Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 197 of the IA Cast. With me today, we have Marty SoBo.

Hey, Marty.

How you doing?

I'm great. Hey, all. How's it going today?

All right. And we have Alicia Geary back with us. Hey, Alicia. Hello.

Hello.

All right, so it's been a busy week, and I came up with a topic after last week's show, and I thought, man, I think this would be great to talk about on the IA Cast. And we'll get to it in just a moment. But we've got some breaking news that I want to talk about, and that is that if you follow, we all talk about Mastodon on all these blindness podcasts and assistive technology and all those kind of things. So if you follow Mastodon and if you're interested in it, it has been decided that the American Council of the Blind national Organization is going to embrace Mastodon. There's no details about this or when it will happen, but it is going to happen finally, as far as we know. So what are your thoughts on this?

I'm really happy about it. I think it's a good idea. I think a lot of blind and visually impaired people are on macedon now, and I think it's a good place. And since there's other social medias that aren't doing so great these days, I think it's a good alternative. So I'm excited about it.

I don't really have too terribly much input because I don't usually get involved with blindness organizations. I have reservations about that that I won't talk about here because I don't want to offend anyone. But I do think it is good that they're finally putting theirselves where the blind people are and getting themselves not necessarily off of other social medias, but I think it's a better place. I think Mastodon is a better place for us to be.

So, yeah, I think it's very interesting. I think the more organizations we have over on Mastonon, it kind of gives a signal that it's okay, because I think we see more people transfer over to these platforms when the groups and the organizations they trust and they will follow make that switch. It helps bring people over to make an impact, and I think that that's going to really help the cause here. One thing that was not announced is what the username is going to be, what server it's going to be on, and things like that. So I think that that's going to be the next thing that we need to find out about from the organization. But it has been approved that the organization is moving to Mastodon. They just are going to consult with their It team to make that happen.

Well, you would think that they would do their own server, and that way they can keep it contained. That way if they decided right. I don't know what their rules are or anything like that. So it's hard still. It's early days that this decision was just made earlier today. So we'll just have to see how it plays out. But I definitely am excited about it. We'll see what they do.

I agree. So I know there's plenty of other tech news, but we gave out a lot of tech news last week and so we'll skip a lot of that this time. This will be kind of a shorter episode, I think, but that's totally fine. Unless you guys have anything that you guys feel would be a good thing to mention here.

We could talk about maybe some bugs that we've experienced over the past week and some of the operating systems that had updates over the past week or so.

Well, one big thing is if you've updated to the latest beta of iOS, you may notice something is missing.

What would that be, Michael?

And it doesn't sound as good as it did. The new sounds and ringtones in iOS 17.1 beta one are missing. So if you loved your sounds from iOS 17 and you updated to the new beta, these sounds are gone for this beta. I'm sure they'll be back in the next beta, but currently they're gone. That was kind of a big oops.

And do you think that it's gone because they've removed it or you think it was an error?

So the way that this kind of works a lot of times is when they're developing software, right? As they're developing software, teams or developers have different versions of the code. And so when they make a build of that code and distribute it, they have different channels. And so the beta channel and the release channel were probably different. The beta channel didn't have sounds, the release channel did. And so they did not put release back into beta. So that's what happened there. So it's kind of funny being a programmer myself, working on an app with a team. We've had builds that our other team members have put out that say this has all these fixes. And I said, hey, I don't see my changes in here. Oh, we forgot to pull your changes down into our version before we made the build. Sorry. So that's kind of what I think happened here.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, there is other big news. I mean, there are bugs in operating systems, but I want to go to a more positive topic for the moment. So later today the day of recording this podcast. By the time you get this on Monday or Tuesday, it will already be out. But we've recorded our third, technically a reboot episode, but it's episode three of.

The ICAST yes, which is super fun. That was a great first show, or I should say a great reboot show coming back and definitely super excited about it. And I'm looking forward to growing the show and having some different things that we're going to do on there. We're going to have some rotating guests coming in and out and possibly app developers, web developers, people in the industry, people in and know the whole technical visual landscape. So I'm pretty excited. I think we're going to have a really good so.

And you know what's funny is know Marty and Alicia have not even heard the theme music to the show, I don't think. Have y'all?

