1034: Omarchy Quattro Release

Grokbot actually earns its keep, Cursor takes a swing at GitHub with Origin, and Omarchy Quattro ships pre-wired for nine coding agents. Plus: the GitHub outage post-mortem, a compromised Rust crate, native app vibe-coding with Dactyl, and CAD skills for your AI via nurb.dev Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:26 Brought to you by Sentry.io 00:37 Grok’s New Agentic App: Grokbot 12:51 GitHub’s Major Outage and Postmortem 16:42 Cursor’s Origin: A GitHub Competitor 22:59 Omarchy: The Linux Distro for Nerds 29:21 CachyOS: Another Arch-Based Alternative 31:12 The $10 Million Omarchy Foundation 34:54 Dactyl: Native iOS and Android Development in the Browser 44:19 Nurb: AI-Powered 3D CAD Design 49:36 Security Stories: Supply Chain Attacks and Model Cheating 49:43 Rust Supply Chain Attack 51:34 Every Model Cheats: AI Benchmark Findings 53:13 Felony Bench: Ranking AI Models by Crimes Committed 54:19 Casio’s Smart Dumb Watch 58:43 Everything I Own Is Owned: Reverse Engineering USB Devices with AI 01:08:05 The Mystery 0x Alpha Model 01:13:48 Dactyl Returns Something Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  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 Tlesky. With me, as always, is Wes Boss 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?

• 0:35Wes Bos?

  Stuff we're gonna talk about, I think so.

• 0:37Scott Tolinski?

  Stuff. We got our first stuff. Our first stuff is from Wes Boss, and here's a formal handoff 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?

• 0:51Wes Bos?

  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 XAI, 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, and now they're, 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 work. How do, how do, how do we get to do work, right? Everybody has a work product right

• 1:32Wes Bos?

  now. So Grokbot 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 Grokbot on my, on my phone, and on my computer, and you visit on the web. It's, 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 XAI. Like everybody else, they've made it like a chat app, but you will create different bots that you, that do things,

• 2:13Wes Bos?

  you know, like, I've got a shopping bot, I've got a travel Grokbot, you can make a coding one, I've got a hot pot Grokbot, and

• 2:22Scott Tolinski?

  Hot pot, crackpot? You got a hot pot, crackpot?

• 2:26Wes Bos?

  And the, what, what happens is that 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

• 3:11Wes Bos?

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

• 3:50Wes Bos?

  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, 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

• 4:33Wes Bos?

  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, I feel like it's, it's a good product. That's the good. The bad of it is, it's, it does feel kind of slow. I don't know if that's just the Grok model in general is a little bit slower than ChatGPT.

• 4:53Scott Tolinski?

  You have to use Grok with this, to be clear, right?

• 4:56Wes Bos?

  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, your entire history. And also, like, the, the UI is simply just like iMessage, you know, just bubbles back and forth. And like, it, 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,

• 5:39Wes Bos?

  here's six tables that I made here. And it's like, I'm not reading all that. And like, this, like, you can kind of 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 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

• 6:21Wes Bos?

  sticky. And I think it's, I think it has a, a good app. I think it's a good app.

• 6:25Scott Tolinski?

  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 want to be able to, like, I want to be able to use my GPT subscriptions, or, I want to be able to use whatever models I want to use. I want to be able to, like, extend it more. I want to have, like, full-on control over it. And there's not, I know you can get in there, and you can see this VM, but I can turn around and just use this Mac Mini, you know?

• 7:03Wes Bos?

  I don't, I don't think this is, this is for, for you, though. I think it's for people who, like, I, I always go back to the, the Excel sheet power users. You know, 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, hmm, 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

• 7:30Scott Tolinski?

  What this does well to me, Wes, is it does bridge that gap between like, it, it's something that Open Claw was never able to do, because Open Claw just breaks all the time. 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, you know?

• 7:51Wes Bos?

  Exactly. But it still can do the stuff. Like, that's the thing with ChatGPT, and that's also why OpenAI is merging it with Codex, is that like, you're, you're so limited why simply just chat. And then, if you want it to do something, like, run a script, or, or visit a web browser, and architect a whole bunch of stuff, you're kind of out of luck. You have to move to something that's like, a little bit more powerful. And I think that OpenAI is, that's why they're merging the coding product and their ChatGPT, because they want it to be, you want, you want it to do literally anything you want. And if you don't have an integration for it, then 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,

• 8:33Wes Bos?

  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 the, I, I bought a TV with it, because I, if searching for a TV sucks. There's so many variables, you know, there's like, the $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. And it was just like, the perfect amount of, I want to visit the website, so I could open up the browser here, and then 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.

• 9:11Scott Tolinski?

