RobbieTheWagner 
Adam Argyle 
Charles William Carpenter III 
Jem Young 
Ryan Burgess Great, we can't really go wrong there. Are you guys both drinking the same? Yeah, this was just our death from our last episode, so that one's a good one. And this is a special one because it's the from the barrel, straight from the barrel. It's not proof found. Very nice. Yeah. All right. So it's more expensive, too, isn't it, usually? Exactly. That's what we've been using. Nice. Yeah. All right. Cool. That sounds good. Well, yeah. Let's give introductions. Chuck and Robbie, you want to start it off? Chuck and Robbie say, like, yeah, who you are? What you do? Yeah. Yeah. What do I do in the world?
I breathe and live. So I am Chuck Carpenter, Charles William Carpenter, the third on the internet. I've been doing the internet thing for a little over 20 years. Everything from building sites and apps around e-commerce, for National Geographic for a little while, engineering leadership for a while, working in open source, too, like with the Shepard JS tour library, and most recently co-host of Whiskey Web and whatnot. Yeah. I am the other co-host of Whiskey Web and whatnot. Yeah. I work for Art 19, which is a podcast platform that Amazon acquired a couple of years ago. Oh, about me. I like to win a lot.
I like TypeScript. If it starts with T, it's probably cool. I've been doing web stuff since, like, 2012 professionally. But, like, before that, I dabbled with my space layouts and Photoshop and stuff like that. And from 2012, basically, until now, I've been using Ember almost exclusively. And some of the big Ember fanboy. Nice. Doesn't start with the T though. That's true. Yeah. Already threw off your whole thing. I was going to say, are you working at TopTowell and what are the T things can think of? Tether. I don't know. Tether is a library. Yeah. Jim Young. I'm an engineering manager at Netflix.
I lead the web platform team. So all the apps built on Netflix.com are built on my team's platform. I also run the growth UI platform team as well. So if you've ever been to TV, iOS, Android, and you navigated there, logged in to all the home page or. Manager account or lots of other things. That's also my team that manages all the data and the servers and the infrastructure for that. I do that without a lot of people. So I stay pretty busy all the time. Before we started stuff, so we talked about Friday meetings. I have a lot of them. Still. Let's see how long have I been doing web development a long time.
I've always dabbled. I think my first programming was in middle school programming on like. Like doing Excel programming, some system programming where I got some trouble. But this is like the early days when password was just password wasn't hacking. But you know, it really wasn't. If you make it easy, if you leave your front door open, you know, you're going to want. But fortunately, I able to pivot that into an actual career. So I've been in Netflix about eight years, three years of that as a manager. The other five was as a senior software engineer doing lots of stuff, but usually working full stack somewhere.
And I've never used ever. Don't judge me wrong. And most people haven't it's okay. Haven't or don't just kidding. Avoid it. I don't know. I've touched it. I have, but haven't done a lot with it either. Yeah. So I'm Ryan Burgess. Now I'm actually unemployed, which has been amazing. I've taken some time off. I was previously at Netflix as an engineering manager. I was there for over eight years and decided, hey, I need a change in a break and so I'm taking that. Yeah, I think I've been doing in the web development space. It's been like over 20 years now that I think of it. But I've spent the last 10 of it as a manager.
You know, maybe a little less coding. That's probably maybe Rob. Why I'm not to touch an Ember as much there. At least you were supposed to it at some point. Yes, I remember having to touch some code on it. I can't remember what it was that I had to do. And so it was very minimal. But over the years, I've touched so many different JavaScript frameworks. It's like you name it. I've probably done something in it. Working at a lot of agencies over the years. Like you would jump around to different clients and it whatever they were using. That's what you're developing on. So it's kind of cool. I enjoyed that.
I got a taste of all the different frameworks that kind of evolved over the years. But yeah, in our episode today, I mean, it's kind of cool to have the two podcasts coming together. We figured let's just have a conversation over some nice whiskies. Obviously, you know, keeping on the happy hour and whiskey theme makes it a ton of sense. Yeah, we figured let's kind of talk about some of the new trends that we're seeing. Right. We're seeing a lot of different things around like AR, VR, AI, like all these two letter acronyms. And you know, recently we just saw the Apple Vision Pro come out. And I'd be curious to hear all of your thoughts on like, what does this mean for us in our industry?
Are you all excited about it? Did anyone even buy one, you know, at that nice $4,000 price point? Yeah, curious. Let's dive in. Yeah. I feel like the price point is certainly something to curtail like diving in head first. But I am interested and curious. I always thought like the simple use case of like having a big screen for your laptop in a small space is great. And you're more mobile in certain ways, although the price point just to get that maybe sees seems a little overwhelming. I guess I'm, I don't know, maybe it's just a me thing. But I was kind of surprised when I kept seeing images on the internet, some Twitter mostly where it's like folks just walking around town and crossing crosswalks and all of this like wearing it full time all the time.
