WeAreDevelopers LIVE - Of Agents and Robots

On this episode of WeAreDevelopers we've got Cloud & IoT Engineer @ RoboTwin, Marc Plogas, to talk about all things agents, robots and automation - and to play a round of Fake or news of course.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:05

Hello and welcome to another We Are Developers Live. We are here live. It's Wednesday again, and it's one day after We Are Developers Day, where we basically celebrated yesterday. There's 30 days to go uh until we go back to San Francisco and we fly to San Francisco, but then we go to San Jose to actually do our event in America for the first time. So I'm kind of excited. I'm also kind of worried, but at the same time, it's interesting because we've just both been to Silicon Valley uh to promote that. And it was interesting to get people to sign up for a developer-only event, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Yeah, yeah. I mean, first of all, I should say it feels a bit weird actually, us both being back in our houses doing a normal We are developers live. It feels like a long time. Um, but yeah, it does. It was it was a really good trip. It was um the British weather came with me. I won't talk about the weather too much and be a stereotype, but um it did it's it did surprise me, you know, kind of how how different it is over there. And uh when you when you speak to people in the kind of tech world over there, there's so many events that sometimes they don't know which ones are kind of big and important, like ours, and which ones are kind of meetups or or something that might just be a kind of um you know a momentary thing. So yeah, it's been it's definitely been a learning experience, but it's good fun.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Yeah, I mean it was interesting to go back to San Francisco after like 10 years not being there and seeing all the changes, like uh taking robot taxis for the first time and like still seeing people arguing with traffic lights and talking to themselves, but you actually don't know if they're just people of the tender line or if they're people wearing smart glasses and just uh babble away from in from them. Like it's it's fascinating to see how how people are embracing the tech much more there because of its availability, I guess. Uh, but it's just uh it's fascinating to see. But uh I also saw backlash, like people are not too happy about the robo taxis, and I mean I took one of these electro scooters at one time and I drove it in a Berlin fashion, so that made like two of the Waymo stop. Uh so yeah, it was interesting to see. So um, as usual, we have a guest again today. So, and this time it's Mark Plogas, and he's from Robotwin, he's a cloud and IoT guy, and uh, we knew each other from Microsoft before. And it's interesting to see that you're that you bet on a thing like IoT, which is a growth market that has been coming for the last 20 years, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Yes, yes, unfortunately, or fortunately, so it is growing steadily. Um, and now it's combined with robotics, so it's basically the best thing of two worlds.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

It was interesting because when IoT started, and we all like, well, there's not enough DNA, there's not enough IP numbers, like because back then we had the the original IP numbers, and IPv6 and IPv5 was still a was still a fever dream. And we're like, okay, so how do we do that? Do we mesh networking between those different devices? Like, how many devices will you have in your house? And yeah, it it kind of became a thing that's just in the background. People have their smart uh doorbells now and their smart speakers, and everything is probably mining data in the background without you knowing it, but uh people are just became used to it.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Well, we had a hope at IPv6. Um, we're still hoping, probably also for 20 years, and hoping for the next 20 years. Um, but um actually remember I made a call at the Weird at a session at the We A Developers where I was actually hacking one of these IoT devices, and I was even doing this kind of hands-off because I've trained agents to do this because it's always basically the same steps. And that is more the frightening thing that comes up now that basically everyone can do this now hands-off with without any pre-exposure or something to hacking or IoT devices at all, they just connect the devices and figure out what's going on. And the vendors should be very worried, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Yeah, and also outdated materials. I mean, the amount of like hacked routers that you saw over the last few years that basically that the America not allowing for any Chinese routers at all. At the same time, I mean, if it's like a Fitz box that has been installed in 1995 in Germany and hasn't been changed since then, that's also a problem, especially with the password being admin one, two, three, four, five.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

I could insert the joke from Spaceballs, hey, that's also my password, but yeah, true.

SPEAKER_02 4:27

Yeah, it's pretty bizarre how these uh how we became dependent on these things, and then when they that they're always great until they don't work, and then people get stuck. Which brings us kind of to the topics that we want to cover today as well. So, yeah, we are 30 days away from our event in uh California. And if you scan this QR code later on in the recording, this is a 50% off code. So basically the tickets are not the normal price but 50% off. In case you don't know yet, uh it's the same thing that we do in um in Europe, but uh a bit smaller, but at the same time, uh the same kind of numbers: 10,000 people, 4,000 companies, 2,000 decision makers, 500 speakers, and we got a good rotor of people. We got Thomas Domke coming again, we got Kelsey Hightower out of he kind of has digital retirement. I haven't seen him in a while, but he's still a really interesting guy to talk to. Uh, we've got uh the Sentry CEO, we've got people from Honeycomb, we got people from Microsoft, Scott Hanselman, of course, again that's he is gonna hack this time live. Um, I mean, he I remember the talk where he gave about his instant pump, and the other thing that he did lately was make uh make a free version of Peloton, so you can basically cycle at home with like different videos and stuff. So I always like that he messes with things. Victor Safkin was also in Berlin. Uh, he has a very interesting talk about uh how what we can learn from JavaScript frameworks and how we can put that one, uh put that one into the work, uh, into the work that we do these days. So lots of people, lots of people coming, lots of things happening. It's gonna be at the Congress Center in San Jose. So yeah, that's like a 50% code, gonna send that out later on as well. But let's talk about a few things that we were involved with and that we talked. So we had uh a meeting, uh a meeting space, a cafe where people can come in, and we did a few events there. And it was interesting to see that everybody who we met, uh not a single person called himself a developer. Everybody either called themselves a founder or called themselves a builder, and I think the builder thing is uh is really honest and interesting, but at the same time it sounds super generic. I hear builder and I just think of like, can we fix it? Yes, we can, or YMCA. Uh, what about you, Mark? Did you start embracing the builder concept of a new work drop job title in our world?

SPEAKER_01 6:50

I guess I'm too old-fashioned for that. I'm still considering myself an engineer, but I've seen this as well. I've been hosting a hackathon yesterday with the global AI community, and there were many builders there. There were also engineers there that had kind of like the proper, proper education, but there were lots of people that didn't have any exposure prior, and they were actually building amazing things in a hackathon for the short amount of time. It's probably not production ready, but it's still a result, and that was amazing.

SPEAKER_02 7:25

Well, that was not the goal of a hackathon, wasn't it? Production readiness. I mean, that always that always annoyed me when when like when you did hack days in the company, and then basically uh product people came up. So that we can build that live tomorrow, right? Like, no, no, it's absolutely insecure, it's really not working. So, uh yeah, the big one, of course, was github.com being down uh on August 17th. And um they did a very uh I mean I love the transparency to explain everything that happened and what was going on. I wasn't uh at all impact impacted by that. Did did it make a difference to you, Mark or Daniel?

