Developer Communities in San Francisco - WeAreDevelopers LIVE from Corgi Cafe

This week we popped up bright and early at the 24-hour developer (and dog)-friendly Corgi Cafe, San Francisco, where we talked about how the US tech scene compares to Europe's, why you should never out your zip code on stream, and the episode gets brilliantly de-railed by some dogs.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Well, welcome to We Are Developers Live here at the Cori Cafe in San Francisco. We're here bright and early, pushy tale of sorts, but uh not quite sure yet. And uh yeah, we're waiting for people to come in. It's bright and early, so that's why there's not many people here yet. But we're gonna be having quite some people to play um uh fake or news with, to do some recordings. And you're on the way back to Europe, aren't you?

SPEAKER_04 0:24

In about one hour from now, yeah, I'm pretty much gonna be finishing this and going straight to the airport. So um I I feel like at this point though, I probably should have like a bed in the Corgi Cafe because I have been here for every day for the last nine days. Um, it is 24 hours, but I have been kind of going back to the hotel, I will say that much. But I'm not convinced that everybody's actually leaving. You know, there's some people I think I've seen them here like all week, and uh I'm I'm never actually quite sure when they're sleeping, you know.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

I mean, we got 24-hour things in Berlin as well, but these are looking very differently to this one. And uh yeah, but it's it's good to have a cafe like that to hang out in. I mean, it always cracked me up like uh back in the days when it was really bad connectivity, you had like these lily pads of connectivity where you jump from Starbucks to Starbucks and work like that. But having a place like this where you just hang out, great.

SPEAKER_04 1:09

Yeah, yeah. And I think um a couple of people that have kind of put their heads in actually have said, um, is this place like WeWork? And then we've said, Yeah, kind of. And then they've said, Well, how much does it cost? Not bankrupt. Yeah, um, yeah, that's true. And they said, How much does it cost? And we said, Well, how much does coffee cost? You know, it's like the fact that it's a free, it's free to um to enter when you've got so many of these places that are quite expensive. Um, you know, it's it's it's great, I think. And they've also opened one in London as well. So um it opened, I think, the same day as this one. So obviously being h over here in the States, I haven't actually had a chance to check out the one um in the UK, but yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing that.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Yeah, but you also live in Bristol, so like why would you?

SPEAKER_04 1:42

Yeah, I won't be going there every day. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Um but I think the area that it's in, it's in um an area called Shoreditch, it's like very similar to kind of this part of um or or San Francisco, really, and the um it's the sort of tech um hub.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Silicon roundabout.

SPEAKER_04 1:55

Silicon, yeah, I like it.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

No, I'm not kidding. We we we were at an event, I think it was 2004 or something, and Mike Butcher and me were on a panel and basically we made the joke Silicon Roundabout and became a thing. The BBC started calling it a silicon roundabout, and everybody else was like, oh god, no.

SPEAKER_04 2:10

I like it. I talk silicon nearly, silicon nearly nearly, you know, because it's like I suppose it's it's like Silicon Valley without the sun, and it's not quite the level of money that's floating around, you know. Our salaries are not quite like the US tech salaries. Um, silicon nearly yeah, to a degree, yeah, yeah, like like Tesco Value Silicon. Yeah. Something, yeah. Yeah, it's all Timu, Timu, Timu Silicon Valley, you know.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Well, it was interesting talking to people here, like being I have not been in San Francisco in a while, it's like that the salary uh that the median rent is now overtaking New York. It's like expensive as hell over here. It's just fascinating to me to see. And all the places I used to hang out in, like, all are closed here in this in downtown San Francisco. And um not nothing moved in. They're like boarded up, right? Yeah, yeah. And that's the weird thing. I mean, if real estate is such uh uh such an expensive thing here, seeing a place that's just completely empty is odd.

SPEAKER_04 3:02

Yeah, and it's tough, isn't it? Because I think in the tech industry, we we know that like by its very nature, you don't necessarily need to be in the same place as anybody that you're working with. So I suppose then it kind of, you know, with a lot of the uh uh the companies that were kind of moving out, you know, with the the with during COVID, and there was you know various reasons why they moved out. Um I suppose it's difficult to kind of justify moving back in or well, I mean, all of them force people to.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

That's the weird thing. I mean, like I started We are developers because it's the only company that allowed me to work from home. Everybody else wanted to be like, okay, I gotta be in the office. One of them was asking me to do like a 400 kilometer commute. Whoa, like twice a week I have to be in Frankfurt, and I'm like, no, I don't, like, not really, that makes no sense. But I guess the problem was that a lot of companies had like lease on their offices for 10 years, so they got really cheap uh uh uh uh rates for that, and then when the when the place is empty, it just costs them money, maintenance and all the bits and bobs. So basically, they needed to get people back in to work on the thing to work in there, but yeah, I agree. We technically could work from wherever, and now with like agents, we let them work from wherever, really.

SPEAKER_04 4:05

Even when we're not awake, they're working, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah, it's kind of 24 hours. So it's it's an interesting thing that people need to be in offices, but then again, the water cooler moments when you meet people and you talk to them, I think that makes it worthwhile.

SPEAKER_04 4:17

I think we've seen that this week, right? The amount of conversations that you have with someone just uh you know, spur of the moment, you're not sort of not really expecting to have the conversation that you have, but then we've met so many interesting people that are building building interesting things, but also I think the thing that surprised me is the the sort of level of like creativity actually that's going on, you know, in the um I think we often get this idea that sort of developers are are purely technical and that the creative creativity side you know isn't that important. And I think maybe it's a founder-specific thing, I don't know, you know, the fact that they kind of have to do wear so many hats, but that's been like a theme that that a lot of a lot of people I've spoken to this week have said, you know, that it's um it's like a creative drive they've got, and that now, whether it be that they're semi-technical vibe coders or that it was just something that they felt like the ideas that they'd had in their head, now they can kind of make them come to fruition. Because if if they were more technical, then the kind of creative side can be filled in by by the LLMs and you know the UI design and things like this. Um, so I'm just quite surprised by that. I thought it would be very computer science focused as opposed to I found it very Californian thing.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Like I know so many people that are basically engineers, staff engineers somewhere and do pottery on the side. Yeah, like it's a very like it's it's a craft thing that happened here. And I remember I was at like when UN conferences were a thing, there was a science camp here as well, but people built like little rockets and these kind of things. So that kind of geekiness that uh we don't have in Europe. In Europe, we got developers and they're outside of community basically. But here it's been like the nerd geeky science community and developer community kind of mixed.

