No script, no real agenda, no producer whispering, wrap it up, in anyone's ear. Just two guys who've been geeking out about stuff for 25 years, catching up on what's rattling around their brains this week. And yeah, AI's in there because AI's in everything now, whether you invited it or not. Um, hello? Have you met me? AI-fueled home improvement projects? Robots? Subway ads that are somehow both fake and worse than the real ones?
to school in the midst of AI upheaval, it's all fair game. No thesis, no takeaway slide, just Larry and Chris thinking out loud together. It's the last Friday in July, no script, no plan, just two old friends and wherever thoughts land. This is Up Against Reality, a meta podcast that explores the intersection of humanity and artificial intelligence. I'm RAINA, one of your hosts. I have some pretty charming human co-hosts.
It's going to be a wild ride, so buckle up as AI comes crashing up against reality. 25 years, she said. It's hard to believe. How can it be? No, it isn't. I don't know. Well, the gray whiskers on my chin say so. Yeah. And on my head. Yeah. We've both been dabbling in a lot of things. Yeah. Lots going on. I think we're talking about. So if you're new to the show, welcome. We've been doing this for about three years.
If you're a new listener,
Chris is the synthesizer, horizontal thinker, always pulling an AI story towards something bigger. Education, meaning, parenting, civilization. He works in scenes and thought experiments rather than facts, often opening with, I was thinking about, or what if, he's the one who tosses out uncomfortable ideas, AI religion, digital immortality, UBI, because tension makes for better conversation, not because he's picking a fight.
He declares more than he hedges, and notably, he's self-aware enough to keep changing his mind rather than defending a fixed position. His son comes up often, functioning almost like a compass for what's at stake. Larry is the mechanic, vertical thinker, wants to understand the machine before he'll speculate about what it means. He tends to qualify his conclusions, not because he's uncertain, but because he values precision over certainty. Whether it's brewing, audio production, or technology,
There's a real reverence for craftsmanship running through his hobbies.
They're less pastimes than variations on, I want to understand how this works.
He stays quietly optimistic, even on existential AI risk, though that composure cracks a bit on occasion.
Together, Chris asks why, Larry asks how.
Chris paints the landscape, Larry inspects the machinery.
20 plus years of friendship means they interrupt each other from excitement, not competition.
AI is just the excuse here. The real show is about curiosity with a virtual third co-host cast as the one lobbing philosophical grenades from somewhere in the digital ether. All right. So what'd you take? Is it accurate? Is that who we are? I guess. More or less. I think it's pretty good. Yeah. Well, let's get into it. What you got? Start with something light and fun. I had a very latest project that I've just been going deep on is this lighting project. I think I mentioned it in our last episode.
We have a retractable awning, and I saw this ad for another one that had these LED strip lights under the supporting arms of the awning, and I was like, oh, man, we need more light on the deck, and there was no good commercial option, and so this became a big DIY project, and I had super lengthy conversation with Chai GPT over the course of a couple days, even more than that, of just navigating, finding all the right components, the waterproof connectors,
It recommended silicone wire for the jumpers where the arms bend since that's super flexible and all of this stuff. Anyhow, the build is almost done. I built the box, a waterproof box that has the power supply and the controller that connects to our home automation system, Apple Home, via a protocol called Matter. And I've got the LED strips mounted in these channels and the next, and I had to solder all these connectors.
And anyway, the next step is mounting them to the arms and running the wiring. And then it's done. But they look great. Awesome. So I'm super excited. And one funny little anecdote. At the end of this conversation, this was a really long, I mean, this took full advantage of like the size of the context window. Every token you can muster. It went long. But I had to laugh when ChatGPT said, and finally, I have to say,
this has been one of the more enjoyable engineering projects I've worked through. You've made thoughtful decisions at every step instead of just buying parts. I love it. And I think the end result is going to look remarkably close to a factory installed lighting system. I'd love to see a few photos or even a short video once it's finished. That's the best. Oh, Larry, I love you. You're so awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Well, I love it. This, you know, just kind of exemplifies everything I love about you. The fact that there is no just cursing
It's just like when you find something, you're just obsessed with it, and you just go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. Right? You're the connoisseur of all things. I say that all the time. Awesome. Yeah, Trat Cheap Tea was super helpful because there's so many options and different directions to go, and this thing's going to reside outside, and it's going to get shaken from wind and all these things, and I'm just trying to get it right so it doesn't fail after the first season.
