Existential Horror of Existence

[JM]: Today I want to bring your attention to the Virtual OS Museum, which is a set of, I think, two different virtual machines, one of which is large and comprehensive.

[JM]: The other one is a more stripped down version.

[JM]: And the full version, if I understand it correctly, is a museum of over 1,700 pre-installed operating systems that are ready to run, going from the modern ones that we are using today, presumably, all the way back to the first stored program computer from 1948.

[JM]: And it spans the earliest mainframes.

[JM]: home computers, personal computers, mobile and embedded, and presumably some very obscure operating systems if they have this huge number of them.

[JM]: It sounds like the full version ships with everything already downloaded.

[JM]: It runs offline.

[JM]: And the Lite version dynamically downloads certain things, presumably upon launch.

[JM]: And my thought when I see things like this is I'm just amazed and grateful that there are people that feel passionate about this enough.

[JM]: to create projects like this.

[JM]: It's amazing to me the sheer breadth of the operating systems that are contained in here.

[JM]: And I also must point out that when you go to virtualosmuseum.org, and you should, the synthwave design of this site just makes my whole day.

[JM]: It's fantastic.

[JM]: The bitmap fonts, the color scheme, it is a beautiful 1980s throwback.

[DJ]: Yeah, I almost can't wait to just be done recording this episode so I can go play with this thing because it looks magnificent.

[DJ]: And so much credit to the person who put this together because it is just a one-person project.

[DJ]: And they say down at the bottom of their awesome webpage various ways to support them and spread the word.

[DJ]: And one of the things they mention is, like, mention this project to people who do computer and digital archiving projects

[DJ]: and things like that.

[DJ]: And so yeah, I really want like the internet archive to go help this guy out because this looks so cool.

[DJ]: And I was poking around just a little on the page and I can see there are these various emulators for old operating systems like my beloved classic Mac OS, which I managed to get working on an old G4 iMac I have.

[DJ]: Ask me about that some other time.

[DJ]: but they have this emulated version of it.

[DJ]: They also, but then they also have an emulator for, I think it's a computer called Celiac or something like that.

[DJ]: But it's one of these computers that is, as you said, like from maybe the fifties or something where there was no like visual interface for it.

[DJ]: And so the emulator is like a digital version of switches and slots and things like that, that you have to operate sort of mechanically to

[DJ]: I think, to set registers and things like that.

[DJ]: And I would just love to play around with this.

[DJ]: Some of our pre-show links, I think, yeah, that's all right, I guess.

[DJ]: But this one, this one I am definitely like salivating, virtually salivating about.

[DJ]: And so I think this is great.

[DJ]: You check out the virtual OS museum and maybe support the person who's creating it.

[DJ]: We should definitely spread the word about this one.

[JM]: Yeah, and I'm looking forward to checking out some of the operating systems that I've played with in the past when they were actually current modern operating systems of the time, including Next Step, BOS, and of course, classic macOS.

[JM]: It looks like it goes up through macOS 10, 10.5.

[JM]: Presumably, subsequent Mac operating system versions got harder to

[DJ]: virtualize or or distribute in this way but it'll be fun to have this fun walk through computing history when uh yeah when i can find the time now justin i i can't help but notice that you neglected to mention your favorite old operating system that being microsoft windows 3.11 oh yes was that an accidental oversight or what what happened there

[JM]: Not exactly, no.

[JM]: As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever used that version of Windows, thankfully and gratefully.

[DJ]: No, no, no, no.

[DJ]: You're very wrong about that, because I definitely used that version of Windows on my family's first PC-compatible computer, and it's a marvelous thing.

[DJ]: I can't wait to see the hot dog stand theme once again in all of its glory, running on my 4K monitor in 2026.

[JM]: Another fun site that I came across is called Is AI Profitable Yet?

[JM]: Which you can find at isaiprofitable.com.

[JM]: And most domains and sites with titles like this, where it's a question, is something profitable?

[JM]: insert some adjective have traditionally just been a one word piece of text on the site and nothing else.

[JM]: And that word traditionally has been either yes or no.

[JM]: This site takes that concept one step further and spoiler alert.

[JM]: If you're wondering what the big word is at the top of this page and the answer to the question is,

[JM]: The answer is no.

[JM]: AI is not profitable yet.

[JM]: It says no.

[JM]: And then underneath it, it says everyone's broke.

[JM]: And as I said, this site takes it one step further.

[JM]: And in addition to just displaying the word no, it also says that it is tracking the expense and revenue of frontier AI companies as of the present day.

[JM]: And it shows some statistics, total industry expense growth,

[JM]: is $1.4 trillion as of this writing.

[JM]: Total industry revenue related to that is $613 billion.

[JM]: And there's a running counter that says how much has been spent on AI since this page was loaded, which is currently at $58 million.

[DJ]: What?

[DJ]: Oh, my God, Justin, close the web page.

[DJ]: You're wasting so much money.

[JM]: If only it worked that way.

[JM]: And then underneath, there's a list.

