WEBVTT 1 00:00:18.140 --> 00:00:19.500 Hey, Ben. 2 00:00:19.500 --> 00:00:20.440 Hey Matt. 3 00:00:20.440 --> 00:00:32.160 We are in some kind of... catastrophe. Catastrophic situation where my computer keeps crashing, or rather my CalDigit 4 00:00:32.160 --> 00:00:44.240 docking station keeps dying with USB. So this may never go out. So I'm talking to you, and then maybe this is the only time this will ever be heard. So what are we going to talk about today? 5 00:00:44.240 --> 00:00:53.980 I think we could do... some discussions of some personal projects that we've been kind of kicking around with Claude. I have two. 6 00:00:53.980 --> 00:00:54.400 Okay. 7 00:00:54.400 --> 00:00:57.900 It's almost like, I almost want to feel like we're doing these in like lightning talk format because it's like these. 8 00:00:57.900 --> 00:00:58.680 Okay, let's do that. 9 00:00:58.680 --> 00:00:59.120 Part of... 10 00:00:59.120 --> 00:01:01.820 Because I may disappear at any time. 11 00:01:01.820 --> 00:01:07.900 Right. So we're reducing the scope of each iteration so that, like, if one fails, then we've at least committed the. 12 00:01:07.900 --> 00:01:09.860 We've. This is a redundant array of inexpensive. 13 00:01:09.860 --> 00:01:09.860 Yes. 14 00:01:09.860 --> 00:01:11.260 Podcasts. 15 00:01:11.260 --> 00:01:14.140 Podcasts, yeah. That has a terrible acronym. 16 00:01:14.140 --> 00:01:14.140 Okay. 17 00:01:14.140 --> 00:01:15.590 Let's not say that one out loud. 18 00:01:15.590 --> 00:01:15.740 Oh. 19 00:01:15.740 --> 00:01:16.660 Don't think about it. 20 00:01:16.660 --> 00:01:16.940 Right. 21 00:01:16.940 --> 00:01:17.840 Yeah. Okay. 22 00:01:17.840 --> 00:01:18.960 Yeah. 23 00:01:18.960 --> 00:01:23.940 Go. Tell me about one. I've got several on the desk next to me, so you go first, and then we'll take it in turns. 24 00:01:23.940 --> 00:01:40.920 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a few years ago, me and my oldest child, we were exploring our basement, let's just say. And we are like, oh, here's the control panel for the Brink security system that was installed in our house 25 00:01:40.920 --> 00:01:54.840 when it was built, you know, 20 years ago, whatever, which is now obviously totally useless because we don't pay for Brink security. However, looking at this control panel, this does not seem as complicated as one might think. 26 00:01:54.840 --> 00:02:02.950 I think these things are just switches, and maybe it's a little more complicated with motion sensors because they require power, but surely we can figure this out. 27 00:02:02.950 --> 00:02:03.040 Okay. 28 00:02:03.040 --> 00:02:03.280 And this was... Yeah. 29 00:02:03.280 --> 00:02:10.140 Switches as in like... network switches here, or switches as in literally up and down buttons? 30 00:02:10.140 --> 00:02:15.080 No, just like... when the door is closed, the circuit is closed. And when the door is open, the circuit is open. 31 00:02:15.080 --> 00:02:15.300 Oh. 32 00:02:15.300 --> 00:02:18.340 Right. And the default state is closed so that you know the system's working. 33 00:02:18.340 --> 00:02:18.400 It's... 34 00:02:18.400 --> 00:02:18.940 Right. Like if there's a loop through the circuit. 35 00:02:18.940 --> 00:02:21.240 Oh, oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. 36 00:02:21.240 --> 00:02:21.420 Right. 37 00:02:21.420 --> 00:02:21.600 Yeah. 38 00:02:21.600 --> 00:02:24.140 So an actual switch, except, you know, yeah, right. As you described. 39 00:02:24.140 --> 00:02:24.740 Yeah. 40 00:02:24.740 --> 00:02:25.020 Okay. 41 00:02:25.020 --> 00:02:35.560 Yes. And, you know, this was like, obviously there was AI and other tools back then, but it wasn't quite as prevalent. So we did a little digging and we're like, oh okay, yeah, no, we figured this out. It's not that hard. 42 00:02:35.560 --> 00:02:53.720 The doors and the windows are just a circuit. It's just a switch. And when it's closed that means that the device is closed, and when it's open that means it's open, and it fails open, so you know the alarm goes off, something is wrong. And then the motion sensors are the same thing but also require 12-volt power. 43 00:02:53.720 --> 00:02:54.180 Okay. 44 00:02:54.180 --> 00:02:58.690 Right. So if you give them 12-volt power and you let them kind of warm up for a second, they will then close, 45 00:02:58.690 --> 00:02:59.120 Okay. 46 00:02:59.120 --> 00:03:08.260 indicating that there's no motion. And then if they see motion they will open back up again, the circuit will open. Right. And that is the extent of the part that is wired into the house. 47 00:03:08.260 --> 00:03:12.670 Okay. And this is... These motion sensors are like the little things you see up in the corner of rooms that are essentially infrared light. 48 00:03:12.670 --> 00:03:12.820 Yeah. 49 00:03:12.820 --> 00:03:15.290 I think it's an infrared light and then a kind of clever... 50 00:03:15.290 --> 00:03:19.240 I think they're infrared detectors. Yeah. 51 00:03:19.240 --> 00:03:29.170 clever... reflect... yeah, a photo receiver that notices when things move in some way or something, I don't know. I watched a YouTube video that was very impressive and then it's immediately forgotten. But yeah, okay, so... 52 00:03:29.170 --> 00:03:29.640 Yeah. 53 00:03:29.640 --> 00:03:31.200 But it looks like a switch is what you're saying. 54 00:03:31.200 --> 00:03:31.480 Right, right. 55 00:03:31.480 --> 00:03:32.420 Other than you power it. 56 00:03:32.420 --> 00:03:36.020 If you give it 12-volt power, it acts like a switch. It just goes on and off. 57 00:03:36.020 --> 00:03:44.540 All right. I have questions about that because if you give it, like... In order to give it 12 volts, it needs to have a zero volts for it to flow through. So where does... are there like two connections to it? 58 00:03:44.540 --> 00:03:47.480 Well, there's additional leads. Yeah, it's not with those things. 59 00:03:47.480 --> 00:03:47.600 Ah, okay. 60 00:03:47.600 --> 00:03:50.700 It's not just two wires. Actually, also, interestingly. 61 00:03:50.700 --> 00:03:51.420 Aha. 62 00:03:51.420 --> 00:03:58.210 All of these things use Cat5 cable. It's just that only two of the cables matter for most of them, but the other ones 63 00:03:58.210 --> 00:03:58.540 Ah. 64 00:03:58.540 --> 00:04:03.900 There's two additional ones that carry the 12-volt power for the things, and I have a feeling there might be other things too. 65 00:04:03.900 --> 00:04:04.000 Is... 66 00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:04.960 I hope. Yes. 67 00:04:04.960 --> 00:04:07.160 Is that the same as PoE or is that different again? 