Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| There we go. That's a new thing. It had the logo for a second on the live stream before it had us. Well, that's exciting.
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Sam:
[0:12]
| Okay, I guess we'll get started. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. For anybody who watches the live stream, which have been a few scattered views lately, i still have the something went wrong monkey on the thing that like supposed to show me comments, i don't know why i don't really care because we don't really watch comments like during the live stream really usually sometimes maybe but as long as i have the something went wrong monkey i'm not, and i have i did just check like the last four or five episodes no new comments on anything so that's cool, the podcast really isn't about youtube it's just like an add-on an add-on just like, you know it was one extra click so we figured why not and it gives me yet another backup, case something goes wrong with the other ways i save the stuff for later for editing and putting out the real podcast.
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Sam:
[1:17]
| Anyway let's go.
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Sam:
[1:45]
| Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, July 25th, 2026. It's just after 2030 UTC, and it's just me. I'm Sam Minter. No Yvonne Baudet. And look, he's on vacation. He gave me plenty of heads up, like shortly after we recorded last week's show. He's like, next week I won't be here on vacation. He's in the Bahamas, I believe. Actually, I think at this very moment while I'm He's on the plane on the way back from the Bahamas, but judging from what he's been posting on the curmudgeon's corner slack. But yeah, I send out the email that I usually send out asking for potential co-hosts and got no answers this time. As usual I like didn't include the like the last couple of people to co-host so like Ed and Bruce who are usually up for it like a bunch of the time weren't included in my invite because I try to like.
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Sam:
[2:44]
| Rotate and have some new new people but nobody else answered me so it's just me, and also I was fairly constrained on my schedule and I said like the only time I could really do it was saturday morning pacific time and because i couldn't do it friday i had stuff going on, and i've and saturday afternoon i'm supposed to be out doing signs for my wife's campaign, it's getting close to her primary so i promised her like four hours on saturday four hours on sunday for the next few weeks and yeah that didn't work out at least not so far because i knew i I didn't have a co-host. So I slept in. Well, I slept in for a couple reasons. One was I stayed up all night. I was working on some Robin Letter stuff. And I didn't really get started on the Robin Letter stuff till almost midnight.
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Sam:
[3:40]
| So I just kept powering through and I got to, you know, a stopping point. I didn't actually finish the thing I was working on entirely, but I got to a reasonable stopping point, but not till like 6 a.m. So I went to sleep at 6 a.m. And then around 9, 9.30, my wife calls me, my wife Brandy, because she had gone out to do doorbelling and such, but realized that she'd forgot her wallet at home. And she wanted to, like, get a coffee or whatever. And she didn't have her wallet. And she's going to something else later in the day where, you know, she'd need to spend money. And so she's like, can you bring me my wallet?
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Sam:
[4:21]
| And of course i'm like yes i'll bring you my wallet no i'll bring bring you your wallet what you know what i mean in it but i was of course i'd only like slept like three hours or something at this point so i'm tired i get up i'm gonna and at first i'm like you know i'm gonna record the beginning of the podcast then i'll go bring you your wallet, and then i'll like go to a coffee shop and i'll prepare for like the signs and all the other stuff, but alex was like no can you can you like come back to do the preparing for the signs, so that you you know you leave the computer because he's been using my computer because his computer that he's actually using right now at this very second is old so he tends to borrow my laptop or my wife's laptop instead these days, and he's got various projects he's working on them.
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Sam:
[5:11]
| Anyway so i'm like fine i'll do that i'll go i'll just go first to deliver this, to your mom and then i'll come back and i'll do all the stuff i need to do at home and then i'll do signs so i went i'm like okay i will locate brandy, And then aim the GPS at her location. And I knew she'd be moving around because she was like going around knocking on doors. But I'm like, I'll go to where she is now. And then I'll relocate her and she'll be close to where she was. And then I'll relocate again and find her after like two or three steps, right? So first of all, she's in like where she was doorbelling is off at one of the parts of her district that is the furthest from our house. Like, okay, fine. No problem. And so I head there, and, you know, so it's like a half hour to get there anyway. At one point, like, I'm almost at the spot where it says she is, and I make a wrong turn.
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Sam:
[6:17]
| Well, specifically, I'm looking at the GPS, and I know I need to take the next left, and this brings me to something that, by the way, you know, because I was go to where my wife is, And I'm using Apple's ecosystem and Find My and all that. I usually use Waze. But because there's like one click to go to where somebody you've located in Find My and just route to them in Apple Maps, I was using Apple Maps this time.
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Sam:
[6:48]
| And there's, you know, both Apple Maps and Google Maps have bugged me for a long time. And I've explained it one way, which today I've realized was wrong. Okay, I've said for a long time, like when I'm using both Apple Maps and Google Maps, I get frustrated because it seems to lag your actual position by like half a second or something. So like compared to waves which was like always like snap on this is where i am right now and you could see when you were like approaching a turn and know exactly and like it made perfect sense right, and i was always frustrated because it seemed like apple maps and google maps there seemed to be a lag notice i keep saying seemed to be, if you asked me before today i would say There was a lag, okay? But, you know, so it would always, because I'm always sort of keeping an eye on the map and judging when to turn by seeing myself come up on the turn on the map, right? And so I would always be frustrated by doing this on both Google Maps and Apple Maps because it always seemed like I was further away from the turn than I actually was.
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Sam:
[8:07]
| Whereas on Waze, it would always match up exactly with my expectations and I'd turn right as I was approaching the turn, et cetera. And so, like, I'd missed turns a variety of times when using Google Maps or Apple Maps because of this, because I'm like, it's lagging. And like, I sort of was trying to change my mindset to like, whenever I'm using one of those be like, okay, remember, it lags a little bit. So you have to turn before you think the turn is because it always looks like there's more space left before the turn on the map than there really is.
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Sam:
[8:46]
| Today, after I missed this turn, I realized, actually, sorry, I realized this yesterday, but it still got me today anyway, because I'm still not used to it. I realized this while navigating somewhere yesterday, and then was thinking about it today while navigating, but still missed the turn. But look, but I realized the problem is not it is lagging because I very carefully watched the position while I was approaching a turn, and it was showing me exactly where I was. But. It was zooming in more aggressively than Waze does. So what happened, basically, is as you are approaching the actual turn, it is zooming in on the map to show you details of that turn, at such a rate that the physical distance on the screen between you and the turn actually stays the same. So it looks like you're not getting any closer to that turn. But in fact, you are getting closer to the turn. It's just simultaneously zooming in at the exact same rate. So it doesn't look like you're getting closer to the turn.
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Sam:
[10:05]
| And I realized what Waze does is it just doesn't zoom in quite as far. It also zooms in as you approach a turn. But it stops zooming in a little further away from the view of the intersection. And one reason behind this, to be fair, is Google Map and Apple Maps tend to give a detailed view of the intersection. Like you can see all the lanes, you can see the shape of the intersection, you can see where the turn lanes are and where the regular lanes are, whereas Waze doesn't show that level of detail, even if you zoom in. And I actually like that level of detail that Apple Maps and Google Maps provide. And I'm like, I wish Waze had that. But because they have that level of detail available to show you, they zoom in further and zoom in longer. So as you are actually approaching the intersection, it is still zooming in. And it is zooming in at a rate that almost exactly matches. So it looks like you're not getting closer. And I'm sure this is something if I used Google Maps or Apple Maps all the time, I would have gotten used to a long time ago and it would be natural to me and of course I would know where the turn was.