I have heard it. I heard it from actually.

So yeah, it's coming out today, so it's all themed up and everything. It sounds really sharp. So I'm excited for you guys to hear it because I think it just really makes it into an Apple focused show. I really like it.

Yeah, it's going to be great. Go check it out everyone, and let us know your thoughts on the first reboot episode.

And we did get an email at the feedback email address. So if you are a listener that has emailed us, thank you for emailing and asking a question and I want to address that here. And the person asked what password managers do we use? And I personally use one password, but they've heard of Bitwarden, but they wanted to know what other password managers people are using. So, Marty and Alicia, what do you guys use currently?

I'm doing the old fashioned way and I use my head. That's a terrible way to do it, but that's what I happen to be doing at the.

Currently I am I used to use LastPass. I used to use LastPass, but then manufacturers, phone manufacturers started coming out with their own. So now I'm kind of using a combination between Samsung Pass on my phone and icloud keychain on my iPad.

Okay. So there are a lot of options out there, so it really just depends on what works best for you. And the icloud keychain is great. If you're iOS and Mac, one password is great. They have had some hit and miss and in and outs on accessibility. Bitwarden is one of the cheaper options. I know a lot of people that stick with Bitwarden, so I would consider that one. I just like one accessible.

That helps a lot.

It is accessible. Yeah. I just stick with one password because it works for me. But I think for the most part.

LastPass is free until you start adding a bunch of other devices.

Yeah, check it out.

I'm not sure what the pricing structure is, but go check out their website and see what they have to offer.

Did you say LastPass?

LastPass.

So one thing that people really need to be aware of with LastPass is they have been hacked three times and those vaults are still getting hacked into. So if you've used LastPass, I would be very hesitant to keep using them. In fact, I was just it's kind.

Of ironic that you have a password program that you're using that's been hacked three times. That kind of makes you feel a little uneasy.

Another one I've tried I think it's called Dashlane.

Dashlane, yes.

That one seems pretty inexpensive for the most part, but I don't know how accessible it is.

Yeah, Dashlane has a cool auto login feature that I really like. So I would check those out. Yeah.

Depending on the system that you're on Mac, Windows, see what's out there, what's better for you, what you like the best, how it works. It's good to experiment a little bit and see what's out there and what works the best for you.

Yes. Password managers are a very personal thing. It's what works best for you. And it's really like I like one password. Some people don't. Some people love bitwarden. I find the interface for Bitwarden to be a little confusing, but I'm looking at it from a visual standpoint. So it really just depends on your preference. Right. Also, Bitwarden and some of the others allow you to even self host your password vaults. So one password does not. It's pretty much a full paid thing. Icloud keychain that's all built in. So it just depends on do you want to pay for things? Do you want it for free? And if you do use Bitwarden, it is a very cheap version of that.

And nothing is free. I mean, even though maybe you're not making a payment out of your pocket, you're giving up something. So keep that in mind.

Convenient sometimes. So the title of the episode I thought was kind of creative because of our topic, and I titled it, is It about to Rain? And what made me think about this, I was listening to a YouTube video from this week in Tech and they were talking to a person from intel and they were talking about the fact that new intel processors are going to have a NPU, which means a neural processing unit built in. And this is the same technology that Apple is using on their M Series and A series chips for machine learning. They have the machine learning cores. You always hear about that. Ten CPU cores, 16 neural cores and all. It's like, okay, so other manufacturers are starting to do that too. And even Microsoft, on their Surface laptop, studio Two announced NPU cores, which is that neural processing unit. So it allows companies to you put images on your computer and those neural cores can recognize stuff in images like Apple's been doing for a while. That would be very okay, just a little slight tangent. That would be very interesting if in iOS 18 you could ask questions about images just like you can by uploading an image to chat GPT. That would be really cool. Definitely. But that kind of goes into what I'm talking about with this topic, is are we going to start seeing more of our AI infrastructure be moved off of the cloud and onto our devices? Because tech companies are not doing so well? The amount of money for data centers and clouds and all that is so much that it is making it to where they're having to lay people off and not being able to really do much. But I think that they're realizing that people have all of these computers and all of these things at home that they could do stuff with that they can utilize to use compute power. And if you don't have to use data center power you could just use at home compute, then why are you going to use all of that data center work and you could just save yourself money. So I wanted to have a discussion about this to say do you guys think that this is the way we're going or do we think that we're going to just stay in the cloud? And we had an interesting before I let you guys go on to that, we had a very interesting conversation on WhatsApp that really was interesting. So if y'all want to go ahead.

