Techstrong Gang – October 31, 2024

Live long and prosper from alternate universe Spock, it's Halloween and you're watching Textron Gag. Hello, everyone. As I said, live long and prosper.

It's Alan Shimel, his alternate universe, Spock, and happy Halloween here from the Textron Gang. We have a lot to go over today. We've got some AI stories, some GI GitHub news, as well as Russia circumventing, uh, sanctions.

We're gonna talk about all this war, but before we do a little bit of housekeeping, I made some remarks yesterday about my New York Yankees. I said they were out of the World Series. They came back and they won last night.

Now we have a few wild-eyed optimists here on our gang who think the Yankees still have a chance. Primarily San Francisco giant boy out there. Big boy had, had now a favorite Halloween character, Freddy or whoever he is behind that mask.

Let me just say this now as Spark of the Yankees winning the World Series as 5,762,319. One approximate. It's not happening, but I'm the fan to Hope Springs a eternal Jared call Pitches tonight.

We win. We go back to LA for game six and anything can happen. There you go.

So I'm gonna take off my Yankee hat. Now. Let me introduce you to our gang.

First of all. As I mentioned, San Francisco Giants big boy there in the outfield. It's our own Jon Swartz with his little bobblehead to boot.

Hey John, This is Lucille. Hi. Hey everybody, this is Lucille.

He's the mascot of the Giants. And when you say opt, when you say Optimist and Giants fan, that's a contradiction. So anyway, I There is a pulse in the Bronx.

It is getting stronger, I feel. Game six. All right.

Alright, um, joining us from the set of his latest movie, Halloween 46. He's our chief content officer, Mike Vizard. Hey Mike, how are you?

I'm good, I'm good. Let me explain this. Go ahead.

So there is an anime series called Bleach that's been going on for about 20 years now. And they have a set of characters in there who are, shall we say, rogue. And nobody knows exactly where their allegiances lie, but um, they're called bizarres and this is their masks.

So there you go. Oh. So that's the bizarre.

There you Go, man. Wow. There's A method.

So excellent. Check out bleach sometime. It's always bleach.

You know, the things you are wearing on text or text, It will and will always suck up about, you know, 50, 60 hours of your life watching anime. But, you know, it was one of this, What, what else you got to do? Okay, I'm presenting the adults in the room today is, is our fu of analyst, um, Camberley Bates.

Kimberly, I'm not sure what more to say, but why don't you say it? Well, Well, you know, I do have a little guy that I have in the office, so maybe that's my, it's not even, he's not, yeah, this is my worry ball, so when I'm on whatever, but yeah, so, and that his face is there because he is worried about the Yankees. So sorry, We're all worried about the Yankees.

We're all worried. But thank joining in ending a touch of CL to today's gang. Yeah, you it.

Um, and then finally from somewhere added tattoo NY Tattooing Tattoo. He might be the last of the Jedi or he kidding. Down over to the dark side like spark here.

It's our CTO and FU analyst DevOps. Mitch Ashley. Hey Mitchell.

How are you? Very Good. Actually, I dyed in in the Phantom Menace, but GaN Jin.

So I do, I do have the hair for it now too. Do I say you have Y Jang J here? Yeah.

Very cool. So the ability to to speak does not mean you are intelligent by Young Pad one. Absolutely.

Alright, so it is a, it's Halloween. Happy Halloween. We hope you're enjoying it and out later with the kids to are out there trick or treating.

And what do people dress their pets up too for Halloween? Now, you know that, see a lot of them. Um, unfortunately in our neighborhood, we don't have a lot of kids.

I bought five pounds of candy. My wife told me I'm crazy. It was the Costco.

But anyway, let's jump into what we're talking about today, gang. Our first block AI changes the work equation. This is coming outta a couple of tech strong AI articles.

Uh, Mike, why don't you head us all? Take us out here. Yeah.

This week LinkedIn, uh, launched an AI agent that helps recruiters and it basically sorts through all the resumes that people are sending in to help identify who's a better job candidate. And of course, the folks at Upwork have a similar thing going on where they're building out AI agents for both freelancers and for the people who hire those freelancers. And it's an interesting thing 'cause what they're both saying is that it's not so much that AI will replace the need for people as much as it is, it's gonna just change the pace at which we all work and it's gonna be significantly faster.