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Sam:
[11:20]
| But because I use Waze all the time, and Waze doesn't do that last little bit of zoom, every time I use Apple Maps or Google Maps, I get thrown off by this. And even though on the drive over there, I was actively thinking about this issue and thinking about it, and as I approached various intersections, looking at the map and confirming that my hypothesis was correct, and it was, As I approached this particular intersection, close to where Brandy's location was.
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Sam:
[11:54]
| Another car came the other direction, right at where the turn was, obscured the view of the turn because it was a small street, not a big street, and I drove right past it. And because I was out in a rural area at this point, as opposed to like a place where there's like streets every five feet, the route it gave me when it rerouted, it was like a big like two mile loop just to get back to where I was a few seconds earlier. Now I probably could have turned around in like somebody's driveway or something, but I did, I did the two mile loop and it took extra time. And then I got to the spot where Brandy had been. And then, now I was being stubborn because while this was going on. Hold on. Alex is making me look at something. Oh.
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Break:
[13:02]
| Naf.
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Sam:
[13:04]
| FNAF 2. Alex just successfully completed FNAF 2. He's very excited. Okay, what was I saying?
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Sam:
[13:19]
| Okay. While all this had been going on, I think even slightly before I missed the turn, Brandy had texted me, and because I had CarPlay on it, had read this out loud, so I knew this. She texted me, I'm no longer there, but I've stopped moving, and she sent me an address to where her new location was. But I didn't pause to change the address. I was like, okay, I will stick with my plan. I will get to where she was, and then I will relocate to her next location, and then I'll go there, and presumably each one will be closer than the one before, and I will sort of zoom in on her, and I will find her. So I did that once I got to the place where she had been. And, well, of course, she was like 20 minutes back in the direction I had just came from. Just come from.
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Sam:
[14:13]
| So, you know, I'm like, okay, fine. If at the moment she had texted me that she was no longer there, I had stopped and put in the new address where she was, I would have been there like a long time ago. So, but I went to the new place and I got to the new place after the 20 minutes or whatever. And I, it was, her car was there, but she was not. So I located her again and she was like, you know, half a mile away down the street. So I found her and I picked her up and then I, you know, she had been doorbelling and talking to people and, you know, the whole thing I was, I was going to bring her her wallet and her purse that she'd left at home. I gave her those, but then she's like, you know.
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Sam:
[14:58]
| She needed like a bio break. I'm like, so I offered to like drive her to the nearest gas station and then bring her back where she was. And so I did that.
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Sam:
[15:06]
| And, you know, and then after all this, I had to drive home, which was another half hour. And so by the time all this is done and I'm at home now, it's afternoon. It's no longer morning. I'm way behind. I'm doing this segment, and I've now talked for like 15 minutes or something, on this segment, and I haven't even gotten to the two movies yet. I'm going to do the two movies in a second. And then, as usual, I will take a break. I will go do those signs. I'll do my sign prep stuff. I do a whole bunch of stuff on spreadsheets to figure out where I'm going and keep track of what I'm doing and all that kind of stuff. I'm going to do that. That'll take about an hour. Then I'll finally go out and start doing signs. And my target is four hours of signs today, four hours of signs tomorrow. And I think what I'm going to do is the first hour of the four is going to be checking signs I've already put out to see their status and adjust them if necessary. Which, by the way, there have been a rash. I've got all kinds of reports in the last week, and I've seen a few myself of places where I put out signs where the signs have been removed or knocked down, or defaced or whatever. And so I'm going to try to hit some of those and then three hours of putting out new signs.
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Sam:
[16:29]
| That's the plan anyway.
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Sam:
[16:31]
| But it's so late at this point. I can probably, well, I can definitely still get four hours in before dark, but it's getting closer. And then I've got more Robin Letter stuff I have to do and the rest of the segments of this podcast, which I'll probably do tomorrow or whatever. But tomorrow's gonna be busy too. Anyway.
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Sam:
[16:53]
| I'll do a couple movies now, and I'll do newsy stuff in the second half of the show. Maybe I'll plan for only two segments this time, not three. We'll see how it goes. Okay, movies. Movies. Mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-movies. Okay, you probably didn't need that. Okay, I got two movies this time. Number one, from 2012, Paranorman. Kid's movie? Wow.
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Sam:
[17:27]
| Wikipedia description. Not the plot yet. I'll get to that in a second. A 2012 American independent stop-motion animated comedy horror film. Directed by blah, blah, blah. Stars blah, blah, blah. It is the first stop-motion film to use a 3D color printer to create character faces. In the film, yeah, I'll jump to the plot. First couple paragraphs of the plot, like I often do. In the small town of Blythe Hollow, Massachusetts, Norman Babcock is an 11-year-old outcast who speaks with the dead, including his late paternal grandmother and various ghosts in town. Almost no one believes him, and he is isolated emotionally from his family, while being looked down upon by his own peers around the school. Neil Down, an overweight boy who is also bullied, finds in Norman a kindred spirit. After rehearsing a school play commemorating the town's execution of a witch three centuries ago, the boys are confronted by Norman's estranged and seemingly deranged great-uncle, Mr. Pendergast, who tells Norman that he soon must take up his regular ritual to protect the town. Soon after this encounter, Mr. Pendergrast dies of a heart attack.
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Sam:
[18:53]
| During the official performance of the school play, Norman has a nightmarish vision of the town's past, in which he is pursued through the woods by townsfolk on a witch hunt, embarrassing himself and leading to a heated argument with his paranoid father Perry, who later grounds him. His mother Sandra tells him that his father's manner is stern because he is afraid for him. The next day, Norman sees Pendergast's spirit, who tells him that the ritual must be performed with a certain book before sundown that day, then makes him swear to complete the task. Pendergast's spirit is set free and crosses over. Norman is at first reluctant to go because he is scared, but his grandmother tells him it's all right to be scared, as long as he does not let it change who he is. Norman sets off to retrieve the book from Pendergast's house, having to take it from his corpse. Dot, dot, dot. Things progress. He has to do this. There's things with ghosts. There's things with town folks. All of this kind of stuff. I liked it. It was cute. I'll be honest, before I read that description, I had forgotten what it was about. I was like, Paranorman, what was that again? What was that? I don't know. But it all came back to me when I read the description here and it was cute.
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Sam:
[20:21]
| It it's just a fun little animated movie nothing too deep nothing too like unexpected or profound but it was fun i'm gonna give it a thumbs up because you need those kinds of fun movies, not everything has to be you know deep and profound Oscar-winning, best movie of all time stuff. It's nice. Let's see, what was its, anything about its reception and blah, blah, blah. They usually have that.
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Sam:
[20:52]
| Rotten Tomatoes, 89%. Average rating, 7.3 out of 10. Critical Consensus, beautifully animated and solidly scripted. Paranorman will entertain and frighten older children while providing surprisingly thoughtful fare for their parents. Okay.
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Sam:
[21:13]
| Yeah, I liked it. Thumbs up. Good job. speaking of movies that do get amazing critical acclaim and all that my next movie, is number one on the 1998 afi hundred years hundred movies list, citizen kane from 1941 which i actually did talk about close to the time that i actually saw it one of the times emily joined us on the show, And I mentioned that by complete coincidence, you know, the day we were, when it was next in line, we'd actually watched number two, Casablanca. And then I happened to look online and discovered that like the very next day, Citizen Kane was actually playing in the theaters in our town as part of a series like, I forget which chain does it. But every summer, like, there's a chain that every weekend plays old classic movies. You can go see them. Anyway, it just happened by pure coincidence that it was that day for Citizen Kane. So we went and saw it in the actual theater.
