somethinguseful thing about David Pierce's produtivity app (see highlight) actually ## Cold Open Altman Quote 0:00 (upbeat music) - Welcome to "The Vergecast", the flagship podcast of being unconstrained by truth, 0:06 which is what we do here on "The Vergecast". - Wow. - I'm your friend, David Pierce. And Nilay Patel is here. - Would you say 0:11 in this media environment that we are the flagship podcast of that? 'Cause I don't, whoo... RFK started a podcast this week. 0:18 You know what I mean? - It is a very high bar for being unconstrained by truth on a podcast. But here today, we're gonna do our very best. 0:25 - The Webby for being unconstrained by truth. The voting is now open. - It's beautiful. That, of course, is a line from a "New Yorker" profile 0:31 of Sam Altman that is deeply fascinating and has been making the rounds this week. We're gonna talk about it. There's another big story about Satoshi Nakamoto, 0:39 the founder of Bitcoin, that's been going around, that we're gonna talk about. We have some Brendan stuff to talk about. We have some Anthropic stuff to talk about. 0:45 We have a lot to talk about. All that is much less important than weird things Nilay and David have been doing on their computers this week. ## Webbys and Events 0:51 We also have a couple of housekeeping items for you. One is please vote for us in The Webbys. 0:56 The voting is open until next Thursday. We are currently winning for Best Technology Podcast, but it's too close and it's making me uncomfortable. 1:03 - Yeah, we're not winning by enough. - I would like to win in a way that hurts everyone else's feelings. Do you know what I mean? - Yeah. 1:08 I'd like to win in a way that we have to be good winners. (David laughing) Do you know what I mean? - Right. 1:14 - Like- - It becomes incumbent on us to give a nice speech, acknowledging the others. - Yeah. If you thinking here, I was like, 1:20 oh my god, I'm so happy I won. But like, if you win by enough, if you don't nail the speech, you're a jerk. 1:27 And I want to be in that position. I want that level of stress and pressure on the five-word Webby acceptance speech. 1:32 - I respect that. I would like to be required. I want the like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan level of success 1:40 where we do so well that we still find haters and everybody's like, (Nilay laughing) wow, the amount of rage 1:48 and anger that you have to have to still find haters amongst all the success. That's what I want for us. - And then, thrive on them. 1:54 - Right. Like- - I think it's clear that I thrive on my haters, David. I don't know that we need to find anymore. 1:59 - That's true. People have been saying this about you. Also, The Verge movie night on April 27th is already sold out. 2:05 Not only did the IFC Center have to bump us to the bigger theater to go see "Sneakers" with all of you, it's already sold out. 2:12 So, A, very excited to see a bunch of you for "Sneakers" in a couple of weeks. B, I think this is officially 2:17 a thing we're gonna have to do again. - Yeah. - So, keep an eye out. We're gonna do more of these. It's gonna be very fun. Last one, in two Tuesdays, I think April 21st, 2:27 we're gonna do a whole Vergecast about The Verge and "The Vergecast", the media business and journalism 2:32 and AI and our feelings about everything. So, you and I are gonna spend a whole episode answering as many questions as we can. 2:37 We're gonna loop in Helen Havlak, our publisher, to talk about the business a little bit. If you have questions about The Verge or "The Vergecast" 2:45 or the state of media or why Nilay is like this, (Nilay chuckles) you can always call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. 2:52 Email us, [email protected]. Send all that stuff in. We're gonna answer as many of those as we can in two Tuesdays. 2:58 So, you've got a little bit of time, but not too much. Get all that stuff in as quickly as you can. That ends up being, I think, one of my favorite episodes to make. 3:04 - Yeah. - We do this like once a year, I would say, on average. It's very fun. Get all your questions in. 3:09 - David and I have this like old school journalism, don't do inside baseball and make this story about yourself. 3:14 And then, you look at every famous creator and influencer and they're like, "Here's what I wore today." 3:19 And we we're just gonna try to, we're gonna try to thread that needle a little bit more. - Yep, 100%. 3:25 But all of the news this week, I think, is demonstrably less important than weird stuff that Nilay 3:32 and David have been doing on their computers this week. - Let's make the show about ourselves, David, - Yeah. - as I was saying. - Let's just do it. ## iMac Monitor Retrofit 3:37 Let's start with you, Nilay. 