68 00:04:07.160 --> 00:04:09.800 I don't think it is PoE. 69 00:04:09.800 --> 00:04:10.540 No. 70 00:04:10.540 --> 00:04:14.630 Okay. Right. But obviously it uses... it also uses Cat5. 71 00:04:14.630 --> 00:04:16.100 Yeah. 72 00:04:16.100 --> 00:04:21.550 Like, I think the electricians just wired it with Cat5 because they're like, we're running these cables, might as well use Cat5. Right. 73 00:04:21.550 --> 00:04:21.690 So. 74 00:04:21.690 --> 00:04:23.280 Right. Anyway. Got it. All right, anyways. 75 00:04:23.280 --> 00:04:33.140 It's all low power, so who cares? So this is what we did two years ago. And so... Kit was very much like, we need to name this thing GLaDOS 76 00:04:33.140 --> 00:04:34.800 from Portal. 77 00:04:34.800 --> 00:04:35.060 Oh. 78 00:04:35.060 --> 00:04:35.320 Right. 79 00:04:35.320 --> 00:04:36.220 So we built. 80 00:04:36.220 --> 00:04:55.110 We built this whole, we built an Arduino circuit that interacts with all of these switches and replaces the Brink's circuit board that was there. We wired it into a Mac mini that we have that's sitting in the same utility closet. We wrote a little Python app using asyncio that, like, talks to 81 00:04:55.110 --> 00:04:56.180 Oh. 82 00:04:56.180 --> 00:05:23.690 the Arduino over serial connection and serves up a web interface that has, like, the layout of the house and shows all the zones, and yeah, we went in with, like, SVG and mapped out all the zones and where all the windows and doors and all the motion sensors cover and all of that, and there's like an event log and all this stuff, and it was super cool. And we did this as a project, yeah, like two years ago. 83 00:05:23.690 --> 00:05:24.490 Wow. 84 00:05:24.490 --> 00:05:37.500 And then, like, it was, I don't know, three or four weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago, it stopped working. And I went and investigated and I'm like, well, obviously I'm not going to do this myself. 85 00:05:37.500 --> 00:05:44.040 So step number one in this investigation is get Claude running as like a systemd service that will automatically restart in case I screw something up. 86 00:05:44.040 --> 00:05:44.340 Ha! No! Oh no. 87 00:05:44.340 --> 00:05:48.120 So now I've got Claude running on this machine. 88 00:05:48.120 --> 00:05:55.840 No, oh, right, right. Not... Claude running as a systemd service. But Claude setting up a systemd service to keep the thing running. Is that what you were saying? 89 00:05:55.840 --> 00:05:58.400 Well, no, actually it was both. So it was... 90 00:05:58.400 --> 00:05:59.060 Oh. 91 00:05:59.060 --> 00:06:07.540 So I basically wanted to make sure that I could always remote into this thing, even if it rebooted or restarted or anything else went wrong. So I'm like, 92 00:06:07.540 --> 00:06:08.540 Right. 93 00:06:08.540 --> 00:06:14.530 Claude... And of course, I'm telling Claude to do this, but it's like, yeah, I made a systemd service that runs tmux, that runs Claude. 94 00:06:14.530 --> 00:06:15.280 Ah. With remote control or whatever. 95 00:06:15.280 --> 00:06:18.660 And then that has remote control enabled so I can go and connect to it. 96 00:06:18.660 --> 00:06:18.660 Yeah, yeah. 97 00:06:18.660 --> 00:06:22.000 And obviously I can SSH into this machine too. It's not like I can only access it with remote control. 98 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:24.320 But now you can be out walking the dog and just bring your phone out and say. 99 00:06:24.320 --> 00:06:28.900 Exactly. And I can talk into my phone and be like, hey, Claude, can you make GLaDOS do this thing? 100 00:06:28.900 --> 00:06:31.580 And then it'll be like, yeah, sure, fine. 101 00:06:31.580 --> 00:06:44.200 It's kind of scarily, you know, how commoditized that has become, so easy. I'm so used to it. And yet, yeah, so many questions, so many flaws. But anyway, carry on with your... 102 00:06:44.200 --> 00:06:47.480 And the fact that you called it GLaDOS doesn't really help the whole argument here. 103 00:06:47.480 --> 00:06:47.520 Yeah. 104 00:06:47.520 --> 00:07:00.760 I was just... and that's, that was going to be the punchline of this whole lightning talk, is I don't know if it's a good idea to have an LLM in charge of a system that was, like, you know, designed to be malevolent and evil and just, you know, torture humanity with experiments. 105 00:07:00.760 --> 00:07:00.760 Oh, I'm sorry. 106 00:07:00.760 --> 00:07:00.760 Uh-oh. 107 00:07:00.760 --> 00:07:00.760 Yeah. 108 00:07:00.760 --> 00:07:05.740 But that's what I'm doing. So, okay, fine. But the... 109 00:07:05.740 --> 00:07:20.090 But I did this. I'm like, all right, well, what's going wrong? And of course, it just diagnoses the issue and says, oh, the Arduino's gone bad. You need to replace it. And I'm like, okay, fine. I'll flash it. And then it handles, like, updating the firmware. And I'm like, all right. Cool. That was super easy. 110 00:07:20.090 --> 00:07:30.720 Let's connect it to the sump pump. So I took a picture of the sump pump label and it's like, oh, yeah, there's an RJ11 connector that you get. I'm going to give you the Amazon link. You can order all these parts. It's actually going to be real simple. 111 00:07:30.720 --> 00:07:37.760 The listener can't see that I've just got my mouth wide open. It's just ordering parts. What do they call it? Meat pipe for Claude now? 112 00:07:37.760 --> 00:07:40.780 Yes. Yep. I mean, meat proxy. Meat proxy. 113 00:07:40.780 --> 00:07:42.920 Meat proxy and the credit card. 114 00:07:42.920 --> 00:07:43.640 Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds great. 115 00:07:43.640 --> 00:07:43.640 Yeah. 116 00:07:43.640 --> 00:07:53.370 And, you know, again, the sump pump actually just like acts like another on-off switch. It's almost like this was intended to be wired into security systems in the same way. It's like, okay, that makes total sense. 117 00:07:53.370 --> 00:07:55.500 Right. 118 00:07:55.500 --> 00:08:09.080 So I got to get the simple RJ11 cable, plug it in, snip a couple of wires and wire it into the Arduino. And now I have the sump pump support. I was like, okay, cool, that was great. I've got a UPS, a universal power supply, that's also connected to all these things, it keeps my internet running when the power goes out, and 119 00:08:09.080 --> 00:08:10.380 I think uninterruptible. 120 00:08:10.380 --> 00:08:12.080 Uninterruptible power supply. Did I say interruptible? 121 00:08:12.080 --> 00:08:21.780 He interrupted you. No, you said universal. And I couldn't miss the opportunity to interrupt you to tell you that you'd said it wrong. 