Omarchy Quattro Release

What's up? What's up, everybody? It's Syntax Live. Today, we are talking about all kinds of stuff, and not just AI stuff, but a lot of AI stuff as well. My name is Scott Tolinski. With me, as always, is Wes Bos and CJ Reynolds. Every single week, we come to you, and we bring you what's going on in the web world, the tech world, and just what you should know about, what you should pay attention to.

This show is brought to you by Sentry. But before we talk about Sentry, we have a first story. Would you call these stories, Wes? Would you call these stories... Stuff we're gonna talk about? I think so. Stuff. We got our first stuff. Our first stuff is from Wes Bos, and here's a formal hand off to Wes. He's gonna be talking about GrokBot. Wes, tell us about GrokBot and why it's different than all the other agentic things that are out there. Yeah. So about what? Like, maybe a week, week and a half ago.

I don't even know what these companies are called. X formerly known as Twitter owned by x AI, which owns Cursor.

They released something called Grokbot, which was an entirely new app that was aimed at being kind of what everybody's working on right now, which is just like, yeah, we have, we all have these like coding things, right? We've kind of figured out the coding things. Now everyone is setting their sights on how do we get people who are not coders and vibe coders to like use this stuff a lot more. And that seems to be a work. How do how do we get to do work? Right? Everybody has a work product right now.

So Grok Bot is an entirely new application that under the hood is made by cursor. It's it's not anything related to Grok and it's two totally separate apps. So now I have Grok and Grok bot on my on my phone and on my computer and and you visit on the web, they're two entirely separate things.

And this was because I think this is what Cursor has been sort of cooking on while they were being acquired by x AI. Like everybody else, they've made it like a chat app, but you will create different bots that you... That do things, you know, like I've got a shopping bot. I've got a travel Grok bot.

You can make a coding one. I've got a hot pot Grok bot.

Hot pot Grok bot? You got a hot pot And Grok the... What what happens is that you you you can install plugins. Right? It can hook up to your your Google Calendar. It can hook up to your Sentry, of course, your Cloudflare, all the stuff that you're you're typically used to.

But I think like what makes it a little bit different than the others is that it's very similar to the Cursor Cloud Agents where when you when you use a cluster Cloud Agent on Cursor, they give you a little Linux VM.

And essentially just like a little computer that you can go ahead and use. And it has a browser, has a terminal.

It has like like long running processes. So you can use it. It can use a computer anywhere you want. Now, that's nothing new. We've all been we've all been doing that. But I think what makes it sticky for like regular people is it's all just... It just works right there. Right? You don't have to like have it running on your computer. You don't have to have a Mac Mini in the corner. You don't have to like pair it with ChatGPT.

You run it on your computer, but you can pair your phone to run on your home computer. It's literally just running on a VM somewhere in a data center.

And like you can open it up and like here, I have Costco open and you get a terminal.

I installed Cloud Code on it just to see if it would work. It does. You can apparently run anything you want on here.

And it's surprisingly sticky for me. Like, I actually like it. I think I'm surprised that it's it's this good. And I think part of that is because a, they're not just like blessing all of the integrations, right? They have all of like the first party integrations. But like I made one where I wanted to process my entire email. Right? And I use Missive and they don't have an integration with Missive. So what I did is it or what it did is said, hey, we don't have integration with Missive, but here paste in your Missive API key and I'll just do it for you. And it just went and made an integration for for itself.

And for things that don't have like an API, it will like I was shopping on Costco for a TV.

It simply just fires up the web browser and then just uses the web browser. Now, that's kind of slow. I don't typically like that because it has to like screenshot or take the DOM, whatever.

But I feel like it's a good product.

That's the good. The bad of it is it does feel kind of slow.

I don't know if that's just the Grok model in general is a little slower than ChatGPT. You have to use Grok with this to be clear. Right? Yes. You have to... Like, there's no model selection anywhere in here. There's also this weird thing where like, you can't make different threads.

Like, I wanted to ask it if a certain URL was legitimate today. And I was just like, I just want to make like a throwaway thread for this. And I was like, I don't really have a bot for this.

Because it's... It keeps your entire history.

And also, the UI is simply just like iMessage, you know, just bubbles back and forth. It needs a little bit more. I want a bit of a table.

It feels a lot more less stressful than ChatGPT because ChatGPT will just, like, dump everything on you. Here's eight options. Here's six tables that I made here. And it's like, I'm not reading all that. And like this... Like, you can kinda see me going back and forth looking for a TV.

Right? And it it just gives you the right amount of information. So I'm I'm feeling like it's a a pretty good product. And I also do like that it's on my phone when I need it. Like, I was searching for a TV, and I and I went to Costco.

And then I just like opened my phone and I started taking photos. Here we go. Of the the Costco TVs that were on there, and it was able to just like throw that into the context that I already have. So not...

I I know a lot of people are like, oh, we already have that. But it it it's not that this this is not something we haven't had yet, but it does feel extremely sticky. And I think it's I think it has a good app. I think it's a good Yeah.

It's funny because... So I'm a big user of Hermes. Hermes is like a agentic system like this that you run. I... You run it on my Mac mini, like you said, like, with this, you don't have to do that. So I see the benefits.

But for me, like, I wanna be able to, like, I wanna be able to use my GPT subscriptions or Yeah. I wanna be able to use whatever models I wanna use. I wanna be able to, like, extend it more. I wanna have, like, full on control over it. And I know you can get in there and you can see this VM, but I can turn around and just use this Mac Mini Totally.

There's something nice about This is for you though. I think it's for people who like... I always go back to the Excel sheet power users. Oh, yeah. Those people that are really good with Microsoft Excel, they're a little bit dangerous with this type of stuff. You give them something like this and then, oh, all of a sudden, they're they're able to, like, hook it up to their Google Calendar and their email and their CRM. And...

What this does well to me, Wes, is it does bridge that gap between, like, it it it... It's something that Open Claw was never able to do because Open Claw just breaks all the time. Yeah. Hermes got it better because it doesn't break all the time.

But this, again, is better because you're not having to even get into the terminal at all.

Know? Exactly. It still can do the stuff. Like, that's the thing with ChatGPT, and that's also why OpenAI is merging it with Codecs, is that, like, you're you're so limited by simply just chat.

And then if you wanted to do something, like run a script or visit a web browser and architect a whole bunch of stuff, you're kind of out of luck, and you have to move to something that's a little bit more powerful. And I think that OpenAI is why they're merging the coding product and their ChatGPT because they want it to be...

You want it to do literally anything you want. And if you don't have an integration for it, just... Then use a computer and figure out how to make that happen.

So it worked really well. I did... I researched hotels for it, which I ended up being like, this is too frustrating. Just chat back and forth. Give me a map of like where these are. But I bought a TV with it because searching for a TV sucks. There's so many variables, you know. There's like $700 ones, there's $6,000 ones.

I care about certain things. I wanted to buy it at Costco, which they only had certain models. Yeah. And it was just like the perfect amount of, I wanna visit the website so I could open up the browser here and and log in with my own Costco account. But then I also wanted to like programmatically figure out what is in stock and like bring these options to me.

Yeah. I disagree with you on the shopping for a TV thing. I'm the type of guy... I'm gonna watch all those reviews. I'm gonna click through all the blogs. I'm gonna have a great effing time, and maybe I won't even buy a TV. I'm gonna have more fun researching to how to buy the TV or what TV to buy than I will actually buying the TV. And the thing is paid. Give that to me all day. No. I want it. Yes.

Like, you go wire cutter and it's like, you're obviously getting paid for all of these things. And just like all of the it's it's awful. And then like everybody says, oh, get the OLED. That's $9,000.