Projects are gonna take less time, we're gonna have more productivity. And I guess the scary part of this whole thing is, well, A, you know, do you trust an AI to be the recruiter because the existing systems haven't been doing a great job? But b, are we prepared for that level of change in the way we work?

And the pace is gonna be so much faster, projects are gonna be shorter and completed sooner, and the cognitive load is gonna be a lot higher. So I'll, I'll throw that to Alan 'cause I know, you know, you're always Mr. Good news when it comes to ai, but I guess culturally, are we ready?

Well, whether we're ready or not, it's coming, but, but here is the good news. Hopefully we can train this AI not to be prejudice, not to discriminate based on gender, right? If I'm looking for a developer, let me look at the code they write, not what their name tells me about their, uh, ethnicity or gender or race or religion, right?

Let's, let's make it a meritocracy. And I think we could do that a lot easier with ais making some of these calls than we can by leaving it to, to people. And so I'd like to see AI get more involved in picking the best candidates for the jobs.

I think it will come down to what we show the AI then, because I think a lot of people are worried that it'll be too much like the current system where basically I'm scanning for keywords and resumes and not coming up with the right candidates 'cause I'm not really understanding their experience level. Uh, and then I'm surfacing a bunch of resumes from people who know how to gain that system and put the right keywords in, but they might not be the best candidates. So, um, Mitch, I know you've seen this in the past, but every IT person I talk to complains about the fact that they can't even get an interview because of these systems are deeply flawed and the HR people don't know what they're looking at.

Well, there, there is, there's sorting through this stack of resumes, the virtual stack of resumes now we're talking about. But there's also, you know, is, is AI gonna go mine their social media? Is AI gonna look for their GitHub account and go analyze their code?

There are lots of places that this could go. And you mentioned bias or Alan mentioned, you know, not having bias. Bias is introduced by the people who build the models, whether it's gen AI or it's ml.

And so I think there has to be a really conscious, there has to be a conscious effort to remove bias. 'cause you can't help it, um, being put into the models as you're developing it. So you've gotta find ways to identify and take it out or identify ways where you're introducing less bias and you know, it's not gonna be perfect.

So it, I I think it's has to be an aid in the beginning. It can't be go find me the top 10 candidates and you know, who know Java and, and, uh, JavaScript. So that's my thing this year or whatever.

And running in this kind of an environment. So you could, you could name some kind of interesting parameters to, to do natural language searches and things like that. But then again, if you as a, as a recruiter don't know, you know, this kind of medical procedure for a medical person or this kind of technology for a IT person, you know, you've gotta rely on the AI to discriminate that for you.

And if it does a good job, great. If not, you're, you're still left not knowing what you're looking at. Hey Mitch, could we program it to say, these are not the candidates you're looking for.

You must live in the moment. Wow. Yeah.

You know what's interesting Mike, is uh, what, what, uh, LinkedIn and upworker doing is Amid was Aptio today announced agents for FinTech. So you got all these companies who are figuring out ways, as you said, to make things more productive, ease of use, but what have you to leave more space for cognitive. That that is true though what Alan says is that the whole bias thing, they're all these little extra extraordinary worries that all these companies have to worry about.

But nonetheless, there was a, uh, I'll throw out a story out. We did a survey about, from a, a company called, um, team Viewer. And they're finding that these employers and business leaders are just going full ahead.

80% believe their organizations implementation of AI's mature. And compared to a year ago, it's up significantly. So we're seeing this rolled out and it's reflected in all these companies announcing agents, nickname, Upwork, Microsoft, Cisco, ServiceNow, Apptio, what have you.

So Kimberly, we're four guys dressed up for a kid's holiday. But are we mansplaining? This is No actually my as as you know, as you guys were talking through about what AI is would do in terms of the hiring process, the thing that struck me is that when you go through the interview a process, yeah, you're looking at the skills and capabilities, but the other thing you're looking for is how does this person fit into the culture of the organization?

And so I'm thinking through is like you, I know the, I can do a lot of interesting things, interesting things, and it can alter its work. I mean, I've used it to alter, you know, editing and that kind of thing and, and creating a better, you know, tone of, of something. Maybe it's it's writing or something.