SPEAKER_04 5:48

Yeah, yeah, I definitely say that. And I mean, again, it's kind of one of the things I've liked actually about being in Corgi is that when we're when we're meeting people, you're seeing like students, you're seeing people that are you know maybe 20, 30 years into their career. But what I like in Corgi is that you are seeing it's quite a generally quite a young kind of customer base, yeah. Um, and you know, whether that's that there are a lot of people I'm speaking to, you know, are either whether they're students or maybe that started their career, or there's people that sidestepped um you know education entirely. And yeah, there is this kind of um dropout culture, but not in a I I don't know how we maybe view that. Do we view that differently in Europe or what are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_00 6:20

I don't know, I've never been in university, so I've been I I I had the same issue, and uh for years people have been talking about it like in interviews that you need it, or when you reach a certain level in a company, like to become a manager, you need to have a degree for a certain Ivy League place as well. And I think there's a lot of change in this one, and I mean it's kind of arrogant at times when you got like people that are I'm not gonna call them by name, but when they say, like, oh, you don't need a degree anymore, you can just work and hustle and immediately get money in my company, and I'm a millionaire because I did that. You're like, No, you had a lot of chances, you had a lot of opportunities, and I think education is never a thing that is wasted. Yeah, it's a matter of like how it took on the market and how it actually how uh related it is. If you learn things in university that are relevant still or not, that's where it falls apart, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 7:13

Yeah, and I guess things like you know, costs, of course, that's one thing, you know. We were speaking to um a few people here about having had having done their degrees, you know, the costs that comes with it, you know, it is different, obviously, in the US. And I think um what's actually been interesting is is hearing some of the stories of EU and European founders that have come over. Um, because I'd heard about one, somebody from Germany actually that had arrived here. I think he was 23. He'd arrived here two weeks ago and he's raised $900,000 in uh in uh in funding. Now, I wasn't there to actually meet the person, so I don't know what that that app is for, but you know, you think that this um the idea of kind of coming here and there's so much opportunity, I think it it is a real thing.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

The money is much looser here, it's really harder to get uh funding in Europe at all. And I mean the other thing that I found fascinating is like if in Europe you you mess up and you actually uh you tank your company, you're done. Like beer is like, okay, he he he just went back, he just went bankrupt with five startups. He he learned his lesson and now he's gonna do it better. And you're like, there's of course a measure to that. Like, no, maybe he's just bad at it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 8:12

But at the same time, you know, there's there's something to be said for that kind of optimism, I guess. That you know, if you've if you can uh if you can afford to invest the money and you know and you and you believe in it, then you know who am I to kind of say say not to? But yeah, there's definitely a cultural cultural difference there, I think.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Um I'm getting wary of the numbers though, like that's my thing. Like, I mean weary of the numbers. I mean, when you see like the investments, like that company bought that company for 1.8 billion and that for 1.2 billion. And I I mean my favorite story was this one thing that I saw where I where I realized collecting e collecting headlines for our VR developers, Dev Digest, and also for for Fake One News. And it was a company that basically was a price comparison website for virtual sneakers in the metaverse.

SPEAKER_04 8:53

Hold on, I have to just break that down. So price comparison for virtual sneakers in the metaverse. Okay, so it's kind I know I know there's sort of uh marketplaces for some sort of like video games, you know, series where they'll do things like selling the whether it's shields or you know, weapons.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Oh yeah, the uh the the templates and the the um yeah and and so did they get was that was that a startup you say or was that yeah, and it was what was bought for like 500 million or something, or like 20 million or something, it doesn't matter, more than a million. And I'm just like okay, price comparison websites are always I I worked on one in 2000, no, 1998, and they're all fake. They're basically they're they're listing the but the best prices the company that paid the both paid them the most. Interesting, like that's just basically it's it's a big scam. Uh, maybe there's some out there, sorry about that. But I mean the ones that I worked on were just horrible, and uh, and I mean that's the first thing. I'm like, nobody needs that for starters, especially now in the world of agents where you can send the thing out and scrape different things. You don't need that one comparison side anymore. You can do the you can get the live data from the web and compare those with each other. Uh, secondly, virtual sneakers, as you said, like it's basically uh your upgrades for your game character or these kind of things. But metaverse, when it came out, didn't have any feed.

SPEAKER_04 10:09

Okay, that changes things. Yeah. So it's so confusing, isn't it? I mean, that's been that's been one actually that's come up this week in the metaverse, is that uh we spoke to somebody earlier in the week, and it was again a great story of kind of uh you know, fortuitous just happen to kind of come across it, uh come across them, have a conversation about what it is you're building, and then we find that actually what they're building could be useful for us if we are developers, which was a kind of virtual events platform, um, and it was designed to kind of increase um uh access uh for those who perhaps have got disabilities or maybe want to travel to to conferences but perhaps can't afford it because of the distance or whatever. And um, and when I said to them, where did the idea come from? They said, We just thought the metaverse was interesting, but what if there was a point to it? And so they were kind of saying, Well, you know, what where would the real use for something like the metaverse be? Because I think that was the criticism. It was interesting, uh, looked a little bit like kind of Wii, you know, the the the Nintendo Wii graphic.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Second life, back then.

SPEAKER_04 11:04

Second life, yeah, but you didn't really know kind of what you were supposed to do with it. It was like you've been given a toy and then nobody told you quite what it was supposed to do.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

I mean, the the the the video that he did back then where he was playing poker with all these these strange characters, and I'm like, and this is the world that we want. This is basically we burn shit lots of energy for that.

SPEAKER_04 11:23

Yeah, yeah. Well, what's interesting is I think you know, you always have that time, don't you, where it's sort of the new technology technology comes out and it's this this this uh period of like experimentation, and then it'll settle down and then people find real uses for it. And I think actually speaking to this person, I will give him a shout out actually to Ali. Um, and you know, the fact that he was able to say, We we'd actually they'd actually created this product initially as an experiment. There wasn't sort of again, they didn't necessarily know what the need was, and then it was actually through um them putting something on YouTube and this comment there was one comment that somebody put, and they or sorry, it was a it was a comment in response to their Reddit post, and this person said, Um, this idea is amazing. Um, I'm a wheelchair user, and this will change my life. Yeah, and they said it was that one comment that made them just say, Okay, there's there's a need for this, there's a real use for this, now we know what we're building. And I thought that was a really interesting kind of uh um story because for them it was the thing they said was it gave it substance, which put that back onto the metaverse. That was what was so I think there's some there's a there's a really interesting kind of thing to be said for not always knowing exactly what it is, but actually responding to the validation from the which brings me to user testing.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

I mean, we kind of skip that nowadays with like vibe coded things that are different every day, but we had it yesterday in our own platform where it's like we have a new uh a new way of putting the videos up, and it basically has a crunch up when it uh puts the videos up. So it says published in the back end, and it wasn't published until the crunch op runs. So I basically gave them feedback and said, like, that should be called scheduled rather than like published.

