Apple Took F1 Too Far, iPadOS 26 Features, Are We All Just LLMs?
Download MP3All programs have a desire to be useful. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Big show. There's lot of LLM and AI news. Reddit is being overthrown by AI content, but there's been a couple court cases that say it's okay to train on just the open Internet.
Stephen Robles:And as a YouTuber, we're gonna get into that. Some Apple news like that f one notification. People weren't happy about that. Findergate. We're gonna talk about iPadOS 26 beta two, some of the features.
Stephen Robles:I made a video about that. And what are the best iPad keyboard cases right now? This episode is brought to you by ZGO and Surfshark, and, of course, you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and joining me as always, my friend, Jason Aiten. How's it going, Jason?
Jason Aten:It's good. It's been a 172 degrees for the last two weeks here. And finally, for the last two days, it has been a 100 degrees cooler than that, so that's nice.
Stephen Robles:There there was a heat wave. It was actually hotter up north than I think than it was down here in Florida, which
Jason Aten:is It was I think it was hotter in, yeah, the Upper Peninsula Of Michigan than it was in Florida. We were we were it was bad.
Stephen Robles:That was yeah. That is wild. Do you know the movie, that that quote was from?
Jason Aten:All programs want to be useful.
Stephen Robles:Have a desire to be useful. That's right.
Jason Aten:I'm thinking it's, no, I don't have a clue, but I could guess. IRobot, it's probably older than that.
Stephen Robles:It is both older and newer than that. That's a hint.
Jason Aten:Okay. That rules that narrows things down for me. Maybe Tron?
Stephen Robles:Yes. You got it. You got it. I knew you gonna
Jason Aten:get it. I wrote I made a I started making a list of movies when you were talking about it. I'm like, what could it be? I'm doing, like, a crossword puzzle over here.
Stephen Robles:That's it. I mean, you know, we're talking about a lot about AI, and we have some thoughts. We actually had, like, a whole pre show. You know, we if we were doing a live stream, you know, the live stream could have tuned in for our pre show chat.
Jason Aten:We should start recording them for our members.
Stephen Robles:Oh, let us know. If you wanna be in on the live recording, let us know. There can be another member benefit, which I'm just gonna say right up here at the front. We have, I think, the best membership, like paid benefits of any podcast because you get an ad free version of the show, you get bonus episodes every week, and you get the daily Primary Tech Daily show, all for paying supporters. We're gonna just keep adding more benefits.
Stephen Robles:We're gonna make it so irresistible, you have to join. You literally won't have a choice.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I think our our members who do subscribe and listen should leave us a review that tells us whether they prefer the Steven actually does this The Daily Show or Eleven Labs does it for us.
Stephen Robles:Now listen here, buddy. Listen. I was doing some traveling and so Eleven Labs was helping me out then.
Jason Aten:I'm just saying.
Stephen Robles:And then my daughter had a sleepover and there were a bunch of friends over. And if I had recorded the daily show and an actual microphone, you would've just heard girls screaming. And so that's, you know you gotta pick and choose your battles. You know what
Jason Aten:I'm That's a different kind of daily show. Okay.
Stephen Robles:Good. That's what you gotta do. Now, Jason also said a file so listen, if you wanna become a member, support the show. You can go to join.primarytech.fm. You can do it through memberfold there, or you can do it in Apple Podcasts.
Stephen Robles:You get the same benefits. Well, you don't get chapters in Apple Podcasts. But we're lobbying Apple to change that.
Jason Aten:We may have news on that. Oh. But we don't we have no news on that, but we're trying.
Stephen Robles:We have no news, but we might have news someday. But we actually don't have any five star reviews this week, which is a personal affront. And so if you have never left us a five star review, there's a lot of you out there. We would love your support. Leave us a five star rating and review an Apple Podcast.
Stephen Robles:Let us know, doc hiding, doc not or this week, let's see, it's the downloads folder. We didn't have a lot of people say with where they have their downloads go, but we wanna know. Safari downloads. They go to your desktop. You have them go to the downloads folder.
Stephen Robles:You have some weird system where they go somewhere else. We wanna know. Alright. I wanted to do a kind of like a little bit of follow-up because we talked about AI content and media literacy last week, and I I thought that was a good conversation, and I feel like it's very apropos. And I just thought these few stories were interesting because it's showing that, yeah, there's some AI content that might be ruining places of the Internet.
Stephen Robles:Namely, I couldn't read this article, but I saw the headline because it's from the Financial Times. But the Reddit CEO was basically like, we have to get really good at human verification because there's a bunch of companies trying to game the system with AI generated content in Reddit. And I just I love this circle where Google makes a deal with Reddit. And so there's a bunch of Reddit in Google search results, but it doesn't matter because Google's using AI overviews to just summarize your search result results. And now the company that made a deal with that might've provided a result is all is getting filled with AI content.
Stephen Robles:And so it's just this wonderful, just circle of life of AI life, I guess.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I think this is unavoidable. Like, I don't it's unavoidable that it's going going to be overrun by AI. And I think that what people think is that it's gonna just be bots going in and posting things. I don't and it's no.
Jason Aten:Even if it's all humans, the humans are just gonna be using the AI to come up with the the content that they're going to be posting in the different places. It's like if you have a Reddit thread for your favorite podcast, which, I mean, we should have one of those maybe someday. If you did, then you're not gonna sit there and write a real thoughtful review of the latest summary of the latest episode. You're just gonna use AI and be like, summarize this, and then you're gonna post it in that Reddit thread. So stay stay as human as you want.
Jason Aten:AI is just coming for us all.
Stephen Robles:That's a good tagline.
Jason Aten:That should be our next t shirt. Stay as human as
Stephen Robles:you want. Oh, that's really good. Stay as human as you want.
Jason Aten:Gonna write it down. Don't worry.
Stephen Robles:That's good. I'm also wearing my iOS 26 shirt, but basic apple guy made me helped me make this with Roman numerals, and I'm just I'm really excited about the shirt. I just love it. So someone said Marcus Aurelius iOS.
Jason Aten:It actually makes it seem more ridiculous. They went to 26, if
Stephen Robles:you ask Exactly. Once we get to iOS 50, if we're all alive by then, it'll be, what, iOS l.
Jason Aten:I'm hoping that in twenty four years, we're all still alive.
Stephen Robles:That's true. It's not that it's not that far away. I said 2050 as though it was some long distance, year, but it's it's actually not. It's not long at all. And, yeah, I mentioned the AI houseplant thing, and this was just a vertical article saying that AI is ruining the houseplant communities, which is that's very sad.
Stephen Robles:And, yeah, again, AI is coming for us all. Be as human as you want, I guess.
Jason Aten:I think what this means is the online communities talking about houseplants. Is that I don't what is a houseplant community? I don't understand.
Stephen Robles:It's just it's actually houseplants, that have
Jason Aten:Get together and have relationships.
Stephen Robles:The other it is hinge, but for hedges.
Jason Aten:See, I was thinking I'm
Stephen Robles:gonna see myself out after that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Come on. That was pretty good.
Jason Aten:I see. But you're from Florida, So I'm really surprised that that this was that the reference wasn't to what is the old people's playground in Florida?
Stephen Robles:Oh, the villages?
Jason Aten:The villages. It's the villages, but for plants.
Stephen Robles:It's vie the village is for
Jason Aten:vines. Vines. Villages for vines.
Stephen Robles:Man, I'm on a roll. This is gonna be a great day.
Jason Aten:This is the worst podcast ever.
Stephen Robles:No. No. This is the best. This is the best the best episode yet. And, okay, last little piece of news before we get into, like, iPadOS and things like that.
Stephen Robles:Apple is celebrating twenty years of podcasting today. Is today. Right, Jason? Like, this is
Jason Aten:So they are releasing today a list of 20 favorite podcasts for the twentieth anniversary.
Stephen Robles:And we are so excited to announce
Jason Aten:That we are not on it. I'm sorry.
Stephen Robles:Not on that list, but that's okay.
Jason Aten:But that's okay. This was the the reference that Steven made earlier was I I had a conversation with, Ben Cave, who's the global head of podcast for Apple. And and during that conversation, I was very clear with him that it was made us sad that the experience for people who pay to be a member in Apple Podcast is actually worse than people who get it for free. And and I think he was pretty sincere that that's a thing that they didn't realize was the case and that they are going to try to fix. But, yeah, the the actual twentieth anniversary of the announcement, there was a press release, was actually June 28, '2 thousand and five.
Jason Aten:So, technically, we're two days away, but I think they wanted to get this out there Yeah. Ahead of time. And, so I published an article that just kinda gave an overview. They had a bunch of quotes from, you know, the the guys from Required and, This American Life and Serial and that kind of thing, and there's a whole big by the time you listen to this, all that stuff will be live today.