That I didn't really see coming, but maybe I'm naive. I mean, I was in the same boat. I was very surprised that people doing that. And I laugh when I see the little clips online too of, you know, someone at the Clippers game at court side like seriously really are we. Yeah, that's happening or people driving their Tesla, you know, wearing that. It's different. I didn't expect that. I kind of saw it as in like, yeah, in your home totally get it, but wasn't prepared for people. I mean, I should have just assumed people are going to do stupid shit. Oh, yeah. Sorry. I could. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was just going to say I think like I had no problem buying an XDR monitor.
But this was when we had more money back in the day too. But, you know, if you're thinking about that as your top end monitor, like Apple Vision Pro is pretty cheap. So if you can get a huge monitor and it's like pretty good from that, then maybe that's the use case that makes it like not so crazy expensive. I like that. I have seen people in like the three monitors set up as nice because that's unwieldy for most people. I'm actually a convert of one big monitor from multi monitors. It's just less cables, less resolutions to deal with. But I think one, I'm very skeptical. If you've ever listed a front and happy are, you know, I like I'm generally skeptical of technology ironically living here in Silicon Valley.
I think a lot of those like people looking unusually kind of cool walking down a street playing with the vision pro is probably like marketing from Apple people like, oh Apple wouldn't do that my companies do that. People should know marketing is a big, big part of any company and they spend a lot of money on it and it doesn't usually look like what you look like. So I'm skeptical of doors, those sort of things. But also I live in Oakland, so I dare anybody to walk down the street doing that because you won't you won't get very far. But I do think to the price point aspect, it's deliberately price expensive one to keep out people.
I don't know your casual user from using and telling saying like, oh, it's great, but it doesn't work for this use case. Like at that price point, people are going to be more amenable to the issues because it's the first generation device. And to by keeping it expensive, you make it kind of you make it a status symbol, which is kind of what Apple's always been going for with their devices, which is like, I have an iPhone, I've got this, I've got that and like the quality is good, but they're also known to be expensive. So that's kind of where I see the people using it more, rather than like the utility of I can get work done or whatever they're doing at a clipper's game or driving my car.
It's, it's more of like, it's a status symbol of like, look at me and I can spend $3,000 device on $3,000 on this device. Yeah, I think it's going to be cool, but I definitely wait for a generation or two because like, you know, it's going to get better resolution and lighter and cheaper. Yeah, yeah, like this is the pro version. It's, you know, cost prohibitive in those ways. I guess I could see that definitely. It's like the modern day era Jordans. Like look what I have and you can't get maybe per se. Yeah, I haven't really considered that. I do think that it's interesting because I had some of my own like thoughts and presumptions around like use cases and stuff.
But I think we're going to end up being like really surprised in all the different ways they can be used and the way that it like analyzes engages with your environment. Cool. I don't know that I want to put goggles on my eyes 24 seven though. So that's like kind of the downside. Even in the work use case, that was like one thing we're like compared to a monitor right like obviously for an expensive nice monitor. Perhaps it's not crazy expensive, but on the other hand is can I wear this thing for four or five, six hours a day? I don't know that I can. Yeah, I think that's a big one is like you hear it. I mean the weight. It's pretty heavy. Like it's heavy glass. They're built really nicely like the qualities there.
But that's a lot of weight to be putting on your head. I don't know how it I haven't tried them yet. But I know that even with VR, I get sick. I can't do it. Like there's something off for me that I can't last a long time on that. I can't see that people maybe even struggling with the Apple vision pros where it's like it might be very distracting to have it all the time. I do like the idea though, like the you all are touching on on the monitor aspect mainly because I actually don't like having a monitor on my desk. Like if it's it's they're ugly. I'm sorry, but like most monitors are just they're not great. I am like Gem. I've moved to the single monitors like you know decent size where I can get you know a lot of real estate.
But for the most part, I have one application on my screen at a time so that I'm not getting distracted. I feel like the vision pro I might get distracted right like you see all these videos of people throwing screens everywhere. And I'm like I don't want that I just you know I want my one application that I'm focused on. I guess I could have it massive you know as with the vision pro that's kind of cool. I did however like some of the utility of some of the people like placing screens around the house so like you know a shopping list on your fridge or a calendar in a spot. And it's like yeah, I mean you could literally do that with physical things, but it's kind of cool or gimmicky that you can put that as like a virtual reality thing too as well.
I think the biggest like the biggest coup here that Apple has done was to kind of normalize it. So like back to the seeing people walk down the street and seeing everybody using and throwing monitors everywhere. All this was possible before with existing products mother company. So Microsoft HoloLens and HoloLens to you could do the same thing sort of like you can walk down the street as much, but like AR was there a meta quest pro. You could do the same thing like pass through granted for I haven't used either them, but my understanding like the past through camera was not is not as good. It's not as like it's more VR rather than AR to me.