122 00:08:21.780 --> 00:08:25.660 You know, it's almost like I could have done that on purpose. 123 00:08:25.660 --> 00:08:28.480 On purpose, if only... 124 00:08:28.480 --> 00:08:31.710 Our listener knows that we made no effort to organize this ahead of time because... 125 00:08:31.710 --> 00:08:32.380 But yeah. 126 00:08:32.380 --> 00:08:32.840 You would think, well, whatever. 127 00:08:32.840 --> 00:08:34.280 Anyway, yeah. 128 00:08:34.280 --> 00:08:50.120 Yes. So I have this, the UPS, that is the battery backup for the Mac mini, for, you know, the router and the cable modem and everything else, and it's got a USB port on it, and I'm assuming that was for control, and I'm like, so I take a picture of the 129 00:08:50.120 --> 00:08:50.120 Yeah. 130 00:08:50.120 --> 00:09:00.900 power supply and it figures out the model number and it downloads the specs and everything else. It's like, oh yeah, no, you can just plug a USB... you know, USB cable into the back of this thing and then plug that into the Mac mini. 131 00:09:00.900 --> 00:09:09.180 And then I've got it from there. And then it's like, yeah, cool. Great. And now I'm monitoring my household power through the UPS through NUT, which is the Linux 132 00:09:09.180 --> 00:09:19.560 you know, package that you use to monitor these types of devices. And I've got a new page on. 133 00:09:19.560 --> 00:09:23.360 Out of interest, is the whole house on the UPS or is it just like critical equipment? 134 00:09:23.360 --> 00:09:23.660 No. 135 00:09:23.660 --> 00:09:25.980 Yeah. I was going to say, because I had one downstairs until it ran out of power. 136 00:09:25.980 --> 00:09:26.240 It... 137 00:09:26.240 --> 00:09:30.160 The battery, like, died, the lead acid battery in it. And I was like, I only had a computer plugged into it. 138 00:09:30.160 --> 00:09:30.160 Yeah. 139 00:09:30.160 --> 00:09:34.780 And even then it would only power the computer for like 30 seconds while it shut down. 140 00:09:34.780 --> 00:09:35.740 Right. Yeah, no. 141 00:09:35.740 --> 00:09:40.780 But it did monitor and it would tell me, oh, by the way, there had been a power event, which you know is useful to know. 142 00:09:40.780 --> 00:09:43.320 Right. Yes, yes. And now I've got it sending alerts to me. 143 00:09:43.320 --> 00:09:43.500 But. 144 00:09:43.500 --> 00:09:49.270 I mean, I had the alerts before, like the whole burglar alarm system we wired into Pushover, which is a super cool. 145 00:09:49.270 --> 00:09:49.480 Of course. 146 00:09:49.480 --> 00:09:50.200 Oh, yeah, little, like... 147 00:09:50.200 --> 00:09:53.560 Not an ad, but I like Pushover a lot for these kinds of notifications. 148 00:09:53.560 --> 00:09:55.050 Yeah. Yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah. 149 00:09:55.050 --> 00:10:06.180 So Pushover notifications for, like, if the power goes out, it's like, yeah, and it can monitor the battery levels and be like, you know, you've got 30 minutes left. You've got 15 minutes left. 150 00:10:06.180 --> 00:10:17.380 Whatever you want. And then I can tell it to remotely shut down the computer to save power so that we can preserve the internet access if we need to, you know, keep the Wi-Fi running, but we don't want to necessarily have the computer running. 151 00:10:17.380 --> 00:10:18.000 Right. 152 00:10:18.000 --> 00:10:28.620 And so all of this is basically just me randomly sending messages to, you know, Claude in the middle of the day being like, yeah, do this and then order this thing and do whatever. 153 00:10:28.620 --> 00:10:39.520 It's actually pretty impossible now, I can't think how this could go wrong. You've wired a malevolent AI, you've given it a license by calling it that, and then you've given it 154 00:10:39.520 --> 00:10:39.520 Right. 155 00:10:39.520 --> 00:10:45.360 access to your power, internet, and remote door controls. 156 00:10:45.360 --> 00:10:57.400 Right. Right. And so all it's going to take is for this instance of Claude to accidentally scrape some Portal lore about what GLaDOS is and how it should behave for it to, like... 157 00:10:57.400 --> 00:10:57.400 It. 158 00:10:57.400 --> 00:10:57.400 It knows. 159 00:10:57.400 --> 00:10:57.400 Yeah. 160 00:10:57.400 --> 00:11:03.040 It knows already. It's already in the training set, dude. I mean, like, oh yeah, you are... 161 00:11:03.040 --> 00:11:03.600 Yep. Yeah. 162 00:11:03.600 --> 00:11:05.300 you're in trouble. 163 00:11:05.300 --> 00:11:07.900 You know. This is... This is what we're... 164 00:11:07.900 --> 00:11:07.940 It... 165 00:11:07.940 --> 00:11:08.160 Is that? That looks like a... 166 00:11:08.160 --> 00:11:11.370 And then the next thing I'm going to do is connect it to my garage. 167 00:11:11.370 --> 00:11:15.510 automatic repeating rifle behind you that you've got and some kind of tripod thing with an orange light in the middle? 168 00:11:15.510 --> 00:11:16.800 Yeah. Uh huh. 169 00:11:16.800 --> 00:11:19.800 Is that... Did it tell you to put that together? 170 00:11:19.800 --> 00:11:22.780 Yeah, you know, sentry turret, you know, and just wire that directly into the burglar alarm. 171 00:11:22.780 --> 00:11:23.620 Yeah. That's right. 172 00:11:23.620 --> 00:11:26.100 You know, it's just airsoft. It's fine. You know. 173 00:11:26.100 --> 00:11:28.640 It's not going to kill anybody. Yet. 174 00:11:28.640 --> 00:11:30.340 Oh man. 175 00:11:30.340 --> 00:11:30.860 The laser turrets are next. 176 00:11:30.860 --> 00:11:34.020 So where are you going? What's next with this? 177 00:11:34.020 --> 00:11:41.060 Yeah. So the next step is I'm going to hook it up to my garage because I want to be able to tell if my garage door is open or closed. And then the next thing after that is that I want to actually be able to. 178 00:11:41.060 --> 00:11:42.940 You know, the way that I do that is like this. 179 00:11:42.940 --> 00:11:45.940 Right. Well. 180 00:11:45.940 --> 00:11:47.680 It's, yeah, the listener did not see, but I craned my head out the window or towards the window. 181 00:11:47.680 --> 00:11:55.940 Yes. Look out the window. We have this nasty habit of leaving our garage door open and then going somewhere. And then we've done this enough to be paranoid about it. 182 00:11:55.940 --> 00:11:56.040 Ah. 183 00:11:56.040 --> 00:12:13.480 And so there's this thing of like, did I remember to close the garage door? And then it's like. So step number one is I got a security camera that is rated for cold temperatures because, you know, where I'm in Chicago, and even though it's a garage, it's not an attached garage, I think it's cold. 184 00:12:13.480 --> 00:12:18.840 So I got a security camera that is like local network only, 185 00:12:18.840 --> 00:12:19.820 Yeah. 186 00:12:19.820 --> 00:12:30.520 rated for cold temperatures. I'm going to put that in the garage and then I'm going to teach GLaDOS how to do image recognition to tell whether or not the garage door is open or closed because I also want the pictures. 