Dull, dirty or dangerous

How many keystrokes you’ve got left?

Oh, good question.

Oh gosh, I could probably check. I made a website… Let’s find out how many keystrokes I’ve got left. If you go to keysleft.com… And we’ll put in my keystrokes, and then we’ll find out how many. Probably a couple hundred million, but it depends on whether I’m dictating…

Left?

…in my hands.

Life expectancy.

Because you have a finite number of keys left in your hands before you die. Are you familiar with this theory?

I am.

Yeah. So you can go to keysleft.com and you put in how old you are, and then we assume that you’re typing a certain type of – I type about 80 words a minute, but about 20 of that is backspace… So I have 175 million keystrokes left in my hands…

They’ve put you at 60?

…but the keystrokes are going down, because I’m not typing right now. Because that time’s not coming back.

That’s right.

So that’s something I used to be mindful and thoughtful about.

Does 175 million give you pause? Because to me, that feels like a lot left.

Well, let’s talk about it. So if you look right here, this is what it really is, right? I mean, do I want to be writing love letters, or do I want to write emails to my boss?

You’ve got a million tweets, you’ve got 58 novels left in you…

Yeah. Or computer programs.

350 computer programs.

Of medium size. Or I could write a million emails to my boss. So when you sit down and you decide to give your keystrokes to a walled garden, whether it be a Facebook or a whatever, or your own blog… Or someone emails you. Like, we just met here in person, and I met you for the first time, and… Let’s say you send me a nice email afterwards and you go “Hey, I had a follow-up question.” You know, we’re cool, but I don’t know if I know you like 3,000-4,000 keystrokes cool… Because I might write you a whole five paragraphs, and then I send it to you and you go “Thanks.” Those keystrokes are gone. No one can google them, no one can find them… So the right thing to do is to write a blog post, put your excellent question in the blog post, turn it into a piece of media, and then send you a link.

Bam.

And then if three people read it, I’ve tripled my keystrokes. I got keystrokes back. I can sleep, and my keystrokes are working for me.

Does that work with novels?

I’ve got an idea.

Yes, sir.

Why not both?

Well, that is literally what I said. Both. Meaning that I would send you a link to the blog. And then I’ve achieved both. Or I could copy-paste.

Copy-paste, yeah. So I’m thinking, “Yes, I agree”, but maybe I’m just pedantic about flow. So is your flow communicate with me, rough draft, copy-paste a blog?

No. My flow for the last 25 years has been get an email from someone, say to myself, “That email is a gift. That is a great question. I like that question.” I’ve got an email right now I’m working on a blog post, because a gentleman had a question about being an early-in-career developer in a time of AI… And then I’ll write – the flow doesn’t matter. I’ll write six, seven, eight paragraphs. I can then copy it into a blog post. But the point is, those words can help somebody.

Sure.

So I just try to make as many artifacts that have public URLs as possible. And if you do that at scale for a quarter of a century, you will be a mid-level blogger of minor renown. [laughter]

Which is what we all aspire to.

Yes, that’s right.

Right. You too can be a C-level celebrity that got recognized on the street. Somebody thought that I was an extra on Law & Order. They were like “Were you in Law & Order?” I was like “No, I’m at Microsoft Build.” [laughter]

Yeah. How does spoken word equate to this then for you?

Yeah, dictating.

So you’re on a podcast right now… You’ve got your own podcasts, too.

Yeah, I’ve got a couple of podcasts.

That’s multiplication right there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought that there was going to be a tariff on podcasts for white guys. Are we paying that tariff?

[unintelligible 00:07:31.00]

They need to stop giving us microphones. Yeah, I started my first podcast 20 plus years ago. I’m on episode 997. So I’ve done an episode every Thursday for the last 20 plus years. And then I’ve got Azure Friday, which is on episode 800… And then I’ve got Mark and Scott Learn To, which I’ve done, and then I did a couple of popular culture podcasts, and stuff like that. All of those turn into transcripts, which turns into material… I don’t know if you saw my talk on day one of Microsoft Build, but we built a flow to reduce the toil of the transcripts, the show notes, all the tedium that you guys know very well about podcast production.