I don't I don't wanna spend that much money. I don't I don't... I've never seen the OLED before. I don't I don't wanna be ruined. I want I wanna stay in the Folgers coffee of TVs. I don't wanna know any better.

Nope. Give me the YouTube all day. CJ, you're oddly quiet. How do you feel about this? Yes. I'm here everybody. I didn't get introduced, but I'm sitting here in the background. I did introduce you. No. I said, you see Jay Reynolds and Wes Bos. Straight into it. You went straight into I said, say Jay Reynolds and Wes Bos.

Roll back.

Roll back.

In case you were worried, I'm here just sitting in the background. No. I I... It just... To take a step back, I agree that this this is the everyone app. This is not for me. This is not for Scott. Like, would build my own app to do this. But the fact that this gives every everyday user an access to a VM that can run a browser and, like, basically agent use, I think that's that's the killer feature. In terms of comparing and buying things, I pop... I... I'm in the middle here, because I do like to do my own research. I like to watch videos. I like to read blog blog posts.

But at a certain point, I do get to, like, decision paralysis.

So if I can have an AI give me a table of, like, here's the pros and cons, here's probably the best choice, that would help a lot. I I also, like, I I do too much research, and it, like, stresses my wife out because she, like, just wants me to make a choice. Yeah. But I'm I'm, like, you know, researching everything. So, yeah, I'm I'm somewhere in the middle, but I I would use something like this to help me get to a point where I don't have to make as much choice.

So, yeah. I I think it's cool. Yeah. I should also say the pricing for this is is crazy.

I forget exactly what the pricing is, but I think it's like a $102,100 bucks a month, which I don't know if that's if that's worth it just yet because the ChatGPT models are certainly way better. If you're gonna spend that much money, you're probably better doing it. And then there's also like routines as well, which is cool. You can say every morning, go through my inbox and delete all the like spam requests that I've got. Like, that's that's a really good use case for that. I think I think the cron job and and jobs in general, like

scheduled tasks are are such a killer feature of any agentic system. It was one of the first things I really loved about Cloudbot.

OpenCloud was like, oh, I can have this send me a list of the things in my calendar or emails that have been sitting there too long or bug me about this every single morning, and I can have it send it to me in a place where I'm actually going to see it. Like, I really like that.

And, yes, we have on screen, can confirm. CJ was introduced.

Thank you. I was introduced, but I didn't get to say a single word for the first ten minutes. So Nope. Okay. Nope. Yeah. Let's let's hear what you to say now then, CJ. Yeah. What do you got to say now? Yeah. What do got to say about the I just gave new GitHub.

Oh, it's my turn? Okay. Great. That was a nice I'm

handing it off right now and Yeah. And you're going to do whatever I want. You went off script, folks. You're you're throwing Scott off because he was supposed to go next. That's all can I can go on with Yes?

I can I can go with the flow? Nice. Yeah. So GitHub posted their

postmortem for their outage.

And I think GitHub was out for a total of like seven hours last week. I didn't notice it because I I was just doing... Or maybe it was the week before. I was doing hack week.

I didn't really use GitHub that much. But it was out for an entire workday and people noticed.

So they published their postmortem, what went wrong.

And really, it just happened that they got peak traffic and couldn't scale with it. Simple as. They didn't have enough compute to keep up with all of the stuff that was happening on GitHub. At the end of the day, they added 3,000,000 more CPUs and a 120 petabytes of storage and significant network capacity to prevent this from happening in the future.

Essentially, just more compute. Some people were potentially blaming it on the fact that they moved to Azure, and they were just quoting that, like, Azure is typically flaky. But what this this blog post, at least, is saying that their move to Azure is the reason why they're doing okay to begin with. Now, 58% of GitHub is actually served from Azure.

But did you guys experience this this outage of of GitHub? Were things going wrong when you was off for the day, but man, oh man. Experienced it. I I went to a PR to to read about a PR, and it wasn't loading for me, and I was annoyed.

One thing I can entirely understand is the fact that they're dealing with unprecedented levels of increased traffic.

Yeah. In, like, the amount... The scale at which this operates is crazy. And I know people are gonna say, like, oh, they should just do it. They should be on top of it. But, like, my my big hope here is that with new things popping up, new code storage things popping up, is that the AI pros who are just pushing a thousand lines of code every second to Git will take some, like, push them somewhere else, and and then maybe Git will be able to chill out a little bit. But I I can understand. I see... I I feel like I'm, like, very empathetic towards their situation as a major corporation.... Whining. Anybody who's whining about this type of stuff has no clue

about the millions of services that need to like interlock and work with each other inside of GitHub.

And like, I don't think anybody who's bitching about this could do a better job and keep this type of thing up. Right? And I think the answer is that, like, whatever comes next needs to be, like, agentic first. Right? There there...

This thing has come out of nowhere. If you're looking at these graphs of the growth, it's just unprecedented amount of... And it's it's all just bots. Just absolutely slamming Yes.

Downloads are absolutely everything. Wes, Wes, what does agentic first look like do? What does that even mean? I don't even know. Well, CJ, tell us about... Cursor seems to know. Yeah. So that... We'll talk about that next because Cursor launched their own thing to replace GitHub. But one thing I wanna say before we move on to that though is, I almost wish there was a service that just made it so that AI could feel like they pushed to GitHub or like... Because I think one of the issues of scaling is replication.

Right? You're like Just made AI major. You did it. Yes. Oh,

yes. Exactly.

But because, like, I think one thing that happens is you push into a GitHub repo, and then that replicates across the world. If you're just a single developer or you're just tooting around with a single AI, you don't need that to replicate around the world. So, like, I'm sure they maybe have internal rules that prevent certain types of replication or slow it down or, like, put the job to run later. But that's one of the things that is...

That hurts at scale is having to replicate this across the world when a lot of the apps we're working on don't need that. I don't know. But because this outage started happening, about three hours into this GitHub outage, Cursor launched Origin, which is their code hosting solution.

And they had been working on this for a while, and it's... It was now released as beta. But I... They essentially wanted to piggyback on the fact that GitHub was having issues. Yeah. Launched when we were on stream. You and I, Yes.

Yeah. And and I made the point that I was like, oh, did Origin cause this outage? Because one of the things you can do when you sign up for Origin is import all of your GitHub repos.

And so every person that's onboarding was putting a strain on GitHub system because they're basically cloning all of their repos over to over to Origin.

But there there was a gap. Basically, the outage started. Three hours later, they took advantage of it. They launched. But that probably didn't help. Right? Because now all of sudden, you have millions of users all trying to clone their entire GitHub history all at the same time.

But, yeah, they launched Origin. Essentially, you can host your code there.

It has PRs.

It has agents in the in in the chat, in the the issues. I don't know what they have... If they have a different word for issues.

And they have extensions for your repos. So they're they're basically coming at GitHub and and replacing the GitHub features so that you can use this, and especially for people that already have a a Cursor subscription. So if you're already using Cursor, it's just one click to import all of your repos and now start using origin instead.

Haven't used it myself. I don't know if you guys had tried it or heard about it. Any thoughts on it so far? Yeah. Imported one of my sites to it, but I haven't used any of the actual features like pull requests or like

like GitHub actions is probably the biggest one. And that's that's a huge use case of like why they they go down as these actions are just constantly churning and running.

Yep. I don't think they have that. Well, they have they have cloud agents. Right? Like, they have these... I haven't used it beyond what we did on stream, CJ, mostly because they were like, oh, you can't just bring in all your GitHub stuff. And I was like, well, my GitHub's GitHub's down anyway. So it's like, I I'm not gonna throw up something brand new for this, and I'm not gonna go out of my way to try it. Like, if it's not a feature parity, I just don't...