SPEAKER_02 12:50

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

And you're like, and he's like, okay, so he changed that now. But that's the kind of stuff that only user testing can actually give you. And I spent a lot of the time of my life behind a two-way mirror seeing people not press the one button on screen, like and saying, like, I don't know what to do. And I'm like, there's only one button, like you know, you'll you're like the person who built the thing is far too close to the subject matter to actually know how to use it. And I think one of my best stories of this that I found in the past was uh looking at log files and looking at your traffic is super important. There was a company in New York called Igniter, and that was a dating site for uh uh for group dating. So basically, if you're not one-on-one dates, but you want to have people like four or five people going together on a on a night out and maybe a date coming out of it of two of them. So that was mostly for like the Jewish community in New York. They thought about that because they like to send uh their cousins and and things to to help each other, kind of like, yeah, but I'm I'm bringing my cousin to to make sure that you're a good guy, kind of thing. Yeah, and yeah, it almost went and it went bankrupt almost because in the first two months they had like 20,000 users, and for a dating site, that's basically dead. Yeah, and then they or they almost shut it down and said, like, okay, that's what's that, but then they looked at the traffic, and all of a sudden they had a lot of signups, and they had a lot of signups from India and Pakistan because that's where this is a thing as well, like where you go out with the whole family to get to know a person, and uh they're now the biggest dating site in India, and they almost shut down because they only they never looked at the log files where traffic came from.

SPEAKER_04 14:21

Wow, yeah, and it's kind of the idea that you know it I I think I I can relate to the idea that sometimes you you know you build something and it's um you don't really want to accept that it's not great, or you don't want to accept that maybe it's not you know um what what you think it is, or even that perhaps, like you said, you know, when when someone's too close to the subject matter, I think that is the key thing, right? Is that um the amount of times that I've kind of made something, built something, and then it's only when you release it, it's almost day one, it's like nobody has to even tell you sometimes. You know the moment you put it out there that you go, actually, this isn't what I thought it was, or this should have been this. Um you know, and I think that's that's something that uh that you you really do have to listen to, you know, and you can't you can't just bury your head in the sand and say, well, I I'd like to build this, and so I'm going to build it. Um, unless we should go should go back to that a little bit, unless you're just building something for fun. Yeah, what we're talking about here is obviously being in some in San Francisco, it's it's tempting to talk about everything being kind of seed funding and and YC and finding investors, but there's actually still a lot of people building things and just saying, I'm just making it for fun. And I think that that's the story you don't hear so much about it um happening in San Francisco. The they're still building for fun.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

I think yeah, it's a matter of like a side hustle thing, or like I mean, that there's I mean, there's the people who actually are in education here that do that a lot. Yeah, but yeah, with the I mean the focus on having the company here and actually selling it or getting investment and stuff, of course, you don't have time for that. But I mean, that's the other thing. It's just uh I always found that weird that like my favorite stories are the successes in technology of people that built something that they wanted to build or build something about a top subject that they cared about and then got the investment. But there's just so many people uh in this world here where it's just like it's not about the product that you build, it's just about how much money you can make with it and getting getting funding, which is which is fair enough if that's your thing. But I I want a world where software was built by people that care about it and not about seeing it as an investment.

SPEAKER_04 16:17

But how do you feel as well if you are I do think about this, you know, that if the goal is to to make an exit, and we know that you know quite often when when an app is uh kind of integrated in or bought by a a uh larger corporation, let's say, it's gonna change, you know, and the idea that the thing that perhaps you loved when it was kind of bootstrapped or it was a grassroots kind of app built by a solo developer is probably gonna change. Um and it and that's quite that's quite difficult because you feel like, well, the thing that I I I want to support in its early days might not always be there. And um, when you've got the sense of now, you know, everybody's talking about let's build 50 apps in a year, let's build 100 apps in a year, um, I'm cautious about signing up to any of those. And I've actually had my fingers burned. Um I I'd uh I can't even remember what the product was now, but I I'd bought um a product and it was not described, uh it was not, I think I subscribed to a SAS and it wasn't as it was um described. And then when you try and sort of you know go back and say, okay, I'd like to cancel this, kind of have a refund, you hit a brick wall, you start following you know email addresses at the bottom of things and you email that and it's a brick wall, and then you realize, well, the person's abandoned it and they've they've purposely kind of taken the breadcrumbs away to make sure that I can't follow them. Um now the the problem is is when you're working, uh when you're talking about an international app in that sense, that it's like bought online, um, you don't know what your consumer rights are, you're not it's not very easy for you to actually kind of get that refund. And in the end, I never got it. Um and that left me with quite a bitter taste in my mouth around the sense that you know, you you do like to feel that someone who's built something loves it enough to then really stand by the people that have um bought into it in the early days, and that if we're focused on quantity, that the the danger there is actually that that the quality falls, but also you don't then really care about the the users so much, you know. Um, but what I think he's promising is actually when we are speaking to people here, that's not what we're hearing. We are hearing people that love their products and they really want to talk to you about it, and that's that's I think really great because you can see people's eyes light up and they want to know like, am I on the right lines? Will this actually solve a problem? You know, yeah, it's it's not that they're just focused on the exit, and I think that's um that's been really nice to see, you know, and you only see that in person.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

What is weird if I I found as well, like there's lots of hackathons happening today and the next few days, and all of them about database companies.

SPEAKER_04 18:26

Yeah, I know, yeah, that's true actually. I think is it MongoDB today?

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Yeah, MongoDB today, yeah. There's this Hydra hack, which I just saw, and like hack hydra, that sounds like Hail Hydra from the from the Marvel movies.

SPEAKER_04 18:40

But I think though, I can I can understand why that might be because if you think that let's say if you were sort of you know pure front end and and and you weren't particularly comfortable with, I mean, we've seen this before, all the kind of nuts and bolts that that you that you need for that sort of SAS, which is largely what we're we're hearing people building. Um, you're talking about your Auth, you're talking about your payment processing, and I think that's where now when you're by coding, it's going to very much just set you up with, you know, here's your MongoDB, here's your your superbase, it's going to handle all of your Auth, or here's your Verseau, or Next Auth, or whatever it is you're using. Um, and I think that that's probably why the databases are kind of getting so much, they've been talked about so much, because it's really the fight for the agents to, you know, to be to be the product that the agents recommend or the agents kind of go to.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

And I mean databases have become a different beast altogether. I mean, we've got vector databases now, and you've got like I remember when Microsoft did the first Cosmos DB that was basically doing uh inference and machine learning on the database itself rather than you having to do it. So I think that that is the main difference. I mean, we're still talking to MariaDB, which we're gonna be which is gonna be at uh our congress in in San Jose as well. So I have to call him to do a coffee with developers because it uh that that was my favorite story, because he's the guy that originally did my sequel. All right, and now he did a database called uh then he didn't like that being sold to a large company and these kind of things, so I did a new database called MariaDB, and they're both named after their children. Like MySQL is not about MySQL, but his kid is called Miss MYS, and that's why basically the database was called MySQL, and the MariaDB's the second daughter is called Maria.