Stephen Robles:Oh, there you go. So top 20. I'm trying to see if I I listened to This American Life a lot when it came out. Serial, I listened to that first season, I think, like a lot of people did. But, you know, my favorite podcasts are not the big ones, you know?
Stephen Robles:They're the Sure. Mid to small size one.
Jason Aten:You know, the interesting omission
Stephen Robles:Which one?
Jason Aten:From this list. What? The biggest podcast in the world is not on that list.
Stephen Robles:Right. Right. It's a kid.
Jason Aten:But I do think you can get it now in Apple Podcasts. Right?
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah. It's not exclusive anymore because that was a terrible idea, and I'm glad that ended.
Jason Aten:In fact, in Apple Podcasts, it says a Spotify video podcast on that chapter on artwork, excuse me. You know that Spotify is just doing that because they're like, no. No. No. No.
Jason Aten:They're we're gonna. You can go other places, but we are gonna make sure everyone knows that this is a Spotify video podcast.
Stephen Robles:I, listen, I've talked about podcasting a lot, and I remember when Luminary came out, if you recall, do you remember that podcast app? It was an app and service. Yeah. I think And they they were the first ones to really try to make exclusive podcasts a thing. I think like Russell Brand was like a partner when they first launched, and they were like, you can only get it here.
Stephen Robles:And thankfully, that died quickly. Spotify has now tried to close you just listen. You can't stop RSS. It is literally unstoppable. That's all.
Stephen Robles:That's that's what I'm here to say. Okay?
Jason Aten:Yeah. And is that's actually, you said that, but it's actually true on two levels. One
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:Right? It is philosophically opposed to the underlying principle of RSS to have it be exclusive to one platform. Right?
Stephen Robles:Yes.
Jason Aten:And, also, the people who care about RSS will just punch you in the mouth if you try to take it behind the paywall. Like, it's like right? It's just not
Stephen Robles:So true.
Jason Aten:It's like, excuse me, but what are you doing with my feed? You cannot it's just insane.
Stephen Robles:RSS it's probably well, I don't know if this is true, but when I go to podcast conferences, I have some friends in, like, the podcast hosting business and marketing agencies, and there's, like, meetings just about RSS where, like, the RSS guys and what's the the they call him the father of podcasting. What is his name? Adam Curry.
Jason Aten:Oh, okay.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. And they'll they basically there's a cabal that's, like, trying to get RSS two point o and, like, make that like, RSS is is gonna be here for a while. I still use I use RSS for my news now. And I think, you know, we're half joking, but also look at, like, The Verge where one of the benefits of their membership is a full RSS feed with the complete article content in the feed. And honestly, that was probably, like, the main benefit that encouraged me to sign up.
Stephen Robles:And if I could get that for, like, other news outlets, I don't know if maybe you can. I know you subscribe to more than I do. But, like, a full article RSS, that's not a verb, but a full article of RSS, that would be a benefit. Like, I would pay for that. Like, that's legit.
Stephen Robles:But do do any of them offer that, like Wall Street Journal or New York Times or anything?
Jason Aten:You know, I don't even know because a lot of them that are behind a paywall like that, I don't you know, they do the thing where the titles all show up and then, like, the first paragraph.
Stephen Robles:Right. Exactly.
Jason Aten:Then you have to click on it to go to the website, and the reason is because that's where the ads are. There's no ads in an RSS feed. So I understand all that, but you can try really hard. You can stay as human as you want, but the RSS feeds will be here long after the AI.
Stephen Robles:Thank you. I'll what I want you know, I've I've not thought of a use for, like, Google VO to generate video, but now I might get in there and try to make a boxing match between RSS and AI. I wanna see that fight. I think that would be way better than that Mike Tyson and whoever Paul fight.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Well, if you do, make sure you drop it in the podcast feed because it's RSS.
Stephen Robles:Well, yeah. There we go. The the video RSS feed that we don't have. This this this is
Jason Aten:We are we are not a Spotify video podcast is what he's saying.
Stephen Robles:We are not. I mean, you can watch the video on Spotify, but we are RSS all the way. Let's talk about iPad for a second. I did a video. I put the beta on my iPad.
Stephen Robles:I have to say iPadOS 26 developer beta two, which is a mouthful, but I got it out there. It's pretty good. It's pretty stable, and I've been using it on my m four iPad Pro. So I made a video about 10 of the big features. I talked about windowing and all that kind of stuff.
Stephen Robles:I have to say it's pretty good. I really like it. I like the new Files app, which I think I inadvertently called the Finder in the video several times because it just feels like Finder now. And I don't know why they don't just call it that, but we'll get to Finder in a second. But, yeah, iPadOS 26 is really good.
Stephen Robles:The audio input control that I've asked for for years works well. The local capture, I was surprised how not useful it might be because, you know, a lot of people were saying like, oh, this is Sherlocking Riverside and other podcast recording tools. Here's the thing. I didn't even know where it was at first. Like, the local recording control is not in the three dot menu in apps like FaceTime.
Stephen Robles:You actually have to add the control in control center first. You have to search for, like, the local capture control, and then it gets added to control center, and then you can enable it. It started recording immediately. Like, there wasn't even, a start recording option. It just, like, started right away.
Stephen Robles:And then I realized this doesn't start the recording on the other person's device automatically. So you actually have to walk your guest or your cohost being like, okay. Now you record. And hopefully, they actually do it right. And now you have two different length tracks because you started recording first and then they recorded.
Stephen Robles:And it doesn't stop the recording unless you end the FaceTime call. You have to manually stop. You're the other person has to manually stop or you end the call and then it gets saved. So anyway, I I don't think this is Sherlocking very much at all. But if you wanted to, you know, record a podcast from your iPad and you're doing all the manual editing and lining up of tracks, I suppose.
Stephen Robles:And it does work on iPhone as well, and I believe Mac, if if someone was wondering. So you technically could do a FaceTime call, one iPhone, one iPad, still do the local capture and and do it, and then it gets saved to your files app. But, anyway, iPadOS is pretty good.
Jason Aten:I think there's you know, obviously, we have to make a disclosure that Steven works for Riverside, so he's obviously slightly biased. But everything he said is also true. That's fine. I think Thank
Stephen Robles:you.
Jason Aten:Also, this depends on the fact that you're doing a podcast where you have to be technically savvy enough to do everything he just said and also not just record a podcast on a Mac with someone else who's not just gonna record their podcast on a Mac? Like, right? Yeah. Who what are the chances of two people just randomly thinking, let's FaceTime and record it as a podcast on our iPads? Like, that doesn't seem like it's that large of a group of people.
Stephen Robles:Maybe the kids. I don't know. Maybe the kids like the teens. Maybe they do it.
Jason Aten:Generally. I mean, I did just discover that my 11 year old apparently has a YouTube channel that I didn't know about. What? So the teens are doing a lot. Yeah.
Jason Aten:That'll be a topic for another conversation I need to investigate a little bit.
Stephen Robles:That's wild.
Jason Aten:Bro, I told them, said, buddy, you can't you're not even allowed to have a YouTube account. You're Right. Like, you're not even 13, and he just started crying because he thought he broke the law and was gonna be in real big trouble. I was like, you just keep believing that because
Stephen Robles:No, Jason. You should lean into that. You said, listen. Police are coming. They're on their way.
Jason Aten:No. I am the law. I am the
Stephen Robles:laws. I am the law.
Jason Aten:That's a Western reference, by the way. Oh, thank you. But about this, I have found that the betas so far have been enjoyable. Yes. Except Oh?
Jason Aten:I don't remember a beta period that sucked the life out of my iPad battery more than this one.
Stephen Robles:Are you on the beta two? Did you go to the beta two?
Jason Aten:Also or the second one? Yeah. I'm I think I am on the second one. I'll have to check to make sure, But I put it on a a m two iPad Pro, so it's not on my m four
Stephen Robles:iPad Pro.
Jason Aten:So it could be just that the battery is trash anyway.
Stephen Robles:I only had beta one installed for, like, a day, and then beta two came out. So I guess I don't have a lot of experience with beta one, but beta two seems pretty good. Alright. So I also wanna talk about iPad keyboard cases in just a second. I was looking for the message, but I also wanted to mention the the spatial scenes, which I always you know, you hear about that feature and you're like, oh, this is probably pretty, like, gimmicky or whatever.
Stephen Robles:It's actually one of the coolest things. Like, I was using my own pictures as lock screen images and enabling that spatial scene, And it is wild, like, the way that they have the clock and the picture and it all feels very three d. Like, it does feel like the iPad becomes this three d window into this, like, multi layered scene. Like, it's pretty wild. It's really cool.