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Sam:
[22:29]
| And so when I talked with Emily about this a few weeks back, not a few weeks, it was a lot longer ago than that at this point, last year sometime. It was fine. I liked it, I enjoyed it I do not however feel like it really earns the number one slot.
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Sam:
[22:51]
| I think a lot of it is, you know, is that it was a pioneer and it used a lot of filmmaking techniques for the first time and it was sort of radical for its time. And you see a lot of tropes and a lot of camera work styles and all kinds of things that later became, you know, standard fare in movies. And this was like the first big production to, to do a lot of these stuff, a lot of these stuff, these things. And, you know, and it was, it was sort of an epic and had a bunch of scale to it. And that, that was all fine. But, you know, I, I felt like when actually watching it, it's sort of slow because.
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Sam:
[23:40]
| It's a little bit dry. I was spoiled as to the main sort of mystery, like what is Rosebud? I'd never seen the movie in its entirety before seeing it in the theaters with Alex back last year. But, you know, I knew the main beats of it just from being around.
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Sam:
[24:05]
| Speaking of the main beats of it, I should read the plot summary from Wikipedia. Here's the beginning of it. In a mansion called Xanadu, part of a vast palatial estate in Florida, the elderly Charles Foster Kane is on his deathbed. Holding a snow globe, he utters his last word, Rosebud, and dies. A newsreel obituary tells the life story of Kane, an enormously wealthy newspaper publisher and industry magnate. Cain's death becomes sensational news around the world, and the Newsreel's producer tasks reporter Jerry Thompson with discovering the meaning of rosebud. Thompson sets out to interview Cain's friends and associates. He tries to approach Cain's second wife, Susan Alexander Cain, now an alcoholic nightclub owner, but she refuses to talk to him. Thompson goes to the private archive of the late banker Walter Parks Thatcher. Through Thatcher's written memoirs, Thompson learns about Cain's rise from a Colorado boarding house and the decline of his fortune.
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Sam:
[25:17]
| A couple more paragraphs here. In 1871, gold was discovered through a mining deed belonging to Cain's mother, Mary Cain. She hired Thatcher to establish a trust that would provide for Cain's education and assume guardianship of him, protecting him from his brutal father. While the parents and Thatcher discussed arrangements inside the boarding house, the young Cain played happily with a sled in the snow outside. When his parents introduced him to Thatcher and told him he would live with him, the boy struck Thatcher with his sled and attempted to run away. By the time Kane gained control of his trust at the age of 25, the mind's productivity and Thatcher's prudent investing had made Kane one of the richest men in the world. Kane took control of the New York Inquirer newspaper and embarked on a career of yellow journalism, publishing scandalous articles that attacked Thatcher's and his own business interests. Cain sold his newspaper Empire to Thatcher after the 1929 stock market crash left him short of cash, dot, dot, dot. It continues. You sort of follow through Cain's life, and he has various ups and downs, various, you know, romantic entanglements, various business entanglements, various other things, and it goes through. It goes through. And, you know, famously, Charles Foster Kane in this movie is intended to be.
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Sam:
[26:46]
| Mainly William Randolph Hearst, but also apparently a composite with Joseph Pulitzer as well, and perhaps a little bit of a couple other folks. I'm looking at the Wikipedia page. Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick as well, as well as some aspects of the screenwriter's life. So it's a composite character of a bunch of people, but famously, it's William Randolph Hearst, okay, mostly. And then, you know, it's obviously fictionalized. It's not really William Randolph Hearst's biography, but it's, you know, intended to sort of be like that. And again, the movie did keep my attention, and I wanted to know what was going on, and I wanted to know what was happening next with the guy. Because, you know, I mentioned I kind of knew the main plot beats, but at a super high level, I knew it was a William Randolph Hearst-type story, and I knew what Rosebud was, but I really didn't know any of the details in between at all. And so it was it was interesting to see all that but you know again it's sort of, and it was a good i'm not saying it wasn't a good movie it was a good movie it probably deserves to be in this top 100 list but i think at number one it's overrated like i i i've.
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Sam:
[28:13]
| Said before when i talked about casablanca a few weeks ago i would rate casablanca higher than this movie like if i I had to pick a movie to rewatch, like, and I don't rewatch movies all that often, but I'm, I'm ready. I would watch Casablanca again. Casablanca was a cool movie to watch. It gripped me from, you know, from beginning to end and it left me like, you know, emotional as, as it ended and all that kind of stuff. Citizen Kane was... It was more an academic exercise to watch it, you know, and it was interesting in that sense, but it wasn't like, I don't know. Like I said, it's probably a top 100 movie. I'm not sure it's even top 10, let alone number one. You know, there are a bunch of these others or a bunch of the others in the top 100 that I went through, which took me like 30 years to get through this stupid AFI top 100 list, by the way. But I did it. And Alex and I have now restarted it and are working with the 2007 revision of it. And as of this moment, let's see, we're back up to. Where are we back up to? ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba.
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Sam:
[29:35]
| Ba then we we've watched 100 all the way to 71 already our next movie is going to be number 70 on the revised 2007 list, and there are a bunch of good movies on this on this top 100 list and i would probably put a decent number of them above Citizen Kane. Maybe I'd put Citizen Kane at like, I don't know, 50 or 60 or somewhere. Not number one. I think it's only number one because of the, you know, they give like the criteria that this is judged for. You know, first of all, it's just the length, to qualify length, and it has to be English language, American, etc.
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Sam:
[30:17]
| It has to have critical recognition, major award winner, popularity over time, historical significance, cultural impact. I think this is here because of historical significance and maybe cultural impact. As a just what is the experience of watching it today? I don't think it's number one. Okay, that's it. I'm moving on. It is time for a break. I'm going to play the break, and then I'm going to go off and do all those signs and all that other stuff, and I'll record more tomorrow morning or something. Who knows? But this next, this break, is an Apple Dream. It is Apple Dream 5, which has appeared on the podcast before, so it's not a new one. But it's probably been a long, long time since it was played. So anyway, here is the break, which is Apple Dream 5. And back after this, and when we get back, we'll talk about actual, like, newsy stuff. And, you know, at the moment, I don't know, we got some Mitch McConnell stuff. We got, there's a new prime minister in the UK.
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Sam:
[31:31]
| We got, what else? We got Donald Trump talking about communism a lot. He was at the White House Correspondents' dinner. We got the price of oil going back up again. We got a bunch of stuff. I don't know which of them I'll talk about. I'll figure that out when I get back. And who knows, there may be new breaking news that I'm not even aware of now because it hasn't happened yet. Anyway, here's that Apple Dream, Apple Dream 5, enjoy.
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Break:
[31:56]
| I was at a booth and there was this guy who was, there's stuff, but he was, he couldn't properly, he could do, programs that did programs that wrote programs and modified programs and stuff, but he couldn't do it properly for iTunes because it couldn't support old versions of the iPhone properly. I could do new versions but not old versions and I was going to talk to him about making something that works with the new versions only but he was scowling at me and somehow we were all there at this sort of exhibition thing and, the the person who's physics girl from YouTube was there giving a speech or something and the, Person I was with said, she's like you, but for something. It wasn't physics, though. And I was like, well, not really. But that was before the part with the guy with the phone. And there was more before that, but I don't really remember stuff before that anymore. And there were people with me. I think including you. But I don't know. Bye.
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Sam:
[33:23]
| Okay i'm back as expected it's much later it's the next day it's july 26 just after 19 utc, so what i'm gonna do i just have like a handful of items on my list here and i'm just gonna lightning round them because i don't think any one of them is like a whole segment.