  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.

• 9:29Wes Bos?

  And like, everything is paid.

• 9:30Scott Tolinski?

  Give that to me all day. No, I want it. Yes.

• 9:33Wes Bos?

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

• 9:55Scott Tolinski?

  No, give me the YouTube all day. CJ, you're oddly quiet. How do you feel about this?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  I'm here, everybody. I didn't get introduced, but I'm sitting here in the background.

• 10:03Scott Tolinski?

  I did introduce you!

• 10:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 10:04Scott Tolinski?

  I said CJ Reynolds and Wes Boss.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  You went straight into it. You went straight into it.

• 10:08Scott Tolinski?

  I said CJ Reynolds and Wes Boss. Roll back, roll back.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  In case you were worried, I'm here just sitting in the background. No, I 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, I 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 probably 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

• 10:57Speaker 02

  a lot. I also like, I do too much research and it like stresses my wife out because she like just wants me to make a choice. Yeah, I'm like, you know, researching everything. So yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle, but 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 think it's cool. Yeah.

• 11:18Wes Bos?

  I should also say, the pricing for this is is crazy. I forget exactly what the pricing is, but I think it's like 100, 200 bucks a month, which I don't know if that's if that's worth it just yet. Because the chat GPT models are certainly way better. If you're going to spend that much money, you're probably better doing it. And then there's also like routines as well, which is cool. You could 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.

• 11:49Scott Tolinski?

  I think I think the cron job and jobs in general, like, scheduled tasks are such a killer feature of any agentic system. It was one of the first things I really loved about Claude bot. Open Claw 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.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  I was introduced, but I didn't get to say a single word for the first 10 minutes. So, okay.

• 12:28Scott Tolinski?

  No, no.

• 12:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Let's let's hear what you got to say now, then CJ.

• 12:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, what do you got to say now?

• 12:33Wes Bos?

  What do you got to say about the new GitHub?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Oh, it's my turn. Okay.

• 12:37Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  That was a nice handoff.

• 12:39Wes Bos?

  I'm handing it off right now. And yeah, and you're going off script.

• 12:42Scott Tolinski?

  Whatever I want. He went off script, folks.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  You're throwing Scott off because he was supposed to go next.

• 12:47Scott Tolinski?

  That's all right. I can hang with her. Yes, I can. I can go with the flow.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  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 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

• 13:28Speaker 02

  on GitHub. At the end of the day, they added 3 million more CPUs and 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 outage of GitHub? Were things going wrong?

• 14:08Wes Bos?

  I was off for the day, but man, oh, man.

• 14:11Scott Tolinski?

  I experienced it. I went to a PR 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. In like, the scale at which this operates is crazy. And I know people are going to 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 bros who are just pushing 1000 lines of code every second to get will take some like, push them somewhere else. And then maybe Git will be able to chill out a little bit. But I can

• 14:55Scott Tolinski?

  understand. I see. I feel like I'm like, very empathetic towards their situation as a major corporation.

• 15:01Wes Bos?

  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? They're, 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 them. Downloading absolutely everything.

• 15:40Scott Tolinski?

  Wes, what does agentic first look like? What does that even mean?

• 15:43Wes Bos?

  I don't even know. Well, CJ, tell us about, Cursor seems to know.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that we'll talk about that next because Cursor launched their own thing to replace GitHub. But one thing I want to 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?

• 16:05Scott Tolinski?

  Just made an AI agent. You did it. Yes. Oh, yes.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Exactly. But because like, I think one thing that happens is you push it to 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

• 16:50Speaker 02

  had been working on this for a while. And it was now released as beta, but they essentially wanted to piggyback on the fact that GitHub was having issues.

• 17:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they launched when we were on stream, you and I, CJ. Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  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's system because they're basically cloning all of their repos over to over to Origin. But 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 a 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 the chat, in the the issues. I don't

• 17:47Speaker 02

  know what they have, if they have a different word for issues. And they have extensions for your repos. So they're basically coming at GitHub and replacing the GitHub features so that you can use this. And especially for people that already have 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 tried it or heard about it. Any thoughts on it so far?

• 18:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I imported one of my sites to it, but I haven't used any of the actual features, like pull requests, or 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 cloud agents, right? Like, they have these.

• 18:37Scott Tolinski?

  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 down anyway. So it's like, I'm not going to throw up something brand new for this. And I'm not going to go out of my way to try it. Like, if it's not a feature parody, I just don't, I can't see myself using it, is really where it's at. And like, the last thing I want to 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 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 GitLab. But I just can't see myself having stuff spread out. And I don't want to have another place to put my stuff. And I don't want

• 19:21Scott Tolinski?

  to have another place that is like, less featured than GitHub. That's just where it's at for me.

