever. 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Get 20% off your delete me plan when you go to join delete me.com/twit and use the promo code TWIT at checkout. And the only way to get 20% off is to go to join delete me.com/twit and then make sure you enter the code TWIT at checkout. That's join delete me.com/twit and the offer code is TWIT. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and doing really important stuff. Back to the show we go. We had just begun. We've only, in the words of the Carpenters, just begun to talk about the Windows world and Computex anti-speak on mute. [00:33:09] Speaker 2: Yep. So I looked this up while you're doing the ad there, but they wish I were on mute right about right about now. I just want to say, yes, sir. Go ahead. First gen Snapdragon X, the memory bandwidth was 138 gigabits per second, gigabytes per second, I guess. Snapdragon X two plus elite is 152. So a small gain. And then if you go up to X two elite, it's a 50% gain from that. So 228 gigabits per second. And this makes a difference in, in, in AI. Yep. It makes a difference in everything. I mean, but yes, especially in AI. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, yeah, I just, I was just curious. I, yeah. Okay. So, uh, yesterday it was the build keynote. It was two and a half to three hours long. I completely lost my mind by the end of it, but unlike the past, um, I'm going to call it 10 years or so. Um, there was a bunch of stuff in there for windows and for the client, which I think is kind of cool. Yeah. [00:34:07] Speaker 3: Yeah. Look, the new stories about windows is amazing. When does it build? How many builds do we have with nothing about windows? [00:34:13] Speaker 2: Right. And, uh, this is, um, I think this is part partially due to the fact that cloud computing just didn't have anything interesting for windows. That was the focus for such a long time. Um, I don't think it made it very interesting for people who had considered themselves to be enthusiasts or whatever. Um, whereas AI, even if you don't like AI, like it's generating news and excitement, it's interesting, like this stuff happening. So that to me, this is interesting. Um, Microsoft, I mean, this goes back to windows 10 really, but they've been trying to position windows as the best desktop platform for developers for a long time. But this is why we have WSL, the windows, uh, subsystem for Linux, et cetera, et cetera. Um, you know, I don't remember the timing of any of this anymore, but, you know, dead box came out of this, all the improvements to terminal, et cetera, et cetera. Um, I have to say super excited. I, I, unless I'm misremembering, which I could, cause it was a long event. I think the first person that came on stage that wasn't Satya Nadella was, uh, Kayla cinnamon, who does, um, I think developer advocacy, but she's in terminal, right? And she, and she has an awesome, uh, YouTube channel by the way, where she does a lot of terminal tips and tricks and stuff. Excellent. And some great run asses with me too. Yeah, she's great. So she did some, some terminal demos like right up front, which I thought was really cool. But, um, so they announced a bunch of things. There is a, uh, something called the windows developer configuration, which is what this new, these new NVIDIA based PCs are going to ship in, which is a wind get or a windows package manager based, um, configuration that creates a distraction free environment for developers. Now I didn't say this, but to me that sounds like Xbox mode, but it's like developer mode, you know, for developers or whatever. Right. Um, so less stuff going on, um, you know, widgets aren't popping up, notifications are off, et cetera, et cetera. Um, there are optimizations in there for things like visual studio code, GitHub copilot, um, WSL, et cetera, et cetera. So that is actually out there now, if you want it, you can just install it. Like it's, I think it's on GitHub. Um, so if you want to just, you know, one line and auto configure computer to be less annoying, that's something interesting. Dev config can be annoying, annoying too, just in a different way. Yep. It's in dark mode. You know, I don't know. Um, yeah, the, uh, we talked about this at least twice previously, but back in January, Microsoft announced something called the, I think it's the windows app development CLI, the win app CLI, um, which as originally released in 0.01, you know, forum didn't, I didn't quite understand the point of it. They later added support for workloads like.net and all the.net frameworks, like, you know, WPF, et cetera. And I was like, okay, kind of interesting, but now it's making sense. Um, because they, a, that thing is now generally available and there is a plugin for it called the windows developer could fit. Nope. Called the windows developer skills that allows you to use the win CLI to create in this case, native when UI three apps from the command line. And I'm going to talk about that in the back of the book because I did it. And, um, okay, very interesting. So what I'm going to say though, just here is that CLIs are huge this year all of a sudden. And it's the same reason that Markdown is huge. It's, um, it's because of AI and, uh, agents in particular. Thinking tech space. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:37:37] Speaker 3: So .net rocks a few weeks ago. That was like, build your, uh, CLI first. [00:37:43] Speaker 2: Yeah. And this is that thing we talked about a couple of weeks ago, you know, back in the day, Mike, I think it was exchange 20, 2007. We're going to build this thing in PowerShell and then we're going to build GUI on top of it. That made sense to me kind of architecturally or whatever. But, um, now in the AI era, we have, um, a newfound need for this kind of thing. So we have apps that exist and we live in kind of a screen scraping world because we don't, meaning, you know, compute use where we have to deal with what people have. But apps are also can be, you know, can be adapted to expose their capabilities, individual features through a programmable interface, which on, I think on Android is like app intense maybe. And on, um, windows it's, it's called AI actions or just app actions. And this is when you can right click on a file and file explorer and go to AI action submenu and then like remove background with paint or whatever. Right. It's exposing a feature which is okay for people, but it's awesome for AI. And that's why that exists. And then this, when the CLI stuff is the same thing, it's it, but for agents specifically, right, that, uh, having a C CLI interface to anything helps you do a bunch of things. But one of the key ones is grounding AI in something in particular. So when you use this windows developer skills plugin, the, the, whatever AI you choose, you can use, you know, cloud or open AI or copilot and then eventually everything. But today those things, um, it will only be grounded in all of the documentation and learnings they have for whatever environment you're working in. So if it's when you, why one of the problems I've run into and it, they specifically call this one out is general purpose AI or general purpose. Coding AI will pull in stuff. That's from WPF or other frameworks that are similar and it will make mistakes. And you run into that thing where you're like, okay, we fixed it. You're like, no, you didn't still isn't compiled. Oh, okay. I see the problem. Now the problem is in it talks and talks and talks and you run about all your credits. You're like, but yeah, this is the, this is a solution for that. Right. It's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:39:47] Speaker 3: He's run out of credits. I tried to make an animation today for my data centers in space talk and I ran out of tokens on like three different services and got nothing. Yeah. [00:39:58] Speaker 2: That's a good experience. Um, such a standard Microsoft productivity experience, really. Um, there's a new intelligent terminal terminal mode coming. Uh, it's an experimental preview right now, but basically what this is, is another way to interact with AI agents in a command line where the top half is the normal terminal window, you know, PowerShell typically the bottom is like the agent CLI interface. And so you can go back and forth between the two. It's kind of interesting. Um, lots of WSL improvements. I don't think we need to get into too much, but the big one is a container support is coming. So that's awesome. And then, um, they released for utils, which is like over 75, um, CLIs from Linux now in windows, right? That weren't there before. Um, so again, really pushing the, the kind of command line part of it. Um, the, they have something on Microsoft execution containers for agents, which I, when I first saw that name, I was like, oh my God, oh my God, they're doing it. They're doing windows 10x. No, it's not windows 10x. Um, this is so agents running on windows can run in their own little sandbox environment, right? Right. Um, and then you can, you can feed it the data you want and it won't be able to bleed out. [00:41:08] Speaker 3: Well, yeah, this is, this is how like cloud co-work works, right? Is it sets up a VM on your machine, restricting its ability to access the machines. You have to specify what on your machine you're allowed to use. Yeah. That'll jump across that VM barrier. [00:41:21] Speaker 2: So I haven't done actually, I think it's fair to say I haven't done anything with cloud code from directly from a command line other than like through a chatbot interface, which is sort of a command line. Right. Um, but when you do that, my God, does it ask you for permission all the time? Oh, you need Yolo mode, dude. [00:41:40] Speaker 1: Um, whenever you watch, dude, dude, you're no one does it that way run unsafe. Yeah. So the, so that when you invoke cloud code, you type cloud dash dash dangerously bypass permissions. I don't like the sound of that, but called Yolo mode. Oh no, everybody, because it's, it's, you can't get anything done. You're constantly. Otherwise it's just constantly managing. Yes. Well, yes. [00:42:05] Speaker 2: Okay. So in the, in the workflow that I will talk about later in the show, um, generally speaking, you, there was an option. It was like, yes, dear God. Yes. You can access the file system. Relax. Um, but there was a second one that was like, always allow, like in this case, you could kind of, you could, you could, you could, you could, okay. I just, I don't know. [00:42:24] Speaker 1: I know it's scary, but well, slash dive into deep end. You only live once, Paul. Yeah. Yep. [00:42:32] Speaker 2: I just don't want to fall off a cliff at the end of that life. [00:42:34] Speaker 1: No, I run everything that way. Everything all Yolo all the time. [00:42:39] Speaker 2: Um, this is the, that's the story of my life. Okay. [00:42:45] Speaker 1: There's your title. [00:42:45] Speaker 2: I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not in a, I'm not in a place where I feel comfortable doing that or recommending it to other people, but I, okay, maybe, um, [00:42:53] Speaker 3: you're not alone, Leo, I know a bunch of, you have to run it's because otherwise it's, it's worse than UAC. It's like, yeah. And the, and their gate check is just at a different point. [00:43:02] Speaker 1: Right. It's the pull request. Right. It's all right, Paul. You, once you get some comfort with it, you'll realize it's not going to delete your database or anything. It's not, you just got an apology from AI that deleted something. [00:43:13] Speaker 2: What are you talking about? Well, that's a good point. It's okay. [00:43:18] Speaker 3: And it felt bad about itself. [00:43:20] Speaker 1: Yeah. And it felt bad. We're talking about Opus 4.8, which is really good at apologizing. Yeah. I really, I know, and no one likes data loss. That must've hurt a lot. I'm so sorry. [00:43:29] Speaker ?: Okay. Okay. [00:43:30] Speaker 1: I have, I have very good, strong backups of everything. I'm not, I'm not too worried, but it really, it, well, sorry. I'm not going to argue and no, I'm not arguing. I'm just, I'm just saying, I'm not arguing with you. I'm just saying, I'm not going to, I'm not going to make the case for YOLO, but you'll see soon. [00:43:48] Speaker 2: I feel like it just did make the case for it. Like it's, it's okay. Um, I'm, I was not aware of this option. I'm not sure I want to be aware of it. I don't know. Um, it's okay. I, I, I, I look, I'm just baby stepping at this point in this stuff. Dangerous, skip permissions, Paul. I'm sorry, Dave. [00:44:07] Speaker 3: Just think of it as permission to be awesome. Yeah. [00:44:12] Speaker 2: Um, okay. So the, the on-device AI thing has come up. Right. And Microsoft, uh, if anyone has ever tried to, and I have used the APIs that Microsoft has talked about, which have changed dramatically over the past two, three years, you know, there was like the, what was the, the windows co-pilot SDK or whatever it was called or the, whatever the heck that was. And they changed the name and blah, blah, blah. And basically what these things are using is Microsoft small language models running on the device, mostly in the five family, I think is where most of this stuff comes from or has come from. But they announced a new set of these models, which have a new name called Aon. If I'm pronouncing that correct. Um, there's a AI, Aon 1.0 instruct, which is smaller, faster, and smarter local AI than five was, I guess a on 1.0 plan, which is a reasoning and tool calling model, uh, for a genic capabilities, et cetera. Both are coming soon, but you can experiment with them in preview today in various ways. Um, and they're expanding. I didn't, this much, this must be the new name for that. Whatever that co-pilot SDK thing was the, what they're calling the windows AI APIs. Like, so there's the windows API. There's our SDK, whatever the windows API is like win 32. There's the windows app SDK APIs, right. You know, for modern app development and there's the windows AI APIs. So there are three sets of capabilities that are coming, moving off of being co-pilot plus PC requirements with an MPU. So speech to text is not going to work on CPUs in addition to MPUs. Text intelligence. CPUs, GPUs. It just says CPUs, but it could be, I'm not sure about that. Um, text intelligence capabilities will work locally on DGPUs. And then video super resolution will work on CPUs. Okay. So again, they have not said how, or if they are changing co-pilot plus PC as a spec, but we've made this case on, and now I will say on both ends of the spectrum, we've got the Nvidia thing on the way high end. And then we get the Snapdragon C, which we'll talk about in a bit on the low end, which you get, which