Stephen Robles:So you
Jason Aten:should try it. Yeah. Whenever I come across pictures that have turned into that on this happens on Facebook all the time. Facebook just does that to images and stuff. I just block the person.
Jason Aten:I'm like, I don't we can't be friends anymore. So
Stephen Robles:Well, face face and Facebook, you know, I don't know if they'll do a good job at it, but I think Apple's spatial scene thing like, this was an image I didn't take a spatial photo Right. You know, which is a thing you can do. I just took a photo, like it was actually a raw Max on my iPhone, and then used that as a wallpaper, and it does a good job. Because, you know, Apple is your iPhone is saving all that depth information anyway, even if it's not a portrait photo or whatever. And if you're not holding if you're not moving it, like it's paused right now, it just looks like a flat photo.
Stephen Robles:Like it doesn't look like anything, but it's when you start moving it, and it really because
Jason Aten:of the That's cool.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. It's it's pretty cool. So anyway, I'll I'll run the betas at your own risk. Although, I will say beta two's been pretty good. So, now someone was asking me in a DM about iPad cases.
Stephen Robles:This was Justin, and I have to hopefully listen to the podcast. I'll just send the link to him directly. Said, hey. You should listen to this. He was asking he wants to get an m four iPad Pro, use it as his main device with iPadOS 26 because it's so good with the windowing and all, and I could definitely see that.
Stephen Robles:But the Magic Keyboard is really heavy, and so he was asking what is the better option for a keyboard case for an iPad? And this sent me spiraling because I I still don't think there are super great options, although Jason's gonna tell me something he's been using. Because any Bluetooth keyboard, I find to be such an inferior experience. The pairing, you have to charge a second device in addition to your iPad. But don't even give Bluetooth keyboards the time of day.
Stephen Robles:I'm just like, maybe they're for somebody, but I don't I want a smart connector keyboard. And on you know, when iPad came out with the smart connector, I'm pretty sure Apple said, like, from the stage, like, this is gonna be a whole ecosystem of accessories using the smart connector, which never actually came true. We have basically two keyboards that use the smart connector, which is the Magic Keyboard. We used to have the Smart Keyboard Folio, which I and Jason loved, and it's gone now. And then there's one other.
Jason Aten:It's not gone. I have one right here.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. But you can't get it for the new ones.
Jason Aten:Have an m two iPad Pro right here, and I every day, I think I might just go back.
Stephen Robles:But you can't use that on the new m four. No. It doesn't fit. The magnets are different and all that
Jason Aten:kind stuff. I'm gonna sell the m four and just use this m two. Mean, m two copy paste. It's the worst trade off you have to make, and it's like the best keyboard case Apple ever made
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:Or the best display Apple ever made. You can't have both. Why not both? Why can't we have both of Why
Stephen Robles:not both? But you have discovered, something recently, the Logitech Combo Touch, which my wife has one of these for her iPad Pro, but it's a couple years old. And it's it's okay because it's the smart connector, so it's not Bluetooth, but it felt bulky. But you're saying the new one's not.
Jason Aten:It's fine. I I got one recently. So I have been just using the standard silicone, like, whatever Apple
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:IPad case. Just I don't even know what they call this. It's not smart. It's not magic. It's just a case.
Stephen Robles:IPad case. Yeah. No. No.
Jason Aten:No. No. I also have a magic keyboard for it, but I just basically refuse to carry it around in that because it's just heavy. It's
Stephen Robles:just 30 pounds. It weighs 30.
Jason Aten:And, like, most of the weight is in that hinge, which is just shocking. It's like, oh, if you just And
Stephen Robles:the trackpad. The trackpad weighs 10 pounds by itself.
Jason Aten:That's true. But this Combo Touch thing is I had had one on a larger iPad in the past, and I didn't like it at all because it was it was big and it was heavy. The new one, though, is a good it's a really good keyboard, and it's a it's it's I like it.
Stephen Robles:It's
Jason Aten:I'm gonna try it for a while. We're gonna see like, the the only thing I don't prefer about it is if I'm carrying a backpack, I can keep the iPad just in the iPad case and then just throw the Magic Keyboard in there if I want. Right? Like and then I have that at both options. This one, you're committed because it actually goes around it.
Jason Aten:Right. Yeah. So there's that part that I isn't my favorite, but the keyboard itself is actually really good.
Stephen Robles:Yes.
Jason Aten:I mean, it's it's on par. I think the Magic Keyboard and the Magic Keyboard trackpad are are definitely better. There's no question. But this is the next best option. But I don't understand why they don't just make another Smart Folio keyboard.
Stephen Robles:They need to bring the Folio back. They're all Logitech also makes this other one that I just discovered because it's on their website, but the Flip Folio, which looks more like a lightweight case, like you can snap it on and off easily, more like the Magic Keyboard or Folio. But then the keyboard is, like, separate, I guess, but then it attaches. So I'm I'm curious if any of our listeners have tried this one because this is tempting. I've I've not been carrying a keyboard with my iPad.
Stephen Robles:Also, of my m four MacBook Air is so good. I just bring my MacBook Air everywhere now. So but anyway, let us know if you have a favorite iPad keyboard that uses a smart connector. Basically, if you Yeah. These.
Stephen Robles:These are your only options. There are And I will I will
Jason Aten:just add, if you're looking at the Combo Touch, it's also worth comparing and thinking hard about how you tend to use an iPad. And the reason for that is it's like $229. Yes. You know? And the Magic Keyboard for an 11 inch is $2.99, I think.
Jason Aten:So it's not that much more expensive. But if you are going to do a if you primarily wanna use an iPad as as, like, a teaching typing, excuse me, typing device, you might just wanna spring for the extra $70 and get the magic keyboard. But if what you want is something that's a little bit more versatile and you tend to use it as just an iPad more, this is probably a good option.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Okay. Very good. Alright. Another quick Apple news before we get to big AI conversation.
Stephen Robles:The Apple Sports app has been updated, which I actually used recently when the Knicks were in the playoffs or whatever, and I wanted to see the live activities.
Jason Aten:For which sport?
Stephen Robles:Listen, I know what the sport of the Knicks are, okay?
Jason Aten:The sport of
Stephen Robles:the I know the sport of the Knicks.
Jason Aten:Jeopardy! I don't think that's an acceptable answer.
Stephen Robles:What is basketball? I I know. And I'll have to say, the sports app was kinda nice with the live activity, seeing the scores on my lock screen, and, you know, I wasn't watching the game. So, anyway, it was updated. Now includes tennis scores in time for Wimbledon.
Stephen Robles:I forget, do you use the sports app? Like
Jason Aten:I use the sports app only occasionally. I don't use the live activities for any of the scores, but I have been using it because I can't keep track of which part of the world the f the next f one races are in, and so that means the start times are different. They're basically 02:00 local time most of the time. Okay. I think that's true.
Jason Aten:So but I'm like, they're the race is in wherever Azerbaijan. I don't know what time that's gonna start. And so then the sports app does a good job of telling you what's upcoming for the things that you follow. So
Stephen Robles:I have to say, Jason, I saw the f one movie at Apple Park in Steve Jobs' theater. I think I talked about that. We there was an early screen there.
Jason Aten:You just really wanted to say that again.
Stephen Robles:I didn't wanna say it again, but then you told me I should check out drive to survive, the reality show on Netflix.
Jason Aten:It's so good.
Stephen Robles:And I did, Jason. And I'm two seasons in because I got hooked, and I'm like, oh, no. I like I think I like F1. And then I discovered that the Apple Sports app has the F1 in it.
Jason Aten:Yep. And I was like
Stephen Robles:I was just perusing, and I was like, wait a minute, Max Verstappen. I recognize that name because I saw him in the show. And I'm like, shoot, is F1 how I get into sports after 40 of life?
Jason Aten:This is amazing. I'm so excited for this moment right now.
Stephen Robles:It makes it the series on Netflix did make it very exciting. And I was like, I was resistant because the whole tech world got into F1 at the same time for some reason. I hear my
Jason Aten:Because of that show.
Stephen Robles:Because of that show. Okay. Well, yeah, I might be into it. And now I'm like, when is the next race in Miami? Because I might, which is not till next year, apparently.
Jason Aten:But No. It's not till next year. But there's one in Austin, and then there's one in Vegas. Vegas is you know, we can go to Vegas in November, I think.
Stephen Robles:Go to Vegas. Let's do it. For Cirque du Soleil in f 1. That's those are my reasons to go to Vegas.
Jason Aten:Have you ever been to Vegas before?
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I was there for a podcast conference, and I saw the Cirque du Soleil O. I saw the O show.
Jason Aten:Alright.