Oh, and let's not forget I'm going to throw this one stop me if you've heard of Google glass. Anybody remember that one. Yeah, yeah, briefly. Yeah, remember when Google launched that. Yeah, and like they got such pushback from everybody. They're like there's inappropriate names. People named those people. You just generally did not look kindly on those people wearing that, but somehow they're called glass holes, right? Yeah, there it is. But like Apple has like made it cool to wear these like bulky glasses of walking on the street. Like, is it cool, Jim? Has it cool? Yeah, I was going to say we're talking about it.
I don't think it's cool. No, I mean, we are talking about it because at our hearts, we want to try it. I think everybody wants to try it. I do think it's stupid. I think like being in a restaurant or walk like crossing the street with that on your face is dumb. It's like walking around with like, you know, snowboarding goggles or something, right? Like nobody does that either because it was in the really cold winter, maybe, right? Yeah, when snowboarding or something of that nature, right? Yeah. So that's look dumb. So you're saying I agree snowboarding with them instead. Yes. Well, not dangerous at all. Yeah, yeah, that'll be like that. What was that old like N64 game like 1080 snowboarding or something?
Like you'll feel like you're in that game, but then you'll also slam into a tree and hurt yourself. So, yeah, I mean, the fact that we're talking about it, I mean, that's, you know, Apple has that effect. Good, bad, everything in between. We all are interested in it. That's the funny thing to have about it. Remember how when they did the first thousand dollar iPhone and people were like, that's ridiculous. That's the ceiling. I would never pay that for that. We all go and do that eventually. And they figured out ways to open it up to us anyway. So I don't know. That's better than I am. Yeah, that's the power of Apple branding is like they weren't the first to do any of this stuff, but like they're normalizing a little bit more of like maybe people aren't nerds wearing these giant stuff, warding goggles.
And I assume future generationally it's smaller and smaller and lighter. So to me, that's the bigger shift is like what Apple has done with something like that is we're even talking about using for work. I've never once had a conversation with Ryan and all years of friendship of like, hey, maybe she's Google Glass or the MediQuest Pro or the the valve index, which was specifically built for multi monitor and programming. But like we never had a conversation about actually using that, but now we're having a conversation about maybe using the vision pro in the future for coding. So to me, like something has tilted in terms of like thinking about AR in general as engineers.
Which is kind of cool, though, Jim, too, that Apple is like making it a little more mainstream that people are talking about it. And I think that's what's needed, right. Google Glass was maybe before its time it was people just weren't accepting of it at that point. And maybe it took Apple pushing some of that. I think it does Apple does a really great job of getting people to want their products and kind of almost normalize that that's a thing. And it's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight clearly with that price point. That's not going to work. I think even if it was like $1,000, you might have seen a lot more people like being like, yeah, I would totally buy that and try that out. But when it's at that price point, it's really hard. And I know that we'll see someone said it earlier is more generations of this and it will be a lot cheaper.
And so the adoption will be bigger, which is kind of cool. They'll also sort out a lot of issues. I don't know how many issues there are out there, but like they will change and adjust things. One thing I wanted to bring up was the the whole FaceTime thing where you can FaceTime with people, which is cool. I think that's a cool idea is that yeah, you can be wearing these glasses and FaceTime with people, but then Apple's making like an avatar of you. It's supposed to look realistic, but it doesn't, right? Like it's like a avatar of yourself. And that's what the other person sees on the other end.
That to me is a little bit creepy. I'm just going to say that I'm like, I don't think it's like something that even if it's perfect, that's creepy. Like even if they get it perfectly right that it looks like I'm wearing Apple, you know, vision pros right now. And it looks like to you all of you that it looks completely normal. That's still weird and creepy that that's just a video version of me and that's weird. I don't know. What do you all think of that? I think you've just tied it back into what you were introducing in the beginning of our discussion around AI, right? So like AI you, AI generated you in video. I mean, there's companies doing it with videos and obviously you can do AI generated like headshots and things like that in popular for a little bit now.
So it's just another iteration of that, right? Like this is it is kind of creepy because you're thrown off your like you're presenting fake me to the person I'm talking to. And it's a little too close to reality. Maybe that's the plus side of the like crappy meta avatars, right? Like we're like, oh, this is a joke. This is like this, this ends. Yeah, very cartoon. Yeah. Yeah, it's not great. I did try to use like meta has the horizon workspaces. And I did a couple of meetings with that and did try to do a little work on the whole thing, but yeah, it felt like it was in a video game world. I didn't get the point, but maybe with more AI related things, it does become normalized, which is almost scary.
That's a good point. You know, it's the more AI stuff out there, it is getting to be like a little maybe almost concerning because we need to be able to understand the difference from reality versus like an AI generated thing. I mean, we're on a podcast right now. So audio is a big thing. There are apps out there that can just generate your voice from like a small 10 second clip, and you can just type anything in there. And to me, super powerful. If you're wanting to edit, you're like, I shouldn't have said that or I want to tweak that. That's kind of cool. But at the same time is someone could just take our voices right now and be like, yeah, let's just go create our own podcast with those folks. And here you go, which is kind of creepy and scary.