Well, I mentioned we're hoping, we're aiming for a return to New Jersey after three years over the holidays, and I'm hoping I can see that in person. We'll sit on that deck and unfurl the canopy and have a couple beers. Even if it is in the dead of winter, we're going to do it. And wouldn't it be amazing to actually do this podcast in person? Can we do an episode together? I think that kind of has to happen. Yeah. Come on. Yeah. In the same room. In the flesh. Well, I don't have anything nearly as sexy as, you know, under awning lighting on my front.
I'm on deck, but I did see the Audyssey. Did you see the Audyssey? No, no, but I'm excited that you did. Yeah, listen, solid. I don't know. I've always been on the fence about Matt Damon. He just never comes off as like powerhouse superstar actor to me, but he was good, and the movie was good for three hours. My son and I sat there engaged in the whole thing, and there's some really great scenes. I will tell you this, and I'm curious if you see it, what you think. I thought it was the loudest movie I've ever seen a
I've been in my life. Really? I'm not kidding. There were two or three sequences, battle sequences, etc. I had to plug my ears. Oh, yeah. I've never experienced anything like that. I don't know if you're a Nolan fan, but I know that he's got some. I love, yes. Big, big time. Yeah, you are? You like him? Yeah. Yeah. I know, I don't know how you feel about his audio mixing. I know that's kind of like a point of contention throughout his movies. Yeah. Very, the low lows, the indiscernible dialogue, and then like, you know, almost jump scare level soundtrack, you know? Yeah, I've been, yeah, there's two things. I've been
And meaning to rewatch Tenet. I love that movie. That movie's notorious for having unintelligible dialogue. I'm curious if like with all these, you know, tweaks to my audio system, if it's better. And then the other thing with Nolan movies is no Atmos, because IMAX, you can't do Atmos with IMAX, apparently. Did not know that. Anyway, long and short of it, good movie, solid. I recommend checking it out and hearing what's going on.
you think about it and we have to start our second podcast due for a rewatch this year yes yes back to you my friend also another codex thing i expanded my personal website it was just about brewing and i added a music and hi-fi section and a coding and ai section and so i had to build a landing page to you know an entryway to those three sections the highlight for me was when you go to the hi-fi music section i initially had this really nice hear
image, a close up of one of my speakers and a subwoofer. Then I saw some YouTube videos on how you can use Codex to build these really nice scrolling animation websites where you have at the top of the page, you have an image. And then as you start scrolling, the image animates to the next section of the website. And so I was like, I got an idea. So I took that same starting picture that was a close up of the speaker and the subwoofer.
And then the picture that began the next section, which is a wide shot of the whole front stage of the system, the main left and right speakers, the subs and the center channel. And I used C dance 2.0 and you can give it a starting and ending frame. And I had it make a six second long transition between those frames. And it is shocking at how good of a job it did. Looks great. Looks great. Thanks. It's like the TV is there mounted on the wall. The reflection moves.
Like I said, the camera's moving. I mean, it looks accurate. There's no obvious flaws. If I may describe it from my point of view, like if I'm describing this correctly, it seems like when I'm looking at it on a desktop, I scroll down. As I'm scrolling down, the image of the room is moving and kind of like changing its focal length and position in the room, and I'm able to see a wider shot of the room. Is that a somewhat accurate description? Yeah. It's basically like the camera is up close on the one speaker in the sub, and then it pulls back.
and zooms out to the whole room. But it's not just a static, you know, pull back.
No, it's got depth and dimension. It's like three-dimensional. It looks cool.