'Cause you, I think, owe us updates on a couple of different projects, 3:43 starting with your iMac as Monitor Saga, which has become, it has been elevated to the level of a saga 3:49 here on "The Vergecast". (Nilay laughing) - It is a little bit of a saga. It's not so much of a saga, but it's a little bit of one. - I believe where we left off 3:56 was you were gonna try some wacky firmware shenanigans. - Yes. - So, what's been going on? 4:02 - So, I bought the StoneTaskin R1820, which is now a model number that I know and talk about as though everyone 4:08 cares about iMac display retrofit boards. - Yeah. - There is a community and that community is great 4:13 and they have been working on this for years. You can go read those threads. They were literally years-long on various forms. 4:18 So, I bought the newest board 'cause you gotta buy the newest one, not the one everyone's been using for years that obviously works, right? 4:24 You have to buy the newest one. (David chuckles) The 1811 is one that everyone's using for years that already works. But I bought the 1820 'cause it's new. 4:30 You understand what I'm saying? - Sure. - So, 1820, I came to my house, opened the iMac. 4:35 It was harrowing in its way, but not as hard as people say. (David laughing) Put the board in, kinda did a bad job. 4:43 I call that Snazzy Labs that needed a way better job. - Mm-hmm. - Go watch that video. It's way more impressive than whatever I did. 4:50 Set it all up, it works, it lights up, it looks beautiful. I have a little color calibrator so that when the display is in an iMac, 5:00 Apple controls the color. So, it's like perfect in the way that Apple color is perfect. When it's just running native off some board 5:05 you bought from China, it's just sort of a little green. So, I color-calibrated it, made it look good. 5:10 And then, you install the software called BetterDisplay to control the brightness with the keyboard, which you obviously have to do. 5:17 I mean, how could you not? - Mm-hmm. - And that the backlight mapping was inaccurate. 5:23 And so, as you stepped up the brightness, it would get to 100, and then reset like halfway through, and then do it again. 5:28 And this- - Okay. - So, one, this is not a problem because you can just set it to 100. 5:34 - Right. - You can set it to its obvious brightest setting and leave it alone. But I cannot do that. (David chuckles) 5:39 Like, it has tow work. - Just on principle. - So, I find myself emailing with StoneTaskin and just as a customer. They don't know who I am. 5:44 They were very responsive. I feel great about that. They sent me a very blurry video of how to update the firmware using a piece of software 5:53 that only runs on Windows and only addresses the card over display port. - Oh, Lord. Okay. - Now, here is problem one. 6:00 All of my Windows PCs don't have display ports. Like they're all ancient. The only one in our house that does is Becky's work computer, 6:05 which she would not allow me to install Chinese firmware update or... - Fair, I would say. - Two, I never anticipated 6:13 using the display port on this thing. And the board is now sealed inside the iMac - Oh. - whose screen 6:19 has been glued back on. - Right, 'cause you get to the end of this process and you're like, I am never going to open this - Yeah, you're like, 6:24 HDMI port, - or touch it ever again. - Yeah. - set up, it's plugged into the Mac studio. By the time I buy a new computer, this adventure will have to come to some sort of conclusion. 6:32 - Sure. (laughs) - This display will be like 20 years old and I will have to buy a new one. - Sure. - I made it work in this setup 6:38 and that's how long it's gonna take. Now, I need the display port. So, the only way to, I'm not gonna cut the display open again. 6:44 So, I have to dig around the memory access door with a display port cable 6:49 and try to get it in the board. So, that's one. And then, two, I was like, I need a computer with a display port. 6:56 And we looked in the reviews closet, I said last week. And we found a surface laptop from like 2019 with a mini display port. 7:02 And I took it and I took it out of the reviews closet and I put it on my desk in my office and then I promptly left the office without it. 7:08 So, now, what am I gonna do? I installed Windows 10 on Becky's old Intel MacBook AIr, 7:13 which has been sitting on a shelf for ages, - Hell yeah. - with a USB-C to display port. Figured it all out, downloaded the weird software, 7:19 watched a very blurry video that was... (David chuckles) The software is in Chinese. Part of... 7:24 There's a lot going on in this video. Nailed it. Nailed it out the gate in one. Terrifying, the MacBook Air has now been reset 7:31 because it had a Chinese firmware update around, installed the Windows on it. So, that is no longer doing 7:36 whatever it may have been doing to my house. And then, I booted it all up and it worked great. And the entire interface of this monitor is now in Chinese. 