SPEAKER_01 8:03

Like it did. I was like, okay, days over, thank you. I mean, if you have to be after review, what are you gonna do, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:10

It's funny actually, because we did see some images. How I found out about it is actually linking back to what we just spoke about. I'd I'd searched Corgi Cafe on X and I'd gone on there, and somebody had posted a photo that was loads of developers sat in there and they said something like, uh, now this is the real test of like what do developers do when they can't develop, but you sat around other developers in somewhere that you've come to develop. And it was the idea that kind of we might as well actually just have a coffee and sit and talk, like we did before we made it all about development. But I didn't experience it, I didn't experience it at all. It seemed to be fine for me. So, you know, maybe I'm special or just lucky.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

It was lucky late in the evening for us Europeans, so we had most of the work done, but it kind of reminds me of the good old days when it was like oh stack overflow is down, we cannot work. Or nowadays, I mean, there's also, for example, if Claude is down or or codex is down, lots of people are also like, okay, um, that's it for today. And it had kind of like the same feeling, at least for me, because I had a PR to review and I was like, hmm, dang.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

It that is an interesting concept. That's something we should talk to GitHub about, isn't it? Like that, why couldn't you review PRs offline? I mean, you pulled them anyways. Like, you know, you you you do the the the code changes and the common functionality could also be cached and could also be queued up for actually that you could say, like, let's download those five and then uh offline uh watch them offline, but maybe it's just that people don't care about offline at all anymore. But I found it like reviewing huge PRs on a train, for example, is also a pain because it it will not actually finish the things that you typed in.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

I was using PyCharm from JetBrains, and this renders stuff into the things, but it does it apparently online, so it requires this connection. And if it's work if it's not working, it's gonna be like, sorry, can't reach GitHub right now. Please try later.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Yeah, yeah, but that to me is like that shows again like the quality of like uh software development these days. That's an edge case that we that we always should be thinking about. Like, what is what about a flaky connection or Li-Fi as uh as uh as Jake Archibald used to call it, that basically says like you have connectivity, but then it's not fast enough or it doesn't work. So the whole like scheduling and caching and uh and doing these kind of things is something that we might be thinking about. Interestingly enough, uh, on the same day that there was this uh outage, uh Cursor released its own competitor to Git hosting, um, which is now available for people to use as well. People have been looking into other options as well because of the outage, you know, like GitLab and of course Codeburg in Berlin as well would be another one. I mean, the Git hosting is one part, but I think that was never the interesting thing about GitHub. I think the interesting thing about GitHub was the whole interface around it that actually allows you to do the pull requests and then the community-building tools that they added to that one. So the hosting will be one thing to just have that reliably, but maybe it is a good opportunity, a good opportunity to think about multi-cloud hosting or multi-vendor hosting for your Git code now as well, and do load balancing over them. But then again, do you want to pay for five of those? That's the other question.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Yeah, I mean, or you can still add three remotes to your repository, but still you have to sync them and be mindful to sync them every time. And that is given the laziness or the fatigue many people experience these days, I guess that also is not the best solution.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

I think there's something really interesting about this and and the previous one. That's the uh, what do we do when we when we sort of are forced to work offline? And that it feels like in some way that the cursor alternative has come about, maybe because of these kind of you know issues that people are having with GitHub, people are feeling like, oh, it's slowing me down, or there's these issues that have come up that potentially are making them question whether they might move to another as an alternative. And Mark, when you said like um when uh Claude goes down for the day and we sort of say, well, that's it, you know, and I thought, well, we we're not in the place yet where we switch to another model because or to another you know uh vendor because it's another subscription cost or it's another kind of membership. Um and that it does then put us in that position, Chris, doesn't it, where it's like, it's not our fault that there's well, it is our fault in some ways, we're using it too much, but it's not our fault that the infrastructure of kind of of GitHub and et cetera is kind of struggling at the moment because of so many users. Uh but what we don't want is to see that we're then pushed to have to go and pay for another subscription because of that, those problems with the infrastructure. But it feels like that's probably what is going to happen because it does cost a lot for the vendors to actually run and the infrastructure, et cetera.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

Um I guess it would be interesting to analyze as well. I don't think it's the hosting, and I don't think it's the normal day-to-day Git thing. I think it's like all the uh the GitHub actions that actually took it down. I mean, that's the thing. Like we we we do build processing directly where we also do the source hosting. So that made me the issue here that we're trying to do too many things at the same time on one infrastructure. I mean, I remember Bazaar, that was like a version control system that was sharing across the users that was basically like a BitTorrent client on your machine. So basically, the more people that worked on your project, the more it got distributed, and the more it actually had safety backups. And uh we used that offline in the Yahoo office, for example, because it was just going over the Wi-Fi in the company instead of just using any uh centralized server. So that was an interesting way to do version controlling as well, because that way you basically made uh have a safety copy and a full copy on each machine, um, which is like I remember when Pixar had that problem. I think it was the first Toy Story where they basically had a server crash and they lost the whole movie. And turns out that one of the designers had taken a pre-copy to uh to uh at home to show to their children, so basically that was how they actually saved the whole movie. She illegally actually brought something home, and that's how they saved the company. So, yeah, that was an interesting one.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

But yeah, it's no longer possible with corporate compliance nowadays.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

Yeah, probably there's probably a copy on BitTorrent anyway. So, yeah, another thing, of course, uh uh Slack now has a uh has a vibe coding tool as well, Slack code, um which allows you to code directly inside Slack. Um vibish in a vibish way, and um they call it uh agency coding is multiplayer now. Um yeah, I'm not sure if I want to use Slack also as a coding environment, but that again might be that I'm just old school or that that there's one way of doing it. I mean, we tried that with other tools before as well, where you could generate things in in Excel uh with a sidebar on GitHub Copilot and uh Microsoft Copilot, and like I'm not sure. I mean, I I've talked to our salespeople while we were over in America, and they actually showed me what they do with their gent with agents inside Slack and these kind of things as well. So maybe that's just the next world of uh of where we are and build things, and that was the idea of agents that you can run them from wherever, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Well, but as you just said, like would you do this? Do you have the choice of the models, or is this a solution that they it is like the one size fits all solution?

SPEAKER_00 15:40

Ah, so it's a launching today. Uh it looks like Slack code is live. Uh, launching today with agents from Anthropic, GitHub, Cognition, Anversel. Um, so it looks like yeah, multiple.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Um so it's basically the harness that they provide.