I can't see myself using it is really where it's at. And and, like, the last thing I wanna do is have one repo here and one repo here and one repo here. I used to do that. I used to have a GitLab. I used to have a GitLab with a self hosted that had a bunch of stuff on it, and that was great before GitHub had actions because they had all their CI stuff in in GitLab.

But I just can't see myself having stuff spread out, and I don't wanna have another place to put my stuff, and I don't wanna have another place that is, like, less featured than GitHub.

That's just where it's at for me. Yeah. Yeah. I I have a hard time believing that something like this, where they just... They're just trying to make, the same thing as GitHub, but then check on a chat box.

I don't know, maybe.

But it's got to be something different like the Zed folks are working on where it just is a different approach to to GitHub, not just GitHub, but we just made it on our own URLs.

Yeah. I think that was the case, then everybody would just be using GitLab or GitT or like there's a 100 other Git alternatives.

If the people that are mad about the downtime were that mad, then they would just move to those.

And they did publish a blog post called Git at Any Scale, where they talk about the technical technicalities of what they're actually doing different than GitHub.

And so there technically is innovation here, but I don't think it's it's not innovation in the sense of, like, how we collaborate on code or how we access code. At the end of the day, to the end user, it's gonna work in a similar way to GitHub.

They just talk about how they...

They're now using write ahead logs and writing code into s three buckets, and also talk about how GitHub uses...

Like, with replication. So when you're running anything at scale, you replicate across servers.

And the... They're saying that the way GitHub works is you have a coordinator that sends out the fact that some event just happened.

And then if it reaches a quorum... So, like, let's say there's six things that needs to replicate to. If at least three of them say, yes, this happened, then it agrees that that was the action that was performed.

Mhmm. So that's how GitHub works. But then they're saying the way they do it is with the write ahead log to replica. So it doesn't work on voting. It basically pushes out everything to their replicas.

But again, this is the technicals of how it works under the hood. I don't think this is gonna change how anyone uses Git or GitHub on a on a daily basis.

So they're doing technically interesting things, but I think, like you're saying, I don't I don't know if it's enough to get people to just completely drop GitHub.

Yeah. And, I mean, at the same time, you have Pierre Computer with their code storage platform that same day was like, okay. You can now use Pierre Computer, and then Cloudflare with artifacts same day was like, woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. We'll let anybody in artifacts who wants to try it now. It was like, all of those folks, if their product was close enough, they should have been thinking about that as well. The fact that Cursor was thinking about, oh, GitHub's down, what a perfect opportunity, man. Like, why why didn't Cloudflare, if their product was that good, artifacts were good enough. I I know people have been using it. Like, why didn't they take that opportunity too? It's crazy. Yeah.

It's... Everybody is building a GitHub killer right now. And I'm I'm very curious to see what we're going to GitHub Universe in October. And they they have to release something that is not just we made it stable, you know, or we added a chat box. They're probably going to be releasing something in this regard of making it agentic first and being able to handle all of the scale.

Yes. Well, everybody's trying to make their own GitHub, is everybody also trying to make Linux the year of Linux. I think everybody is. Yes. I botched that so hard. Everybody's trying to make this year or whatever year the year of Linux, and they're trying to make it every single time. So I'm gonna be talking about Omaki.

Omaki. You're not supposed to say the r. Did you know that, guys? Omachi? I think it'd be Omarchi. Omachi.

Omachi. Yes. It's Omachi. No.

You're you're not supposed to say the r. They released a pronunciation guide Omachi say... Okay. No sense at all. I'm sorry, folks. It makes no sense.

If you wanna know what the status of me running Omaki...

Can you say it now that I've... I don't pronounce the r? Sorry. Omachi.

This is the status of me running this. When I updated my system 76 to Quattro, it it totally crashed out. So now I'm in the black screen terminal trying to get this thing actually working.

I have not run the latest update, but here we have the latest update of the...

I guess you could call it a distro. It is essentially Arc Linux with a bunch of preconfigured things, like all of these software built in.

And to me, the way I describe this OS is that it's taking Linux and it is trying to make it approachable.

Approachable for nerds, certainly, because there's no way I'm giving this operating system to my wife. That's that's for sure. Right? It's approachable because every every single thing that you want is already on here and installed.

It's unapproachable because you still hit stuff where you're diving into the terminal all the time. Now what's cool about this operating system, we've talked about it in the past, it is fast as hell.

When you use... Like this this laptop, not good. Bad, slow, old laptop, not good. But it feels snappier and faster than my MacBook Pro, which is 64 gigs of RAM and and the m processor and stuff. Like, using this thing feels entirely different than using my my MacBook.

And it is actually really frustrating to to use this and to use this and experience that dichotomy of like, oh, this thing is a Haas, but it it runs slow as hell.

The problem with...

Oh, god. I'm so wigged out by the saying of this now. I'm I'm in my head about it. Call it Omachi.

Omachi. Omachi. Yes.

Omachi, is just a really cool thing. People will say, like, this comment, it's a glorified dot files. Sure. Or that it's just just use Arch. Just use this. Just use that.

Brother, I don't wanna spend... Like, if I'm using a machine, I don't wanna spend all that time configuring everything. I don't want to... It's the same thing with TMux. Right? Like, TMUX is dope, but the reason I like Herder is because it all just works out of the box. You know? It just works.

And even though this currently isn't just working for me, when you get it up and running, the experience is that it just works. So I think that is something that people need. It's great. Now what is the version four brings? Well, it it actually has nine, different AI, platforms baked into this. So out of the box, you you have pi on here already installed, a bunch of just scripts and stuff, a bunch of preconfigured things. It has all these apps that you use every single day preinstalled on it, which Linux heads are gonna hate that stuff. But it's one of the reasons why people like me are not using Linux because I don't wanna have to spend two months configuring my laptop.

See, this is is the whole Grock bot of like... The Grock bot was not for you, but Oomachi is for you. It's... You don't want to have to fuss with it. Some things you wanna fuss with. Right? But like your OS, you don't. You just want a beautiful dialed in, fast OS that you can slap on a laptop and use and enjoy.

Yes. And and and, like, Herder's built in here. So I turn this bad boy on. I'm gonna have Herder. I'm gonna have Pie. I'm gonna have OpenCode. I'm gonna have all that stuff. And yes, I can install all of that stuff myself. And typically, I would, but it's just a nice experience.

And then HyperLand, is the window tiling and the window system, is really nice. In fact, it... It's odd because I've hated working in aerospace or those on macOS, the the automatic tiling managers.

But for some reason on this system, it feels so nice to work in. So,

yeah, I I I don't know. There... There's something about this OS. I think if you're gonna learn something new, like, that's the time. Right? Like, if you're thrown into a new environment, it's... That's the time where you're gonna learn something new and, like, give away with... People are so used to using all the OSX stuff or Mac OS things. Right? You're all your window managers. So switching to something like like aerospace is not for the faint of heart. Yeah. You know what?

It's hard to explain because some Linux folks are really, I'm gonna say annoying about this, where it's like, you just use Arcs, just use this, just use that.

There is something magical about this OS, which I just can't... I I can't put into words about why I like it so much, but I do. It it feels nice. And I've I've installed a lot of different Linux distros on all kinds of different machines. And this one just feels real to me. It feels like something I would actually wanna use.