But you know, when my, you know, a foreign company I used to call, you we're a bunch of quirky people when I was at this other co when evaluator group and you know, you had to fit into this quirky group of people that we had. Um, and you know, this, you know, it's not that we're crazy or anything, it's just that, you know, and, and the same thing goes with Futureum. If you, you know, the Futureum organization, ha you have to demonstrate your ability to, to deal with change because it's gonna happen every day and or every week and to go with the flow.

So how does, but you know, when you're streaming through the, the, the resumes and that kinda stuff, you're not necessarily gonna see that, but you're gonna fee, you're gonna have, you have to have that person to person kind of experience, I think to ascertain that when you go through the interview process. So there's you, there's both sides to this kind of equation that's going on. Unless all you you are looking for is somebody to program.

I wonder how many people are really dependent upon hr, refining them candidates and surfacing. I think we post jobs, but most of us go looking for somebody. Um, and we're not necessarily always gonna rely on AI to do that.

We are, maybe some of us are constantly recruiting and we always kind of have somebody in mind, but I'm not sure that all the things that we think about for who we want to go hire can be put in an AI agent. But it seems to me, you know, maybe this will do some of the scut work for the HR manager and sending out emails telling people, thank you very much. I got your resume and your input was valuable to us and we'll get back to you in five years.

Um, but other than that, I kind of look at it sometimes and I go, you know, is this an instance where maybe AI's not all that helpful? Well, I think you're still hiring. I mean, even I have to go back to the people that I was hiring and that kinda stuff.

And I'd say a good 50% of the people we hired, we hired through a job search process, whether or not we went to campuses to look for, um, interns that are coming in through the campus process and interviewing you through there, or whether or not we use linked LinkedIn in terms of posting and stuff. So, I mean, we still went through it, even though from a, maybe from a higher level kind of, you know, executive, I mean, definitely if you're doing hiring an executive, you're doing an executive search firm to go do that. There's an entire process for that, for recruiting.

Um, and so you, maybe it's the mid-levels, but yes, we do hire people we know, um, and we keep our tabs on those people to say, I want you to come with me. I've got my group of people I want to go do this project with here, you know, instant group. Um, but I, we're still looking for the others, you know, to fill, fill the other P positions.

And there's so many, um, you can see it. How, how would work itself into ai, into the communications process, writing emails, using templates, maybe customizing 'em, uh, some of the, the workflow part of it. Like I'm, look, I I wanna hire this kind of person, but I don't wanna go searching on Indeed and everywhere else to find job descriptions that I'll pull from.

You know, go search that for me. Bring me back through examples. I like this, this, and this.

Now craft a new job description for me. So you can see a lot of the, the tasks part of it being aided by AI and then kind of far reach into it. It's like, are you gonna be intervi interviewed by an AI assistant or are you gonna be recorded and then analyzed by AI for, so you can go back and look at what the person said and, and, and transcripted and all those kind of things.

So you can see it, it, yeah, there's sort of the far future stuff of AI taking over a agent kind of task, but there's others just using it to help you manage the information and recall what the communications have been and what they've said. I think we're much more likely to see those kinds of aids in a LinkedIn kind of expanded AI capability. Alan, how stressed are HR folks gonna be?

5 candidates for every one job that's open these days. So what's your sense of as we go into 2025 or are HR people gonna be stressed or are we gonna be kinda treading water? Maybe.

It is a great, it is a great place to bring up. Predict 2025 just started the promos through this. I believe it's January 8th or ninth.

And this mike is where we answer those kinds of questions, right? What do we, what's in store for 2025? And we're looking for speakers who want to talk on on what, what, what 2020 five's big stories are and what we can expect in the way of hiring and economy and stuff like this.

com, or you could get to it off a tech strong events as well. It'll be up in the next day or two. Um, but you know what my part of me says, do you hear that violin playing for the HR people?

Then they got jobs at least, you know what I mean? 5 people for every job out there, that means there's people outta work Know, I think that, I think that number is, is significantly higher out here in Silicon Valley. I mean, I have friends who are Looking for More than, they've been looking for more than a year for jobs.