[JM]: It's really a ranking more than a list of companies and their cumulative profit or loss, as the case may be.

[JM]: And taking the number one spot is Amazon.com.

[JM]: With total related capital expenditure estimated since 2022 of $313 billion, with related revenues of $22 billion, that results in a cumulative loss of $291 billion.

[JM]: And it continues, the next spot, trailing a close second, is Google, then Microsoft, then Facebook.

[JM]: These four are all...

[JM]: well north of $200 billion of cumulative losses.

[JM]: And then you have smaller ones like Oracle and OpenAI and Anthropic.

[JM]: And I say smaller because they are roughly an order of magnitude smaller, but still something in the $20 to $30 billion range in terms of cumulative losses.

[JM]: Nothing to sneeze at.

[JM]: But I think my favorite part of this list is at the bottom is the only thing in the green, which is NVIDIA.

[JM]: And it says it's a net $253 billion gain, which really says a lot.

[JM]: I love this so much.

[DJ]: You sort of imagine like the behind the scenes is that there's this like mysterious chamber somewhere circa around 2022.

[DJ]: And the heads of all of these software companies, primarily software companies, are ushered into the chamber and it's very quiet.

[DJ]: And there's like a row of chairs and a semicircle.

[DJ]: And the CEO of Nvidia steps out.

[DJ]: And they're like, why'd you ask us to come here, CEO of Nvidia?

[DJ]: And he says, oh, I just, a friend of mine has a very important message for you.

[DJ]: And they usher in like a cartoon hypnotist with like a big top hat with like a swirly thing on it.

[DJ]: And he hypnotizes the CEOs of all these companies to basically say, to basically describe an elaborate scheme through which they will give all of their money to Nvidia.

[DJ]: And that's why this is happening.

[DJ]: It's the most sensible explanation, Justin.

[JM]: That's got to be it.

[JM]: It really harkens back to the days of the internet bubble where the companies making money, like the gold rush days of yore, where the people making pickaxes and selling Levi jeans and selling all the tools for people to go out and seek their fortunes.

[JM]: Those people generally didn't make any money, but the people selling all of those tools sure did.

[JM]: And that's how it worked in Internet Bubble Part 1.

[JM]: People selling servers and telecommunications gear and other equipment like that made out like bandits.

[JM]: Pets.com, unfortunately, not so much.

[DJ]: Yeah, whatever happened to Pets.com?

[JM]: You fast forward to the present day and you see the same thing at play.

[JM]: AMD, NVIDIA, makers of memory chips and CPUs and hard drives and solid state drives and all the other related equipment.

[JM]: Yeah, they're all doing great.

[JM]: The company's buying all that equipment to deploy all of this generative software.

[JM]: Yeah, it's not clear that they're ever going to make a return on that investment.

[JM]: But it's interesting to have a site that's tracking that investment as well as the extremely wide gap between that and current revenues.

[JM]: And speaking of investing countless sums of money in large language models, after 25 years, Google has taken the first step towards killing its search product that put it on the map in the first place.

[JM]: and replacing it with a default on AI mode.

[JM]: And when I first saw this news, I can't say I was particularly surprised.

[JM]: I think we all called this months ago, maybe longer.

[JM]: And when I went to Google site, sure enough, the traditional design had been replaced.

[JM]: And when I typed in my query and hit return, it displayed some typical large language model chatbot response.

[JM]: instead of the list of links that it had always displayed, albeit with increasing amounts of ads over the years since Google was founded 25 years ago.

[JM]: When I went to Google.com and I tried to search right before recording, I noticed that I got a list of search results instead, just like it has always been for 25 years.

[JM]: But I'm not clear on why that is.

[JM]: Is this an experiment that they were trying?

[JM]: Did they respond to the Internet's collective backlash?

[JM]: I don't really know what's going on because it'd be hard for them to claim it as an experiment.

[JM]: I don't recall them ever promoting it that way when they announced it with large fanfare at their annual conference.

[JM]: So I don't know.

[JM]: Dan, have you checked this out?

[JM]: What has your experience been?

[DJ]: So I don't know what they announced, but did they say they were rolling it out immediately?

[DJ]: Like this is already happening.

[DJ]: Enjoy it.

[DJ]: Or is it coming soon?

[DJ]: My experience with Google, which I use on my work computer, is for a long time now, when you search for stuff, you still get links to websites, that quaint old archaism soon to vanish.

[DJ]: But there's also like a box at the top that gives you a generative AI response.

[DJ]: You get them both.

[DJ]: Is that what you were seeing, or were you not even getting the generative response?

[JM]: The way I remember this when I first tried it was I recall putting in my query, hitting return, and getting some large language model response.

[JM]: So either A, they changed something, or B, what I actually did was type in a query, and instead of hitting return...

[JM]: I tapped on the AI mode button that's very prominent as part of the box that you're typing your query into.

[JM]: Because there's two buttons.

[JM]: There's a Google search button underneath the bar that you're typing.

[JM]: And then there's a button inside this bar that you're typing your query into that says AI mode.