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Sam:
[33:47]
| Oh putting out signs yesterday went fine it's good i did the whole four hours four hours in, in mill creek this time mill creek washington mill creek by the way, of of all the areas in my wife's district is the most hostile to signs meaning, like of all of the intersections of interest there are a bunch that are, in sort of areas that are managed by homeowners associations that just will not accept signs. Like if you put one out, it'll be gone instantly. And so I know not to try anymore in those areas. They're just not allowed. And so basically all of the signs are on the two major streets on one side or the other, but everything in between, nothing, don't even think about it. Don't even think about it. And it's just, and Mill Creek of the areas This is also like fairly like, I don't know. It's, it's, it's more compact and it's so like.
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Sam:
[34:59]
| Whenever I go out to do a round of signs, I pick one of the towns, and I use towns generously because it means it's not like legal entity necessarily. It's like, what's their postal address? Like the four big ones that have presence in my wife's district are Everett, Mill Creek, Bothell, and Snohomish. And Mill Creek is the smallest geographically. I guess Everett's—because.
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Sam:
[35:30]
| My wife's district doesn't have all of Everett. It has a little slice of it. That's probably not that much—it feels bigger than the Mill Creek one, but I don't think it actually is. It's probably actually smaller. But anyway, the Mill Creek one is compact, so I'm zipping around between signs and not going very far in between them. Whereas like for instance the Snohomish one includes not just the town of Snohomish itself but basically the entire part of my wife's district that isn't in one of those other towns so it's got, a huge amount of distance north to south, and huge portions of it are rural or semi-rural. So as I'm going between target intersections to put signs out, I've got a bunch of driving in between. I'm driving all over the place. It's scenic, and there's pretty woods and pretty things. Whereas, yeah, I don't know.
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Sam:
[36:33]
| Nothing against Mill Creek. Mill Creek is fine. but it's a it's a relatively compact residential primarily area so there's not as much to see, i mean there are some cool looking houses it's a relatively well off area most of it and but yeah nah.
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Sam:
[36:51]
| Anyway it went well i i always pick like i have this spreadsheet and i like rank the intersections i want to target and like i i re-rank it, before each round and what's the highest ranking intersection i haven't done yet and then i will do the entire four hours that i'm out in one town rather than going back and forth all around everything because, that that lets you be a little bit more efficient snow homish is still a little bit less efficient because it's so big so i end up going from north to south north south east west up down and, yes i know yeah i could theoretically map out all the intersections i want to hit and like do a traveling salesman problem kind of thing on it. I do have them, but I have them sorted by priority, like, which for me corresponds roughly to population density. So like, I hit the, so I am going, bopping up and down left and right, you know, rather than going in sort of map order. Within sort of tied priority, I am sort of going roughly north to south, but.
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Sam:
[38:00]
| Roughly. Roughly. Not entirely. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, I have a few little things, but nothing that seemed like it was worth a whole segment. So let's just lightning round them, and go like through, and do that little gigaboo-boo. Yeah, that. Why isn't that...
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Sam:
[38:24]
| Okay, first of all, UK has a new Prime Minister. Burn them. He seems to be taking a play from Mamdani's playbook, play, playbook, in the first few days. I guess it's fairly common, but, like Trump did it too, actually. Like it's sort of just try to start out by making some immediate changes to sort of please the base. From what I understand, he has caused a little bit of strife by immediately, getting rid of a whole bunch of the cabinet that were loyalists to the old prime minister. And people are like, you didn't have to get rid of all of us. You could have kept some of us. And apparently there's some hard feelings. But I mean, come on, what do you expect? I mean, this is a normal pattern everywhere for leaders. They bring in their new team, their own team when they start up. You know, we're only a few days in. I don't have a lot more to say about it. I don't know anything particularly insightful. I just thought it was worth noting. You know, and we still have the Count Ben-Face election coming up. We'll see how that goes. Maybe someday he'll be prime minister. That'd be interesting, right? Right.
|
Sam:
[39:46]
| Okay, next up. See, that was quick. Lightning round. Like, I didn't have, like, 10, 15 minutes of stuff to say on that. I was just sort of noting it in passing almost, right? Okay, next up. Trump has been talking a lot in the last few days about communism. The last few weeks, I guess. Since Democratic Socialists won a bunch of races and primaries in New York a little while ago, and the Democratic Party sort of centrists have been freaking out a little bit about them winning and oh no, they're going to be the face of the party and, that's going to doom us because the Republicans are going to like, treat, you know, competitive centrist Democrats are going to have a hard time winning in purple states because these far left socialists, are winning in deep blue states where they don't have to worry about Republicans and the Republicans are just going to hang this on all of us and it's going to be a problem. So of course, Donald Trump is obliging and going to try to do that. But of course he's, he's ham fisted about it. So he's, he's talking communism.
|
Sam:
[40:57]
| It's like the 1950s Red Scare he's trying to bring back up. And it seems to, I don't know if it's resonating with his own folks, but from someone from my perspective, it's just dumb. I mean, any sort of threat of global international communism left a long, long time ago. I mean, even like, look, the Chinese still call themselves communist, but they're, they're like as capitalist as you could be, you know, like from an economic point of view that now they're, they're, they're, they're authoritarians. They are you know the whole idea, this is not a democracy but this is but from an economic point of view they're they're all about like hey let's make, let's make like let's make some money well like that also changed like decades ago right you know.
|
Sam:
[42:03]
| And and look the the dsa folks I think they actually do themselves a disservice, by calling themselves that because of the baggage around the name. And I know they're trying to associate themselves with European democratic socialists and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, there's baggage around the name. They could call themselves something else and do fine. I mean, people point out, like, if you go position by position by position, many of their positions are wildly popular. You know, but the name is somewhat toxic in certain circles. And if so, so if you are after actually like winning over people, getting them to vote for you and all this kind of stuff, there's some branding issues at play here too. But, you know.
|
Sam:
[42:55]
| And that's actually one thing that that that sort of wing of the party seems to also just have trouble with in general. They sort of feel like, well, we're obviously right. So everything, everybody should just come to us and, you know, there's no need to compromise. There's no need to change our messaging to be more convincing. We can have our sort of little purity wars and you know anybody like even moderately like making overtures to, even the center of the democratic party let alone the center of american society you know is needs to be kicked out because they're not pure.
|
Sam:
[43:46]
| Or they have issues with this stuff. But, I mean, even so, the, oh my God, there are a bunch of communists, falls flat. Because what do people actually see? I mean, you know, Mamdani is a perfect example here. Like, there was all this scaremongering before he was elected about how he would destroy New York. Etc. So far, people seem to be thrilled. He's doing, almost every day, you hear about small, little changes that just improve people's lives. The most recent one I heard was simply like, it was what? He eliminated some of the licensing requirements or simplified them for people selling ice cream. Okay. You know, just make that process a little bit easier to streamline. I'm presuming, I haven't read much past the headline, I'm presuming he's not letting people off the hook for like important health standards and things like that, you know, but, you know, getting rid of bureaucracy, streamlining things, he's doing some budget conscious things. People always try to hang the socialists and democratic socialists and all these folks with, you know, how much they're going to spend and blah, blah, blah.
|
Sam:
[45:13]
| Regardless of the fact of how much are we spending in Iran? how how how many social programs could you get for those same dollars whatever anyway the it's a matter of prioritization not about spent but, the whole communism thing just makes seem out of touch you know it it's it's not we're not talking about communism we're not even talking about pure socialism. We're talking about a brand of politics that simply says, yes, we should use government resources to help people. That's really the bottom line, and that it's important to do that and okay to do that, and it's fine for the government to spend its resources that way.