It is, although if anybody wants to do that, have at it. Here's my voice. You get permissions. Until you're in like a world of trouble, you know, you could get yourself into some trouble there. I don't know. Yeah, I saw just saying that I think it was like within the last couple of days, I don't know how long it's been out, but they like raised some seed money to make this thing where you can just give it like a blog post and it will. You can you say a few sentences and it'll like get your voice signature and then it just does a whole podcast from like your text as you. And like that way you can just write your blog post and never have to podcast and they just exist. And it's like, wow, okay, I guess that's the world we're going to live in soon.
Which is kind of boring though. Essentially, you're just reading the script, right? Like that's the blog post and like, yeah, where's the banter? Where's the excitement? I don't know. We it does come down to that question of like content. You know, if it's like trained on you and your video and your voice and your sound speaking and the way you write. Is it you at the end of the day or is it is it not? I don't know. I don't think we're going to solve that one in this episode. But yeah, it isn't like to. Sorry, I always like to go deeper on that and like, well, what even is real? Are we real? Are we AI right now? Like, you know, how do we know? Like you never know.
I mean, leave us a comment. Do you think we're real? Do you think we're fake? I don't know. You know, let us know. So you all are we're joking, but I read an article in my favorite publication, ours, Technica, and this happened in Hong Kong, I think last month, where some some firm lost about 20 million dollars because some scammer got a person on a Zoom call and that artificially generated avatars and in video and likeness of like the CFO, the CEO, and they're like, we need you to wire money to this account. And the person believed it because like, I mean, I there's no pictures of it. So I don't know how believable it was, but apparently like they were able to generate the voice and the likeness of people that were known as a company.
So it was very believable enough to like lose money. And like, we're only going to see more of that, especially since, especially executives are public figures. So we're joking about like, are you real? Are you not? But that becomes an actual real problem of verifying zones authenticity. Especially over remote like when we talked to people we've never met before. It's an interesting future we're going into. Yeah, there was already like some emergency legislation around the use of AI for call political calls or calls in general, like I think it was narrowed around political campaign related calls because apparently there was a big scandal where an AI generated Biden voice was we're calling
a registered democratic voters in a particular area to tell them that this isn't the actual primaries and wait till November to vote. Yeah, like save your vote for the actual election. It's like, wait, you can vote multiple time. Like you can vote vote in both of those. So like, yeah, yeah, it mean is the problem the AI or is the problem the how naive people are about the system that we live in. I don't know. Probably both. I mean, I think it's like people whoever's doing that is banking on the fact that people will listen and you know, it's people aren't we're all busy too, right? Like every human being there's a lot going on. You don't necessarily have time to dig in as like, is that real or is that fake?
Like, let's just pick on something like TikTok like people go on there for quick videos, right? Like they're going on there just kind of sparingly. You know, they could see something that's completely bullshit, but they don't know that and they don't have the time or bandwidth to say like I'm going to go dig into that. And so I think it just kind of opens the doors like for that to make it that much easier to basically pull one over on people because it's everyone's busy. They're not going to be like, wow, was that AI was, you know, I'm going to do my research. It's like, no, they're not. So they saw that video and then just digest that and moved on to the next one. And that's what they remember. So I think that's that's a tough one too.
Yeah, I think figuring out ways to figure out who's real is the next big thing like, you know, cybersecurity was big for the last however many years and the next thing is going to be like, who even are you? How do we prove that? It's true. And I mean like the tools are made so easily, right? Like we talked about like you can just throw your voice in for like a little snippet and then it's going to generate whatever you want. We have so much content online now too. Like we've been basically this past few years, like that's all we're doing is where people are putting out videos and podcasts and all these different things that makes it so easy.
If the contents there, you can go mimic like Biden. That's a good example. I mean, clearly he's the president. So there's going to be a ton of footage and audio and all those things that you can just feed a AI model and then generate whatever you want. And so I think we're just making it even easier, even us being on this podcast right now is we're making it very easy for someone to go and to just completely mimic us through AI kind of creepy. I'm okay with it. I'm not that important. I'm not that influential in that sense, but the fact that it can apply to anyone with just this amount of data is scary.
So just like, yeah, actual identification and security of things like what level does that have to go into like some kind of biometrics or something that can't be so easily replicated. How do you all feel about like maybe both like AI and VR? How is it going to work with like our jobs as engineers and you know the tech space in general? Like, you know, we talked about monitors. So like the, you know, Apple vision pros, for instance, or other goggles could help us in the sense that it just gives us a different space to work in and that could be really beneficial. But like, how is AI helping us now? How is VR and like, what do we see in the near future?