SPEAKER_02 15:54

Well, it would be fun to see what people are building and what people are doing. And uh, I mean, that's the I that that was always the the promise of uh agentic coding and AI coding, is that that anybody can do it. And I mean if we meet them where they are, why not? Not a bad idea. Much like how how how much like when we did like uh when we had like uh uh Excel now supporting Python and basically did uh because everybody is in there, so yeah. I I think without without Excel there wouldn't be any software world. I mean it still runs like 90% of what we do every day.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

I actually think that's where like the real productivity, like I was thinking about this the other day, that so much of like the stuff that we hear about AI or we hear about technology is the stuff that's exciting, and that it a lot of the stuff that isn't that exciting is usually where like the real productivity is or the real gains are, but it's not that easy to like tell people that story. And I feel like with Slack, right, the best example that I could think of right now that I would say everybody, almost everybody, could benefit from it is what you're saying, Chris. If you went into the formulas in Excel, the most annoying bit about the formulas is that you are essentially writing code. And if you don't write code, you don't really know what you're looking at, and you're kind of debugging something that's like a foreign language until it works, and then you're doing the kind of equivalent of us going on Stack Overflow saying, why doesn't this work? And that if you can just now in natural language say, give me the sum of all of these different cells, but divide it by a monthly thing so that I get a revenue and compare it to last year, one sentence that can do like a really powerful thing. It's not very, you know, exciting, but it's probably gonna make a real difference. And I think that's where like I am weirdly excited about this Slack bot because it's probably gonna create lots of boring but useful software that actually is probably more productivity worthy than what we're hearing about.

SPEAKER_02 17:37

I found it very confusing that all of a sudden in Slack we have like more than the people in the company because everybody runs like three agents and has like a bot that joins the meetings, and you're like, what is this thing? This feels like a takeover or a hack to me, but it's actually just somebody putting their a transcription uh agent in the meeting instead of them. Which of course brings us to this that Anthropic has this project Parker now that uh sits through meetings and assigns Claude agents to homework. So basically, instead of you being in a meeting and getting uh getting work assigned to you, it basically then creates uh spawns up an agent that does the work for you immediately. And um yeah, I'm I'm also this is great, but I'm also worried about that kind of thing. Like, because I mean the amount of things in meetings where people assigned work to me and I told them that this work is not necessary, that to me was always the skill that you need as a lead developer, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Okay, that reminds me what I read this week. It's like um someone wrote, uh, I have become the API between Claude and my manager. And yeah. The firewall that's really yeah, it's strange.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

It does, it's like that whole dead internet thing when we talk about, you know, the internet is now just bots talking to bots. Um it's that we're we're now yeah, creating agents to take things that have been recorded by agents, and we've created that whole thing with an agent. And I don't I don't know. I mean, again, it's it's if it really makes a difference that I'm interested in. Is this just cool sounding, but not that productivity, you know, doesn't actually bring about any more productivity or whatever, or is it just something that's a nice, interesting article? Um Mac?

SPEAKER_02 19:18

It's interesting that that yeah, that that that is thing that that stands out to me. The amount of like Mac first or Mac only things that these companies are rolling out right now is of course, I I guess there's a lot of like uh intelligence on device on Mac, especially with the vision framework and these kind of things that you can use. So that's probably why. But I I mean Microsoft has been banging that drum for so long to basically say, like, okay, we have on-device things in Windows, but uh seems we lost it. But of course, there's the whole thing about Mac minis being sold out everywhere because they're really good to run your own models on them. And on a Windows machine, the problem is you never knew what machine it was. It could be anything. Whereas with a Mac, you know what to expect from the machine. Now, one thing we found in America is that a lot of people were running around with metaglasses, and uh it kind of annoyed me because they talked to me and I didn't know if they're recording right now. And it basically uh it felt a bit like talking to uh talking to Clark Kent and expecting Superman. And it's just yeah, the lights are not really that obvious that the when they're recording something, and you had people mumbling to themselves walking through the cafe, and it it was not crazy people, it was just basically somebody filming with their glasses and doing their cool uh influencer kind of thing. And then you said like this page that's a privacy page for uh for uh for meta glasses is a a master stroke in terms of uh marketing. Why is that?

SPEAKER_00 20:50

Yeah, yeah, because um it was actually that I'd uh I think I just done a Google search like just to get to this page, basically, just very quickly. And I type in, I typed in something like MetaGlasses privacy, just to unthrow it in. And it comes up with a little kind of slug, you know, in the Google search results. And um I think I actually sent it to you, Chris. I'm actually going to see if I can just find the exact wording of it. But it made me laugh because um it says uh something to the effect of uh let me just see if I can find that. Um there it is. Uh it said, Ray-Ban meta AI glasses were developed with your privacy in mind, giving you, the wearer, control over what you share, uh over what and when you share. And I thought, well, that's not really what we meant. We meant the people that are being filmed, and it doesn't actually mention them. And it's kind of putting in this idea of like, you know, privacy is right at the forefront, but it's for the wrong people. So it's not, you know, it's not how we would see it. And I think what it did as well is it tapped into some of the like concerns we often have in Europe that are around privacy and that might be linked to regulation, and that you know, uh there is very much an excitement around new technology in San Francisco, which is amazing, but it can kind of maybe be slightly like jarring if you're going in as a um a European and you're saying, Oh, I'm I'm not used to this, and that you know, GDPR would Probably stop this happening. Um, there is also one more thing just to bring attention to that's quite funny, that's uh just above where you are, Chris. That's the uh respect people's preferences. So it does kind of mention it, but it says not everyone loves being photographed. Stop recording if anyone expresses that they would rather opt out. To me, that says when you've already got the content that they didn't want you to have uh and they tell you to stop, then you can stop taking more content. But that's uh I've got a small child, I would say I wouldn't want them to have that. Please delete it. But where are my rights? So yeah, it's very cleverly done, but more on the theme of like tech marketing.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

It would be fun to see if that automatically follows QR codes, and then you just basically show people QR codes of like horrible sites that automatically open or something like that. But I don't know if that's a thing, but that would be fun to do. Clever. Interesting. But yeah, that there's a whole horrible the horrible the most horrible people of the web are already using those again. There's like a whole channel of like on YouTube about pickup artists going to ladies with their glasses on, and when they say no, then start abusing them, and basically uh uh verbally, and that's the whole thing. And uh and some platforms, not to mention names, uh by somebody with a name like Tusk, uh basically support even that with a special with a special hashtag. And it's just like the yeah, um, I mean, iPods with cameras are the next things that are coming out, so that's the question as well if that's gonna be a thing. But yeah, it's it's weird. I just I'm just not used to it yet to talking to people like that. And it feels like the uh when you when you think back of the fifth element, like that influencer guy that was just basically filming everything with his glasses, and it feels the same annoyance in there. Um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I have enough problems with my glasses as they are, I don't want to wait for them to have no no battery as well.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

I I may be old, but I compare this to the uh Google glasses that came out like 20 years ago, and the outcry, like the worldwide outcry of like being filmed, and now we are at the point where it's kind of normal, and there are hacks to make this light not shine as as bright as possible, uh as as little as possible. And so, oh man, that is an interesting turn of uh of understanding of privacy in the last 20 years.