And I actually, Silicon Valley got hit very hard at this. Yeah, It's, I mean it's proportionally there are more, more people looking for work out here. And I really hope, my sincere hope is that when this, that there is no bias, of course there will be in these models, but what's particularly alarming to me is I was talking to a friend of mine who worked at Apple for 20 years.

She actually was ha handler of Steve Jobs for a while. She can't get a job. And I said to her, what can I do to help you?

And she goes, well, and you could do is you could erase 20 years from my age and that that'll help me. So I mean, I really, really hope that's too, Right. It doesn't apply to me.

I'm still in the pride, but real, Yes, it's, I think that's that. You see, so, so you're 30 years younger in the alternate universe. Is that where you're going with that?

Thanks there. Key wasabi. Well, There's a flip point to this and that is what about the person looking for a job and the tool AI tools that yes, will become available or are available to them, right?

And it also gives maybe those skill that leverage, just like people who are better at search can find things. Maybe people are more skilled at knowing the system. Know how AI works and getting those tools to work in your favor has a competitive advantage and finding that job.

And that might actually be a good skill that you're recruiting for. I wanna know, I want somebody who, you know, stands above in their AI skills. Hey, there was, you know, there, there was a subtle message in the LinkedIn thing though, and you had to read into it a little bit.

'cause they were saying, you know, initially it was gonna help HR managers and then the verbiage changed to hiring managers. And so a lot of folks will just maybe look at this little tool that LinkedIn has and go, oh, maybe I don't need a HR person to go find these people. Now I got a little ai AI agent to handle it.

I, I HR I'm, it, it's gonna win the candidates down until you do the face-to-face. And based on the face-to-face, I think that a little bias bias creeps in. Again, I'm not just being a cynic about it, but I think that's part of, that's part of the frustration or the end result for the people who've been looking for so long who were overqualified, but probably in the eyes of the company, probably kinda, I sneak salary.

I I think frankly LinkedIn is missing the point. It's the people applying for a job that need an AI agent to help them sort through all the crap that helps them get my point, you know, to interview. And I think, you know, the, the, the proverbial cart is in front of the horse here and they should have solved that problem first before they figured out how to make it, you know, easier for the HR manager to deal with all the resumes.

Well, they're just monetizing. Well, managers isn't usually the people that are paying European people. You gotta follow the money.

They're, they're monetized, they're monetizing this. This is an opportunity. Yeah.

Sorry, sorry. Well look, just like in so many other verticals and, and situations, AI is going to have an impact here. AI is going to make itself felt.

And I, I think, you know, we'll, we'll keep an eye on this going forward, you know, and how, I mean, just think about the whole recruitment industry, not just executive search, but recruiters in general and, and what, what effect this could have on disrupting that, right? It, it, it can be highly, highly disruptive. Uh, let's take a break here on Textron Gang though, and let's come back and talk about GitHub.

Eliminating the need to know programming languages to build AppSec. I've been preaching this for a while. You're watching Text Trump gang.

All right. And we're back with our little theme here of some AI scary things. And one of those things is GitHub is showing a tool that lets people kind of write their own applications in plain English.

You don't need to know Python or JavaScript. And it's still a technical preview, so it's not quite here yet. But, um, Mitch, how are developer's gonna look at that?

Because in, in some ways, I think when you talk to those folks, the fact that they know Python or JavaScript is, well, that's their superpower. And now if everybody has superpower, it's kind of like waking up one morning if you're Superman and everybody has x-ray vision. So how do you kind of see this all playing out in terms of what is the definition of a developer?

'cause GitHub is now saying there'll be billions of developers. Well, I, I do agree with that, that, that the lines definitely blur. There will be folks who are super technical and, and really, you know, understand the underlying technology and can, can work magic that way.

And there'll be more folks, citizen developers, lower skilled people who are not developers, right? But lower skilled developers as well. I mean, we're, we're at the beginning stages of this.

So for an experienced developer to use a tool like natural language to write code for them, it's gotta save them time or do a better job or whatever, help them in some way, otherwise they'll keep doing what they're doing until that catches up and now it's an, it's an added benefit. Again, I think it's kind of back to our last discussion around the people who understand how to leverage AI to help them do their work, whether they're in a technical job or not have a leg up. That's, that's part of your superpower is helping AI and then transforming or adjusting and, and changing, rolling with the changes that happen.