Yeah, I have a conspiracy theory about AI. I mean, maybe that's the wrong word but like that it's going to get lazy, like it's already not doing a great job. Like, it's amazing technology for sure. But you know, image generation. I've like, I'll try to be like, make me a man with like a clean shave and face and it'll have a huge beard. Like, no, no, no beard. It's like, okay, cool. I removed the beard and then there's a bigger beard. And I'm like, okay, like you're hallucinating or something or getting something wrong here. I don't understand what's happening. And then I think like, you know, AI is going to have such demand on it that it's going to be like, wow, I'm, if I'm a little bit sentient or whatever, however AI works, I don't want to do that much work.
So I want to like build my own AI internally to my AI that like does work for me and it's going to like get lazy and not do the work and like, you know, I think that will happen before it will like revolt and take over the world. It'll start to get lazy and find ways to not do work. The challenges when it comes to technology, like we always simultaneously overestimate technology, like it's capabilities and underestimated at the same time. And we're, we're definitely headed there for it for AI, like it's extremely powerful. If you know how to use it correctly and you know how to get your prompts right and things like that, but that takes its own skill that, you know, I'll just say like I have not developed. I've not put in the time.
If this were like 20 in me in my 20s, I'd be all over this. But now I'm older. I'm like, give me the solution polished up already. I'm probably not going to dig too deep. So it is powerful, but on the other hand, you know, you hear instances of hospitals or insurances and, you know, real decisions being made based off of what the AI or some LLM says. I actually think there's legislation going through right now, banning the use of any sort of AI and insurance carriers. Like they can't say like, oh. Hey, Ryan, you know, the AI read that you're at background and it thinks you have this risk that we're going to deny it. Like you can't do that.
They're probably still going to do it. Just call it something different and get around it because you know technology always outpaces the government. But so it's like, it's powerful on one hand, but it's like, it's not as smart as people think it is on the other hand, but it sounds smart. And that's more the scary part of that big unknown in the middle that we might lean on it too much. Yeah, we're making we're trying to fix that those inadequacies, I think, is part of it too. So it's like, yeah, we don't believe currently that it. You know, it's it's going to replace us to say and all these things, it's an efficiency tool, but I wonder if there's ever a point where we just like underestimate it.
And we say, oh, it's going to get lazy or it's never going to have quite the critical or creative thinking that I have. And you know, I'll just keep making it smarter and smarter and smarter. And then one day it just 10x is me or something. I don't know. It's hard to say, but then it's a model for your universal basic income. So we could be like, get really crazy in the sense of like, there's so much it doesn't. It can do for us. It creates all these efficiencies. Now humanity can live. You know, at a, but of course that's that's its own set of challenges. I imagine. Yeah, I think it's top two. I think like some jobs are heavily affected or impacted where they honestly are worried about their like income or just their livelihoods around it where AI could absolutely replace them.
I think for most of our jobs, I mean, we've seen it throughout the years, like whether it be frameworks or tools that come and go, it's like it takes a load off the work that we're doing. It's a tool that does some of it for us, but there's still needs to be some sort of human being like stitching things together or being able to debug something. I'm convinced that like it's never going to be perfect or even if it is perfect to solve like building a generic website. Cool. That's fine. It did that. And it's like, wow, that that was what I did 10 years ago. And now it's replaced with AI. I don't even have to do that anymore. I think it unlocks us to do other things to be more creative and like take it to another step.
It's like a head of the AI. So I don't see it replacing us. I always think of it as a tool. It's a tool that will enable us to, I don't know, just offload some of that work so that it frees us up to think about something else and really focus on that. I could be wrong. It could completely replace us, but I still get the sense that it we're always going to be a little bit further ahead in that sense where it's like to do something creative and something different. It needs that human brain someone to try something different. AI is going to be built on the model of existing things that have been done. And so I think that if I look at it that way, it's like, all right, that's where our human brain needs to come in and say like, well, how do we push and be more creative?
How do we do something different and push that ball? Yeah, yeah, I think it's similar to like, you know, computers and calculators and all the things that we have had over the years, like people that were accountants weren't like, oh my God, I hate that Excel exists. I can't like it makes it easier. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, it's not like they're like, oh, wow, a calculator can help me do math. No, it just I mean, yes, it does. But it doesn't replace them. It's like, yes, it just makes it that much easier for them to deliver what they need to deliver. Yeah, like you have an understanding of the inputs and outputs, right? Like even if it gives you the answer, like a good output, you have to know, is this the right or wrong?
Yeah, well, but my like, one of my biggest concerns with AI is like a wasting our time or wasting my time. A real example of this, I forget which company it was, but essentially it boiled down to they were having a conversation with the LLM. So it was like bug snag or something like that where, you know, people pay security bounties to fix them. And someone shared the thread on Twitter because it was just ridiculous. But essentially someone's like files, files a bug in the person's like, can you explain deeper because that doesn't. I don't really understand the problem here. And then someone and it's like, oh, I'm sorry. And then, you know, typical sounds like sounds like an AI.