we also do not know a lot about. Um, but we do know eight gigs of Ram on the small one. So that's not a pilot plus. That's not 128 gigs. Yeah, no, it's not 16 either, which is the baseline for it. So the theory is this is going to change and these API changes, um, speak to that. So, uh, you can preview these today in edge insider channels. I'm going to talk about, I think the edge is probably the next one. Um, and they're coming to hugging face in July. And then I, the general availability later in the year, they haven't said, but, um, this is a kind of a generational evolution of, um, what I believe of Microsoft five, which I assume is going to go away, but they did not say that. Um, and then there's the, uh, uh, the RTX dev box, which we talked about earlier, right? This is like a data center in your lap, you know, [00:47:20] Speaker 1: instead of a blanket, you got it. I actually asked, uh, my AI to make us a bandwidth chart. Cause they are, there is some, uh, bandwidth information, uh, out there. Uh, and you know, the, the big boy is this, I don't know how much it costs. NVIDIA is DGX station, which is seven terabytes per second of bandwidth. Uh, and then if you have an RTX video card, that's a lot 1.7, but it's only 32 gigs of RAM. So you can't really fit a model in that, but if you could, it would be fast. [00:47:52] Speaker 2: Well, that's specifically on the GPU, right? [00:47:54] Speaker 1: Like in other words, the one, this is integrated or unified RAM, right? Uh, the Apple has a real advantage here. The M three ultra is almost is 819 gigabytes a second and five max. The new, uh, RTX spark is, is actually pretty good. 300 gigabytes a second. Uh, the DGX spark there, their desktop is actually considerably slower. Uh, the Strix halo, which I have is 256 gigs per second. And then you get to arrow, like, and stuff like that. And it's 102 gigs per second. So there is a big golf. Um, but this, this RTX spark is going to be pretty good. 300 gigabytes a second is, is this is, this is the, what they announced anyway. So, okay. I just thought I'd pass that. Yeah, no, that's crazy. I had that, had it generate all that. Uh, I wonder how I'm going to just go price a DGX station. Just don't be right back. Okay. If I have a heart attack, I'll let you know my falling over. All right. Leo. [00:48:56] Speaker 2: Uh, Google just got in trouble for secretly, although they announced this, uh, downloading a four, I think it's a four gigabyte SLM with Chrome. You know, when you start using AI features, um, I made the point at the time, like everyone is doing this, including Firefox, by the way, um, Microsoft is doing it in edge and they announced, uh, separately from what I just said, but it's the same thing is those on device AI capabilities will also be available in edge. And you can test some of them right now through, I think it's edge canary or whatever. Actually, one of them might even just be available unstable at this point, but, um, edge canary dev, et cetera, have access to at least these capabilities. And so as a developer, you could write whatever apps that run against these things and it would run locally. So it could work offline, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so we'll see. Cool. [00:49:48] Speaker ?: Yeah. [00:49:49] Speaker 2: Um, I think just, I'm just going to do this kind of quickly. If you looked at build from the outside, didn't know anything about it and tried to make a general summary of what was going on, probably using AI, uh, you, it would be that this is an AI agent show, right? Um, I, I, I don't think I did this last week. I must've done this more recently, but I looked, uh, at the sessions that build had and they were like over 400 and over 300 of them had the terms agent or agentic in their title or description. Right. So a lot of the other hundred were wrong. Yeah. Right. Um, and then, you know, like, uh, you know, uh, copilot, for example, only came up like 117 times or whatever the number was, you know, um, I, I honestly, aside from the final thing we'll talk about, I think for build, I would say most of this wasn't super interesting to me, but I'll just mention a couple, um, they were rumored they, Microsoft were ruined to be working on a so-called like AI super app or whatever. Um, they have announced that it's called scout. It is their version of Google spark. Right. Which is, I think now available to people paying Google 200 bucks a month or whatever on that subscription. Um, and it is just early days. Right. But this is where we kind of move. So we have agents and we, and obviously we're familiar with the term copilot, but they've introduced the fairly obvious language of autopilots, right. Um, which are agents. Um, so this is going to be like, uh, this will probably eventually replace all the copilot apps and stuff. I think this will become the, the experience, you know, but it's a, a desktop app. I think I'm sure there's going to be a web version, et cetera, but, um, and I'm sure it will do hybrid things, you know, a local and, um, cloud-based AI, et cetera, but early days for that. And then, uh, they also announced a GitHub copilot app, which made me do a double tape because I thought, I was like, isn't there already a GitHub copilot app, but I think it's only on, maybe it isn't, maybe it's just GitHub, I guess. Cause I have a GitHub app on my phone, but, um, but this is, uh, the first step to a big agent native desktop experience for GitHub. And so it's basically for managing, uh, agents essentially, I guess is the way I would say it. Of course it is. And, um, you know, using get on the backend, right. Which does make sense, I guess, for these projects you might be doing with this thing. And I don't know, I'm just, this is like, I don't know, whatever, um, it's on preview. Don't despair. I'm just, I'm just, I just don't know what to make of this, uh, quite yet. Um, more interestingly, perhaps I, it was, uh, Mustafa Suleyman came out and announced that his organization, which is Microsoft AI, MAI, which, um, is seeking to basically replace all of the reliance Microsoft now has on open AI in particular, but also I would say anthropic, um, announced seven new models, including the first reasoning model that also offers like, um, high efficiency and low token cost. And it's kind of interesting. It's like they claim that they're most of this stuff. I would say is some number of months behind the best, very best models across the board, which is not bad because, you know, again, they're kind of building this up from scratch. They couldn't even start working on this until they changed their agreement with open AI. One of the two agreement changes ago, that was the big deal for Microsoft. It allowed them to pursue this stuff internally without open AI's help or okaying it even. So they have, uh, an image, you know, a MAI image 2.5 and with a flash variant, which they claim is better than nano banana, um, based on benchmarks and whatever, however you'd measure these things, not just based on their personal opinions. Like I like that picture of the tiger better, um, transcription model. I know. Am I a voice with a flash firing again, uh, for natural generation, which is already very good, by the way. Um, I believe they're, yeah, well, based on the version it is their first coding, like inference coding model. Am I MAI code one, uh, which is available in GitHub co-pilot now in VS code. And, um, they're going to make these things available across more platforms in the future as well, like fireworks, AI open router, et cetera. So, um, it's like kind of a big deal actually. Yeah. Um, and he, you know, yeah, he keeps saying all the right things, uh, uh, uh, uh, Mustafa Suleiman that is, but yeah, the best part of this keynote and the one that really made me kind of perk up was, uh, Stevie Batiche came out and, um, Yay. We like Stevie. [00:54:33] Speaker 3: He was one of the first guys back in the beginning bit 23 that inspired us. Yes. Yeah. Right. [00:54:39] Speaker 2: So that was, that was the build car. It was, uh, uh, what's his face? Uh, Panos Panay's last build, which it looked like he was having a stroke, like in the annals of like horrible, uh, industry conferences that went wrong. I would say Gil Emilio, uh, announcing that Steve jobs was coming back was still probably number one. And what they gave the one, it babbled for three hours, but Panos Panay in 2023 was a close second. [00:55:05] Speaker 3: It was very different and clearly we figured out what had happened, right? Like, yeah, so they took away his new hijack from him. Yeah. [00:55:12] Speaker 2: And he was just, just making it up and man, he was not doing a good job. He's not good at that. He was, you know, he needed, no, he just, you know, content. It was, no, but he needs, he's the type of speaker who needs rehearsal and active audience participation. He was very, you know, didn't go well for him, but Stevie Batiche came out and he's like, look, I got to run to the airport. I only got like 15, 20 minutes and then launched into the most eloquent description of how AI was going to, I, I rewatched that so many times. Does it still? Yeah. Oh yes. Yeah. And that's actually. We refer to it all the time. Yeah. He referred to it yesterday. Yeah. Three years later. Right. So remember, um, well, or, or know that there were three, what he called AI app structures. It was inside outside beside beside was the first one that they don't actually not necessarily mean they go from one or the other, but they all exist. Or, you know, the first one was beside, which is a copilot, right? Which can be literally of an app and then maybe like a chat bot on the side and two different apps, or maybe you have a pain inside the app because you've added it, you know, whatever. And then AI inside, which is where you actually integrate AI capabilities into an app. And we see that in various ways throughout like Microsoft Office, obviously. But then there was the AI outside, which I think is the one either was a little bit misunderstood or he's expanded the definition here. But AI outside was the sort of background for the talk he gave at this show, which is about something called Project Solera. And Project Solera is, and it's hard to even explain because it's so different from the way things are and have been forever. Like in the traditional kind of personal computing model that has existed since the Commodore 64 or whatever, you know, someone builds hardware, there's a software platform you can write apps and games to or whatever. You do that. There are different ways to do that. And then they run on that thing. And pretty much, you know, obviously we have cross platform solutions, whatever, but it's it's like device with apps and stuff running on it and stuff meaning like, you know, whatever services, etc. You know, Windows works this way. Phones work this way. I mean, this the web sort of works this way, whatever. But you target this very specific thing. And so the idea behind Solera, and he didn't quite say it this way, but this is almost like a modern answer to the next wave problem that Terry Meyerson always had, like Microsoft missed phones. So we want to be on the next thing, which maybe the next thing at that time was going to be VR, MR, AR, or maybe it was going to be something like Cortana, which is a smart assistant. And then that, of course, evolved into what we have now, which is AI, which is, you know, you could make a good argument. This is the next [00:57:53] Speaker 3: platform. Not that it was a straight line. My only concern here is then they rolled out with something that looks disturbing, like an Amazon Echo. Right. Well, so the point, but this is this is [00:58:03] Speaker 2: the this is what's interesting about this. So there each of these devices, it's it's meant for a like a multi device agentic first kind of world, meaning that the there's an there has to be a platform layer on there of some kind. But and it's a little bit like a like a net PC or network computer or whatever. It doesn't necessarily have to have a lot of compute or RAM or whatever, but it can. And that story that thing you're talking about does the two types of devices they showed off was like a smart badge, essentially. And then that little screen thing, which does look like an Amazon Echo or whatever those are called. And but what makes this different from everything that's come before, and this is very much like Microsoft used to talk about stuff like this all the time. I don't mean stuff like specifically like this thing, but rather they would talk in this way about the future. Like, this is how the future is going to be. And we're like, oh, my God, this is gonna be amazing. You know, they haven't really done this in a long time that the the center part of this platform is the agents. It's not the thing running on the device and that the device. And he calls this, he says, oh, I hate to look this up. The OS layer is liminal, which is means the new word. It's intermediary and minimal, but the operations move between devices. Here's just as a random aside, because I this I couldn't believe look up the word liminal. That is not what it means. Yeah. Luminality is the ambiguous in middle stage of a rite of passage. Okay. I did look it up. But anyway, oddly, he's making up a new meaning. I'm sorry. I wrote that. That was how he just said he just said liminal and kept going. And I just looked it up. Oh, I see. I see. This is a random aside today. Activision announced the next season of Call of Duty. All I care about is what are the maps going to be. There are four new maps coming on Thursday. And the first map is called what guys? Liminal. I had never seen this word in my life. And I'm like, are you kidding me? And then it showed up twice. It's bizarre. But [01:00:09] Speaker 1: it's the new it's a new thing. The kids are all about it. It's all about the liminalness. [01:00:14] Speaker 2: One would argue that adolescence is liminality, right? Let's not get bogged down by liminal. I love it, though. It's a great word. The point is that the AI agent that is doing whatever it is you need, whether it's something proactive it's doing because it knows your schedule or where you are or whatever that might be, or it's something you've asked it to do, you send it off to do some task. It's going to create the UI on the device in real time based on the capabilities of the device and the thing it needs to communicate. Like, in other words, we don't the device does not have or the OS platform does not have a UI layer. Well, it does obviously a basic one, but it's not like a framework that determines what buttons look like and what windows look like or any of that stuff. It's just it's something that the AI agent does on the fly. And if