[08:10] Yes.

The part that’s no fun. The talking part, the yapping is great. I love the yap.

The necessary parts that are not as fun, yes. I don’t know though, Jerod and I have turned it into a game when naming our shows, so…

Naming is an art.

Naming’s fun, though.

Yeah, that’s true.

I don’t want the computer to take the fun part away. It’s the part where I say, “Alright, Jerod, I’ll put that in the show notes”, and then I’ll never do it.

And then you’ll forget.

I’ll totally forget.

Yeah.

Do you feel like I feel like sometimes with the coding tools, that some parts it is taking the fun part away… I kind of like some of the low-level… In the small, the function. I like writing that function.

Yeah. It makes me think about, if you remember maybe 25-30 years ago, when BMW came out with a car that was both a stick shift and an automatic?

Sure.

And you could be doing your thing in automatic… You’re like “You know, I want to get closer to the metal” and then you switch into manual. Sometimes you just want to drive stick.

Right.

So I try not to let any of these tools take away the good stuff. I want it to do dull, dirty, or dangerous.

Okay. Triple D.

That’s what robots are supposed to do. Dull, dirty, or dangerous work. But if anything’s fun, or creative, I’m not interested. I’m going to do that myself. Yeah… Spell checking is dull.

There’s several dirty jobs that I would prefer my agent to handle.

Yeah. 100%.

Do you want to list them off? What have you got?

Spray foam, man…

Spray foam, yeah.

Spray foam. I never want to do spray foam in my life.

That might be dangerous, too.

Happily pay for that service.

Spray foam like closing up a thing on your…

Right.

Like a hole in your –

Like the under–

[unintelligible 00:09:47.00]

Like the undercarriage of something.

I like watching it go –

That could be satisfying, I think.

Very satisfying.

But at scale…

Pressure washing?

Pressure washing is fun.

Pressure washing is fun for five minutes.

Yeah.

Somewhere around an hour or six… Pressure washing becomes less fun.

It’s tedious.

Pressure washing is really fun for 60 seconds on TikTok.

I want a pressure washing Roomba. Give me a robot. We’ve got the robot vacuum, we’ve got the robot…

I want to drive it.

They’re mowing lawns now.

Yeah, they are mowing… Husqvarna.

It turns out - I just learned this about robot vacuums. They don’t – not robot vacuums. Robot lawn mowers. They don’t actually cut your lawn. They shave it.

How so?

Well, I thought it was a spinning…

Yeah, like a blade.

No, it’s a sideways blade, it shaves millimeters off, and it has to run all the time. There’s a really great thing in The Verge about how the guy thought it was also spinning… But it’s too dangerous to have spinning blades on a robot, so…

I guess that makes some sense.

…it shaves the top a millimeter or two at a time. So as long as you’re running it every day, then it works.

That’s constant energy use, instead of the…

Yeah. Not good.

Yeah.

But you know, a robot let loose in the world that has a swinging blade on it does sound like –

Bad idea. I want a robot to–

Dangerous.

…to fold my clothes.

Yes.

No fun.

How about this one - do you want a robot to book your plane? Because that’s what everybody seems to be doing. Even in the demo the other day, or yesterday, in the keynote…

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about that. Like, party planning and travel… That’s all fun. I like that kind of stuff. It depends on if it feeds your spirit or not. Do you book your own travel?

I do, and I’m also kind of particular…

See?

So I just want to make sure – I’m also afraid that something’s going to get booked wrong, and it’s hard to back that out.

For example, when I got through security, and I was about to go through the check of my ID and confirming my boarding pass and all that good stuff… Well, my boarding pass was not correct, because the birth date was not correct.

Uh-oh…

For whatever reason, I was January 1st, 1999, or whatever.

Was that a human error, or a software error?

So whoever booked the flight didn’t put my correct birthday, and – I didn’t book the flight.