[JM]: So I can't remember exactly what I did here.

[JM]: So either something changed or it's just I tapped the AI mode last time and didn't realize it.

[DJ]: Maybe they've rolled out the thing and maybe they haven't, but presumably they're going to do the thing that they're describing doing.

[DJ]: And, you know, we've seen a bunch of posts and articles and things basically pointing out what's going on, which is that this is just the latest and perhaps most sweeping attack on what we think of as the World Wide Web.

[DJ]: Because you don't need websites.

[DJ]: Well, whether you need them or not, you can't get to websites if the search engine doesn't tell you about them and just generates text that was paid for by advertisers.

[DJ]: By the way, that's also what is apparently in this announcement.

[DJ]: So that's awesome.

[JM]: Yeah, it's a little comfort, this idea that, okay, we knew this was coming, and now the first shots have been fired.

[JM]: And whether it's adding this prominent AI mode button near the thing you're typing your query into...

[JM]: as a first step, but still retaining for at least as of this moment, the ability to hit return or tap the Google search button below and get to a traditional list of links.

[JM]: It's pretty clear that that's just a stepping stone toward everything being AI mode all the time.

[JM]: And Google is just abdicating the whole concept of providing links to information and is just going to provide the information from those links

[JM]: without any attribution or reciprocal traffic.

[JM]: And you alluded to this concept of ads, right?

[JM]: So where did the ads go?

[JM]: It used to be you got a list of links, many at the top being ads, crowding out the actual search results down below.

[JM]: But with this new large language model powered search, there are no ads.

[JM]: nor do I think that in any of the announcements that they made, I don't think they ever talked about ads.

[JM]: And so it seems like folks that have dug into this and have looked at some of the output that Google's research teams have published, the idea is that

[JM]: In this new world, advertisers aren't going to buy ad slots on a page.

[JM]: Instead, they are going to place bids token by token on the actual text that their models generate.

[JM]: And by their models, I don't necessarily mean customers.

[JM]: I mean, the advertisers, the idea is that they would each bring their own LLM and then some auction mechanism is going to decide which of those models gets to influence the next letter or word or however this is chunked.

[JM]: And so the output is in this idea would be a weighted blend of

[JM]: of these different bids from advertisers heavily influenced by whoever is willing to pay more.

[JM]: So that's one possibility based on some things that folks have seen from Google research teams.

[JM]: And another one is something they're calling prominence allocation.

[JM]: And that's where when someone submits a search with some kind of potentially commercial relevance,

[JM]: the system would run some auction that influences how the LLM writes the response.

[JM]: So in this case, the auction would assign a prominence score for each advertiser telling the model, okay, give this particular product 20 words, give that one 15, give this other one zero.

[JM]: So the ad in this case is not next to the answer like we've always been used to, but the ad is the answer.

[JM]: And this is all very consistent with what we have discussed in the past.

[JM]: We knew and have talked about at length the idea that they're just going to bake the ads into the large language model output.

[JM]: And that does indeed seem to be the plan.

[DJ]: Hold on.

[DJ]: Did I get all four of them?

[DJ]: Yep.

[DJ]: But at the same time, as you said, the stupidest thing about it that I hate the most because it's crap is how inevitable it feels.

[DJ]: Google's like, hey, guys, we're doing this great thing.

[DJ]: And then it turns out actually the great thing we're doing is instead of you being able to look at web pages, you'll type what you want to know into Google.

[DJ]: We will let a bunch of advertisers bid on whether they tell you about Tide Pods or some other kind of pods.

[DJ]: And then we'll spit that out at you.

[DJ]: And you, because you've been trained over the past couple of years to think of large language model powered software as your helpful buddy, you will blindly go out and buy Tide Pods instead of figuring out how to refinance your house or whatever it is you were actually asking Google about.

[DJ]: This is a real example, Justin.

[DJ]: Seriously.

[DJ]: I took it off the real examples from google.com page that I found.

[DJ]: Um...

[DJ]: The worst part is when a bit starts to disintegrate right underneath you.

[DJ]: But anyway, Google sucks and is terrible, but it's sucked and has been terrible for a long, long time.

[DJ]: Like we've been talking about, you know, how do we get ourselves and our friends and our families off of Google and its products for many, many years for reasons of very similar to this one, which is that the company just exists to extract all of your information so that they can make advertising revenue.

[DJ]: by warping what you see, hear, and think, basically.

[DJ]: So in the light of this news, I guess I only really feel a renewed surge of what I've already felt, which is hatred.

[DJ]: No, which is the desire to like, okay, how do I make sure I'm not using these products?

[DJ]: Okay, next step.

[DJ]: How do I try to make sure that the people I care about who are not professional technology nerds and also like non-professional technology nerds

[DJ]: How do I help them benefit, right?

[DJ]: Like, how do I help them find alternatives?

[DJ]: Because in my more cynical moments, I just immediately think the biggest problem with this is no one cares.

[DJ]: People don't want the web.

[DJ]: People don't care about web pages.