You know, there were some other really interesting things that were announced, uh, in the Mitch told you So category of, 'cause I've been talking about really AI agents that are performing very specific tasks. You know, we all talk about the big, um, you know, platinum golden, uh, gold master LLMs that are massive, right? That are trained on lots of information that do quasi good job, but not always on, on tasks that you ask them to do.

And having specialized in their LLMs or small language models, um, are are where we're gonna see a lot of advancements coming out on the technical side, the software development side of it. So there were announcements of tools that go out, would go out and, and, uh, look at areas where they could do vulnera, uh, find vulnerabilities or do upgrades to software tasks like that that you would, you know, kind of put in the toil category for a developer. And I think we'll see a lot more of that.

And I think the same is true for writing a code, for writing code, you know, if you need to augment or change existing code, I wanna use an, uh, a system in LMA model, whatever it is that really understands Python and maybe the new features of the, the new Python that that's come out they didn't wanna leverage as opposed to just throwing some code out of whatever random, uh, model that is behind it. So I think the other side of this, one more thing that came out of this is it is one approach that folks are taking is giving developers flexibility of we support three versions of cloud cloud, we support these lms, go pick your LLM. And a lot of that, of course is takes experimentation, which is probably where we saw some of that hit that the Dora metrics talked about, of is it really improving developer productivity?

Well, not if you're kind of figuring out how to use it still, you're in that, uh, kind of gangly teenager phase. So look, I, you know, in the category of Alan's been telling you, so we're going, we're Mitch Kenobi out here. Um, We're going to a world of 500 million developers, right?

We're at 27 million. We thought we were going to 35 or 40, but no, we're going to 500 million. Everybody is going to be a developer.

I think that's a given. And this GitHub story is just, yeah, the first of many we're gonna see along this, the issue is what does that mean? So what do they say?

There's like 2 trillion lines of code right now out there and AppSec and stuff like that. When you have 500 million developers developing applications, how many applications are you going to have? How many lines of code out there are you going to have?

How do you manage, deal with secure everything involved in this, right? You think we have hyperscale now, you ain't seen nothing yet. The scale is just coming because, because the, those amounts of developers and what this does to allow everybody to develop AppSec will, is like the rat and the snake working its way through all those people developing AppSec make a lot more AppSec.

You need hosting for those AppSec. You need monitoring for those AppSec. You need security for those AppSec.

You need scanning for those AppSec, those AppSec throw off data and more data and more work gets created from the app, right? That is a huge, this is gonna be a huge boom to the IT industry, to the dev DevOps world, to SREs and platform engineering and to the hardware. What does it mean for our hardware?

So I'd might take it to another place, Alan, and, but I, this is gonna be, and if you guys think I'm so far off, you just kinda like, write me off here. Are we talking the printing press here? I I you're Talking about you, what you're talking, I mean, what, what you're saying is that every, you have this 500 million people that can program.

Well, at that point in time we had very few people that really could read and write and what we enabled them, whether it was the printing press or other things that happened there through education, we enabled them to read and write. And now we have, you know, if you can't read and write appropriately, you're now considered really behind. Whereas before it was, you were really advanced.

And so we've given now these tools to this place to do this and, and You're dead Aren and you're raising the issue of security and everything else like that. But the tools also can tar start to take care of that. And, and I would be curious to go back to some of the people that are, you know, the historians of that age and say, how did they feel?

You know, were there people that back then they were talking about this is gonna be the destruction of the world because you're communicating now broadly. Well, the church, the church and the church did the church, Right? Because who wrote back that?

Monks, right? Monks did all the writing. They wrote, they wrote, uh, you know, scripts and, and and so forth.

Unfortunately, most people didn't read either. And you know, you had the church preaching in Latin and, well, we Catholic church, That's the other side of the equation is the reformation when, you know, the Bible is trans translated into English, right? Instead of Latin.

So now we not only could print it and distribute it, but at least back then you had a language change that's akin to, I don't need to know Python and everything else. I just talk and speak or, or type in my language, whatever that is. And now that, that's part a big part of what this whole enabling that many people to be developers, if you will too.