Stephen Robles:And I just have to say, the O this is so off topic, but it doesn't matter. I like the energy of the show. Me and my wife actually went to Vegas because it was both of our first time, and we wanted to see the Cirque du Soleil show. And so it's in the Bellagio, I believe. Like, the Cirque du Soleil show is, like, through the casino and hotel, and I had never been to a Vegas casino.
Stephen Robles:Like, I'd just never been there. And just walking through the Bellagio Casino, it's just such a wild experience. You see just literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people, like, hunched over on poker tables and on slot machines. And then it's like very I mean, no one looks super happy because I don't think anyone's winning the jackpot. And then we're just all shuffling towards it was it was a wild experience.
Stephen Robles:So anyway. Yeah. The O Show was pretty good. But okay. Speaking of f one, there was a notification that went out to some people.
Stephen Robles:Did you get this notification about the f one deal?
Jason Aten:Yeah. And it also was like a persistent thing in the Apple in the wallet. It's still there.
Stephen Robles:It's the wallet. Yeah. It's in the wallet app. So Apple sent a notification. It came through the Apple Wallet app that, hey.
Stephen Robles:There's an offer at Fandango for f one the movie, and you can basically whatever. It's like a sale for the movie ticket. And people were ticked because it's, once again, Apple using its platform basically for advertising that it does not allow third party apps and services to do. Although I do get a ton of DoorDash notifications if I don't turn that off for deals and Uber Eats. But to be fair, this notification, if you have notifications turned on for the Wallet app, it's probably due to the finance information you would like to glean from that or maybe your order status, which iOS 26 you know what?
Stephen Robles:I just it just hit me. I don't think this is some master plan, but in iOS 26, you'll be able to do package tracking whether you have bought something with Apple Pay or not. And so I imagine people will want to turn on notifications for the Wallet app because they can get their shipping notifications all in one place. And if you have those notifications on, you're gonna get weird offers like this. And now I'm like, is this a mass conspiracy?
Stephen Robles:But anyway, this notification came through. I don't know if I got it or not. I understand why people are upset. And here is my solution, Jason. You tell me if this is a viable option.
Stephen Robles:If Apple wants to advertise its stuff, like its original movies and TV shows, which it does a lot, the f one marketing campaign is insane. I mean, partnered with McDonald's. There's commercials. I think I saw There
Jason Aten:are two podcasts in the podcast app showing off f one content.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I'm pretty sure I saw a hot air balloon pass by my house with the f one movie on it. Like, it's wild.
Jason Aten:Are you sure it wasn't a boat going down the river with a big sign
Stephen Robles:on it? Could have been that too. I saw an alligator wearing an f one T shirt. I mean, it's crazy out here.
Jason Aten:Wow. Was it Ferrari or Mercedes?
Stephen Robles:It was, Aston Martin, actually. I was trying to think of all the the names from the drive to survive show. So anyway, here's my solution, and I think it makes sense. Apple has an app on the device already for its original content about movies and TV shows. It's called the Apple TV app.
Stephen Robles:And if you wanted notifications about new Apple TV plus shows and movies, you would probably have notifications turned on for that app. And f one, being an Apple original movie, they should have put the notification through that app. And then if someone had notifications turned off, they wouldn't have gotten it. But if they do have notifications on because they like Apple TV or or movie original content, then they would have gotten it, and it feels like it would have been more apropos and less sleazy. What do you think?
Jason Aten:My big thing is that Apple shouldn't do on its own platform marketing and advertising things that it would never let anyone else do.
Stephen Robles:Sure.
Jason Aten:It that to me feels a little bit abusive, especially because when I say abusive, I don't mean, like, like Perth, like violent. I mean, it's like abuse of the trust that you have built up over decades with users. And when you have someone like Tim Cook who goes up on stage at the International Association of Privacy Professionals and basically compare says all the other big tech companies are just monetizing your personal information. This ad is not your personal information. Right?
Jason Aten:It's it may be targeted, but it's not a like, they don't know that I'm watching drive to survive until they show me this this ad. They're showing it to everyone. They want everyone to buy the tickets, and that's fine. But there's this little erosion of we thought Apple was different. We didn't which let's be honest.
Jason Aten:Every time you get a new phone, there's 17 red dots in the settings app. Like, did you wanna do this? Did you wanna set this up? Apple Music. Apple Music.
Jason Aten:Music. All those types of things. But this is, like, another level because it's promoting Fandango, an offer to get you to buy tickets to a movie that Apple made. And I just feel like that is probably too far, and it's probably a thing that someone is like, well, the dial on some movie tickets, we could do it. We we have the Wallet app, but no one expects to see marketing messages in the Wallet app, and that's the problem.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. And I think your Wallet app again, if you have credit cards in Wallet, probably have notifications on because you wanna know about charges. And if there's ever a charge that you didn't expect, you would get a no immediate notification. But to put an ad and let's be clear. This was an ad for the f one movie.
Jason Aten:Absolutely.
Stephen Robles:To put an ad in that feed of notifications from a pretty, like, personal app, like the Wallet app is your personal cards and information and all that kind of stuff, it it didn't feel great. Now I will say if you go to the settings app on your phone and you go to the Wallet and Apple Pay section, there is a show card benefits toggle, and there's an option to toggle off rewards. I'm not sure if that would have actually made the notification not come through or not. It's hard to say. But supposedly you could turn that off.
Stephen Robles:You know, you get sometimes I don't get notifications for these things, but you can open the Wallet app and it's like Panera Bread is offering a dollar off a broccoli cheese soup or whatever if you use your Apple card. And that that feels kind of meh too.
Jason Aten:Well, and I feel like what happens is, yes, this type of thing is incredibly effective. Sure. Putting in someone's face, hey, you haven't ordered Uber Eats in a while. You should do that right now. And you're like, I'm really hungry.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I should just tap on this thing and I should take these $3 offer or whatever it is. That sort of thing is just a numbers game. If we push a million notifications and we get a even if we only get a thousand orders out of it, that's a thousand orders of incremental revenue. The problem is that they don't take into consideration the number of people that just then decide I'm turning off notifications, or they just get angry and are like, forget this.
Jason Aten:Get rid of this app. I don't even want this on there. Because all you know is you converted a thousand people to do orders that you, in your mind, wouldn't have done that. But what you can't figure out is, yes, but 900,000 of us all just deleted your app.
Stephen Robles:Well, and what I do is if I ever order something through DoorDash or Uber Eats, I will turn on notifications for that order and then immediately turn them off once it is delivered. Because otherwise you get offers like all the time, and so
Jason Aten:And I don't mean this as any any I'm not throwing shade at you, but like do you have a shortcut that does that? Because that would be a good use of shortcuts.
Stephen Robles:Listen, it would be great if you could actually adjust notifications for apps via shortcuts, which can't do that. If
Jason Aten:only we knew someone who had a YouTube channel that talks about that talks about shortcuts all
Stephen Robles:the Well, you know what? There's a few of those channels now, and we're gonna get into that in a second because they they keep crop they're cropping up. And, yeah. Well, anyway, okay. Before we get to that, last thing, the Mac Finder icon in the last beta supposedly was fixed and not fixed at the same time.
Stephen Robles:So if you didn't know when the first macOS Tahoe beta dropped, the Finder icon got swapped, namely the white and blue side of the face, and people were very upset about that. And then in beta two, it got swapped back. So the blue side is on the left, white side is on the white, but it still has like this weird blue border around the finder icon. And so some people were like, oh, they fixed it. And then John Gruber, friend of the show, because he's been a guest, was like, no, they didn't fix it.
Stephen Robles:They kinda fixed it, and it still looks bad. And then this design, if I get who this was made by, but, like, someone on x was like, listen. This is what the Finder icon should look like with liquid glass, and I agree. Like, this actually looks good, and it still is reminiscent of the traditional Finder icon, and, they should have done that. So I don't know.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Except so there was actually two things wrong with the first version. It's just no one realized that the second thing that was wrong until they tried to fix it. Because the two things that were wrong is this idea that you have a plate of glass that has the clear part, and then you have a second plate of glass that has to lay on top of that. And the only way to make it seem as though there's a second piece of glass laying on top of it is to have that border around it.
Jason Aten:Mhmm. And so that's what they did. And so they did sort of fix it philosophically. Like, the finder icon, you didn't need to change the colors of or reverse the colors. No.
Jason Aten:So they fixed that part of it, but what they didn't fix is the part that was less obvious before, which is the idea that the one side had to be smaller than the other. I don't know. I mean, that doesn't kill me quite as much. I think it looks ugly, but at least it's still the it's still the finder character in the same sort of vein that it has been for the last, whatever, twenty years or whatever since Mac OS 10. Yeah.
Jason Aten:But I don't know. You and it is funny because this is a great example of a thing that people who care really, really care about.
Stephen Robles:Yes.