Oh, man… I was trying to explain to my 17-year-old the difference between a phone purchase and a laptop purchase.

You know what I mean? Where it’s like, “Hey, we’re going to go to Hawaii. Okay, I’m going to go ahead and book the flight.” Like, what are you doing touching your phone? That is a laptop moment.

That’s a serious thing.

Multi-city… Trip to Vegas, direct flight? Phone. Multi-city European trip? Laptop.

[12:09] Yeah, good point.

There’s just a moment where the screen needs to be bigger. You’ve got to open a couple of tabs.

Yes.

Security.

That’s the difference, I think, between talking to a chatbot - phone. Agentic system - laptop. That same kind of emotional weight. Again, I’ll book a flight to Portland, to San Francisco on my phone. I won’t even worry about it. But if there’s a layover, I have feelings. I know which airports I know I can get through, I know which airports I want more space at…

Right. It’s like you have to have the right amount of ceremony to give credit or respect to those –

But that gets to human in the loop, right?

Yes.

Like, if there was a human in the loop, you would have caught the birthday thing. If there was a human in the loop, you’d say “Well, I want a longer layover.” And that’s where, if you have an executive assistant that really knows who you are, they might be able to do that. But I don’t have executive assistant money.

Right. Most people –

But you do have executive assistant agent money.

Well, but then that gets into the slippery slope of trying to replace humans with agents. And I’m not interested in that. So then we have to start asking ourselves what toil is.

You don’t have a human currently, though.

I don’t have a human currently.

So you’re not replacing a human.

Fair. But that would argue that if my job got fancy enough or the stuff I have to do got fancy enough, that I would get a human, and hopefully I would have interesting and creative work for them.

So what if the baby step to having that possible human is saying “Look, higher ups, this is how much more productive [unintelligible 00:13:30.07] with an agent. I think a human in the loop is actually better, but –”

But then I want the human to control the agents, because then I’d be hiring a chief of staff.

You have agents and agency…

Back to why not both? Agent and human.

Here’s the thing. There’s some really interesting work that’s being done by this young lady named Maggie Appleton, who talks about the UI of AI. We are trying to figure out as a community what this stuff is supposed to look, is supposed to feel like. You see people naming agents, giving them names, anthropomorphizing these things… Other people are going out of their way to not anthropomorphize them. Sometimes they’ll name them with the title of the job, or they’ll give the “This is Bobby, the travel agent”, or whatever. And other people will say “No, no, I don’t want to do that. It’s not a person.” But the brain keeps telling you that it’s a person, because it talks. The Open AI models breathe, and pause awkwardly, and stuff like that…

Right.

I am not interested in – if you’ve ever seen Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams, when he’s a robot that helps the family for 200 years? I would like it to be more like Star Trek, The Next Generation. Like, you never thought the computer had a name or a personality.

Right. [unintelligible 00:14:40.06] Just computer.

It was just computer. Right. Remember, Scotty’s going, “Computer”, talking into the mouse… Those kind of things where – it’s your excited intern, it’s your enthusiastic research librarian. I don’t know that the research librarian’s an expert, but they might know people who are. So you get this kind of orchestrating chief of staff, or orchestrating business manager. That’s what I think would be cool.

Right.

But then I would want it to say, “Alright, here’s three flights I put together. Which one do you like?” and nudge me in the right direction. That part’s tedious, but I want to keep my hands on the steering wheel.

Yeah, we were just talking yesterday with Amanda Silver about that with regards to SRE and some of the cool new features and availability of these agents who are basically keeping watch so you don’t have to have anyone on pager duty… And then there’s also that moment where it’s like, you have agents talking to agents in the middle of the night, trying to do the right thing in order to not have a cascading failure… But man, you can sure create some cascading failures. You’d think if there’s no humans around, and then they just come in in the morning and hope everything went right… So I think we have to ease into these things.