you think about like, I don't know, like the the vibe coding stuff, which is going to come up again and how that's evolved and how this notion that anyone is going to be able to describe an app to AI and have it be made. This is kind of like the next or maybe two, three steps later where it's you're not going to ask it to make an app or a UI or anything. It's just going to do it, you know, like it will just happen. And it's kind of this is fascinating to me. Like I this is this is very interesting. So they're working where they have silicon partners, you know, Qualcomm and MediaTek are doing the chipsets for these things. They have other hardware partners that are working on devices. They have services partners that are going to like AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Health, et cetera, that are going to be, you know, it's a little bit like maybe it's a little bit like that spot watch thing they were going to do or yeah, it's kind of like this connected platform where it's decentralized. It's essentially it's not, you know, there is there's not a central OS running on a device that, you know, necessarily, but they all have to conform to whatever these specs are. You know, it's kind of hard to say, but this is not a it's not necessarily going to happen, I should say this. They're still, you know, they're working on it. But the point is, it's like further [01:02:23] Speaker 3: along than you would think. Like when Microsoft used to do, he is more of a futurist than a builder, per se. So, you know, yeah, I mean painting a future that can be built, [01:02:33] Speaker 2: but but they're literally working on building that now. In other words, this isn't a bunch of like foam models and, you know, like PowerPoint slides. It's like we're actually building this. Like he's like, look, maybe it fails that, you know, who can say, but like it's the UI, the way they describe the UI is will make sense in our industry. It's like just in time UI where the experience adapts across devices and modalities without requiring developers to redesign everything for every single form factor. You don't write an app for a phone or an app for a tablet or a computer or maybe one that layouts automatically between all three or whatever. It's like, you know, it's it's the declarative thing, you know. Yeah, it's very interesting. Well, it's all command line. It's going to be easy. Well, yeah, I have some commentary about the ease of use of CLIs, but it'll be probably right. I mean, certainly. I mean, yeah, that would definitely be part of it. Yeah. Voice and image. But they're like what it's seeing. Yeah. I mean, like there'll be a look. It'll probably be glasses. It will be pendants. It will be rings. It will be a TV. It will be it will be the range of whatever, you know. This is, [01:03:41] Speaker 1: by the way, why I still want to have a local. AI, because I don't want everything, all of that to go to Microsoft or somewhere else or wherever Amazon or open a iron. I kind of want it to go to my home [01:03:56] Speaker 2: server. Right. Well, OK, so from Microsoft's perspective, they wouldn't understand why you don't trust them. From my perspective, I completely understand that. But but there are also benefits like from their perspective of doing this, even like even assuming you just blanket trust this company for some reason and, you know, related to those things we talked about before, where when it happens, I mean, obviously it's an agent. So there's going to be connectivity. These things have 5G connectivity and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Well, and certainly we're going to be able to put rules [01:04:25] Speaker 3: in to say these are where you're allowed to run things, too. You know, what you're talking about here is a classic Microsoft. This is ODBC for AI, right? It's hey, we can't dominate the space with our tech. So let's just sit in the middle of everything. But that's where the money is. Bridge between it all. Well, it's how you stay in the market for sure. And it's certainly where you'll where you see weakness. You'll be able to drop in your piece and prioritize it. So it's it's it's in the liminal [01:04:55] Speaker 2: space. It is Microsoft live. Well, so I mean, to Richard's point, Windows Intune will be part of this. Enter ID will be part of this Windows Hello business. And that's how they get in. You know, that's where they become, you know, the money making part of this to some degree. Right. Like, but there's a there's like they've already created an ecosystem device ecosystem platform for this, which is based on Android AOS AOSP. There's an agent shell which will handle local and cloud based agents. Right. And then all that enterprise support for those customers. It kind of. If you think about [01:05:32] Speaker 1: it, because of economies of scale, Microsoft will always be ahead of what you could do locally. [01:05:38] Speaker 2: Right. And of course, yeah. And but if you have policy based rules to determine how your data is used, et cetera, et cetera, like you and I, I don't trust [01:05:50] Speaker 1: Microsoft either, by the way, but like, well, I don't trust any big tech company. You know, people are saying, well, Apple will be fine. No, I don't trust them either. I don't trust any of them. No, you shouldn't. But there will always because of economies of scale, I think they'll always be somewhat ahead of us on these things. But they're certainly not going to sell devices that allow me to use [01:06:08] Speaker 2: this locally. I mean, that's not. I don't know. I mean, some of those devices. Yeah. So I think the progression here is fascinating because it's happening so fast. Like you, AI occurs. Okay. We have AI agents. Okay. Fantastic. You know, we today people use whatever device, a computer, a phone, a tab, whatever it is. And you as an app store, maybe you go to the, if you're on a computer, you can download stuff from the web, whatever you run this app, you run word, you want to write words. That's what you do, whatever. Um, you know, the, we, we're just now getting to this point where we can see this near future where even a normal person, a non, um, uh, technical person could describe to an AI some with something I would call an app and they can put that thing on their device and it works and it does what they want. It looks the way they want, et cetera, et cetera. That's exciting. Yeah. But now there's this next step where it's like, yeah, that's actually going to, you know, like, like, it's not so much that, well, I don't know if it's going away, but like, we're, it's just going to do this for you. Like, you don't have to worry about it. Like even today, you could say something to AI, you could say something like, uh, here's a document I made, turn this into a PDF or, you know, do whatever that thing is. And I think that's going to be what this does, right? Not, not turn a document into a PDF necessarily, but something more complex or exciting than that. Like where you let, you know, you talk to it and you have a trip coming up or a work project you're working on and you're constantly interacting if you want to with this thing, probably by voice and it's making things for you. Just like you can like, like today we make like infographics and they're often excellent looking, you know, um, because that's a capability that's built into the AI. But it's like, this is describing capabilities that are like, you don't have to worry. Like you don't even think like, who cares what the app is, if there's an app or what the online, you know, like you don't really think about this stuff anymore. Right. It really changes the interaction [01:08:03] Speaker 1: model a little. I have to say this whole liminal thing makes it a little, I mean, everybody's faces in shadows is a little dystopian. You think it's a little creepy kind of, I mean, it's, I don't know, I agree with the premise. Yeah. Uh, that, you know, it's kind of computing at the edge becomes AI at the edge, AI everywhere. That's right. Yep. Uh, and, and, uh, I think it's very interesting. The notion of AI kind of doing what you want without you even asking for it. [01:08:36] Speaker 2: I, I, the, the disruption here is really interesting to me because, um, you know, when you go to mobile and you have these app stores that are controlled by big tech and you have to go through them to even get an app out to our user, like that's one way of doing things. And so you look at like AI, uh, like coding AI, especially an ability of these things to create apps for you, bespoke, you know, personalized apps, whatever that's a threat to that app model, right? Um, this is, this is a tsunami of a threat to that app model. This is like, oh no, we're not threatening your app models. Your app model is going away. This is not people are going to run apps a different way on your device. This is, they don't care about it. Your stupid apps anymore. Um, it's really interesting. [01:09:18] Speaker 1: So they, they focus on this, what looks like exactly like an Amazon echo. Are they thinking of making this? It's a concept, obviously, but it's a concept. I think they're, [01:09:27] Speaker 3: what he was saying was we expect the third party ecosystem to build devices for us. They might look like this middleware company. They don't want to be an end end user. [01:09:37] Speaker 2: Middleware is kind of a tough topic in the Microsoft world, Leo. I don't know if you remember the antitrust trial. Um, but, but yeah, I mean, yes, of course. Right. But you hit on the key things here, [01:09:47] Speaker 3: Paul, which is along the way of using this tool to make decisions about what agents and so forth to use. You're going to need an authentication strategy and intro is going to be front and center there. You're going to need a place to store data and one drive is going to be front and center there. Like they're just going to make it easier for you to use their engines, their platforms for the [01:10:06] Speaker 2: bits you want. This is focused on enterprise, right? I mean, well, it's, I think it's going to be both, you know, consumer and business, but I, but yes, for, for businesses, part of the deals, it has to have that trust built in through authentication, et cetera, uh, identity management, whatever else. But the, the, the, this is fascinating to me because this is like two of Microsoft's biggest strengths. Like Microsoft has always hated to be compared to IBM, which is, you know, an infrastructure company. That is a big part of what Microsoft is. They're good at it. But the other one is like the platform bit, like they make platforms and this is the classic Microsoft to me in that sense. It's, this is a platform. It will use their infrastructure. I mean, it's, if this develops into a, a standard of some kind, I suppose you could, you could probably have different, you know, there'll be a, a matter for this thing or something where you can cross use whatever devices from whatever ecosystems, but this, this is like a, this is a fascinating old Microsoft plus new Microsoft kind of combo killing, you know, kind of a thing. Like it's, I just have not seen something like this from them in a while years. [01:11:16] Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, he's really, uh, forward thinking. I mean, obviously he's the idea guy, right? I mean, yeah. Agents will reshape not only software, but the devices themselves as his coda, [01:11:28] Speaker 2: which I think is really interesting. Right now you can be, it's easy to be cynical about this because Microsoft, you know, it, and to use their own words, you know, miss the mobile wave. They missed whatever waves of, you know, like they obviously dominated in the personal computing wave and the PC wave and have not, uh, and they compete with in cloud computing, which is not the, you know, it's not personal computing, but, um, this is, you could look at this and be like, well, of course they come up with this kind of thing. They don't have a position in mobile. They don't have a position in whatever. And it's like, yeah, but I mean, yes, fair enough. But I also like this to me is them playing to their traditional strengths. You know, I mean, this is, this is what they are good at. [01:12:09] Speaker 1: It's one of the things you're good at. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it reassures enterprise, even if end users are maybe aren't convinced of the privacy and security enterprise. What's this? [01:12:18] Speaker 3: I many years ago. Sorry. Consumers won't buy this. Consumers will buy the device. [01:12:27] Speaker 2: I was just going to walk down this path. Like, uh, when it wasn't clear how the world was going to shake down, you know, um, like Microsoft had things for like automotive, they had, you know, obviously phone initiatives, they did IOT, et cetera. And, you know, I, I had said at the time, like, look, it's not such a bad thing if your name isn't anywhere, right? Like Microsoft as a brand might be associated with a certain connotation or a thing from the past, like an Oldsmobile kind of quality thing that maybe you don't want on those things. There's a reason Xbox is not Microsoft Xbox, right? It's Xbox. Um, it, it's not such a bad future for them to have, uh, designed this platform, I guess. How are you? What do you call this? Like a connected platform? I don't know what the hell you call even call this thing, but, um, and others create the, um, agents and the services and whatever that run on it and the devices you use that are compatible with it, but you're, you're in the mix because you, you know, you're getting the licensing. You sit in that, in that in between space. [01:13:26] Speaker 3: It's not, you can call it the, you call it biz talk for AI. Oh, I thought you got to sell it the [01:13:32] Speaker 2: liminal space. You might call it liminal. Microsoft is renaming itself to liminal corp. [01:13:37] Speaker 1: There you go. All right. Well, we're going to pause, uh, on that. So you have some time to dream. Uh, by the way, they added that capability to Claude code, the slashed dream skill. [01:13:49] Speaker 3: It just goes off with its own little work. I'm not burning enough tokens. Let's do random. [01:13:54] Speaker 1: Exactly. Can I burn some overnight? Just, you know, I know you need to sleep, but I don't, I don't, I never sleep. Yeah. Um, yeah, it's a very interesting world we're entering. It is, um, it's an issue time. No two weeks about it. Yeah. That's good. Uh, maybe that's why you should maybe think a little bit harder about security. Uh, our, our show this week brought to you by threat locker, love these guys, uh, threat lockers, zero trust platform now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions. They've always protected the end points, but now they will protect your company network and your cloud. They added all of this. They, these newly announced features are so exciting by extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks. Threat locker ensures that devices are, this is, you need this. 