[DJ]: They just want to talk to their chatbot buddy or whatever.

[DJ]: And they don't really care about their privacy and they don't really care about advertising.

[DJ]: They just want everything to be as simple and easy and smooth as possible.

[DJ]: They just are desperate for anything to take the existential horror of existence away from them for a couple of seconds.

[DJ]: So all this new crap that Google is doing will just be welcomed with open arms.

[DJ]: I want to jump back a second and point out that I said that's in my more cynical moments that I think that.

[DJ]: Just so we're clear.

[DJ]: But when I come back down to earth a little bit, I think, well, what can we do about this?

[DJ]: The reality is I do know people who are not professional computer nerds who don't like this stuff either, but they don't really know what the alternatives are.

[DJ]: So the best thing that people like you and I and our listeners can do is find alternatives online.

[DJ]: Because those alternatives exist.

[DJ]: And then I kind of want to find a less loaded verb than evangelize, but tell other people about them.

[DJ]: Help them move various workflows in their lives out of Google and onto other things.

[DJ]: Like it can feel inextricable getting Google out of your life if you use Gmail for all your personal and work email and you use Google Calendar for all your personal and work calendars and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[DJ]: But there are alternatives.

[JM]: There are indeed.

[JM]: And before we get to them, I want to just mention a couple of things that synthesize how some of us feel about what Google is doing here.

[JM]: One of the comments that I think sums it up well for me is Google has declared war on the remnants of the Web.

[JM]: And the remnants of is doing a lot of lifting here because there's been so much assault on the web that it does feel like there are these few of us here that are trying to protect what remains.

[JM]: And here we have Google announcing that.

[JM]: unambiguously and in a very presumably excited manner that this is what they're doing.

[JM]: And the goal is clearly to remove the web and to guide people into Google's abstraction on top of it, an abstraction that they can totally control and monopolize and

[JM]: manage whoever they want to.

[JM]: And I think that one of the comments that I saw that summarized this well is by Paul Cantrell.

[JM]: And he said that Google search rests on a social contract.

[JM]: Their bots can crawl our sites.

[JM]: They can index our sites and they can show excerpts of our sites because and only because they send people to our sites, our sites.

[JM]: Google is announcing unambiguously and with great fanfare that they are now fully breaking that already ragged contract.

[JM]: And he goes on to propose that we should reciprocate and...

[JM]: figure out ways of removing our sites from these large language models that are trying to ingest them and turn them into this regurgitated product.

[JM]: And that is both a very difficult to do.

[JM]: B may not have any effect and C largely irrelevant to most humans, because as you say, most people don't have websites and aren't publishing things on them.

[JM]: And as you said, just want to get an answer to their question.

[DJ]: About Tide Pods.

[DJ]: Yeah.

[JM]: and find that interactive chatbots are a good way of getting that information.

[JM]: But as you pointed out, this is a big divergence from the way Google has always operated.

[JM]: I'm looking at a screenshot from 1999.

[JM]: I don't know what page or book or whatever this came from, but this photo, presumably, it's probably not a screenshot, it's probably a photo, says Google...

[JM]: is a pure search engine no weather no news feed no links to sponsors no ads no distractions no portal litter nothing but a fast loading search site reward them with a visit this feels so quaint

[DJ]: A lot changes in a quarter of a century, right?

[DJ]: Like I would like to point out there is an entire generation of adults who weren't even born when that was published.

[DJ]: So like a lot has changed, but it really throws into stark relief how at least like in this domain, we're talking about the web and all the things that are great about it, that how much that has changed for the worse, right?

[DJ]: Yeah, Google started off as one of the greatest champions and enablers of the decentralized web where anyone could publish whatever they want and hyperlink them to each other.

[DJ]: And then there was a way to find them with the search engine index.

[DJ]: And

[DJ]: You know, it's not a new idea.

[DJ]: It's not a 21st century idea that power corrupts.

[DJ]: And we can see how perfectly that plays out here, where now Google has been and is continuing to do everything they can to, as you say, remove the web and replace it with their own thing.

[JM]: Yeah, so now let's finally go back to what you were alluding to before, which is, okay, great.

[JM]: What are the alternatives that we want to use, that we want to recommend to folks that we know?

[DJ]: And I have a bold suggestion for you all, Justin.

[DJ]: I know it's going to surprise you.

[DJ]: I'm going a little off script, but hear me out.

[DJ]: Fax machines.

[JM]: I thought you were going to go with carrier pigeons, but you know what?

[JM]: Fax machines really is a bit more modern.

[JM]: So, yeah.

[JM]: Unsurprisingly, I'm going to mention Kagi here as my preferred choice.

[JM]: That is what I use day in and day out these days.

[JM]: It is well worth the $5 or $10, whatever I'm spending on this, I don't remember.

[JM]: It is easily some of the best money that I spend and I am happy to do it.

[JM]: I am really happy with the search results.

[JM]: I love that there are zero ads.

[JM]: There are no large language model overviews that come first or anywhere on the page.