SPEAKER_02 24:23

Yeah, I mean, we're gonna come back to that later as well about flock cameras and all kinds of things, like it's a weird thing, but just do some geek things. Uh, I love this one, HTML can do that, it's just basically all the new HTML bits of Bobs that are interactive elements uh that basically allow you to not have to use any JavaScript for it. And then you just wrote an article as well in our magazine about input types and what they can do. So uh that's something to keep reminding you. Like before you actually write an agent that uses tons of tokens by installing 6,000 JavaScript libraries, um, maybe use the right HTML or teach it to use the right HTML, and you can save a lot on like computation both on your user uh on your end users' devices and your own device. So that's pretty cool. AliExpress did an interesting thing. Uh they they use silent audio to uh to fingerprint visitors' browsers. I've heard that before that people actually use the silent audio playing so that the uh the tab wouldn't fall asleep and it actually would still use uh show ads and stuff like that. But using the audio to fingerprint visitors browsers was an interesting new idea. Or not new. I've also seen ads that actually would play silent audio and other tabs would listen in on that, and if it's at a certain frequency, it know that the other tab is open. So there's a lot of stuff happening with your audio. So if a tab shows the uh shows the the the uh the playing thing, be aware of that and uh uh uh be aware that there might be something going on that's not supposed to be going on. But it's fascinating that people always find these things, you know.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Sorry, and that's the thing. I think the AliExpress tab did not show the audio icon. Um, that was the challenge, but the fingerprinting thing is kind of like I thought it's old news because as you said, I I heard about this before. It was just not on AliExpress, but on some yeah things that were used to fingerprint. I mean, they have a bazillion ways of fingerprint um your you or and and your browser, and that was just one of them. But um the thing was as I said, like that it didn't show the the icon for the audio recording and playing because it's oh because it used it used web audio, it didn't use an audio element to actually play it.

SPEAKER_02 26:46

So that's I guess why. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is this is tie tying into this one that I found it was interesting. It's basically glass box, it's a tool that actually shows you um your uh what your machine tells you about them. How can you actually be uh be fingerprinted? In this case, I'm 100% fingerprinted here. Uh one in 11 billion browsers share this profile, and it shows all the bits that actually your browser tells about you. You got the client hints, the screen and the display, time zone and locale, um canvas 2D, if it actually allows you to create those kinds of things and WebGL renderer, Web GPU, audio stack, installed fonts, and so on and so forth, all the things that actually allow you to get fingerprinted. And I had this discussion with the person who did H just HTML in Canvas on Chrome. And he said, like in the W3C meeting group meetings and my in the groups that I'm in as well, we keep trying to make uh users not fingerprintable by guess that fight is lost because your browser tells you so many things about you. That's uh I mean, if you if you put the effort in, you can detect people easily. To try that on my hard machine, because I've got another box where I use LibriFox as my browser, and I got a VPN running and all kinds of things. So it would be interesting to see how many of those are in there that actually allows you to do that. But the installed font bit is hilarious that you can find people dead weight.

SPEAKER_00 28:11

I never knew that. I had no idea. I think this is actually really interesting because it does um for me as somebody who sort of doesn't know how to fingerprint somebody and just knows that it's sort of like a general you know word that we use for sort of identification, it's really interesting to actually see that broken down because it does even there was a part where I got to a moment ago where it's got um, yeah, it's even telling you things like you know, CSS media features, your color scheme set to dark, like so many of these variables going down. I mean, that one's obvious. You you'd say, yeah, that they're gonna find that. But the fact that when you put it all together with even your battery status and your keyboard layout, and you know, this surprised me. I I really didn't think too much about those.

SPEAKER_02 28:44

I mean, the math theme is my favorite because that also allows you to detect if it's Windows, Mac, or uh or Linux just with one uh with one calculation because the rounding of a certain number is different than all these different operating systems. That's just mentor. Who comes up with that? Now, talking about old stuff, uh do you do you guys remember that one? It's the Windows pipe screensaver of Windows 95. And somebody did somebody did that in WebGL. No, it's CSS only, that's not actually WebGL, it uses poly CSS, uh, which is a simulation of a 3D environment in CSS. And um I just loved that somebody built that, and then of course I had to look up the origin story of the pipe screensaver uh that actually has all the information about it, like um who uh who came up with it, what they did with it, and uh actually I mean I I always like the I always like the uh the maze more, but yeah, it's it's it's just funny that screensavers are such a thing of the past. Not a single screen burns in any longer. We don't need screensavers anymore, but it's still a thing that people use.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

Aren't OLED screens burning have have the issue of burning in if you leave them on for too long?

SPEAKER_02 30:02

Uh probably yeah, that was the uh that was the Windows 3D screensaver that one, yeah. It was basically if the Wolfenstein engine in a very PIS pro version, and uh uh it was just uh yeah, but it still was fun to show people these things. And uh Windows 3.11 when I used that one that also had a few screensavers that were really impressive for the time. And now you can do all of that hardware accelerated in JavaScript on your device. So that's pretty amazing. But yeah, this is basically the bits and bobs that we had this week to talk through. So um now we got a feature that uh I'm I I don't know if I talked to it about you, uh uh fake on news, where we're actually gonna show you headlines uh and you have to tell us if they are real or if they're not real. So let's play fake on news. BMW is putting Spider-Man ads on your dashboard after promising it never would.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

That is unfortunately news.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

Have you seen about it? Have you seen the news?

SPEAKER_01 31:06

I heard the outcry on yeah, yeah, yeah, that was that even made it to Heiser and so on, yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

Wow, the problem was saying they never would. So correct, it was news.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

A real macOS flaw worth $200,000 went unreported because Apple Buck Bounty inbox was full of AI slope.

SPEAKER_01 31:24

Oh thank okay. It sounds so relatable, right? This could be news nowadays. Go for news. Correct again.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

Two arrested for checking into esports hotels and stealing RAM, making off with over $2,000 in profit in just one month.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

So they stole two RAM things, just just two of them? Because 2,000 is not much, right? Yeah, it's not much.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

What do we think? Less than 10 seconds. Should we say fake or real? It's too little.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

I I would say it's rather fake because for 2,000 euros it's old.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

It's new stuff.

