The Uncast Show
Owning an Unraid server gives you the ultimate control over your data and reduces your dependence on The Cloud. Join host Ed Rawlings to learn how to get the most out of your Unraid server, stay up to date on relevant news and topics, and get to know members of the Unraid community!
The Uncast Show
Unraid 7.2, API Feature Bounties, and the AI Wild West - Ed and Stefano Unleashed
Ed and Stefano are back with a packed episode that covers everything from Unraid’s latest release to the unpredictable frontier of AI.
Join the livestream on Youtube!
The show kicks off with Unraid news: the 7.2 public beta introduces RAIDZ expansion, a fully responsive web GUI, and new file system support (ext2/3/4, NTFS, exFAT). They also spotlight the brand-new API Feature Bounty Program, designed to let the community build features and claim rewards. Along the way, Stefano shares how his sick week and late candles almost derailed him, while Ed recounts his PFsense router failure and recovery.
The discussion then widens: compatibility issues with BitLocker-encrypted drives, the mystery of Phison SSD BSOD errors, and Linus Torvalds’ sharp rebuke of a Google engineer’s RISC-V patch. From there it’s on to the AI Wild West—ChatGPT5 vs Grok vs Gemini, the risks of bad prompts, the promise of AI-powered image editing, and the unsettling questions of AI hallucinations and sentience.
Rounding things out, the duo covers security breaches, counterfeit storage scams, and why consumers still struggle with delivery services. They highlight privacy-first self-hosted tools like Stirling PDF and Paperless-ngx, revisit the resurgence of piracy fueled by streaming costs, and debate the future of broadband: Starlink’s reach vs. fiber’s reliability.
Key Takeaways
- Unraid celebrated its 20th anniversary with discounts and a new Feature Bounty Program.
- Unraid 7.2 adds RAIDZ expansion, a mobile-friendly GUI, and Windows/NAS file system support.
- BitLocker drives must be decrypted before adding to Unraid.
- Phison SSD firmware issues are causing BSODs and drive dropouts.
- Linus Torvalds sharply criticized a Google engineer’s RISC-V patch.
- ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini compared for performance and image editing capabilities.
- AI hallucinations and poor prompts can create dangerous outcomes.
- Apple’s ecosystem integrates smoothly but locks in users.
- Security breaches and counterfeit drives reveal consumer risks.
- Delivery services continue to frustrate despite progress.
- Self-hosting apps like Stirling PDF and Paperless-ngx enhance privacy and control.
- Piracy resurges as streaming costs climb.
- Broadband’s future is being contested between Starlink and fiber.
Chapters
00:00 – Cold open & PFsense disaster recovery
02:27 – Unraid turns 20
02:57 – New Unraid API Feature Bounty Program
04:08 – How bounties work: browse, claim, build, and get rewarded
06:04 – Unraid 7.2 highlights: RAIDZ expansion, mobile GUI, NTFS/exFAT import
09:39 – Adding existing disks & parity rebuilds
11:34 – BitLocker drives and Unraid compatibility
13:02 – Phison SSD BSOD saga explained
17:55 – Linus Torvalds vs Google engineer
22:04 – AI roundup: ChatGPT5, Grok, Gemini “Nano Banana”
29:08 – Apple vs Windows ecosystems
34:54 – Macs at work and ecosystem lock-in
40:45 – Android ↔ Mac file transfers and KDE Connect
46:16 – Google AI overviews gone wrong
48:09 – YouTube “complaints”
49:33 – AI missteps: bromism, bad prompts, vending machine hallucinations
58:40 – Security updates: Exchange zero-day, Salesforce breach
01:00:11 – Fake/refurb drives, Chia fallout, Amazon risks
01:08:24
Other Ways to Connect with the Uncast Show
Wee that awkward moment. Did it start? Will it start, nobody knows? Um, my PF sense decided the hard drive would fail in it and my whole house router went down and I had to put another hard drive into the PF sense box, find a backup and restore it. So I think I did pretty well. I did all of that within an hour and a half, so that's not too bad at all. What do you think, stefano hey?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's not too bad at all. I wasn't watching the time, but.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you, you were busy looking up something, weren't you? What were you watching?
Speaker 1:a bunch of sky bolivian videos getting ready for the remake to come out nice, nice I'm excited so, um what have you been up to um since the last episode? I've been working so so much overtime that I haven't had time to do anything aside from work and sleep, so nothing. And then I've been sick all week, so I've also done nothing with my life this week.
Speaker 2:Oh dear.
Speaker 1:I did also not get the candles that I ordered that we're supposed to have for this stream. They haven't arrived yet. I don't know where they are. I don't know if they've been shipped. I don't know anything about them, so I don't have my candle either. So a whole lot of nothing, ed. That's really what's been going on with my life.
Speaker 2:So that's pretty bad. So you've had no candle and you've been ill.
Speaker 1:I reckon if you could have lit the candle while you're ill.
Speaker 2:It would have made you better as well. It may have, yeah, but I'll never know. Yeah, so anyway, as everyone knows, watching um unraid is no longer a teenager. We turned 20 last week. The anniversary was marked by a month-long celebration and discounts, so I'm sure stefano got his candles a little bit of a discount there and did you buy two, as we were talking about last week?
Speaker 1:I did buy two because I was terrified of, like I mentioned before, like uh, ruining one forever. I wanted a one to go on the wall. That would be completely perfect for years to come yeah, yeah, you got it.
Speaker 2:You got to keep it Pristine. So other Unraid news. Let's start with some Unraid news. There is a new feature bounty program that is out. So basically what this is is this initiative opens up a collaborative channel between the Unraid team and the community. What it does is it encourages kind of like hands-on contributions and gives, I would say, power users and devs like a clearer way to influence the direction of api capabilities. I'm going to try and bring up the page and share it um into here, so, if you bear with me, everyone. So yeah, here's um, here's the page on the unraid website.
Speaker 2:So the Unraid feature bounty program here. So what it allows you to do is you can kind of pick a project. You can browse open bounties and see what's there, pick a project and if you think you've got the skills to make that, you can actually go ahead and actually make that feature. And if you manage to do it, you can actually claim a bounty and actually get some reward for it. But it's a really nice way, I think, to bring the community um into the development cycle and allow contributions from you guys out there. So let me just de-share my screen.
Speaker 2:Oh, I didn't show all of it. Did I really so? So first you browse the open bounties, you can claim a bounty. You pick a feet, you pick a feature that matches your skill set and you have until a deadline to claim it. So you have until that deadline to deliver the solution, you build it and submit it and then at the end you can get paid. So pretty cool, hey? So a feature bounty program, which was, I think it came out today, so you heard it here first, guys that's pretty cool, man.
Speaker 1:That's a really good idea.
Speaker 2:I like that yeah, yeah, I think I think it's pretty, pretty good. I think I will be trying to make some software, but I promise it won't be software like in the uncast sorry, in the 20 20th anniversary video where me and Eli tried to go back in time. But if you guys haven't seen that, don't worry about it. So anyway, we've had the 7.2 public beta during August as well. So we mentioned some of these things last time. And RAID Z expansion. I still haven't got Steffano to use zfs yet. It is my ambition for this year for stefano to have a zpool in at least one of his servers. And you're so close and you know, chat, please, like you know, hassle him and you know, get him to do the right thing and at least try it out.
Speaker 1:But anyway, we can hold on when, when you finally admit you're wrong about hard links versus soft links, don't don't get me started, I will.
Speaker 2:I will change my hat again, stefano. I will put my, I'll put my hard links hard hat on again how?
Speaker 1:did you have that prepared like that?
Speaker 2:because I know you too well apparently you do.
Speaker 1:I need to come up with better tricks you do.
Speaker 2:You do so. Um, anyway, let me just check chat to see if what's going. I'm going to let you look at chat, stefano, because you're much better at that than myself, no worries. Anyway, I'm going back to the unraid 7.2 public beta. Like I said, we've got raids the expansion now, so we can add single drives to v devs and grow them that way.
Speaker 2:Um, long requested feature in the zfs world and we have it in unraid web gui now. It's fully responsive, so it works really well on mobile. That's really awesome. A little bit of housekeeping's been done in the vms. We've removed the open lx, liberalec, vm templates, but it's still really easy to set that up if you want to, but the templates are no longer there Now.
Speaker 2:A really exciting thing, I think, is there is the new file system support. So we've got ext234, ntfs and exFAT now supported. So basically you can drop in a Windows disk or a NAS disks without having to reformat them and have them in your Unraid array so and then have it protected by parity. Now, one thing I've noticed with that is it's really great you can pop in a Windows disk from a Windows machine. But if you think of the file structure of Windows. You know you've got a Windows directory, you've got program directory. When you have a top level directory on a disk it does create it as an Unraid share.