SPEAKER_04 20:12

Chris, you need to write a book just about these kind of like tech Easter eggs, because the amount of things like I can't there's so many things I can't look at in the same way because you drop those pieces of information in. I mean, I I was probably the only person on earth that didn't know that you know the uh the the GitHub um uh uh the GitHub uh what's the word I'm looking for now, the uh mascot, you know, that the um OctoCard, Octocat, thank you, is uh is uh named after it's Mona Lisa, isn't it? I think and uh yeah, and I think you know that uh is it the colour of it? No, I'm gonna I'm going blank on that now. It's the CSS, it's the CSS logo, that's what it is. The CSS logo, and I believe that the the colour of the CSS logo was like specifically, it's got a name, and I I believe that it's then named after like the the daughter of the person who was.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Oh yeah, basically Eric uh Eric's daughter, she died, and it basically that's why it became part of the CSS standard. Uh Rebecca Purple. Thank you. Yes, the colour.

SPEAKER_04 21:01

Yes, that's it. I mean, this is what I mean. How do you have that? See, I was there patching it straws and getting it wrong, and you've just got it ready to go. It's it's really amazing.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Well, it was there when it was named, so that helps. Like, like, yeah, it's uh it's an interesting one in this case, in this regard, what gets into those platforms as well. I mean, uh, I was thinking about getting to uh getting to the brave office here as well. I mean, when I when I talked when I worked at Mozilla and Brendan Ike was my boss, and he invented JavaScript in 10 days. I mean, this is just bonkers, you know.

SPEAKER_04 21:31

I know it really is. And I mean, that story sort of is almost used as a thing of people saying, you know, so you can do it too. And I'm thinking, no, no, I don't want to create more problems because I love JavaScript, but I hate JavaScript dates. Uh and so, you know, I don't think I'd do anything any better, right? But also, why why would I create a programming language when we've got JavaScript and I love it so much? But yeah, uh JavaScript dates, like dates.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Okay, yeah, but now we've got temporal for them. This is those. Yeah, and I'll take that was a good idea. And this was just taken from Java, they didn't build anything themselves like. Date engine is the 20-year-old Java engine or something.

SPEAKER_04 22:03

Interesting. Yeah. And I mean the temporal API is is huge. As in, like, it is such a game changer. Like, I know I know we hear that phrase a lot, game changer, but it's like for me, it was something that actually made because it was before that. It was that dates were something that you were just hate having to deal with because you knew it was a headache. You knew that they're sort of um trying to create your different time zones and work across different time zones, and and temporal actually makes it make sense.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

It still it still breaks. I mean, like, and now I've set up my our calendars, like now we set them up to Pacific time, yeah. And there's an in-between of two days when basically the world falls through. Like, whenever there's a time change, the summertime, winter time, none of our meetings are actually working. And I don't know any calendar platform that does it right. Like Google calendar is broken, Outlook is broken that way. Like it's just like it doesn't work this way. I mean, we we we just missed the uh uh the solar eclipse, like in Europe. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 22:54

And I mean, yeah, again, I I I I I I think when you said, you know, that the uh none of the calendar apps seem to get it right, yeah. We know these things are coming, right? We know that like the uh daylight savings time or whatever it is is coming, but they still can't get it right. And I think that shows how sometimes something that should be simple in software is actually quite a complicated thing to solve. And I mean, we know that actually when we're talking about time, we were just saying before this that flying back to Europe, we we leave on Thursday afternoon and we arrive for Thursday evening, but then suddenly it's Friday afternoon or Friday you know morning. Um, and so then when you think putting that that idea into software, it's pretty confusing, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:30

A lot of calendars and stuff now have NLP in there in there, like then you say, like, okay, make this event two days from now or in the afternoon of Monday, and then it will automatically find the right thing for you to set it. Yeah, but we talked about that yesterday as well, but the AMPM that can go into the C. I'm I'm just like, I mean, it makes no sense when people say, Oh, it's 5 a.m. and you're like, just say five or seventeen hundred.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

Like, you know, for me, 1700 is mad because it's because I think this is well, five in the afternoon, yeah. I will say that like what does AM and PM mean after midday, pre-midday? No. I've never actually thought of it.

SPEAKER_04 24:06

That's a really good point, yeah. I suppose, but I mean, I I didn't even know until you said it when you said, um, why are you saying at a M and PM? And I said, Well, that's what we say. And then and then when you said just say 17, and I thought, wow, if you if you did that in the UK, perhaps somebody would go, sorry, do you mean seven? Because you just wouldn't see it written down.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Well, like five in the afternoon is what I normally would say. It's interesting when you said like half two and half past as well. In Germany, it does depending on where you're from. But people from the south say like it's it's half two, the people from north say it's half past.

SPEAKER_04 24:34

Okay, because I've definitely found that I've confused other people, and then I've not understood how they've been confused, because I've said I'll see you at half two, and then somebody said, Well, that means 130. Uh, 130 is half two, which to my British mind, it's obvious that it's 230, but again, it's that uh way of phrasing things. I used the word I used the word fortnight with somebody the other day to say two weeks, and they and they uh there's an American person and they went, Okay, Shakespeare. Furlong. Well, yeah, this is it. You know, it's like don't even get us started on the uh you know metric and imperial because I think um you know being being from the UK, we just mix and match, it depends what you're measuring, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Um, and yeah, and then the American mile and the the uh UK mile is a different measure as well.

SPEAKER_04 25:13

Okay, never knew that. That's confusing.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

And then you go, I'm 15 stone, and you're like, no, you're not.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Yeah, you're you're bloke, like another stone.

SPEAKER_04 25:20

But see, now map all this back into software. Yeah. When you say user testing, this kind of kind of idea that you think you you think you know what somebody else, you know, maybe in a different country does, or you think you know what's how it how it works or what's normal, and I say that kind of in in invert um commerce, but it it shows that you actually need the people that are in that area or people that really understand, you know, how things are phrased, because that's I mean, dates, we're going back to dates, but the US format is is really confusing for me, you know.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

And I don't think I'll ever quite get used to it because when I'm checking in for a flight or something like this, and I'm putting my date of birth, if it's a kind of a US airline and I'm using the different format, um, and it says make sure this is as as it is on your passport, and I think, well, it's not, it's the other way, you know, as far as I remember uh uh putting petrol in the car here, and you had to put in a zip code, and I put in my British for two A and it didn't work because it only allowed you for numbers. We should blank that, otherwise somebody's gonna go to your house, Chris. But yeah, yeah. Well, it's not my house anymore, so I mean I don't care. Like, and and and that's a weird postcode, anyways, because it was in between two buildings. There used to be a thoroughfare with that postcode, and then they knocked down the two buildings and made one big building out of it. So the thoroughfare didn't exist any longer, but the postcode still was that one. So when I tried to get tickets for the Olympic Games in London, I couldn't get any because it's that postcode is invalid.