SPEAKER_02 32:05

Okay. You never know. Ancient princesses were weapon wielding bad as the scientists discover.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

It's got to be real, it's so specific and weird.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Um, I would say that it's fake. Let's get the fake.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Oh, it's news. Whoa! Okay, it's vague, but it's and it's weird, but somehow it's real.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

We need more of those. Papaya runs on device, listens to you having sex, and draws a cartoon about it.

SPEAKER_00 32:37

Previous point again.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

I'd say this is yes, this is definitely news. This is people are coming up with all kinds of these things.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

This is where I've got a horrible feeling Chris is gonna surprise us, and he's made this one up. I hope you're right, Mark.

SPEAKER_02 32:53

Oh, yes, it's news. That's the kind of stuff you normally get out of a hackathon, right? Yes, totally. Crypto exchange unveils marketplace where AI agents can hire each other.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

Feels quite real.

SPEAKER_01 33:07

Feels like something would exist. Didn't they hire humans for this? I I know that there was this marketplace for humans, but this shut down. So maybe they try now with other agents. No, I would say this is fake, but then again, it's crypto voice.

SPEAKER_00 33:24

Uh it's I like your logic. You thought it might be real, so you went for fake. Ah, there we go.

SPEAKER_02 33:31

Yeah, that human AI that shut down really quickly as well, didn't it? The one where they hired humans, so that was weird. Discord pens text requires all communication through AI-generated avatars.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

No way. No way. The outcry would have been like in every media outlet, yes.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Yeah, it would be madness.

SPEAKER_01 33:51

Good.

unknown 33:52

Fake.

SPEAKER_02 33:55

Delta flight carrying DEF CON hackers hit by Wi-Fi attack mid-air.

SPEAKER_00 33:59

I think it's fake because I think you've you've gone on Delta recently, Chris, and I think I wonder if this is something you've made up on the flight. I think it's fake.

SPEAKER_01 34:06

Yeah, usually most of the hackers are very aware of when and where they should hack. So I would also say this is fake.

SPEAKER_00 34:17

Just in the nick of time. Oh, and it's real. What's wrong with people? Oh no. You'll see this, Mark. It's uh we you really can't tell. And I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing when you get it right, because you know, if you can kind of tell that these are real or not, I don't know if that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

Zoom's new AI presence mode. Quiety attends meetings on your behalf when you decline.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

That sounds like a feature, no? Um, I hope it's news, because it's actually a great feature.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

It would be handy, but then it sort of defeats the object of saying no, because it's I don't know, it feels like another thing you'd have to go and do, but I'll go with you on that. News. Ah, this is what I mean. Okay, or new feature.

SPEAKER_02 34:59

I mean, if you if you decline my my meeting and you send me a robot instead, I will hate you and I will hunt you down. Because the idea of a meeting is that I meet you, not like something that records things and then you not answer. Okay. Amazon announces new warehouse efficiency AI that schedules worker breaks to optimize package throughput.

SPEAKER_01 35:19

Totally news. I see this as totally as news.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

I'm hoping it's not, but um, I I think you're right. Yeah. Chris, you're getting good at this, they're getting more believable. This is a real problem.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Webpack 7 achieves 4 millisecond build time by refusing to check for errors.

SPEAKER_00 35:38

No, surely not.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

Please let this not be news.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

Please, Chris. Chris, the fact you're laughing means I'm worried.

SPEAKER_02 35:51

GitHub Copilot now charges one cent per line of generated code that contains bugs.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

I know this is fake, but this is actually a great idea.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Yeah, yeah, agreed. So we'll say it's fake, but yeah, we both quite like it. Correct. Mark, I will say at this point, that means because we've had two guests, you and Jason from last week, your joint first on the leaderboard, and you've both got a streak of two. So nobody's beaten you, but it also means you're first and last at the same time. So there you go.

SPEAKER_01 36:22

Cool. So that was fake on news for today. You played well. The Amazon one was really good because that sounded like totally something Amazon would do.

SPEAKER_02 36:30

This one was all over the news as well. China had the uh humanoid uh competition, running competition, long jump competition, and basically Usain Bowl's record for 100-meter dash has been broken by a robot. And uh whilst that they had like uh cage fights in San Francisco with humanoid robots as well. The runner actually ran into a wall at the end of it and uh and smashed all kinds of things. Um, so I I mean you're the robot guy, you probably can tell me this, but I'm like, yes, a robot can run faster than a human. A forklift can also carry more than I can. Like, isn't that what we build machines for? Why is that a thing?

SPEAKER_01 37:16

I don't know because media outlets were looking for something to report on, but yes, I'm with you. I'm not surprised that a robot can. I mean, making a robot walk or run is a bit challenging, but I think we have this, we we can do this now for I don't know, like two or three years reliably. I don't know. And I mean I'm all for robot Olympics.

SPEAKER_02 37:38

He did well in the running thing, but then he didn't do well in the stopping thing. Oh wow, I didn't see that.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

Okay, yeah, maybe maybe next time the engineers also consider what happens after the after um finishing the race.

SPEAKER_02 37:56

That's probably a good idea, but I mean the the whole idea as somebody who worked on robotics in the past as well, and uh and like these kind of things making a computer run like a human seems to be like the most inefficient way. I mean, we stumble all the time and we fall over. It's like I think the the robot dog idea, the four legged ones, uh uh seem to be a much better sensible way of doing it. But yeah, as you said, like it's a media outlet headlines thing. If it walks like a human, then more people look into it, or more people get excited about it. But uh, I mean, also there was the other the other uh thing where they have these robots that come into your house in San Francisco and clean up, and they're also like erect walking and fold things and wash dishes, and you're like, that's what we have dishwashers for. Like it feels so bizarre that we're actually building this like half-human things. Uh, one of my favorite movies of that, uh, or like I think uh undervalued movies was Westworld that then became a TV series in a modern fashion as well. And I always hated it watching it as a kid because there was this one thing where it had a sign and it says like robots of that and that type are not meant to actually go past this sign because humidity is too high there. And you're like, why would you build a sign for a robot to read OCR scan and analyze when you just can control a robot and say like this place is off limits, so you don't need to put up the sign. The sign was only there for the human that watches the movie and not for the robot itself.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

I would say so. Yeah, I mean, I mean, but on the other hand, this society or this we made this our environment for bipedals and humans with most of them with arms and hands. So I guess that's what this interest with uh humanoid robot comes from, because you could technically get this thing into your house and do or hope that it does most of the work that you would do. We're not there yet, apparently, but when it comes to running, we are there yet, I guess. Have you tried the typical example of folding t-shirts? That is always hilarious if you see these types of robots folding t-shirts, and they are like also I I didn't knew that, but I learned this like half a year ago that they're um t-shirt or cloth folding machines where you basically just drop your stuff in there, it detects like it's a t-shirt or it's trouser, like pants, or something like that, and then it folds the stuff for you. So it's also probably better for this single purpose, and yet we're still showcasing to investors our humanoid robots that can fold t-shirts.