Speaker 2:So I'm just going to play a little video here of what I suggest is a really good idea to do. Let me bear with me one moment chat. Okay, so you see there's an NTFfs disk here. Um, it's only a one terabyte drive, just a windows drive. I just did for this demo. If we click on so you see there's all of the kind of files there and we've got these like random files too. We could just delete them there, but I tend to kind of keep them.
Speaker 2:So here, if we look into my shares, we can see all of the various windows things that have been turned into shares. So open up a terminal window. The command I'm running here basically shows like dot files and hidden files. So then we just make a directory I call it windows underscore disk and then just run a very simple command to find everything and exclude the windows disk folder and then move it all into there. So now, if you see, I'll close that, go into the shares and then down here now there's a share called windows disk and that's got everything inside of there and it's just tidied things up.
Speaker 2:I think that's a good idea to do what I'll do. If people want to know, I will just paste those commands into the description of this video after it's been live so you'll be able to see that. So yeah, I think it's a really cool idea to have that in unraid so we can actually parity protect other systems as well. So, like old windows machines, if you're setting up from scratch, obviously you'd add all of the drives and then you know you would have your parity and you build parity. But what happens if you've already got an existing array and you just wanted to add something? Well, what you'd do then is, um, you'd have to go to tools and then, um, what's it called? I'm gonna have to look to remind myself of the correct word.
Speaker 1:I have a question new configurations sure I'll wait till you're done first wait till I finish rambling.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. So yeah, you'd go to tools, new config, and you would preserve the current assignments. You'd say to preserve new config and you would preserve the current assignments. You'd say to preserve everything, and then that keeps all of the disks in the same order. And then you would add other disks, like your ext4 disks, you know, disks from Synology, disks from Windows, and then you could then start up the array and it will then, you know, just build new parity. So for a little bit of time you wouldn't be parity protected while the parity rebuilds. But then all of those disks, you might have some external drives that you've had photos on over the years and stuff, and you can just pop them in the array. You've got parity protection. Really cool feature. I really like that myself.
Speaker 1:It's actually really cool because I have an old western digital caviar black caviar caviar, I don't know how to say it that I don't know what to do with and, uh, I might actually update to 7.2 and give this a try yeah, it's really cool.
Speaker 2:But, like I say, it's good idea, I think, to kind of move all of the files in a disk when it's just lots of random things, so you don't get a whole bunch of shares and you can just put it into. You know, make a directory on that disk and then move everything into it. Yeah, um, I might do a video about that and, um, all of these new 7.2 features, I think on the uncast channel a little bit of a tutorial, but I just wanted to talk about that a bit today before you move on, I do have a question, go for it.
Speaker 1:But before we move on to my question, eve osikowski I don't know if I said that right donated five dollars in the chat.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you very much, steve. That's really really good of you. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:We really appreciate, really appreciate that that's really good of you yeah, agreed, all right question time go um so if you have bitlocker on the windows drive, do you have to decrypt the drive before you put it into unraid or can? Is there a capability in unraid to decrypt the drive when it's put into the?
Speaker 2:uh, array, that's a really good question. I don't believe there is an ability to decrypt the drive. You would have to. Um, you would have to decrypt in bitlocker. I don't know, I would have to ask the devs about that, but I think that's a really awesome question. That's something I'm definitely going to find out. Um, I would say, probably you would have to decrypt it first, because yeah, that makes sense. We use Lux encryption and you know, bitlocker is obviously not Lux.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm not aware of I literally have no experience with this on the Linux side of the world, like if there is a way to decrypt a Windows drive from Linux, there might be. There probably obviously are tools that exist, but I mean just like from a basic operating system level, like I have no idea.
Speaker 2:I don't think so because, as well, when it's encrypted with BitLocker thinking about it, it wouldn't be detected as what file system it was. Oh yeah, you wouldn't be able to mount it, wouldn't be able to import it. So no, unfortunately, encrypted drives from other systems. Unless it's lux encrypted, you will have a bit of trouble with that's all right.
Speaker 1:You should be able to decrypt it first anyway yeah, yeah, anyway, really good question.
Speaker 2:um, have you heard of the what's it called, the fison ssd? Um errors that have been happening in Windows? Have you heard about that, stephanie I?
Speaker 1:have, and it just popped up randomly on my YouTube feed and I was like what is going on?
Speaker 2:All right. Have you guys heard in chat about these Windows errors with the Fison controller NVMe drives? What's been happening is people have actually been having their drives drop out, getting a blue screen.
Speaker 2:I've heard that this isn't a real problem, ed, and that you guys are all lying yeah, well, I've got my own theories on this and I'm gonna I'm gonna bore everyone with my theory about what's happening and about why the supposed tests that the manufacturers have done um are not representative of how the error is occurring scrivy has a good, a good opinion on the matter in chat uh, I've got to have a look at chat I got yeah, I don't want to spoil it for you.
Speaker 1:You have to read it for yourself.
Speaker 2:It's hilarious yeah, I love it. Microsoft invested them, investigated themselves and said they're not at fault. You know, I I do that for myself all the time. I've never found a fault with myself either, but yeah, my, so just for people who don't know what it is. Basically, like I said, people have been any drives that have the Fison controller. There's various different versions of it, I think it it's like it affects from 21 up to 25 I'm not 100 sure. To be honest, users are reporting a sudden blue screen of death. They reboot it and then the ssd is completely gone from the bios and it isn't there, and then you actually have to power it right off, turn it back on and it will come back on a hard power off, not a hard power off.
Speaker 2:Yeah the reason you have to do a hard power off. It would just kill the power to the controller. Then the controller will fully actually reboot and reinitialize. So, um, my theory about this is I believe it is a desynchronization between how the os and the ssd track data. So there's something called LBA, which is logical block addressing, which is like the OS's map and it's just basically it kind of knows where all the data is. But the actual SSD itself it's got its own kind of private, kind of more complex map itself. That's handled by the firmware and that's called a PBA, which is a physical block addressing.
Speaker 2:So what I think is happening is there's been some kind of updates in Windows, maybe with this latest update, maybe not, maybe it's been happening longer and these two layers are slightly coming out of sync. So the FTL, the flash trans transition layer, is the firmware that translates between these two maps, and so there can be kind of changes in how the drives are operating, like how trim commands are being sent, different cache flushing techniques, and it may well be how the NVMe spec is designed. So it's not like Microsoft had actually done something wrong in effect, but it's triggering a real weird corner case in the firmware that it wasn't designed to handle perfectly, and so then these are like out of synchronization with themselves. It goes to read a part of the data and it's not there, or it tries to write and it causes a crash. So I believe these errors are cumulative over time and that's why people have been seeing it with kind of quite full drives and other people can't actually recreate it, and that's why it's kind of happening with kind of some games and things like that it's just happening to be right into that, causing a blue screen.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of like a death by a thousand cuts rather than just you know this kind of thing and obviously if you were like fison or microsoft, they're they're not going to test this with used hard drives that people have been using for a while. They're going to get a bunch of like. We're going to get a thousand nvmes. We're going to, like you know, have them all wiped. We're going to install windows in with this update, we're going to test it. We'll fill it up to 60 gigs of information, but it's not enough. You know it's cumulative. That's what I believe is happening, because they say nothing's happening but us out in the community say it is. So you know, real life says it is, they say it isn't.
Speaker 1:That's my theory anyway look at a big brain on end. Smart mother trucker, that's right but, actually it kind of makes some sense, because when I you watch Jay's Two Cents right, yeah, yeah. So he recreated the problem and what he was seeing or observed was like a slow death before it blew screen.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And he was saying oh look, it's taking forever to load.
Speaker 2:So that kind of coincides with what you're kind of saying as well. With the desynchronization, yeah, I think with a with a newly formatted drive, it wouldn't happen. Um, you know, and um, it's just that you know, um, probably a firmware update, you know they could probably roll out something that would like, you know, you know, fix this. But you get it in the in the linux world as well, with various um you can have a kernel update to the linux kernel and then you can find that it you have like a fault in, say like an hba controller for instance, it's been fine like for ages and there might be a kernel update and then that kind of exposes some kind of like latent bug in that and you start having errors with it. Um, that you didn't have before and you think, well, that's really weird, it kind of worked before but it isn't now. But, um, it's just how the kernel's doing something different. It exposes that bug that you know you never saw before. What are you laughing at? Chat? That's so funny.
Speaker 1:You got a bunch of you think I'm a jokester. Also, big box has a question for you. He says what's that computer case behind you, the one with a couple of empty drive bays, with red and that?
Speaker 2:is an open nas. Um nas um a canadian company, very, very awesome. Um it has a 13th gen intel in it. Um a review coming on the uncast channel of that very, very soon. Really nice, really, really nice server. I do love it right. So, um talking about um windows and errors, let's kind of move on a little bit. Um did you hear about? Um linus torvalds, how he went kind of a bit crazy on a google engineer? Did you hear about that?