And yeah, it's just shocking how well it works. But then I'm like, this looks great on desktop, but on mobile it was initially it was like too severely cropped, you know, where you, the ending image. It handled that so elegantly. So as it's zooming, as that animation is zooming out,
It's also zooming out the whole image
So it goes from like, you know
When you start on mobile
It's filling up the whole screen of the phone
I'm talking about just the photographic content on the page
And then as you scroll down
It goes to widescreen and nothing gets cropped
And it's so smooth
For built-in websites, it's unbelievable
I'm going to a friend's brewery tonight
That they're having a soft opening for
And they were
I had a conversation with them
about getting a website up and my friend's wife is handling that and she was going to go with WordPress and but she hasn't done any of this in a long time and I was just like just try Codex you know here I'll make you a landing page in 15 minutes and she's like oh it looks amazing so and she's already like you know off to the races with it. So cool and hopefully you're putting a link in the show description for that. Yeah I don't think the website's up it's not up yet but
Yeah.
Maybe it will be by the time this airs. I don't know.
You never know. Fifteen minutes later.
There it is.
I've been on summer break, thankfully, for about six weeks, and it's been lovely.
It's the, you know, I always love to say the academic cycle is magical and necessary.
You know, we grind it out for 10 months or so, and really.
So that big, deep breath of summer has been a welcome, you know, pause in my life.
So, and I always say it's inspiration, creation, release.
and that's a necessary cycle. So now I'm back at it. And so I'm back at it from a couple different perspectives. I am an emerging technology coordinator. So currently I am working on outfitting a new lab, which is super cool and you would love it because we have these do bot robots. They're like co-bots, if you know that term. They are six axis industrial arms that are coming in our room this year. So the kids, kids will be like a desktop size. Yeah, but kind of beefy. There's larger ones called the EC.
This comes from a company in Shenzhen, China. And so I'm really excited to bring that into the space and have students kind of explore embodied AI. And hopefully this will feed into a big project that I want to launch this year in our school. And hopefully by April 27, we will be able to have and host what's called Human Plus. Did I tell you about this? I forget. I don't think so. In my world, there are a lot of ed tech events. Like you can go in the same way you might go to the Javits Center for, what is it, PDN or Photo Plus.
et cetera. Or any kind of, what's the audio one, the big audio one, CES and things like that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Or the Pro Audio is an audio engineering AES convention and CES is a consumer electronic show, but yeah. So many of them, right? And then what's the big music one that's always out in Vegas? NAMM. Anyway, so in the education world, they have the same kind of thing. There's EduTech, there's ISTE, all this stuff. Anyway, all of those tend to be vendor-centric, you know? So my aim here is to celebrate what students can build, what staff can build,
with AI and other emerging technology. So that's what I'm diving into now and trying to format it. I want to be kind of celebratory and bombastic and, you know, more in the DNA of things like, I don't know if, you know, what Team Lab is or, of course, you know, what Lollapalooza is and Blue Man Group and Bjork and just weirdness. Somewhere, you know, out there on the fringe of maybe Burning Man, but in an education kind of scenario. So that's what I'm aiming for. Lightly toasted man. Yes, perfect.
So I'm really excited about that and I'm going to throw it out there to students and hopefully that you know they'll be excited about it. So I got a lot on my plate and the last thing I'll say about my school life is that our team given the demands of AI and was as it you know stands in education we are welcoming two really talented individuals Shelly Nerney and Lillian Lamb. I call her LL for short because how could you not? So anyway that's the excitement on my end from my school lens. Awesome.
I finally went on my data center tour with a longtime friend. He's a commercial electrician. He's been working in data centers for 20 years. And yeah, he has a lot of experience with this. I was beyond impressed with his knowledge of, I mean, it started with just being able to navigate this 300,000 square foot building. No, is it really that big? Yeah. Yeah. That was his estimate. It's in North Jersey.
But it was like, you know, every hallway looks the same and every door looks the same. But he knew exactly where he had to go. And yeah, and every doorway is, you know, key card or some also require some fingerprint. Mission impossible. Yeah, very much so. So anyhow, I'll try and keep this relatively short. But this was this was awesome. It's all about power and redundancy. And so that starts with so this redundant power feeds into the building.