Jason Aten:And then most people don't care about. And you mentioned before, like, why do they call it the files app on iPadOS and not just Finder? Because ask everyone in your family, what's that thing? What's that icon right there on your on your dock? I don't know.
Jason Aten:That's where the my files are. Right? Like Yeah. They would just call it the files app. And so on the iPad, if you called that thing Finder, most primary iPad users would be like, find what?
Jason Aten:What is finder? I don't even understand. So
Stephen Robles:Yeah. It's it's fair. I just I don't know. It's fine. It's fine.
Stephen Robles:We'll see how it actually ends up. I I I wonder if that border will go away actually before the final one comes out because I mean, this looks good. That looks glassy. I don't know why they didn't just do that. But anyway
Jason Aten:Yeah. It I'm glad that they at least list it's the part that I thought was really interesting as they listened.
Stephen Robles:They did?
Jason Aten:They changed it, and they said absolutely nothing. They were like
Stephen Robles:I should probably submit some feedback because if they are listening, I got some thoughts about shortcuts. You know? And, actually, there's this weird bug. The one bug I'd found on iPadOS is I use universal control all the time to drag audio files from my Mac to my iPad to then edit in Ferrite. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:And if I do that when Ferrite is full screen, it won't drag the files and it'll just snap it. Like Ferrite gets like snapped like this thin app, and then I have to leave it in that thin window, drag the files into that, files will copy over fine, and then I can make it full screen. So I should actually not complain about it on a podcast and actually, submit feedback. We'll see if that actually happens. We will see.
Stephen Robles:But we need to talk about some of the court cases that have gone and the LLM training that is now allowed where these companies like Meta and OpenAI can train on content on the Internet and how that feels as a creator. And I don't know, maybe some other situations. But before we do, we have a couple friends we wanna thank. And this first one I'm really excited about because I live in Florida. And one of the biggest problems about living in Florida, well, is Florida.
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Stephen Robles:So go to surfshark.com/robles. That's right. So that's slash
Jason Aten:Again, not the other guy.
Stephen Robles:Not the
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Stephen Robles:Well, thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this episode.
Jason Aten:I want one of those I want one of those mosquito things.
Stephen Robles:Listen. I'm a I think they're actually gonna send me one because I mean, mosquitoes. Florida. It's, like, synonymous. It's almost
Jason Aten:Michigan. It even starts with the same first letter.
Stephen Robles:Oh, that is true. I just can't wait to put it outside at night and see a laser show. Because if it shoots lasers at all mosquitoes that it detects Yeah.
Jason Aten:I'm definitely not putting that in the bedroom. I cannot sleep with, like I feel like I'm in a Mission Impossible, like, episode.
Stephen Robles:Dun dun dun dun dun. My dentist is calling me. Why is the dentist calling me? That's what I wanna know. Anyway, sorry, dentist.
Stephen Robles:I got an appointment for a couple weeks from now. We don't need to talk right now. Alright. There's been a couple court cases. Ben Thompson at Strathecari wrote about one, and there was the Medicort case.
Stephen Robles:The first one that Ben Thompson wrote about, this was with OpenAI. Correct?
Jason Aten:No. This is Anthropic.
Stephen Robles:Oh, this is Anthropic. Excuse me. This is Anthropic, and the court case was about fair use and whether companies like Anthropic and Meta can train their models on the open Internet.
Jason Aten:Well, just sorry. No. This is actually about it used books.
Stephen Robles:Books.
Jason Aten:OpenAI fed a bunch of books into, to do its training models. And there was sorry. There's two pieces of this that that was subject that was part of this case. One of them is Antopic used pirated copies of the books, which was not great.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:But, also, the larger philosophical question is, can these LLMs use, copyrighted material? Sorry. I I I realized I didn't give you very
Stephen Robles:good No. Thank you. No. That's good. So is the medic case, which meta won this case about training It was
Jason Aten:also about books in this case that were copywritten. Okay. Now the medic case is slightly different. So, yeah, the in the medic case, the judge was like, this is, meta wins, but kind of even said that the reason meta wins is because that the authors in this case didn't do a very good job. Like, it just didn't do a very good job in, they didn't show actual harm or how those the results were being used for direct competition because the, you know, the fair use exception to copyright basically says, yeah.
Jason Aten:You violated copyright, but it's fine. That's kinda like Right. You made a copy of it sorry. You made a copy of a thing without a permission, but it's fine because you did certain things. Right?
Jason Aten:And Transformative. Yes. And in this case, it's likely for fair use because these models are not using, you know, was it Sarah Silverman had a book, I think, that was in here? Like, you're not using it to recreate a Sarah Silverman book. You're learning you're using it to learn about how books are written, right, and what constitute a book and what all the material that's in the book.
Jason Aten:And then someone would use it to generate something that's completely new. So what was what was the judge said in both of these cases essentially is, yeah, it's fair use to use these copyrighted materials. Now in the Anthropic case specifically, the judge was like, except you did use, like, 7,000,000 pirated books, and it's you ended up paying, I think they ended up paying for copies of I don't know if they paid for all of them. Like, they ended up but the judge was like, that doesn't negate the fact that you still took the pirated books. Right.
Jason Aten:So, yes, the judges have said it's not a copyright violation, at least in these cases, to be using these books that were copyright. And I kinda thought that that was the way that this was going to go. We had a conversation about this a while ago. I think it was around the open eye New York Times lawsuit maybe because what the this is a super oversimplified version of it. But, essentially, the what they're doing with the large language models is they're feeding it information to teach it about things.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:To teach it about and I when I say teach it about things, I don't mean it's like learning about birds and earthquakes. It's like learning about how words go together and how book structure like, that's the kind of thing that's happening here, which is exactly what you would do if you wanted to write a book. Right? You'd read some books and you'd maybe read some books about writing books and then you would write a book. You wouldn't write a copy of the books that you read.
Jason Aten:You would write your own book, but you are informed and you learn by consuming this information. And the objection has been, yes, but these computers can do that more and faster. Right. You can only read so many books.
Stephen Robles:So being about books specifically, you know, we'll have to talk about the larger idea of training LLMs on just the open Internet because it's free, you know, free information, namely YouTube, especially. But, yes, you're the LLMs are learning to write a book, not necessarily write a Sarah Silverman book. But I imagine once an LLM is trained on the Sarah Silverman book, if you ask it questions, it should, and I think would, provide information found in that book even though and and not require you to buy it. I mean, once it's trained on the data, it's not, I wouldn't think, correct me if I'm wrong, but like sifting through and saying, all right, well, we're not gonna tell you anything that was in this book. We just learned how to write books because of it, right?
Jason Aten:Okay, but what you do you've read some books I haven't read, and if I ask you about them, the your only answer should be go buy the book?
Stephen Robles:Sure. But I I cannot answer so many questions about the book because I don't have the memory that I could basically regurgitate all the pertinent information. Like, I'm just not capable of that, and most humans would not be unless you have some kind of crazy photographic memory. But with an LLM, I imagine you could, in a series of questions, extract all the information you want about that was found in the book, the Sarah Silverman book, without ever having to read it. That feels like the diff the difference.
Stephen Robles:Right?
Jason Aten:So what you're saying is that the difference here is just a matter of scale. Humans have limitations because our brains are not that big, and so we can't store all of human information in them. Right. And so it's fine if we read all the stuff, get you know, learn from our own ideas based on other people's ideas, and then create our own thing.
Stephen Robles:Well, that that, I think, is the point. Like, when a human being synthesizes information, when asked about it, it will likely synthesize both what is from the book that they read, but also from all their other information. Like, that synthesis just happens in the background. But if you start asking an LLM about a specific book, like the Sarah Silverman book, I would assume it's going to be just giving you information about that book that it just knows, maybe even quoting from it. And I feel like that's different.
Stephen Robles:Like I can't quote, I don't know.
Jason Aten:Feels so You've been able to do that though with Google for a really long time.
Stephen Robles:Sure. Sure.
Jason Aten:Now here's an interesting thing about the books thing. So there's books and then there's other types of information, YouTube videos, the Internet. Right? Right. Essentially training LLMs is this the cases were specifically about books, but I don't think that the ruling is specific to books.
Jason Aten:Meaning, I think this is precedent that will be applied across other things. Right. The the the challenge here is, like, a book, generally speaking, is not just freely available on the open Internet. Right? So it is a slightly higher threshold in my mind.
Jason Aten:Now I'm not saying legally. You have to acquire a book in order to see what's inside the book. So the LLMs have to acquire the book, and that's one of the that's the part that the judge said was wrong was they just took a bunch of pirated books. Right? They were just people had scanned them in and put them on the Internet kind of a thing.