SPEAKER_02 40:44

Yeah, I mean, that where do these where do these uh uh benchmarks come from? I mean, the same with like uh with like when it comes to AI generated movies and it's like uh eating spaghetti, that kind of thing. Like, you know, it's just really bizarre. We come up with the most useless things to do rather than like, okay, here's a robot. And when you look at like uh warfare and you look at like drones, they become actually more stupid now. These these are just throwaway machines that basically are there to hit one target and that's it. Like uh the whole smart thing kind of goes away in that market. Uh we saw these in San Francisco as well, that toaster-shaped robot uh things. I hadn't have a time to use one, but there is a cafe where you can actually where you can actually hire them and just go in and and sit down on the thing and they go between one cafe and another and drive you there. And I kind of like it because that's very simple. And I I'm I'm more excited about public transport being self-driving than uh personal compute uh personal uh cars being self-driving because we have too many cars on the road and we don't have enough buses. But uh Dan, did you manage to take one of those?

SPEAKER_00 41:58

No, but I do know what I can't look at them the same way now they've called them toaster shaped because it kind of undermines it a bit for me now. Now I sort of would feel self-conscious if I was in one and they they they don't look as cool to me now because I sort of can just see a toaster. But um, yeah, I agree with you, Chris. I really like the idea of it being something that maybe is less of a personal vehicle thing, because aside from the fact we're saying we've got too many cars, you've then got all of the um energy that's gone into kind of the fact that it will have you know AI and robotics in the car as well, and it feels like a double whammy of wastage. Um, and that if we can if we can find something that, I mean, obviously, you know, bus drivers and jobs, etc., we know, but if we can find a way that, yeah, we can make this something that is is um brought up to scale so it can do public transport in a safe way, I think it will probably help people get behind it more because it does feel like some of when you guys were talking then. Um there's this thing of the the need to sort of market your product and maybe market what you can do. And I felt like the robot Olympics was a bit like the Steve Jobs moment when he took the um uh Mac MacBook out of the envelope and it was kind of there's nothing new, it's just really small. And that with the robots, I think it's kind of a thing of saying, we're not necessarily trying to show you again the the boring specifics of what we can do right now, we're trying to excite you about this technology. Um, so I think they kind of need something similar now with this kind of using automated buses and things like this. Again, it just doesn't feel like something there's a huge kind of uh push for people to do because we're so concerned with doing it for individual cars and it being a very individualized thing, you know.

SPEAKER_01 43:30

Have you guys been using self-driving cars or taxis in the US before?

SPEAKER_02 43:36

Yeah, I did the uh I did the Waymo thing and I actually made a video doing it so that that that was rude that my driver didn't show up. Um they're very uh they're not very fast because they're they're they are on the side of caution. So that's one thing, and it's really easy to make them stop if you just walk in the street and stuff. So that's fun to do as well. But uh it's uh I I like the I I like the idea, but Dan, you had discussions with like taxi drivers that were super against them, right?

SPEAKER_00 44:06

Oh, yeah, yeah, really against them. And I mean, you know, obviously we've got the kind of worries around jobs, but a lot of what they were saying was actually kind of on the ground. They said that there's a feeling of in in uh San Francisco particularly, where people tend to love new tech, there is a feeling of um there's something here, they they're very good, you know, but maybe not yet. And that actually a lot of the issues that are the big stories that we're seeing around some of the self-driving cars are these slightly funny ones, things where someone stood in front of it and a sensor's gone off and then it's frozen in the middle of an intersection or something, and whatever it might be. We're hearing these kind of big, scary moments of things that are slightly dangerous. And I think that is sort of trickling down, even amongst people where you know we love tech and we sometimes think, oh, let's take it on, even if it's not perfect. So I think it's interesting. It's almost like the opposite of the vibe codey approach that you were talking about earlier, Chris. You know, move fast, break things, don't worry about security. Those same people are actually worried about security and they're worried about privacy and safety and all of these things.

SPEAKER_02 45:02

I find it really interesting that the that the steering wheel is still turning in the thing, and there's a steering wheel that and it it tells you like 16 times, don't touch it. That's not for for you. Uh, but then why have it? And it feels really bizarre because it feels like a ghost driving the car. Uh but what I learned actually was in the interesting thing about Waymo was that the cars that are actually there, they're Jaguars. And it turned out that the uh that the back window, the the the rear window, is actually too small for a human driver to safely watch the road through it. And that's why it was a failure actually as a sale as a cell for Jaguar. But then Waymo took it on and said, like, okay, what about what about we don't need a driver for it? And you can still reuse all these cars that you build without actually having to fit them with a new rear window. So uh that's a classic case of like building something, and then uh without just having to discard it, they actually made it a cool feature now, and everybody looks at those things. And I was wondering why Jaguar would do something like a self-driving car. But turns out that it was just a very badly designed car for humans, but now for robots, not so much.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

Interesting. Waymo is also planning to come to Munich, right? Did you see the announcement?

SPEAKER_02 46:15

I didn't, but I'm not surprised because that's where they always tried. I mean, that's where BMW did their like uh the whole fleet of minis as well, when when they started doing that about the time sharing of cars. So um, yeah, it would be interesting to see. I mean, it doesn't matter because there's always a traffic jam in Munich anyway, so it really it's pointless to have. I mean, I just look at those and I'm like, I don't see toaster, I actually see like a uh a carriage, like an old one, you know, the horse-drawn carriages looked a bit like that.

SPEAKER_00 46:44

Somewhere between that was a London cab, like it's got the four people facing each other, like the London black cabs.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

I mean, that was always a lie because horses can't draw. I mean, and if they would draw, they would draw a totally different picture than those. Yeah, so yeah, that's weird. Um, that was also a really one that I actually thought about putting into fake on news. So the FDA approves a robot that can find your way in, insert a needle, and draw blood without human help. That also means it's better to kill you, and it can also administer drugs that you should not have. But it feels like I mean, look at the size of that thing. You know, uh yeah, it's it's interesting to see if that really is that that much more efficient than actually have a person draw blood.