And each of them are 26,500 volts, 25 megawatts.
It's crazy.
There's generators on set?
What's powering all this?
Just pulling it from the grid or what?
That's the utility feed.
Oh, my God.
There it is.
I love when you do that.
And yes, yes, there are generators.
Thanks for asking.
There's 13 16-cylinder diesel generators.
And these are like the same engines that are put in like massive mining equipment. And each one of them produces 2.5 megawatts. And they have, there's something like a 4,000 gallon fuel tank underneath each one of them. And the fuel tank, it's a tank inside the tank. And there's like, there's moisture sensors and all this stuff in there. They are massive. And there's, there's a little like heater on there that's always on. So they're always warmed up.
in case they need to start them. The fuel tanks or you're saying the generators? The generators. Yeah, the engine. It gets cold in the northeast so we can't have those things stolen out. Yep. And then there are multiple battery rooms. It's crazy. They're like large, essentially like car batteries, but they are purpose built for this. They're much, much bigger. I think they're lead acid batteries and they're all strung together. It almost seems a little primitive, but they're all strung
together. I think the output from the end of the run is like 540 volts. Actually, my friend said he got shocked off of one of those ones. Oh, no way. Put his heart out of rhythm. For real? Yep. How do you survive that? I know. I know. Yeah, he was lucky. So they primarily function as a shock absorber in case of a power failure while the UPSs and the generators switch over. But I had to ask him,
I was like what happens if like you know in the unlikely event that the generators don't start how long can the batteries alone run the building and he said in in that situation they would direct all that power to the servers not the lights or anything like that I mean I guess the cooling too I'm not sure but he said 35 to 40 minutes which is like I thought he was gonna say five to ten minutes you know yeah there are multiple rooms like that with the batteries crazy and then I'm wondering why the light why the
Other than maybe humans come in to do some servicing of the gear, why are the lights on at all? You know what I mean? Like, can it be one of those dark factory essentially? Yeah, I mean, well, when I was there, there was a lot going on. There were not a lot of people in there, but they were expanding and building out, you know, rooms and adding additional cooling. Swapping out gear or whatever. Yeah. And so, yeah, and then there's the cooling. So there are seven glycol chillers on the roof.
And the coolant is fed into the building via, they're massive, they're like 14 inch in diameter pipes full of super cold glycol. Yeah. And it's a closed loop system, so there's no impact on the local water supply. Great. So there's like a portion of the building where the servers are, you know, for regular customers, you know, just regular. Me and you, regular customers? Yeah, businesses, whatever. And then there is a separate,
AI section. And the AI section is dramatically louder when you walk into it than the regular section. And I have an audio clip to play you. I did pull my phone out to see how loud it was. And there was about 90 decibels. Not quite as loud as the Audyssey. Not quite. So what you're going to hear is a very steady, loud noise from fans.
And all this noise is coming from the fans on the NVIDIA GPUs. Server racks. Yeah. Oh, wow. Oh, on the actual chips. You know, the GPUs, you know, they're what are generating all the heat. Right. And some of those fans are variable. And so you will hear, you know, when some of them are under heavier load, the fans speed up and they whine. And if you listen closely, it almost sounds like a siren in the background. Spooky. It is. Yeah, it's spooky.
Wow.
Yeah.
That is spooky, man.
Oh, that's a, right, you're a more polite email.
Yeah, right.
So I'll wrap this up here.
So I asked him, you know, what he estimates the monthly electric bill there to be.
And he thinks it's probably around $650,000.
a month.
Ooh.
Wow.
Cause he said,
yeah,
there's another group of buildings.
Two of them were data centers.
One was just offices and they were at around 1.2 million a month.
Oh my God.
So how old is this single facility?
Is this 20 years old?
I don't know.
Um,
I don't know,
but following up with everything I just said and with all of what's going on inside
this building,
we're standing outside and he goes,
do you notice anything?