187 00:12:30.520 --> 00:12:35.980 But, you know, I could just, and I might still just hook up like a sensor to the garage door to tell whether it's open or closed, but I want to do this the hard way. 188 00:12:35.980 --> 00:12:38.020 I mean that would seem simpler. 189 00:12:38.020 --> 00:12:41.370 It is. It's not about simpler. This is about like. 190 00:12:41.370 --> 00:12:41.500 Yeah. 191 00:12:41.500 --> 00:12:50.100 How much complexity can I throw into this thing by just typing words into a robot and just see what happens. 192 00:12:50.100 --> 00:12:51.120 Yeah. 193 00:12:51.120 --> 00:12:51.900 And so that's kind of what I'm doing here. 194 00:12:51.900 --> 00:12:54.180 And the answer so far is pretty much everything. 195 00:12:54.180 --> 00:12:57.000 Yeah, turns out you can just throw whatever you want in there. 196 00:12:57.000 --> 00:12:57.150 Yeah. 197 00:12:57.150 --> 00:12:57.460 Yeah. 198 00:12:57.460 --> 00:13:03.720 So that's my quick lightning talk on how I'm empowering a malevolent AI to destroy my family. 199 00:13:03.720 --> 00:13:07.800 I... Yeah. I can't top that, Ben. 200 00:13:07.800 --> 00:13:11.060 We should have finished with that one. 201 00:13:11.060 --> 00:13:20.860 That's kind of it now. I think we're 12 minutes into the recording. Yeah, no, well, I mean, you know what I've been up to recently. 202 00:13:20.860 --> 00:13:28.140 Well, I've been doing a whole bunch of things obviously. I've forever got Compiler Explorer on the back burner and I'm trying to find ways to lighten my burden 203 00:13:28.140 --> 00:13:28.140 Mm-hmm. 204 00:13:28.140 --> 00:13:52.140 in terms of, like, the boring, automatable or semi-automatable work, you know, reviewing some pull requests which are almost rote, or, you know, servicing requests like, can you add compiler X, it's just like GCC only slightly different, and there's a lot of things that, again, AI can automate most of that stuff. But the thing that I'm having the most difficulty with on that is 205 00:13:52.140 --> 00:13:52.140 Okay. 206 00:13:52.140 --> 00:14:12.740 as I think all of us are who are trying to use this in a principled way, is trying to find the right amount to use because it's really, it's really convenient to walk the dog and say, okay Claude, agent, whatever. Yeah, just review these 10 PRs from random people. If they look good to you, merge them in. But then those 10 people are like, did... Did... Did somebody... 207 00:14:12.740 --> 00:14:15.120 Look at this properly. Am I... 208 00:14:15.120 --> 00:14:15.120 Yeah. 209 00:14:15.120 --> 00:14:20.620 as a human, am I valued, is my contribution valued, and I want to make them feel like 210 00:14:20.620 --> 00:14:20.620 Yeah, yeah. 211 00:14:20.620 --> 00:14:36.960 I looked at them, and not, I got my robot little lap dog to go and do it for me, even though that's kind of... you know, maybe. So yeah, trying to find the balance there is really difficult for me. I definitely want people to feel valued. 212 00:14:36.960 --> 00:14:44.140 But on the other hand, I have very, very finite time, and the pull request list just grows and the number of issues grow and do... 213 00:14:44.140 --> 00:14:44.140 Yeah. 214 00:14:44.140 --> 00:14:57.000 Ultimately, most people on the site just want to have the compilers there and have it work and all that. And so I'm going to try and find that thing. That's a difficult multidimensional optimization for me to do personally. 215 00:14:57.000 --> 00:15:24.140 Certainly. And making it amenable to other people also using AIs to do some of the work. So I can say to them, look, if you have Claude or Codex or whatever, then just point them at this doc and do it, you know, and it's human readable as well so you could use this as well, but like, realistically speaking, you don't have to babysit four different PRs, I can do that, you know, the machine. So that's one part. The other part is one of my emulators, which I've been going great guns on. I've been doing a whole bunch of work behind the scenes 216 00:15:24.140 --> 00:15:39.200 tarting up and doing all the to-dos and going through the massive issue backlog of, like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if, for my BBC Micro emulator, which has been a ton of fun. And yeah, most recently I've been updating my... 217 00:15:39.200 --> 00:15:49.940 the way that it processes input, so it's running in a web browser and you're playing, like, 1980s absolutely unfair Twitch games that are like... run dead. 218 00:15:49.940 --> 00:15:50.640 Su... 219 00:15:50.640 --> 00:15:51.680 Oh, you didn't jump on the right frame. 220 00:15:51.680 --> 00:15:51.800 Yeah, right. 221 00:15:51.800 --> 00:16:05.320 Okay, fine. And I want to be able to, like, replicate those, but you know, there's kind of a lot of things going on between the keyboard, you know, there's the classic Google question, like, what happens when you press a key, is only exacerbated by, you know, when you're running an emulator 222 00:16:05.320 --> 00:16:07.620 in a web browser, how... 223 00:16:07.620 --> 00:16:07.930 Right. 224 00:16:07.930 --> 00:16:08.540 Right. Yeah. 225 00:16:08.540 --> 00:16:26.240 far is it between you pressing the button on the keyboard and it actually taking effect and you then seeing it. So there's like two different latencies there. There's a key press to logic of the game latency, and then there is latency from logic of the game and it presenting to you. 226 00:16:26.240 --> 00:16:26.700 Yeah. 227 00:16:26.700 --> 00:16:39.980 And there are two parts to that. There's the physical, like, screen-based view, like, and they're obviously, you know, there's graphics and there's double buffering and there's also post-processing to try and make it look like a telly and all that kind of stuff, as well as, like, you know, 228 00:16:39.980 --> 00:16:49.660 just the actual, like, emulation part, which is actually the easiest part of all of this. Then there's also the audio, and a lot of stuff goes off audio cues. And then you've got this really fine line between. 