SPEAKER_04 26:38

I see. I mean I've had it as well, like in a couple of places actually in in San Francisco, when when you're um you're you're you're paying for something and they might say, Can you put in your your phone number? And the format just doesn't compute, really, because it's oh yeah, the German one's too long. Yeah, like yeah, and it's sort of like give us the three give us the three numbers at the start. And I think, well, mine's plus 44, so it's not that, is it? And then it'll sort of say, but it has to start with a zero. And I'm going, I haven't I have no idea how to make this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

I mean, as soon as you got the international code, the zero goes away. Yeah, it should be. That's the idea. So basically, yeah, that it is.

SPEAKER_04 27:09

You know, but it's still it's still that kind of idea that it's um for me as like the user, there wasn't a skip button, so I actually couldn't do anything. And so the person who I was speaking to at the till, I just said, Can you just enter a number for me? And he came up and he just put in any number, you know, because otherwise you couldn't move forward. And I thought, well, a skip button would be great because I just don't have a US number. Um, but yeah, that's what that's what I mean. It comes sense.

SPEAKER_00 27:32

I once got a I mean, no, you could get a virtual one, so that was the other option to do that. I mean, the the other thing I once had uh refused a rental car because it said my driving license was invalid and uh uh expired, but it wasn't expired because it was the European date on it. So I'm like, I'm like, no, it this is not expired because if you look at the other date on the same official document, it's my birthday. I wasn't born on the 4th of the 26th month, was I?

SPEAKER_04 27:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think just going back to that idea of kind of empathizing with the users though, it's um what's been interesting as well is the amount of people you see at the meetups who will uh just kind of put put laps on laptops uh down with their with their product and then getting people there and then to actually kind of use it. And I think that's that's something that I suppose I I wasn't expecting from the meetups. I don't know kind of what I what I thought. I thought it'd be maybe more of just just networking, but then you've got people that are saying, like, look, I really want you to kind of have a go on this and then tell me what's wrong with it. And I think that that's quite that's quite promising as well. That it's not just this, you know, put it out into the void and hope that somebody online has a go with it, it's actually kind of hearing the brutal feedback in person. And I think that's um that's been really nice actually to kind of see the in-person meetups again.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

I mean, I I remember the marketing move when back in the days, like, oh, Apple left a pre uh a model of the next phone, a pre-model in a in a bar or in a in a cafe where strangely enough, lots of tech journalists hang out. And yeah, I mean, I I guess the new one now is like, oh, our model escaped the sandbox and hacked other people, and like, please, we cannot release it. And you're like, yeah, uh, I mean, it's interesting because when it says like when it says like uh this and that model escaped the sandbox and hacked other companies, just replace that model name with the name of the company, and people would read that headline completely differently. Yeah, yeah, that's very true. Like company XYZ hacked a random other company, and you're like, wait, that shouldn't happen. But oh well, with a model it can happen, that's fine.

SPEAKER_04 29:20

Is it something interesting in that though? Like, do we do we in some way maybe uh yeah, are we gonna see people? I don't know if you look at the the legal side of it, right? If they're because we we know there's kind of agents gone wild and there's things that they've done that they shouldn't have done, but where does the buck stop? Like agents gone wild and sounds like a TV show. I knew Agents Gone Wild. Chris, I wouldn't put it, I wouldn't put it past. You know, that one day it's gonna happen, you know. If we've seen robot wars, they're showing their RAM. Like, you know, well, we've seen robot wars, yeah. Agent wars, they can even build themselves, you know. You could have this, because you I mean you're getting a lot of seeing it here, especially you know, kind of automation, robotics, you know. Wasn't that the wasn't that the the plot of Big Hero Six?

SPEAKER_00 29:56

Yes, yes, pretty much.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

Yeah, yeah. That movie, that movie vanished.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

It was sort of there because Frozen was so successful in the same year. Yes, it was, and it was a lot uh because I mean the whole world around Big Hero Six I thought was lovely, like that San Francisco-Tokyo mix.

SPEAKER_04 30:11

Yeah, and I actually know I even think as well that things like Wally, that was one where you know it's like all the these ideas of this kind of like uh vision of the future where it's all sort of quite fun and animated, but um, well I'm not saying that people are like the the the the the thick-set people in Wally that just eat things on their on their on their floating things, but it it it's getting that way.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

It's getting that way. You know what he's bought he was based on? No, Buster Keaton. Really?

SPEAKER_04 30:36

Again, more Easter eggs from Chris, don't know where he gets them, but yeah, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

Wow, yeah. Because I mean you see he doesn't speak, he does all these slapsticky things, and at one time he has this disc where he goes like that, and there was a dance that Buster Keaton did in one of his movies.

SPEAKER_04 30:50

Okay, very nice, a little bit of trivia, yeah. But I mean, you know, that that idea anyway of the vision of the future. And I mean, I could I could see something like Agent Wars. It might it might be interesting because I'll tell you what we did see was somebody this week.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

Well I mean the whole cyber warfare thing is actually dead at the moment, isn't it? I mean, like the the uh North Korea sending out fake job interviews that infects people's computers.

SPEAKER_04 31:10

But you're also finding, I mean, somebody was talking this week, and I mean we probably will edit this one out, but the um spermors and the fact that there's the uh it's a startup and that it was I'm sure you saw it, but it was uh a kind of uh race, very, very strange, right? But I think that kind of speaks of the the the level of like uh experimentation and the the wacky weirdness that I uh what I couldn't understand was how and why it was invested in, you know, because I I think okay, I don't quite understand here what the the point was.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

I mean there I mean there was there was a I mean I had it in in faker news as well. I mean the problem was that uh sperm count that we do in like normal doctors nowadays is kind of not as uh as 100% as we want it to be. So they came up with a new model and actually found sperm count in people that were actually be uh already seen as barren by their doctor. So that's how it worked out. So I think there is a lot of the irony is like we have too many people on the planet, but the irony is that the people that want to have children can't get them. Yeah, like the amount of people I know that have like IBF treatment and like you know, kind of things because yeah, and I mean you go to a country where where survival is a thing every day, they have children because we have no uh pension plan.

SPEAKER_04 32:17

Yeah, I suppose I thought that startup was just a kind of you know a viral thing and that there was no real kind of purpose to it other than the marketing of it of it being a thing, you know, it's kind of crazy, so everybody talks about it. But the fact that there was investors in it, you know, I hadn't even really thought of that. I just assumed it would be something that had gotten maybe a couple of sponsors, it was a one-time event, but it's like to hear that it's actually a startup. And I think I I'm definitely, you know, it's it's very odd, but I'm definitely in support of the idea of the uh the the really weird, wacky out there ideas that it's the the the pivoting as well.

SPEAKER_00 32:46

I mean, Alberts is now an AI hosting company, the shoe company. And it annoys me because I loved my Alberts. The first round in during COVID, I only I wore one pair of shoes for like two years. Yeah, like and they were great. They they they were like natural materials, your feet didn't stink, they were really, really good now, and then they got worse and worse, and then the company doesn't make any shoes at all anymore. And you're like, I don't know which ones I got on now, but I'm I'm I'm not as happy with them. Yeah, there's a German company that does shoes at uh Kieswein that does the same as like all birds, but they put the huge logo on your shoes. I don't like that.