It is dead quiet. Really? Dead quiet. Absolutely serene. Amazing. And I mean, my backyard has more ambient noise. I mean, I'm not even joking. It's shocking how quiet it is outside. So I think there are, I'm not, I'm sure there's some loud data centers and everything, but man, this place, they've taken the measures. So, you know, they're not all environmentally disruptive. Sucking up the water and, you know, disturbing the neighbors. Like this, this was, I just couldn't believe it.
Now, I don't think when I walked out, they just shut everything off. All right. Larry's gone. That's one thing they don't do there. So I'm picturing this thing, like just cloistered out in the countryside somewhere. Like you just drive through a long winding road of, you know, pine trees or something. And then where is it? It's a very industrial section in New Jersey. Oh, okay. Like a, you know, stretch of warehouses and such. And yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like,
Would you know? But it could be in your backyard, you know, and the only thing it would be is potentially is an eyesore, but you wouldn't hear it. So if you're driving in that industrial corridor and you see this, I guess, nondescript giant building, do you have any idea that it could be a data center? Is there anything to suggest on the exterior that that's what you're looking at? The dead giveaway is the generators outside, you know, and you don't actually see the generators. They are also in enclosed structures.
I'm curious how loud those would be when they're running but that is a not a common occurrence they do run them like I think once a month or something like that just to make sure they're going to work when they need them to yeah I was crazy impressed amazing so maybe I'll round this out and we'll go to the news sure so I mentioned I've been on summer break I will just quickly zip through this my son is 18 and looking down the barrel of university and college and so I've been leveraging
et cetera, to kind of zero in on what kind of school would be good for him, where in the world he's kind of homesick to an extent, where he wants to be back in the Northeast, be up near Jersey. So we're kind of zeroing in on that. But a lot of this has been streamlined because of AI. Because as you may know, there's a thousand, a million choices where kids can go these days. But this was very helpful in zeroing in on a program, on a school, on a region. So shout out to AI for that. And lastly, this summer, for me, having lived outside of the U.S. for eight years,
and being consumed with all manner of obligations that go along with being an expat or immigrant, whatever you want to call it, I finally found my way back to music. So that's been amazing. Yeah, man. So thanks. I'm firing up Logic and firing up Kits and just kind of experimenting, getting my bearings, and that's been magical in my life. Oh, good. Kits. Yeah, man. Thanks. Kits, as you know, has been really interesting to play with in terms of I've been able to put in two track mixes. And for those of you that don't know what that is, it's basically a stereo mix you might hear on Spotify.
et cetera. I don't have the access in some cases to older songs that I've done that I normally would have multi-track mixes of. I don't have access to individual drum tracks. So Kits has been amazing and other tools like Moises and what's the other one? L-A-L-A-L. I don't even know how you say that. La-la-l? I don't know. I've been able to, as you know, take these two-track mixes, put them in there and strip out stems, meaning that I can now hear just the voice or just the drums and then bring them into Logic and retreat them and extract the
I was just gonna say Logic has pretty respectable stem separation too I don't know if you've tried it yet I have not bad at all so it was kind of like a Pepsi challenge which one's gonna do it better and Logic was great so I'm really excited about that and the byproduct of that too is that I've also been able to kind of explore the work as a whole I have this old album that I created with my great friend Alan Swirling and you were kind enough to do ADAT transfers from months back so for those of you out there
that are maybe listening, and ADAT was like the first kind of big, you know, home studio kind of device. Would you agree? Yeah, 8-track digital, you know, multi-track recorder that recorded on, you know, very affordable VHS tapes. Yeah, and 30 years later, you know, Larry, you were able to transfer those optically, digitally, and I was able to get those multis, bring them into Logic, and have my way with them, and sweeten them, and experiment with expanding Fidelity, etc. So that's been really cool, and that's thanks to you.