Now, here's my first comment about this. I think they're going to try and get as much compute on the device as possible. Of course the main reason would be because like you said, saving money, all that cloud infrastructure, all of that stuff. But here is another thought, and that is if you can do as much as you possibly can do locally, then without having to call home, you don't need an internet connection for a lot of things. A lot of things that are on board. Like, for example, turning on and off. Something like, say like you want to turn on and off voiceover. Or let's say you want to set a timer. You're cooking, you needed a timer. Or you're getting ready to crash and you need to set an alarm for the next morning. There's all of these functions that you can do that don't need to call home if you don't have to. So a you're saving a ton of money on cloud infrastructure cost a and you're also speeding up the process of being able to do certain things because you're not actually having to leave the device, call home and then come back again, then do the thing. If it's just on the device, it just does it without having to do all that middleman stuff and calling home. So I think as many things as that they can have on device, they will do, especially since we're talking about saving costs with cloud infrastructure and also the speed of what you can do if you're not having to call home. And thirdly, what if you're somewhere where you don't have any internet connection at all? It used to be that all of that stuff was only through the cloud and if you didn't have any internet, for example, then you were dead in the water. You couldn't use your for example like Siri to do anything, you just would be completely dead. It wouldn't do anything at all. So they're solving that problem as well. By going on device for as many things as possible. Now with that being said, there are just a lot of things that is impossible to keep on device if you're going to ask it to look up what's your favorite band from 1990 and what song did they sing, or whatever the case is. I mean, all those kinds of things that you need the internet for, but.

That'S what I think. So what are your thoughts on this, Alicia? What are your views on where this is going?

I think that there still will be some data that stays in the cloud. I feel like there is going to be some sort of balance between what's in the cloud and what's on the device. And the reason why I say that is because there are some things that you can only train an AI model on so much data if it's going to be stored on one device to be able to keep everyone happy with how much storage they're getting. I don't think there will ever not be AI in the cloud, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, that does. And I think it's going to be like you said, that balance. Because I think that and it's interesting because a lot of Android phones were made with very small storage amounts so that people had to use the cloud to store things. But I think even on Android we're starting to see the tides shift to be bigger phones with bigger space so that bigger models and different things can be put on the phones. And I think that we're starting to see AI being used more on device. And like Apple, I think you have to elect to download some of this stuff to be able to use it. Same with like speech synthesizers. It's interesting because I think some of the I could be wrong, but I think some of the voices in Edge and things like that, you actually could use, but only if you had an internet connection or it would cache them for a while and now I think they're offloading more of that to the computer. But what I think what we're going to see is where you have your personal LLM and it's built off of content that you have and that will be kept mostly on computer. So you could look up very simple things in your kind of like Windows Copilot maybe eventually offline, where you could say, show me all of my pictures of my family in 2018 and Copilot can go and do that or whatever, siri, if that's what they're going to keep calling it. Can do that in the next version of macOS or things like that. We're already seeing on Apple side, they've been doing this for a while where you can plug in your phone and it will go through all your photos, identifying all the objects and things in those photos all offline.

How many people do you actually think store their photos locally on Device. I mean, I feel like most people are storing in the cloud because they use up their internal hard drive on their device. If they didn't have them on the cloud, everything would be on Device.

I think there's a way you can optimize your phone storage so it downloads just like low res copies, but that's still enough to machine learn what's on your photo library on your phone.

Definitely it's still cloud infrastructure and a lot of people now want to share their photos with their friends and significant others, family members, things like that. So you still need some kind of cloud to be able to do all of those things.

But I think we're going to see for users, yeah, we definitely need a cloud. The cloud will definitely be there for backup infrastructure and things like that. But I'm thinking for compute power it will be faster for data to be downloaded from the cloud and then processed on your device instead of being processed elsewhere.

I agree with that. Yeah, definitely. If they can use the power of local onboard devices, that saves a ton in the cloud.