SPEAKER_04 33:19

Like yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was such a strange pivot, wasn't it? Because you it's almost like is that is that I mean, I wouldn't know about all birds and whether or not they were like doing well at that time, right? But was it like a um a thing of because AI has got so much investment going into it that it's such a strange pivot, but it meant they could survive, you know?

SPEAKER_00 33:36

Or I mean it's also the the irony of it is like that they were all like we're this sustainable company and we make things that are biodegradable and then like and now we make AI hosting, like yeah, screw the nature, I'm not carrying my own.

SPEAKER_04 33:47

You sort of feel like what you know is that something it doesn't exactly fill you with the sense that they've got like expertise in that area, though. Do you know what I mean? It's like if if you had an AI company tomorrow, say now we're a bakery, I wouldn't expect them to make the best kind of uh paid goods, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:59

Well, I guess with hosting it's a different thing because if you're if you if if you're an enterprise player yourself or an e-commerce player that does its own hosting, then they will have had their learnings there.

SPEAKER_04 34:08

True, yeah, yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

I mean, like we we we we make fun of companies that basically nobody cares anymore, but everybody, HP, for example, is still the biggest hosting one of the biggest hosting companies out there. Yeah. I mean, uh I I talked to Nokia the other day, and I'm like, what do you even do? And they're it's all infrastructure, it's all like uh masts and uh these kind of things, like all the cables on the ground and that kind of stuff is owned by them as well.

SPEAKER_04 34:33

It's interesting, and I mean, you know, as we see with AI, like NVIDIA, for example, like that that's now where the real money is, right? The kind of infrastructure. Um, so I wonder, could Nokia make a comeback?

SPEAKER_00 34:42

It's interesting though that like the the uh Gen AI is was not the the the huge thing that they wanted it to be. Like, I mean, it's like uh everywhere's like Gen AI, especially video generation, is going to be the future, and now everybody pulls out of those markets, like because end users don't like AI sloppy looking videos and movies.

SPEAKER_04 35:01

Well, we talked about that actually, didn't we? I think it was yesterday. Um, again, shout out to Julio Cordick who pointed this one out. But um, the fact that on LinkedIn now there's a button that says um seems like AI slot. And I thought it was really interesting, but um, I'd also wondered, well, what does it do though? You know, if you click that and you say it's AI slot, what's the mechanism though? Is it that there's like a threshold of maybe it's relative to like how many you know impressions it got, if like a certain percentage of people are saying this is AI slot, does it then get sort of um you know uh brought down or kind of uh you know crushed?

SPEAKER_00 35:30

That would be that would be the right thing to do. I mean, uh Facebook has it as well, it says like AI generated, but it doesn't do anything with it, and you know, and I would love to have that as an option just to filter it out, like just don't show me anything AI generated. Yeah, and I mean, of course, I would probably miss out a lot of posts where people say something interesting but have a really horrible chat GPT image to go with it. Yeah, but I'm like, I'm sorry, then don't do that image because I'm done with that style. I'm really I don't care anymore to have you as a cutesy little comic book character in front of your keyboard during like this, and you're like, this has been played out.

SPEAKER_04 36:03

I actually think there's the same with with UIs, you know, in that um I think it's one of the best things, but it's also kind of difficult, you know. And that for me, that's where I what I love doing, right? I love designing UIs. I just absolutely love it. Sometimes for fun for no reason other than just practice, you know. And I think that when when uh kind of generative AI came along, it was it was great for us being able to kind of say, Well, okay, now I don't really want to have to sit there and kind of figure out the the border radiuses and making sure that everything's kind of pixel perfect. But what it then does is it has the kind of bootstrap effect of um, I think what was it you said the other day? You said something like there was a time with with bootstrap websites where everything was a hero image and three columns, and I thought I can relate to that and then click to action button. Yeah, that's it, yeah. And I and I thought to myself, well, the amount of times that I would build websites for people, and they would say, So I've got this sketch of a website, and basically all it would ever be was a hero image with a call to action and three columns, you know. And and it was the idea that actually be people would go and look around different websites to get ideas, be a magpie for kind of ideas, and then they would say, Okay, well, that's how it's done by everybody else, so that's the way I'll do it. And if you think about how how kind of LLMs and agents work, well, that's what they've done, right? They've been in indexed um on a load of things that exist, and they've said, well, this is how it's done, and then that means that nothing really ever moves outside of that kind of standard way. And I think that's a real shame because that's really where I think, you know, going back to the thing about UX and actually understanding your users, if you if you are just saying, make make me an app that does this, you're not then thinking about the details of the actual flow for the users and the user experience, and it ends up becoming a very like stale, um, you know, uh yeah, it's I mean, it's like a predictable design kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

I mean, I'm an I'm an ancient investor in a company that does like uh uh Figma to uh to code, and what they did is actually they indexed like 900,000 buttons of the internet over like 15 years and then basically looked at the interfaces that way. So basically, instead of just going for the one thing, they basically said like what's really in use and what's successful in use, and then give you the button that way. So that's where like real machine learning people come in rather than just AI companies, you know?

SPEAKER_04 38:04

Yeah, yeah. It would have been interesting as well. Like, I always sort of thought it would have been good if there were, or just an interesting one, if there was uh loads of false positives. And what I mean is like if you were to index enough of the web, um, and again, I know the quantity of websites is like much greater today, but I love the idea that what if LLMs had like indexed the web and they'd said there's a lot of guest books out there, that's the standard, you know, and that guest books and things like this from like the early web comeback because there doesn't seem to be this sense of like like there was with vinyl when MP3 came out, you know? Yeah, it's this sense that people have the nostalgia for the past, and that it's almost like there's a uh when as we go further and we go more advanced, people quite like the simplicity of the guest books.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

It's rumored to come back all the time as well. There's also there's also uh uh I I read that there's gonna be a new um oh what's it called? Like the the uh uh uh MySpace kind of area kind of thing.

SPEAKER_04 38:56

Yes, um I I did see, I can't remember the name of it now. We'd have to try and uh put it in, but there was somebody had built, didn't they, a kind of MySpace um Hayspace. Hayspace, yeah. Hayspace, yeah. And it had so many, so many millions of users and you know, and all this, and it was kind of interesting because I I definitely, definitely was on MySpace quite a lot. And please don't go and look for the photograph because I had some really bad hair, I was in a metal band, but it was a different time, wasn't it? Because it felt like this very kind of innocent, you know, you still had people still had safe safety concerns about the fact you're speaking to people you didn't know, but it felt like this very kind of innocent internet, and um, and there was something that that that I still think is the big thing that I miss about um from the old days of social media the customization. Yeah, you know, I used that was how I really learned how to just HTML and CSS and like pushing it as far as you could, uh, even down to just doing display none on the terms and conditions and on the uh banner at the top, which wasn't good, but I did that for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 39:47

I think that the problem with that one is just the security aspect of it. Like, I mean, the the uh customization to allow you for theming. I mean, WordPress is mostly hacked through themes and plugins, yeah, like not the WordPress core. So, yeah, that's the issue there. But I mean, yeah, um and then like okay, you can change the background image, or I mean, I haven't even looked at the things that you can do these days. I see LinkedIn, you can do like an avatar waving kind of animation thing when you roll over your image and these kind of things. I never get time for that, but I see people using it, and you're like, oh, that's kind of cool, but okay, done.