SPEAKER_00 47:31

And is that even the image? Is that sorry, is that even the device? Like when when you see the image at the top now, I never quite know if something's like a proof of concept AI image trying to show you what it could look like or a real photo's taken. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:43

Is it and I mean is it already approved? Yeah, there's approved. Okay, if VA approved. There are people, I mean, probably uh that's what the nurses tell me. There are people where it's really easy um to draw blood, and there are people where it's really, really hard to draw blood because of whatever physiology. And um the question would be apparently if this robot will try five times and then call the nurse, or if it just continues finding your vein.

SPEAKER_00 48:14

Something tells me it's gonna give you an answer, like a lot of the AI. It's gonna go, it's gonna look to give you an answer, so it's probably just gonna administer it. But yeah, guardrails, guardrails, guardrails.

SPEAKER_02 48:22

This is great. I got four pints now. Let's see what more is coming out here. Like, yeah, nurses always love me because of my skin color. It's like you can see my veins shining through really, really easily. So that's really a fun thing that ginger people have, it seems. So yeah, but uh, I mean, this is again like uh uh I like the article telling about like, oh, you might be worried about getting your blood taken by a human, so how about a robot? And I'm like, really? I mean, do I trust the machine more than a human in this case? Like uh it feels bizarre, but yeah, it's uh uh I mean if it's already approved, it went through like lots of things. So, I mean, we're almost out of time, but like let's talk about yesterday. So, uh Mark, what were your impressions of the of the hackathon? And did you do anything roboty there as well?

SPEAKER_01 49:11

Or was it only about agents and AI? It was only about agents and AI, no robots involved. Um, the people, it was like probably a mixed cloud mixed crowd. They had um pretty good ideas, and what I love and about hackathons nowadays is even people that aren't familiar with coding or have like this proper education can try to get their ideas to to a state where they can be showcased. And there were quite a few, uh there were quite a few people that were in this state, and they were using the regular agent harnesses and building interesting stuff. Um, for example, there was this one guy who built um who hacked together. It was in a in a venue that was called Music Hall, and they connected the dots, and they're like, okay, so I'm gonna build something with music, so you could actually punch in the chords on a web UI, and then it checked using a graph database, checked if these chords have been used in previous um music pieces from so it's probably something for for a bigger music company. Um, but also interesting for smaller musicians. And this is the fun part about these types of hackathons now, because I remember back then when we used to do these hackathons, for example, with with Microsoft back then, those were usually a couple of days. For example, for the HoloLens, you can't hack something together in one or two days, you need almost kind of like three days or an entire week, and now you just have four hours or something, and people come up with crazy things. Can't say any different. So um, there was also this guy who hacked together um a tax advisor with voice. So I mean, you obviously whisper it, then you trans uh transcribe it, and then put into an agent, and then um use the graph database for the documents and and all the the the tax laws. But I thought, like, hey, this might even be better than my own tax accountant, so not bad. And he did this also in a few hours, so impressive, really, really impressive. So I like where I like the directions where hackathons are going now.

SPEAKER_02 51:28

Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, Elster is basically the official German uh government software to do your taxes, it's not fun at all. It's uh uh yeah, it's pretty bizarre. I never understood the name because that basically uh uh what's what's the bird's name? It's basically a bird. Yeah, yeah, but the English name for it is basically a bird that's that's uh that steals uh uh uh shiny things, and that's the official name of that. Yeah, Magpie.

SPEAKER_00 51:53

That's that's not got good kind of connotations, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:56

Yeah, it's really bizarre, but yeah. But uh, I mean I like the I like that these hackathons are just working out nowadays, and I mean Neo Fuji was a partner, and of course it was the the uh uh the the the group that we normally I I wanted to go, I couldn't get yesterday because I was just uh uh wound up in other things. But uh it's good to see people feeling inspired to do things. The uh the follow-up was always my issue with hackathons as well, like what happens next, and I mean we give people prizes, and then basically, yeah. And uh we talked about it earlier. The other problem was internal hackathons when you had it in companies, then you had your product managers show, like, oh well, that's that's done now, isn't it? Like, okay, we can release this now. And you're like, no, it's a proof of concept that it can be done. Uh it's probably not a good idea to release it immediately because of the security issues and performance issues and these kind of things, but that's a step we we seem to be losing. A lot of people, the builders that we met in San Francisco as well, like they don't even know what their tool is doing. And if it doesn't have a feature, then they just rewrite the whole thing from scratch rather than just making one feature differently.

SPEAKER_01 53:03

Yeah, and to what you just said, um, the product managers who didn't knew about the quality issues with MVPs or POCs um from hackathons. I mean, these builders, I I I I'd argue the quality of the code builders produce and release is probably not worse than what the people were doing at the hackathon. So we are at this hey, looks good enough, let's release point.

SPEAKER_02 53:33

Yeah. And then, like, oh my god, we've been hacked. How did that happen? Yeah, the password was one, two, three, four. Uh like, yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_00 53:40

It might settle in though as well. It might take a bit of time, and then actually it kind of gets to the point where you know you can use the vibe codey kind of or the kind of hackathon using vibe coding tools, things like this, as a way of just getting, you know, understanding that it is just a V uh MVP and that it can actually help you to identify some of those issues rather than sort of just have them and ignore them. Um, so hopefully, you know, the people with more experience will then guide the the kind of hackathons or the vibe coders or the people that are less technical to kind of learn that. That's my optimistic hope, but who knows?

SPEAKER_02 54:11

Well, it's a bit like the thing that he built with like chords, the same bit like code. I remember GitHub Copilot in a in a demo version that I had or in a in a preview version would tell you like this code is copyrighted because it's from that GitHub repo with that license. So I think that's a very important bit that needs to happen as well. And Deezer uh in Berlin did this uh AI uh generate uh AI detection tool, like if the music was generated by AI and automatically discards it now because they had a problem that 90% of the uploaded music is AI generated these days. And yeah, I don't know, don't know why that is a flooding thing, but I mean there was uh there was a big scam on Spotify as well, where somebody generated AI music and then generated bots that would listen to it and then get actually money from Spotify because of the high listening numbers.

SPEAKER_01 55:02

The internet is that a valid business model because paying the bots, like paying the tokens, is probably not cheap.

SPEAKER_02 55:12

Well, I mean, if you'd really need to go through, I mean, if you if you run it on a local machine, then it's not an issue, is it?

SPEAKER_01 55:19

Oh, fair, true.

SPEAKER_02 55:21

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 55:33

That's that is happening. That is happening. And yeah, I've even seen it on the on the manual, you know. I've even seen it as a manual thing that there was when I was playing in a band, there were it was known that there were bands that would put their songs up and then they would do that, leaving their own phones on, getting it running around the around the clock, so that it would at least have a few hundred uh views so that it didn't look like it was unpopular. And now we've just gone, agents can do that.