7:42 (David laughing) (Nilay laughing) Okay. 7:48 - I hate to say you both deserve this and should have seen it coming. (laughs) - Yeah, it's excellent customer service. 7:53 Just one last step that I needed to resolve. So, I ended up sitting there with Gemini, 7:58 taking pictures of the display, translating menus until I found the one. 8:04 I mean, this is like, if you look at the buttons, it's just a raw PCB that sticks out of the back of a iMac casing 8:10 on a ribbon cable. - Mm-hmm. - And it just has some unlabeled buttons on it. (David laughing) So, there's just a lot of mistakes to be made 8:16 as you navigate backwards - Uh-huh. - on the front of the thing in Chinese with Gemini in your hand. Like, none of that was elegant, I would say. 8:23 - But I feel like monitored interface is like four buttons. It's like you can figure out which icon means contrast and which icon means brightness, 8:29 and then you just move it to the thing and it's fine. Right? - I would say that they did not use icons. 8:34 - Mm. - The universal language of graphics is not present in this interface. - Yeah. 8:40 Contrast, you have the dark half and the light half, brightness is the sun. Like, it's, we've developed - That's not what I was try... - the language. 8:45 - I was trying to change it to English, which is like, (David laughing) I think in the grand scheme - Sure. - of all language settings, 8:51 the fact that the one that lets you change the language is always in the language you don't understand. - Yeah. - Like, that's how that goes. 8:56 - Mm-hmm. - Anyhow, I figured it out. It's in English now. It works. The only thing is when you turn on the computer 9:02 and it wakes from sleep, it lights up, and then it turns off and it thinks real hard and then it comes back again and then it's fine for the day. 9:09 - Okay. - It says is one little problem is it does a little hand shaky weirdness, but like totally acceptable 9:15 to have an excellent-looking 5K display connected to my Mac studio. - This is now a what is Nilay's threshold 9:20 for solving this problem question. Because are you gonna do that for 10 days and then be like, "I could fix this," and go through this again? 9:27 Or have we officially reached, I'm never touching this thing ever again? - We're never touching it. It is buttoned back up. 9:33 - Okay. - There's a display port extension coming out of it. As long as I was fishing, I put a USB-C extension in the back of there. 9:40 We're done. We're super done. - How upset do you think Jony Ive would be if you showed him the inside of your iMac now? 9:47 - I think the part where I grabbed the main logic board of an iMac 9:52 and just yanked it out of Jony Ive's carefully constructed exquisitely packaged internals. 9:59 Because I was like, it doesn't matter if this breaks, and I just yanked it. (David laughing) I literally thought about Jony Ive in that moment. 10:06 I was like, someone worked on this very hard. Because it's like, it's beautiful in the Apple way you open it 10:11 and it is beautiful inside. And I was like, huh, that sucks for you. And it just started pulling nonstop. 10:17 (both laughing) Because what you need is an empty case to fit the board in. 10:22 Anyway, it's done. We're gonna leave it alone. The other hilarious thing about BetterDisplay that I should say, my other monitor, my Zoom monitor, ## BetterDisplay Tricks 10:30 my Google Meet video conferencing monitor, is the sort of infamous Samsung Curve TV that I bought almost a decade ago now. 10:36 - Amazing. - Because it's all you need. You just need a 40-inch screen over there to run some video conferencing software on. 10:43 And there's like a webcam in front of it. It's BetterDisplay can talk to that screen over Wi-Fi over the internet. 10:50 - Oh. - So, when I turn on my computer, it now, 'cause that's a TV and it doesn't respect sleep commands. 10:56 So, it's like, okay, I found that display. I fixed its IP address on my router. 11:02 And it just turns it on and off with a computer now over the network. I've never been happier with like a little thing, 11:08 like an unnecessary little feature. - Yeah. That's awesome. - I used to have to turn on that thing with the remote every day. And now, it's like the computer is like, I see it. 11:15 I'll just send the packet to it and it just does it. It's amazing. - That's- - The software is like wild. It is not complete software. 