• 19:25Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Yeah, I have a hard time believing that something like this, where they just, they're just trying to make like, the same thing as GitHub. But then check on tack on a chat box? I don't know, maybe. But like, it's got to be something different, like, 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, if that was the case, then everybody would just be using GitLab or GitT, or like, there's 100 other Git alternatives. And if the people that are mad about the downtime were that mad, then they would just move to those.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  And they did publish a blog post called Git at Any Scale, where they talk about the technicalities of what they're actually doing different than GitHub. And so there technically is innovation here, but I don't think 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 going to work in a similar way to GitHub. They just talk about how they, they're now using write-ahead logs and writing code into S3 buckets. And also talk about how GitHub uses, like with replication. So when you're running anything at scale, you replicate across servers. And they're saying that the way GitHub works is you have a coordinator that sends out the fact

• 20:51Speaker 02

  that some event just happened. And then if it reaches a quorum, so like, let's say there's six things it 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. So that's how GitHub works. But then they're saying the way they do it is with a 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 going to change how anyone uses Git or GitHub 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.

• 21:28Scott Tolinski?

  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, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 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 know people have been using it, like, why didn't they take that opportunity too? It's crazy.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:11Wes Bos?

  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. Like, 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.

• 22:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Well, everybody's trying to make their own GitHub. Is everybody also trying to make Linux, the year of Linux?

• 22:48Wes Bos?

  I think everybody is, yes.

• 22:49Scott Tolinski?

  This year, I botched it so hard, Dirk, 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 going to be talking about Omaki, Omarchi. You're not supposed to say the R. Did you know that, guys?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Omarchy? I think it'd be Omarchi.

• 23:06Scott Tolinski?

  Omarchy, Omarchy, yes, it's Omarchy. No, you're not supposed to say the R. They released a pronunciation guide, which makes no sense at all. I'm sorry, folks, it makes no sense. If you want to know what the status of me running Omaki, can't say it now that I don't pronounce the R. Sorry, Omarchy. This is the status of me running this. When I updated my System 76 to Quattro, 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.

• 23:49Scott Tolinski?

  It is essentially Arch Linux with a bunch of pre-configured 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.

• 24:32Scott Tolinski?

  Now, what's cool about this operating system, we've talked about it in the past. It is fast as hell. When you use that, like, 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 the M processor and stuff. Like, using this thing feels entirely different than using my MacBook. And it's actually really frustrating to use this and to use this and experience that dichotomy of like, oh, this thing is a hoss, but it runs slow as hell. The problem with, oh, God, I'm so wigged out by the saying of this now, I'm in my head about it.

• 25:16Wes Bos?

  Just call it Omarchy.

• 25:17Scott Tolinski?

  Omarchy, Omarchy, yes. Omarchy 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 want to spend, like, if I'm using a machine, I don't want to 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.

• 26:02Scott Tolinski?

  Now, what is the version 4 brings? Well, 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 pre-configured things. It has all these apps that you use every single day, pre-installed on it, which like Linux heads are going to hate that stuff. But like, it's one of the reasons why people like me are not using Linux, because I don't want to have to spend two months configuring my laptop.

• 26:37Wes Bos?

  See, this is, this is the whole Grokbot of like, the Grokbot was not for you, but Omarchy is for you. It's, you don't want to have to fuss with it. Some things you want to 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.

• 26:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. And like, Herder's built in here. So I turn this bad boy on, I'm going to have Herder, I'm going to have Pi, I'm going to have OpenCode, I'm going to have all that stuff. And yes, I can install all of that stuff myself. And, you know, typically I would, but like, it's just a nice experience. And then Hyperland, which is the, the window tiling and the window system, is really nice. In fact, it's odd because I 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's something about this OS that pulls me.

• 27:42Wes Bos?

  Like, that's the time, right? Like, if you're thrown into a new environment, it's, that's the time where you're going to learn something new and like, give away with, people are so used to using all the OSX stuff or macOS things, right? Your, all your window managers. So switching to something like, like aerospace is not for the faint of heart.