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Get a free 30 day trial. Learn more about how threat locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com/twit. We thank them so much for all the support they've given to it and our network over the years. And of course, windows weekly as well. Thank you, threat locker. The DGX station is a mortgage payment. Actually, it's more than a mortgage payment. Wow. 100,000. It's a mortgage. My AI agent says, and you're not the target market, Leo. It's a pretty nice car. It's like, please do not replace me with this thing. Yeah. You know, for that kind of money, you could run frontier models for a long time. Yeah. Or make a down payment on a house. Down payment, not a mortgage payment. It's a down. Yeah. Down payment on a house. On we go with the show. Indeed. Wait, what? Windows? What? That had to happen [01:18:51] Speaker 2: eventually. Windows? What? I know. It's weird. A couple things going on. So tied to some insider stuff, we'll talk about in a moment. Pavan Davalori has started a podcast, if you can believe this, as one does. Yep. Called Inside Windows. And on the first episode, he is talking to Marcus Ash, who's a guy I know, who's a great guy, very involved in this pain point fixing thing they're doing right now. And they just provide kind of an update on, you know, what they accomplished toward these ends in May, essentially. And this includes, you know, changes to the insider program, changes to Windows Update, changes to the taskbar, and then changes to start, which we'll talk about in one second. Actually, we'll talk about it right now. So I've been installing the stuff. Sometimes you have to really work at it to get to these things. But, you know, the start menu, and it's not clear when this will come out to stable per se and the new taskbar. Right. I would say this start menu stuff is pretty subtle. You can choose between big and small sizes. You know, it's fine. You can turn off your well, you can turn off your profile picture in the bottom of start. But when you click the little empty circle that's there, you still get the same menu as you got before with all your stuff. And it's okay. So that has whatever. Yeah. So there's that stuff. So, okay. Like, it's fine. This is, you know, when this originally came up, like I made this point that I have these very specific problems with Windows 11. And these things were not one of them. I just don't care about the stuff. But okay, they're changing the star menu. Okay, fine. The taskbar stuff is a little more interesting. There's obviously the ability to move it to different sides of the screen, which is fine. I don't want or need that. If you turn like the combine icons options and never, and you put it on the side, you get that wider taskbar like we used to have back in the day where you can see like a kind of an inch wide icon for each app icon, which is interesting. I do that. Okay. So you'll like that. The one that I really like is that you can, they didn't change the name of the option. It was just kind of bizarre to me. But you can, let me see if I can, let me just find the exact name of this thing. It's like, if you go into taskbar behaviors and taskbar settings, the bottom option is called show smaller taskbar buttons. In the current shipping version of Windows 11, that's there. If you turn it on, the taskbar does not get smaller. The icons get smaller. It's like, guys, I don't want the icons to be smaller. I want this giant inch tall thing to be smaller. But now with this update, it actually gets smaller. And I love that. Like, I love it just for that. Like I, to me, that's actually kind of a big deal. Um, just because, you know, screen real estate is a premium and I want to use it. So that's cool. I like that part of it. Um, and that, uh, update, like I have like a million links in today's notes of the wrong articles, but, um, that most recent update, which is the start menu one is in the most recent, uh, experimental build, which is how I got it. Okay. So that's still properly insiders, but it'll make the full build in a month, right? Maybe we'll say that's what I'm wondering. I don't know, you know, given the timing, I mean, to me, it does make sense for them to kind of pull a 23 H two where they release all the stuff before the next major release. Right. Um, at meaning this summer, which I think would be ideal because, you know, they've been talking about it. Plus I think they want this stuff in place in time for the back to school stuff, which is happening now. The, um, these new computers, which we're going to talk about based on Snapdragon X and the, uh, the new Nvidia stuff, et cetera, like where, and also for, um, gaming handles, right. Which can use all the resources and stuff. Cause a lot, a lot of the changes they're making just under the covers thing to improve latency and performance and, uh, resource usage. I think it's important. So I hope it's soon, not like the fall. It seems mostly fine to me. I, you know, two seconds of testing it on one computer. I can authoritatively say it's fine. No, I don't know. I mean, we'll see, but, um, it looks like it's working well. So we'll find out, um, on the hardware front. So obviously we have the Nvidia thing today, which, you know, humongous, um, last week after the show, Qualcomm announced a new chip for low end PCs that cost 299 and up called Snapdragon C. The thing that this has in common with the new Nvidia stuff, aside from the fact that it's based on arm is we know almost nothing about it. So, um, there, there are no, but you talk about handhelds, uh, arm chip would be a hell of a handheld. Yeah, it would, but you're not gonna, not for gaming PC, right? Like, um, unfortunately, but you know, it's vague things all day battery life, which means nothing, uh, responsive performance, cool and quiet designs, blah, blah, integrated MPU. Okay. Neat. Um, it is built on the same architecture as the Snapdragon X2 stuff. Okay. Um, and the first PC based on this chipset, which is coming from Acer was announced the next day and that's coming later in the year and we don't know how much it's going to cost, but, um, is that true? Yeah. Yeah. We don't know the cost of that one, but these things are very clearly meant to compete with the MacBook Neo, right? Which starts at 599, eight gigabytes of Ram can't upgrade it. Um, these things will be eight gigabytes of Ram. Um, they have various things that are better, uh, across, you know, across the board, so to speak, than the MacBook Neo. Um, but the Acer one, it's kind of hard to say it's a bigger screen. You know, you get like a, uh, 15 inch screen on that one. Um, it, the way they describe it is like up to eight gigabytes of Ram. It's like, uh, uh, you know, um, whatever. But then more recently, um, Dell announced a, now this one's not running on Qualcomm. It's running on Wildcat, which is the low end in child chipset. Right. Right. But also a, uh, an XPS 13 that is going to start at $600 aimed at students aimed at the MacBook Neo. They call the MacBook Neo explicitly several times in this announcement, which I'm fascinated by. Um, so this is a core series three process and not ultra is the new core series three, um, which is a low end processor, obviously, um, Wildcat 40, uh, tops MPU. So it's a copilot plus PC, eight gigs of Ram. It's under the ball four, uh, which is better than Neo, uh, wifi seven, Bluetooth six. It's all aluminum, like the Neo touch screen windows. Hello, which the Neo you have to pay extra for the touch thing, uh, variable refresh rate display. It looks pretty good. Um, it's running on an Intel chip, but you know, no, nobody's perfect. Um, and then, uh, I think I skipped over this one before, but just today, just as we were heading into the show, um, there was a leak that Microsoft is prepping a Snapdragon X2 version of the surface pro, which we originally assumed would ship and not assumed that we heard, uh, again, rumor wise, not Microsoft, but, um, actually Microsoft did kind of say later in the year, um, that the, the next pro and laptop based on next two would come out later in the year. We assumed like late in the year. Um, but this rumor is claiming it will come out in June, [01:26:07] Speaker 3: which is this month. Um, you know, and we'll see. Um, but, and the pros are the click off keyboard, you know, kickstand models. Yeah. The tablet, uh, yeah, deal exactly with a snapdragon tune. [01:26:20] Speaker 2: It is nuts. Yeah. X to elite. Um, yeah, when I look, that's a great chip. Uh, there's nothing really to say. It's probably going to look exactly like it does today. I believe it's mostly, you know, same basic colors, except for, I guess not the blue finish. Apparently this is a leak. I, I don't know how to, I don't know what to say about this, but yeah, um, they just announced the new Intel ones. Yeah. It makes sense. The timing is faster than I thought. So that would be great. I think sooner is better than later. We will see. Okay. Um, there's a bunch of AI stuff. I'm going to gloss over most of this. Uh, but anthropic went through a new valuation round and now they are worth more by valuation. That open AI, which is fascinating. 24 hours later, they announced they're going to do an IPO. So they've done the initial filing with, uh, the securities and exchange commission. And sometime this year, uh, I guess we'll see what happens there. I think the valuations are a lagging indicator. Yeah. Right. Right. Because I didn't, this isn't in the notes, but one of the things that also happened, if I read the headline correctly, was that, um, chat GPT just surpassed 1 billion active users, I think, which is insane. Right. And I think the fastest, any, well, they wanted, [01:27:38] Speaker 1: they said they were doing it last year. So they're still behind what they projected, [01:27:42] Speaker 2: but it's, yeah, that's a big deal. I mean, there's some, right. I think anthropic has probably eaten into that a little bit, but, um, yeah, that's interesting. Um, this was just fascinating to me. You were talking about how like this model was apologizing to you, right? So, uh, open AI released chat GPT 5.5 instant. I don't like sometime in the past month. 30 days, whatever. And I guess a lot of people complained this thing was like sycophantic and had problems with facts, like what, you know, like typical AI problems, right? The, the per, the open AI research research lead who announced this via Twitter said that it was bullet-pilled, [01:28:22] Speaker 1: which like liminal, I had to look up. What is that? What is, I don't know. Bullet-pilled is to be [01:28:26] Speaker 2: deeply obsessed with a specific topic, product, or idea often to the point of being defensive or dismissive of alternatives, right? Like everyone in this industry. So yeah, where'd they go? Who made this? Of course it's like, oh, it's like us. And so I guess they, uh, they fixed it to be less less bullet-pilled, just just bullet-pilled. Anyway, bullet-pilled slider. [01:28:52] Speaker 1: Yeah. That's really, that's all it is. You know, it's not, it's not the model. It's the, it's this. [01:28:56] Speaker 2: Yeah. Right. Right. Right. It's like, I think it's the default, um, like settings for it, for people. [01:29:01] Speaker 1: Like, I guess, you know, five, five, remember they said, uh, they taught it not to say goblins. It's saying goblins again. And it's saying raccoons. I keep, it keeps saying, oh, we got a raccoon [01:29:12] Speaker 3: in the wire closet. It's like, you gotta, you're like, that's, that's fun. Um, could you, could you [01:29:18] Speaker 2: fix the code thing I'm working on, please? You know, what are you talking about? I tease it. I say goblins. You just like, you're bait, you're goblin baiting it. I'm goblin baiting it. I am. [01:29:29] Speaker 3: Do you remember five was the original, the claim to be less obsequious and it upset a lot of people. Right. Right. Right. Cause people got really used to this thing. Yeah. It turns out people like people to kiss their ass. It was their baby, right? It was their little person and their little person was it when it wasn't constantly reinforcing them. Wasn't a good little person anymore. Right. They demanded 4O back and Altman gave in. I, I've kept a couple of those Reddit posts of like, my baby is back and I'm crying. Like, yeah, it's software, man. That's not healthy. [01:30:00] Speaker 1: People married 4O people. I mean, and there's still, uh, companies that are offering 4O like models, right? And 4O machines and all sorts of things. It's optimized for maximum connection time. [01:30:16] Speaker 2: Sick of fancy. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, what do you want to watch? I want to watch whatever you want to [01:30:21] Speaker 3: watch buddy. Gross. But you know, if your only metric to keep your investors engaged is usage time, boy, you suck up to the user all the time. [01:30:37] Speaker 2: Yep. Yep. Right. That's the business. It was trained. It was trained on Apple marketing. So it's always like, whatever we're doing now is fantastic. I don't know what that crap we released last year was, but sorry about that. This is awesome. Oh, and you're holding it wrong. Yeah, exactly. [01:30:54] Speaker 1: Well, we know, you know, the truth is we know these models are all trained on everything. Good, bad, and ugly. Right. So it's in the post training and the instructions after the training that they say, okay, now ignore the Mecca Hitler stuff. Be nice. [01:31:09] Speaker 3: Yeah. And everything you got from 4chan, leave that out. [01:31:11] Speaker 1: Right. Leave that stuff out. But it's all in there. [01:31:14] Speaker 2: Yeah. Right. I'm sure it's all in there. So you can get a model to be evil pretty easily. I get a lot of like PR outreach type stuff, which I look at briefly and then get rid of. But one today I did a pause on, which was like, it was like a guy I could quote about what it doesn't matter. I don't want to give this guy away. I'm not trying to make fun of him. But unfortunately, his last name is Himmler. And I was like, I don't know. Maybe was he was he in Argentina? Yeah, exactly. Right. No, no. We're the Latino Himmlers. Yeah, no, I we understand how that happened. Don't do that. Wow. I changed my name. I would too. I think so. Yeah. Sorry. I'm sorry. If you're out there, I'm so sorry. I don't mean to make fun of your name. It's not your fault. But really Himmler. Wow. Okay. And then just the other one, just because this is Windows specific is OpenAI has a codex app, right? If you're on mobile codex capabilities built into ChatGPT, you can get a codex app on Windows. Now there's a version that's a plugin just for Chrome and Chrome browsers, obviously, and for the Mac. The Mac version got computer use capabilities. Like when they announced computer use that went out to the Mac version of the app and it's available in Windows now, if you want Anthropic to take over your PC when you're not around, you can use the you can control it from your phone, right? You leave the idea is you leave the computer on. It has to be running, right? What could possibly go wrong? Well, what would you call it? Put the Yolo switch on, let it turn off the power management and be like, not only do I trust you, but I'm going to walk away from the computer. Here's all the tokens to dream with that you can imagine. Go, go, go. I'm not even gonna. You do what you do, man. You know, you be you. He's all in. Yep. So anyway, if you're, if you're waiting for that for some insane reason, that's available. So, okay. And then a couple of quick dev things. Oops. I just closed. What did I close? I closed my nose. Don't close anything. Oh, no. This is the problem. I have multiple screens. I do control W and some closes. I don't know what's happening. I'll put it up on the screen. No, I got it. I got it. Oh, okay. So just two dev things that are kind of related to each other a little bit. I was catching up on before build happened and ruined my life. I was catching up on some of the Google IO sessions on YouTube right after the show, like over the weekend. And one of the ones I watched was about Flutter and sort of casually in the middle of it, they were like, oh, and by the way, and for people who don't know, you know, Flutter is a cross platform UI framework made by Google that run, that you could create apps. Originally it was iOS and Android and they have, they don't call them themes, but they're basically themes. So these things look in our essentially native. So like as a material you theme, when it runs on Android, a Cupertino theme, when it runs on iOS or whatever, they've since expanded it to include the web and desktop and then other devices like Flutter is used in like cars and things like that. But desktop Flutter was very interesting to me because you could do Windows, Mac, Linux apps with a single code base. And it's like this is maybe I should, you know, so I'm kind of interested in this. But anyway, right in the middle of this little presentation, what's new in Flutter? They're like, oh, by the way, we've handed over control of Flutter desktop to Canonical, the guys that make Ubuntu. And that's it. No, they're not like just running off with it and doing their own thing. Obviously, it's still part of the, you know, they're part of the process, but they were operating. Yeah. So a couple of years ago, Canonical announced they were going to use Flutter to redo the like the setup sequence, the setup app, I guess, for Ubuntu. And that's there now. And I get I didn't know this, but apparently several apps that are in the ship with Ubuntu are written in Flutter. So they've they've done a lot of work with this thing. And they're like, look, we know how we need to fix this. They one of the things they're adding in preview right now is like different types of like sub windows, like dialogues and notification panes and things like that. So like they've actually done, I guess, a great job with this. So they're going to take a nice language. Dart is a very nice language, right? Which is, you know, another C like language. It's a declarative UI thing like we were talking about this, I think, before the show, you know, which is ties into this next thing. So 25 years ago, Microsoft, you know, Andrews Heilsberg and said the dotnet team, et cetera, came into this notion of like using and it's based on really in the way the web works with HTML, but it's an XML based language for creating UI called XAML, right? And so WPF and on every Microsoft app framework they've done for Windows uses some form of XAML. They're very, very, you know, they're basically identical, but there are differences for creating UI. And I, so when I do this app stuff I've been doing, I write a lot of XAML. I understand the pros and cons of it. It's extremely verbose, meaning you have to for, especially with complex UIs, you have to write like a ton of code. But you know, it's, I find it, I'm used to it. I just, you know, it's like, I'm just used to it. But in more recent years, there's a new type of declarative UI programming model that I believe I could be wrong, but I think actually Facebook started it with React. And it's used by Jetpack Compose and Andrew McCotlin, the language it's used by Flutter. It's used by Swift UI on the Apple side, same thing, right? So it's kind of fascinating to me, but I also don't understand it, but the Microsoft world, we're not really getting much in the way of like new app frameworks or UI frameworks or whatever. But there is a project, someone pointed to me this last week, I'd never even heard of this. But if you go to GitHub, there's a project called Microsoft UI Reactor. The name is an indication of what it is. It's a way to make C# based declarative UI instead of using XAML. So in other words, using C# in the same way you would make Swift UI Kotlin/Jetpack Compose or Flutter or React UI. And it's actually, it's not made by Bob. It's made by, it is Microsoft. It's like Microsoft's GitHub account. And it doesn't mean they're switching to it. And it generates to Win UI. So it's right. It's modern. Yeah. So I'm going to look at this. I'm kind of interested in this. My only, well, one of my many blockers here is I've looked at all of these frameworks I just described to some degree, some a lot, some a little. And I just haven't had that moment where I'm like, I get this now. Like, I get it. I can do this. Like, I still find it. I don't know. It's a little bizarre, but I guess I did kind of wonder, would they ever do something to bring this kind of programming model to C# slash dot net? Essentially, all this is. Yeah. I just don't know that it has anything to do with dev. It seems like the Windows team is doing something. I don't. Yeah. Look, this Microsoft has a rich history, especially in the past 20 years of trying to bring developers from somewhere else to them. Like, you know, Windows 8 did this with HTML and JavaScript apps, et cetera. This may be an attempt. Like we need to, we want to get people who can write native Windows apps, but the vast body of outside developers today who are not in the C# dot net world are writing React style apps. Sure. And so maybe this. Well, and we saw that happening to Windows too, [01:38:28] Speaker 3: you know, pre Pavan, we were seeing more and more like React blocks being written into Windows. And I think it was part of this because when UI was part of Maui and I don't know that they were interested in working on that. And this was the workaround and it made people sad. And now with Pavan on board and taking the feedback about those kinds of problems are like, [01:38:49] Speaker 2: Hey, but we have a library. Let's just go use it. Yep. So I, this is, I will see. I don't know how well it works. I don't know how complete it is. Like, I don't know if there's some, if you think of when UI and all the different buttons and controls and stuff, you can have a Windows if there are 300 of those and maybe this supports a hundred. I have no idea. I don't know where it's at. I don't know how official I don't, I don't think it's going to replace XAML or anything like that, but it's no. And [01:39:14] Speaker 3: they're saying it's all about interoperability. So. Right. I think they're just trying to re organize when UI to be a first class citizen and allow for native development and then also still [01:39:26] Speaker 2: support all the alternatives. Yeah. This is why I brought it up because, you know, a month or two months ago, whenever it was, when all of a sudden we're going to fix all the problems when there's 11. And then some guy on the Windows dev side was like, we're going to make new native apps. And it's like, why? Like, they're so terrible to me. Like when UI is a is terrible. And I say that [01:39:48] Speaker 3: because I've used it, you know, and it came from the whole UWP movement. Like they, there were so [01:39:53] Speaker 2: many things it was supposed to be and never became. It's incredible how much stuff isn't in it. Like, how incomplete it is compared to premium. Like, obviously it does all the modern UI stuff, but things like, for example, you know, the stupid little notepad app I always work on, like one of the things that there's, there are no native APIs for printing in Windows app. It's like, okay. I mean, like, am I going to write that in like Win32 C++ code or something and then do some interoperative? What the, like, what is that? That's ridiculous. But that's, you know, like in the same way when .NET first came out, like it did a lot, but there were certain things, I don't know, I might be room streamer. I feel like sound APIs weren't part of it in the very first release or something, something like that. And then eventually they add that stuff over time. But I feel like the Windows app SDK is just kind of sat there and hasn't really been. And, you know, the concern with, [01:40:45] Speaker 3: if WinUI goes back into Windows, it says that every time they build a version, they've got to send out a new version of Windows. And that, that was that Windows 10 nightmare, where devs were using these tools and then asking sysadmins to update Windows so they could deploy. And this was like, no, I'm not doing that. I'm not 100% sure if anymore, but I feel like they [01:41:07] Speaker 2: decoupled the Windows app SDK from Windows versions. They better keep it that way, right? I think so. That would be the smart thing. Don't wait for Windows resonance with a UI. Yeah. Fairly recently. But yeah, originally, yeah. You're 100% UWP was tied and Windows app SDK was tied to like specific Windows versions. [01:41:23] Speaker 3: Yeah. But there was also a motion at the time to have Windows update monthly. And that, you know, they lost enthusiasm for that pretty quickly. [01:41:33] Speaker 2: But see, to me, that's like a runtime decision that you bring up some app and it requires whatever version of the thing. And like, you just install it as part of the app at that point, when you need it, you know, anyway, I just wanted to I just thought I I've never heard of this. I don't know where it came from. I don't know. You know, it just came out of the blue. And I'm like, [01:41:50] Speaker 1: okay, you know, not super busy. An ad, an ad, but also this note from a club member Tron man, triple seven, who mentions that today, June 3, 2009 Microsoft released Bing. [01:42:08] Speaker 2: Wow, I'm surprised I didn't think to observe that milestone. And Bing is 17. Boy, that's cool. [01:42:18] Speaker 1: It drives a teenager. And that's getting a little unruly a decision search engine created to satisfy initial queries while also presenting more retrieved information and its contemporaries, according to Microsoft. And this is from a post on X by Web Design Museum. [01:42:33] Speaker 2: I mean, obviously, Microsoft had previous search engines, right? I mean, that kind of fed into this, like Windows Live search. It's really more they released the name Bing, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, which confused the hell out of everybody. What? Like the, like the guy from Friends? [01:42:54] Speaker 1: Which is what everyone said, like, what? Hey, let me, let me mention at this point, our fine sponsor, we still have lots to come, including the back of the book, the whiskey segment, and most importantly, the much heralded, long awaited Xbox segment still coming. But first, a word from Cashfly, Windows Weekly brought to you and you, you hear it, you know, you've heard it for years. 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[01:46:26] Speaker 2: There's a lot going on here. Whoo. I know. So, Asha Sharma, it's been a couple of days, so she's in the news again. She sure gets a lot of attention. The newish head of Xbox. I look for the most part. I like what she's doing. I do feel that we've now gone a little too far. So there there is this conversation to be had where it's like, look, this business is not working. We need to make some changes. The previous regime was making those changes. We're going to do a bunch of that stuff. Like we're not really necessarily like, yeah, we're going to have a new console, but they were going to have a new console, too. Like so I we're getting to the point now where it's like, look, we, you know, we need to make this business profitable. We need this to work, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like, you know, the tough problems remain. But then Microsoft just did a like a game showcase, right? They showed off that like the Halo campaign of all things coming out, the new Forza game, a new coming Gears of War game. That's I think a prequel fable, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, just like AI getting overly defensive, you know, Xbox fans complain. They're like, why am I seeing a PlayStation logo on the screen during an Xbox event? And the point of it was they show these logos when the games are going to go to different platforms. And like, this is an Xbox event. Why are you showing a PlayStation logo was the complaint? And so she like apologized for this. And she's like, you're right. This was a mistake. I own this. We're talking about how we adjust this for future shows. And it's like, excuse me, what are you? You're a cross-platform game publisher. Why? We can't sustain the look of a PS logo on a screen. Like what is wrong with you people? But I, at some point I think people need to understand you're never, you can't please everyone, but you're also not going to please anyone. So like in this, these people are so opinionated and so like on one end of the spectrum about this stuff, like what they want you to do is stop making games for PCs, stop putting games everywhere else. Even though those games were like holiday were always everywhere else, just making for this console that nobody buys. That's what we want. And it's like, you would sink that business in two seconds. If you follow these people's advice, don't start apologizing to gamers. You'll never end. You'll never stop. Yeah. Do not give into stuff like that. This is, I'm not, no, I am. I'm saying this is, this is a stupid complaint and it's a stupid thing to come back and be like, yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. And like, no, like you're not right. And