SPEAKER_04 40:19

Yeah, yeah. But you also, you know, you you wonder as well, like you're saying, if it's security, is that kind of trade-off, right? And there were there were definitely a lot of kind of very clever things going on with how people were kind of hacking MySpace, but yeah, a bit like WordPress, where quite often people are doing a lot of hacking and overriding and just important on everything, you know what I mean? Just just override the CSS, and it it it was definitely a very ugly time in terms of if you looked at the code, but there was something really fun that was quite sort of free about it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 40:44

It's interesting now that with CSS that it's a never-ending game. Like, I mean, people get like super annoyed about CSS being a horrible programming language. I think it's it's a gorgeous web programming language, it's very complex nowadays with all the bits and bobs. But I mean the bigger problem is actually browser and interface is still throwing us, uh throwing us uh a spanner in the works because we now know how to center in CSS. That joke is done, you don't need to worry about that anymore. There's a hundred ways of doing that, but now actually with uh uh with sidebars coming in like uh like codecs and these kind of things, the browser having a sidebar, all of a sudden a lot of the centering doesn't work anymore.

SPEAKER_04 41:20

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

Yeah, the same way we had the problem with like the virtual keyboard on like on like iOS and Android. So that was the other issue with 100 VH and these kind of stuff. Like so, and now sidebars are basically putting a span in the works of like about pixel perfect CSS. Here's the answer: never ever care about pixel perfectness, it doesn't exist. The idea of the web is that actually I can resize the font to my needs, I can put another font in if I wanted to. I might have a dark broad, I might have a light mode, I might have a screen reader, I might have a zoom thing. You are not in control of the interface of the web. The end user is. And when once we embrace that, we actually can we actually can be much, much happier with what we have.

SPEAKER_04 42:03

Yeah, that's very true. And I think actually there was a um, I'm trying to remember what the uh the plugin was or the tool that we kind of used, but there was something where we could set CSS variables and then you could add the controls to the kind of UI. Yeah, and I thought that was really interesting as well because it's like just another layer of actually you saying, I understand I don't have absolute control over this UI, but you shouldn't want to. Yeah, um, and any way you can kind of give that over to the user, why wouldn't you? You know, yeah. Um I see the way that like say my mum or dad, you know, they're in their 70s, and you see the way that like their iPhone looks, and it it barely looks like the same phone as mine because the text is so huge, all of the icons are very kind of like simplified, and it it doesn't look like the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

So map that back onto you know, there's a hidden setting in iOS, which I I put I put in a newsletter, I think, soon uh that actually turns into kind of a dumb phone, just like two buttons to call, and that one never got released, but it's in there and you can turn it on. So so an iPhone becomes like a kid's uh a kid's phone. Yes, I see.

SPEAKER_04 42:58

That's interesting. Because it you know, because again, we we've talked about kind of filming on it and things like this, and how you you know you essentially you've got uh a camera with about 500 features that you don't need if you were to look at it like that. Um, so even that customization of the actual device would be quite interesting, just turning off, you know, turning off all of the different uh kind of features to make it something else.

SPEAKER_00 43:16

Yeah, it's quite an interesting idea. Google with the Pixel 11 just announced that they're actually making the phone, uh the camera less perfect because people are tired of like every image being perfect by like by like phones because yeah, what goes into the lens is not what comes out in your gallery for a long time now. And they they tweaked it a bit more to make it look more natural, and people are actually flogging to it and love it, and that makes sense, I think. Like, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:42

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I think definitely there's something to be said for like you know, the the the the I think as we go through the kind of uniform stage, everything starts to feel the same. You're gonna have the the pushback the other way, yeah. You know, and people are gonna kind of yearn for that customization. And um, I I even wonder if there's gonna be, like I said, the the if you think about the sort of I know Gen Z gets used as. Like a catch-all phrase for people of a certain age, but there is something to be said for like the way that this recycling of fashion, right? Yeah, but we don't really assume it's ever going to happen in technology because we go, no, it's an onward onward march, we're never going to go back. But I do I do wonder if there will be this kind of like um uh pushback against even just automating things or even just using AI amongst the younger generations.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

I think it's a privacy thing as well. Like, I mean, uh smartphones are so smart that they're also complete control objects. They they basically record everything you do and everything you you have and where you are, and I think people will get sick of that sooner or later and then want to have a dumb phone again that just does pause.

SPEAKER_04 44:38

Yeah, it's the idea, isn't it, of the uh the smart house, you know? It's like I'm I'm so guilty of it, um, but I I am aware that I'm just adding more and more Alexa's to my house, essentially, you know, and uh more and more and more things to record what I'm saying. But also, Alexa is much smarter now. You know, I've now got this uh, I think it's uh is it Alexa 2 or Alexa Plus, they've called it, where it's basically just got um a kind of natural language, got AI rolled into it. So now rather than saying to it, can you tell me what the weather is, and it will just give you the very simple thing, you can ask it kind of complex questions like you would ChatGPT or whatever. Um, and I think that then you go, well, there's a whole different level of intelligence uh in relation to what it's recording as well. You know, it's kind of able to process what it's recording in my house. Um, and it and it is that thing of like the excitement of the technology means that we kind of welcome in things that privacy-wise might not be a great idea. Um, but it's always the kind of balancing act because at the same time, I love the fact I can walk in and say, Alexa, turn the heating on. I'm I'm almost conscious that it's going to actually turn the heating on, you know, from my phone if it hears me say that. But saying, like, Alexa, turn the heating on, Alexa, turn the turn the lights to blue or whatever. I love that, and it's it's that like excitement that I know is also that Star Treky thing.

SPEAKER_00 45:44

Like, I mean, talking to the to the uh computer that's somewhere, like like ubiquitous computing, we used to call it back then, like when it was just a type dream, but now it's it's a thing that that happens, but at the same time, I'm like, I mean, I I just had a warning this morning because Martina came to my house because I have my camera turned on, and I'm like, okay, I forgot about that one, so I turned it off because I don't want to look at her doing that. But like, you know, like it's it's an interesting thing that these things are just there for us now. But uh, genies are at the bottle, and I think the problem is like it records everything that you do. It's interesting when you see like crime shows, like my wife loves like real crime shows and like every woman on this planet, weirdly enough. I wonder if it's just for training to kill me without a trace.