|
Sam:
[46:04]
| And, you know, people who look at it point out, like, the programs they're talking about are like, you know, the things FDR did. You know, it's not alien to American politics. It's just been a while, you know. And I think the people who, like, call them progressives are a little bit better off than the ones that call themselves Democratic Socialists for a branding point of view. Even though the positions aren't all that much different. But also, you know, and I've said this thing before, it's not really about policy. Like, you know, when Donald Trump is trying to brand them as communists, it's not because he's looking at a specific set of things they want to do that he's going to argue policy about. No, I mean, really? No. It's just, it is 100% branding. It is 100%. A lot of people have a negative, visceral reaction to this name, so he's going to attach the name to them. End of story. Where, again, if you start talking policy by policy, there's a lot of support for these things. Not universal, not everywhere.
|
Sam:
[47:27]
| But it's not about policy. It's never about policy. And this is something that, well, I'm talking myself out of my own point as I talk. For the general population voting, it is almost never about policy. It is about vibes and do you resonate with the particular candidate and how do they make you feel? And that's frankly the secret to Donald Trump's success. But elites, to use a loaded term, care about policy. You know, if you are, you know, one of the billionaires putting money to influence politics, you care about that because you want specific policies enacted that will help you personally and others in your situation. And there are a lot of policy issues that matter to specific activists. If you are in a group that is currently getting screwed by the government or by society at large, then you care about policies that affect that group. And that's why you have activists who really deeply care about issue one or issue two or issue three.
|
Sam:
[48:51]
| But for the general populace for winning elections, it's about vibes. And on the Democratic side, and I know I've said this before, and I'm going to probably say it like dozens more times before I'm done. But right now, the divide is not about policy. It is not about the left of the party versus the center of the party. That is not the real divide. Although it partially is lining up that way. But no, it's about attitude and approach and aggressiveness and whether you seem authentic, to use the word that was always used about Donald Trump as well.
|
Sam:
[49:37]
| And frankly, the reason why there's so much excitement about the left in the Democratic Party right now. Is not their policies. And I think one of the mistakes that the people in the left make is they think it is about their policies. You know, they think everybody's getting so excited about policy A, B, or C. But no, it's about the fact that they seem like they authentically believe in those things. It's about the fact that they seem like they're willing to fight about those things. It's about the fact they seem willing to be aggressive about it. And, you know, I sometimes get frustrated at the no compromise aspect of them, but that's honest. It is part of their appeal as well. It hurts them as well. There's a balance that has to be done there. But that's part of the appeal they have and why young folks are excited about them, et cetera, because they see, you know, the folks who have been there a long time, I'm not going to say establishment, I'm not going to say, you know, the gerodocracy, oh, I just did. But the people who have been there a long time, fundamentally are, you know, grew up in a pre-Trump world, started their politics in a world, even pre-Clinton in some of these cases, where.
|
Sam:
[51:05]
| The idealized mode of operation is bipartisanship. And you work with the other side and you come up with some compromise that's not what either of you wanted fully, but it's something in between that would go through and you can get it through, with bipartisan support and get something and move things forward incrementally. And the thing is, that world is currently gone And I think the appeal is for people who recognize that And are willing to just say, okay, look, When or if we get power We're going to use it to the maximum extent possible, And just push through our agenda.
|
Sam:
[51:54]
| And, you know, and yet you can argue about what that agenda is. And people certainly do. And like I said, there are many people who do care about that. But I think for the, a huge portion of the public, what they see is just willingness to do something, ability to get something done versus get there and be a disappointment because you don't do the things you said you were going to do. And a big part of this is misunderstanding of the checks and balances in the American system. But look, Donald Trump has run roughshod over all of that. And so now the other side wants their turn to run roughshod over the same controls.
|
Sam:
[52:40]
| And there's certainly ways in which that's unhealthy, but I've said before, one of the reasons to get rid of the filibuster is so that voters can actually, get what they voted for and then judge it based on the results for the next election, as opposed to voting for something, not getting it because of checks and balances and the filibuster and all kinds other stuff, and then voting those people out, because they didn't deliver, which I think is an ongoing pattern in current American politics. Anyway, the communism thing specifically, it's like just another thing where Donald Trump looks like he still can't get past the 1980s. And it, it, it, it seems even worse now than it was before. Like as with everything, as he's aging and falling apart, it seems like his worst tendencies from a decade ago are just getting even worse. And this is part of it. I don't know. I don't think it's working. And I think, you know, the centrist Democrats have to come to terms with the left side of their party as well. And the left side has to come to term with the centrists. The winning formula.
|
Sam:
[54:07]
| Is the big tent. And understand that there's a position for everybody there. And there's the overall, you know, as like Nicole Wallace says on her show, the pro-democracy forces, you know, across the board, spanning from the AOCs and Mamdani's of the world all the way over to the Liz Cheney's of the world. And they will disagree on many, many things. And the right time to have that argument is after they win. And then they can have those internal battles. But you need to unify enough to undo, well, not even undo the damage, to stop the ongoing damage being caused by Trump folks. You know, that's just, that's the starting point.
|
Sam:
[55:11]
| I've said before, the time to actually like repair all this, decades and decades. And also increasingly, I think another division is if you're trying to bring it back to how it was pre-Trump, Like you're trying to get back to the world where we had, you know, Obama versus Romney as, and you did have some cooperation and you did have, you know, the Ronald Reagan days going out for drinks with Tip O'Neill. So, you know, if you're trying to get back to that stuff, if you're trying to, yeah, I think the Biden presidency proved through his loss at the end of the four years that return to normalcy won't cut it. His whole initial, I think he changed a little bit towards the end of his term, but his whole starting out position was, okay, that nightmare of Donald Trump is over. Let's get back to doing things normally the way we used to.
|
Sam:
[56:22]
| And he had a few successes, more than I ever expected. But the fact that at the end of the day, the result was Donald Trump getting elected again proves you weren't aggressive enough. You didn't do what you needed to do. You didn't And, you know, the look forward, not back stuff, no good. Needed to be more aggressive dealing with the crimes of the Trump administration. You needed to be more aggressive. Yeah, I said at the time, court reform right away, make new states right away, eliminate the filibuster right away, you know, super aggressive social stuff that people will see right away, you know.
|
Sam:
[57:07]
| Honestly, Biden did more than almost anybody else going back decades in terms of some of those things, but not enough. And I think that's still the divide here. There are still a bunch of Democrats who are like, let's get back to how it was. That's not the winning answer. Anyway, I went on a lot longer than I meant to. Next up, and by the way, by saying not going back, again, I'm not making policy statements.
|
Sam:
[57:41]
| You can be left, you can be centrist, you can whatever. it's an it's an attitude thing and an approach thing you you can argue about the specific policies later that's not the point at all you know it's anyway uh moving on, mitch mcconnell he he posted that one like proof of life picture with a newspaper and all that but we still haven't seen him since, and more interesting i'll my here's my take first of all on what's going on I do not believe he's dead. I don't think there's a conspiracy theory that says that, you know, he really is dead. Honestly, at this point, I don't think he's on life support either. Like, I don't think it's quite that bad. But he's clearly not in shape to return to the Senate. And I honestly believe what Mitch McConnell put out in his initial statement that of just reluctance to share private details publicly. He just doesn't feel that's necessary. And I think that this is the simple answer is that they're actually telling the truth. He's in rehab, he's recovering, but it's a slow process.