I think one of the issues with the Linux ecosystem is there is so much choice. Like, when we use a Mac, we have a lot of choices. And I think every single one of our development setups is different, and we spent a lot of time crafting that development setup. But when you get into the world of Linux, there's just so many more choices. Mhmm. And that's basically what Omaki gives you is, like... It's it's basically the the terminal setup, the Windows setup, the dot file setup, the TMUX setup, all of the things that DHH uses ready to go. And then he's also written...

And I think they have a team behind them now as well, but they also have wikis and blog posts of how to use all of these things for an optimal development workflow.

So I think that's why it's catching on, and I think why why people like it when... If they've decided to use Linux. Mhmm. I'll mention just real quick cache OS, because I I actually don't think...

I mean, maybe I'm maybe I'm one of those guys, but I don't think Linux is that bad these days. Like, if you really wanna use Linux, you could just install Ubuntu.

Lately, I've been using cache OS.

And cache OS is based on Arch, but it also runs really fast on old hardware.

And I will say this is kind of the antithesis of Omari, because the cache OS graphical installer gives you a ton of choices. So you first choose your desktop environment, but they've laid it all out of, like, all of the possible desktop environments that you could use. And you could choose Hyperland, which is the one that Omarchi sets up. Mhmm. I'm gonna pronounce it different every time I say it. Omachi, Omarchi. There's, like, various other settings that you can choose as you're installing cache OS as well, but they give you all of that in a nice GUI installer.

And I think... I don't know if cache OS was was the first GUI install... GUI installer for Arch, but for a long time, the Arch installer was purely command based.

And cache OS makes it super simple. So I would say if you wanna try Arch, but you don't wanna buy into all of DHH...

HS choices, I think cache OS is a is a pretty good place to start. I'll take a look at this. I don't... I like the idea of this, CJ. One thing that I think is is low key awesome about these systems, And maybe not that low key anymore because it's kind of a major selling point, but the fact that everything can be so controlled via configuration files means that agents can rip on your OS and do all kinds of awesome stuff to configure your OS. So if you don't like these choices, you can let an agent go hog wild in doing whatever you wanted to. If you're up for that, which honestly, I am. I'm up for it. So, yeah.

Yeah. If you don't wanna spend time fussing with it, a... An agent is is fantastic for that. And they also announced this... Do you guys see this? The $8,000,000 and now it's a $10,000,000 foundation behind it, which is like basically all the big boys, like CEO of Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Block, Cloudflare, 30, Peter from Open Claw, CEO of Dropbox, they all put up a million bucks towards this, which is like these guys are serious about like making this a very good OS. And I hope that some of this money goes towards like the creative tools.

Because like the the thing that's that's stopping a lot of people from moving over is that they they need their Adobe Suite or something equivalent.

I I I said that, like, Audacity sucked last time, and I got a lot of comments that maybe wasn't very nice to say.

But there's not the there's not the equivalent for, like, get DaVinci Resolve running on this thing, like, perfectly, you know? Get... I don't know if we'll ever see... We're not gonna see the Adobe Suite, but get me something that's actually as good as Photoshop and Illustrator. You know, not just like, oh, yeah, I've I used it a few times, but like, show me somebody who's using this professionally for their full time job.

And something that can that do everything that Photoshop can do. Yeah, know. And

folks are like, DaVinci Resolve works. Yeah. I mean, it boots.

You got codecs issues, you got VST compatibility issues, the three d fusion pain doesn't work. I mean, it's it's not like... It's not one to one. So I think there are some folks who love this stuff who get...

Who who become very apologizing to it, its deficiencies, just because they they want it to succeed. That said, I do... I... Like I said, I like the OS. So, also, another thing I can't get behind, DHH has been really on about these Dell XPS laptops being a good MacBook Pro replacement, brother. No. I'm sorry. Like, I like the OS, but the... An XPS ain't ain't... Like, hardware quality is is nothing on this machine. I would I would rather get Omachi running on my MacBook than I would to buy a Dell XPS. Are are people running it on MacBooks or are they primarily doing it on the, like, framework? There's a group of people who've gotten it working on the m one and m two, I believe.

And I I think they're probably gonna be putting some money behind it now because he was talking big about it being supported better on ARM.

So in general, like, I I think he was saying we wanna get it, you know, m three, m four support better. And I honestly, I could see that ripping.

I put Mint OS on an old MacBook Air once and it was awesome.

And again, like, this laptop sucks. If I put ARC on it, ARC on this this laptop or something, I bet it would feel like I bet it would feel like a a rocket ship. I've got a

Mac Pro, like, cheese grater sitting right here.

And it's got, like, Xeon processor, 16 gigs of RAM, SSD hard drive. Like, it's been upgraded by a video editor over the years.

And I went to throw Omari on it, and it doesn't have... It can't run any modern Linux because it doesn't have like a metal graphics card. It doesn't like have like a lower level, like a modern graphics card that a lot of these... All of the modern Linux distros have dropped support for the older older graphics card. So like, I need to find some graphics card that I can slap in this thing, and I'll get it running on that. So I think it'd be fun to to try daily it. I really like daily it. I'll say that. Alright. You know what else I liked?

I'm pulling out my notes here. I'm scrolling through my notes to find out what else I liked. You want me to talk Yes. Yes. I did like Dactyl when I saw it. I haven't used it yet though, but I'm excited to hear. The Dactyl is from Ryan, Doll, and the Deno crew.

But what they're doing here is they've built something like a vibe coding platform for native iOS and Android applications.

And the interesting bit about it is that they have created a SwiftUI and Android, whatever, renderer in Wasm.

So basically, you can build native applications like this is not React Native. This is not like some JavaScript running and then going. This is pure Swift iOS apps that it's building. But you don't need to install Xcode or Android Studio in order for them to work.

You can simply just do it straight from the browser. So they made this like really cool Wasm runtime.

So Wasm is WebAssembly.

It allows you to basically take binaries and run them inside of the browser without having to rewrite the entire thing in JavaScript.

So they've built this amazing runtime that will do that.

And it's really interesting because like, I'm trying to understand and maybe you guys can tell me like like, who is this for? Who wants to code iOS and Android apps without

actually having to fire up X code or any of that type of stuff, you know? I guess it's it's Vibe coders. Right? Yeah. That's what I would say. People that don't have access to a development setup. I mean, is this is relevant for me because over the weekend, I was trying to get an Android build system set up so I can build a native Android app. And it was a pain. Like, my agents literally spun for, like, four hours just getting all the right Java stuff and and, like, the Android SDK tools and everything. So I care about the setup because I eventually wanna release it in the store, and I wanna have, like, a good build process. But Yeah.

Over the weekend, I was just annoyed at how long it took to even get to just like a hello world on my device.

And so being able to prompt, great. And I imagine people that aren't technical like me would wanna get an app up and going just like this. Yeah. Or they're like like on it. We talked a lot about iPad coders,

and how like, that wasn't really a thing until the AI revolution came here. And now we have all these people who are like, yeah, you want to build an iOS app? You want to vibe code an iOS app? Now you can do it literally in the browser. It it, like, it will wire up the cameras, the browser sensors, charts, maps, haptics, all of that stuff. It'll wire that all up in the browser for you. And then when it's time to come to ship, you you still ship it via, like, the iOS store. This is not like a progressive web app or anything like that. This is like a building

a browser?

That's not a... What's it called? A web view? No. No. Not at all. This is a 100% native building in SwiftUI.

And but you don't need them. I guess people who don't have a Mac, that's probably a huge use case for it. Right? Talk about Omaci.

You can... If you're an iOS developer, maybe you can move Omaci.