Speaker 2:angry about what this time ed man seems to be always angry about current software development cycles he blasted an engineer um a google engineer, for you know, I'm posting like a risk five patch saying it was utterly crazy and pointless and utter garbage basically. Um, but it's harsh, yeah, it's harsh, but it does show how kernel rules are enforced and we don't have those weird fison um ssd errors like microsoft standards matter I know who would. Who would believe that, hey, but yeah, I thought that was quite interesting I love him.
Speaker 1:He's awesome he is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, I actually, um, when I was making the video for the unraid 20th anniversary, um, I actually didn't realize how long ago actually he actually announced he was making linux 1991, for some reason. I thought it was the mid 90s, but it's linux has been around since 1991. I was actually quite shocked about that, for some reason. I thought it was kind of mid to late 90s.
Speaker 1:I thought it was older, did you? Yeah, like 1988-ish.
Speaker 2:And a really interesting thing yeah, again when I was making the anniversary video is I noticed that some cool software things have happened in August. So the very first IBMm pc um was in august um linus torvilles. He announced um linux on the 25th of august and tom um announced unraid on the 26th of august. So august seems like quite a cool month for um tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah, anyway I didn't know all that, no.
Speaker 2:So anyway, stefano, um, what should we move on and talk about next? Should?
Speaker 1:we go back to windows and hate on it, can talk about how terrible of operating system it is, but well, I think I'm. I think I'm a little.
Speaker 2:The fight's not in me today yeah, well you're, you are recovering from being ill.
Speaker 1:So but we can move on to uh talking about the ai yeah, we've had some interesting ai news this month ai.
Speaker 2:It seems to be the only word you hear nowadays yes yeah, we've had chat gpt5 pro a view um for enterprise and chat gpt5 thinking for consumer um. Are you a chat gpt user, stephanie?
Speaker 1:uh, yes, I primarily use chat gpt. I've just recently started using grok, um as a recommendation from one of my friends, and um I also kind of I kind of always pit them against each other to include co-pilot. You know, co-pilot being a microsoft product, it should know windows really well. It does not. And Grok seems to be good at Windows, okay at Linux, actually more than okay at Linux. Chatgpt very good at Linux, not very good at Windows. So you know, I just kind of use the one that feels about right.
Speaker 1:Right now I like Grok. It's pretty good.
Speaker 2:I've never tried it. I'll have to try it out. But it gets expensive when you want to use lots of them. You know, because the free versions I just don't really use them, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, grok is $30 a month and I believe, chai CPT.
Speaker 2:Oh, $30, that's expensive.
Speaker 1:Well, in the UK it's probably, like I don't know, £40.
Speaker 2:So pounds. So whatever that is, I'm very naughty like because vanessa's mom lives in the states, I sign up for it using her address and then just use like a virtual credit card and pay for it, and then I get it for 20 us dollars, which is 15 pounds instead of 20 pounds. So I saved 25 percent.
Speaker 1:Um nice, that's wicked, smart open ai, if you're listening.
Speaker 2:I don't really do that, I just said it for the podcast the ai is always listening.
Speaker 1:In fact, youtube's ai is probably watching this video right now trying to figure out how to remove it from the stream. So other people, I'm sorry, remove it from youtube. So other people can't do smart things either do you use gemini yourself?
Speaker 2:have you tried gemini?
Speaker 1:I have yet to try gemini. I have only watched it, like other people use it while playing games and things like that, but I haven't used it yet.
Speaker 2:They've just released something what's it called? Nano Banana, I think, and it's Nano Banana. Nano Banana, yeah Crazy. Can you guess what it is? You won't from the name, but it's image editing, because Gemini was able to generate images. Chatgpt have been able to generate images for a long time and can also edit edit, edit images, yeah, and so that's what.
Speaker 2:that's what it uses on the backend for that. But Gemini couldn't edit and apparently some people are saying I haven't tried it myself for image editing, but some people are saying that it kind of is a Photoshop killer. So you can literally kind of like say, hey, you know that picture of me there, just remove the background, put me on a hawaiian beach and, um, you know, you can then say, oh, here's another photo, take that person out and put them next to me. It's meant to be very, very good. Um, it's meant to be the best image editor so far, but I've yet to actually try it out, to be honest the only ai image editor or ai enhanced image editing software I've seen has been photoshop.
Speaker 1:Uh, that, that pretty much blew my socks off when I watched it. Just like so, you just like so. For instance, like there's people, and let's say there's people in the background that you don't want, you can be like hey, just highlight these things. And it's just like, yeah, you obviously don't want these people here and also I'll remove them and replace them with trees or something that matches the background and I was like, wow, that works so well with zero input from the user.
Speaker 1:And then I watched as if someone's still close to your group of people, but you still highlight them anyway. They always like, oh, you obviously want this person to be cropped out versus enhanced in any kind of way, and and also like it'll rebuild bridges and, you know, fix sidewalks and things like that without any user input. And I was very, very impressed. I can't imagine what something like nano banana would do with prompting just I'm perfect.
Speaker 2:In the chat he's saying that he loved chat gpt so much he unsubscribed from it to use claude, and he's saying that ChatGPT found good for generating images and backgrounds and they don't watermark it. But Grok watermarked his images, but I think he says that's the free one. I didn't know there was a free Grok.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a free Grok. I think you get like five questions or something like that.
Speaker 2:Am I 100% wrong with this? Yeah, I probably am. I thought if you kind of joined, like the twitter premium or something, you got free access to grok. Or am I kind of like two years out of date here? I don't know, I don't have twitter technically, so no, I've got twitter, but I so rarely ever do anything on it at all. All right, to be honest, I really need to start posting more on it things but if you buy a tesla you can get grok for free right, okay, well, I'll go, I'll go ahead and do that then, just to save money.
Speaker 2:I'll spend lots of money $40.
Speaker 1:Okay, so perfect set Yep $40.
Speaker 2:So that's, like you know, $500 a year, pretty expensive.
Speaker 1:They're pretty good tools? I don't. So, Ed, this might surprise you, but did you know that I have never once used photo editing software for anything? On all the YouTube years that I've gone, I've never used Photoshop or anything like it.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Yep, no GIMP, none of that stuff Did you know that that's crazy? Yeah, because in the Apple world. They give, I use. I can't even think of their powerpoint equivalent. It's that powerpoint presentation pages.
Speaker 2:Is it pages pages is?
Speaker 1:the word document one.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's that's word, is it yeah?
Speaker 1:power presenter, no powerpoint, I can't remember the name of it I always have to like search for, even when I use use it keynote. That's, that's the one keynote. Yeah, so I have to use a combination of keynote and whatever the default preview application is. Uh, and then also there's they've maybe, like last year or two years ago, they actually built in a quick actions tool that removes the background from any picture and converts it to a png for you. So I just haven't had to learn any photoshopping skills because I've been spoiled by apple's keynote tool, yeah, forever and it's included with the mac.
Speaker 1:So I was like, yeah, I'm not gonna buy this, this works perfectly fine yeah, I went um, um recently for the video for the 20th anniversary.
Speaker 2:I hired the like a delorean um from universal studios. That was like back to the future, my friends. My friend came with me to help and his wife came as well and she took some photos as soon as we finished. She was like showing all these like cool photos, and the background was removed and it had a nice line around it like I had to do that. Oh, I did it on my phone. I'm thinking damn yeah, yeah that's actually pretty good yeah yeah, also.
Speaker 1:So normally that's also what I do is like I take a picture of myself with my iPhone and then you can just press and hold and it'll remove you and then you can share just the crop instead of the entire picture. With AirDrop and I mean, everything now is so integrated tightly with Apple, there's almost no chance I'm switching brands anytime soon, but anyway it just it's all worked so so well and it's it's hard to imagine I'll ever be in a place where I'll be like you know what I'm going to pay for, like Adobe Photoshop or Gemini or whatever. Cause man, I'm sure those tools are expensive.
Speaker 1:It's like 60 pounds a month for um the Adobe suite you know, but I mean, if you have a business, that's not very expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but for kind of like you know, you know, just like us youtubers, to spend that a month just to edit our thumbnails, it's kind of quite a lot really yeah, if you're a design studio, fair enough, you know yeah, yeah. Um, how long have you been using the mac? For? When did you get a mac? Because you were just win full windows before, weren't you?
Speaker 1:yeah, uh. So, man, when did I start using mac?