I have some input on that photo thing. So I for one keep photos on my device. And the reason why I do that is because I feel like the cloud is for more important things. I feel like the cloud is more for larger files, documents, maybe even videos and things like that. But photos. As for me, from a personal standpoint, my photos are going to go immediately to social media or to friends and to family. So I will still have access to those on my social media profiles and things like that. I don't really look at photos long enough to keep them in the cloud, and I don't really spend all that much time on making sure that my photos are safe and things like that, because likely they've already been texted to friends or sent as a social media post or sent in a discord server or something like that. And if I want to see those photos, I can just go find them on my social media profiles because I don't really refer to them and I don't really look at them long enough to keep them on my device. I keep them on my device and once they're out somewhere else that isn't in my hard drive or in my cloud storage, then that's where they stay.

That's very interesting. I have not been doing this often. I am a photography, it's a hobby for me. I really enjoy taking photos and so I like to take photos and I enjoy just storing them and collecting them. I have 40 gigs of photos and videos in my Icloud account.

Another thing to think about too is a lot of people aren't spending money on the top of the line phone. Most the average person is getting what they can afford and that's not a nine to one $200 phone. Typically it's something that's going to be a little bit lower level, more into like four, five, $600 range. And typically it doesn't come with nearly as much internal storage as those more expensive ones.

Right. So I have nearly 4000 photos in my library and when I started with an iPhone I used to take more photos than what I do now and I need to get back in the habit. The nice thing is I just got this new iPhone 15 Pro Max and another, getting the new phone always happens at a great time of year. And you know what that is?

The holiday season, that but the change.

Of summer to fall when it actually cools down and you actually want to get back outside and start taking pictures. So I'm going to do more of that this year. I really enjoy taking neat photos around. I love the city of Austin where I live and I want to take a lot more photos around the city and things like that. So we're going to see how well they come out this year. And the neat thing is each year I go and take photos of the same spots and you could kind of look and see, okay, that was on an iPhone Twelve, that was on an iPhone 13 Pro Max. So it's kind of neat to compare how things, the quality between the different phones, definitely.

And around this time it's a really good time because you get a lot of contrast with the falling leaves and the different colors, the browns and oranges for the fall season and stuff like that. So you get some really cool picks in this time of the season.

And we're seeing posts on the hashtag which is really neat from Michael Babcock. He found a thing called what's it called? Freedom. GPT I believe yes. And it lets you do GPT offline and you could pick from several different large language models. So that's pretty interesting. Definitely. So check out the Iacast hashtag for that information. But we had an interesting conversation in the WhatsApp group because a lot of people that work in bigger businesses, the cost of cloud people went from on premise to cloud so that they didn't have to manage their on. Premise computers. And it turned out to be a little more expensive just because you need more compute to do things, especially with the size of the world and infrastructure now and the amount of people using it. And so it's interesting with Web 3.0, we're talking about a lot of different technologies. And I think now that we're starting to look at decentralization of resources using the devices on hand and not just big server infrastructures to save money. I think that's where we're going to go in the future is know microsoft will use people's computers for processing machine learning or processing information that can normally go up to the cloud. And I think we're going to start seeing that on our mobile devices and all those because there's not many devices that don't have. Most people know we have a built in processor on our computer, the CPU. We have a graphics chip called the GPU graphics processing unit. And now we have this new processor called the NPU Neural Processing Unit. So almost every computer is starting to have that now. And it kind of reminds me of the old Dos days when we had processors, but they didn't have the math coprocessing unit. And you go to play a game, it's like, oh, you don't have that. You can't play this game. I kind of feel like we're kind of getting into that now, where we have these three essential processing parts of a computer to process this information and content.

Yeah, that's definitely interesting stuff, for sure.

So what about the privacy implications? Do you feel that it actually is more security, that more of your content is being processed on your machine? Or do you feel like, what if those companies are using your machine to process other people's data?

Yeah, that would be really interesting to even think about. I mean, is that even possible for them to use your local processing power to process other people's data? That'd be really interesting to know if they're doing that and how they're doing that. I mean, it's one thing for your own data to be more secure and processed locally on your own device, using your own processing power, but other people's information? I don't know. That's interesting to me. I don't know. Could they even do that, do you think?

Well, by law, they probably shouldn't.