Jason Aten:Right? And that was not okay. But if you buy if if they buy or license or whatever get access to all this stuff, the authors can't object because they didn't have permission to use that content in any in this particular way in the same way that you could buy 50 books about how to start a YouTube channel and then start your own YouTube channel. And the people who wrote the books about starting a YouTube channel couldn't complain that you're that you did that. The only again, the only difference is that humans have such a limited capacity to do this.
Jason Aten:So I just wanna be clear, like, what we're saying is not that the act of learning from someone else's work and recreating your own thing based on that is wrong. It's that the computers can just do more of it faster, but that's not necessarily, that's not a copyright distinction.
Stephen Robles:Right. So let's bring it to a place that is close to home for me, which is YouTube, which no one has to pay for. You can watch all the YouTube videos you want completely for free. Of course, you have to watch the ads, but it is for free. You don't have to pay for it.
Stephen Robles:And all the LLMs have likely been trained on all of YouTube because you
Jason Aten:have- Definitely Gemini.
Stephen Robles:Definitely Gemini, and you know, you can ask it to make an MKBHD style video, and it knows how to do it. So clearly there's been some training. So at what point is that, obviously, there's no copyright issue. Anyway, the example we were talking about before we even started recording was like, I make shortcuts videos. I did not create shortcuts, and I had learned from the greats, namely Federico Vettichi and Matthew Casanelli about shortcuts.
Stephen Robles:And learning from them. I synthesize that information, and then I make my videos. Now they are not as active on YouTube, so it feels less like a straight copy or like I'm doing what they're doing. But since I've been doing a lot of Shortcuts videos, I see a lot of channels now coming up with similar thumbnails and titles to my own. And it is not a straight copy, obviously, because it's not my face and their thumbnails, and it's not the exact wording, but it's very close to the format.
Stephen Robles:And, you know, I've a lot of places on YouTube, you run into that. Like, if you wanna do videos about iPhone tips, there's a lot of channels out there doing that. And there's only so many ways to package that kind of content. You'll end up looking similar. For me personally, if someone learned from my videos and see that how I'm doing is working and they wanna do it themselves and hopefully begin to make it their own, like, great.
Stephen Robles:I'm not I don't have a problem with that and, like, more power to them. You know, if they were to take my exact thumbnail in my face and put it on their video, that would be a problem. And maybe that's the difference between the copyright law and just, I don't know, the fair use stuff. But I also know. So I watched a couple YouTube channels about iPhone tips, and I learned from them.
Stephen Robles:And then I wanted to incorporate some of their tips into my videos. And there was someone who commented on one of my videos a while ago. They're like, I saw the same tip from so and so, or I saw the same two tips from so and so. You're copying them. And I was like, okay.
Stephen Robles:I mean, I did learn from them. I didn't take their video footage or their script. You know, I did it myself. But for me, I also like, you know what? I wanna be able to say I learned this myself or whatever.
Stephen Robles:And so I stopped watching those channels because I if someone says you copied so and so, I could say, you know what? I can't I don't watch their videos anymore because I don't wanna be accused of that. And if I do find a tip from, a TikToker, I'll link them in the video description, and I'll mention them. And, honestly, TikTok is a great resource for that. So I there's a lot of I don't know.
Stephen Robles:There's a lot of nuance there, and I don't know I don't know how it applies. But you also look at the Studio Ghibli thing with OpenAI, and it's like, okay. OpenAI trained its models on Studio Ghibli content. And, like, Sam Altman is out here with his profile picture on x still being a Studio Ghibli style. And it's like, well, does Studio Ghibli ever make this exact image?
Stephen Robles:No. Could OpenAI's models make this image without being trained on Studio Ghibli's content? Probably not. But, man, it feels sticky. Right?
Jason Aten:Okay. But, I think the important piece here is there's a difference between a, like, a copyright And what we just think is icky because these things are scooping up content that the people who made it never imagined would be used in this way. Because if Sam Altman was capable of just drawing that, he might get some criticism for being like, dude, like, that's you're copying a style. And we tend to, as creators and as humans, think that you should have your own particular style. Right?
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:It wouldn't be a copyright violation if Sam it might just be bad taste for him to do it. Now it's extra bad taste because it he he just had, know, open AI spit it out, and he's just still using it. And it's kind of like, what are gonna do about it? And Right. Going to see what they're gonna people will wanna do about it.
Jason Aten:But I I think that in general, we get mad that the computers can do things that are beyond our capabilities. But if humans had the capability to do that, again, copyright is literally did you have a did you have permission to make a copy? Like, a literal physical or not physical, but, like, digital or physical copy. So, like, if you wrote down all the words to a tale of two cities, you made a copy of it, and that would be a copyright violation unless the reason you made the copy is for something transformative. So perhaps in the in in example you use where you just kept feeding questions into anthropic and eventually it spits out the entire text of a Sarah Silverman book
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:Maybe that is a copyright violation. Like, you know what I mean? But using so I don't know. Like, I don't and that wasn't addressed in this particular case. In fact, it the authors did not allege that the output of anthropic was an illegal copy because it was transformative.
Jason Aten:Had they argued that, it's not clear whether the judge would have ruled that that was illegal or not. Like, that was not addressed, and so maybe it will be addressed in the future. But what is pretty clear is that using making a copy, which is what a computer has to do in order to ingest something. It literally has to make a copy of the bits. Right?
Jason Aten:And in or doing that, training it, and then creating a different set of output is not a copyright violation. Because, again, if you read 10 books and you you I mean, if you're not literally making a copy in your brain, but you're depositing the information to your brain Right. And then you come up with the thing, It was not a copyright violation to those authors even if they never intended for you know, Hem Hemingway never intended for you to become Hemingway junior and be his biggest right, with your own works.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:It's not a copyright violation. And I I honestly think that, like, I think this feels really icky to us, but I think it's right. Because and because and the objections to it is simply that they that that these computers make all these NVIDIA if you have a billion dollars worth of NVIDIA GPUs, you can just do this faster and more. And and and these companies don't have a billion dollars. They have $50,000,000,000 worth of GPUs.
Jason Aten:Right. So they can do more of it faster, but that doesn't make it any more illegal. That's the tricky thing.
Stephen Robles:And I I guess you're right. It does feel icky because of the scale. Like, a human cannot watch every YouTube video and then spit out information based on that. Only a computer can. So I yeah.
Stephen Robles:I get it. And also, I benefit from it because every time I make a video, I feed my transcript to ChatGPT, and I ask it for title and description ideas. And I just said on another podcast I was on Clockwise earlier this week. And I created a shortcut on my iPad because I have the iPad OS 26 now using the model framework action where you can choose between Apple's private cloud compute, Apple's on device Apple intelligence model, and ChatGPT extension. It's all you can do all three of those in the same action.
Stephen Robles:And I made a shortcut that basically will run whatever prompt I want through all three models so I can see how the output compares between Apple's models, private cloud on device, and ChatGPT's. And it's pretty stark how much better the ChatGPT output is. One, because it follows my instructions better. Like, you can I ask it, give me just 500 characters worth of tags for YouTube because that's the maximum? And Apple's private cloud compute was like, here's all the tags.
Stephen Robles:And it gave me like 2,000 characters worth. I was like, well, that's not the instruction. And in the prompt, I also ask it, hey, I mentioned two videos at the end of every one of my videos. Let me know what videos I mentioned. Apple's models didn't even try to give me that information.
Stephen Robles:ChatGPT nailed it every time. So the only reason ChatGPT is so good at that is probably because it's been trained on tons of YouTube videos, and it knows the structure of a YouTube video. It knows probably what makes a better title and description than Apple's models do ad does. And, also, someone on Mastodon recently discovered if you ask the models through that shortcut action, if it can search the web, it basically tells you we've only been trained on data up to 2023, and it can't do, like, real time web search. So your it's older data that it's been trained on, not the most recent, can't search the web, and the output is just not as good, probably because it hasn't been trained on as much stuff.
Stephen Robles:So I benefit from all that in all all that OpenAI ingesting of YouTube videos I I benefit from. So I understand, like, it's I'm in a position where I can't really be, like, super mad about it. But it just feels good to
Jason Aten:be feel weird. I did it, but it but, also, it's it seems a little bit like, you know, when you were in school and there was the one kid and math just seemed like it came easy to them and it made you so mad because it seemed so unfair that he didn't even have to work and he could get an a on the test and you'd study all night and you'd get something other than an a on the test. I'm trying not to pick on Steven here, but, you know, like and we would feel like that was an injustice and it was unfair and, like, whatever. But it's like, take that up with the maker because it's not, like, it's not the kid's fault. Right?
Jason Aten:And so in this case, what we're what people are mad about is it's like, yeah. But they have the, you know, computers shouldn't have been able to do this. But I don't think copyright is the thing people are really mad about. That's, I guess, the point I'm trying to make because copyright is literally, did you have permissions to make an actual copy of the thing? Right.