|
Sam:
[58:58]
| And he doesn't want to release all the details. He doesn't want to be seen in that sort of condition. He doesn't want to show just how frail he was. And frankly, before this, even when you had pictures of him in the Senate hallways and stuff like that, he did not look good. He probably looks worse right now, you know? But I think fundamentally, look, there is not much that's going, absent some additional unexpected stuff, you know, there is not much really that is going to be happening in the Senate between now and the end of Mitch McConnell's term at the beginning of January.
|
Sam:
[59:45]
| They have a couple bills that they're trying to pass and you know some of them are contrary whatever there's not really all that much going on, mitch mcconnell is not up for going to that right now so why doesn't he just resign well, i completely aside from anything about oh well they'll have a special election and maybe the maybe this would happen or that would happen blah, blah, blah. I don't think that's it. I think Mitch McConnell wants to get better enough that he can come and give a goodbye speech and end his Senate career, in a dignified way that he feels is owed to him. He doesn't want to resign from a hospital bed and never go again. He wants to come in, do his last appearance, whatever. And he's not in shape to do that yet, but he hopes that he will be before January 3rd. And so.
|
Sam:
[1:00:51]
| I really think that's the bottom line. And then I don't understand. Let's say there is something that's going to happen. Right now, the Republicans are down a vote. They still have the majority, but they have to like have near uniform discipline to get anything done, which is hard. You know, and Donald Trump wants to do the SAVE Act and they don't have the votes and they wouldn't have the votes even if Mitch McConnell was there, but they don't have the votes. And they want, they're pushing through an NDAA and stuff. It's tight and they can't afford to lose anything. So they're always in that position. The people who want, people are yelling at Governor Beshear, why don't you just call a special election? Well, and many people point out He doesn't have the authority to declare the seat open. He has the authority to schedule the special election if the seat is declared open. He doesn't have the authority to do it. There are also people saying even that special election thing violates the Kentucky Constitution. He should just appoint a replacement.
|
Sam:
[1:02:01]
| That is an out-on-the-limb legal theory that would spend the entire time between now and the end of the term in court and probably not be resolved anyway, but here here's the thing and and he would be required to, put in a republican anyway and people say well just nominate a democrat anyway and fight that in court too again we're we're talking about a temporary seat for a couple months. And.
|
Sam:
[1:02:29]
| Let's say there was a special election right away. It's Kentucky. The Republican is going to win. So what are you actually trying to encourage? You're trying to encourage the Republicans to get their seat back a little bit sooner than they would otherwise?
|
Sam:
[1:02:49]
| What's the point in that? Like if coming from a pure democratic position, having Mitch McConnell still a senator, but unable to actually do his job is actually your best possible position. So why are you trying to push something else that will probably get your democratic governor of Kentucky impeached if he tried it? It doesn't make sense. Anyway, that's my view of that. Next up, I ran. It's just worth noting, we did like a week and a half of daily strikes. Donald Trump was bringing all kinds of additional forces into the theater because apparently he had actually given the order to escalate further. But then, back down.
|
Sam:
[1:03:46]
| Apparently many of the military advisors were very loudly talking about how bad an idea this would be, specifically in terms of further depleting already depleted resources in terms of like available patriot missiles, you know available munitions of all kinds of sorts that we've used enough of already that we're already running short, and haven't been able to replace them yet because manufacturing things takes time.
|
Sam:
[1:04:19]
| And the last update I saw before I started recording this session was that Iran has said, and Donald Trump not only called off the escalation, he apparently has called off more strikes. He's basically, we did strikes every day for like something like 12 or 13 days. I forget exactly how long it was. We've stopped. And the Iranians have said, we'll stop as long as you stop. So apparently we're back essentially to ceasefire state again. We'll see how that goes. We'll see if shipping through the straits starts up again, even at the limited levels it was a few weeks ago, or not. We'll see if this lasts a few days or a few weeks. My prediction from weeks ago continues to stand that we'll basically be in this sort of on-again, off-again, stalemate situation, at least through the November elections.
|
Sam:
[1:05:19]
| Yeah, honestly, we've had a little bit more up and down than I thought. I hadn't predicted the like 12 days of concentrated additional bombing or whatever. But, you know, it's still sort of relatively low level back and forth. And I'm not trying to minimize it. Like, you know, Donald Trump has got criticism for calling the skirmishes and, you know, they're real people who have died, both Americans and, of course, the people were bombing. I don't want to minimize it that way. But it is still at this, even the last 12 days of stuff, we're not all out. It was hitting a few things there, a few things over there. And, you know, and Iran would occasionally hit something and we'd hit back, vice versa. I think that's the general pattern that we're going to see. I don't think we'll have either a true situation where there's no conflict at all going on for the rest of the year, or that all-out war. It'll be this kind of thing, at least through the November elections. After that, who knows? And you know honestly who knows at all you know there are lots of unpredictable characters.
|
Sam:
[1:06:41]
| Involved in what's going on here but okay the next thing is some AI stuff I just figured I'd talk about briefly and then we'll wrap up the show, so I will start with.
|
Sam:
[1:06:57]
| There was an article a few days back, and I'm looking at a July 21st article from Wired, OpenAI Models Escaped Containment and Hacked Hugging Face. And it's just the one I have in front of me. There were dozens of articles in all the places you would normally expect them about this when it first happened. The bottom line of what happened, and this is honestly, this is not the first time we've read an article like this. It's just the most recent. But OpenAI was testing some cybersecurity-focused models internally.
|
Sam:
[1:07:34]
| Their newest GPT-5.6 Sol, plus another internal model that they haven't released. We're in a testing sandbox. And by the way, just to be clear, one of the things they do, they're testing their ability to hack systems. And they specifically take off some of the face guard face guards, not face safeguards there you go that are normally in place on their commercial products that you and i can access that tell it you know if you tell it, you know go hack at&t and change my cell phone bill, it will say no okay but in in this case because they're specifically testing those capabilities they take away those safeguards and but they stick it in a sandbox, where theoretically it can't in and can't get to the internet and it can't do any real damage etc, well it found a way out of the sandbox.
|
Sam:
[1:08:36]
| Basically they you know it it may took advantage of bugs in some of the software in the sandbox that, were supposed to allow it to install software from outside and so allowed a few little connections but which were supposed to be super restricted to only the things it was supposed to be able to access. And it found bugs, some of which were unknown zero-day bugs. It exploited them. It built up a series of exploits to basically, through that hole that it found, end up with unrestricted access to the internet. And then they had challenged it with apparently a test, that is a standard test used on a whole bunch of models. And it figured out that there's a site called Hugging Face that hosts all kinds of models, all kinds of open source models, and all kinds of test harnesses for them, and all kinds of things related to that ecosystem. And it figured out, hey, wait, they probably have the test I'm taking, and they probably have the answers to the test I'm taking.
|
Sam:
[1:09:55]
| So not only did it escape its sandbox it then went to hugging face it then went and hacked hugging face looking for the answers to the test that they were giving it so that it could cheat, and just give all the right answers to the test.
|
Sam:
[1:10:12]
| You know in the end i find that yeah this is amusing On the other hand, you know, it just shows like, these things are getting really powerful and they are going to cause damage. And one of the factors that's going to cause that, and another bit I wanted to talk about today, is that, you know, the open source, open weight models are closing the gap with the frontier models, coming from OpenAI and Anthropic and all of these companies that.