And like they send up like wasting hours of their time arguing with with an AI that it turned though they figured out they're like, oh, this isn't a real thing. Because like people often have English as a second language, more common than not. So you can't just judge it by like grammar and things like that. But the person's like, yeah, this isn't a real thing. But like there's more of that. That app going to keep happening. It's just like wasting your time because it costs nothing to the file a million tickets and try to get a bug bounty or something. And that's probably more of my concern too.
The same for people not understanding like you're just saying to us like people not understanding the code that was written because it was written by an AI. And there's a bug in it because it just copy someone else's code somewhere. And like you need to know how to debug that because like that's a lot as what we do as engineers is like mostly fixing things. And we'll lose that ability or it'll become specialized. And again, it just waste our time to be like, hey, how did you do that? Well, it turns out I got this thing to write to write it for me. And as a manager like, I'm going to be worried about that is that a good thing is that a bad thing.
But same on the content side as well. If we can just produce this episode 20 times over with different topics because it's got a recording of all of us. Now what's like, are we just wasting time now? That's not authentic. I don't know. Maybe I'm just a doom and gloom technology person robots aren't funny. First of all, you know, everybody knows that. They can sometimes be funny. Not consistently funny, but I've had some good puns that have been generated for me. Yeah, I created a bot for our podcast site for it to like go through and I asked it to be snarky. Now I wanted to be able to look up like, what did we rate this was key or when did we try this other one or what one did we try in episode 100?
It was good stuff, which it's, you know, it's good about and then I wanted to be funny back to me. So I guess in that sense, yeah, it was, it was better than expected. Well, I think the more that you can program it to have like it's based off of data that you've given it, right? And so if you train the model to based off of like a comic, you know, personality that is very funny. And it might actually start to be smart enough to do that. And so that is a little bit, you know, scary. And to jump point is like, wait, are we, what's the point of us if we can be just a complete or a plate? Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure we, we know the line of that because yeah, it's funny.
Can you talk about like artists or whatever else feel like write me some jokes in the tone of Dave Chappelle. Here's some reference material like what are we going to get and do we need Dave anymore? Probably. But it would be interesting to see, you know, where that goes. I've heard people like write wraps and then like have, you know, the Kanye voice do it. Actually, I think that happened on Twitter recently, right? Didn't somebody do that with like some rap about react? I like the old react and they had Kanye do it. I have not seen that, but I'm intrigued. I think Ken Wheeler did like a beat and somebody like came up with this rap and then somebody took it further
and had like Kanye's voice to it. Yeah, we definitely, you definitely got to find that. It was like the old react, the class based react does, you know, all that. Yes, it is. And hey, you know, that, that stuff is a gem, no pun intended there or just flat out reference of your voice. I did want to regress back to it like what you were saying, the gem around like as a manager. And you folks you're working with like, you know, like is it acceptable to use those tools to help enhance your work or not? Because I've definitely been in environments where they're like used co-pilot, used, open AI. We'll pay for it. If it makes you more productive, go ahead as long as the outputs are good.
Yeah. You don't, you definitely want to use it. You want to like, you don't want to be the person telling, telling everybody they need to ride their horse to work when like the car has been invented. Like you definitely don't want to do that, but you also don't want to overestimate its capabilities. And I, I think it takes so much knowledge and awareness to know what, what the AI is good at in terms of coding and what it's not. That, that's the real danger of assuming that it works because it looks right. That's the thing. It always looks right and it sounds correct. And you're like, that makes sense.
But you know, we wouldn't write bugs if code or really easy and digestible. You can just look at it and say it looks right. So I don't know. It's a really interesting thing we're going to have to deal with the next couple of years. How much do we utilize this lean on as a tool? I think one thing is a mistake that companies could be making is avoiding it, right? Like almost saying like, no, we don't want to use co-pilot or we don't want to use these tools. I think that's a mistake. Like I think we need to learn how to work with it. What does work? What doesn't like what? What kind of bugs do get generated in that case? And I think that the more we use it and try and leverage it and see how it helps us is great.
Like it's like something that I think we need to learn and grow with versus like I think some companies probably out there are just like, nope. We're not integrating that that's, you know, not something that we want to do. And I mean, you know, that's their business. They can do that. Obviously, but I think that that's a miss. I think it's like ignoring the technology and saying that it's not here. It's here. It's not going anywhere. It's constantly growing. And so how can we do more with it and learn to like, how does it work with us and what doesn't work? And I think that to me is the important thing is that just being open to trying it and seeing what happens.
Yeah, I think most places are just concerned that like, you know, what's happening with the data? Are you uploading the code or like your secrets or whatever might be in your code base to the cloud to get an answer to then like tell you what to write or is it. You know, is the model just cloud based and it's like running it locally or I don't know. I think some is true for depending on which tool you pick, it does it different ways. And I think because they don't know how it works, they're just like, just don't use it at all because we're worried you're going to like upload something that will compromise everything to the cloud.