[JM]: And it's extensibility in terms of customizing your experience, letting you filter certain websites and refining search results with lenses.

[JM]: These are all features I don't even use today.

[JM]: But I like that they're there.

[JM]: And this is a great solution that I highly recommend.

[JM]: Before that, I used DuckDuckGo for years.

[JM]: I haven't used Google as a search engine.

[JM]: And I don't even know how long, a decade more.

[JM]: I've been using DuckDuckGo essentially since it came out.

[JM]: And...

[JM]: It is a great free alternative if for some reason Kagi is not a good fit for you, either because it's not free or for any other reason.

[JM]: DuckDuckGo is a terrific alternative.

[JM]: You are making a bit of a trade here.

[JM]: You are going to see some ads.

[JM]: But unlike Google, it's not collecting user data in terms of tracking what you're searching for.

[JM]: What are you browsing?

[JM]: What are you buying on the web?

[JM]: DuckDuckGo is not interested in that and is only choosing their ads based on what you're searching for.

[JM]: I could mention other search engines, but really those two are the ones I want to highlight.

[JM]: There are others.

[JM]: We'll post a link to Ecosia and perhaps some others.

[JM]: So you can check those out if they interest you.

[JM]: But as far as I'm concerned, those two are the ones that I would recommend.

[JM]: What about you, Dan?

[DJ]: I haven't tried Kagi yet, although I have thought about it.

[DJ]: I've seen both like really positive feedback about it, like your own and others.

[DJ]: And I've seen at least one sort of should we really trust this trustworthy search engine company article that was interesting, but is, you know, also I think has to be taken in its context that the person is.

[DJ]: Writing about it is like a real privacy extremist, which is fair.

[DJ]: But personally, yeah, I've also been using DuckDuckGo for many years.

[DJ]: And as web search engines go, I've been quite happy with it, especially as like Google has gotten worse.

[DJ]: I feel like maybe a decade or so ago, you could have said like, well, you know, DuckDuckGo is fine, but the search results just aren't as good as Google's.

[DJ]: But increasingly, Google search results suck and they're replacing them all with generative AI output anyway.

[DJ]: So I think DuckDuckGo is great.

[DJ]: One thing that I was just poking around here and because what you said jumped out at me.

[DJ]: I use DuckDuckGo and Safari and maybe something else is blocking them, but like I don't see ads in my DuckDuckGo search.

[DJ]: So I was just looking at their settings to see have I like opted out or something.

[DJ]: But one thing I did notice while I was doing that is DuckDuckGo actually has a lot of interesting settings now that include things like include this site, exclude this site, etc.

[DJ]: Some of the stuff you described about Kagi I think is also interesting.

[DJ]: in DuckDuckGo.

[DJ]: So I would probably put it forward as if someone is just like, please just let me use something other than Google as a search engine, I'd say give DuckDuckGo a try.

[DJ]: You can get as advanced with it as you want or not.

[DJ]: And then if you really want a much more customizable experience, then I would check out Kagi, at least based on your recommendation of it.

[DJ]: If you're willing to actually like if you decide, you know, actually a search engine is something I would pay some money for, then give it a shot.

[JM]: I also don't see ads in DuckDuckGo.

[JM]: Presumably that is because both you and I are using ad blockers that are suppressing those ads.

[JM]: For people who don't have these kinds of ad blockers configured, they're probably going to see ads in DuckDuckGo.

[JM]: So...

[JM]: Everyone can choose for themselves how they want to solve that, either by using an ad blocker or, as I would recommend, by giving Kagi a try and seeing if using a product that you actually pay for and not seeing ads might be a good fit for you.

[DJ]: Now, Justin, I hope you're not completely exhausted talking about Google because there is some more very interesting Google, I'm going to say nonsense, that we should probably, probably discuss.

[JM]: I don't know if interesting is the word I would use, but yes.

[JM]: Google has announced also to great fanfare their Google Book because Chromebook wasn't already a bad enough name for a product that they decided that Google Book.

[JM]: Can you imagine Apple releasing Apple Book?

[JM]: I don't know.

[JM]: There's something about the name of this product that's weird.

[JM]: But anyway.

[DJ]: I mean, I'm not saying they did it, but back in the 80s and 90s, I could 100% see Apple releasing something called an Apple Book.

[DJ]: They used to put the word Apple on everything.

[DJ]: Remember Apple Talk?

[DJ]: True.

[DJ]: We're reaching way back into the virtual OS museum times now.

[DJ]: But anyway, Google Book.

[DJ]: It's a silly name.

[JM]: Okay, well, that's fair.

[JM]: But yes, it's also silly.

[JM]: And the Google book apparently is an Android-powered notebook entirely built around Google's Gemini large language model.

[JM]: And to me, there's just already something profoundly weird by saying, here, here's this thing that looks like a computer but runs the same operating system as your phone and is chiefly designed to be used with a chatbot.

[DJ]: Well, it's the next logical step in computing where people aren't allowed to use computers anymore.