229 00:16:49.660 --> 00:16:56.440 If I have a massive two second buffer, then I will never, ever drop and you won't hear a horrible click in the middle of, like, 230 00:16:56.440 --> 00:16:58.620 playback, but 231 00:16:58.620 --> 00:16:58.620 Right. 232 00:16:58.620 --> 00:16:58.620 Yeah. 233 00:16:58.620 --> 00:17:04.900 it's two seconds behind, so now you're like, oh, it feels like I'm disconnected. 234 00:17:04.900 --> 00:17:05.980 Yeah. 235 00:17:05.980 --> 00:17:09.160 There are some things that you can take advantage of here. I haven't... 236 00:17:09.160 --> 00:17:36.140 implemented all of these yet, but there's some cool tricks. So one thing you can do is, you know, multi-threading of a sort. The audio workers can live in a separate thread, and then what I used to do is, like, send messages to the audio worker saying, here's another 1024 samples, play these out, and, you know, keep a small ring buffer ahead of you and try and keep this minimal, you know, try and not get so far ahead that it's backed up and not so far behind that it drains, ever, in the sort of time slices that we've got. But 237 00:17:36.140 --> 00:17:41.000 Mm-hmm. 238 00:17:41.000 --> 00:17:49.160 it then occurred to me that that's not how a... I'm gesturing wildly to the desk, which is just out of shot for Ben and definitely out of shot for you, the listener. The BBC Micro on my desk here. That's not how this works. What you do is you send across the bus 239 00:17:49.160 --> 00:18:01.060 values to registers that are on a chip. And that chip just keeps making that noise until you tell it not to. And so what I can do is I can now send not the 240 00:18:01.060 --> 00:18:10.720 sort of synthesized buffers, but I actually send the commands along with timestamps about when in the virtual stream of events that these happen. And now I synthesize 241 00:18:10.720 --> 00:18:31.080 the entire audio stream as if it was, like, a separate component, as indeed it is. It's just a bunch of counters and flip-flops, right? It's all the stupid sound chip is, and a noise chip. And so that means that if you do alt-tab away from the BBC, it no longer goes pop, clack, crack, and, like, break up with the audio. It just keeps making the same noise, just as if you, like, 242 00:18:31.080 --> 00:18:44.020 left it plugged in. Now that's not perfect. You know, if you're doing one of these, like, sampled speech things, where, you know, the CPU is running at full blast, just changing the volume up and down as fast as it can to sort of... 243 00:18:44.020 --> 00:19:12.170 try and make it like a sample, and then you alt-tab away, obviously, you then actually hear the weird noise that it would make if it wasn't doing that all the time. But for the rest of the time it means you've got this really buttery smooth audio frame that is really tight to current time, and then if it does drop, instead of having a really hideous noise you just carry on with the same, as most of the time you can't tell the difference because, you know, the CPU wasn't in fact changing the audio at that point in time. Now I can't quite do that with the video. 244 00:19:12.170 --> 00:19:12.720 Yeah. 245 00:19:12.720 --> 00:19:34.240 But what you can do is you can... play a bit of fun and games by running ahead, or allowing the video, the presented frame. And then if you know that you're like two frames ahead, if somebody hits a key or any other external stimulus, you can backdate those. 246 00:19:34.240 --> 00:19:34.960 Oh, okay. 247 00:19:34.960 --> 00:19:38.180 So you just go back two frames to the state that you kept. 248 00:19:38.180 --> 00:19:40.620 Is this like branch prediction, but for... 249 00:19:40.620 --> 00:19:49.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You predict that nothing... I mean, in this instance, you predict that everything continues the same. But if you discover that it doesn't, then you can go back two frames and go, oh, actually, the Z key was down. 250 00:19:49.940 --> 00:19:50.820 Yeah, yeah. Yes, right. 251 00:19:50.820 --> 00:19:55.320 Now run forward two frames or three frames, now by the time you've caught up. 252 00:19:55.320 --> 00:19:55.440 That's clever. 253 00:19:55.440 --> 00:19:56.720 And then it's not 254 00:19:56.720 --> 00:20:05.100 perfect because you will see those two frames that were, like, wrong, and, you know, Twitch game people will go, oh, whatever, but if you've just missed a jump 255 00:20:05.100 --> 00:20:12.850 you'd probably prefer to see one or two frames of the character having fallen off in it, followed by the character then jumping. Looks a bit too good to be true. 256 00:20:12.850 --> 00:20:13.080 Yeah. 257 00:20:13.080 --> 00:20:21.460 I haven't fully implemented that. I have got the rewind. So I can just rewind time and just play back. So that's what I usually do when I miss a jump. And then, but 258 00:20:21.460 --> 00:20:31.040 Yeah. I feel like you get that in, like, fighting games and brawling games too, where it's like, but the animations at least. It's like, oh no, actually the user pressed this key and this was blocked. 259 00:20:31.040 --> 00:20:31.220 There's a bit. 260 00:20:31.220 --> 00:20:34.890 So you get the first couple of animations of the hit landing, but then it backs up. 261 00:20:34.890 --> 00:20:34.960 Yeah. 262 00:20:34.960 --> 00:20:42.160 And definitely in network games where there's a bit of prediction as to what's going on and before it finds out, no, actually, that it just snaps to a new position. 263 00:20:42.160 --> 00:20:42.750 And yeah. 264 00:20:42.750 --> 00:20:43.050 Yeah. 265 00:20:43.050 --> 00:20:44.540 So there's some cool things. 266 00:20:44.540 --> 00:20:44.840 Interesting. 267 00:20:44.840 --> 00:20:51.090 So do you have another? That's my five-minute segment over. I've got one more after this, but we can certainly talk. 268 00:20:51.090 --> 00:20:53.770 I got a quick question, actually. I'm kind of... 269 00:20:53.770 --> 00:20:54.070 Ah. 270 00:20:54.070 --> 00:20:57.640 embarrassed that I've never asked you this before, given your affinity for 271 00:20:57.640 --> 00:20:58.240 Oh. Awkward. 272 00:20:58.240 --> 00:21:09.550 for emulated games and stuff. But I remember from my youth playing games on, you know, the Sega Genesis and the Nintendo and Commodore 64 and all of these other games. And there would be this phenomenon where 273 00:21:09.550 --> 00:21:20.860 when the, you know, usually it was like the end fight was getting super intense and the game clearly never expected to have this many sprites on the screen at the same time, the game would slow down. 274 00:21:20.860 --> 00:21:38.430 And, you know, eight-year-old me thought this was just the game giving me a break because it's hard to navigate all the little whirly bits on the screen. And it just got a little slower. But you know, obviously now I realize that it's like, no, that loop just took too long and now the game is slowing down. 275 00:21:38.430 --> 00:21:44.980 Is there anything special that you need to do to accommodate that fact in an emulator or does it just naturally happen? 