11:21 Like, it's obviously made by people who care a lot about displays in very nerdy ways and assume you know everything that they know. 11:27 - Sure. - But when you figure it out, it works amazing. - That is pretty cool. I just realized, A, we need to do like a Nilay Patel 11:35 studio tour thing, - No, no. It's a mess. - but, B, my picture of your studio, I'm just realizing this right now, 11:41 is that you essentially are in like the back room of a Best Buy with just a bunch (Nilay laughing) of like weird old stuff. 11:48 - Yeah. - That you've just sort of, it's like there, you're like an ongoing Geek Squad project 11:53 that no one wants at the end. (both laughing) - It's not wrong. (David laughing) 11:59 Except it's like the attic next to my daughter's bedroom. - Nice. - And it is just a mess in here. 12:05 Like, there's just stuff everywhere. I need to clean it up. That's why I was like, no one wants a studio tour. But- - People think this is all 12:10 very glamorous and exciting, and I'm like, I'm staring over my laptop at a just a giant pile of unfolded laundry. 12:17 Like this is just what we're doing today. - That's very good. (Nilay laughing) All right, what's your project? - So, I've been Claude-coding like a maniac, ## Claude Built Productivity App 12:25 like for months now. But I have finally built my dream productivity tool, 12:33 which no one is gonna care about, but I've had very funny adventures with it recently. So, Thomas Paul Mann, the CEO of Raycast, 12:40 came on this show a while ago and told me his big theory of AI is that the best thing you can do with these generative tools is build software 12:48 because you can do it once. And when you get the thing to work, then it works every time, that like reinventing the wheel 12:53 and having this thing go out and do explorations for the same thing over and over and over, the sort of agentic world we're talking about, 12:58 is the wrong approach. But what you can do is you can build specific useful software 13:03 that you can then test - Mm-hmm. - and verify. And once you have that, it can just be reliable software. So, he was like, he was one of the first people 13:10 who really turned me onto the idea of like, why like AI software is actually a really powerful idea for a lot of reasons. 13:16 So, I have set out to build myself like my ideal to-do list 13:21 and notes and like, keep all my life together tool. - Yeah. - I need to write a long story about my many adventures. 13:27 But I basically, like, I tried to build a whole thing from scratch, got super far down the road, and then got annoyed by all the bugs 13:32 I couldn't figure out how to fix and bailed. I then tried to do a less ambitious thing that I got bored with and bailed. 13:38 And what I eventually found was I use a bunch of different services, all of which have built MCP servers, 13:45 they've built really robust APIs. And in many cases, they've built command line interfaces for working with AI. 13:50 So, I was like, oh, rather than try to like reinvent Todoist, which I use for to-dos, 13:55 which I think is like a really great infrastructure, but a really ugly app, I can just build my own thing to look at Todoist. 14:03 And so, now, I have a thing that pipes in my calendar events from Google, my to-dos from Todoist, 14:08 my notes from a text file, which I sync with Obsidian, and then two other services, one, Readwise reader, 14:14 which I use for saving and reading articles, and Raindrop.io, which I use for bookmarking. 14:19 And all of this just pours into one little web app that I've built myself that looks exactly the way that I want to 14:24 and is just full of all the things that I make every day. And then, at the end of every day, I export a markdown file with everything I did and created that day 14:31 that now is like in a searchable archive of text files on my desktop. And it's awesome and I love it very much. 14:37 But the funniest thing that has happened to me recently is I wanted to build this thing for mobile. It's a web app, I can use it as a progressive web app, 14:44 but I was like, there's some little things I wanna do. I wanna build this as like a more robust desktop app on my computer. 