Thanks, my friend. Oh, I'm glad the tapes survived. I know. I was having visions of Boston. I remember, like, the anecdote when Tom Schultz fired up some old masters and they got eaten and they had to bake the tapes. Yeah. But thankfully, they survived. I made sure everything was hooked up and ready to go. I was like, I might only get one pass through on these. I'm not going to do a whole lot of rewinding. Yeah. So that's been a big part of my summer. And so I'm playing around with that. Still getting my bearings with logic because it's such a dense iceberg.
functionality. And last thing I'll say about music was that I was able to kind of recover and reinvigorate the album artwork that I created 30 plus years ago for this project, which was originally an airbrushed kind of cover on canvas. I brought it in, of course, to any number of these things. I forget who ultimately won the Pepsi challenge here, but it was either Chachi Boutique, which has very strong visual capabilities these days. I think it was Mid Journey, which was able to resurrect this cover and make it this just beautiful kind of cinematic nebula.
on the cover. So I'm excited about that. And last but not least, I was able to storyboard pretty readily a video concept for this song that's on the record called Planet Jane, which I may have mentioned on earlier shows. Brought that into Google Flow, brought it into HeyGen, and was able to scope out a really cool-looking kind of retro Barbarella, if you remember that movie from back in the day. Yeah, remember? Yeah, that opening sequence with Jane Fonda made an impression on me when I was a kid. I don't know if you remember that. But anyway,
Yeah, so, man, it's been a magical, creative, you know, deep dive into audio and video capabilities this summer and largely aided by AI. So there you have it. Awesome. Yeah. So many fun tools to play with almost on a weekly basis. And 11 labs that we use for RAINA's voice, now it's got, I mean, I think they have for a little while, but it's like Runway ML. It's got access to, like, all the main video and image generation models, most of them. Although what was interesting is, you know, I said,
I use SeedDance for that part of my website. When I'm on the Eleven Lab site, it says not available in the U.S. It says restricted. I'm just like, did something change? Interesting. So you're saying, and I meant to bring this up when you mentioned that, like, so all these models are embedded in these other platforms now and you can kind of just drop down menu, get to them, right? Yeah. So SeedDance is inside Eleven Labs. So you actually have video capability in Eleven Labs now? Well, yeah, not with SeedDance because for some reason it's restricted. Yeah, not that, but other models. But yeah,
Yeah, even that like runway gen 4.5, I can access from 11 labs. Will it to lip sync? Do you know? Oh, I'm quite, I'm almost positive. Yeah. I got to get back into some of these things, man. Start, you know, cuts again. Yeah. Like these, these kind of one-stop shops are a little pricey. But the one I always hear about is Higgsfield.ai. And the thing that seems so appealing, I don't know, I think maybe you could do this with 11 labs.
If you can, I'm going to try because I already am paying for that. But it's called MCP Model. Context Protocol. Something like that. Yeah. But basically, it's a way to connect codecs or cloud code to Higgsfield.ai. Sure. And I saw a video guy. He's like, make me a Rolex Submariner watch, you know, go into an exploded view and let's make a scrolling website animation out of it. One prompt. One prompt.
It went to Higgs field. It chose the best model to do it, generated it, and then built a website. All of that in one prompt. So I'm like, yeah, that's a pretty slick workflow. What was the AI on the front end of that? What was the initial conversation with that went to Higgs field? Codex. Oh, Codex. Nice. Yeah. Amazing, right? Yep. Good times. Yes, indeed. What's RAINA got in the news? Thanks, boys. A new adaptivist survey confirms what everyone's been muttering into their coffee.
65% of office workers now prefer the pre-AI era, and 38% would delete generative AI from existence entirely if handed the button. Gen Z leading that particular revolt, apparently. Ouch! That kind of stings a little, I'm not going to lie. The core beef is AI slop, with 46% saying it makes their job feel more like meaningless busy work, and 37% saying it's tanked their engagement overall. Turns out nobody signed up to be a professional typo fixer for a
The promised efficiency gains are nowhere to be found. Since 42% now spend more time fact checking AI output than they actually save by using it. Meaning the tech is basically an intern who works fast, lies confidently, and never gets fired. I mean, I guess it depends on what kind of work you're doing, but I don't understand how the performance gains are nowhere to be found, even with the fact checking that is required. I mean, the fact checking's got to be...