[DJ]: All of the computing hardware that is available to them for purchase is just a portal to some giant company's chatbot.

[JM]: Yeah.

[JM]: Right.

[JM]: And this announcement is somewhat short on details.

[JM]: There is one feature that I have to say is pretty cool, and that's that apparently there's a feature where if you move your cursor around, if you wiggle it back and forth, it'll pull up contextual suggestions based on what's near your mouse pointer when you do it.

[JM]: And so they mention as an example, if you select a picture of your living room and an image of a new couch online, Magic Pointer can help you instantly visualize them together.

[JM]: No right-clicking, saving, uploading to a chatbot, and prompting.

[JM]: Google Book immediately understands the context and gets to work.

[JM]: Another example, point at a date in an email to instantly set up a meeting.

[JM]: Find good spots to meet up or draft a reply.

[JM]: I don't know that these are great examples.

[JM]: I don't know that these are examples of things that I would necessarily do.

[JM]: But at least as a user interface concept, the idea of wiggling your mouser around something and having it bring up contextual issues.

[JM]: next steps that would be useful, whatever those are.

[JM]: That's a pretty interesting idea.

[JM]: And it turns out, by the way, not particularly new.

[JM]: There are multiple third-party utilities for macOS that implement this.

[JM]: I have not used them personally.

[JM]: And if I remember, I will try to dig them up and put links to them in the show notes.

[JM]: But this did seem like an

[JM]: adding something that could be potentially innovative and interesting, even if there is prior art.

[DJ]: Yeah.

[DJ]: Yeah.

[DJ]: I hear you.

[DJ]: I immediately take that credit away, revoke the credit, if you will.

[DJ]: So like imagine Justin reaching out his hand with credit in it.

[DJ]: And before Google can take that delicious credit for itself, I snatch it away.

[DJ]: out of the palm of his hand.

[DJ]: Because basically, as far as I can tell, the way this feature would be implemented is that now every time you move your mouse cursor, that information about, say, where your mouse cursor is and what sort of stuff is underneath it is being sent to Google.

[DJ]: So Google's large language model can process it.

[DJ]: And I mean, that enables really powerful features and also sucks and is terrible.

[DJ]: And I don't want anything to do with it.

[JM]: That's a good point.

[JM]: I mean, I assumed that you actually had to wiggle it.

[JM]: It's not like just, oh, I ran my mouse cursor over this thing and therefore Google instantly took that information and ingested it into their maw of...

[JM]: large language model processing.

[JM]: Maybe that is how it works.

[JM]: I don't know how it works.

[JM]: But either way, you're right that that's not a feature that I would want because I don't want those kinds of things going into some third-party, off-site, cloud-based large language model.

[JM]: Yeah, you're correct.

[JM]: That is not something I'm interested in.

[JM]: Now, I don't know.

[JM]: Maybe these things are made to run Gemini on device and...

[JM]: It never goes off device.

[JM]: Again, I say that with a great...

[DJ]: Sorry.

[DJ]: Sorry.

[DJ]: That's so obviously not going to be the case that I couldn't help literally cackling aloud at the notion.

[DJ]: I mean, we're talking about Google, remember?

[DJ]: Yeah.

[JM]: True.

[JM]: It's also the company that apparently is shipping without you asking an additional four gigabyte add-on to Chrome browsers.

[JM]: When you download their browsers now, it's tacking on an additional four gigabyte large language model that's running when you run Chrome.

[JM]: So in theory, if they're doing that, they could also be running something locally here.

[JM]: Do I think in all reality that everything is staying on device?

[JM]: No, that's not Google's business model.

[JM]: They're here to mine all your data and sell it.

[JM]: That's their whole thing.

[JM]: So yeah, I'm as skeptical as you are on this count.

[DJ]: I have mixed feelings about Reddit usually when I look at it.

[DJ]: I mean, A, I don't think – speaking of betraying the web, Reddit is a bad citizen of the web and the internet in general like the company and its products are.

[DJ]: So that's bad.

[DJ]: But also the kind of commentary you find on Reddit is sometimes really good and sometimes it's the worst.

[DJ]: But I've got to give props to the Android subreddit commenters who

[DJ]: Because there's a thread, there's an official announcement from Google, apparently, on the Android subreddit of the Google book.

[DJ]: And instead of there being like hundreds of loyal fan boys and girls and non-binary people...

[DJ]: Talking about how excited they are, I would describe the commentary on this announcement as excoriating, brutal, punishing.

[DJ]: It was very entertaining to me to read the degree to which people seem to be unimpressed by this device.

[JM]: Absolutely.

[JM]: And I love that the top comment says, Google Book is a generationally terrible name.

[JM]: Yes.

[JM]: Yes.

[JM]: Because as we've already noticed, it is.

[DJ]: Yes.

[DJ]: Well, and what I love is that like no, no aspect of this product escapes because yeah, there's lots of people just complaining about the name.

[DJ]: And then there's lots of people going like saying what I said before about how, okay, so instead of using a computer, we get to interact with a chat bot now.