14:50 So, I start futzing with Electron. We go through this whole thing. It's like, okay, well, I'm just gonna build this thing as a DMG on my Mac 14:56 so that I can pin it on top of other apps, essentially, and access it with global shortcuts in from the menu bar and stuff like this. 15:02 You have to build slightly more on top of a tab in order to make that work. 15:08 I told it to just do this, and it's like, "Cool, I can do that for you." Goes off and does it, 15:13 it pulled an entirely different Vercel web app 15:19 and compiled it onto my desktop. (Nilay chuckles) It's the strangest thing I've ever experienced. It was like I've been doing this thing 15:26 inside of Claude Code for like three weeks now, like building and refining this thing. And I was like, okay, 15:31 just make this thing a DMG, and it goes, "Great, I've compiled this for you to run on your desktop." So, I run it and install it. Completely different. 15:37 I just got somebody else's private web app - Wow. - inside of my thing. And I literally, I responded to Claude Code. 15:42 I was like, I don't know what this is, but this is a completely different app. And it goes, "Oh, sorry, grabbed it from the wrong URL." 15:49 - No. - So, you could just do, it just went and got it for me. And this is a thing that has actually happened a few times where it mistakes, 15:56 like it guesses what your GitHub link is and pulls the wrong thing based on what it thinks its name should be. 16:02 It has tried to upload things to the wrong place. It, at one point, made this whole thing public, and then was like, "Hey, your Google API credentials 16:09 have just been public on GitHub for five minutes. Hope that's not a problem." (Nilay laughing) And so, it's just like all of these... 16:16 I know you've been using these tools a bunch too. - Yeah. - But it's like, it has this relentless ability 16:22 to just keep trying to do stuff. And generally speaking, 16:28 I've had to interrupt it a bunch of times, and be like, hey, you need this one very small piece of information. I can just give it to you. 16:34 Like, you don't have to go guess where it exists on the internet. - Yeah, yeah. - Or try to figure it out or do a bunch of weird shit to go find this API. 16:41 Like, I know the URL. I can just tell you what it is, it'll be fine. And it's like, "Oh, that'd be great." 16:47 (both laughing) I'm like, well, didn't, you've been working for an hour and we've burned down a rainforest 16:54 so that you could do this. But at the end of all of this, I did it. I have vibe-coded myself an app 17:02 that I use all day every day. - And it's just a regular piece of software that you made that runs on your desktop natively. 17:09 - It's mostly still a web app because I wanted to be able to use it like, A, everywhere, and, B, like in a browser and pulse up to it. 17:15 - Where's the web app hosted? - Vercel. - Okay. - And I could tell you the URL but then you'd presumably (David drowns out Nilay) be able to just use it, yeah. 17:21 - I should... Can you give me access to... (David laughing) I feel like I can start assigning you stuff- - I would like you to add things to my to-do list. 17:26 That would honestly - Yeah. - be helpful for me. But yeah, and it's like I feel sort of the way I bet you feel about your iMac, 17:32 which is that like, I did it. (both laughing) Because there's this insane process. 17:37 It took too long. Like, could I have successfully used the limited amount of HTML and CSS 17:43 and JavaScript that I have to build this myself? Probably. But instead, like, last night, 17:49 I spent three hours playing video games. This is a real story. I'm sitting there playing "FIFA" 17:55 and every time the ball would go out of bounds and there's like a throw in or halftime, or whatever, I would just lean over and do another command for Claude Code. 18:01 And it's just sitting there, building this thing for me as I'm playing video games. And I'm like, this is a future I can get behind. 18:06 - Yeah. I have two thoughts about this, 'cause I'm gonna talk about my own little vibe coding adventure. One, I have the same general reaction 18:12 to all of these stories that I do when people tell me about their dreams. I'm like, you had real emotions, 18:20 you felt real feelings. - Mm-hmm. - I feel nothing. Because you were describing a literal hallucination 18:26 that your mind created (David laughing) while you were asleep. Like, I'm sorry. - Mm-hmm. - Like, I under... And like, some people are really into other people's dreams 18:32 and some people aren't. Like, actually, Addie Robertson wrote this headline about AI-generated art for us like years ago. 18:39 Because people would make it and they'd be so excited about it. And as we can all tell, - Right. - it like doesn't hit 18:44 unless it's like a dancing baby strawberry and you're like, something is happening in America. 