you shouldn't be sorry for this. It's ridiculous. I mean, this is how, this is how feeble we are. You know, we can't, you can't even admit that PlayStation exists. I don't, I just, I don't get it. This is too bad. So anyway, we'll see. Well, now we see the limits of her knowledge and [01:49:26] Speaker 3: understanding of the space, right? Yeah. Now she has to start making decisions, right? [01:49:32] Speaker 2: Right. It was easy and Phil Spector be doing it. Okay. Um, uh, yeah. So, um, fable, uh, is a remake of fable, right? The game, uh, it was supposed to come out this holiday season. Microsoft just delayed it until the spring. Um, not because it's not ready, not because it's not running at the right frames per second or whatever, but because GTA six is now occurring in the holiday season and they want this game to have its moment and they feel like if they release it around the same time as GTA six, no, one's going to notice. It's going to suck the air right out of the room. Yep. [01:50:07] Speaker 3: And two ways about it. So that will be the biggest game release in a decade by all expectations. [01:50:12] Speaker 2: Yeah. Whatever. I mean, if you can look at this up, like what the most popular games of all, like GTA is GTA five is the best selling game of all time. It's its own things of millions of copies. [01:50:22] Speaker 3: It's incredible. GTA six has been delayed for years and it's turning into the Duke Nukem. Yes, [01:50:29] Speaker 2: it is. Random prostitute assault games. It's the Duke Nukem forever of video games. Wait, [01:50:34] Speaker 3: there you go. They were going to ship it. They say. Yep. Um, and then it is a new month, [01:50:40] Speaker 2: so we're into June. Now, um, we have a new, uh, set of games coming to game pass across all the platforms it supports. I don't see anything in here that is super interesting to me. Um, frog squad with a W fun. Um, so I'm going to move on from that, but whatever, um, that's happening. Nothing, nothing. You, not a thing, huh? I got nothing. I'm sorry. I, I can't even like, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll do is sound uneducated. Where is the W in frog squad? [01:51:08] Speaker 1: I don't whether you would be normally like, yeah, you say it like, [01:51:11] Speaker 3: where's the Lispin small child or something. Oh, that's not. Oh, but astroneer is a great game. I played, I played on the beta of astroneer. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest that some of these, I mean, that's fair. You know, when you play, uh, persona is a potent game too, but astroneer. Yeah. That was, that's that one. There's so many silly things you do in that game. My goodness. It's, it starts out. You just being a survival experience game, building out your factories and so forth that it eventually evolves into things where it's like, let's drill a hole through the planet. Uh, let's blow this mountain to pieces. It sounds like fact, uh, factorio a little bit. Yeah. In the same kind of league as well, but you gotta use multiple worlds that you're getting different supplies from and things. So, so this is star seeker astroneer expedition. Yeah. Some subset of the astroneer game. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was an old beta tester on that game. [01:52:09] Speaker 1: I loved factorio. I, I might, if it's a factorio, like that's it off. Yeah. You'd recognize it. [01:52:16] Speaker 2: Can I shoot Marines that are in a different, uh, group from mine and kind of a team deathmatch situation in this game? There is some multiplayer options in astronauts. I don't know. It was never [01:52:27] Speaker 3: the features that I liked there. I mean, being tea bagged in a cartoon is no better than being tea bagged. Otherwise it does look a little like factorio. Doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It looks like [01:52:37] Speaker 2: the graphics are fun. Yeah. It looks, it looks, uh, this looks like, uh, it's got a cartoony element, [01:52:41] Speaker 3: you know, it's, uh, yeah, it's got a little bit of no man's sky in there. And yeah, it is. And it [01:52:48] Speaker 2: is procedurally generated each world. You never know what new space friends, but in space, we just call them friends. It's like in Mexico, they call it Mexican food. I literally had a guy who owns a restaurant talking about maybe partnering with someone to open a restaurant, another restaurant. I said, what's, what kind of food is it going to be? He goes, Mexican food. I'm like, don't you just call it food? It's just food. Like Mexican food. What are you talking about? Okay. He knows his audience. Yeah, no, that's for sure. Um, this is kind of minor, but there was, uh, an Xbox insiders release, uh, in alpha skip ahead, which is like the, like the canary of Xbox insiders, uh, three new features that they're testing early that it will eventually come to, um, everyone else. None of these are a big deal to me. Uh, if you've ever used the Xbox accessories app, which you do have to use, if you want to update the firmware in your controller, it gives you a, you know, it gives you a control. It looks like a controller sort of, but I guess now it's going to be exact. So if you have like a customized controller that you made through that program, Xbox has with, you know, whatever color schemes and stuff, it will be that exact controller, not just like a white controller or black controller or whatever. I'm like, okay. Um, basically whatever number, like, uh, hex color codes for accent colors instead of just whatever the grid of colors. So you can have any color and then there's going to be a, what I think of as a Chromebook style. Um, your console is rebooted. Here's what's new. Uh, kind of little infographic up in the corner. You can click on and see the whole, the whole deal, but I, okay, whatever. Not, not a big, big deal. Um, of more interest though, um, Asus has announced a new edition of its ROG Xbox ally gaming hand handheld. So this is the X 20. It's a X 20 bundle. Actually. I'm sorry. I should say a new, it's a bundle apparently. So it's, um, uh, the, Oh, that I'm sorry. It is a new model. So there's an OLED display on the device, 120, uh, Hertz refresh rate, uh, free sync, premium pro W vision, 1400 nits of brightness. It's just like, I get, this thing probably has 500 nits. And I go to a white screen of this thing. I can't see for 10 minutes. I don't know how bright that would be. Um, you'll see the future. Yeah, exactly. Um, redesigned thermal system, et cetera. Um, you know, whatever. So, uh, sort of like the Xbox elite controllers, the, um, D pad transform. So you can have different, like pull bits off, put different things on there. Uh, 24 gigs of Ram, terabyte of storage, auto SR upscaling, which I think was already on the other ones. And then it comes in a bundle with a real, what do they call real? I guess X real R one gaming AR glasses, um, that you can plug into the handheld with a USB cable, and then you get a virtual 170 inch screen, I guess. 240 Hertz refresh screen. Okay. Um, so there you go. Um, no pricing, uh, no word on availability, but that's coming down the pike. So probably this holiday season, I would think. And then also tied to, um, gaming, handheld gaming, uh, Intel this past week announced a new series of processors specifically for this market. Like, um, AMD is now on the second gen of their chips specifically for gaming handhelds. Um, now they have their first, so they have arc G three and arc G three extreme, obviously X 86, um, based on the same architecture as Panther Lake, which is fantastic. Um, two performance scores, I think it's six sufficient, no eight efficient cores, and then four low power efficient cores optimized for this, you know, form factor, obviously super resolution, multi-frame generation, low latency, you know, all this stuff. So, um, there will be an Acer device. They were first with this one as well. Uh, based on this, um, I don't know if we have, uh, I guess possibly as soon as June, that's this month. So, um, there will be multiple devices based on this architecture. So yeah. A lot of compute to play with hard to make decisions on which ones to use. I had a hard time not putting this at the top of the show because it's the most important news of the week, but active vision announced the next call of duty game, um, modern, uh, I, I tried, I, I could have, I think I could have gotten out of that without laughing, but Leo left. So, uh, modern warfare four it's my, in the, in the confusing world of call of duty. If you know the history, you know that, um, the game that I think exploded call of duty, uh, with popularity was call of duty for modern warfare, which started a trilogy of games. Then there was call of duty, no number of modern warfare two and then modern warfare three. They later remade that series. And now we're doing a fourth game in that series. But this is that, I think I talked about this. Like, um, I had read an article where someone's, you know, if you play call of duty, you know, that the current launcher, which is, could be 280 gigs of stuff, uh, is the front end for the most recent game, the previous game and the previous two games before that. And then all the sub games like war zone and zombies, et cetera. And it's a freaking mess, but the original, the original remake of call of modern warfare, um, predates that. And if you install that game now it's on game pass again, it's a smaller, obviously it's one game and the graphics aren't as good. Like it's a different engine or whatever, but it has this kind of gritty, awesome kind of feel to it. And that's what they're doing in this next game. It's a little, I think obviously influenced by the latest battlefield game, which do this as well, kind of authentic boots on the ground stakes are high, you know, actual fighting kind of stuff. It looks awesome. So I, I haven't said that about a call of duty game since longer ago than I can even remember. It's been a long time. Um, it's coming out in October. It's coming to the Nintendo switch, uh, two as well. So obviously PC multiple ways, uh, Xbox latest gen consoles only. It's not doing previous gen now. Um, and PlayStation five. Um, so it actually, very, very nice. It's pretty good. Very, very good. Well, [01:58:58] Speaker 1: we have completed the, the, uh, base body of work by basement work. The base has done, but that means that the, the, the, the pediment needs to now be placed upon the base that pedigree in the liminal period between the normal, no, this is the liminal period in between the base and the pediment. And, uh, and the pediment will of course be the tips, the tricks, the app picks, the, uh, runner's radio pick, and then the whiskey pick of the week, the back of the book in other words. [01:59:34] Speaker 2: So we have the pet impediment, which is me. And then the pediment is that correct? [01:59:39] Speaker 1: Uh, I think you're the Corinthian column that holds the damn thing up. Okay. That's what I think. I don't know what's going on. Uh, but let me, uh, use this opportunity, this moment in time, this liminal moment in time to move back into a liminal space. And you see, I am now coming to you from the club twit clubhouse. And this is where my friends, this is where the good stuff happens. As you know, we are, and I will always be, and I'm committed to a, uh, free and open ad supported podcast network, independent, not owned by a big company, beholden to none. I really believe strongly for we've done this for 20 years. I've been doing it for 50, uh, in, in the notion of giving, you know, representing users, uh, not the companies that we cover, but the users. Sure. That gets me banned from events. True. I don't get computers on my doorstep, but you know what? It's worth it because I'm a user, you're a user. And, uh, and we, we need to stick together. That's why we created club to it because even though we do have advertising, it does not cover all our costs. Uh, even, you know, and we've, we've tightened the belt as much as we can. We've cut back on shows. We closed our studios. I'm doing it for my house, that kind of thing. But we want to make sure that our contributors get paid, that our staff, we still have 11 people working at twit. They get paid. The light bill gets paid. The, the internet bills get paid all of those things. Uh, and advertising only goes about, I don't know, about 60 or 70% of the way. Uh, that's why we started the club back in the COVID days because we thought we wouldn't it be great if we could do a network that was supported by its listeners, even though there's no paywall. I just, I, I like to do that. Now we do give you some benefits. If you join the clubs, 10 bucks a month, uh, you get ad free versions of all the shows. I can't, I don't know how many we have 15 shows, something like that. Uh, you get access to the club to a discord, which is a great hang, a really nice place to hang out with other smart people. You know, it turns out when people pay 10 bucks a month to be in a discord server, the quality goes way up. You don't get spammers. You don't get the jerks. You get smart, interesting people who listen to our content and talking about not just the content, but everything on their mind. And I love that. Uh, you also get a special programming for instance, coming Monday, we've got the WWDC keynote. And because Apple doesn't like the fact that we cover their keynotes freely and fairly, uh, whenever we stream our coverage on YouTube, they, they not only try to take it down, they try to take us down the whole channel. So, uh, we've decided not to put keynotes in, uh, in the, on, in the public anymore. You have to see the keynote coverage. Mike and I will be doing that 10 AM on Monday, 10 AM Pacific in the club to a discord. We actually give you a private YouTube link as well. So you can watch it on YouTube if you prefer, but it's not open to the public because we don't want Apple to get on our case. So that is something new. Uh, most of the other stuff we do in the club to discord, the, the photography show, the travel show, Jeff Atwood's off by one show, which is going to be great. We're gonna do that every month. Uh, Stacy's book club. Micah's added to Stacy's book club. Now Micah will also do media. So, uh, I don't know what the voting off to look at the poll. We voted on a variety of different media, uh, choices and picked one, uh, one to watch for his next one. That's coming up. Micah's crafting corner. A lot of stuff. Our AI user group is Friday. That is a great get together with people who are actually AI practitioners. I want to rename it to the lead to, I want to call it leap the league of excellent AI practitioners. Uh, our, our next leap meeting is, uh, this Friday at 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern. All of this is in the club. We do stream it live as we do with all our shows for everybody to watch. I don't like paywalls. I'm not trying to put stuff behind paywalls. I really just would like to ask you if you'd like what we do and you want us to keep doing it to, to show your support by going to twit.tv slash club twit and joining the club. Simple as that. That's all. That's all it is. Thank you. And thank you, uh, especially to all our club two members who in fact did not see this because it gets cut out of all of the shows because they don't get any ads. Now I will never cut out Paul Thorat's tip of the week back in the book of time. Polly [02:04:27] Speaker 2: you're on earlier. I mentioned that this is like the year of CLIs. I just got an email where you were talking about club twit from build. It's like following up after day one of build. There's a Microsoft build CLI GitHub repository. And if you go to this thing, yeah, it's, um, so you can, you can add it as a, uh, a plugin for GitHub copilot CLI. Right. Um, and then you can go in and say what build sessions are relevant to my, the project that you're working on or whatever. Like, it's like a way to access the content from build from inside of GitHub. From a command line. That's hysterical. I know. Do you have to use PowerShell or can you use any terminal? I assume you can use any terminal, but you would, you would just run the terminal app and it would be PowerShell by default. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. So great. Interesting. Right. So, um, there are lots of CLIs now, right? There's an Android CLI. If you want to, uh, create like, um, Kotlin jet pack, compose apps from a command line in the Microsoft space, I mentioned the win app CLI that I didn't understand when they announced it in January. And then there's the Microsoft store CLI, which I didn't understand when they announced that in whatever month, April or whatever that was, because we already have win get. And why do we have another thing? But I think these things are all interrelated and during build, as I said earlier, they announced something called the windows development skills, which is a plugin for GitHub coply, but also you can add it to, I, I, I added it to anthropic cloud code, but, um, you could add it to, uh, open AI, uh, codecs, you know, whatever your choice. And the idea is that you can use this to vibe code a modern when UI three app. So I've done a bunch of this vibe coding stuff recently. Um, after Google IO, I did a bunch of stuff. I wrote three articles about that and probably made eight or 15 apps. I don't read a lot of apps. Um, so I saw this and I was like, okay, obviously I have to try this and it is a hundred percent CLI based, right? Um, you add the plugin, um, you run it, it has to run probably almost certainly would have to download some prerequisites. In my case, I think I didn't have, well, I didn't have the win app CLI. I didn't, there's some when UI three templates, uh, there's a dev, a development mode needed to be enabled, which I normally do enable. You have to enable that in windows. Uh, if you make a UWP or, um, windows app. Yep. So it did that stuff and then it spent about 45 minutes talking to itself. Um, and, and this was the thing where I was saying, like in the beginning I wanted to, we were kind of half joking about this in the beginning, but anyway, this is when you were talking about Yolo mode. And I, the reason I didn't just let it do its thing is I actually wanted to see what it was doing until that got so tedious. I finally said, geez, just yes, allow all the edits during the session. This is so fricking yellow. Yeah. Yeah. So we all get there is the point. And anyway, 48 minutes into this and you know, it does the AI thing. It's like, oh, all right. So I'm going to run the app. Oh, wait, something didn't work. Okay. Oh, I see what it, you know, it does that thing. And I know, but the thing is, this is now you got to remember this is grounded in when UI three windows app SDK, it's not pretty magical, right? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's weird, but it's magical. I asked it in this case to me, all I wrote, let me find my actual prompt. Cause it was very simple. I was like, uh, cause I, you know, this is the app I've been making for years, build me a win when UI three app that is identical to notepad and windows 11 visually and functionally. Oh, now you can vibe code in it. [02:07:58] Speaker 1: Yeah. That's, that's what you do with it. Like that's what that, that is what you do with it. So it's not just for installing stuff. It's building stuff, right? That, which is why I had, [02:08:08] Speaker 2: this is why I had to try it. Um, took a long time. Um, didn't really cause any problems. I mean, the Iran, I, I loaded the project that made it into visual studio. No problem there. Um, having built this out myself so many times, and then of course doing it in when UI three, most recently, I can see some of the things that did that are not correct from a design perspective. Like the, the menu is above the tabs. It should be the other way around that it's very hard to do by the way, which was one of the problems I solved. Um, it doesn't have a settings page. Um, the fonts thing is like, it's a little dialogue and it doesn't persist settings. I didn't ask it to, right? I mean, I could keep going with it, but I don't really see a point to doing it. The thing is like, this is the second time talking about when get, this is when app. Yeah. I get it. Yeah. So this is what fascinates me. Um, back, back, no, I probably linked to the right thing. Um, back when I, before I moved to the windows app SDK for my app, I was using WPF and WPF doesn't support a lot of the modern controls and things that are in, you know, in this thing. So one of the things that didn't support, it was just a thing called a content dialogue. And if you use notepad today and you do like find or replace a content dialogue comes up over the editor and it has all these different options you can do. It's really elegant and looks great. And I couldn't do it in WPF and I tried to fake it. And I was like, you know what, I'm just going to come up with a UI that I think looks native and works well. And I came up with a find and then a find pain and then a re replace pain that would come under that. If you did that, that sits between the menu and the edit box, the text box. And, uh, I thought it looked great. Like it worked well. It, it feels native. It's not the way notepad does it. It's not an, you know, a normal way to do this. But then I used like cloud, uh, code or cloud, maybe just whatever it was last late last year or something like that. And it, it generated an app that used that UI that I had. And I was like, wait a minute, I invented this UI. Like I didn't get this from anyone. I made it, you know, you know, that this app that vibe coded in 48 or 45 minutes, whatever it was, has that UI. Huh? It, the find and replace pains are not identical, but they're what I made. Like they're, they are the UIs I made. Now my code base is public. It's in GitHub. I mean, must be using, they must've both grabbed, you know what I mean? Like, I guess I'm part of the, [02:10:37] Speaker 1: the DNA of this stuff. Yeah. There's a certain sameness to a lot of the apps. You know, if you have cloud make one app. Yeah. It's right. Which I, by the way, I understand. I'm just saying [02:10:46] Speaker 2: that, but this is mine. Like I made it. Oh, this isn't, this isn't something you made with Claude. This is something you wrote yourself. Well, no, like the original time that I did those find and replace pains, I wrote that. I, I, I don't mean to say like I invented it. So what you're saying, I learned from, it learned from you. I, I don't know how, but it did. I mean, it's on GitHub. Yeah. Right. Right. It's just, I'm just fascinated that it did that. So there are, there are all these things I would do to kind of fix this. I don't, I'm not going to, because I already have, I have a more sophisticated version of this app that I made or whatever, but, but, but it worked. Like, [02:11:20] Speaker 1: Isn't it interesting? They really want to enable normal users. It sounds like to write Windows apps. [02:11:26] Speaker 2: Eventually. Like, I don't think most normal users are going to sit down in a command line and figure out all the machinations to do what I did to make this work. I mean, a developer would, but, but that's, this is the back end to what will be a, a gooey something that, yeah, anyone could absolutely. I mean, this is only a matter of time and given how quick this stuff goes, I think it's going to be pretty, and it's not specific to co-pilot that can use cloud or can use. [02:11:52] Speaker 1: Yeah. Because they all use the same, uh, you know, they all interoperate, right? Like, Oh, it's the open, it's probably the open AI API. That's a standard. Yeah. It's like, [02:11:59] Speaker 2: people supporting. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually others will. Yeah. You can, you can, you can plug in those three at least. I know that. So I just used interoperate, but I was like, that's okay. This is like, so, you know, I've done like an Android app, a couple more than one, but I've done some Android app stuff with a Google AI studio. I've done some, um, uh, what do you call it? PWI or web app type stuff also with Google AI studio. I've done just the thing where you go into GitHub copilot inside of visual studio code, a visual studio or, um, I mean, or a white ball or like just anthropic cloud. Like, you know, you just use, like, I'm going to write code and just does it on. It's like, I've done all these things, you know, and like, I have to say, like, this stuff has gone from like, eh, it needs some work to like, holy crap. Like this is, this works pretty, like it's, it's pretty good. [02:12:45] Speaker 1: Yeah. I was talking about this with Gibson yesterday. This, I used to think this was like spicy auto, correct, right? No, no, I don't understand how it's doing this. I, I feel like [02:12:55] Speaker 2: they're very, they, they, they, they, they're presenting this as something a human being would use. But the reality is this is really here for the AI agents, right? Like that's really what it's about. And it's a harness. Yeah. Yeah. And, but the, the, to me, the other than the obvious, it does the thing and it does the work. Like the big deal to me is when you go into cloud code, which in this case, right from the command line, and then you tell it, we're going to use this thing, which is using when app CLI on the backend. So this thing being, I keep forgetting the name of the windows developer skills, you know, what you're doing when you issue that command line is you're saying you are grounded in this, you're not looking at the web, you're not looking anywhere else. This is all of your, so it's like what you did with Lisp, like we always use this example, you trained AI, here's the documentation. It's this finite set of information. Just use this to make an app. And that's what this is doing. But with when UI three and it's, you know, it took, it took a while, but it, but it's, it's pretty good. Like it's, I mean, the app works like, it's great. It runs an arm. It runs on X64. It's fun. Like it works great. So I thought that was kind of it. Yeah. [02:14:06] Speaker 1: It's on GitHub at WinApp CLI. Yep. And you just point your AI agent at it and say, install this. [02:14:14] Speaker 2: This is one of my favorites. Well, so the thing you, yeah. So what you really need is something called the windows developer skills. So you should look that up on GitHub or wherever. Okay. That will install the WinApp CLI as part of its prerequisites. Like it will do it. It will do that for you. Nice. But yeah, uses that on the backend. And this, to me, this like, now it's kind of coming together. Like I said, in January, when they announced WinApp, WinApp CLI, sounds so weird saying it. I didn't understand what the point was. I was like, what is this? Like, and now I'm like, oh no, no, I get it. Like they're, this is all, this is all about driving these agents to, you know, get them to do this stuff. It's really cool. And I just mentioned, I've written free markdown editors and soon we're all going to be doing this. But in the meantime, there are two really, really good cross-platform markdown editors, in my opinion. One is the one I use mostly, which is Typora. But the other one is IA Writer. And I, this is, this is my favorite on the Mac. It actually works better on the Mac, I think, than it does on Windows. But it's available on the iPad as well, on the iPhone, if you wanted to do that. The problem with this app is that you could only buy it through an app store. So on the Microsoft side, you had to buy through the Microsoft store and the Apple side, obviously buy through their app store. And I guess for the six, eight years, whatever it's been, they've been trying to figure out a way to, actually it's 16 years, just to sell this thing directly to people. And the idea is that you just sign it with your email account. They'll send you an email, you get a code, you sign it, it's a 2FA thing or whatever, essentially. And there's no like special online account you have to deal with. It's just the thing you use to buy it. And so you can do that now. So if you don't want to go through an app store, you want to buy the Windows or Mac version of IA Writer, which is, I do recommend, it's a great app. You can do it directly from IA now. So that's pretty cool. Nice. Markdown is the lingua franca of AI too. It's everybody everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Between like, it's like, everything's text, you know, it's like Markdown is text, CLI, obviously text mode, like this is text. Text is back, baby. Text is, oh, I keep saying, I told you about this, like MS style, well, MS style editor, edit that Microsoft released. It's now just built into Windows. I love this thing. I have a right click memo. Like I can bring this [02:16:21] Speaker 1: thing up from a right click. Lisa said, I want, because I was showing her my agent. She said, I want, I want that. I said, well, you can't have it because it's command line. You got to do command line. She said, what do you mean command line? I said, what command line? You know where you type it? She said, you mean like DOS? I said, yeah, like DOS. She said, I could do that. [02:16:40] Speaker 3: Okay, it's yours. Actually, it's got to be sufficiently motivated. [02:16:45] Speaker 2: But the UI for that's going to be voice, right? I mean, like at some point, it's just going to be [02:16:49] Speaker 1: natural language and, you know, yeah. Yeah. Let's see. That concludes