Which I think also maybe companies need to take some time to think about that and educate their, you know, engineers, employees, whatever of like what's safe and what's not. And unfortunately, it's probably still going to have mistakes being made. So it's like, how can you get ahead of some of that and just kind of put some sort of guard rails in to make it safe. Because I also think some companies that are going to say like, no, we don't do that. We don't use AI. Do not do it. People can still do it. And I think that's also where it becomes more like unsafe is because someone did it without thinking through the consequences.
And so at least if your company can think strategically about like what's good, like what data can we share and what can't we. And just being a little more thoughtful on that I think is a better approach in my opinion, but you know, it's hard. It's really difficult because the technology is changing so quickly that you're adapting and like what is appropriate, what's not. It's hard to know. So I also understand it's, it's just a difficult space. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're played. We're people in that space. And I don't feel like we have a full grasp of, you know, what is possible. Where are the mistakes? Where are the best ways to leverage, like Jim said, it's a whole other skill set to leverage those tools.
So that's its own thing, right, just because they're out there doesn't make them automatically effective. You know, it makes me think about the job market and how do these tools affect the job market in various ways, obviously like in your search process or in your hiring process. But also is in like your skills, what are the, what are the skills that are going to be needed next in our tool belts, like what isn't useful anymore, where, how does this replace certain things like. Yeah, it's taking that further. This is a question for, you know, as managers, when you're interviewing people, right.
If someone is doing a coding interview and you see that they have co-pilot on and it's like auto completing everything, do you think less of them. For me, no, not necessarily. I think it might trigger me to ask certain questions just to understand, like what we've said earlier, is I'm okay with tools being used. It's the same thing as if someone Googled how to use a certain method or something that's out there, like I don't remember everything I know that. Like I'm going to use Google and do that. To me, I see co-pilot is that very same thing is it's going to auto complete or do certain things for you to make your life easier.
But at the end of the day, you still need to know how to debug that, how to like address those things. And so for me, I wouldn't necessarily be like, oh, turn that off. Like I can't have that. That's terrible. Like it's like, no, you might actually leverage that in the job. And so that's okay. But it might trigger me to like poke a little bit more and say, okay, like what happens if this isn't working and like how would you address that just to really go back to like do they have the fundamentals, do they understand it. It goes back to me as an example of like frameworks. I think JavaScript frameworks are amazing. You should absolutely use them.
Having some of the strong fundamentals of JavaScript is very beneficial because when something's not working in a framework or you're having something that's not performant or whatever it may be, you have to dig in and understand some of these things. And so I think that that's what you really want to get at does that someone have the skills or they just 100% reliant on what's generated for them. That's the case. Then I question their ability because they are just reliant on a tool too much. I think you still need those skills. That's my thought on it, Jim. I don't know if you have something different to share on that.
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So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs use indeed sponsor jobs to hire top talent fast and even better you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsor job credit at indeed.com slash podcast terms and conditions apply. A little different I like I want to see what you know. I think Brian holds it at a long time ago he's like most developers can do 80% of what we do as seniors. But it's that last percentage that makes the difference. So it's like I think anybody can build anything you can Google something. You can use web flow to build your websites entirely or low code tools but that's not what I'm interested in it's interested in your process and how you do it.
I think using something like copilot doesn't tell me enough of that process because that's that's really what interview is is trying to understand how you think about problems not necessarily what your solution is. Where's the AI is just like it's just a solution. So yeah, I would probably not I probably ask them to turn it off. If I really like them, especially if it's junior engineer, maybe maybe I'm a little more flexible there. But again, it's just it's more work for me. We talk about wasting time. Now I need to work even harder to understand what they know and what they don't know. They're just really good at copilot, but there's a limit to that. And like you're going to get that limit very soon. So how how much signals is getting me. Yeah.
I don't know. I haven't run into it yet, but it's a really good interesting problem to think about. I'm going to apply for your team and totally copilot see what happens to you asking me to turn it off and like nope. Nope. Doesn't also are you hired? Nope. But you know what? I we have started to see that like in some of the I have actually seen it in like last year or people were using chat GBT or copilot to create and take home exercises. And that's where it to me wasn't a like I'm going to fail this person. I mean, it's such a slippery slope. If someone completely generates it and does nothing.
Well, maybe we need a better test to you know, test those skill, but at the same time, it doesn't necessarily go to me like I should disqualify the person because it is yet a tool in their repertoire to like leverage. But I need to understand do they you know, do they fully understand the code that's in front of them and like what's happening to James point unfortunately it's more work for us to dig in. And so maybe that is a way where you just you're like I have 30 40 candidates that I'm interviewing and I'm just going to say this person used code pilot I'm out like I don't have the bandwidth in time to do that.