Yeah, that's crazy.

But I want to call your attention to an older project. Alicia, I don't know if you've heard of this because it's been discontinued for quite some time, but Marty, did you ever remember or use the SETI at home? Yes, I did.

And you know what? That was crazy because it was like this whole I think they did it through a college. Actually, I don't remember which one, but it was like a science program in a college, and they put out the screen saver, and every time you had the screen saver running, you were processing their power. Of course, it was volunteer, and it was something that people were putting on their computers and voluntarily using their processing power. But I do remember it, and it was a whole space thing and all of that. It was pretty cool at the time, actually. I don't know if they're still doing.

It, but it has been discontinued.

Yeah, I think that was, like, in the early 2000s ish I want to.

Say it was discontinued, I think in the middle of the 20 teens or maybe later. But it was a very neat project that used decentralization of processing to process radio frequencies and things from space to look for extraterrestrial life, and that is an example of how this could be used. Right. They were kind of ahead of their time in using decentralized processing to where they didn't have to use a data center. They were just using people's background processes on their computers to process data.

And they actually kind of gamified it a little bit, if you remember, like if you downloaded the screen saver and you crunched numbers and everyone had a little bit of a different result because the more powerful your computer was, obviously the faster you could process and more you could process. But you would hit certain milestones and they would send you like a cool little SETI at home certificate. Kind of the thing saying, hey, you got to this point. So I remember that was pretty cool.

Yeah. So it's a very similar concept to what we're talking about here with moving things off of the cloud and into more processing on device. Again, I don't know how much of that would be the same as like SETI because processing other people's devices or data would be a privacy issue on your computer. But I think that now that's another concept altogether. If a company is using your computer to do processing, then should we still be obligated to pay those companies as much money as we do for subscriptions? What do you guys think about that?

I want to go back to the using your machine to process things for a second because I have some thoughts. So what I worry about is, can they use what's on your machine to understand more about you and to exploit more of your data? That is kind of the question that I'm asking because since they're using more of your machine to process all of these types of tasks, are they using your machine and the stuff that's on your machine to understand more? About you and better target you with things like ads or maybe even just exploit your data. Just use that against you, whether it be selling it or marketing stuff to you based on what's on your computer and based on how you use your computer and things like that.

Interesting point.

Yeah, definitely. I was just thinking the same thing. Definitely an interesting point. I'm not sure how that would all play out, but it's definitely something to think about. And that kind of thing is running rampant. And a lot of times there's apps and companies out there that are trying to utilize your hardware to do stuff, whether it's do something fishy or there's any number of things. But that's a really good point and that's a whole thought to think about how you would even kind of manage all of that.

But you could be guaranteed it'll be in the terms of service, because that's already happening.

If you've really thought about it. Have you ever been I mean, everyone's gone through this experience. Let me walk you through it. I bet you can say that.

That's happened.

Have you ever searched for something and then about an hour or two later gone on another app and saw an ad for that something you searched for?

Yeah, that definitely happens to a lot of people.

Right.

Or even if you're having a conversation with someone and you bring up a topic and you're talking about that just in general.

Right, and then it not even on.

The computer and then all of a sudden it shows up on your that's happened multiple times.

Right. I feel like it just kind of gives companies more data about us and helps people I don't know, I feel like it just gives people more insight on what we do with our devices and how we use our devices and what we I don't know. I feel like it's more of an invasive maneuver, if that makes any sense.

Oh, definitely. But more importantly, think about this. You're in a room with a couple of friends and you guys are just hanging out. No one's really on a computer or anything. You're just hanging out in a room and everyone's having a good time, chatting away and whatever the case is, right. And then you either pull out your phone or your tablet or whatever it is and all of a sudden the thing you were just talking about ten minutes ago was right in front of you. It's creepy feeling that's the thing is the creepiness of the weirdness of that. You could just be talking about something and then all of a sudden it's in your face. So how does that happen?

Well, certain companies have been caught leaving the microphone open to do that very thing.

Well, even if you have any of the smart speakers, I mean, the microphone has to be open some way because it's got to be listening for you to say the magic word to make it do a thing, right. So you know that they're listening. And here's another thing that's really creepy. You don't even say the word you're supposed to say to invoke. Whichever we'll say smart speaker that happens to be in the room half the time, they just start talking because they think that you said something that's supposed to invoke it but you didn't actually.