18:49 That's how I feel (both laughing) about all of those. - I think that's fine. - There's something about that 18:54 that I think is really important and it connects to how all the software people we know 19:00 are having full emotional crises about the nature of software development. And they're landing on the thing is alive 19:06 and the way OpenAI and Anthropic now talk about their coding tools. Specifically, they just call them AGI. 19:13 We'll come to this, right? Like- - Yeah. - They've arrived at like, it's obviously, AGI's here 'cause it can write software for you. 19:19 But then, the outputs are like, I made myself a little piece of software. 19:24 I'll just, I'll say mine, I made myself a little piece of software this week. It is very stupid. It is so much stupider than yours. 19:30 But I defeated the SmartThings API on the Frame TV. I'm very proud of myself. (David laughing) 19:35 - Okay. You let the AI control your house now? - No, no, no, no, no. - Oh. - I'm much more of a scaredy cat than you. 19:41 - Oh, oh, okay. - So, I have a MacBook Neo that now has Canva on it ## Frame TV Automation Hack 19:48 because we got Max a Cricut printer for her birthday. - Nice. - And so, like, 19:53 we're just gonna use it for that. But also, it's my agentic toy playground, you know. - Sure. 19:58 - That's the right combination of things. - Yeah. - Let it design - Your - and print stickers. - elementary school child and OpenClaw. 20:04 What possibly go wrong? (Nilay laughing) - It's fine. So, just using Cowork, 'cause Cowork is a little bit better behaved. - Okay, sure. - Also, Anthropic change its pricing for Open Claw. 20:11 - Right. - So, that's all a mess. But so this week and so I just won't let it out of the box. 20:17 And so, I really want, I have two shows. I host "Decoder" and we, I do "The Vergecast", 20:24 and I need to change the picture on this TV. And then, alsom we've decided that gamer lights are appropriate for "The Vergecast" 20:30 and not appropriate for interviewing CEOs. (David laughing) So, like, the lights need to change, like the lighting preset needs to change. 20:36 I bought a Stream Deck, a Stream Deck Neo. It's little and cute and it just has buttons on it. 20:41 And I was like, when I push the button, the lights should change and the image on the TV should change. 20:47 - Okay. - And the lights are easy 'cause the lights run on a piece of Mac desktop software called amaran desktop, 20:52 which has a Stream Deck plugin. So, you set up the scene, push the button, great. The lights all change. 20:57 - As someone who has seen you fight with just changing the image on the Frame TV, this seems very exciting. 21:03 - Right. So, the Frame TV (David laughing) runs Tizen, which is controlled by SmartThings, 21:09 which is software written by Samsung. And Samsung, I would say, has not taken advantage 21:16 of the vibe coding revolution to make better software. - Yeah. 21:22 - It is just, it is the thing that is and SmartThing's a platform in particular is very bad because from what I can tell, 21:29 a TV runs like a little web server, (David chuckles) that the SmartThings app on your phone has to connect to a new every time, 21:35 as though that - Great. - it has never even considered this opportunity in its life. 21:40 It's like, "Oh my god, I can see your TV. Would you like to set it up?" (David laughing) Like, every time, - Yeah. - it's like utterly confused about what's going on. 21:47 And nothing about that API lets you do the one thing that you might want to do on a Frame TV, which is change the artwork. 21:53 - Right. - Or importantly, I know that you've run into this, turn the TV on and off in a predictable way. 22:00 That is just not a choice - Well, - you can make with a Frame TV. - that's because on and off is not a concept the Frame TV understands. 22:06 - Right, off is- - There's kind of on and then there's also off, but off is sometimes on and on is technically also off. 22:12 - Yes, it- - Everything I just said is accurate. - It's 100% true. - Fact-check me, Frame TV users. - So, 22:17 you wanna turn on a Frame TV into art mode and then set an image. You would think this is like the most basic thing 22:25 you would wanna automate - Yeah. - on this TV. It is possible to light up a Frame TV, pick one of Samsung's built-in free streaming apps 22:33 and like select a channel. It is not possible to turn it on an art mode and select an image. 