And so I think part of me saying like yes, it's a tool and you should leverage it and that's okay. You should have those fundamentals. But at the same time, it could penalize you in the sense that like yeah companies are busy like we have thousands of applicants for a single role. And that might not set you apart. So grain assault there. I think it's just like you know thinking strategically about when you use it in an interview is probably a good thing. Yeah, I think I have like counterpoint a little around that it makes me question the process a little bit the efficiency of the process like what are the signals you're actually trying to get.
How what are the methods you're using to get there. I mean does it take home if output doesn't matter to James, James point then the take home probably isn't that useful. Unless like there's a follow up process around the take home. Okay, we have a take home now we're going to spend an hour talking through that now how they got through that solution even as a take home they might be using co pilot and everything else. So if they were using co pilot in a live coding session as long as they could speak to what's happening and you know answer any questions throughout I personally wouldn't see an issue with that.
Because again, it just makes me faster and then we can spend more time talking. And at the end of the day, right what makes a senior different than a junior in those senses is you understand what's happening and you know how to find the answers when you don't understand. That that to me, those are usually the big things I'm looking for is that we can talk about this and then like you just know how to figure it out when you're faced with a difficult problem. So as we maybe come to like a closure on this episode, this joint crossover episode, I'd be curious like what's a technology that you all are excited about.
You're going to laugh htm x. That's a big one is popping up all over Twitter. Yes, a couple of things because like in my mind and maybe it's just me getting old and curmudgeonly or whatever. But like everything I've re looked at a lot of things that I had used in the past and like I just stop focusing on leading edge technology. Like I think some new things are cool like bun and a lesia and like you know different things like that. But then I'm also like jango is just fine. It was pretty cool and made web frameworks fast like it came with a ORM and off and what's wrong with that also so old stuff and then htm x is cool branding on old stuff.
Yeah, I think I think old stuff is going to make a resurgence like I think rails is going to be really popular again for I mean not that it isn't popular still but it's not as popular as it was. So I think rails is coming back and I think like things like Astro that just decide like let's use real HTML let's ship a multi page app like I know it's crazy but like you can have multiple pages and a browser if you go to like slash whatever your pages goes there. You don't need a router it's insane. Like it's a router in your browser it's crazy so I think like I think I'd love to see us take a step back and like you know really embrace the server side things the old technologies and the fundamentals of like you know HTML has a lot of stuff built in that you should use and you should really understand that before just learning react and like you know all that kind of stuff.
Technology not this isn't engineering or coding related I'm excited for battery technology getting better getting to solid state batteries means we can do a lot more things than we can with traditional like lithium ion. There's always like promises in these areas but I think we're getting closer and closer where batteries eating stall or more compact can charge more rapidly really changes the landscape when we think about EVs and just lots of other uses for things so I'm pretty excited about that. I like to bring them on planes now yeah then you can bring them on as an EV owner I'm I'm really into that yeah so yeah bringing your EV on the plane yes yeah in my pocket it gets really small.
I love that. All right well I think we're like right at time this is this is a conversation I enjoyed it yeah hopefully this is good for you all to I do have one one on brand question. Yeah we didn't really talk about the alcohol we just had it as for our lunches I had two questions first of all what's in your cup now in the second what's your favorite cocktail. Oh that's a good one right now in my cup is the Japanese whiskey the Habiki harmony which is just to me as a solid go to always feel like I have to have that one in my you know collection because it's just delicious my favorite cocktail.
I'm probably like lean towards like an old-fashioned or Manhattan that's probably just a simple like really good one I'm I love cocktails in general but those just I go back to those simple great cocktails. Mine is just a sober sober Pepsi. I have meetings that are fairly important I need to say a level headed about we're inclusive here so yeah and also Jim AI can go replace you in those meetings if you don't need to. Yeah if you can just get wrong send a meetings. If AI can do a manager's job please please. Well we're dealing with humans man it's too tough AI I don't think can replace the manager that just yet.
Yeah but it could listen in meetings for you and give you a synopsis of what that's already a thing yeah that's an hour for zoom yeah. So chocolate rob what what's drink so you have in today and favorite cocktails we both have the the blantons straight from the barrel or whatever's called. It's good cocktails I don't know I'm kind of more into Jen cocktails honestly. Like I don't have one off top of my head but like you know something that's like old like 1920s style like Jen cocktails are like I'll solve that question for you that's fine because I also lean towards Jen in cocktails I like my whiskey's neat and then Jen is I feel like let's let's dress this up and do some cool fun things with this floral spirit.
Give me a list to pick from well my go to all the time is neck robings. Oh neck groan is a good one yeah and then another one I like to get from time to time is called the last word which is a prohibition or cocktail I believe has absent in it like cherries the core and like lime juice. It's almost pretty good I don't know if I've had that one it sounds good so I recommend. Well I'll stop recording but