Jason Aten:And what the what the judges are saying is that under the law, under the fair use exception, if you're going to use that to be transform in transformative in some way, then you didn't have to have permission. You can go ahead and do that. And that applies to what LLMs are doing. Right. We can still argue about, yeah, but it just feels super icky.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And I don't know how we resolve that, but I don't think apparently copyright lawsuits are going be the thing.
Stephen Robles:I wanna end this section by, telling a brief story from kindergarten, which was my first, encounter with copyright.
Jason Aten:Way back.
Stephen Robles:I still remember this like it was yesterday. We were doing this little exercise where we had three different color beads and you were supposed to find out all the combinations that you can put these three beads in in, like, different patterns. Literally, I remember this from kindergarten. I am a completionist. I also wanted to be a good student.
Stephen Robles:And so I had figured out all like, and the paper told you how many patterns were possible, and I got them all but one. And I was so stressed out about that last one. I couldn't figure it out. And I did I looked at my neighbor's paper and saw that pattern. And apparently, the teacher caught me because she sent me to the round table, which was the troublemaker table.
Stephen Robles:And that was the only time I got in trouble. I'm pretty sure I cried at that table, but I got in trouble for copyright in kindergarten because I made a copy.
Jason Aten:Who accept
Stephen Robles:It's not really copy.
Jason Aten:Copyright or was it like
Stephen Robles:Cheating.
Jason Aten:Patent infringement?
Stephen Robles:Patent infringement?
Jason Aten:Was it plagiarism? Was it I don't know.
Stephen Robles:It was straight cheating. I still remember that, and I'm still bitter
Jason Aten:about it. Still it's just straight cheating.
Stephen Robles:It's just
Jason Aten:straight cheating. Doesn't need any fancy name.
Stephen Robles:It's just we have an important personal take that I wanna get to, but but the last story, just mentioned quickly is, you know, that that wedding invitation from Sam Altman and Johnny High?
Jason Aten:The $6,000,000,000 wedding. And we're not talking about Jeff Bezos.
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. Yeah. Doesn't that happen this week?
Stephen Robles:Isn't he married?
Jason Aten:I think he's getting married. I think they have bought all of Venice.
Stephen Robles:They just like monopoly?
Jason Aten:People of Venice are not super happy. Like, they're not, like, welcoming. They're not like
Stephen Robles:He was wow. That's that's what they're doing. They're playing monopoly at a at a world scale. Like, you know what? We're gonna take Venice for what?
Jason Aten:He would like Venice or risk. They're playing risk. They're just like, we'll just move all of our people.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:Yeah. That's
Stephen Robles:true. Well, Sam Altman, there's a company that is fighting Sam Altman about the IO trademark. And so if you wanted to watch that video, the love story between Sam Altman and Johnny Ive, that's been taken down. The wedding invite page that we talked about a couple weeks ago has been taken down because they're in the middle of this trademark battle. And then Sam Altman in a, I don't know, seems a little immature, but he just he then posted a bunch of the emails between him and the IO company person about the trademark, and it's I don't know.
Stephen Robles:Seems all very
Jason Aten:similar. Yeah. But this is this is Sam Altman. He did the same thing with Elon Musk for that lawsuit as well. He doesn't care about legal things.
Jason Aten:He cares about public impression. Right. He just, he's just, it's like, and he he's trying to make the story be that the founder of that, and it's spelled I y o, and it is some kind of a audio audio device that is gonna incorporate some LLM stuff. Sorry. I don't
Stephen Robles:know a lot about it.
Jason Aten:I'm not I'm not trying to undermine it. I'm just saying, like, I don't know that much about it. And he's, like, was trying to get so he released Sam Altman released a bunch of emails between the between OpenAI and this founder talking about how he was looking for them to invest and wanted to be partners and wanted to be connected include included and whatever. And then they went and did their own thing. So that founder is sort of positioning it as like, you guys just took all of our best ideas and you're gonna go take our name as well and do this.
Jason Aten:And Sam Altman's like, no. We just didn't wanna do a deal with you, and we got this cool name. I don't know. I don't know how it's gonna work out. I think it's ugly and messy for everybody, but I do think they're still getting married.
Jason Aten:They just might have to call it something different, which, honestly, what difference does it make? It's part of OpenAI now.
Stephen Robles:Right. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Does it even need its own name? Does the device have to have, like
Stephen Robles:They're gonna call the device something too. Like, the hard the piece of hardware will have a name that's not mine.
Jason Aten:Call it hardware.io. Like, just whatever you wanna call it, which Sure. I mean, just call it. It's fine.
Stephen Robles:Call it openai.io.biz. That's all
Jason Aten:you need to do. Yes. .Web.
Stephen Robles:.Web. Alright. Personal tech, we have an important story,
Jason Aten:and Important story.
Stephen Robles:I know it is.
Jason Aten:Speaking of LLMs.
Stephen Robles:Speaking of LLMs, yes. This is, this is your story, and I'm gonna find the I saw this article.
Jason Aten:Did I give you the actual link?
Stephen Robles:No. I'll get it from Reader, but why don't you start? Tell us what happened.
Jason Aten:Okay. Yeah. So this is a weird, I should start by saying that as a general rule, and this is literally how I started the article, you should not just start randomly typing symptoms into Google or chat GPT. If you are concerned enough that you want to know what might be causing them, you should just go see your doctor. You should just literally go see your
Stephen Robles:doctor. Sure.
Jason Aten:But my brain is riddled by technology. And so I do the thing that you shouldn't do. And over Memorial Day weekend, I was sitting there and I started typing a series of questions of symptoms. I just said to chat GBT, like this very, very simple question. I've been having some strange symptoms the past few months.
Jason Aten:What's most likely wrong? And then I listed three things. Right? Shortness of breath when doing things that were normal, like climbing the stairs or mowing the lawn, a feeling of congestion in my lungs. I was coughing a ton and then very, very tired and increased, blood pressure.
Jason Aten:I was like, what? We had thought for the since, like, February, maybe I just had a really bad case of seasonal allergies this year. It would explain, like, the shortness of breath. It would explain the congestion, whatever. And so I typed that in, and it's like, based on the symptoms described, the most likely thing is heart failure.
Jason Aten:And I was like, that doesn't seem good. That seems bad. Like, heart failure is a bad thing. And and it's and it then it literally said, please see a cardiologist or a primary care doctor right away or go to urgent care or to the ER. And I was like, I was hoping it was gonna be like, yeah, you super have allergies.
Jason Aten:I think it also later looks farther down said, you know, other possible causes, bronchitis, tuberculosis. I'm like, I don't think I have tuberculosis. Right. I'm pretty sure it's not bronchitis because that doesn't usually last for a few months, and I had no fever. So I called my doctor the next day.
Jason Aten:I went in to see the doctor. The doctor graciously was like, let's just check everything. He was worried it could be a blood clot in my lungs. He was worried it could possibly be heart failure. He was worried it could be bronchitis.
Jason Aten:Like, let's just rule everything out. So I did a CT scan. That came back clear, was great. Did a whole bunch of blood work, and then they had me do what's called an echo, which is a, ultrasound of your heart, basically. And I go into the room and and I'm doing the they're doing the ultrasound.
Jason Aten:The guys the sonographer is doing the ultrasound of my heart and, I don't know, after not very long, a couple of minutes he goes, hang on. I'll be right back to, finish this test. And that's not good. Like, literally the only reason that they that that ever happens and we actually had this happen when my wife was pregnant with one of our pregnancies So I I remember this feeling distinctly. I mean, all of our kids are fine.
Jason Aten:But the only reason they do that is they saw something really bad and they go to get a doctor. Right. Right? And the doctor comes back in the room and he says, do you know why your primary care doctor sent you here? And I was like, well, you know, I had had these symptoms and he wanted to rule some things out, so whatever.
Jason Aten:And he ordered this test to check for congestive heart failure. And the doctor says, I can, like, remember it as if it's he's standing here right now. He's like, yeah. You have heart failure. I was like, what is is this survivable?
Jason Aten:Like, what what I don't know what that means. And he's like, well, first of all, heart failure is a super bad name for for what because it sounds like you're about to die.
Stephen Robles:Right. A failure of heart would be death.
Jason Aten:Your heart fairly important to, like, your livelihood. Right?
Stephen Robles:Very important.
Jason Aten:And he's essentially, they measure it based on how much blood your heart pumps out every time, and normal is somewhere between 5570%, I think. And mine was around 25. So it was operating at, like, half less than half capacity of what what it should be doing, which explains being tired. It explains all the and the congestive part is, like, fluid buildup because your body's not moving fluid around, which was causing the congestion and all the other stuff. And then they one of the blood results came back.