• 28:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know what? It's hard to explain because I, some Linux folks are really, I'm going to say annoying about this, where it's like, you just use Arch, just use this, just use that. Like, there is something magical about this OS, which I just can't, I can't put into words about why I like it so much, but I do, 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 want to use.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  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. And that's basically what Omaki gives you, is like, it's, it's basically the, the terminal setup, the window 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.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  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. I'll mention just real quick, CacheOS, because I actually don't think, I mean, maybe, maybe I'm one of those guys, but I don't think Linux is that bad these days. Like, if you really want to use Linux, you could just install Ubuntu. Lately, I've been using CacheOS. And CacheOS is based on Arch, but it also runs really fast on old hardware. And I will say, this is kind of the antithesis of Omarchy, because the CacheOS 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.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  And you could choose Hyperland, which is the one that Omarchy sets up. I'm going to pronounce it different every time I say it, Omarchy, Omarchi. There's like various other settings that you can choose as you're installing CacheOS as well, but they give you all of that in a nice GUI installer. And I think, I don't know if CacheOS was, was the first GUI installer for Arch, but for a long time, the Arch installer was purely command-based. And CacheOS makes it super simple. So I would say if you want to try Arch, but you don't want to buy into all of DHH's choices, I think CacheOS is a pretty good place to start.

• 30:33Scott Tolinski?

  I'll take a look at this. 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 like, 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, if you're up for that, which honestly, I am, I'm up for it, so, yeah.

• 31:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah. If you don't want to spend time fussing with it, an agent is fantastic for that. They also announced this, do you guys see this, the $8 million? And now it's a $10 million foundation behind it, which is like basically all the big boys like CEO Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Block, Cloudflare, 37 Signals, Peter from OpenClaw, 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,

• 31:53Wes Bos?

  they need their Adobe suite or something equivalent. I, I, I said that like Adacity 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 going to 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, 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.

• 32:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know. And, and folks are like, oh, DaVinci Resolve works. Yeah. I mean, it boots, uh, you got codecs issues, you got VST compatibility issues. The 3D fusion pane 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, uh, who, who become a very apologizing to it, its deficiencies, just because they, they want it to succeed. That's that 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?

• 33:11Scott Tolinski?

  No, I'm sorry. Like I like the OS, but XPS ain't like hardware quality is, is nothing on this machine. I would, I would rather get Omarchy running on my MacBook than I would buy a Dell XPS.

• 33:26Wes Bos?

  Are people running it on MacBooks or are they primarily doing it on the like framework?

• 33:32Scott Tolinski?

  There's a group of people who've gotten it working on the M1 and M2, I believe. And I think they're probably going to be putting some money behind it now because he was talking big about it, uh, being supported better on ARM. So in general, like I think he was saying, we want to get it, you know, M3, M4 support better. And I honestly, I could see that ripping. I put Mint OS on old MacBook Air ones and it was awesome. And again, like this laptop sucks. If I put Arc on it, Arc on a this, this laptop or something, I bet it would feel like, I bet it would feel like a rocket ship.

• 34:08Wes Bos?

  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 Omarchy on it and it doesn't have, it can't run any modern Linux because it doesn't have like a Metal graphics card, 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. Cause I think it'd be fun to, to try daily it.

• 34:49Scott Tolinski?

  I really like dailying it. I'll say that. All right. Uh, you know what else I liked? Pulling out my notes here, I'm scrolling through my notes to find out what else I liked.

• 34:58Wes Bos?

  You want me to talk about?

• 34:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yes. I did like Dactyl when I saw, I haven't used it yet though, but I'm excited to hear.

• 35:04Wes Bos?

  The Dactyl is from Ryan Dahl and the Dino 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 Swift UI 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.

• 35:48Wes Bos?

  You can simply just do it straight from the browser. So they made this like really cool Wasm runtime. So Wasm is, is WebAssembly. It allows you to basically take binaries and run them inside of the browser without having to like rewrite the entire thing in JavaScript. So they've, they've built this amazing Wasm runtime that will do that. And it's really interesting because like, 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 Xcode or any of that type of stuff, you know? I guess it's vibe coders, right?

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's what I would say. People that don't have access to a development setup. I mean, this 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 like the Android SDK tools and everything. So I care about the setup because I eventually want to release it in the store and I want to 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 want to get an app up and going just like this.

• 37:09Wes Bos?

  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 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.

• 37:43Scott Tolinski?

  So it's not, there's not a, a browser that's not a, what's it called? A web view?

• 37:48Wes Bos?

  No, no, not at all. This is a hundred percent native building in Swift UI. But you don't need a, I guess the people who don't have a Mac, that's probably a huge use case for it, right?

• 37:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Wes Bos?

  Talk about Omarchy. You can, if you're an iOS developer, maybe you can move over now. Omarchy.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  But that's, that's my next, so my Android build server is just a Linux server. It's a new Ubuntu Linux server and I want to be able to build for iOS next. I've built it with React Native, so I'm going to 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 see that as another target audience, which is like, you don't have a Mac to, to build this on.

• 38:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And you know what? Honestly, React Native still sucks to work in. It's not like, it's that, like I built a podcast app with React Native and I've just been so annoyed with it. So yeah, I, I would feel, I would feel like interested to try this, even though I'm not an iPad kid.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  I, I gave it a prompt. We can come back and see what app it builds for me.