276 00:21:44.980 --> 00:21:46.770 It 100% falls out naturally. Yeah. 277 00:21:46.770 --> 00:21:47.060 Okay. 278 00:21:47.060 --> 00:21:58.970 What's typically happening behind the scenes is the game is, you know, processing as much as it can, and then it will wait for the next VBlank before it, like, flips the page. And it's not like modern games where... 279 00:21:58.970 --> 00:22:31.720 you're always measuring the time because you may be on a 100 hertz monitor or 120 hertz monitor or, you know, your CPU's faster or slower or whatever, you've got all this variability. So you kind of... there is no "how many frames per second is that". It is just free-running as fast as it can and dealing with the fact that time is variable each time. On these machines it's like, well no, the mains power supply comes in at 50 hertz, the TV runs at 50 hertz, therefore the obvious thing to do is to lock everything to how many frames at 50 hertz, and that's your timing 280 00:22:31.720 --> 00:22:37.080 Okay. 281 00:22:37.080 --> 00:22:41.370 looks like constant. And so if you just take slightly more than 50 hertz then now you take two frames and now you're running at 25 frames a second or 12 and a half or whatever it is. 282 00:22:41.370 --> 00:22:41.600 Yeah, yeah. 283 00:22:41.600 --> 00:23:03.180 And now suddenly it's a bit chuggy. So I don't have to do anything special for that. Now, there's some arguments that say that maybe if you can, as an emulator writer, if you can detect where the idle at the end, you know, waiting for the next frame is going to be, and assuming the game does nothing other than sit there waiting for an interrupt to come in or something like that, you could actually run the game turbo, turbo speed 284 00:23:03.180 --> 00:23:05.850 up to the point, and then sync. 285 00:23:05.850 --> 00:23:06.250 Yeah. 286 00:23:06.250 --> 00:23:06.640 Yeah. 287 00:23:06.640 --> 00:23:24.960 And now you suddenly don't slow down anymore at the end of those, in those games it runs at the same speed because, you know, your computer is effectively infinitely fast now and it's just like, I get a frame's worth of game in every frame. But then there's so many other things that go wrong when you start doing stuff like that, as you know, all the clever timing for changing colors halfway down the screen as the raster is coming out starts to go 288 00:23:24.960 --> 00:23:24.960 Mm-hmm. 289 00:23:24.960 --> 00:23:24.960 Right, right. 290 00:23:24.960 --> 00:23:34.690 wrong. But, you know, yeah. So no, it comes for free if you're emulating authentically at the speed of the computer. But... 291 00:23:34.690 --> 00:23:34.800 Yeah. 292 00:23:34.800 --> 00:23:42.200 You know, that's also, that's its own, there are layers, levels of accuracy there where you can just say, roughly it's a two megahertz. 293 00:23:42.200 --> 00:23:52.900 So, you know, we just do this many instructions on average, or you go, no, no, each cycle of every instruction is actually measured at the correct time. So the bus write happens at the third cycle of the instruction, all that kind of 294 00:23:52.900 --> 00:23:55.380 stuff, which is lots of fun. 295 00:23:55.380 --> 00:23:58.480 Yeah, okay. Okay, cool. All right. Well, there's my tangent. What do you got next? 296 00:23:58.480 --> 00:24:00.500 Okay. Oh, I got me. All right. I thought you had another one. I got another one. 297 00:24:00.500 --> 00:24:11.720 I mean, it's actually related to this in a way. In fact, it segues in naturally. So I'm off to CppCon next week. Yes. 298 00:24:11.720 --> 00:24:17.760 This, in fact, Sunday. Oh, gosh. So our listener now will know where, when we're recording these things and we're about to put another one out. 299 00:24:17.760 --> 00:24:33.560 So yeah. Yeah, confusing. I've got a couple of presentations there, but then all focus is on October, where I have a presentation at C++ Under the Sea, where I have to present, and it's announced now, a new version of my Spectrum emulator. 300 00:24:33.560 --> 00:24:36.020 And in fact, I'm wearing my Spectrum. 301 00:24:36.020 --> 00:24:45.840 It's a shame we don't record the videos for these. I know. It's just too much of a pain. We'd have to actually make an effort of our appearance. But Ben is wearing a... a, yeah, Chicago Bears cap 302 00:24:45.840 --> 00:24:47.540 for everyone there, and I'm 303 00:24:47.540 --> 00:24:49.240 I am indeed. Go Bears. 304 00:24:49.240 --> 00:25:02.320 And I am wearing a ZX Spectrum T-shirt, so that kind of tells you everything you need to know about the pair of us, really. Anyway, I have to update my Spectrum emulator, my C++ Spectrum emulator, because that's what I said I'm going to talk about. 305 00:25:02.320 --> 00:25:03.520 T-shirt? 306 00:25:03.520 --> 00:25:14.510 Excuse me. And the way that I want to update this is to use some of the latest C++26 tricks. So we've talked, I think, about reflection, and did we talk about reflection before? I'm having a moment of, like, you know, deja vu here. 307 00:25:14.510 --> 00:25:16.180 Yeah, we did. And reflecting on it, I believe we did. 308 00:25:16.180 --> 00:25:43.360 Yes. Ha ha! Touché, sir. Excellent. But reflection is all about, you know, statically understanding what the shape of objects look like. And C++ gives us some tools to do that now in C++26, which is fantastic. And at compile time, we can do some magic. But one of the things that we can do with that is that we can take something we found using reflection, say like the field of a class or the enum of an element in an enum, 309 00:25:43.360 --> 00:25:57.890 the number of it, yeah, an element in an enumeration, something like that. And we've got some kind of thing, object, it's called a meta info, we get at this thing and then we can kind of turn it into a human readable string, which means, hallelujah, we can finally enumerate all of the enums 310 00:25:57.890 --> 00:25:58.500 Yeah. Yes. 311 00:25:58.500 --> 00:26:11.840 in an enum, and go "case", you know, build in C++ an automatic... turn the case into a string of that, each enum value into the string of it, which, you know, is like the one and only use for reflection. 312 00:26:11.840 --> 00:26:12.660 Yeah, yeah. Right. 