Right.

It just out of the blue starts talking.

So I want to bring up the smart speaker thing here because I don't want to make our listeners too paranoid here, okay? Smart speakers by law can only listen for their invocation word because if they were using the microphone all the time to be listening for specific things, then you would be able to track that on your internet connection. Right. So they are only listening for the invocation word as an offline mechanism for bringing up the workflow, for taking data in through dictation and transcribing it on the servers. But it is kind of funny because the invocation words are so the language that they use for the invocation words are so like, the patterns are not very good on device. Let me put it like that, because previously you could activate a Google device and device trigger warnings here, folks, by saying egg noodles or capable or even.

Hey, boo boo, that went viral.

Or if you have an Amazon, a lady device and you had the word as Amazon. I've even seen people activate by saying Amazon without the Amazon. Right.

But here's the thing to think about too. For 1 second, remove the smart speaker and say that there's no smart speakers in the room whatsoever. You're still talking about whatever topic with whoever's in the room. And then ten minutes later, you pull out your phone or your tablet or whatever the case may be, and then all of a sudden, that thing you were just talking about 1015 minutes ago in a room with some other people where nobody was on any devices or computers and there's no smart speakers. But all of a sudden now, whatever that topic was is in front of your face.

We know that companies like Meta and Google specifically have gotten around safeguards to keep the microphone from staying closed. It will open the microphone on the device whenever that app is running in the background.

Right. So again, creepy, weird, nobody interesting input there.

What's that?

So I have interesting input there. I think this might be one of their safeguards. And I think this is kind of a perceptive opinion. I think people are going to have different opinions on this. But do you know you know how Google has things where donate your data, like donate your voice data to understand what to help Google Assistant better assist you? And you know how the pixels launched with that new feature that allows people to instantly know what song is playing in the background?

Right.

I feel like those are other things that keep the mic open, and I feel like those are other pathways that are being exploited, if that makes any sense.

Yes.

And Alicia just like, you know, they're going to have something somewhere buried in the terms of service that's going to get them off the right. Just nobody spends the time to read the terms of service from beginning to end. They just want to go, agree, let me just get through the set up and let's go. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's neat, overwhelming for a lot of people. They don't understand it. It's too wordy and long, and people just don't want to take the time to try and read the whole entire thing. Plus, understanding it is a whole nother thing because typically it's all lawyer jargon, and people just gloss over their eyes just gloss over. They don't understand what they're reading, and they don't want to take the time to try and figure it out. So it's just agree. Let me get in here. Get me set up. Let's go.

I think there are websites out there that you can actually go into and look up terms of service, and they summarize it, which is kind of interesting. And I think this is worth talking about because with anything with AI or businesses in general comes a privacy concern. And it may be more convenient for you and for the business to have your data on your device and being processed on your device, but what is the cost? In the end? It might make things easier for you. But Apple's been doing this all along. When they're making more and more things on device, like picture recognition, being able to do certain AI features like removing backgrounds and all of those machine learning things is all on device from Apple. And I think that all other platforms are moving that direction because typically Apple sets the trends even though Android and others may do it first. Apple kind of sets the you know, Apple kind of did the machine learning cores first, and now, you know, Google has their Tensor chip. Samsung says they have a chip, but I think they're actually using somebody else's chip from what remember? And so we're going that route. But I think we're going to have to really kind of watch where this goes, because having things on device is one thing, but where does it end? And what are people using our devices to do? Are they using it just to make our experience better, or are they using our devices to help other people's experience better? Like a full like, oh, you're not using those resources. We'll just take care of that. We'll utilize them. That would be not cool. So I think it's a topic that is going to be important. And somebody in our WhatsApp group? Our I accessibility WhatsApp group, which, if you want to join that group, send an email to [email protected]. Somebody said it kind of flip flops in the early 2000s. We wanted everything on our computers. We didn't have good Internet, right? We didn't have the best Internet, so we needed everything to be on our computer. Well, then we got smartphones that could always be online all the time. So then let's put everything in the cloud. And if people don't know the word cloud is just a synonym for Internet, right? So let's put everything on the cloud in the Internet. Let's put it all up there. But then we're kind of realizing, oh, that's expensive. And I think that we're going to start kind of seeing that flip flop back again to be more work is done on device because we have the power to do that on device now. I think that's where we're going. And we'll be talking about this more. And I know to our listeners, this may be a more advanced kind of episode because it's more of a tech infrastructure episode, but we talk about all kinds of different topics here on the Iacast, and we do that. So that you're informed about all of these different trends and things like that, but we're already getting pretty well into the hour, so I want to see if you guys have any final comments before we go ahead and wrap up today.