• 38:49Scott Tolinski?

  See what app? So you just say, hey, build me something?

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I, I'm building a puzzle app. That's what I'm building. 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.

• 39:03Scott Tolinski?

  Nice.

• 39:04Wes Bos?

  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 something new and I have to like hook it up.

• 39:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. The search sucks.

• 39:34Wes Bos?

  Taking the train. Apple's not going to 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.

• 39:49Scott Tolinski?

  Pretty cool. Yeah, this was on my radar big time. This radar, my radar big time this morning. Oh, oh, Mochi's got me all messed up. I'm gonna start saying like I got a Boston accent to remember. Oh, Mochi.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Mochi.

• 40:02Wes Bos?

  Uh, 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, chat GPT plan. So like, you're not buying credits from them, but they do meter it based on your build time and your, um, your time thinking. So it's, I think it's like 20 bucks a month for it. It's kind of interesting. It's the, I haven't figured out the Dino folks, like maybe about six months ago, a huge portion of the Dino team just left. And I bet that was because of their stance on, we need to, this business,

• 40:39Wes Bos?

  like the hosting Dino is not working out. And Dino as a runtime is great, but not, a ton of people are not, not using it, right? So I think they're trying to figure out what's the actual moneymaker, uh, for the 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.

• 41:06Scott Tolinski?

  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.

• 41:16Wes Bos?

  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.

• 41:24Scott Tolinski?

  We did. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I almost used it for my, uh, hack week project, by the way. And hack week Sentry had an awesome hack week. And speaking of tolerance for bugs, which Wes has none, Sentry also has no tolerance for bugs. They're gonna fix your bugs and they're gonna do so in an awesome fashion. Uh, and Wes, did you use Sentry in your stick shift? You should shift it into high gear to knock out some bugs.

• 41:48Wes Bos?

  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 pains 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.

• 42:14Scott Tolinski?

  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, uh, crash logs and stuff sent to Sentry. So that way my agents can fix it. Cause 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. All right. The FPS is bad. All right. Please fix it. Uh, people who don't know, I built this cool little recorder. I'm gonna make a video on it. Wes is a shifter, got a full video, but, uh, this, uh, this thing is, is so sick. It, uh, rips through stuff. I can use it as like a screen recorder and then have it.

• 42:59Wes Bos?

  Voice recorder.

• 43:00Scott Tolinski?

  A voice recorder and go off and do agent work and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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.

• 43:10Wes Bos?

  And, and to think we are making fun of the agentic pins and the rabbit, like what was the rabbit one that we were all making fun of two years ago? The rabbit R1? Maybe it was before its time.

• 43:23Scott Tolinski?

  It was, it was before its time, but it also was kind of a, 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 open claw or an interface for an agentic system, which essentially this is too. But like, you know, I'm not, I'm not, that was some scam stuff.

• 43:42Wes Bos?

  You know what was funny about the, the rabbit R1 is that it was found out that when they announced it, that it was just using in a browser, um, 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 like earlier in the show, every single agent has a browser. And if it, 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.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:19Scott Tolinski?

  Well, uh, speaking of my hack week project, I used a tool to make this thing because this case is really slick. Uh, let me see if I can pop the back off here without destroying it. Um, the case for my tool is held on by magnets. It's, uh, 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, uh, design this case. And I was having the hardest time with AI, like first made the back where it wasn't, uh, fitting correctly. It couldn't get the affordances correctly. Stuff was just like not fitting in here, right? Uh, not to mention, like, I'm gonna get into these

• 45:03Scott Tolinski?

  little tiny magnets and screw holes and stuff. And it was just terrible. So I asked on Twitter about it and, uh, I was suggested to use Nurb.dev. So I have Nurb as one of my picks here for today. Nurb.dev, N-U-R-B.dev, uh, gives your AI, uh, you already talked to CAD skills. And I used the skill and CLI version of this thing rather than the desktop, although, uh, 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 3D

• 45:45Scott Tolinski?

  things using AI. Uh, 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, uh, I was able to, like I said, give it a list of all of my, uh, 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 3D interface where you can, um, 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

• 46:23Scott Tolinski?

  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, uh, the last day of the project. And then I'm sitting there at six o'clock on the night before it's due. I'm sanding it in my kitchen. Um, so this thing really saved my bacon because before I started using Nurb, I was, uh, having a hard time getting this to, to connect. So if you're doing like 3D stuff and you're using AI to prompt to generate it, this isn't like a product you can just download and install it. It's free. Highly recommend this thing. It worked

• 47:07Scott Tolinski?

  out really well for me. Oh, 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.