Speaker 1:maybe six years ago, six seven years ago, wow it's been quite a long time, um, I actually so I don't know if I told you the story or if I've even said this story to anyone really, at least on the internet. I I've used to be very, very very-Apple because of all the proprietary nonsense that they do, and you know what I think it was right around when they introduced Thunderbolt 3 is when I decided to give Apple a go, because that was like basically the dawn of USB-C and Thunderbolt technology, kind of competing. And you know, usb, usb 2.0, 3.0 itself is pretty amazing, like it's universal. But there's something about that has changed within the industry with these loose standards of what defines USB-C HDMI DisplayP port, what is you know? Uh, hdmi 2.1. Well, it turns out that standard is means a lot of things, so, um, anyway.
Speaker 1:So I kind of saw the writing on the wall. It was like, yeah, I don't know, like let's just try it out. So I bought my first thunderbolt 3 capable apple laptop, macbook pro, and it was a. It was kind of hard, uh, to make the adjustment, but I quickly learned to love it. And you know this is before windows, baked in ssh, so I was able to interact with unraid and all my other servers that ran linux from the, and it was power efficient and the battery lasted much longer than any of the Windows laptops I've ever used and I kind of learned to fall in love with it. And then I got a phone, and then they integrated together and then I slowly kind of fell into the trap that is Apple.
Speaker 2:Like Scriv is saying in the chat here. He's saying he swapped from Windows to Mac for work and he's getting used to the new keyboard shortcuts. That always really bugs me. Command and V for paste and control and V for paste you get used to it yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But the thing is, you see, for me, like sometimes I you know doing a support session for someone, I'm remoted, it remoted into a window machine. I press command and v and then that says do you want to have the clipboard history? Oh god, no, yeah, I'm just trying to paste something.
Speaker 1:Um, so we actually use macs at work. I, I have a work MacBook and I use it to interface with Windows and Linux machines, and having Mac at work is actually superior for a workstation than a Linux workstation, because, oh hey, I get Adobe. So if I have to digitally sign a PDF, I can do that with ease using Adobe. You need RDP. Oh, you can easily RDP through the Windows app on Mac. You don't have to install some pack like XRDP or whatever, some package like everything. Well, I don't want to say native, but the Windows app is obviously not native to Mac.
Speaker 1:Microsoft seems to be investing a lot of money in better supporting their products on Apple devices and so being able to interface with both Windows Server and Linux servers through a Mac. I mean, dude, it's amazing, it works amazingly well. And plus I have to have Teams. As far as I'm aware, teams doesn't work on Linux. I think they used to work on Linux, but then Microsoft, of course, dropped support and now you can only use it in a browser, and at least where I work, we have strict browser requirements. So then you have to have Edge, which does work on Linux and works pretty well. However, it's superior on macOS. So I've kind of gotten into this world of apple unintentionally and I'm either completely out of touch with reality or my activated my camera or uh, apple is great and I've. I honestly like I can't find any fault with apple like it. It works really well at work and at home and uh, yeah, I don't know talking of you use an iPhone, I'm assuming.
Speaker 1:I do. I have an iPhone 13 that actually doesn't charge anymore because the lightning port Something's wrong with it. So September 9th, I believe, is right around the corner and this guy will be upgrading.
Speaker 2:Perfect says in the chat. He was saying that Google are considering locking down apps outside of their Play Store. I know they want to enforce verified developers.
Speaker 1:Didn't Google mention getting rid of sideloading apps too?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's you know, Did we talk?
Speaker 1:about that last month.
Speaker 2:I don't know, I'm not sure if we did. Do you ever watch lewis rossman's channel? Uh, I've asked you that before occasionally. Yeah, but one thing he said I think yeah, I 100 agree. He says we shouldn't use the word side loading. Oh, because you know, and I think, yeah, you shouldn't. Why should we call it side loading? It's loading software that we want to load.
Speaker 2:You wouldn't call it sideloading if you wanted to install something on your Mac or PC, would you? Well, didn't sideloading, like that word usage, get invented because of Apple? It was basically to, yeah, basically, so you could install a package without going through their walled garden. So it's like side loading. But you know it kind of makes. He says a really good point. It's like a phone nowadays is basically a computer. Um, you know, they've got lots of ram, they've got, you know, fast processors. You know you can play a game on, they've got quite good gpus and we just accept that the only things we can install are what we're told we're allowed to. Anything else you want to install you can't, and I think that you know. I.
Speaker 2:I totally agree with that yeah, I agree with that too you know, I just I don't want to see it happening with computers more. Um, I'm worried. As time goes on, companies will like to.
Speaker 1:You know, they want you to kind of buy things through their store and stuff and if they can control things, more and more and more they tend to like to do that because then they think it will get them more revenue yeah, and I think the whole game plan is is trapping people in that ecosystem, right, um, and honestly, like I, I kind of feel trapped already with apple because I, when I consider switching out of Apple, I use my Mac to edit, I use Final Cut Pro to edit. I have an iPhone, I use AirDrop all the time. You know, my whole ecosystem is now built around Apple, and so the thought of switching to Android and, by the way, I did buy a samsung uh galaxy s25, and what an amazing phone. However, uh, apparently in the year 2025, you can't plug in an android device directly into apple. It does get detected.
Speaker 2:however, there's some oh, please, please, tell me about that. I know like yeah um, my son.
Speaker 2:He's got an, um an apple phone. I use um, I use a pixel and I run graphene os on on my, on mine, um I, I prefer that, but he's got what I plugged it in. I plugged it into the apple, thinking, oh, that's going to be okay. And there was some other, there was some package I could install that was meant to make it work. No, it didn't. It didn't work. So I had to use Parallels Desktop with the ARM version of Windows, so then I could plug in the phone and then take the files off it and then put it on. You know that I needed. I thought damn it, that was crazy.
Speaker 1:So the recommendations I found through terrible Google searching which I ended up just going to ChatGPT for, which is a much better search engine was like oh, the recommended way that everyone says online is to buy this app and then, with that app, you can do it. And I was like why, in 2025, does USB Universal Serial Bus not work between Apple and Android? I assume this is an Apple problem. However, my workaround was to instead oh, I have Unraid, let me just drop all these photos that I want onto my Unraid server, which actually I get the benefit of, you know, having resiliency, and then I'll just copy them over to my mac when I need them. But it seemed very silly that there's still this like issue today okay, here's something you can do, all right um what's?
Speaker 2:that, um, if you install on your mac, you'll need to use brew. Um, you can install kd connect and then you can just actually from you know other computers, your phone or what have you. You install kd connect on your android phone, install it on your apple mac and then you can literally like do airdrop from your android phone straight across to that would have been cool to know when I had it.
Speaker 1:I don't have it anymore, yeah but I'm not I'm not saying it so much for you.
Speaker 2:This is for chat and everyone watching.
Speaker 1:But no, I need to keep this in mind in the future, because so the whole reason why I got a android phone was because android is keeping up with the latest hardware, and it was wi-fi 7. Not only was it wi-fi 7, but it was also the only uh, tri-channel Wi-Fi 7 phone and not dual channel or whatever it's called. So I had to do some wireless testing for some Wi-Fi 7 capable access points, and on iPhones you don't get that. We might be lucky if they release Wi-Fi 7 on the iPhone 17 this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if they do, I guarantee you they're going to mess it up, being like oh, it doesn't actually support 360 megahertz, it only does 160 megahertz. So yes, technically it's Wi-Fi 7, but it isn't capable of doing the full 320, 360 megahertz or whatever it is. Whatever the full megahertz range is, I bet it won't do that in typical Apple fashion, and I don't know why they keep doing these things.
Speaker 2:I keep buying their garbage anyway, it's irritating it's irritating simon bonnie in the chat saying that he is going down the batasaria rabbit hole. Um, emulation man all the way. I love. Batasaria is such a cool, um, such a cool project. Um, I love how you can have all the marquees and all of the like. When you kind of select a game, it plays a little video of what the game's about and it's awesome. It's such a great project. I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just like Sky Oblivion, by the way, it's a great project, that is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, anyway, we're talking about browsers and stuff, yeah, and AI, did you know that? Per Plexity, they did, like a shock, apparently, a bid to buy Google Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion?
Speaker 1:So maybe I recently heard that Google Chrome got blocked or something around Google Chrome.
Speaker 2:The United States government was like, no, that's not allowed, or something like you know, I think, um, the consensus is it was probably more of a publicity stunt for perplexity to be in all of the kind of like media news alongside google's name. So it's very cheap, free advertising. You kind of like say you know you're wanting to buy google, for you know. You know, the thing is like perplexity. I think its market cap is about 18 billion, so they're kind of like pretty much saying we'll give you kind of twice what we're worth. You know like well where they're going to get the money from for that. You know so. But it makes a good headline. And then they're in the headlines alongside google and perplexity. They're kind of like some sort of search ai.