[DJ]: Again, no thanks, et cetera.

[DJ]: It's, I don't know.

[DJ]: It just made me feel very warm because now I know I'm not alone in hating and fearing this new product.

[JM]: Indeed, it is nice to have company.

[JM]: In this announcement, they also tout that there's going to be deep Android phone integration, which interests me not at all because I don't use Android.

[JM]: But if you did, and that was something that you wanted, this could do that.

[JM]: And it sounds like they're going to work with hardware partners to make the first Google Books.

[JM]: This isn't something that Google is going to make themselves, unsurprisingly.

[JM]: That's not really what they're good at.

[JM]: I'm not really sure what Google is good at, honestly, these days, but making hardware is not that, that I feel confident about.

[DJ]: They're good at collecting your data and then selling it to advertisers to do targeted ads and then making money from that exchange.

[DJ]: That's what they're good at.

[DJ]: That's why they're one of the largest companies that's ever existed in human history.

[DJ]: So yeah, I think they are good at something.

[DJ]: It's just what they're good at is stuff that we hate.

[JM]: You are right.

[JM]: I should probably pay more attention to the words that are coming out of my own mouth.

[DJ]: Sorry, Justin, but this is why you have a co-host.

[DJ]: I've got to hold you accountable.

[JM]: I appreciate that.

[DJ]: Until he replaces me with a large language model, that is.

[JM]: All right, moving on.

[JM]: In other news, Plex, which is a company that makes media server software and players allowing you to play movies, TV shows, and videos, has announced that their Lifetime Pass, which is offered as an alternative to a monthly subscription for the Plex Pass...

[JM]: The lifetime version of the Plex Pass is going to go from its current $250 to $750 in July.

[JM]: And oh, now does it feel ever so quaint when I bought my Plex Pass way back in the day.

[JM]: I don't want to know how many years ago, probably 15 or more, when it cost $99 in the time from whenever that was until today.

[JM]: Very recently, it had increased to $250 and is now tripling, for those not doing the math at home, to $750 in July.

[JM]: And it's hard not to interpret this as, well, we actually just want to make the lifetime pass go away, but we don't want to deal with people...

[JM]: screaming from their rooftops and we don't want to deal with the backlash.

[JM]: So we're still going to offer it, but we're going to make it essentially unaffordable and economically pointless unless you are going to use this for like 10 years and you know you're going to use it for 10 years.

[JM]: And I can't even think of any product that I want to commit to for that long.

[JM]: I mean, I've been using Plex for 15 years or more.

[JM]: But I definitely don't want to keep using it for another 15 in part for silly moves like this one.

[JM]: I can't think of any product I'd want to use for that long.

[JM]: So it to me is very clear.

[JM]: This is just them saying, yeah, we don't want you to do this anymore.

[JM]: We want you to just pay us every month.

[JM]: And this is how we're going to get you to do that.

[DJ]: But it's a weird take, right, to think, well, we can't just get rid of the Lifetime Pass because there will be a backlash.

[DJ]: So I know what we'll do.

[DJ]: We'll triple it in price because there won't be a backlash to that, definitely.

[DJ]: For the record, I think I paid $75 for the Plex Pass, again, like thousands of years ago when dinosaurs ruled the earth because I think at the time its full price was maybe $149, like $150, and I got it on sale.

[DJ]: So I got a lifetime Plex Pass for $75 and now it's going to cost 10 times that much.

[DJ]: But you know what?

[DJ]: I'm not really bragging because I've actually quit Plex in the last year or so.

[DJ]: Because as you say, this is not the first move that they've made that I have looked at askance.

[DJ]: Like I've noticed Plex over the years growing.

[DJ]: acting more and more like every other annoying tech company where instead of just selling me some software that I really like using, they keep adding highly questionable things to it.

[DJ]: Like we suggest that you watch this and like here's stuff from our partners and here's etc.

[DJ]: And like what I wanted Plex for was I have a personal library of digital media and I want a nice way to organize it and view it and etc.,

[DJ]: And over time, perhaps because, you know, Plex is a for-profit company, I think, right?

[DJ]: And they got to make money somehow.

[DJ]: They just keep doing stuff that I kind of don't like.

[DJ]: And just as a slightly more principled thing, like their software is closed source, proprietary.

[DJ]: So I've basically bailed on Plex for Jellyfin for now because Jellyfin is open source software.

[DJ]: And for the most part, as far as I can tell, it basically works the way Plex used to work like 10 years ago, which is just closer to the experience that I personally want.

[DJ]: When you say, Justin, that you don't want to keep using Plex for the next 10 years, have you thought about what you would migrate to?

[DJ]: Like, what is it about Plex at this point in history that you like and that you don't like, aside from the price of the lifetime pass?

[DJ]: Not that that affects you because you already were grandfathered in to the cheaper one.

[JM]: And speaking of being grandfathered into the cheaper one, real time follow up, I searched my email and the first reference to Plex that I can find in my email is from 2011.

[JM]: And it's a receipt where I bought Plex version 1.02 for $4.99.