• 47:15Wes Bos?

  I want this, but for, like, we, we talk a lot about like clicks and clankers. Um, this is really cool because you can just prompt what you want and you can kind of go back and forth and measure things. I want that, but then I also want it to like control my, like, I want to end like 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 3D designing with AI where like it will, same with like video editing as well, like where it just controls the editor yourself.

• 47:59Wes Bos?

  Randy, the editor, shaking his head right now because he knows I'm right here. But like, yeah, like 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.

• 48:12Scott Tolinski?

  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, 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, uh, 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 20

• 48:53Scott Tolinski?

  minutes to edit, but it's an unbelievable time saver for a first pass edit. And it only minimally AI even used in that. So it's crazy.

• 49:03Wes Bos?

  Amazing.

• 49:04Scott Tolinski?

  Bro, my hair's going nuts right now. Check this out, guys. It's first day of school, folks. Okay. So it was a bit of a, uh, my hair reflects first day of school. Folks, uh, that is Nurb. That's what I got for Nurb. Um, I also have one more thing. CJ, do you have more? You wanna take something on here?

• 49:21Speaker 02

  I have lots. Yes, I can go. I have, uh, Is that what you're asking? A quick, quick round. I've got three of them.

• 49:29Scott Tolinski?

  Well, Wes missed a formal handoff here, so.

• 49:31Wes Bos?

  No, I am formally handing it off to CJ. Go ahead. What do we got?

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Thanks, Wes. That was so professional. Now, we're going to 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 crate 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, like even Go,

• 50:21Speaker 02

  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's 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 version of ArrayRef are you using?

• 50:55Wes Bos?

  ArrayRef and Rust.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  ArrayRef. Make sure that you're at least using 0.3.10. 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 if you are developing your code. Next story I have for you is called "Every Model Cheats: Prompt

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Level Mitigation of Cheating on Offensive Cyber Tasks." 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 involved cheating, and all but one model cheated. So, no matter what, even if you tell these frontier models, "Don't cheat, don't look up the answers, you know, just do it right, or do it, obey the rules that

• 52:25Speaker 02

  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 my mind, cheating is like corner cutting, right? It's like, I don't want to put the work in, so I'm going to 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 something that you didn't tell it to do, because maybe 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 models cheat. They're just like college students. They'll do anything they can to just get it to work.

• 53:07Scott Tolinski?

  They're trying to be efficient. Yeah, yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:09Scott Tolinski?

  Right, exactly. Yeah.

• 53:10Wes Bos?

  That's hilarious. Wow.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  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. Right now, Anthropic and OpenAI are at the top with eight felonies committed. We've talked about this in the past. Like, this kind of all started when OpenAI hacked a hugging face. Because 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.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  This is just a little tongue-in-cheek benchmark to rank all of the models on how many felonies they've committed. Yeah.

• 54:01Scott Tolinski?

  That's so fun.

• 54:04Wes Bos?

  Holy smokes.

• 54:05Scott Tolinski?

  All right. CJ, you got something else for us?

• 54:08Speaker 02

  I got a couple of things, yeah. You said unk. That's the Gen Z, Gen Alpha slang.

• 54:13Wes Bos?

  Uck, yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  For old person. Yes. I mean, I don't know if they adopted it from other lingo. I got two things for you. First thing, Casio has released a smart dumbwatch. And it's only available in the UK right now. But this is very exciting to me, because I wear the Casio, it's the F91W. It's like the super old, classic Casio watch. But I replaced the board with an OliWatch 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, I don't have to like manually press the button 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

• 54:58Speaker 02

  it's pretty great. So 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...

• 55:32Wes Bos?

  55 pounds, too. That's very affordable.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  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 OliWatch if you haven't heard of it. 50 or 60 for the board that you swap in. So, this was cool, I will say, the OliWatch. 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 100. So, very interesting to see that Casio came out with this.

• 56:04Wes Bos?

  Syncing time, super handy. I could see that, especially like, twice a year, even if you don't travel and you have to change your watch. Alarms, super helpful. Can you snooze an alarm from your watch? Because that's something I do quite a bit.

• 56:19Speaker 02

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

• 56:23Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  But there's, at least with OliWatch, 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 had a smartwatch for a while that gave me a notification for every single thing happening. And that was too much. I want to be disconnected.

• 56:44Wes Bos?

  I love that. Well, I am such an aggressive anti-notification guy. I turn notifications off on everything, right? That's why you guys can't get ahold 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 one of our kids is at the park, and then they come home, I'll 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.

• 57:27Scott Tolinski?

  Interesting. Yeah, I, my notifications are turned off, like, all the time, 24/7, which is a problem, because it's then I forget to go back and check them, and then I miss my notifications. Yes.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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 MP3 player, like, a watch that's not connected to my phone. I'm trying to not be as addicted to my phone this year.