[15:49] The way I’ve been looking at it is it’s the year of our Lord 2025, and there are companies that don’t have good source control practices. They don’t have DevOps. They don’t have a build server. I was making build servers in the late ‘90s, and it’s 30 years later and you can show up at the IT department of Little Debbie Snapcakes, or the chief architect in the Nebraska Department of Forestry… Just regular Joes and Janes, just doing their job, at the kind of fundamental meat and potatoes, bread and butter kind of companies, and they may not have – maybe Little Debbie is very sophisticated. I don’t know them. But I’m just pointing out just the regular places that aren’t Microsoft, Google, Netflix or whatever. And they’re just trying to have a clean build, good tests… If you throw agentic at that and they don’t have good software development practices, it’s just going to be messy.

Right.

But in their workflow of “Alright, we’re going to start doing unit tests. We’re going to start doing build servers. We’re going to start doing branches. We’re going to have really sophisticated branching systems, and we know how to do a release.” If you’re releasing your software off of like Jeff’s laptop, there’s a software maturity problem there. I think agentic makes mature processes even better.

Fair.

But if you just throw this wombat into the pile, it’s just going to mess everything up. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah. Well, there’s a whole spectrum of adoption, and a lot of people – I mean, there’s probably still pen and paper out there in many cases… Sometimes pen and paper is actually a decent solution for specific jobs, but there’s lots of times where companies should – right now they’re like “We should be using spreadsheets.” Or there’s people using spreadsheets like “We should be using a full database.” And there’s people using databases… You know, there’s that spectrum.

Yeah. Like when your company started on a piece of paper, and then it moved to Airtable… Like, when do you graduate from Airtable to a database? And then a database to like CosmosDB. And a world database. Or Data Lake, or whatever that stuff is. And then should you architect it that way to start with, or should you just make sure that you can grow with such things?

I’m an advocate of as late as possible.

Exactly. Good problem to have, they always say. Will it scale? I don’t know… If it doesn’t, that’ll be a good problem to have.

Right.

Yeah. But I’ve got my podcast that we mentioned before, and I’ve got my Hanselman.com… Like, Hanselman International. It’s like, just me.

Right.

And in the old days, it was a physical server in a closet. And then it was a physical server on a shelf in a data center. And then it was a VM. And then I started to realize that it was slow for people in Australia, so then I got a CDN, and then I realized that the website was slow for people in Japan, so then I geodistributed it… And back in the day, to do something like geo-load-balanced websites would have required me to hire a consultant and fly them in, and they would configure like a rack.

For sure.

You know what I mean? And from the business person’s perspective, from my vice president’s perspective, they would say “Hey, Scott, scale the system out”, and then they’d go golfing. And I would go to a PC micro center and physically buy the machine and rack it. Like, I’ve racked servers.

The good old days…

Yeah, man….

[laughs]

I worked at a company called 800.com, 800.com. We sold three DVDs for a dollar. And they’ve got bought by overstock.com. So I’m in the trenches, pre-cloud. And then now – like, the whole second page of my resume is just how to scale websites. Because you’re not supposed to have multi-page resumes. But now it’s just a checkbox. So like everything that I spent 10 years learning how to do is a checkbox or a slider bar in Azure. So I’m kind of like “Oh…” So now I have a two-page resume. It’s page one and page three.

You can get rid of that page.

That page doesn’t do anything anymore. And then the young people are like “Oh, this website’s taking minutes to scale. Ugh!” Like, I used to work all weekend, while my boss golfed. So I don’t – I used to mourn that. I’d be like “Yeah, back when we used to do it manually…” But now I’m like “Okay, we’ve figured that part out.” We’ve figured out how to scale websites, and now it’s a checkbox, and I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. So now Hanselman International is me. And Azure Cloud, and Kubernetes, and all these kind of cool things… So then it’s like “Well, you know, it’s 2025… Should I really be googling for how to center a div?” That’s dirty, dangerous, and dull.

Yeah, it’s all three. [laughs]

[20:09] All three of those. Potentially – centering a div… People can die. So I would assign that to an agent. But hopefully, that would not be something that would be considered creative work. But I’m certainly not going to say to the agent “Make this prettier.” That’s the part I want to do. That’s the fun part.