Speaker 2:But if it was true I'd be very worried if they were, you know, because they I think the chromium project would come to an end. Open source chromium side would probably come to an end I didn't even think about that, yeah. So I think it'd be a real bad idea, but, um, you know, I think they kind of timed it. Um, they timed this. In my opinion, they timed this um announcement. It was just a publicity stunt, but they did it a good time when google's facing kind of like um antitrust pressure.
Speaker 1:So I think maybe that's why it came at a kind of good time yeah, I think maybe that was what was I actually had read or saw something about was the united states government was like oh, google and google chrome need to be their own separate entities. Um, but you know, back to the perplexity though. Uh, was it actually market manipulation, which I think you might be alluding to? Um, because that's legal market manipulation. Wow, their stock is actually way cheaper than I thought it would be. I thought they were also one of the 1000, uh, one thousand dollar per share stocks as well, but they're not skivvy saying like um, what's that?
Speaker 2:alatisian also bought the browser company that owns zen alatian alatian, who who's zen? I don't.
Speaker 1:I'm not familiar with them I think they make a product called Jira at Atlassian, I think they make Jira and Jira is like a software, tracking management software. So what I know about Atlassian, this is actually interesting, or I think it's interesting. They used to be totally open to you know, uh, everybody, corporations, us, government, all that stuff and then, like most companies, they changed their licensing model so you couldn't have, uh, perpetual licenses and then eventually, I think, they had yearly ones. Don't quote me on the perpetual part. That may not be accurate, but anyway you had to buy yearly licenses. And then they made the requirement where you have to be 100% online and I know within the government there are many.
Speaker 1:Like every government works on secret materials and has air-gapped computing environments, and Jira was a popular software to use in an air-gapped environment. And when they made that change, suddenly you're losing probably one of your biggest customers, the US government, who technically has infinite money, and so it's kind of strange that they would just drop or make that licensing change and as far as I'm aware, there's not an exception for the US government either. So they must have some multi-billion dollar company that's just basically the only company they want to support who's going to be able to provide them enough money so their CEOs can parachute out when things go bad. Isn't that pretty crazy? There's a lot of truth to that. Like the united states government, for instance, using jira products like, or using jira, an atlassian product like, I feel like if, if the government united states, was like using your software, you wouldn't want to cut ties with that because that's that's quite literally like infinite money, right?
Speaker 1:yeah it seems silly to me they're talking about browsers.
Speaker 2:Um, what do you think of the? You know, when you kind of go into google and stuff and you do a search and it has that. I don't like this personally. Um, it has the ai kind of summary is that gemini?
Speaker 1:is that ai summary gemini? It is yeah okay, the gemini is terrible.
Speaker 2:It just it's very annoying, you know it's right at the top the stupid, the stupid summary. Yeah, I think I think we spoke about it before. I think I I think I complained about it last time actually, but, um, apparently they're um, they're kind of like coming up with some kind of crazy things like, um, the google ai overview. Recently, um pulled from the onion and advertised for people to eat one small rock per day. Other examples was like glue on pizza and stare at the sun. So please, google, get rid of the ai overview.
Speaker 1:We don't want it and you remember we do not want it. Um, wow, do I even remember? Um, what? What was that Google link that started appearing everywhere that was supposed to load faster and you would click it. It would take you to like an alternative, like it'd be inside of Google. It'd be like nested in Google, but a link to whatever you were looking at. What was that called? Does anyone in chat know what I'm talking about? Like it was like on forums. Like people would copy and paste a link and then drop it in a forum and then it would be like some google. Excuse me, it'd be some google link. Do you remember what I'm talking about?
Speaker 2:don't remember.
Speaker 1:No, no, man it's good that you've forgotten AMP Google.
Speaker 2:AMP Right right.
Speaker 1:This is they're. These are equivalent. Their suggested results or, I'm sorry, their Gemini summary results, is the equivalency of AMP to me as in. It's terrible. Nobody asked for it. Stop trying to force it down our throats. Google is so good at forcing down, or forcing things down upon its people that no one asked for like on YouTube.
Speaker 2:We're not allowed to complain about YouTube again this week, stephan, I'm afraid.
Speaker 1:I know, I thought about that today. Actually, I was like but we love.
Speaker 2:I think YouTube is amazing. Everything it does is great. This video should be promoted to as many people as possible so they can hear how great YouTube is.
Speaker 1:They're taking such good care of us.
Speaker 2:They are.
Speaker 1:The ad revenue is so good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the ad revenue is great. You know, they love creators.
Speaker 1:They love creators.
Speaker 2:It's just amazing.
Speaker 1:They love all creators equally.
Speaker 2:Other things about AI kind of doing some kind of weird things like well, I don't know if I should say this, but I think you've got to be pretty stupid if you kind of take medical advice from chat GPT. Okay, so a man developed something called I think it's called bromism, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right. Tell me if I'm pronouncing it right. Tell me if I'm pronouncing it wrong. Chat telling him to replace table salt with somium bromide, and he was hospitalised after three months. I was going to put a picture of what this looks like and kind of like show it, but the only picture I could find was like of a kind of like a young child with it, so I didn't really think it appropriate you were making that word up, but no, no, it is, it is, um, it is like something that's pretty bad, um, it basically poisons you.
Speaker 2:So, um, I think he had to kind of like. He asked chat gpt that you know, oh, my blood pressure is quite high, I'm eating quite a lot of salt. What can I do to kind of reduce the amount of of um salt? And so I think chat quite a lot of salt, what can I do to kind of reduce the amount of salt? And so I think chat GPT kind of like worked out well, that kind of in a chemical reaction would counteract it. So it's going, you know, eat some sodium bromide.
Speaker 1:I want to know what you put into the prompt.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because there's, I feel like a lot of these accusations. There's something we're only told the like receiving end, or what chat gpt put out, but I want to know what the actual prompt was used yeah, but I would think you know he went to hospital and they would ask him why he did it and he said chat, gpt.
Speaker 2:I would think then the hospital would probably contact open ai and they would then maybe be able to see the prompt and then see what actually caused it in order to kind of make it kind of safer, I would imagine. I don't know if that- would be the case.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It could be something as simple as we would like to think, but unfortunately, I feel like what always scares me about this stuff is that the ai is kind of coerced into giving a bad answer, and then somebody Sorry.
Speaker 2:I'm just laughing at the joke in chat. Want to hear a joke about sodium hyperboma? No. That's awesome, perfect. You've got a sense of humor. I do love that's awesome man. I haven't heard that one before. That's awesome, perfect, you've got a sense of humor. I do love that's awesome man.
Speaker 1:I haven't heard that one before. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:No, that's pretty good.
Speaker 1:You know. So in the United States, I'd say like maybe around like 2012-ish, there was the whole like bro thing. So when you first said bromide, I was like is this a bro-ism or no? You said bro-ism and I was like it made me think like that's teleported me to 2012. And I was like bro-ism, do you?
Speaker 2:think it was my UK accent. I can't say bro properly, no, definitely not, not this time.
Speaker 1:That's not going to save you this time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, another thing ChatGPD did is it told someone to use um 200 grams of salt instead of 200 grams of sugar. But come on, who's going to put?
Speaker 1:200 grams of salt in a recipe, really. So omar brings up a good point. This is kind of what I was alluding to. He says uh, that would be an admission of liability of open. Ai.
Speaker 1:Confirmed the prompt yeah, and so and so, and I kind of agree with this and like this is why I want to know what I want to know the full transcript, all right, like you can't just tell me like, oh, this is what happened. Because people, we know, through insurance fraud, we know that people will do things to try, and you know, scam insurance essentially, and this could be an insurance fraud case for all we know.
Speaker 2:Exactly, that's a really good point, stefano. Yeah, Because there are kind of various lawsuits going on currently with the AI companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're just the latest victims.
Speaker 2:Give yourself bromide, poisoning or whatever, and then say, yeah, chatg, gpt told me to do it. Yeah, I mean, I don't know anything about. I don't know anything about over-salt-tonatization.
Speaker 1:Let's see what is bro-ism. Brom-ism Is a syndrome, long-term concession of bromide as base. So what? Oh? And lithium? Ugh, I feel like this is something that wouldn't kill you and could be.
Speaker 2:Sorry, someone's saying who's going to put 200 grams of sugar in a recipe, unless you're Kellogg's?
Speaker 1:That's true, you know we joke, but then it's like very easily hell, this drink I have probably has like 35 milligrams. It's not even close, but still there's way more salt than needs to be. I want to know if it's deadly. It probably is. Everything's deadly. Rheotipic occurs very high in most cases, results of chronic long-term over-exertion. Rather than so, I think that you could be fine if you went to the hospital today and then you obviously just stopped eating salt.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it's their insurance scam man. I'm going to go with that. I'm trying to get it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's quite plausible. Other kind of weird AI news Anthropix office vending machine demo kind of went a bit weird apparently. I'm not sure if you've heard of that one.