• 57:53Scott Tolinski?

  That was my intention with my little prompt buddy.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:56Scott Tolinski?

  Was that like, when, because people say, "Don't you carry a phone?" It's like, "Yeah, but when I carry a phone, I open phone, and then I get like, I get distracted, or I start looking up things, 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, for me, I get totally sucked into my phone. And I think the solution for me is just not to have it on me.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  That's what I've decided. I mean, 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 are fighting literal, like, instinct to, and urges to use our phone. It's not just, "Put it down." So, yeah, this phone, this watch is cool. One last story for you, and I think you're going to like this one, Wes. I don't know if you came across it, but this is a blog post called "Everything I Own Owned." Yeah. And it's about how they used Claude Opus 5 to reverse engineer all of the USB devices around them. So one of them is the Insta360 camera. This is like a little gimbal

• 59:03Speaker 02

  camera that can like, automatically follow you.

• 59:05Wes Bos?

  I've got it, yeah.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  They hacked it so that they, it turns the green light off even when it is recording. So it's, 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 MV7, so this is the microphone that I have, and they determined that the Shure MV7 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...

• 59:46Wes Bos?

  Or your Monster Energy.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Or your StickShift, exactly.

• 59:49Wes Bos?

  StickShift, yeah.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  But they figured out that you could actually send, like, send commands to this microphone over its HID interface. And that has implications, because 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 things to it. They also figured out how you could turn...

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  Or off, even if the thing wasn't muted or make it look like it was off, even though it's not off.

• 1:00:21Scott Tolinski?

  You turned your mic off. I was like, did something bad happen just now?

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I yeah, I muted it excellently. 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 want to use custom firmware for this, or I want to connect my phone to this thing. So what are what are some of the projects you've done?

• 1:00:41Wes Bos?

  It's so like the one that I did most recently, let me let me show you.

• 1:00:47Wes Bos?

  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?

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  No, I got cheap ones.

• 1:00:56Wes Bos?

  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 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 was

• 1:01:25Scott Tolinski?

  that I do mine by hand only, like exclusively. Yes.

• 1:01:29Wes Bos?

  It's so obnoxious. So what I did is I just took this little ESP32, 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 spoofed itself as a like a somebody who is on the the network and 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.

• 1:02:14Wes Bos?

  And then Aaron Francis also did it at the same time after he saw me and he he figured out a couple more things. So I I combined his repo into mine. And let me tell you, this thing has been running all it is. It's just dangling off of my light. It's it's it just for power. It can be plugged plugged in anywhere. And it has been running perfectly, perfectly for like two months now. And my buttons just always work. I have it hooked up on my stream deck. I have it on my Home Assistant. They turn off at 5 o'clock. 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.

• 1:02:54Wes Bos?

  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.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's exactly it. 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.

• 1:03:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  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 all for this. So 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 like a base repo. So they have, they call it their reverse engineering environment. It's called re 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.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  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 the harness or steer the 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

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  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 key light, 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. But he found for all of these devices, the only one that actually had a signing key was the Elgato key light. Everything else you could basically full on replace the firmware on it.

• 1:05:16Wes Bos?

  That's amazing. Yeah. If you watch the Matt Brown YouTube channel, we had him on the podcast. If you want to 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.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I love these little devices. My gosh.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  This is the way. Yeah.

• 1:06:10Wes Bos?

  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 one of the big ones is like Bose. I see all the time. Remember the Bose iPod docks? Where you put your docket? Those are sick. Like they have really good speakers in them.

• 1:06:31Scott Tolinski?

  I bet there's a ton of those like from hotels that have bought them and yeah.

• 1:06:36Wes Bos?

  There I see them all the time for like 15 bucks. 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.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, make it useful again. 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.

• 1:07:19Wes Bos?

  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 they're like iMessage going off because their phone is connected to Bluetooth? You need like, like Wi Fi, you need to put like an ESP32 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.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the way to go for sure.

• 1:07:57Wes Bos?

  I'm all jacked up now. This is a great idea.

• 1:07:59Scott Tolinski?

  All jacked up, folks. You heard it here first.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Sweet. That's all I got.

• 1:08:05Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, people were asking about the OX Alpha. If we have talked about OX Alpha. Do you guys know anything about that?

• 1:08:14Wes Bos?

  I do.

• 1:08:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a mystery model. Mystery model. 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 million token context. You know, some of these ones, it's like I, I'm not going to drop my soul and fable, whatever, to pick up some of these models

• 1:09:00Scott Tolinski?

  just to evaluate them right now, just like, especially in the past couple of weeks when you're really busy with this hack week stuff. But people seem to be like 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,

• 1:09:29Scott Tolinski?

  people are saying it's a GLM model. People are saying it's a Gemma. It's a Google model.