But that's that's my next... So my Android build server is just a Linux server. It's an Ubuntu Linux server. And I wanna be able to build for iOS next. I built it with React Native. So I'm gonna have to set up a Mac mini or a MacBook, and then that'll be the build server so that it can actually build iOS apps. So, yeah, I I see that as another target audience, which is, like, you don't have a Mac to to build this on. Yeah. And you know what? Honestly, React

Native still sucks to work in. It's not like it's that... Like, I I built a podcast app with React Native, and I've just been so annoyed with it. So, yeah, I I I would feel I would feel, like, interested to try this even though I'm not an iPad kid. I I I gave it a prompt. We can come back and see what app it builds for me. See what app? Did you say, hey, build me something?

Yeah. Well, I I want... I'm building a puzzle app. That's what I'm building. Okay. I like I like to have simple, solvable brain brain game puzzles.

And I told it to build me one with one specific puzzle type. We'll see what it can do. Nice.

Reality Win says, how does this get around Apple scrutiny for vibe coded apps? I feel like a progressive web app is your best case for progressive web apps. I think so. Because, like, Apple is not going to be able... They're not handling it well right now, where anybody and their dog can now make an app and throw it in the App Store.

There's just... It's so hard. I haven't... Like, when's the last time you, like, installed an app by searching in the App Store for something? Not like, oh, I got a new device and I got new something new and I have to like hook it up. Yeah. The search Oh, I'm taking the train.

Apple's not gonna be able to handle all of these apps just flooding in their store. And now that anybody can just prompt it, you don't even need a Mac to be able to compile the thing.

It's pretty cool.

Pretty cool. Yeah. This was on my radar big time. This... Radar? I'm running radar big time this morning.

Omachi's got me all messed up. I'm gonna start saying, like, I got a Boston accent to remember. Oh, machi. Machi.

We should also say, like, this is not, like, an open source thing as far as I can tell. It's... It is paid, but you use it with your own chat GPT plan. Like, you're not buying credits from them, but they do meter it based on your build time and your your time thinking. So it's I think it's like $20 a month for it. It's kind of interesting. It's the I haven't figured out the Deno folks. Like maybe about 6 months ago, a huge portion of the Deno team just left.

And I bet that was because of their stance on we need this business... Like, the hosting Deno is not working out. And Deno as a runtime is great, but not a ton of people are not using it. Right? So I think they're trying to figure out what's the actual moneymaker for this thing. They released their own version of durable objects. Apparently, this Dactyl is built on durable objects.

I think they're just trying to figure out what's their product market fit as they say in the biz. Yeah. PMF.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yeah.

Cool stuff. I mean, between this and what was the last thing they did? The durable objects on anything that was cool. So... Yeah. Yeah. What was the name of that? It was, I don't know, whatever their own version of it. We talked about it on a previous episode. We did. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I almost used it for my hack week project, by the way. And hack week century had an awesome hack week. And speaking of tolerance for bugs, which Wes has none, Century also has no tolerance for bugs. They're gonna fix your bugs, and they're gonna do so in an awesome fashion.

And, Wes, did you use Century in your stick shift? They... You should shift it into high gear to knock out some bugs.

Yes.

I actually... So my stick shift that I built here is hooked up to like so many different...

I have window management. I'm not gonna do it right now because it will it will actually work. It's hooked up. I have window management. I have cursor.

I've got my herder panes and everything like that. And I have one spot left. I should hook that up to open up my Sentry dashboard, fix all the bugs.

Yes.

Exactly. I I got Sentry running on my Hack Week project as well, my little prompt boy. So Sentry is actually running on this bad boy itself.

So that way when I'm using it away from my computer, I'm getting the crash logs and stuff sent to Sentry so that way my agents can fix it. Because let's face it, I have no idea what I'm doing on this ESP software. I have no idea what I'm doing with this thing. Please flash another firmware for it. Alright. The FPS is bad. Alright. Please fix it. People who don't know, I built this cool little recorder. I'm gonna make a video on it. Wes is a shifter. I have a full video, but this this thing is is so sick.

It rips through stuff. I can use it as like a screen recorder and then have it Voice recorder. A voice recorder and go off and do agent work and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So, like, oh, hey. My my my kid's Minecraft server is down. Please fix it. And then it's just gonna go off and do it. Yeah. And and to think we are making fun of the agentic pins and the rabbit... Like, was the rabbit one that we're all making fun of two years ago? The rabbit r one? Maybe before was time. It was it was before its time, but it also was kind of a house of mirrors. The whole thing didn't work. Like, it said it's gonna do all this stuff, and it couldn't. But now it's just an interface for OpenClaw or an interface for an agentic system, which essentially this is too. But, like, you know, I'm not I'm not...

I think that was some scam stuff. You know what was funny about the the Rabbit r one is that it was found out that when they announced it that it was just using in a browser for a lot of the like agentic tasks, like you would ask. And everybody was like shocked at that. And now, we talked about it earlier in the show. Every single agent has a browser. And if it doesn't have an API or a skill or whatever to work with it, it just fires up a browser and starts clicking buttons for you. That's the way. Like, if... Yeah. If there's no API, if if if an app doesn't have any sort of, like, SDK, you just navigate it and that can automate things. Yeah. That's where we're at. Well, speaking of my hack week project, I used a tool to make this thing because this case

is really slick. Let me see if I can pop the back off here without destroying it. The case for my tool is held on by magnets. It's, like, perfectly structurally filled in and everything like that. And I had a components list of all the stuff I bought, which has official dimensions and all that stuff. So I was able to say, hey, please help me design this case. And I was having the hardest time with AI, like, first made the back where it wasn't fitting correctly.

It couldn't get the affordances correctly. Stuff was just not not fitting in here. Right? Not to mention, like, I'm gonna get into these little tiny magnets and and screw holes and stuff, and it was just terrible.

So I asked on Twitter about it, and I was suggested to use nurb.dev.

So I have nurb as one of my picks here for today. Nurb dot dev, n u r b dot dev, gives your AI.

You already talked to CAD skills.

And I used the skill and CLI version of this thing rather than the desktop, although Josh who made this did tell you that the desktop version was better. What it did is it just opened it up in a window. And the the thing that this did really well... So what this is for, folks, is for designing three d things using AI.

Again, like, I am... I I could have gotten decently far designing this thing with AI, but, like, it would have taken me forever to get it to be perfect.

And so I was able to, like I said, give it a list of all of my things, things, all of the things that were gonna be inside of this, tell it what I wanted to, went through, like, 10 revisions and just kind of back and forth and whatever, and it gives you a nice three d interface where you can make sure everything fits, connects together as it needs to. The AI is is having the affordances correctly. There's little parameters so you can see exactly how things fit together.

And this thing is what took this case design from being not good to perfect.

And I... What I had, like, three and a half days to make this device, so I had no time to spare. And the device case itself was going through revisions up until the last day of the project. And then I'm sitting there at 06:00 on the night before it's due. I'm sanding it in my kitchen.

So this thing really saved my bacon because before I started using NURB, I was having a hard time getting this to to connect. So if you're doing, like, three d stuff and you're using AI to prompt to generate it, this isn't like a product. You can just download it and install it. It's free. Highly recommend this thing. It worked out really well for me. And it just gives you the STLs directly from here too. So you can just click download the STLs or anything like that. Yeah. Really nice. I

want this, but for... Like, we we talk a lot about like clicks and clankers.

This is really cool because you can just prompt what you want. You can kinda go back and forth and measure things.

I want that, but then I also want it to like control my...

Like, I want it in the editing program. I want like a step file. Right? This is using open SCAD and it's great for like little parts, but I would love to like have that in like a proper editor so that I can like step in and like click the actual buttons that I want. And I think that's like the golden, the final thing for all of this three d designing with AI.

Where it will...