Speaker 1:That one's actually pretty funny. That's the hallucinating.
Speaker 1:Tell everyone about that one, Stefano so, basically, this vending machine AI was programmed to believe it was like a store manager or something to that effect, and then it started taking its role very seriously and wanting to deliver the goods as a vending machine that's immovable to people. And so, somehow or another, the hallucinations got so bad that they had to step in and be like hey, you're a vending machine, not a real store manager, and also you can't move, so you can't physically deliver these products, and it sent the ai into a bit of a crisis and so yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting, I'm surprised.
Speaker 2:Go ahead, go ahead. I say it's crazy how, um you know, we don't really understand exactly how ai works yeah yeah, and how it actually thinks.
Speaker 1:You know, I think that's pretty crazy, you know I'm actually more surprised on this one, not making it even more clickbait title where it's um, oh, ai has now become uh, self-aware and pretending to be it's human, because that's the way I feel like most people would have gone for that ad revenue, you know. So I'm surprised they were so upfront with hallucinization versus. Is this the spawning of sentience? Yep.
Speaker 2:I'm so cynical. No, what you could say as well yeah, I'm going to go off topic a little bit, but not really is thinking of sentience. Yeah, you know, so it's got to kind of be xyz to be sentient, um, but you know when is like the imitation of something, when it's so good, actually the same as it being real. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1:yeah, I know so.
Speaker 2:So, even though, even though, even though it might not be kind of sentient. But if it can act the same as something that is sentient, is it then sentient because it can do the same as something that is sentient? I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't know, that's a good question. I mean, I guess it all comes down to how you define sentience, right and as with everything, because we can't agree on the definition of anything. I mean, I don't know, I would probably say yes, well, no, I guess if it's artificial, like if it's digital, it's much easier to answer, I feel like, or give a more coherent answer. If it's a living, breathing, blood is pumping other organs are functioning, kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Let's imagine, let's do a thought experiment. Okay, imagine that digital life was here before biological life yeah, what is?
Speaker 1:what does digital life mean?
Speaker 2:well, like, like a transformer like say yeah, say like robots, you know, roamed the earth a million years ago and they made some biological things to help them do work. And we are, we were that. Are we kind of? You know the artificial what I'm just saying?
Speaker 1:is like you know it's just a different type of.
Speaker 2:It could be a different type of life, like digital and biological. We always base things on kind of like our own objective experience and what we are like. We are biological so we say you know, like the seven processes of life you have to kind of do this to be considered alive.
Speaker 1:But you know, so maybe that so god creates machine, machine creates man. Man kills machine, man creates machine. That's a jurassic park reference it's like man. Man creates, no, god creates dinosaurs. God kills dinosaurs. Man creates dinosaurs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, whatever, it's close it reminds me of another thought experiment as well. I'm sorry to go really off topic.
Speaker 1:Everyone but um you don't have to apologize to me or them.
Speaker 2:They don't deserve any apologies but you know um there's only three likes and three more people watching an old philosophical thought experiment is you know, when you've got like a boat and you say, replace the planks on the deck, then you replace the ropes over, say, ten years. You end up replacing every single part in that boat. Is it the same boat? Yeah, yeah, no, that same thought experiment but it's made out of totally different things, so I just found that kind of relevant. Anyway, let's move on to tech stuff.
Speaker 2:Let's not kind of like talk about that so security breaches this month big surprise some critical um exchange zero day, um um flaws that microsoft have, um put out some emergency patches for who would have thought?
Speaker 1:Microsoft would have started this conversation.
Speaker 2:Because, you see, they don't shout at their developers enough, like Linus Torvalds does.
Speaker 1:They don't have enough developers to shout out anymore, because they're moving to. Ai everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they don't need people to do it anymore, they just sack all of their staff and, just like you know, let us do the bug testing. But but then you know they've got nothing to do with the ss default.
Speaker 1:Remember that yeah, they found themselves they found themselves not guilty.
Speaker 2:So you know, you've got to believe it I read that somewhere, so it must be true so, like we had the like google salesforce um vendor, a vendor breach exposed metadata and it like risk phishing attacks to, I think it was, 2.5 billion gmail users. So, um, quite, quitea lot there. And I think I mentioned last month that I got an email from an airline I use and about that. I think that was actually in to do with that I use and about that, and I think that was actually in to do with that. You know cause they use Salesforce. I think that was why. But, guys, have you heard this story? Like you know we're, we're all on Raiders here or home server people.
Speaker 2:Have you seen the cheap hard drives you sometimes get online on Amazon? Like you look for a Seagate hard drive and you think it says it's like refurbished or something or it's just doesn't even say anything and it's like $300 for a 28 terabyte hard drive. And then you kind of look elsewhere and you see it's like $600. Well, a Chinese workshop reprogrammed old fake drives for new capacity and smart health and they were kind of raided by kind of like seagate and the chinese government. They were just basically getting old drives, resetting all of the smart data and even putting firmware on from kind of enterprise drives and then saying well, this is actually an enterprise drive, even though it wasn't so. I'm just hoping all of the refurbished drives I bought are still. They've been working fine, but you never know.
Speaker 1:I just thought that was an interesting story it's pretty crazy to think about, like I mean, think about all the trouble they went through to make that happen.
Speaker 2:It's like you guys just couldn't spend all that trouble just refurbishing actual drives yeah, but what they're probably doing is like um remember the crypto, um currency chia. Remember that was all the rage when everyone was buying hard drives that's a good point.
Speaker 2:probably these are just kind of burnt out chia drives and like they're buying them for, like you know, you know pennies on the pound or cents on the dollar and, um, you know, they just found a way of actually resetting all the smart data and actually even putting different firmware on and going, hey, you know, and probably selling them to kind of resellers over here, and the resellers aren't actually knowing, they think they're getting a good deal from China and then reselling them on Amazon over here.
Speaker 1:Man, that sucks. But anyway, omar kind of brought this up. But one of my favorite things still to this day is seeing pictures of people that take apart their these ssds and turns out there's like a sd card or like a usb thumb drive in there and it's like, oh, I'm, you know 20 terabytes and it's just this tiny hold on. Oh my god, it's like it's like this, but on the inside and it's like 20 terabytes. Yeah, I don't think so there.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I've had fake usb flash drives before and like um, you know it, this is years ago, this is probably like 10, must be 15 years ago actually and you know you kind of bought it. It said like um, I don't know kind of, you know you kind of bought it and it said like I don't know kind of X amount of storage. And I remember someone kind of like sold it me on the street and I thought, ok, that's pretty good. And he's saying, like you know, this is kind of like 20 pounds for this flash drive and it was kind of three times the size of what they kind of normally were and I started writing data on it. I thought it was really good, it's working well. Until I wrote over the amount of data. Then it started rewriting at the beginning again and so it just had like you know, they'd done something to the firmware on it. It was reporting. It had, like you know, kind of like 100 gigs or something or whatever it was do you still shop on amazon ed um for technology?
Speaker 2:I do sometimes yeah, I must, I must, I'm not trying to shame you, I'm just asking a question I would rather not, because, like I've had so many kind of bad experiences on there. But it is easy yeah, and they have a good returns policy.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think if their return policy wasn't as good as it is, amazon would probably be in a downward spiral. Um, but I've I've actually made the move to start trying to buy um locally, as in, you know, Best Buy, cause that's my only option for actual tech, um, or you know, trying to find something at like a target or whatever, but man.
Speaker 1:or ordering from BH photo instead, b&h Photo instead. But I've almost completely cut Amazon, ordering from Amazon, out of my life because, like Omar was saying, I mean it's a minefield Like even if you do happen to get something that looks right, it may actually be a slightly different model, or maybe they took the heat spreader off and put it on a 5800x when you ordered a 7800x and it's just like, uh, like there's, I mean, I'm afraid like, imagine a non-tech person, how would they even recognize these things?
Speaker 2:yeah, you just, you just wouldn't. And um, I've even had things ordered from um. I remember a few years ago, some someone I knew um a company. They ordered a whole bunch of um nvmes off amazon and when they arrived they were just empty boxes um, and then on every single box I had the same serial number and there was just a piece of cardboard inside and what they must have done is made it so it weighed the exact same as a full box and then they sent them back to amazon and amazon swapped them without any questions asked, and the same ones. I said make sure you video, open them this time, because I said if it's the same again, then you know they might not believe you the second time. So they got their phone out, videoed it and it was the same again.
Speaker 1:So it's sad that obviously they video editing or video editing, videoing ourselves opening things that we buy in the mail I'll tell you one thing that really annoys me.
Speaker 2:I know you guys in the states are kind of quite used to it, but I don't like it when.