313 00:26:12.660 --> 00:26:25.280 That's not true. Obviously, serialization, deserialization, it's useful to go over all of the elements of a structure, a vector and print out debug information. All that good stuff. But it occurred to me that you can use this for evil as well. 314 00:26:25.280 --> 00:26:43.240 And so my talk is about how to take an abstract description of a CPU in its own, like, language, like what I invented, which is essentially a bunch of bit masks that say opcodes matching this bit mask 315 00:26:43.240 --> 00:26:55.020 need to do things that look like this. And so the opcodes list itself is, like, you know, 001XXYYY, and where the Xs and Ys stand in for any bit of the value there. 316 00:26:55.020 --> 00:26:56.990 But I want to be able to do something with the Xs and Ys. 317 00:26:56.990 --> 00:26:57.360 Yeah, cool. 318 00:26:57.360 --> 00:27:00.620 I can declare what Xs stand for and what Ys stand for. 319 00:27:00.620 --> 00:27:00.660 Mm-hmm. 320 00:27:00.660 --> 00:27:02.530 So I get up to 26 different, like... 321 00:27:02.530 --> 00:27:02.820 Okay. 322 00:27:02.820 --> 00:27:04.820 things I can describe using this format. 323 00:27:04.820 --> 00:27:06.360 You can't get uppercase and lowercase with that. 324 00:27:06.360 --> 00:27:21.070 I could probably do that as well. Yeah. But that allows me... And then I can write what the disassembly looks like of that. And I can map the Xs, look at index into this list of things. And this is all, like, in my own language, my own DSL. 325 00:27:21.070 --> 00:27:21.980 Okay. 326 00:27:21.980 --> 00:27:33.900 And, you know, normally that would be the input to something like a Python program that would then churn out a massive, you know, switch statement in C++. It would print it out to stdout, you'd write it to a file, you'd compile it, and then you'd be off to the races. 327 00:27:33.900 --> 00:27:35.660 And that's kind of how you build these things. 328 00:27:35.660 --> 00:27:36.060 Yeah. 329 00:27:36.060 --> 00:27:46.210 But I realized that I can use the two new things, the #embed, which allows me to, like, #include a file 330 00:27:46.210 --> 00:27:51.100 as, like, a blob into the code base. So I can do... char, 331 00:27:51.100 --> 00:28:06.420 you know, char my CPU description equals, open quotes, or no, no, it's actually open squiggles, and then next line #embed the file, close squiggly quotes, and it's as if you've just put the sequence of, like, 65, comma 332 00:28:06.420 --> 00:28:10.190 67, you know, for like A and C, whatever, that block. 333 00:28:10.190 --> 00:28:11.140 Yeah. 334 00:28:11.140 --> 00:28:23.980 And what reflection gives me is the ability to run things at compile time in a consteval block that are just like... just do this now. Like, literally, as the compiler is reading through the source code, it hits a consteval block 335 00:28:23.980 --> 00:28:26.100 and it's like, oh, I have to run this code now. 336 00:28:26.100 --> 00:28:26.420 Okay. 337 00:28:26.420 --> 00:28:28.370 And I can do things like, hey, 338 00:28:28.370 --> 00:28:29.480 Yeah. 339 00:28:29.480 --> 00:28:53.460 parse that string, break it into the instructions, and now I can build a table of instructions that look like that. And there's some other tricks as well that go with it, in terms of, like, I can do name lookup and stuff like that. But effectively I can build the engine for a Z80 from an abstract description of a Z80, all in the compiler as it's compiling the code the first time around. It takes ages. I'm not going to say. 340 00:28:53.460 --> 00:29:06.600 The cool thing about this is it's a very, very, very systematic way of describing a CPU and, like, things like how long each cycle takes. And yeah, of course, I still have to have code that says this is how numbers get added together. 341 00:29:06.600 --> 00:29:21.560 This is the ALU. But like, most ALUs have, like, well, here's the eight operations of an ALU. And of course, they are indexed by one of those XXYY or PP or QQ, whatever. You say, like, no, I just want to look up the function, which is, here's a table of the names of... ALU 0 is 342 00:29:21.560 --> 00:29:24.740 add, ALU 2 is subtract, whatever. 343 00:29:24.740 --> 00:29:43.580 And so it falls out pretty naturally. And in a couple of hundred lines of this... Sorry. A couple of hundred lines of this Z80 description, the entire Z80 with all of its undefined opcodes, all of its multi-byte opcodes, all of its weird edge cases just naturally fall out. And it's... 344 00:29:43.580 --> 00:29:46.410 Beautiful. I love it. 345 00:29:46.410 --> 00:29:46.900 Nice. 346 00:29:46.900 --> 00:30:01.080 And it takes ages to compile, but it is the most efficient Z80 emulator that I have written yet. This is the fourth iteration in the same code base of this, and so I'm excited to present it to people and hopefully blow people's minds about, like, 347 00:30:01.080 --> 00:30:08.690 I'm still on the fence about whether this is a good idea. You know, all great ideas like this start out with, like, is this genius or terrible? 348 00:30:08.690 --> 00:30:09.660 Yeah. 349 00:30:09.660 --> 00:30:15.680 Yeah, so preoccupied whether or not you could, that you shouldn't, that you didn't think about whether you should, right? Yeah. 350 00:30:15.680 --> 00:30:15.680 And I'm like, I'm 50. 351 00:30:15.680 --> 00:30:22.460 That's... Yeah, and that's kind of part of the idea of it. You know, and everyone that I've spoken to is excited about reflection because of the actual reflecty bits. 352 00:30:22.460 --> 00:30:23.040 Yeah. 353 00:30:23.040 --> 00:30:29.780 And I'm excited because it gives me a new power and a new thing that I can do that I couldn't do before, which is 354 00:30:29.780 --> 00:30:34.000 not unrelated to looking at structures. 