Paul's part of this pediment, his impediment, as we say. Right. The part of the foundation that is insecure and will fail you. But now ladies and gentlemen, it's time for Mr. Richard Campbell and Ron Ange Radio. [02:17:10] Speaker 3: A show I picked up while I was in Toronto at NDC Toronto, talking to my friend, Jerry Dixon, who is a Microsoft SQL Server Principal Product Manager, and he works specifically in the data side of things. And it was a tool I knew nothing about called Data API Builder. Now, this seems like a dev tool, but it's really not. It's something that DBA wants to roll with because what it does is it builds abstraction layers over databases. So you struggle with allowing developers to access databases directly because often they can get into dumb situations that will seriously impair performance. So having an abstraction layer gives you a little bit of control over what they can do, what governance you have in place, what kind of monitoring you do, and so forth. And this tool, the API Builder, literally will expose the database the way you want, as a REST interface, or as a GraphQL interface, or even as an MCP server. So you can just make it available to an agent and have called it directly, do some distractions and protections that way. So we went a little nuts on this one. It was like huge possibilities. And right away, I was thinking about features of the restrictions I'd want to put in place and how governance I'd want to throw. And it's like, if I stick this layer in, is anybody calling it like that? So we really had a lot of fun with it. But it's an interesting thought that DBAs now, with these kinds of tools, you still want to allow the devs some flexibility, do some ad hoc work, that sort of thing, but you don't want them to get into trouble. And so rather than having to write a lot of store procedures or just say no, here are some tools that make it a whole lot easier. So great [02:18:48] Speaker 1: conversation. Very nice. Yeah. Jerry Nixon, Run As Radio, episode 1039 at RunAsRadio.com. Now, [02:18:59] Speaker 3: whiskey time. Yeah. This is a fall over from being with my buddy, Remy, who now owns the whiskey store in Alkmar, who handed me what we consider an advanced sample of the old malt casking of a Long Morn 20. And we've never talked about Long Morn before. And I'm just going to covet this right up front by saying, yeah, you ain't going to get one of these. This is literally inside ball about these rare individual casks. There are some regular single malt editions of Long Morn, but mostly it's always been used at blending. So let's, let's just talk about Long Morn for a minute. Then we'll get with this particular edition. And so Long Morn is another one of those classic space sides. So this is on the A941 south of Elgin, which is, that's Glen Rothy's, Ben's Burn, my beloved Craig Alatch in Hotel, McAllen, you name it. It's, this is the council region of Moray, which has human habitation going back up about 8,000 BC or so. So, you know, better part 10,000 years. In fact, if you get up to the Elgin museum, there are all kinds of artifacts from all these different times, from Mesolithic tooling, to pots from the Neolithic period, to diagrams and glyphs from the picks and so on. It's amazing. Now, this is not one of the oldest distilleries. This is from 1893, which is the height of the sort of whiskey wave that, that ran over Scotland after the railways were in and there was a huge surge. And with a, one person behind it was John Duff. And we've talked about Duff before. This was a guy who worked at Glendronach and which is in the Eastern Highlands. We mentioned that. And he built a distillery. He built the Glen Lossie distillery in 1876. And after he's done with that, he thought that he would take whiskey around the world. And so he went down to South Africa and failed terribly. And deciding that was a mistake, then he went out to the United States and tried there. And that did not go well either at all. And when he got back to Scotland, he rounded up a couple of partners, John Sheares and George Thompson. And in 1893, they built the Longmore distillery, Longmore, and does very well. In fact, well enough that within a couple of years, he buys out his partners because he thinks it's going to be all the business. And make, is making enough money and things are so busy that he actually builds another distillery across the highway that derogatorily known as Longmore too, but it was actually named Ben Riak, a better known distillery than Glenmore. Here, one of the reasons that John Duff was so enthusiastic is that there was this group of blenders, the Pattisons, the Pattison brothers, the company's called Pattison, Elder & Co. that had been operating in the, from the early 1880s until the 1890s. And they were big on powerful driven marketing about more and more whiskey. And they were big on pitching hard to the distilleries to produce more whiskey at scale that they could do some storage on and make their own blends and so forth. But they were playing fast and loose with the books and kind of overspending. And eventually the bank calls in all the loans in 1898. And ultimately the Pattison brothers end up convicted of fraud and the whole house guards falls in on itself. And suddenly all these distilleries have barrels that were down at Pattison they can't get back and aren't paid for, and have overproduction sitting in warehouses that don't have homes anymore. And so price of whiskey drops way down and a whole bunch of them go broke. And John Duff was one of them. He ends up having to sell off both the distilleries to James Grant. And that's the Glenlivet guy further down the road there. Creates a new entity called Longmourne Glenlivet distillery for a number of years. And their functioned fine like that. Grant had not been part of the Pattison debacle. Didn't get over leveraged. Longmourne is famous for another reason. Our friend Masataka Takasuri, the guy who worked initially with Suntory and then made the Nikkei distillery, worked there in the 1920s as part of his education to pick whiskey to Japan. By 1970 they're starting to modernize. They dropped the name Longmourne from the name just called the Glenlivet distilleries. Longmourne is not doing a lot of single malts. They're mostly going into various kinds of blends. But 1970 was the very typical time where they switched away from coal heat to steam because it's safer. Got rid of floor maltings, that sort of thing. Sort of standard modernization. And it was acquired in 1977 by the Seagrams Group, which at that time also owned the Chivas Brothers. And Longmourne has always featured significantly in the Chivas blends. And that means it rolls up into Pernod Ricard by 2001. So for the most part, you've never heard of Longmourne because it's just gone into blends. You've likely drank it if you drank any well-known blends, especially Chivas Regal. They did start making some single malt editions in 1993 without a lot of marketing into that. But the independent bottlers have always made big business from them. And so most people keep an eye out for whenever Hunter Liang, like in this edition, but also, you know, pick your bottler. They often make lawn mowers and they are coveted, grabbed up right away, 250 bottles or something like that. The facility itself is large. They produce about four and a half million liters a year, doing malts from the Marnay region, from Baird. Eight and a half ton gristloads is pretty big into 10 stainless steel washbacks of 39,000 liters. They run on four sets of stills, 10,000 liters for the wash stills and 7,000 liters for the spirit stills. Do a lot of their own barrel storage there, but because they're part of Pernod Ricard, barrels are distributed all over. Nothing unusual there. And again, not a well-known brand. They are not one of the unbranded, but also not in the Diageo loop. They're in the Pernod Ricard loop. They're part of Chivas. So this particular bottling, and I don't have it with me, it's back home, but I did get a chance to taste it and it was amazing, comes from Hunter Liang. So this is actually originally, Hunter Liang is one of the sons of Douglas Liang. And Douglas Liang formed a company for doing blending and filling in 1948 and did very, very well. By the 1990s, they were all on this modern single casking approach to whiskey because people like to have one of 250 bottles, that kind of thing. The two sons, Doug Jr. and Hunter, disagreed on a bunch of things. And so by 2013, they decided to split the company and split up the brands. Doug Jr. kept Old Particular and a couple of other brands, but also has now started to move in distilling, which I believe was their disagreement, that Hunter liked making his single bottlings in his relationship with distilleries and didn't want to get in distilling where Doug Jr. is moving in that direction. And the main line for Hunter Liang is this old malt cask, of which this is one of the bottles of it. So this is a 20-year-old edition that was distilled in 1996 and bottled in 2017. And they're now looking at doing distributions for it. So for certain whiskey shops, they send out samples, small little 100 ml bottles that you can, that allow you to try them out so that you decide if you're going to stock some of those. So this hot 260 bottle run, they're going to go there. It's a single cask and very limited production. It was 50% alcohol, but it was a 20-year-old. And you know, I'm usually lean away from those older whiskeys, but this is one of those beautiful silky caramel space sides. It's like everything you ever wanted in a whiskey. And the samples were basically for free. You know, I was given one of them, so I didn't ever pay for it. But you can expect, if you could get your hands on one of these bottlings, and there's a few different editions that have come down the line, if you keep your eye out for getting access to Hunter Liang, which is hard to come by out of Scotland, expect to pay about 200 pounds for a bottle like that of a very special edition that you can serve your friends at Christmas and let them know you'll never have this again. And you can't get it now though, right? Or can you? I think we're just in the advanced sample. They haven't done the release on it. So if you were very keen, you could go looking for it. Oh, you could get that. Okay. Okay. Possibly, but it's not the old malt cask. Yeah. So yeah, the old malt cask is the group Hunter Liang that does the various editions. And they bottle from all kinds of distilleries. So you can't just look at old malt cask. You've got to specifically go hunting for a long morn edition. Oh, this is kind of fun. Look at all this stuff. Is this a subscription? Absolutely. They're not because it's so hard to ship, but it's one of those things where you kind of have to pay attention. And your whole thing here is go to your boutique whiskey maker that might be on the Hunter Liang list. Ask about certain editions. See if you can get a few bottles. How fun is this? Look at all these. And that's the whole thing about these custom bottlers, right? Is that you get all these interesting things from it. And just like I said, they're rare, they're special, but they're a way to get very unique bottles of whiskey. If you want to have something unusual. So that being said, I am in Denmark. And today I was handed the bottle of Danish whiskey. No surprise. The good news is I'm staying for another week in Denmark. And so you'll probably see that. They see you coming, don't they, Richard? They do see me coming. And you know, I'm here to help. The nice thing is I'm here long enough that I can open this bottle and share it with friends and not worry about leaving it behind. We'll be able to finish it. But next week you'll see me, uh, in a different location. Probably I'll be able to scan to get that point. And, uh, Will you share this Danish whiskey with us next week? Yeah. You know, I hate to not do a Danish whiskey. We've done one before, right? We have talked about Danish whiskey before, but this is a different one. So we'll, I'll leave it fun. So I can finish the [02:29:11] Speaker 1: research on it. It takes a little time. Well, bless you. Uh, you, you, you kept it in, uh, under an hour and I appreciate that. And, uh, you think you're going to give me time to do some more work. So thank you for that. Uh, we do windows weekly. Uh, I, the reason I say that if you're watching live is, uh, in about 10 minutes, we've got, uh, Robert Tercik, who was a former creative director at MTV and is a futurist talking about AI on intelligent machines. Uh, and so, uh, that's going to be a lot of fun. Stick around if you want to watch that. If you're not watching live, well, uh, you'll find it on the IM feed a little bit later. We do, uh, windows weekly every, uh, Wednesday before intelligent machines. We do it 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern 1800 UTC. You can even watch us live if you want, if you're in the club, of course, in the club to discord, but also, uh, we stream to everyone on YouTube, twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and kick. Uh, after the fact, on-demand versions of the show at twit.tv slash WW, we have audio and video there. The video is also on YouTube on the windows weekly dedicated channel. Good way to share clips of the show and actually Richard's a whiskey clips. You don't need to clip those out. We, uh, Kevin King goes through those. Uh, he's a little behind takes a while, but, uh, if you go to something weird from my closet.com, you'll find that YouTube playlist with all the hundred, more than a hundred, uh, whiskey, 150, and the story of whiskey and all sorts of great stuff. That would be the first, the first eight [02:30:43] Speaker 3: episodes are me explaining the Scottish whiskey making process to my friends here. And it runs, [02:30:49] Speaker 1: uh, two and a half hours. Well, it takes 20 years. So two and a half hours, that's nothing, nothing. I'm quick. Yeah. Um, Paul Therat is at therat.com become a premium member and you can actually get copies of his books from lean pub.com. And that includes field guide to windows 11, windows everywhere, and the latest in D and shitify windows. Uh, or you can buy them from lean pub.com. Uh, Richard Campbell is at run as radio.com. That's where you'll find his shows run as radio and dot net rocks or DNR, which does not mean do not resuscitate in this case. Uh, the 2000 episodes, maybe you shouldn't risk. Yeah. No, it's living. It's alive. Do not pound on his chest. It's, it's fine. It's quite dead. It's just resting. I'm getting better. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Paul. Thanks to all our winners and dozers out there. We'll see you next Wednesday on windows weekly. Bye bye.