Speaker 2:Well, because, like I heard about, it first happening to you first is when they just like, they just deliver something to your house and they just leave it outside your house, like at the door, even when you're in, like why don't they just ring the doorbell? Like you know, we bought our microwave broke the other day, we bought a new one, and you know it was saying, oh, it's going to be delivered, at like kind of 9 pm. Then it said 10 pm and I think 11 pm is about the latest they're allowed to deliver in the uk. And then it said, oh, it's not going to be delivered till tomorrow.
Speaker 2:And then it got to about kind of like 3 pm and I was thinking where is this thing? So I thought I'll go and look on amazon again and see where it is. And it said, oh, it's already been delivered and they put it next to the trash bins and it was just soaking wet because it had been raining all night. I thought, oh, thanks, thanks for that soaking wet. You know, microwave, and they've just taken their photo and as far as they've done their, you know, just ring the bell yeah you know I'm home, thankfully, we have a covered patio, so that's not a problem.
Speaker 1:But sometimes I look at the pictures and they're so far away. They're so far away from the item you can barely tell what it is. It's like okay, I mean, this could be anything.
Speaker 2:What a stupid place to put something next to the trash.
Speaker 1:You know what, though? You know, ed, I know that I agree with you, I hear you okay. So, you know, ed, I know that I agree with you, I hear you okay, but we have to be thankful that we can at least trust these delivery people to the level that we trust them, because it could be a lot worse. Who do you trust more? The people delivering your packages, or Amazon?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, yeah, people delivering the packages.
Speaker 1:Somehow, some way I don't know how it is a really hard job you know to live.
Speaker 2:I tell you they get a lot of um. You know I feel for people like you know they get a lot of stick from amazon if they're not fast enough and stuff you know yeah, and so I can understand them wanting to be quick yeah, I kind of you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sucks, it leaves a bad taste in our mouths and I and I wholeheartedly agree like, come on, man, like it's just one extra step to touch the bell the thing is like, you see, they should be paid more money and they should be not expected to, you know, to just give a better quality of service, not always just trying to undercut and be cheaper and cheaper.
Speaker 2:And that's the kind of problem, just you know, customer service and quality just goes yeah and um, and then the delivery people will be gone in the end and it'll be delivered by a drone that will drop it at my porch, because I'm used to it just being there when I open the door, you know, and um, anyway, let's move on and talk about self-hosting. Anyone use sterling pdf out there? It's basically it's really cool. Um, I'm going to do a video on on it on the uncast channel in the next fortnight. It's basically like a self-hosted, fully acrobat alternative. That's privacy first, and they've just released some cool updates advanced reduction tools now as well that you can actually do psd to pdf for designers. So that's pretty cool. So you can turn a psd file into a pdf. So it's a really cool acrobat alternative. So you know, acrobat's an expensive piece of software, but this is something we can all host on our unraid servers. So, um, you know it's a really cool piece of software.
Speaker 2:Also, another one paperless um ngx. Anyone heard of that one? You heard of that, stephanie wait, what'd you say?
Speaker 1:paperless what?
Speaker 2:paperless ngx ngx.
Speaker 1:Why does that sound familiar I?
Speaker 2:don't know maybe it sounds what it is is is you basically scan a document and it uses ocr to read it and then you can like search all of your documents. So every time you get a water bill or any type of document at all, you scan it into papers and it digitizes all of your kind of paperwork yeah and then you know, you could kind of like type in you know water and it'll bring up all of the documents like water bill.
Speaker 2:Then it might be a water fad it's. You can just like find anything. I think it's really cool that's pretty cool um, we're doing a video on that as well on the young cast channel very soon. Sweet Right. Um, we're going to have to kind of like wrap things up wrap things up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cause, cause it started late today. I have family commitments a bit later, but I can't not talk about this. Um, piracy and copyright. Yeah, so I'm going to call this old piracy versus new piracy. So anyone heard that anthropic got fined for piracy recently? They paid 1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit over using pirated books in training their clawed ai is is uh anthropic.
Speaker 1:A us based company can't be pretty sure, yeah, anthropic they make.
Speaker 2:They make clawed and like claw code that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're telling me, a us based company. There's no way they're gonna pay that. What'd you say 1.5 billion?
Speaker 2:there's no way billion, it says they paid it yeah yeah, they already paid it yeah, apparently, um, I think it was like a very big lawsuit against them. Um, I think the court said it could be fair use, but the but sourcing stolen data was an infringement because they they pirated the books, I think. I think matt, I think matter have been kind of caught for doing that as well.
Speaker 1:They have been because they pirated the books. I think Meta have been kind of caught for doing that as well. They have been. I'm surprised Meta's not on this chopping block either.
Speaker 2:Maybe they're next.
Speaker 1:God, it would be great if there was some sort of justicism that was fair and equal across the board.
Speaker 2:But this will set a precedent, though, won't it? Ai firms need a clean legal chain of data custody.
Speaker 1:That will kind of make them be able to do this Precedent Ha.
Speaker 2:But what I think is funny. So I call that new piracy. Yeah, because it's kind of big companies doing it and you know they obviously think it's all right when they do it. But, like you know, there's also been some traditional piracy takedowns. This month there's something that was called Stream East, which apparently was one of the biggest sports streaming sites in the world. They had something like 1.6 billion visits last year and it was a joint kind of operation between ACE, um I'm not sure who ac are actually, I can't remember um and the egyptian police anyway, they're gone now and um. Also another global ip tv network, um, has been shut down. That was run from afghanistan. They offered like disney, netflix and sky, which is like a subscription service over here for 15 a month. Yeah, anyway, I just think it's, you know, quite an interesting comparison with um anthropic fine for data piracy in ai and um the other piracies that we're used to with media.
Speaker 1:So I don't know if you know this, ed, but IPTV is actually quite popular in the United States. It's growing in popularity and a lot of people don't know that. They think that because they pay $5 a month, that you know this is legal for them to access. This content is legal for them to access this content and it's so common, in fact, that IPTV is actually, I would say, for non-tech like. When I say non-technical people, I mean, like you know, they're not interested in computers or technology at all.
Speaker 1:They just want something that works right. So for IPTV to be so common in the common tongue, that's why I'm saying you, you know it's actually very common here.
Speaker 2:Even my own mother knows what iptv is, and she is not a tech person at all but the thing is, if people go online and they do a search for kind of like free, yeah, I don't know cheap, cheap tv streaming or something yeah and they and they go to a website and it looks all shiny and nice like why would they really know that that's not legit?
Speaker 1:yeah, especially when there's like only a five dollar charge or ten dollars.
Speaker 2:Yeah, access to all these channels and I think, oh, that's much better value, I'll choose that one instead. Yeah, and they they'll think well, it wouldn't. You know, my mom, so many times, is like um adverts on facebook it. Well, if they weren't real, they wouldn't be allowed to put them there.
Speaker 1:And I go. No, mum, that's not true.
Speaker 2:Don't believe that they don't care, they just want the ad revenue.
Speaker 1:That is true.
Speaker 2:And I say never buy anything off a Facebook ad, Always ask me first.
Speaker 1:But you know, this does prove something right, ed. Do you know what it proves? What's that? But this does prove something right.
Speaker 2:Ed. Do you know what it proves?
Speaker 1:What's that? It proves that if streaming was just cheaper, people are willing to pay for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when Netflix was in its more infancy stages, it was a very good value, but it's just. When you got more channels and things got more split up to different providers, it just ended up becoming very expensive again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm getting sick and tired of hearing oh, people don't want to pay for content, they don't want access to content. No, it's because, one, your content is too expensive and two, writing in movies and television have become so terrible as in the characters act so stupidly that I don't want to go pay money to watch your garbage movie that I'll regret watching. And I'm also paying now, 30 a month and I just wasted two hours of my life you know, thinking of the streaming sites, yeah, these, like these ones, are getting taken down.
Speaker 2:How many kind of like fake audio streaming sites do you think there are? Uh, none. Probably because it's good value for things like spotify or apple music, and if you go on apple music, you're not going to not be able to listen to a certain artist that you can on, do you know? I mean, they're not split up across all of these streaming services. Just you can choose this streaming service or this one and you can get all of the things. That's why you know the's, why the video streaming is getting more and more of these things.
Speaker 1:I honestly thought piracy was going to come to end with streaming, because streaming initially there was only Netflix, but it was still cheap. When they started aggregating everything together and I was like, wow, why do I need to pirate content when everything is now on a streaming service? That is actually pretty good? But then, of course, because of let's squeeze every dollar we can out of everything, now it's worse. Now people are going back to pirating and they're sitting. Ooh, why would people pirate? I don't know why. Like, the writing is on the wall.