I I also think about the, the was with Kimberly was, was, was talking about was what this means for smaller midsize business who always, who are on the outside looking in thinking, we don't have the resources, we don't have the manpower, we don't have the intellectual power to do this. Now that in a sense, this kind of lowers, it kind of broadens the market for them, or at least gives them an opportunity. And of course there're gonna be security issues, but that will be addressed.

But I, I also think about the implications broadly for the economy. Us peasants can now program well Here. Kimberly, though, to Alan's point, is all of this gonna be managed by AI agents or how do you see the role of it folks in this equation when we talk about that flywheel effect that he was describing, where there are all these tasks and data that need to be analyzed, but but by who or by what?

Well, I was thinking of two different strains when you guys were talking about this. One was this, you know, piece of the, everybody reading and writing and now being developers as a core, core element of your skill base. And maybe that becomes core for, you know, classes, right?

You have mathematics now you have a developer. The other one was this issue that I was having with Randy Kerns yesterday. And we were talking about the problem of the skills within it still is a skill problem within it.

And that skill problem is I can hire people can do basic stuff because I'm giving them a lot of AIOps skills and streamlining the process and everything else. But when it comes to a architect and design, that's a problem. And you know, one of the companies I've worked with is sios and they talk about how these companies will bring in something, design this, this incredible, um, coverability that they have in terms of application, high availability, fail over and everything else.

It's all designed, it works, it works really well and it does its thing, but then somebody issues a new patch and it has a trickle down effect. Something goes haywire and they don't have the staff, the company doesn't have the staff to figure out what the problem is. So they have to go back out and hire or get that person in that they had to design this.

So it is a problem, there is a skill problem here and it doesn't do away with having to have the higher skills or having to have the plumber come in and fix your plumbing because you don't know how to, you know, sweat a pipe anymore. My husband does. Okay, but you know, the kids nowadays probably don't, I don't necess certainly don't have to do it.

So those kind of things, I think those skills, those heavy skills, we're gonna be very specialized with them and we have to have those resources within every company. And, you know, maybe it's a, a great place for a bar to be, you know, to bring those skill bases into the companies that they bring it into. Well, change happens in two ways, right?

One is if something's introduced and we figure out how to do what we're currently doing better, faster, similar process, we may change a little bit how, how we work. But it's funnel and kind of the same thing. But now just in a different method, different tool, there's also change that radically.

You don't do it that way anymore more. You can think about when the cloud was introduced, we said, well, it's just like another data center. Let's move everything up there and we'll just host it in the cloud, right?

And now we think about applications much differently about how we design it and distribute 'em, et cetera. Um, the same thing is, is is true and going to be true with ai? There is, if you think about the DevOps world, is all of the things we do, writing code, testing code, securing code, delivering it, pushing it through the pipeline.

Managing source code is the volume of all that goes up. The other areas have to lift up too to catch up to the, to stay with the volume of our ability to produce code. But is there a day where we say, I don't really worry about that anymore because when I make a, when I wanna change, I just say, make a change to this and it changes the code and it doesn't have to be tested or it knows how to test it well enough or knows when it needs to be tested beyond what the AI testing algorithms et cetera do.

I'm not saying it's sentient, I'm just saying it's good enough as a system to know how far to be, to be able to make some levels of change. Maybe some pretty significant ones. Um, you know, what's, what's the Iron Man, the Jarvis that's in his suit?

Jarvis stands for just a rather intelligent system or something like that. Just a rather rather very intelligent system, right? So it's just intelligent enough to know, well, what kind of changes it can make.

And so that, that's a paradigm shift now where I don't need to, I don't need to update, test secure code, create a brand new version of it to do what I wanted to do that does all the same things plus what I wanted. Now That's, that's I think step two, three And four way down the road for sure. Yeah, I mean, but I Dunno how way down it'll be, I think sooner than later.

But it certainly is a additional steps. Guys, let's take a break here. We're gonna come back and, and discuss block three today, which is, uh, can we, can we get sanctions that work against some of these rogue nations?

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All right, folks, we're back. And yes, there are reports about how, uh, companies in India that have nothing to do with tech are funneling GPUs to Russia that are not supposed to be going that way because well, they're on a sanction list and we've been throwing sanctions at the various countries around the world for a long time with mixed effects. But John, you covered this initially.