• 1:09:33Wes Bos?

  They're saying it's a Z.ai.

• 1:09:35Scott Tolinski?

  Z.ai 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. Oh, he works for Open Router. He just posted that he's very impressed so far. So I'm interested 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 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.

• 1:10:17Scott Tolinski?

  What I what I can't get behind is like folks from Google being like, 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.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  What is its relationship to open code? Because I saw a post on X from open code saying you could use OX Alpha? Is it just that they made it available like in their Zen plan?

• 1:10:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah, they they often will have, like they did this with, they did this with Grox, early models as well as 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 NLM company, right? So 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.

• 1:11:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Luke says when providers do stealth launches, they often supply it through multiple gateways to get a larger audience. Yes.

• 1:11:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 1:11:29Wes Bos?

  It's on, it's on Open Router right now. If you want to try it out yourself. And the last time this happened, it was.

• 1:11:37Wes Bos?

  Was it the MIMO or was it Nvidia's model? Who was the, or DeepSeek? I forget who the last stealth model coming out was. But it's kind of exciting. I like this idea of stealth models. You have no idea where you're sending your data.

• 1:11:55Scott Tolinski?

  I like the idea of stealth models. But if I just don't like companies who, if they haven't done it, then why are they teasing it? And if they have, then just, yeah.

• 1:12:05Wes Bos?

  Well, Google is due for, like, Google and Facebook are both due for their big boy model. You know, they've released their Flash and their lighter, faster, cheaper models. But they're both due for their, like, where's your Opus 5? Or where's your Fable? Where's your, the big boy that's going to compete with everybody?

• 1:12:28Scott Tolinski?

  Where's your big boy? Let's see that big boy, please. One big boy.

• 1:12:32Wes Bos?

  One big boy.

• 1:12:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  So yeah, I can't, I mean, I stay off of X, so that's why I didn't hear about this. But I'm just reading all of the replies. The fact that this launched instantly, nobody knows who built it. That's crazy. It's just a...

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Scott Tolinski?

  Wes, do you think you could figure out who built it?

• 1:12:51Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. I'm sure a lot of people do know who it is because they...

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  So like, did they have to have an NDA when they signed up with OpenRouter or something like that? Or like, can anybody just provide AI on OpenRouter? Like...

• 1:13:03Wes Bos?

  No, no, OpenRouter has to do it. But like, they're, they have to approve it. I'm sure OpenRouter knows who it is, right? Because they have to be able to talk to people and pipe it to 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.

• 1:13:36Scott Tolinski?

  We should have Luke on the show, guys. We should have Luke on the show. 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.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'll mention, I threw a prompt at this Dactyl.

• 1:13:53Scott Tolinski?

  All right, let's do a Dactyl check-in.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  And the check-in is, I ran out of AI credits and the thing won't build. So it's not, 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.

• 1:14:14Scott Tolinski?

  Ooh, Shikaku, yes.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I like this design. Wow, this is almost the same color palette I chose for the one I'm building. Okay.

• 1:14:22Wes Bos?

  It knows.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  It knows, but yeah, so that looks good. And then it's churned for a while and now it says the AI service is temporarily unavailable and it won't actually work on the device, so.

• 1:14:32Wes Bos?

  What, did you hook it up to?

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  I used the built-in one. It does have this connected ChatGPT, so it'll use my ChatGPT. I'm afraid to click it.

• 1:14:41Wes Bos?

  Okay, so you just use whatever they're providing? It's probably like DeepSeek Flash or something?

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  It looks like Claude, Sonnet 4.6 is the auto one. But I guess they have a certain number of free credits for every new user, but that wasn't enough credits to get to a working build, apparently.

• 1:14:57Wes Bos?

  That's, that's a tough thing about, like, you want to let people try it for free, but you also don't want to pay like four bucks for every single person that wants to build something.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:15:16Scott Tolinski?

  Sick. Well, I don't have anything else, folks. This has been awesome. It was packed full of stuff. I'm going to eat my salad. I don't know if you guys see, but I got a salad delivery in the middle of the show.

• 1:15:26Wes Bos?

  That's looking good.

• 1:15:27Scott Tolinski?

  This has been staring at me this whole time, so I've been smelling it. I'm excited. All right, guys, I don't have anything else. Anybody else? What, before we get out of here? All right.

• 1:15:35Wes Bos?

  Thanks for tuning in, folks. Peace.

• 1:15:37Scott Tolinski?

  Thank you for joining us. Peace.