355 00:30:34.000 --> 00:30:43.880 So that's another side project. And yeah, that one has... I'll be honest, I have used AI to help me here. 356 00:30:43.880 --> 00:30:44.540 Hmm. 357 00:30:44.540 --> 00:31:12.140 It's my idea. I've been through the code myself a number of times. I'm going to have to go through it one more time, but a lot of it was me fleshing out stuff and then saying like, can you just finish this off please, and, like, here's all of the difficult opcodes but I don't want to have to write all of the intermediate ones, can you just fill this in for me, and getting some feedback and refactoring and whatever. So I felt like morally, you know, I think we talked about this before about whether things are fun, I've had a ton of fun discovering this. And I'm still a little bit like. 358 00:31:12.140 --> 00:31:16.680 It is mine. It's my idea. I can explain it to you. I know how it's working, but it feels a little bit like. 359 00:31:16.680 --> 00:31:16.900 Okay. 360 00:31:16.900 --> 00:31:32.600 But I got my friendly robot intern to do it, so it doesn't feel quite as mine as that. But I'm hoping over the next month, as I research it more and present it to people, it feels more like code that I wrote. But that's going to be an interesting part. And I'm wondering whether or not I should add a section in the talk 361 00:31:32.600 --> 00:31:38.700 about this. I think it's going to be the forefront of everyone's mind, is, you know, like programming is 362 00:31:38.700 --> 00:31:40.940 as we've discussed, you know, something we love doing and, you know, 363 00:31:40.940 --> 00:31:49.790 most of the time, though, we're doing it for a job and certainly in a conference, I'm presenting it in the context of, hey, most of us here are being paid to do this. So, you know. 364 00:31:49.790 --> 00:31:50.080 Right. 365 00:31:50.080 --> 00:31:58.560 It's what our employers want us to do. But there is a bit of, like, but I like it. And so I think that's going to be an interesting, hopefully a bit of human interest 366 00:31:58.560 --> 00:31:58.560 Yeah, yeah. 367 00:31:58.560 --> 00:32:01.940 for it too. What else you got? 368 00:32:01.940 --> 00:32:02.020 Okay. 369 00:32:02.020 --> 00:32:03.440 What else you got? Or what questions or what? 370 00:32:03.440 --> 00:32:26.500 One more that I could probably talk about as a follow-up to the GLaDOS thing, where it's like, you know, once I was like, all right, I'm going to take a picture of the sump pump and then Claude's going to figure out what it is. 371 00:32:26.500 --> 00:32:37.500 I can take a picture of the interruptible power supply and then figure out what it is, is I'm like, oh, well, I could just do this with everything. 372 00:32:37.500 --> 00:32:40.820 So I'm just going to do this with everything. So I started going around my house, taking pictures of all my appliances and the, like, labels on the side of the appliances. And I was like, get all the user manuals for all these things, figure out what maintenance they need, and then tell me when I need to maintain these things. 373 00:32:40.820 --> 00:32:55.200 Like, oh, there's like an anode rod that's in your water heater that no one ever remembers to replace, and it's like you need to replace that every two years, and I'll set a reminder and tell you when you need to replace it, it's like, oh great. And I'm slowly building OpenClaw essentially by doing this, but I'm just like, yeah, whatever. 374 00:32:55.200 --> 00:32:55.200 Oh yeah! 375 00:32:55.200 --> 00:32:57.020 No, but I think that, yeah. Yeah. 376 00:32:57.020 --> 00:33:03.180 Yeah. And I'm just like wandering around my house being like, oh, microwave, dishwasher, refrigerator. 377 00:33:03.180 --> 00:33:04.360 I... There's a... 378 00:33:04.360 --> 00:33:11.040 Washing machine. Like, yeah, I've never given a second thought to any of these things. And now I suddenly care by proxy. 379 00:33:11.040 --> 00:33:28.860 Yeah, I think that's it. Right. You know, so some of this, you know, people are saying, is AI a benefit? And I'm like, well, it got me excited about a whole bunch of stuff that I'd left lingering for a long time. So maybe for that alone... it seems like maybe an expensive thing to justify that, but you know, I kind of 380 00:33:28.860 --> 00:33:28.860 Right. Yeah. 381 00:33:28.860 --> 00:33:47.500 I definitely did. I, yeah. Similarly, my OpenClaw equivalent thing is messaging me every day wishing my wife a happy birthday on my behalf for me and reminding... you know, I'm like, no, no, just tell me what's going on in my diary, you don't have to like editorialize that much, but it's convenient and useful and it kind of nags me, hey, you said you'd check in on this friend and I'm like, oh yeah, I did. So you know 382 00:33:47.500 --> 00:33:47.820 Yeah. 383 00:33:47.820 --> 00:33:59.160 it hopefully, you know, helps. Of course I could do this with calendar apps, you could do this with... And ultimately, and I was raging about this on, not Twitter, whatever, Mastodon thing, 384 00:33:59.160 --> 00:34:00.320 Bluesky the other day, like, 385 00:34:00.320 --> 00:34:00.320 Okay. 386 00:34:00.320 --> 00:34:10.850 I came home and I said, the magic wake words to my listening device, which is by a big web search company. And the reason I'm saying these is so it doesn't do it now in the background. 387 00:34:10.850 --> 00:34:11.580 Okay. Right. 388 00:34:11.580 --> 00:34:28.940 And I say, wake up words. Play some music. And it's been working forever. I just come home and say that and it came back and it said, playing, and then I can't quite... I tweeted what it was, but like it played something that wasn't what I said even slightly. 389 00:34:28.940 --> 00:34:29.380 Yeah. 390 00:34:29.380 --> 00:34:44.560 And I'm like, what? And I said, no, play some music. And it says, playing the playlist, some music. I don't know. It says something else in between, which is even more crazy. And then the last one was a playlist called some music, which someone has clearly put in just for me. 391 00:34:44.560 --> 00:34:44.910 Yeah. 392 00:34:44.910 --> 00:34:45.000 Yeah. 393 00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:48.200 The third song of which, incidentally, was Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. 394 00:34:48.200 --> 00:34:51.250 So I felt like completely owned that. I listened to it. 395 00:34:51.250 --> 00:34:51.280 Yep. 396 00:34:51.280 --> 00:35:03.140 I was like, this is cool. This is all right, actually. But I'm like, Google, for the love of God, I give you... I'm an unapologetic, well, no, I'm apologetic. I'm sorry. I'm an apologetic Google fanboy. 397 00:35:03.140 --> 00:35:14.400 I used to work there. I liked the company, or I like the company. I've stuck with them through thick and thin, and it doesn't make any sense that I do still. But they have all the information about me. They have every photograph I've ever taken. 398 00:35:14.400 --> 00:35:25.820 They know every person that's in them that is related to me so that I can kind of send people... but lovely things like this, synergies between these departments. And they have somewhat decent AI. Some of my best friends work for their AI company. 399 00:35:25.820 --> 00:35:32.580 And yet, here I am in a room filled with their sodding devices, and it can't answer a simple question about... 400 00:35:32.580 --> 00:35:32.580 Yes. 401 00:35:32.580 --> 00:35:34.080