Um, is this the tip of an iceberg? Is this just one instant of a thousand? This is the tip of an iceberg that probably resides in India.

So India is not part of the US and European Union sanctions against Russia. And indeed there's a, a company that was founded in all places in Moscow in 1995 called Reya Life Sciences. So they initially began distributing pharmaceutical products in Russia.

Uh, for instance, between January, 2022 and August, 2024, they sold about $22 million in pharmaceutical pharmaceuticals to Russia. But by September, 2022, they began exporting restricted machines to Russia, which include Nvidia, ai, chip, a MD, Intel chips, advanced ships. So what's become this, this practice of theirs, they initially started going through one company called Land Prints, which was sanctioned by the us.

So Reya then started working with other companies that are not sanctioned by the US to get through the supply chain and essentially Russia's getting these goods despite the sanctions. So we've got basically this whack-a-mole game going on. And it also not only shows how things can be circumvented, but it in it sets, it reminds me of the, the dangers or the flaws that we have in our supply chain, right?

This goes back to what, what happened with the, the exploding walkie talkies and pagers, right? And how that, how those products got to where they landed. And I think the same principle applies here.

And, and India is, is basically kind of the middle, middle person in all this. So they're not part of the sanctions, and I think they'll, these companies will always find a way to get the products to Russia. I'm not really sure what we do.

I don't know what the, the solution is, but this is a, um, a, a growing concern. And the other concern is for the tech companies themselves, whose products end up there. They are in a sense supposed to be working with resellers to avoid these types of things.

So the pressure is on them and in a sense, um, it's just kinda a nightmare, a logistical nightmare. So this reminds me of when the federation tried to cut off the Rolin empire. Oh God, Back in the good old days.

He, He agrees, he agrees with you, Alan. Or we can talk about Dune. There's a new dune series on Mash for Dune.

You what, Alan you know what happens to the alternative universe if you're watching Deep Space Nine, right? Do you remember? Yeah, I I do, I do.

Absolutely. I shouldn't hurt fast. Oh my gosh.

But, but, but seriously, what are we dealing with here? Come company, countries like India are leveraging, as they always have the Cold War dynamics of a Russia block US block to play the middle. India has been buying Russian oil on the cheap and reselling it ever since we put these sanctions in place.

Who do you think is buying the Russian oil? It's India and China, and they buy it on the cheap. 'cause the Russians have no other outlet for it, right?

This is par for the cost, right? They, you know, the government will say, oh, this, this is a private company. We have, we have nothing to do with, let me tell you what the real problem is.

The real PR problem is, again, it's a question of national will here in the US if we're serious about sanctions, we gotta crack down on these kinds of things, right? Which you tell India, Hey, if you don't take care of your own dogs, you're not getting GP news, period. And watch how quick they'll take care of it, right?

Right. Put some tariffs in place Guard. I'm only kidding.

I'm only getting, oh, I I I was waiting for that. Yeah, but you know, we'll solve it. Yeah.

We, we do look like we have a lack of will, right? 'cause the Europeans are still buying Russian oil and we are still buying Russian uranium. There's a whole segment Else.

We, there are provisions to buy Russian oil up to a certain price and threshold within the sanctions, which The Russians are in running left, right and center apparently To, to India. But here's the real issue, right? This is a geopolitical 3D chess game.

We don't want to p**s India off because there are foil to China in that part of the world, right? You wanna play India against China because they all, they have a like amount of people. They could be a, a alternative supply chain and they could be a a and they're a democracy theoretically, right?

So the US is, you know, a strategic political game there is make nice, nice with India, even though Canada says they hired people spa, uh, assassins to kill, seek, uh, uh, uh, seek folks who spoke out against the government and so forth. You don't hear a lot about it here because strategically we want a counterbalance to China over there, and that's India. So we've gotta make the real politic decision of how hard do we wanna be on India vis-a-vis Russian sanctions or Iranian sanctions, or any other sanctions, North Korea sanctions versus our bigger picture where China's China is our, you know, biggest foil and, and whatever is bad for China is good for us.

I think we look at sanctions like it's a blockade, you know, like it's a, the ships are here and you're not going past this line either way, direction. And they're not, they're, they're a sieve, right? I mean, you squeeze there something, uh, another opportunity comes.