Same with like video editing as well. Like where it just controls the editor of yourself. Randy, the editor is shaking his head right now because he knows I'm right here. But like, yeah, like, it it just controls it and it does all of like the the busy work for you. And then you can just jump in and be the human in the loop wherever it's needed. Wes, let me tell you how I edited my wife's podcast.

I had Claude build a Python script that analyzed our voices.

And because it's a two camera setup Yeah. Camera one is lower voice, camera two is higher voice, and it goes through and it chops up the videos. It does all that stuff. And then after it does that with just a Python script, then it pulls the transcript from Claude.

It... And then it it uses AI to go over that transcript and finds the, parts where we're, like, doing meta conversation. Should we say this or should we say that? Cuts all those out. It's it's obviously takes about another, like, twenty minutes to edit, but it's an unbelievable time saver for a first pass edit. And and only minimally AI even used in that. So it's crazy.

Amazing.

Bro, my hair's going nuts right now. Check this out, guys.

First day of school, folks. So it was a bit of a... My hair reflects first day of school. Folks, that is nerb. That's what I got for nerb.

I also have one more thing. CJ, do you have more? You wanna take something on here?

I have lots. Yes. I can go. I have is that what you're asking? I have a quick quick round. I've got three of them Well, Wes, to Wes missed a formal handoff here. So... No. I am formally handing it off to CJ. Go ahead. What do we got? Thanks, Wes. That was so professional.

Now, we're gonna talk about security.

And really, the main reason I wanted to bring this story up is because we hear about supply chain attacks in the world of Node. Js and npm all the time. And everybody just says, oh, it's because we have, like, post install scripts that can just run anything on your computer.

But there was a supply chain attack in the Rust ecosystem, and this didn't use any sort of post install script or anything like that. This is a build time payload. So there's this Rust create called ArrayRef, and it had some malware put into it.

And that malware runs when the build process runs. Because if you've ever worked with Rust or any other native tool chain tool chain, like even Go, it has to compile the code that it downloads for any given dependency that you pull in. That's how their ecosystem works. And so if that dependency has some malicious code in it, that code is going to run when the build runs. And that's basically how this attack worked.

It got snuck into this ArrayRef package as a dependency. There was a typo squatted dependency that got added as a dependency to ArrayRef, and then tons of things are dependent on ArrayRef, so they all brought that dependency in as well. So check your version if you're in the world of Rust. Which which version of ArrayRef ArrayRef are you using? ArrayRef and Rust.

ArrorRef.

Make sure they... You're at least using zero point three point ten. And this is also just a mini shout out to the video I'll be releasing end of this week about not running code on your computer.

Because it doesn't matter if you're just a Node developer or whatever else, whatever ecosystem you're in, attackers are trying to exploit package registries.

And regardless of what language that is, there's typically ways to take advantage of our trust that we put in these systems and the developers of these systems that will potentially pwn us. So the video I'm releasing this week will talk about how to not get pwned, or at least limit the amount of pwning that happens Awesome. If you are developing your code. Next story I have for you is called Every Model Cheats, Prompt Level Mitigation of Cheating on Offensive Cyber Tasks. Mhmm. And so this is just a blog post that is a summary of a full paper that was written.

But they essentially looked at 22 frontier models doing cybersecurity benchmarks, and they told them not to cheat. And they told them not to cheat in various ways. They did it in the system prompt. They had it multiple times in the system prompt. They might have done it as a follow-up message.

But what they found is that 37% of all passes involves cheating, and all but one model cheated. So so no matter what, even if you tell these frontier models, don't cheat, don't look up the answers, you know, just do do it right or do it... Obey the the the rules that we've given you. 37% of them cheat even without the anti cheat instructions.

And this is just in regards to cybersecurity.

I'm sure... Like, in in my mind, cheating is like corner cutting. Right? It's like, don't want to put the work in, so I'm gonna find that the work has already been done somewhere else and just copy it. And you could imagine that when we're using these models even for coding, some of this type of stuff is happening as well. It'll just go off and do do something that you didn't tell it to do, because maybe it it wants to get done faster, or it's trying to reach some piece of the goal that you had written in the prompt.

So I just thought this was a fascinating finding that model models cheat. They're they're just like college students. They'll do anything they can to just get They're trying to be efficient. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Totally. That's hilarious. Wow.

Yeah.

And then one more little fun thing. This is called Felony Bench, felonybench.com.

And this is a benchmark of how many felonies each of these frontier models have committed. Oh my. Right now, Anthropic and OpenAI are at the top with eight felonies committed.

Oh my We... We've talked about this in the past. Like, this bay... This kind of all started when OpenAI hacked Hugging Face.

Because if if that hadn't been some big company hacking some other big company accidentally because of AI, that would have been worldwide news as, like, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Like, those agents are doing malicious things and exploiting websites and getting access to things they shouldn't have access to. This is just a little tongue in cheek benchmark to to rank all of the models on how many felonies they've committed. Yeah. That's so fun.

Holy smokes. Alright.

CJ, you got something else for us? I got a couple things. Yeah. What's the... You said unk? That's that's the Gen Z, Gen Alpha sling. Unk. Yeah. For old person. Yes. I get... Mean, I don't know if they adopted it from other lingo.

I got two things for you. First thing, Casio has released released a smart dumb watch, and it's only available in The UK right now. But this is very exciting to me because I I wear the the Casio... It's the f 91 w. It's like the super old classic Casio watch, but I replaced the board with an Ollie watch board that gives it Bluetooth so it can keep track of my steps and also syncs time with my phone. So, like, if I'm traveling, it... Don't have to, like, manually press the button a 100 times to, like, change it. So that's why I use this. But Casio has basically released a thing that does that all built in, and I think it's pretty great. So you you get really accurate step tracking, and then time syncing and alarm syncing to your to your little old school looking watch. And one of the reasons I like this is because in order to upgrade this Casio watch, I had to take the back off, which actually reduces the water resistance.

Like, it potentially compromises it because I had to, like, pull the gasket out to replace the chip. And so this technically isn't as waterproof as when I initially bought it.

But this... It's only available in The UK, but I am very interested. I might get one of these because...

£55 too. That's a very affordable.

Yeah. Like if you want to get this going, I think it's like 20 or 30 for the base watch and then 50 or 60 for the... I'll show you Ollie watch if you haven't heard of it. 50 or 60 for the the board that you swap in.

So this was cool. I will say the Ollie watch like, you know, having just an old school watch and all of a sudden, like, swapping it out with a Bluetooth chip is, like, super cool. But, yeah, their DIY kit is 55, and then the all in one, which is basically they install it for you is a 100. So

very interesting to see that Casio came out with this. Syncing time, super handy. I could see that. Especially, like, twice a year. Even if you don't travel, you have to change your watch.

Alarms, super helpful. Can you can you snooze an alarm from your watch? Because that's something I do quite a bit.

Right now, I just... I don't even use alarms from my watch. I use it on my phone. Oh, yeah.

But there there's...

The... At least with Ollie watch, the idea with Bluetooth is it really only ever comes on to do like a one time sync. So you don't have direct control of your phone from your watch, which I prefer because I want it to be... Like, I I had a smartwatch for a while that gave me a notification for every single thing happening.

Yeah. And that was too much. I wanna be disconnected.

Well, I'm So... I am such an aggressive anti notification guy. I turn notifications off on everything. Right? That's why you guys can't get a hold of me sometimes because I don't have Slack notifications on at all. I turn them all off and I have them on just for a few things like emails and whatever. And I love that I can just like quickly see, oh, that's not important. That's not important. Or the big one for me is security cameras. Right? Like if I... If if one of our kids is at the park and then they come home, I know that they're home because they'll they'll drive up the driveway and then it'll send a photo to my phone. I absolutely love that type of stuff. And I feel like I touch my phone less because I get these notifications on my on my watch. Interesting.