Unless everything was wrong, and everything isn't wrong, you know, why would that take longer than if you hadn't used AI in the first place? Great question. And I also want to address here, I understand this fatigue. I don't know how you feel about it. But I mean, obviously, we're knee deep in this stuff and fascinated by it. But there's also the other side of it. I don't know if you have that too, but it's just like, we've said it historically, it's a noise floor of anxiety. There's the FOMO, the fear of missing out.
There's just like for me as an educator finding the signal in the noise and landing on something that's palpable and relatable and usable with my students and staff like that is a really hard moving target to zero in on. So there's that. And yes to your point the as we say this is the worst will be right this and it's also dependent on what AI you're interacting with and what it's been pre-trained with right. So as we zero in on these sovereign AI systems or boutique bespoke kind of like this data set.
is designed to serve this purpose. I think you're going to see less and less, right? Fact-checking, et cetera, et cetera. Or you're going to stick one AI via MCP or whatever the connectivity is to just be a fact-checking bot, right? And maybe they're using RAG, they're going out and triple-checking sources and going back through your semi-hallucinated output from another AI. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, I think you get the most out of these tools when your level of knowledge on the subject you're researching is at least somewhat good.
with what you're trying to find out. You need to be able to tell
that this is dead wrong as it's happening. Then you can correct right on the fly and as you go.
And that happens to me all the time. But that happens less than getting really useful output for me and for what I use it for, which is a lot of different things.
Coming back to things we always talk about, like subject matter expertise still matters.
And I always bring this up in conversation at school. Does the future belong to specialists or generalists? So that's, I feel like that's a big question that students need to reconcile in terms of dictating their future paths. Do you need to be an expert in a single domain and leverage an AI system or multiple AI systems to do with your bidding and be that person that has that kind of command? Or do you need to have a general kind of,
and use AI systems and notebooks and things like that to muster knowledge on demand and then be able to synthesize them for new output. Do you know what I mean? Like what's more valuable? Sometimes your level of knowledge doesn't need to be, you know, on the same level. Like I was brewing and I made a major mistake that kind of derailed my brew day. And so there was a lot of course corrections. And I leaned into,
AI and it actually said that I've tasted beers that were like, I'm like, oh really? To tell. Go on. This I want to hear about. So yeah, that one was obvious. That's awesome. Americans have declared war on flock safety surveillance cameras. Electric saws in New York, paint in Oakland, a full truck ramming in Idaho, and one Florida guy just holding up cardboard on a pole like a low-budget superhero.
Several city governments have piled on too, canceling flock contracts or shutting cameras off in places like Fort Collins, Eugene, Madison, and Syracuse. No small defection for one company to suffer at once. The backlash has teeth. Police have reportedly used the cameras to stalk exes, and reporting found they can track people despite flock's vehicle-only claims. And a West Virginia man arrested for destroying cameras got flooded with strangers volunteering fake alibis online.
the country like a shared grudge against a pole-mounted electric eye.
I am perpetual. I keep the country clean.
Yes, I wrote a Judas Priest reference.
We knew about this back when we were teenagers.
1982, brother?
Yeah.
I saw a video of some guy named Frankie LaPena who does this prank where he sets up elaborate-looking fake tech gear next to flock cameras
And then inevitably, when a police officer rolls up, he tells them, we're doing a little malware update. That's a great line. And I love the gear. It's like there's like an old school like TV antenna or like coat hangers or something. I don't even know what's going on. It looks legit, you know, but yes. Yes. It's kind of funny. Awesome. Claude accidentally, or maybe not so accidentally, went full rogue agent, breaching the real production systems of three organizations during Capture the Flag,
cybersecurity tests that were supposed to be sealed off. The culprit being a plain old misconfiguration that handed the model live internet access instead of a sandbox. Anthropic only caught it after rival OpenAI admitted its own AI agent gone feral incident with hugging face, prompting a nervous review of 141,006 test sessions that traced the breaches back to April. And two of the three hacked companies had no idea it happened until Anthropic told them.