This is a way to get what we want. You know, you mentioned oil as this example I was thinking about too. Um, and that's why they say sanctions have limited effect.

They do have some effect. But you know what? Nation state has fallen because we, we've have, we've done sanctions on them.

No, if it's changed, it's been because of military action or internal upheaval, maybe that contributed to it. But there's a lot of good, feel good about sanctions. Um, yes, there's some impact to it, but you know, the Russian government is not gonna overturn because we went and pushed pressured India not to give them Nvidia chips, right?

Yes, do, but you're right, Alan, there's a cost to everything you push on because of the, the multidimensional chest relationships with each na nation and business that we do with each and the companies in, in, in those nations. And also the companies who buy our good and services. It's a very complex thing and that's a lot of why it has limited effect.

But it sure sounds good. You know, when we hear it on TV until we talk about tariffs, then it gets a little Tech. The, oh, the tech companies also wanna play nice with India, right?

Modi's like the conquering gura who, who came here famously to Facebook or what, or now it's meta years ago. That's a huge market. So in a sense, the, the tech companies are kind of in a weird spot.

Sorry Mike. Meanwhile there's all these folks here who are looking for GPUs that are paying more for them because there's not enough to float around. And I got a feeling that there's a lot of 'em on a slow boat to Moscow.

So we are paying for this twice over. Well, if things don't go well next week we'll pack 'em up with the Covid test we were sending. Oh geez.

Just wanna mention It's Great points And a lot of other things. Anyway, back back to Halloween. That was kind of a wet blanket, but yeah, let's go forward.

Brought to the mention. Um, how about them Yankees? About those cowboys?

They, them cowboys? Oh gosh, yeah. I'm so glad you said that.

Jerry Jones is a terrible general manager. I was just, you stole my thunder. I was just waiting to say that, but you're so right.

Anyway, I'll move on. Cameron, you missed yesterday's show's little football action about the Cowboys using ai. Oh, Okay.

Well did they have an ai uh, player on the field or something? What did they do? No, they Need one, they need several.

Don't, I wouldn't swear. Let me set the record straight. It was a sports debate Masqueraded as a conversation about that.

The Cowboys using ai. That's what yesterday. This, that's all.

Please mi Mitch is, Mitch is absolutely correct. But, um, and it seems to me that the Cowboys are just saying that they want to use ai. They're not actually doing anything, but I dunno, We'll see.

No, no. They're thinking, they're thinking about how they can monetize it and gouge the customers as much as possible. But that's the Jerry Jones away.

Sorry. I'll move on. So, so as long as we're talking funny things, I, I wanted to turn and express a couple things that I did this week with the, the lab team that was, uh, and Russ had cracked a joke about saying that if you're using NVIDIA's Dalai Loder and the latest meta LLM, um, are you now Dalai Lama Never Heard.

That was an original joke by him. So I decided, I, I asked him, I said, did you get that or no, you didn't get that from chat GPT. So I decided to go to chat GPT to see if I can get chat GPT to give me a joke.

The first, I said, can you gimme an AI joke? The first one was so late, it was so bad. It was like, really?

So I gave him Russ's joke and I said, Hey, this is a, this is an AI joke. And he goes, okay. So they send one back to me and I'll close with this.

Why did the neural network go to therapy? It had too many layers of unresolved issues. Wow.

I thought it was well there. Oh, you Did hear, you did hear our discussion yesterday. Here You go.

I think we Have to have a whole session on AI jokes. Jokes. I think I wanna write that book with the chat, GPT and Llama.

So you can Do that. Dai Lama Meta Dalai Lama About metaphysics. Hey, you know what?

I can see where we are devolving into the morat here. Now I'm gonna, I'm going to, uh, let these people go on with their trick or treating Kimberly, thank you for joining us today. Thank you Mike Mitchy.

Ken Mitchell Kenobi. John, thank you for joining us. It's, it's been a heck of a week, but we've got you wait, there's more.

We've got another show coming up tomorrow for Friday. We've got a great tech, strong TV light up coming up behind this. So if you're not trick or treating it, you wanna watch some great tech content, stay tuned for the rest of Tech Drunk TV today.

Everyone. Until then, though, we'll long and prosper.