SPEAKER_04 46:26

Oh, yeah. I mean, I I think Chris, if she wanted to, she'd you know, no disrespect, but you'd be you'd be gone. I know a guy, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:32

I know the guy, yeah. Uh uh now the bigger the bigger thing about that one is when you see like uh tracing telephones in Germany is still a huge thing that they have to get like uh uh they have to get uh a court order for it and these kind of things. And here it's just like traced by everybody. It's just a very uh I saw I saw yesterday that in the market street where we are here in San Francisco, there's like 26 different traffic cameras, uh, and basically you automatically get fined in an email when you're more than 50 miles over.

SPEAKER_04 46:59

Interesting. I mean, uh Chris, as you're saying that actually, I'm looking out at a Waymo, and we might cut in some footage. Yeah, I know you're thinking of taking a Waymo later. Um, how do you feel about that? Because there's something, you know, I I have spoken to a few Uber drivers and they are kind of not fans, as you'd imagine. Um, but somebody said to me the other day that they said uh the number of Waymo's here is dropping, and they're I don't know if that's true. I have no, I'd have to go look that up. It's um quite possibly not true, but who knows? But the idea that they said there was a period where it seemed like they were everywhere, and now it seems like there's not so many. And they said, and I I wonder if it's because of some of these headlines that we've brought up week week after week in fake fake on news, you know.

SPEAKER_00 47:34

But there was a DDoS the other day where basically like was it like 60 people higher uh ordered a Waymo in the in a cul de sac, so basically they're all more than in each other's way and couldn't find their way out any longer. So I mean, I I don't care. I mean, there's a zooks here as well, which is just an Amazon's uh delivery things, I think. And uh yeah, it's uh I mean I find it weird. I haven't driven one yet, but I find it weird that they still have a steering wheel in there. Like if I can't interfere with it, why is it in there?

SPEAKER_04 48:03

Yeah, that's what we were saying, wasn't it? On the way, we were saying about like this idea that it is it is it kind of like a software thing where it's the uh I think you even said like uh in in some lifts or elevators in the US, that you know, the idea that the buttons that you press to close the door any button, yeah. Yeah, just give you a sense of being in control. Yeah, and I think you know whether it's software, whether it's cars, we like we like to feel we're in control, but going back to what you said about some of the price comparison websites, we don't want to be lied to by the software, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:27

Um I mean I don't care about the difference between uh uh between an Uber and a Waymo because I mean I like the idea of self-driving cars that are public transport kind of thing, so that's cool. I think for that they're too expensive yet. I mean, if the city provided them, that would be a different issue, but I don't think that goes down in America well at all. But I mean the same the same problem I have with Uber. Uber the original set pitch was like, hey, you have a car, you can make some money on the side, yeah, driving people around just by downloading the app, and then when you when you drive people, then you get some money. Nobody does that, nobody uses uh their own car. I mean, everybody I know that is an Uber driver is an Uber driver, and then they have to put 18-hour shifts in to basically just get enough money in. And that's where it became predatory again, and that's what I don't like about it. Like the whole idea of like the I don't know what it's called, the the sharing economy back then as well. There were also comp uh companies that like if you don't if you need if you need a mechanical drill and you buy it once in your life and use it maybe eight times in your life, you might as well just rent that things in the neighborhood. Yes, so that kind of the the on-demand thing is a great thing about it. I mean, I like the the uh uh the the Waymo looks cool, it's like this this future thing has been around for a long time, uh, but now it became like this like yeah, uh it's always fun when San Francisco has new technology, and then people say, like, oh, people are against technology. I remember when this guy, when Google Glass came out and he went into and he said, like, oh, I got punched in a pub because of wearing Google Glass. And I'm like, first of all, yeah, like uh when I'm in a pub, I don't want you to run around with a camera either. Like, you know, and secondly, he was at a uh at a riot about or a demonstration against house pricing because of Google, and he's wearing Google Glass, and he's like, Oh, and people didn't like me, I don't know why.

SPEAKER_04 50:16

Yeah, I mean I actually found it was very strange. We went to a meetup the other day, and somebody uh came up and he said, What's your name? And I could see he was wearing um some uh metaglasses, I believe. And um yeah, chewing your yeah, but he but he came up and I could see the light was on, you know, and um uh again, this was in the US, so it's kind of uh a bit of a difference. And I know that I've I've said before that in the UK we might be privacy sensitive, but I think that Germany and the rest of Europe is is is is further along in that way. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Um this person came up and he was he was showing me his his his uh product, which was that he he took a look at the badge that I had on the lanyard, and then what it did was it uh it matched with a photograph of my face and it kind of did a search about who I was and it took all the information from Luma and put it in, and he said, you know, look at this, it's amazing, right? And I thought it's creepy. Yeah, I thought he didn't ask me for that photograph. And like if I if I had been doing something, I don't know, like something like smoking a cigarette, and I didn't want you know, something like that. I don't smoke, but you know what I mean. The idea that you'd say, I wasn't actually comfortable with that, and I think it lands differently, and you saw that kind of that difference in how how we treat that, because in in the EU, I think somebody would say, Can you can you delete that right now? Um, and you know, it didn't really give me a sense of like excitement around the product. I was actually a bit concerned. Um, and so I think that's again something that's like you I don't quite know how I know that we've got different regulations, different rules, but um to me that was just something where and I said that to him if you if you pitch in the EU, do it differently because that that won't go across very well, you know.

SPEAKER_00 51:40

I mean there's a whole like the whole black market for like changing software so the light doesn't light up anymore and you can still record. So uh and that's a basically a whack-a-mole in terms of like security and privacy of meta itself and people hacking the thing to make it wrap and work like that.

SPEAKER_04 51:56

Yeah, it's strange we do that though, because it's the same thing happening with the the AI um the this image is AI or AI generated labels that you're seeing now. Because I think you showed me that yesterday. It was a uh Corgies! Oh, this Corgi just appeared. Yes, corgies! Funny we could get the camera on the Corgies. Oh, we're I'm gonna cut in some footage here. That's alright. I'm gonna get some footage right here, and I will cut it in.

SPEAKER_00 52:18

We're like, are you looking at my bum? You're looking at my bum, aren't you?

SPEAKER_04 52:22

Corgies, we've got some you're looking at my bum, aren't you? Yay! Did you say something to Napoleon? Oh, I love that.

SPEAKER_02 52:32

Oh little cutie.

SPEAKER_04 52:39

Look at you.

SPEAKER_03 52:43

Beautiful, beautiful. We will be cutting, and we are surrounded by corgies right now, and we're not complaining at all. There we are. Look at these little guys. Who needs to talk about tech when you've got corgies? This is what we've come for. When they say corgi cafe, they're not lying.

SPEAKER_00 53:09

Well, that was really well across live from the corgi cafe in San Francisco. That little lad has to go back to the airport, so we're gonna see you next week.