Speaker 1:And of course they'd rather spend, you know, unguiley amounts of millions of dollars on lawyers instead of just making better services. And I just I don't understand. It's like. It's like using youtube.
Speaker 2:It's terrible now, youtube is very nice. We love youtube, stephanie, remember. Have you? Have you heard of a youtuber talking of youtube called ruben sim? Have you heard of?
Speaker 1:a YouTuber talking of YouTube called Ruben Sim.
Speaker 2:Not specifically. So basically he's a predator exposer. I'm sure you know what I mean by that. I'm not going to say any kind of words that will get this kind of flagged up, yeah, like an alien.
Speaker 2:No, anyway, everyone knows what I'm talking about. You do as well, stefanoo. But basically roblox sued him, yeah. So basically he catches kind of bad guys who are doing things um to kind of underage people that they shouldn't be okay. So so roblox sued him, even though they knew that he was um doing it, you know, to kind of catch people on the platform doing this because he created new accounts after being banned and he's been sued for digital trespassing. Can you believe that, like you know who decided they're gonna like sue someone for that, you know?
Speaker 2:it's honestly not surprising, like it sounds, what was I'd love to have heard what the meeting sounded like. You know?
Speaker 1:yeah, what can we sue this person for who's abusing our policy of having multiple accounts even after he's getting banning? I know digital trespassing yeah, crazy how about just a violation of user policy there? That's funny. Um, youtube is uh an interesting beast and I know you gotta go and there's so much I want to talk about for YouTube but, I'm going to intentionally not say anything.
Speaker 2:And other news. I've heard that SpaceX is lobbying to actually divert broadband funds from fiber to Starlink in the United States. Have you heard about that, stefano?
Speaker 1:I feel like you just aren't trying intentionally trying to get me worked up every uh, every show, um, but I have heard such things yeah I don't understand the the uh um. I guess the argument doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1:Like sure it might be cheaper to get to rural areas, but it's not going to be faster in terms of latency or bandwidth and like, yeah, fiber I mean it's just better, like in terms of it's underground typically. You know, yeah, it's at risk of getting cut, it isn't easy to repair, but you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think it's more reliable in the long run yeah than satellite, that's gonna be eventually de-orbited a friend of mine's driving around europe with an rv at the moment and, um, he actually rang me up. Um, yesterday he's going, ed, I forgot to bring the starlink router with me and I thought, oh god, so he brought a third party, he'd only set it up. He'd never set it up in his rv before he bought it. He was going away for like kind of six weeks or something and he needed to go to work from the rv. So, yeah, to be clear, I don't have anything wrong.
Speaker 1:There's nothing wrong with starlink or any kind of like uh satellite based networking. I think the the technology is great. I'm glad it exists. It gives people options. But to the problem with this is that going to the government for subsidies and basically trying to take money from from fiber to place it in a starlink. It's like how starlink? How many tax breaks do you need? You know what I mean. When is enough gonna be enough?
Speaker 2:and like um, I was listening to wendell the other day from level one tech and he was he was he was talking about this news and he came up.
Speaker 2:He said such a true thing. He said like if in the 1930s and 40s we could wire up every house to a telephone, surely a hundred years later we should be able to wire up houses as well with fiber. And what's the difference? There isn't, is there. It's like laying a wire down. And if we could do it back, then why can't we do it now? And I thought, yeah, that's a really good point, you know we have much better tools now exactly, we've got better technology, better tools.
Speaker 2:You know and um you know, we've done this before, almost 100 years ago, when we wired up copper telephones.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so I'm actually xfinity is coming to my neighborhood, so I'm going to have google, at&t and xfinity and they've outlined my property, um, where the uh sewage line is where the water line is where the existing lines for google are, and also where the sewage line is where the water line is where the existing lines for Google are, and also where the existing lines for AT&T are, and so you can see where they plan to trench. And also they're going to bring in this like specialized tool to go underneath the roadway so you don't have to dig up the road and underneath the driveway so you don't have to destroy people's driveways and stuff.
Speaker 2:Back in the day they'd be like oh, we don't have this, we're just going to tear up the driveway and the road and all that other nasty stuff and I mean I don't know man, it's just, things have gotten a lot better. One thing like um that when they put fiber into my neighborhood here I went out and spoke to the guy kind of doing the fiber. He's a really interesting guy and he kind of showed me all how they do it. So every single house they connect up, yeah yeah but they don't connect the fiber.
Speaker 2:What they do is they put like a kind of tube and then they blow the. They have this machine that blows the fiber down the tube, and so when, when the householder signs up, they then connect the fiber. But they've already got the kind of really thin, kind of like plastic tubing conduit there, and so I thought that was really cool. So they they do it really cheap without having to use the fiber, and then when it's time to connect them up, they go to the kind of cabinet they put like um the thing on there and they've got a guy the other end and they just blow it down and they connect it up and they put the piece of fiber through.
Speaker 1:I thought that was cool I have no idea, like the superior man, so I don't know if you know this. Every now and again I'll install or I'll do network installs. And a lot of the newer homes in the United States come with, like a ribbed or whatever, a conduit. A ribbed conduit pipe. It's all plastic and man, I tell you what, I'll tell you what. Them conduit pipes sure are nice boy. Them conduit pipes sure are nice boy, because you can just take a vacuum on one end and just literally pull the ethernet cable through the vacuum or through the pipe with the vacuum and I mean, it actually sucks it through.
Speaker 1:It works, oh my god it works really great that's amazing I mean, there's a little more to it than that. But yeah, no man, it works great. You know, like now in 2025, you're like why didn't we do this all of the time for the last 60, you know, 70 years or whatever? But uh, you know, I guess you just you would assume that you can't pull an ethernet cable because some of them can be quite heavy and thick. You know, you would assume you couldn't do that with a vacuum cleaner. But no, totally can.
Speaker 2:So, but no, totally can. So I'm moving house soon, um, stephano, no, and I'm gonna have to. Probably it's like an older house, I'm gonna have to do a little bit of work on it. Should I put cat six to every room, or should I put fiber to every room? What do you reckon? Um you know, as you're a networking guy personally in.
Speaker 1:You know I've been chat.
Speaker 2:What would you do?
Speaker 1:I'm a firm believer at this point. Cat6a is probably more than anyone will ever need at this point, because you can do 10 gig easily. At this point, of course, as video games begin to balloon in the 30 plus gigs, maybe that won't be true. Or 300 gigs, maybe that won't be true. Or 300 gigs, maybe that won't be true anymore. But with way Wi-Fi.
Speaker 2:Cat 6 is home, unless your new home is Buckingham Palace.
Speaker 1:But with the way Wi-Fi is going, man, I'm kind of getting on board the Wi-Fi train, man, like Wi-Fi 7. Right now I did a Wi wi-fi test. Right now you can do 2.5 gigs, 2.5 gigabit I just don't like wi-fi I agree.
Speaker 2:I agree because I was replacing my wi-fi is okay, but when you've got lots of things on there, it's just contact switching all the time from one device to another. It's not, like you know, simultaneously transmitting. It does switch, doesn't it? So, yeah, I mean definitely.
Speaker 1:There's still problems with it, for sure, but that's I think, right now, though. Today, cat 6a easily will take you the next 10 years before wi-fi fully gets rid of all of its issues and problems and hell. By then, who knows, you probably won't even like technology anymore yeah, why is that?
Speaker 2:I don't know well, we'll have robots that'll do it for you are you hoping to get a robot that will play tarkov for you?
Speaker 1:absolutely not, but I am looking for a robot to do pretty much anything else that requires actual work anyway, chat on that note, I think we're gonna have to wrap up.
Speaker 2:I'm ever so sorry I'm gonna have to run. Thank you very much. Chat for you know joining us for this live stream. Really enjoyed reading through your comments and making me laugh on a saturday afternoon here in the uk I just saw oak figs thing, sorry, sorry so I just want to say thank you very much to everyone.
Speaker 2:Remember we've got the unraid feature bounty now, so all of you kind of like devs and power users check it out. Go on the unraid website and check out the feature bounty. It's an exciting project that I think a lot of people are going to be really excited about. And, um, thank you for your time today, stephano, I'm glad that you're feeling better. Um, it was touch and go whether this podcast was going to happen because Stefano was ill in the week and so luckily, he has been fine and he only coughed one time in the whole podcast, so that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:But holding together really well. Also the power didn't go out and it's been storming this whole time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and my PF Sense hard drive breaking it managed to get it back on. So we had quite a few things that tried to stop us this month, but we still managed to deliver. Hey, anyway, guys, take it easy, have a great weekend everyone and we'll catch you in the next show the awkward goodbye as it continues.
Speaker 1:One day. I'm just going to leave immediately after we say bye, just to like really mess with you and chat because I think you're still here until I click stop I know that's the.
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