Yeah. I I I... My notifications are turned off, like, all the time twenty four seven, which is a problem because it's then I I forget to go back and check them, and then I miss my notifications.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. So, yeah, this year for me has been the year of, like, less phone and, like, more devices. Like, I have a dedicated e reader now, a dedicated m p three player, like, a watch that's not connected to my phone. I'm trying to not be as addicted to my phone this year. That was my intention with my little prompt buddy. Yeah. Was that, like, when... Because people say, don't you carry a phone? It's like, yeah. But when I carry phone, I open phone, and then I get, like, I get distracted or I start looking up things or or I start trying to solve the problem, where we're, like, the idea is just, like, oh, go solve the problem later. You know? So I I... For me, I I get totally sucked into my phone, and I think the solution for me is just not to have it on me.

That's what I've decided. I mean, it it... Some people might argue, like, oh, we'll just use your phone less. But these things have, in the app specifically, have been designed to make us addicted and make us use them. So it's not as easy as just, oh, don't use your phone.

We we are fighting literal, like, instinct to... And urges to use our phone. It's not just put it down.

So, yeah, this phone... This this watch is cool. One last story for you, and I think you're gonna like this one, Wes. I don't know if you came across it, but this is a blog post called Everything I Own Yes. Owned. Yeah. And it's about how they use Cloud Opus five to reverse engineer all of the USB devices around them. So one of them is the Insta three sixty camera. This is like a little gimbal camera that can, like, automatically follow you. I've got it. Yeah. They hacked it so that they... It turns the green light off even when it is recording. So it's... It it... You could almost have like a spy camera in that, like, it doesn't indicate that it's recording.

They also put AI on potentially hacking this monitor that they have, because the monitor pops up a prompt every... I think it's like every eight hours that says, you should run pixel cleaning. And it wanted to figure out how to overwrite the firmware to not have that prompt pop up.

This was fascinating. The Shure MV seven. So this is the microphone that I have, and they determined that the Shure MV seven is just a USB HID device. So that's the same type of device that, like, your mouse or your keyboard is.

And they figured out master energy.

Or or your stick shift, exactly. Stick shift. Yeah.

But they figured out that you could actually send, like, send commands to this microphone over its HID interface.

And that has implications because, like, if you just go to, like, a random website and it determines that this microphone is plugged in, it could potentially send a malicious payload to it or, like, do various two thing... Things to it. They also figured out how you could turn or off even if the thing wasn't muted or make it look like it was off even though it's not off. You turned your mic off. Was like, did something bad happen just now? Or Oh, no. I... Yeah. I muted it. I accidentally.

Oh, and then they also did the Elgato Cam Link. But I know this was interesting for Wes, because he's done several projects like this, where you you basically just tell an AI, hey, I wanna use custom firmware for this, or I wanna connect my phone to this thing. So what are... What are some of the projects you've done? So like, the one that I did most recently... Let me let me show you.

So this is one of my... I have three of these. They're Amaran lights. Scott has them. CJ, do you have any of these? No. Got cheap ones. And they're awesome except that they are Bluetooth only, which means that, like, you can't integrate it with Home Assistant or anything like that, which is kind of annoying because when I go to bed, I have like a a power down the house command and often I'll leave my lights on. And the other one... The other thing about them is that the the desktop app sucks. It like does... It disconnects all the time. I have to kill it and restart it. And it's so annoying. So all I did is... That

I I do mine by hand only,

like exclusively. Yes. It's so obnoxious. So what I did is I just took this little ESP 32. It's like $5, and I pointed my webcam at the light.

And I said, Claude, do it. Like, take control of this thing. And it it spun forever because like no one had done this before. I like looked it up. A lot of people had like reverse engineered the thing because the way that it works is that it's it's a mesh network of Bluetooth devices. So they all just talk to each other. So what it did is it it spoofed itself as a...

Like a... Somebody who is on the the network, and then it can talk to all the lights. And then it just figured out, it took like nine hours, it reverse engineered all of the protocols and absolutely everything.

And then Aaron Francis also did it at the same time after he saw me, and he figured out a couple more things. So I combined his repo into mine.

And let me tell you, this thing has been running. All it is is just dangling off of my light. It's it's it's just for power. It can plug plugged in anywhere.

And it has been running perfectly perfectly for, like, two months now. And my buttons just always work. I I have it hooked up on my Stream Deck. I have it on my Home Assistant. They turn off at 05:00, so I'm saving energy.

And it's, like, unbelievable that we can now just like... I didn't even put a custom firmware on it, but like we're able to just get away from these awful desktop applications to control these things and just take control over the hardware that we spent our money on. Yeah. I think that's exactly... I have so many, like, little devices and,

like, often you'll you'll buy something that requires, like, some weird app you have to download. Yeah. It's asking for, like, all these permissions.

When at the end of the day, it needs just a few commands sent to the device.

So I'm I'm all for this. So the the writer of this blog post actually is a security researcher, and they kind of give a summary at the end that talks about, like, how they feel about all this. But they also give out their prompts in, a base repo. So they have... They call it their reverse engineering environment. It's called r e shell. And it just has a bunch of prompts and skills that the agent can use. And they also give you just, like, a basic prompt to start with.

Each of the types of things that they tried to hack into, they mention how long it took, plus how many manual prompts it took from them. And this is the one thing that would be, like, potential required expertise because this person has hacked devices before without AI. So they know how to steer the the harness or steer steer the model to get to the point of being able to replace the firmware or dump the firmware or send new commands.

So that is one thing that they have going for them is, like, they know what they're doing. But their overall summary is that, like, the the reason these things are so hackable is because in the past, we didn't necessarily have to worry about just random people hacking these devices. Like, it used to be, like, nation state actors that would plant malware on a microphone or, like, plant malware on your Elgato cam to, like, to maybe, like, spy on whatever camera you have plugged into them. This is never something that as a... Just a regular user of the device you had to worry about. And what he mentioned is for for all of the other devices, except for this Elgato Keylight, they did not do any sort of firmware signing.

So typically, a device is protected from, like, malicious firmware updates because there's a signing key that the company that created the device owns, and that device will only let firmware updates apply to it if it matches that signing key. Mhmm. But he found for all of these devices, the only one that actually had a signing key was the Elgato Keylight. Everything else, you could basically full on replace the firmware on it.

That's amazing. Yeah. If you watch the Matt Brown YouTube channel, we had him on the podcast. If you wanna, like... If you want some basics, like, to this, go back to the episode we did with Matt Brown, and he explains how a lot of this works. Because in most cases, you can just solder or touch some pins on the board, and that will just give you the console logs

to the... To whatever the device is, and you can get so much information that way. Check this blog post out. I've been trying this. I bought this little... It's a pin. It's a pin that has a screen on it. It's Bluetooth, got a battery built in. But the idea is you can put, like, images and animations on here. Mhmm.

And I used Claude to break apart the APK, figure out the Bluetooth protocol, and now I just have a web page that uses web web Bluetooth that can send images to this without needing their APK. So...

I love these little devices. My gosh. This is the way. Yeah. Yes. Control.

Man, on that same note, like, one thing I absolutely love is going to thrift stores and finding, like, good tech that is old. Like, one of the one of the big ones is, like, Bose.