Right.

Sure.

But that’s going to make my little side hustle more helpful, if I don’t have to do the show notes… Or at least they give me draft show notes that I can then zhuzh up a little bit.

Right.

So we’ll see when you run the transcript if it spells zhuzh right.

We will see. We have a human –

How do you spell it, zhuh?

Z-H-U-Z-H.

There you go. Alex will take care of it. We have a human.

You have a human? See, I pay a human as well. So I pay a human to do my podcasting [transcripts], because humans are good.

They are good.

I like humans.

And you’re speaking to a human right now, because he listens…

That’s his name, Alex?

Yeah.

Alex.

Thank you, Alex, for your work.

Alexander.

Thank you, Alexander, for your work.

I’ve been working with for… Gosh –

A decade?

Eight – yeah, I mean like, a long time…

See? My editor, Mandy Moore - she’s a great podcast editor. She’s been a pro for my production… And I’m going to hopefully give her some of the agents that I built to make her job easier.

Right.

But that doesn’t make the artistic aspect of her job different.

Gotcha. Yeah. I follow Mandy on LinkedIn.

Yeah, so you know her, because she did [unintelligible 00:21:26.17]

That’s right.

I don’t know her, but I know of her…

Well, because in the podcast space, the professionals are a small group.

Few and far between.

Yeah.

Yeah, we don’t meet up enough, I think, maybe. I don’t know.

Well, we get on Zoom or Riverside and talk to each other like this…

That’s right.

Yeah. Isn’t it funny how Riverside and Zencaster have become the places that we do our video calls?

Yeah. [laughs]

And then we’re like “I can’t share my screen.” Well, sorry, you’re doing a podcast. This is not Zoom.

It’s not Zoom…

Yes…

You mentioned before you sat down about dealing with some stuff… Can you allude to some of the stuff? What can we talk about in that juicy mess you may have put on our table here?

I just try to have as much empathy as possible for people who don’t have jobs anymore. That’s challenging. We had a layoff last week and it was very sad.

You know, I wasn’t sure, that kerfuffle that happened during the keynote… I couldn’t hear him. I asked Jerod afterwards –

Oh, the protestors?

It was about Palestine…

Yeah, yeah.

I thought he was disgruntled. It was just so close, the proximity to –

No, no. That’s a totally separate thing.

I just wasn’t sure what it might have been, but… I was speculating, but in my brain I was like “What’s happening?”

No, no, I hear what you’re saying. A lot of people in a lot of different spaces have valid reasons to be upset about a number of things… So yeah. It’s a complicated world right now, and it doesn’t fit in a tweet.

Right.

I didn’t pay attention to the reason for the layoffs, or whatever. Was there a reason ever stated for why layoffs? It just happens…

I don’t know, I think they released some kind of a thing… But it’s like, changing business conditions. You know how those things are. It’s complicated when you’re in such a giant company… Because I am a group, and Amanda is a group, and our group is like a startup within the larger machine. And Microsoft and all these other big companies, whether it be Google or Meta, there’s like – if you think about Meta, there’s WhatsApp, and then there’s the open source folks… And then like – it’s like, my team runs like the OSPO, the open source programs office, and we run the Visual Studio subscriptions business, and we run education. So I’ve got a portfolio of stuff that I run… But Microsoft also has Xbox, and all these other things. So it’s a giant thing. I feel like I’m like Rhode Island, and there’s 49 other states that I’m also learning about what they’re doing in those states…

That’s a good way to put it though, it’s like a mini company in a company.

Yeah, and we have our own culture, and our own vibes…

Is that how you feel then about the way you lead, and what you lead, is that you feel like you run like a mini business within?

Yeah.