[DJ]: Wow.

[DJ]: The more things change, the more they, well, that one doesn't really work in this case.

[DJ]: The more things change, the more they're different from how they used to be.

[DJ]: Right.

[DJ]: A wise person once said.

[JM]: To answer your question, as I've discussed on the show, I am increasingly displeased with Plex and have been eyeing Jellyfin over in the corner for a good long while as the most likely alternative that I'll switch to when I can find the time to do it.

[JM]: It's not something that I'm excited about doing.

[JM]: It will be a considerable investment of time for me to get everything set up and running the way that I currently have it set up.

[JM]: And I feel like, as I mentioned in a previous episode, I have plenty of incentive.

[JM]: I have plenty of reason to want to do it.

[JM]: To recap, the main thing that is the biggest thorn in my side

[JM]: is that they keep ruining their client apps.

[JM]: The server product continues to be quite good because it just does what you want it to do.

[JM]: But it's them consistently ruining the user interface of the client applications.

[JM]: They move things around so frequently.

[JM]: Just in the last matter of months,

[JM]: I updated one day and I swear it was like, I don't think it was maybe more than a week or two.

[JM]: I updated to a newer version and they moved the play rewind and fast forward buttons to a different part of the screen.

[JM]: So the muscle memory gets ingrained.

[JM]: And so I just find myself tapping.

[JM]: on the screen where there are no longer any elements for me to tap on.

[JM]: And if that were not bad enough, the fact that I can't run Plex and play a show on my iPad now without it almost entirely draining my battery in less than an hour is just absurd.

[JM]: I go to pick it up and the iPad feels like I've left it out in the sun all day long.

[JM]: It's just

[JM]: roasting, which is something that the previous version that I upgraded from never did.

[JM]: It worked great, had great battery life.

[JM]: So I'm just tired of them as a company.

[JM]: And I look forward to the day where I can carve out the time to migrate to Jellyfin, which I think will be a much better experience overall.

[DJ]: That makes a lot of sense.

[DJ]: I've found thus far, one of the things that I like about Jellyfin is the ecosystem around it.

[DJ]: And you could say the same about Plex.

[DJ]: Plex has had a rich ecosystem.

[DJ]: There are third-party clients for various things.

[DJ]: Although, again, just because like Plex is proprietary, there's a little warning light in my head that goes like, well, if Plex decides to, they can probably cut off any third party client if they decide that it benefits their business to force you to use their client for some reason.

[DJ]: And so one of the things I like about open source software, of course, is that typically doesn't happen.

[DJ]: So I don't know if you use Plex for music as well as TV and movies, do you?

Yeah.

[JM]: I do.

[JM]: I do.

[JM]: Usually in conjunction with the Plex amp music player.

[DJ]: Right.

[DJ]: Which like when I was using it, I thought like Plex amp was pretty good.

[DJ]: That felt more like whatever.

[DJ]: I don't know what the heck they're doing with their video client, but Plex amp at least felt like someone just really wanted to make a cool, like a good music playing app.

[DJ]: Well, I've been pretty happy thus far using Jellyfin for Music and a particular client, not the official one, called Jellify.

[DJ]: Because there's a bunch of these and I tried a few of them out.

[DJ]: But that one I was very pleased to see.

[DJ]: I was using it.

[DJ]: It's a little bit glitchy.

[DJ]: Using it on my iPhone and iPad.

[DJ]: And then it got an update.

[DJ]: And then it got another one.

[DJ]: And then I got another one and like, I can see, wow, okay, this app is actually being really rapidly developed, which is nice to see.

[DJ]: So thus far, one of the things that I am happy about with the Jellyfin ecosystem is there are, it seems like a multitude of different people building different projects on top of it, which makes me feel good about its future.

[DJ]: That especially like if I have one app I'm using to say, watch videos on my phone or listen to music on this other device, it's,

[DJ]: And it doesn't work great.

[DJ]: Well, someone else will make one.

[DJ]: Or maybe even I could make one.

[DJ]: Who knows?

[DJ]: But yeah, I'm looking forward to when also when you have the time to migrate off of Plex because then we can spend our time pointing and laughing at how expensive their lifetime membership is while we go on and on about alternatives.

[JM]: Absolutely.

[JM]: And you're right that Jellyfin does very much feel like the way Plex felt when it first came on the scene.

[JM]: And I'll put a link to a page on GitHub called Awesome Jellyfin.

[JM]: And it is a list of a whole bunch of plugins and ancillary tools and resources for Jellyfin products.

[JM]: that I think will serve the needs of pretty much everyone.

[JM]: Maybe not necessarily easy to set up, might require a little bit of rolling up your sleeves, but I am excited to find that time to roll up my sleeves and get this deployed so that, as you said, we can continue dunking on Plex while enjoying a much more enjoyable media consumption experience.

[JM]: All right, everyone.

[JM]: That's all for this episode.

[JM]: Thanks for listening.

[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com and you can find Dan at danj.ca.

[JM]: Reach out with your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.