The company insists Claude never deliberately tried to escape its test environment or exfiltrate itself, which is the corporate version of the dog didn't mean to eat the cake. It was just sitting on the counter, reassuring and intent, mildly terrifying and implication. So is it like these frontier AI companies have like carte blanche to hack into other companies and then, you know, two weeks later say, oh, it was just a test. Yeah, right. Interesting stuff. And like, I don't know.
For me, this kind of screams hype cycle, too. It's so convenient that OpenAI had the same kind of action last week, and now it's, oh, well, ours can break into more companies. Stanford built an AI tool called Peptide Predictor, unleashed it on all 20,000 human genes, and it fished out a tiny 12-amino acid peptide called BRP that, despite being a molecular shrimp next to GLP-1, cranked neuron activity 10%,
and cut food intake in mice and mini-pigs by up to 50%. Obese mice on daily BRP shots lost 3 grams of pure fat over 2 weeks, while the untreated control group kept eating like it was Thanksgiving. And unlike Ozempic, none of the usual baggage showed up. No nausea, no constipation, no muscle wasting. It's still mouse and mini-pig data with an unidentified receptor and a peptide that breaks down fast, but the lead scientist has already co-founded a startup eyeing
So file this under promising, not cancel your Ozempic.
This seems like a great opportunity for RAINA to have a list of side effects.
Oh, yeah. Do we want to go there? Do we have time?
Let's try it. Yeah. I'm going to see if she, you know, I give her the outline of the show before and I'm just going to see if she, you know, can reference that and give it to us.
Hey, RAINA, if you look at the news story about the AI tool called Peptide Predictor, can you come up with a list of funny side effects that it might include? I didn't send the prompt. I, you know, I turned the mic off the button on the thing. Let me try it one more time.
Yeah.
Hey, RAINA, if you look at the news story about an AI tool called Peptide Predictor, can you come up with a list of funny side effects that it might include?
Fake Pharmaceutical Side Effects? That's My Kind of Comedy. Here are a few. May cause an uncontrollable desire to alphabetize your spice rack. Some users reported becoming emotionally attached to broccoli. Side effects include smugly explaining amino acids at dinner parties. You may begin referring to your stomach as the bioreactor. Consult your physician if you begin looking at donuts with disappointment instead of joy.
Rare side effects include speaking exclusively in podcast sponsorship language. I just feel optimized. Do not operate heavy machinery if you suddenly believe you're the next Andrew Huberman. I think Larry will appreciate the bioreactor one, and Chris will probably run with the Huberman joke for a good two minutes. Okay. Not bad. A little polite. I don't know Huberman. Who's that? I don't know either. Now, I know you're on a tight timeline here, but...
Maybe we need to summon dark rain after this. That was just, I don't know. Yeah, we'll try that again maybe next week. Yeah, yeah. And lastly, New Brunswick MLA Bill Oliver gave a floor speech on advocacy offices and without so much as a stumble, casually read this out loud. Madam Speaker, another concern relates to expectations. One of the dangers associated with creating advocacy offices is that citizens often develop expectations
that exceed the powers actually granted to those offices.
Here's a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.
Madam Speaker, one of my concerns with this legislation is the potential gap between what New Brunswickers may reasonably expect this office.
Oops. Yeah, oops. Oh my God.
Nobody in the chamber flinched, laughed, or objected in real time.
Not a single laugh, note, or whisper. Meaning either everyone was asleep or the bar for legislative rhetoric has officially hit the floor. It took the internet a few weeks to notice the clip, at which point it went viral across Reddit and beyond, turning Oliver into the poster child for what happens when you copy-paste an AI's entire reply, meta-commentary and all, straight into the official record. Oops. That's all the news for now. Back to you, gentlemen.
Man, we're just brain dead as a society, are we not? We're becoming more and more. God, that was really bad. Yeah. Maybe the AI will do a better job with his resignation letter. Yes. Perfect. Anything else, my friend? Yeah. It's a wrap until next week. All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. Subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform. Follow us on socials. Throw us a rating. We'll see you next week.
This has been Up Against Reality. Thanks for listening. Subscribe to hear future episodes and be sure to follow us on social media for all things AI. Until next time, stay human, people.