22:38 These things just like don't exist in the SmartThings API. So, I asked Claude to do it, Claude, and it's like, I don't know, 22:45 like I have a little kid, you've got a little kid. It's like watching them just fall down this, like fall off the bed. 22:51 It's like, oh, don't do that. Oh, you did it. And it's like, I'm gonna use the SmartThings API and I just watched it try (David laughing) 22:56 to use the SmartThings API. - God. - And it failed. And then, it found a bunch of Reddit threads 23:02 that I was also familiar with from the past, where people have discovered the controls 23:07 to do these things with web sockets locally on the network. So, if, and I have never set this up 23:13 because you need like a Raspberry Pi, like running Python. Like you have to, you need a little computer 23:19 somewhere on your network that will just always talk to this thing. - Okay. - And I just haven't like gotten all the way there. 23:25 But when you have Claude, it's like, oh, I wrote a Python script for your Mac that sits right in front of the TV and now the Stream Deck just runs that Python script. 23:34 And it took a long time. It had to... And to talk to the TV, it had to figure out the file list 23:39 of all the images on the TV and which images I wanted. And all of this is stuff, like you're saying, 23:45 before I had children, this would've been a somewhat frustrating, yet ultimately rewarding weekend of screwing around in the terminal 23:51 - Right. - and like reading Reddit threads. And instead, it was a somewhat frustrating, but ultimately rewarding, 23:57 like half afternoon in between meetings of letting Claude just run at SmartThings and watching it happen. 24:04 And I don't let Claude use my terminal. Like again, I'm much more - Mm. - of a scaredy cat than you are. - Yeah. - So, I was copying 24:09 and pasting commands and code back and forth, which is slow. But like, again, this is my level of understanding. 24:16 Like, I could read the code and like make sure, and these are not long commands, right? - Yeah. - I could make sure it was doing what I thought it was supposed to do. 24:23 Again, very, very basic. I'm not even remotely pretending that I'm good at this. I can just read three lines of Python 24:29 and be like, okay, you're sending a command to the TV to get its file list. Like, I understand what I'm looking at here. 24:35 - Yeah. - Like is there a crypto miner on my Frame TV now? Like, I don't know 100%, but I'm reasonably confident. 24:41 Anyhow. So, we made the scripts. They are sitting on this machine that I podcast from. 24:47 And when I push the button on the Stream Deck, I'll do it right now, it turns the lights, it does a macro, it changes the lights to white, 24:53 it sends the command, and picks the image on the TV. And this is like a huge victory that because I have a baby, 24:59 I would've never had a Saturday to be able to do. And like, I just feel great about this. Did I just describe to you a dream like with the, 25:06 all the emotional stakes of describing a dream? I think so. But I think you and I both look at this and you're like, oh, a lot more people are gonna be able ## AI Hobbyists vs Mainstream 25:12 to do a lot more things, and that is worth taking seriously. - Yes. - Now, I don't think any of this is like consumer software, which is the thing 25:19 I keep saying. - Yeah. - Like, this is, we are, both of you and I are like enthusiast hobbyists, like whatever category of tech nerd we are. 25:27 Like, I could not, no normal person is ripping open their iMac 25:33 and writing Python scripts to change the art in their Frame TV. Like it's just... - Right. - We're still pretty far away from that, but there's a glimmer of something important here. 25:39 - Yeah, I agree. And it's also, it is way too much work. Like even the idea that you have 25:45 to open up the terminal and copy and paste a bunch of commands, like just to get, we should, we're gonna move on from this. 25:51 But one tiny example is I think I've been thinking about a lot is like, when you get into the terminal, one thing you constantly have to do 25:58 is tell the terminal which part of the computer to address. Like, it's understanding of where you are looking 26:05 and where it's supposed to work from doesn't exist. You have to give it all this context. Claude Code, by default, doesn't do that. 26:12 So, you're constantly, at least my experience has been, I'm constantly running the wrong terminal command. 26:17 And then, it's like, well, what, where is that f, I can't find the folder (Nilay chuckles) you're looking for. And then, I have to go back to Claude and be like, 26:23 what's the address of this folder again? Give me the full thing to ask. And it's just like that you've lost people. 