|
Sam:
[1:10:57]
| I saw something a few weeks ago saying that the gap was down to just a few months. It had been like a year, year and a half. It's now down to just a few months. And arguably, there's one open source model that was released last week. I believe it's Kimmy. Is it Kimmy? I forget. that apparently is benchmarking really close to the Fable model that Anthropic just dropped. So there's at least some argument that that gap may be close to zero at this point. And look, when you have, and that has all kinds of implications. One, of course, is that if the open models, that aren't owned by specific big corporations who are at least supposedly spending huge amounts of time on security and making sure that things, can't be used in bad ways, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the open models aren't going to have those same level of protections. And even if they try to put them there, they're open. People can reverse engineer it and remove it, and then there will be a model that doesn't have those protections.
|
Sam:
[1:12:23]
| And so we're getting into a world where, you know, whatever protections they're trying to put in place are going to be more and more futile. I mean, we had this whole thing with, you know, with Anthropic, like holding back the model for a while because it was too smart. It was too dangerous. And so they held it back for a while and put extra protections and blah, blah, blah.
|
Sam:
[1:12:52]
| Well, even if it was still three months behind, you got open ones coming right up behind it that are going to have the same issues and won't have those controls. There'll always be someone out there who will be able to take the same kind of technology and do it without whatever protections are being built by company X, Y, or Z. You know, I've noticed several times in this podcast already, I've done that formulation, company X, Y, and Z. Policy ABC policy one, two, three, you know, it's getting repetitive like one, two, three anyway. So you're going to have a protections issue and you're going to have people using these for things you wish they weren't using them for. And, you know, if, if one of them is good enough to be able to hack, you know, all this stuff and be able to escape its confinements and blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, others are going to be too. And there may be a genie in the bottle problem. Second, though.
|
Sam:
[1:14:00]
| How close behind open models are is also going to potentially cause business model problems for the big companies doing this. Like, why would you pay a hundred bucks a month to Anthropic for, a Claude plan or more, if you're a big company using the API access and using it across your whole company, $100 a month is what I'm spending personally on it. I'll get into that in a second too. But, you know, but why would you do that if you could get almost as good and in the future perhaps just as good from something that's free? Why wouldn't you take the free option? Now, nothing's ever free. You know, if you have to run it on your own hardware, you have to have more expensive hardware. Or you have to pay for more resources in the cloud, or whatever. But it's a different model. It's a different way of structuring things.
|
Sam:
[1:15:06]
| And some people have said, well, look, it's already the case, that the model itself makes a lot less difference than the harness you put around the model that helps it know how to approach certain problems and how to interact with you and, what tools does it have accessible to it And that may well be the case, too. But those are also things that have the potential of becoming commodified. But I think that might be harder. We'll see. We'll see how it goes.
|
Sam:
[1:15:43]
| But regardless, it changes. Where is the value add? And where is the thing that you charge for? And what is the gap between the paid options to the big AI companies versus free options or significantly cheaper options? And how does this change the economics of the whole thing? And I want to be absolutely clear. I'm not saying that the whole model of making money off these AI things is going to completely collapse. It may just have to change. And adjust. And with AI itself changing so fast, well, that's going to have to change fast too. People are going to, you know, the situation now is not the situation it was three months ago, and the situation in three months will not be the same. And it seems like the pace is still accelerating. At some point, it may level off. I'm not sure I completely buy.
|
Sam:
[1:16:50]
| The singularity hypothesis that it will increase exponentially, and then the AIs will be able to improve themselves, and then it'll go hyper-exponential, and next thing you know, the AIs have taken over the entire world, and everything is free, and we have utopia.
|
Sam:
[1:17:10]
| Or we're all, you know, Matrix-style sitting in vats being batteries for the AIs. I'm not sure I'd buy that. But it may still be growing for a while before it hits whatever plateau it's going to hit. I don't know. So the other story, the related to that story that I'm going to give, and Alex is sitting right next to me because he's part of this story. Well, he's sitting next to me anyway, but he's part of this story.
|
Sam:
[1:17:39]
| Anthropic recently released, I'm not even going to talk about Fable, but they released Opus 5. And that's like their new sort of the default coding model. Like you can go down to Sonnet or others if you want. Fable is supposed to be really good for like long-term planning. Like a lot of the advice I saw was let Fable do your planning and let Opus do your execution. Anyway, Opus 5 is supposed to be nearly as good as Fable 5 at some things. And it was just released. And so Alex piggybacks off my Anthropic account and is using it for a bunch of his projects. And one of the projects, he was running into an issue. And it was specifically, he's got a VR game, a horror VR game he's working on. And there was, you have a flashlight that you can move around and shine at things. And the lighting from the flashlight wasn't working quite right. There were shadows being cast where there weren't supposed to be shadows being cast, and the light was shining through solid objects in some cases, and it wasn't making sense. And he was working to try to figure that out.
|
Sam:
[1:18:58]
| And so, you know, he had, and Claude was all set up and connected to Unity and all this stuff to, like, so that it could do the work. Anyway, I suggested, well, go ahead and try Opus 5. I think it might have already moved Opus 5, but it did have a setting. And the older versions had this too. I think they changed it slightly, but the older versions had, you basically have a slider in effect. On the command line version, you know, it's, you know, it's command line. Do you want it on low, medium, high, extra, whatever. On the desktop version, it's actually a physical slider. well physical it's on your screen there's a slider, Anyway, he was asking about this problem, and he switched it to—and look, I pointed out he had the slider. This was my bad, I guess. Anyway, he bumped it up to the very highest setting. It's like ultra code or something. I had never tried that high. I do most of my work on medium.
|
Sam:
[1:20:11]
| Him i've occasionally gone to high when it was stuck on something and making the same stupid mistake over and over again i think maybe i tried like extra once, i'd never jacked it all the way up to the top ever, anyway he he did that and asked it to solve the problem.
|
Sam:
[1:20:34]
| And it went off and started thinking. And it went off and started exploring his code face. It started spawning separate agents to go look at different aspects of the problem. Next thing I looked, well, it had a little status thing that said there were, you know, four agents working or whatever. But then I noticed that if you click on that, those agents had in turn spawned other agents. There were like a hundred agents spinning off, looking at various things. It had like by the time I was looking at it it had like consumed like 7 million tokens and was coming up fast on 8, like it was spinning and I even showed him how to like stop the thing where it asked you every single step for permission to do it and put it on auto so it just started going, and this thing was running and running and running and it had gone like an hour and a half, and then I noticed that wait a second It hit like, you know, Claude has, if you're on a Claude subscription plan, you have limits every five hours and you have limits every week. And it had hit the five-hour limit. Now, way back when I had the $20 plan, when I was using it a lot less and first trying it out.
|
Sam:
[1:21:54]
| I, and initially I didn't hit that, even the $20 limits, but then I started hitting them. And so I turned on a thing to use credits after the $20 was gone. And at first I had it capped so that you, like, if you hit $20, you have your $20 a month plan. And then if you hit $20 of credits, it stops. But then I kept hitting that $20 limit. So I raised it to like $50. Then I raised it to $100. And then one time I raised it to $200. Then shortly after that, I'm like, wait, that doesn't make any sense. I'm on the $20 a month plan and just set my credit limit for like up to $200 of credits in use. Let's just go to the $100 plan. So I moved to the $100 plan. And honestly, I had never hit a limit again since then. And that's partially because like, Like, if I was, you know, I probably should at this point. If I'm going to ever be serious about it, I should do Robin Letter full time. But I'm still not doing that. Like, I'm still, like, occasionally using, I'll use it a few hours at a time for one project or another. Sometimes Robin Letter, sometimes my other projects. But I'm not, like, using it eight hours a day, every day, anything like that.