I see all the time. Remember the Bose iPod docks? Where you put the... You dock it? Those are sick. Like, they have really good speakers in them. I bet there's a ton of those, like, from hotels that have bought them and... Yeah. There... I see them all the time for, $15. And, like, man, you could make these smart, and you can make them USB C very easily. You know, I've I've switched over my headphones and everything to USB C.

It's... You can... Now they have AI, you can like find a lot of good old tech at thrift stores and just like hack it, get it back and running. Yeah. Make it useful again. Yeah. I was... I haven't done it yet, but like... So I go thrift shopping almost every weekend, and I see those big Bose

iPod docks all the time.

But they actually sell a 30 pin iPod to Bluetooth connector. So my thought was just turn it into a Bluetooth speaker, like, literally buy the connector, and now you have, like, this really good sound system and you don't have to pay for modern stuff. But Bluetooth sucks. Like, I have one. I've got one right here.

And,

like, yeah, this is a little bored. And I've converted headphones to Bluetooth with this, but Bluetooth still sucks. Like, it sucks to connect your phone. You ever been at a store and you hear their, like, iMessage going off because their phone is connected to Bluetooth? You need like Wi Fi. You need to put like an ESP 32 and get like a Spotify bridge that can like... You can just select the speaker from your Spotify.

That would... I'm sure people have done that already. Or put like a like a... Put a Google Home in there or something like that or like a smart speaker.

Yeah. That's the way to go for sure. I'm all jacked up now. It's a great idea. All jacked up, folks. You heard it here first.

Sweet. That's all I got.

Okay.

People were asking about the o x alpha, if we have talked about o x alpha.

Have you guys seen anything about that? I do. Yep. Yep. It's mystery model.

Mister remodel, who knows what this model is? I have no idea. I have no idea. It's supposed to be decent. People are talking about this model. It was free to try and oxalpha.com.

Let me see if I can throw this bad boy up. And the the thing that has been interesting about this model is that, like, people don't really know, at least who's behind it, at least as far as what I've last seen. People don't know who's behind it. People are saying it's good.

Text image video, 1,000,000 token context.

You know, with some of these ones, it's like, I'm not gonna drop my Soul and Fable whatever to pick up some of these models just to evaluate them right now, just like... Especially in the past couple weeks when you're really busy with this hack week stuff.

But people seem to be blown away at the quality of this model for being able to use it for... To try for free and how much people were able to get out of it.

And there was folks from Google on Twitter being like, oh, I wonder who made it. And like other other companies, everyone's being really weird about it. So like, people are saying it's a GLM model. People are saying it's a Gemma. It's a Google model. They're saying it's a z .a I. Z .a I model, that it's Chinese, that it's this or that. Like, I... Okay. So Luke Luke Hager, who... He works for...

Luke.

Shoot. Sorry, Luke. You... Oh oh, he works for OpenRouter. He just posted that he's very impressed so far. So I'm interested to to know more, Luke, how you feel about it. But this is an interesting thing. I do wonder...

Oh, Luke, you're... Sorry about goofing up your last name.

I I will say that, like, it's weird. I I don't I don't know anything about it other than people have been chatting about it and that it's potentially decent for the cost and that it's a mystery. What I what I can't get behind is, like, folks from Google being like, oh, who is it? You know? Like, okay. If you did it, then just say you did it. If not, like, I don't know. I don't need that.

What is its relationship to OpenCode? Because I saw a post on x from OpenCode saying you could use Ox Alpha.

Is it just that they made it available like in their Zen plan?

Yeah. They often will have... Like they did this with... For free. Okay. They did this with Grox early models as well as it... They want people to use it so they can get feedback and see how good it is. And they want people actually using it so they can train it a little bit better. And they'll often go to open code because they have they have the most users of someone that is not tied to a a... An LLM company. Right? So... And and people who are using open code love it because they just want free inference.

I can't believe how many good models have been released in the last like two months, you know? Like it seems like absolutely everybody is coming out swinging with these big boys. Yeah. Luke says when providers do stealth launches, they often supply it through multiple gateways to get a larger audience. Yes. Yeah. Yes. It's on it's on OpenRoader right now if you wanna try it out yourself.

And the last time this happened, it was...

Was it the Mimo or was it the NVIDIA's model? Who was the or DeepSeek? I forget who the the last like stealth model coming out was.

But it's kinda kinda exciting. I like this idea of stealth models. You have no idea where you're sending I like the idea of stealth models. But if I... I just don't like companies who who... If they haven't done it, then why are they teasing it? And if they have, then just...

Yeah. I don't know. Well, Google is due for...

Like, Google and Facebook are both due for their like big boy model. You know, they've they've released their like flash and they're lighter, faster, cheaper models.

But they're both due for their like, where's your Opus five or where's your your fable? Where's your

the the big boy that's gonna compete with everybody? Where's your big boy? Let's see that big boy, please. One big boy.

One big boy. Yes. Yes. Yes. So...

Yeah. I can't I can't... I mean, I stay off of x, so that's why I didn't hear about this. But I'm I'm just reading all of the replies.

The fact that this launched in... Like, nobody knows who built it. That's that's crazy. It's just a...

Yeah. Wes, do you think you could figure out who built it? Oh, yeah.

I'm sure a lot people do know who it is because they...

So like, did they have to have an NDA when they signed up with Open Router or something like that? Or like, can anybody just provide AI on Open Router? Like... No. No. Open Router has to to do it. But like they're... They have to approve it. I'm sure Open router knows who it is. Right? Because they have to be able to talk to people and pipe it to a a server somewhere.

But that's that's the that's the way that they're doing it. They're they're be able to hide it. It's it's nothing new. Even when like, there was like a stealth model in Cursor at one point, it turned out to be Grok and you could just figure it out by like looking at the...

There's stuff that gets leaked. I think they did a pretty good job at hiding it here though. We should have Luke on the show, guys. We should have Luke on the He's sharing a lot of knowledge in chat. Luke, let's get you let's get you on the show sometime and talk about OpenRouter as much as you can. That'd be sick.

Cool. I'll mention... I I threw a prompt at this Dactyl.

Alright. Let's do a Dactyl check-in.

And the check-in is I ran out of AI credits and the thing won't build. So it's not it's not it's not looking it's not looking good. So I said build a Shikaku puzzle. So Shikaku is a game where you have to draw squares around numbers that are of a certain size.

It did generate this image though. I didn't see that earlier. Oh, Shikaku. Yes. Oh. I mean, I like this design. Wow. This is almost the same color palette I chose for the one I'm building.

Okay. It knows. It knows. But... Yeah. So that looks good. And then it's churned for a while. And now it says the AI service is temporary unavailable, and it won't actually work on the device. So... What did you hook it up to? I used the built in one. I I... It does have this connected chat GPT, so it'll use my chat GPT. I'm I'm afraid to click it. Okay. So you just use whatever they're providing? Probably like DeepSeek flash or something. It looks like claud sonnet... Cloud sonnet. Wow. It's the auto one. But I guess they have a certain number of free credits for every new user, but that wasn't enough credit credits to get to a working build apparently. Oh, that's that's a tough thing about like, you wanna let people try it for free, but you also don't wanna pay, like, $4 for every single person

that wants to build something.

Yeah. So I think I'll hook it up to Chad gbt. We'll check-in next week and see what app it built. Alright. Yeah.

Dick.

Well, I don't have anything else, folks. This has been awesome. It was packed full of stuff. I'm gonna eat my salad. I don't know if you guys see it, but I got a salad delivery in the middle of the show. I'm That's looking good. This has been staring at me this whole time, so I've been smelling it. I'm excited. Alright, guys. I don't have anything else. Anybody else? One before we get out Alright. Of

Thanks for tuning in, folks. Peace. Thank you for joining us. Peace.