26:30 Like, this is no longer a system that just works in any meaningful sense of the word. But the end result is very powerful, 26:36 which is you have a problem that no one else has. - Yeah. - And I have a problem that no one else has 26:41 and we have both successfully solved that problem. And that's very powerful because I do think everybody 26:46 has a problem that no one else has. So, you can, like, I think you're exactly right, like there is a glimmer of something here, 26:52 but it is like, we're still nowhere near this being mainstream consumer technology yet. 26:58 - And the gap that I would close there is most people cannot describe the problems they have in terms of software. 27:04 - Right. - Your problem, like described it like very abstractly in terms of software is, there's a bunch of databases 27:10 that I would like to look at all at the same time. - Yes. Yeah, very straightforward. - And like, software is made for that. 27:16 - Yeah. - And like, most software is, look at this database. Like, we keep having CEOs on "Decoder", 27:22 and I'm like, all right, CEO Zillow, you made a database and all of your money is in the app that looks at that database 27:28 and now someone else might just show up and look at that database without your app in the way. - Yeah. - And we've just done like 100 episodes that are basically that theme. 27:35 And something about AI is gonna upend all of that. But for consumers being like, - Yeah. - "So, what in your life is a database?" 27:42 You just get the blank stare. There's no follow-up conversation. - Right. - You're just sitting alone at your bar being like, 27:47 but databases are important. - Which to be clear is good and correct. People should not - Yeah. - have to think about databases in their lives. (Nilay laughing) 27:53 - Your life is run by databases. That's all I'm saying. - That is true. - What is the Frame TV but a database of artwork? 27:59 (both laughing) Huh? - Is the database on or is it off, Nilay? Think about that. (both laughing) 28:04 - That is unclear. (David laughing) - All right, let's turn now to the Hype Desk, ## The Hype Desk Returns! 28:09 our new segment about what is cool and rad in the world. (whooshing sound effect) 28:16 Welcome back, Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueda, to tell us what is truly hype on the internet these days. 28:21 Ross, Ashley, welcome back. - Hello. - Thank you for having us again. - Yeah, I didn't think we were gonna get another invitation. 28:26 - I mean, it's a week (Ashley laughing) to week thing, - Okay, fair. - I would say. But for now, you barely made it by the skin of your teeth. 28:32 - Thank you. - Nilay, you gave a speech last time. Do you wanna give a shorter version of the speech this time about what the Hype Desk is? 28:38 - Yeah, the Hype Desk is where Ross and Ashley, who are our friends, who do not work at The Verge, come and tell us what's hot in, I don't know, entertainment, 28:43 video games, cool stuff out in the world. And then, because they don't work at The Verge, if brands wanna do brand integrations, 28:50 you can buy them because you can't buy us. And this makes our ethics policy stay pure, which is very precious to us. 28:56 My favorite part of the Hype Desk last week is the YouTube audience 29:02 completely understood what was going on and was very happy (Ross and Ashley laugh) to see Ross and Ashley and the audience that leaves comments on theverge.com 29:11 was like, "Why do you have to make money?" - I literally got an email last week that was like, "Why are you guys doing stuff that seems like you're trying to make money?" 29:17 - Yeah. - And I was like, well, this is fascinating and we should talk about it. But it is, a thing we will do always 29:23 is try to make very clear what is and is not sponsored in the Hype Desk. Like, we wanna do is we want this 29:29 to be good even when no one's paying for it. And we want it to also be good when someone is paying for it. 29:34 Today is unsponsored for flavor. (Ross and Nilay laugh) 29:41 - Fun and not profit. - Exactly. - Yeah. - All fun, no profit this week. - Yeah. - That's what we're doing. 29:46 Ross and Ashley, what have you guys been up to? What do you have for us this week? - Oh, man. - Ooh. - Well, we've been both obsessing over Artemis II. 29:53 That's like... - Same. - But before we talk about that, Ross, I think we need to discuss the terrible tragedy 30:03 that's befalling us named "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie". - Yeah, there are two through lines in both these, 30:09 which I'm very proud of. I didn't mean to this happen. We're gonna be talking space. - Is it just galaxies? - Yes. 30:14 We're gonna be talking space (everybody laughing) and we're gonna be talking plumbers in both of these segments. - In both stories. Weird overlap. - Very good. 30:19 - Works out really good. - But first, we're gonna talk about "The Mario Galaxy Movie". It had the opening weekend, 370 million. ## Mario Galaxy Movie Talk