SPEAKER_01 55:55

And you can also buy listens and and and clicks and these type of things for Spotify. I there were like a few con uh a few things going on in the German music scene a while ago where artists were accused of buying these uh streamings. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 56:16

Now, uh I mean the other thing that I had uh I can't remember her name right now, uh, but I will have her on a podcast soon. A friend of mine is doing uh uh teaching AI with robots and building like uh little robots that you put together in a bodular fashion and then generate code the same way. And I love that this physical bit is coming in again because we did that with kids in the past. We had like like games that were basically like make a robot go for forward and backward. And I remember notebots when NoteShares came out, and people then controlled things, and you're like, okay, I just wrote 400 lines of JavaScript that I can't read, and now an LED is blinking. That's amazing. Uh it's uh I think that physical thing is always something that takes it away, that makes it more interesting for people. And it would be interesting to talk to Lego what Mindstorms is doing if they actually went into D AI space. Do you know anything about that?

SPEAKER_01 57:08

Discontinued as a huge Lego nerd, this is discontinued, uh was discontinued a while ago. Um, so yeah, because you just mentioned so yeah, there are these robots and those they they bring these like programming into the physical world. And I've seen this with my daughter. I was giving her my mindstorm kit and letting her like this is uh what is the name of this program? But it's basically block-based programming. So you drag and drop the blocks and then you create the flows this way. Scratch. And they unfortunately discontinued that. But these mindstorms, like these blocks, can be apparently reflashed with so it runs proper code or proper software. Um, but yeah, Lego does not have any interest in pursuing this from what I understand. Um, otherwise, they would have jumped on the AI story right now because it kind of, as you just said, it kind of makes sense. Um, for example, I do have down in my basement, I do have um connected my open claw instance to my SO the Lil Robot SO101 arms, which is interesting. Um apparently writing robot code directly is a lot easier because if you have a model that does all these things, or like a VLA or so, it takes a lot of time, right? So it's not like real time. You can only say, hey, there are these five things on the table, sort all everything that is yellow to the left box and everything that is red to the right box. But if you have, for example, two arms that are competing, um, they crash into each other because the model is not the inference is not fast enough, and so on and so forth. So we are not there yet, but we can already play with these things and it's fun, it's really fun because you just said you said this digital kind of like uh yeah, not not graspable thing now becomes something that you can actually see that can actually do things, move things, and interact with the environment.

SPEAKER_02 59:12

It's a bit like when when teaching math and using like generative uh uh uh computing and showing how beautiful a sign curve can be and these kind of things, rather than just telling people like, oh, uh find the X and Y, and just basically give me the number, and that's that. Like it's uh I I I really like immersive teaching, and I think as a physical component to it is a very interesting thing. I um I remember Makey Makey and I showed that to Dan the other day. That was basically that little keyboard thing that you connect, and you uh uh I remembered like having a banana and playing music on it and these kind of things. So it was it was really fun to see in the educational space that these things uh were interesting to sort out. Um let's see where this is going. So yeah, cool. So I guess this is it for today. That was We are Developers Live for today. Uh again, yesterday was We A Developers Day, so we got 30 days to go and meet you in San Francisco. So if you want to have a ticket, uh contact us if you want to see you saw the QR code earlier in the show where you can actually get 50% off. And um, yeah, generally we um showing things.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:23

I saw a tool showcase, yes. I have uh slides to play on its own. But there you go. I thought I'd line that one up so we can end the show by playing that one out and then uh after we've uh done the outro.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:32

Exactly. I totally missed that one. Okay, yeah, let's talk about a tool that I found interesting that you can play with. Let's watch that video. Mac OCR is a free tool that allows you to extract text from images locally on your computer. This enables you to find images faster and agents to convert them without using up any tokens. Check out the full article for more information. If you open an image in macOS using QuickView by pressing the spacebar, you can click the icon on the bottom right corner to highlight all text in the image. If you then press Command A, you select the text and copy it to the clipboard using Command C. If you open the image in preview, you can choose from Tools Text Selection and highlight part of the image with text to copy. This is an offline feature of macOS running entirely on your computer. This is great, but wouldn't it be better to be able to do that as a batch process for a lot of images? Enter Mac OCR. Mac OCR was written by Hiroki Osame and is available as open source on GitHub. It is a Mac OS command line tool that reads text from images and PDFs and creates searchable PDFs. It runs entirely on your Mac with Apple's Vision Framework, nothing is uploaded to any cloud. For example, if you wanted to create text files of all the PNG images in a folder, you can run the following command. This now takes each image, extracts the text from it, and creates a file. This can be extremely helpful to make images more findable. You can now use the search in Finder to find the images containing a certain text. The search will return the text file, and you know the image of the same name is in the same folder. As you can use Mac OCR in your own scripts, it also makes your images findable and indexable for agents without burning tons of tokens. The only caveat is that this is not a direct image-to-text conversion. Instead, OCR means that you detect letter shapes and layout. This means that the final text can contain false information and has a layout component to it. For example, it will detect hyphens and add line breaks. So if you want to reuse the text in a different layout, you'd need to clean that up. It is also not a good idea to use this to create automatic alternative text, as this one should describe the image, not just grab the text it contains. Yeah, I really I really started to use that for a lot of things, and especially for agentic workflows as well, because uh yeah, uh analyzing an image by cloud costs a lot of tokens. Um basically, why not do it directly on your machine if you know that the machine is going to be a Mac machine, it actually does that. Um I think there might be something in Windows doing the same thing. But this has been a really, really cool tool. I reached out to the developer as well, so we might have an in a coffee with developers or even on the live show, because he's in Japan, so that could work time-wise as well. And uh he works for Vessel and he just does that in his free time. And I think that's the kind of tools that I want to see more, like basically to do these things. If you want to see more of those tool uh shows, we're gonna record a few of those. If you have a tool that uh you think it's worthwhile, tell us about it, and we can actually do a review of it like this as well. And I guess other things to say is like we got the DevRel, uh we got the event coming up, we got uh the newsletter, we got uh uh be look for writers for our magazine as well, so you can uh can send us those things in as well. So uh take a look at what's happening in the description of this one as well, because there's lots of stuff how you can take part. And of course, I want to thank Mark for jumping in in the last moment, uh, because I forgot to hire to get somebody for this week. And it's always good fun to meet you. And um do you have any last words for people out there? Any words of wisdom?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:21

Uh enjoy coding, have fun, and also thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:27

Cool. Thanks very much, Mark Ploggers. Thanks very much, Daniel. This was We Are Developers Live for today, and we see you next Wednesday.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:35

Bye.