Jason Aten:Thankfully, it came back after we already knew because it measures some kind of a marker that is present when your heart is under extreme stress. And I don't remember what normal is. It's like a 100 maybe or 200 or it's it's not a very large number that's normal. And mine was 1,400. I'm like, I'm so glad that I had already had the conversations before that came back because I'd be like, so I'm basically just dead.
Jason Aten:Like, that seems really bad if you're super high. So, anyway, I it was thankfully, modern medicine is, like, a miracle. There are lots of drugs that they're basically, like, we're gonna put you on all these drugs. We gotta get your blood pressure down. We've gotta get your heart working not as hard.
Jason Aten:We need to make it less hard for your heart to be working. You need to lose weight. You have to reduce sodium. We just did all the things. Since Memorial Day, I've lost 25 pounds, which is I actually had somebody say, like, you look super different on the podcast than, like, when I see you.
Jason Aten:That's why most of the time you don't I mean, it's literally been a month since Memorial Day.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:You shouldn't try to lose 25 pounds in a month. Right. I wasn't trying to lose it, but if you cut out sodium, you probably lose five pounds of water just in, like, two or three days. So the the whole point was, like, technology has a way of helping us to understand things that people just never had access to. I was able to just give it a set of symptoms that to me, I could explain each of them, but the combination meant something totally different that I would have never Right.
Jason Aten:I would have never come up with, and I never would have done anything. Things would have just progressively gotten worse. Right? And, you know, you there is a point at which if your heart stops functioning, you you're you're done. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Like, you're just done. And so maybe the moral of the story is maybe don't just start typing all your symptoms in. But if you feel like something might be wrong, something might be wrong and you should listen to your body and you should go see a doctor. So,
Stephen Robles:Oh, so glad you did Jason. And, that's great to hear. I mean, I assume you have follow ups and you'll know, if it's
Jason Aten:yeah, go back to the doctor next week. There's a whole other story about insurance companies. We're still waiting to do one of the tests, but the insurance company doesn't think it's medically necessary.
Stephen Robles:I'm like, anyway.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I mean, it feels medically necessary to me because the doctor said it was medically necessary. Oh my word. But we'll we'll wait. We're waiting.
Jason Aten:And, thankfully, that that they wanna do a heart catheterization where they, like, stick a tube up there and they look around. They wanna make sure that I don't have any blood clots. They think that the main cause of it is mostly genetic. Mhmm. Not that I had a did you know you could have a heart attack and not even know it?
Stephen Robles:I've heard these things.
Jason Aten:Yes. Silent heart attack. Like, they they don't think that that's the cause. They don't think it's blood clots, but they would like to because I'm only 45, they'd like to rule that out and make sure. Yeah.
Jason Aten:So that test is not, like, urgently urgent, but it is still medically necessary because they do need to in order to properly treat it, they need to know what the cause is.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:So also, if you have blood clots, bad things just happen.
Stephen Robles:Bad yeah. Bad things.
Jason Aten:Or blockages. No. I'm sorry. Not blood clots. Blockages in the arteries of your heart.
Stephen Robles:Right. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. My my mom is actually doing some of this stuff now because she had recently had a heart cath and and stuff, and she's doing okay, but they they all sort of like medications and trying to like raise the heart function.
Stephen Robles:So anyway, I'm glad you went to the doctor, man, and I'm really hoping it improves quickly. Congrats.
Jason Aten:It has been better if anybody's wondering. I mean, think when you lose weight, suddenly people are like, are you dying? Because, like, most people don't lose weight quite that quickly.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And so people it's hard for people to know. I actually I felt bad. Someone came up to me and said, hey, man. Listen. You you look really good.
Jason Aten:Whatever it is you're doing to lose weight, keep it up. I said, well, I mean, I got diagnosed with a heart condition. So
Stephen Robles:That is motivating.
Jason Aten:I felt bad because I was I was trying to be lighthearted, but I think I made him feel terrible because it's like, oh, I had no idea. It's like, I know. I know you didn't know.
Stephen Robles:No. No. And it's well yeah. Again, we're not not keep us posted, but I but I hope, well, you'll text me, and I just turns around quickly. And, yeah.
Stephen Robles:I'm glad you went to the doctor. My goodness. I mean, chat you could see, I guess. That's that's wild.
Jason Aten:Well, what I appreciated about it and what I think was important in that was that it it's it said literally, you should just go see your doctor. Yeah. Right? That is
Stephen Robles:true. That is good.
Jason Aten:It was not just a situation where, well, here's some information. It's like, here's a breakdown of what might be happening, and the combination could point to this. You and then it just literally said to me, please see a cardiologist or your doctor right away or go to urgent care or the ER. It's like it didn't hedge the hedge the bets at all. It just, like, was straightforward.
Jason Aten:And I think that directness actually helped me because it's like Right. Oh, this could be like, literally after going to see my doctor, we're like, it could be asthma. It could be allergies. It could be a blood clot. It could be heart failure.
Jason Aten:Wow. I'm praying for asthma. I'm hoping it's, like, the least perfect, like, thing. I never thought that was gonna be the thing I would be hoping that I had, but the the point was, like, I don't know if I would have even been sitting in doctor's office till the next time I had a physical had it not been for that.
Stephen Robles:Right. Right. Well, a lot of things we were talking about earlier, I guess kudos for telling someone to go to the doctor. I mean, that's, yeah, that's good. I know you reached out to OpenAI, but they haven't commented yet.
Stephen Robles:I'm curious.
Jason Aten:Not yet. Yeah. They they did finally respond to my email. We'll see if they have anything they wanna say. If so, I'll update the story.
Stephen Robles:The response feel like a chat GPT response, or do think it was actual human?
Jason Aten:This oh, I know for sure it was an actual human because finally my editor because they didn't I held the story for a month because they didn't they had not respond. I reached out to them real quickly Yeah. And then was writing the story. And but I held on to it for, like, a month partially because I kinda wanted to know, like, what was going on more before I wrote the story.
Stephen Robles:Sure.
Jason Aten:But I my editor was like, you know, one of our one of one of the reporters here has contact. Would you like that information? So I reached out directly to a person who responded and said, hey. Let me let me see if we can contribute something. So Okay.
Jason Aten:Happens.
Stephen Robles:We'll be curious curious to hear if they respond, and it seems like a big story. I hope that the article's out there now. The link will be in the show notes. You can read Jason's story there. And, yeah, that's that's pretty wild.
Stephen Robles:Well, we're gonna make we're gonna go record a bonus episode. It's going to be, I was gonna say lighthearted, but we're talking about the hundreds of millions of dollars of sign on bonuses that Meta is using to poach AI employees, OpenAI employees. So we're gonna
Jason Aten:talk Whether crazy or whether the fact that professional athletes are already making that kind of money.
Stephen Robles:Listen. And I know about sports ball. No. I really don't. But but Jason's going to educate.
Jason Aten:F one drivers make a lot of money. Let me just
Stephen Robles:They make a lot yeah. They make a lot of money, and there's only 20 of them. That's another thing I learned. There's only 20 f one drivers.
Jason Aten:There'll be 22 next year. Do you know why?
Stephen Robles:Oh, the new team?
Jason Aten:Yeah. Do you know who it is?
Stephen Robles:Something US something?
Jason Aten:Cadillac. Cadillac's gonna have a
Stephen Robles:team next year. Cadillac.
Jason Aten:Yep.
Stephen Robles:I can't believe I'm into the f one thing. It's ridiculous. But anyway
Jason Aten:so excited.
Stephen Robles:We're gonna we're gonna go record that bonus episode. If you want an ad free version of the weekly show, the bonus episodes every week, and our daily podcast every Monday through Friday, you can support the show at join.primarytech.fm, or you can support us directly in Apple Podcasts. If you want the chapters and the best experience, go to join.primarytech.fm and sign up there. And, again, we're we're gonna add more benefits. If if people would like a livestream listen.
Stephen Robles:Here's the deal. We record Thursday mornings at, 08:30AM. Unless it depends how long Jason and I shuck and jive Yeah. Before we hit record. It's around 08:30AM.
Stephen Robles:So it's pretty early for most people. But if access to a live stream of our recording and then we could do like a chat, if that's a benefit that members would like, let us know. I would love to hear it. You can comment, on the community, social. Primarytech.
Stephen Robles:Fm, or just email email podcastprimarytech. Fm. We'd love to hear from you there. If you haven't yet, five star rating and review on Apple Podcast helps out the show. We're still a 4.9 pod star podcast.
Stephen Robles:Maybe we'll get up to five stars again one day. So leave us those reviews. You get a shout out at the top of the show for that. And, of course, you can watch the show at youtube.com/@primarytechshow. We'd if you subscribe there.
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