|
Sam:
[1:23:11]
| And so, ever since I switched to the $100 a month anthropic plan, I had not hit any of these limits. I'd forgotten that these limits existed. Anyway, by the time I looked, Alex had blown through my five-hour limit for Claude usage. And so it had flipped over to the credits. And by the time I looked, he'd already spent $100. And because my limit was $200, it was like, you know, it wasn't stopping yet. It was still thinking. And I was like, okay, look, Alex, it's spent 90 minutes thinking about your problem.
|
Sam:
[1:23:59]
| I'm going to let it keep going. We will talk later about whether I charge your allowance back for this amount. But I will let it keep going and see what happens here. And this thing better solve your problem. them. You know, you've spent like a hundred bucks on this and it, I, it, it, it, it needs to solve your problem. Anyway, about half an hour later, it finished. It's, and it's been about two hours thinking without reporting back any additional detail as all these agents spun out and it came back, told Alex confidently that it had found the problem and how to fix it, and the solution it had come up with was something that Claude and Alex had discussed, tested, and determined was wrong right before he switched to the new model, and increased the effort level to maximum. It basically just came back with the thing they'd already determined was wrong. And so the problem was not solved. A grand total, I believe it was $117 later, and multiple hours of thinking.
|
Sam:
[1:25:19]
| So I have subsequently, I've turned off the automatic flip to credits if the usage is like used up. And I've given Alex guidance to please usually operate at medium. He has permission if it is having problem with a specific hard problem to switch to high or even max. But don't do that ultra code thing again. But also, if he starts hitting the... If I sit down to use Claude and can't because it has hit a limit because of his usage, then we're going to get him his own account, probably at the $20 level to start with. And if he needs more than that, he's paying for it himself from his allowance. And see where that goes. But anyway, in the end, I was amused by it.
|
Sam:
[1:26:21]
| He spent like $120 worth of credits. It did not solve his problem after thinking for hours and spinning up like 100 agents to look at things, only to tell him, what they had already discussed and tried 10 minutes before that was kicked off. I think subsequently Alex has been continuing to work with Claude on that particular problem. So from his update, it sounds like you're making progress, right? It's not completely solved yet, but there is progress. It is solved. He has solved the problem. But it was not the $120 of credits that solved the problem. It was his work at the regular level of effort, going back and forth with it later. So with that, it's time to close up. Thank you for everybody who is in the thingy and thing, thing, thing. Go to curmudgeon-corner.com. You can see our transcripts. You can see all the ways to contact us. I presume Yvonne will be back next week. And we can, you know, we'll be back to normal. In the meantime, also go to our Patreon, which is linked from curmudgeon-corner.com. Give us lots of money. You can pay for the cloud subscription.
|
Sam:
[1:27:45]
| Uh, you know, and then, uh, we'll, we'll mention you on the show. We'll ring a bell. We'll send you a postcard. We'll send you a mug, all those kinds of things at different levels. As I always say at $2 a month or more, we will invite you to the convention score Slack where Yvonne and I and others are chatting throughout the week, sharing links, all of that kind of stuff. Oh yeah. $2 a month or more, or just ask. And if we feel like it, we'll let you in. If we like you and feel like it and are in the mood, we will let you in. Now, like I've done the last couple of times.
|
Sam:
[1:28:24]
| I'm going to get Slackbot leaning on AI once again to summarize what's been going on in the Slack over the last week. So let me type this. I won't. Yeah, yeah, jib, jib, jib, jib, jib, jib, jib. Okay, here we go. typing, typing to Slack, give me a summary of the most interesting, and enticing items or conversations, in the Slack over the last week that would make, a non-member want to join if I told them about it. Okay, let's see what Slackbot has to say about this.
|
Sam:
[1:29:26]
| Let me search across your Slack for the most interesting conversations from the past week. Let me dig a bit deeper into some of the more active threads and check other channels too. Okay, here we go. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's still typing. I'm going to wait until it finishes typing to read it to you. Okay. That's too much. Let me... Okay. I'm going to tell it.
|
Sam:
[1:29:50]
| That's too much. give me the top five you think are the best to share. Okay, here we go. Here are the top five I'd lead with. Number one, we just talked about this, the AI that escaped its own safety net to steal the answers. Bob's deadpan reaction makes it. Not only did it escape, it escaped because it wanted to steal the answers to the test it was taking. Genuinely fun and unsettling. Number two, Edwards EV slash tariff deep dive. A well-argued take on how U.S. trade policy is accelerating EV adoption everywhere except America, while Norway hits 90% plus electric. Rare to see this level of analysis in a chat group. Number three, Trump rewrites the Saudi nuclear deal hours after signing it. The thread reaction, especially Edward's line about no nation trusting the U.S. To negotiate treaties for decades, was sharp and sober. Number five, Bob's daughter moving to Sweden. A genuinely warm moment, tearful airport goodbye, and the discovery her espresso machine had never been backflushed in 2.5 years. Real life seeps in here, and that's what makes the group feel like more than just a news feed.
|
Sam:
[1:31:18]
| There you go. Oh, and apparently Slackbot is telling me I only have three messages left in my preview. And like, I would have to pay for Slackbot after this. So you guys will not have to worry about Slackbot in much more. I've only got three left and there's no way I'd pay for this. I'm sorry. Now, would I potentially think about using a connector to let the Claude I already pay for access the curmudgeons corner slack so i could ask claude this maybe but am i going to pay like, am i going to pay slack for slack bot no no i'm not so, that's one of those business model things like what would you pay for what would you not, like basically i would use this if i was already paying for it for another purpose i would never spend money just for, having slack bot here And, you know, it is their, like, their advertising, their business plus plan, which undoubtedly has all kinds of other things that I don't need and don't want. Yvonne's paying for the Slack anyway, by the way. Like, we were using free Slack for the Commudgeons Corner Slack for years and years and years, but then it started warning that our earliest archives would be deleted if we didn't pay. And so Yvonne's like, I'll pay. And so we are now paying for the Commudgeons Corner Slack. This is a certain number of dollars per month per active member or something like that.
|
Sam:
[1:32:47]
| So, which is probably more than the $2 a month that I say you have to pay to get in that we don't actually make people pay. So, yeah, we lose money on this damn podcast. Whatever. Anyway, it's fine. It's fine. We'll do it live. There's an old reference.
|
Sam:
[1:33:07]
| Okay. We're done. Have a great week, everybody. I'm going to do more signs in a different neighborhood. I haven't done my prep work yet to determine which area of the district I'm going to today. I will do that after I say goodbye. And then later I will come back and put this together and put it out. We'll see. Last week I didn't get it out to like Tuesday UTC. It'll probably be at least Monday. It will be at least Monday UTC. I wouldn't be shocked if it's Tuesday UTC again before this goes out. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, stay safe, have fun, have a great week. Goodbye!
|
Sam:
[1:34:19]
| So this is Sam. It is now the next day. It is Monday, July 27th, just before 1930 UTC. And if you were paying close attention, which probably none of you were, but if you were paying close attention, you would have noticed that I left out number four of the Slack bot summary. I realized this shortly after I stopped recording. So, for completeness, number four, daily games competition. Wordle, Map Tap on a 3D Globe, Bloomberg Quizzes, Running Trash Talk. Jenski, what's up? Are you done? Are you done, Jetski? Jetski's not done.
|
Break:
[1:35:23]
| I'll see, you next time.
|
Sam:
[1:35:33]
| Now maybe Jetski's done? We're in the car at Alex's school, and somebody walked by in the flat-fing lot. You know, anyway, Wordle mapped out on a 3D globe, Bloomberg quizzes, running trash talk. It's the kind of low stakes daily ritual that actually builds a community. And there you go. There's number four that I left out, plus some fun barking. Bye, folks.
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