This is something that just is, like you said, an ongoing conversation. Everyone has kind of a different opinion on it depending on who you are. And it's always evolving. It's like the devices are getting more powerful, so that means bigger hard drives and the security that's going on, whether you're putting more into cloud infrastructure and security to make sure that if they're doing cloud, that it's secure and that there isn't an issue, which is always a battle and it's always evolving. This is just going to be something we're going to have to pay attention to, keep an eye on and just keep reporting back because it is something that's ever evolving. It just is evolving so quickly, in my opinion, that it could change by week to week, month to month, sort of a thing. So we're going to have to keep an eye on it and see how things go moving forward.

Sounds great. Well, as we typically do, do you guys have any let's do picks and where we can be found online? So, Marty, do you want to start us off? Sure.

So my pick for this week is actually a podcast called Friday Finds with Lynn. And she's got her own feed now, and she's been rocking it. She's been doing a great job. So she talks about three different news topics, and usually they're topics that she puts kind of her spin on, which is really cool. She does a great job at it, and they're a little bit off the beaten path. They're not the same news topics that you're going to hear on every other podcast or news outlet that's out there. She kind of puts her own little spin on it and she does something a little bit different. It's really cool and fun. So I would check that out. You can find her in any podcaster, and you would search for Friday Finds with Lynn and you'll see Friday Finds with Lyn Schneider. So check that out. Subscribe in all the places you can hit her up. She's got a website also that you can check out if you want to for her show, which is called Fridayfinds Show. And if you want to reach out to her, you can do that at feedback at Fridayfinds Show. And if you want to catch up with me, then you can find me on Macedon. Marty at Unmute Community.

All right, Alicia, how about all right.

Well, um, I don't really know what my pick of the week is this week.

I know one thing you could pick.

Sure, go for it.

You're talking on it.

Oh, well, sennheiser profile, I guess. You can find me online on Macedon at blind. One lives at Techopolis Social you can find me on Facebook well, you can find me on Facebook as Alicia Geary, LinkedIn, same thing discord as Blind One Lives. And then my new website launched, so you can reach out to me [email protected].

So my pick this week is going to be another video game, and this one Alicia got me into and I can't stop playing it on my Nintendo Switch. And that is Mario Kart. Eight deluxe. Yeah, it's fun. It's a good fun game. It's easy to see. The contrast is pretty nice. So I'm having a lot of fun even playing single player. It's a really fun game, but with.

Multiplayer, we've been getting really competitive.

Yes, it's a real fun game. We all podcast together, but we all hang out throughout the week together too, so it makes it nice as being a group of friends and podcasters. So it's really so as for you could find me online, I'm Mike Doey's on most places. Mike DOE's at Techopolis social. I'm Mike DOE's on X. Michael Doey's on Facebook. You can email me at [email protected] and you can find me all over the web. So this has been another great episode of the Iacast. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks Marty and Alicia for being here today. You can also send us feedback at feedback at. We had our email that we mentioned earlier, so keep the feedback coming, keep asking questions, we'll talk about them on the show. So thank you for that and again, great episode. I think we had a good discussion. Hopefully it made people think a little bit. That's what I aim to do on this show. So we'll be back next week with another Iacast episode and we hope you enjoy the ICAST and all of our other shows on the Iacast network. So thanks again everybody, and we will see you all next time. Bye everyone.

See you everyone.

Thank you for tuning in to the Iacast. We hope you enjoyed the show and found the conversation to be insightful and informative. If you have any feedback or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Please send us an email at [email protected]. You can also follow us on Twitter at iacastnetwork to stay informed about new episodes and other updates. Don't forget to check out more great podcasts on the Iacast Network, iacast Net. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.