Are you responsible for like your revenue targets, your product targets, your user targets [unintelligible 00:23:57.25]

[23:59] Yeah, because everyone has different goals. I came to work at Microsoft like 16, 17 years ago, to do open source. I don’t know if you know the story, but long story short, I had just finished working at a company called Corillian, that got bought by CheckFree, and then Fiserv, and I was the chief architect of this big banking system… And I had introduced open source to a lot of banks. And banks are very regulated environments, so open source and banks doesn’t usually match. And then I ended up meeting Scott Guthrie at FOO Camp, Friends of O’Reilly. Tim O’Reilly used to hang out and have these folks visit… And I was down there, in their backyard, where they had set up some tents, and I met Scott Guthrie. And he’s like “Yeah, we’re looking at Ruby on Rails, and thinking about what the .NET version of that is”, and it’s like 2003 or 2004, and I was like “We should make .NET on Nails.” And I thought that’d be cool. They didn’t like that name. And we ended up making ASP.NET MVC, and we’re like “We should be open source.” And I was doing open source, and he seemed really cool, and I said I want to work remotely from Portland, and he’s like “Sure, no problem.” So I’ve been remote the entire time, my entire team is remote, spread all over the place… And fast-forward all these years later, with folks like Scott Hunter, and David Fowler, and all these other leaders in the .NET space… C# and .NET are open source and run everywhere… And we went from a place where the lawyers would always say no by default, and now they say “Yes, and…” Like good improv.

I was going to say, what’s the and?

Well, “Yes, and.” Do you know about the “Yes, and” theory?

I do. In improv? Yes.

Yeah. So that’s the whole point.

[unintelligible 00:25:29.10]

“Yes, and we can do this, and we could also open source that… And have you thought about this license? And…” They’re partners. Rather than being haters, they are like “Yeah, let’s do some cool stuff.” And then we open sourced DOS, if you remember, a couple of – a year and a half ago. Why? Why not?

And WSL just yesterday.

Yeah, and WSL yesterday. And pull requests are already coming in. Why? Why not? Because it’s awesome.

And GitHub Copilot, or some aspect of it.

Oh, yeah. That one’s cool.

That’s a huge one, right?

So Copilot, the Visual Studio Copilot… So Visual Studio Code is open source. But the Copilot extension wasn’t. Now it is.

So you’ve got a whole open source AI editor thing going there.

Do you know why it wasn’t in the first place, and why it is now?

I don’t know about the business stuff… That’s a couple of layers above me. But I do know that if you’re a business that’s built on open source, but then you have – they call it open core, where you create something and then you have plugins. Redis did this…

Sure.

…where you have the base thing that everyone can use, and you provide it as a service, and then you have some special herbs and spices that are custom, and then you pay for those plugins. So for example, if you want to do the C# DevKit and do sophisticated debugging on Visual Studio Code, you would then sign in with your Visual Studio subscription. But then for the longest time, GitHub Copilot’s extension was not open source, which means we couldn’t build on top of it. So if I had a cooler AI thing and I wanted to use their APIs, I couldn’t.

Right.

So usually, they hold them back and they kind of like – it’s like putting your finger on the chess piece before you make the move. You’re looking around the table and you’re like “I think this is cool. I’m going to make that move.” And they chose to make the move to make it a fully open source AI editor. And then hopefully, people will build on top of that with other stuff, other herbs and spices of their own.

Yeah. I think that’s really cool. I think – I wonder if it’s a reaction to the Cursors and the Windsurfs, and everybody who’s taken VS Code, forked it and built their own kind of GitHub Copilot challengers…

Yeah, yeah. That’s what happens when you do R&D for the entire internet.

Yeah. And then they get huge user bases, and then everyone’s like “Well, now GitHub Copilot’s also open source.” So it’s kind of taken their custom thing and said “Well, it’s kind of taking the open source foundation and raised it up a level.”

Yeah. Well, I actually think about it in terms of like a rising tide lifts all boats. Theoretically, that extension can now be used, and is open source, and people can explore it and make stuff better. So it’s kind of a coopetition, a thumb war of kinds. Like “Well, okay, you’re going to do that? Well, I’m going to do that.” “I’m going to do that, and I’m going to make it free.” “I’m going to do that, and I’m going to make it open source.”

[28:01] Theoretically, the whole point of this kind of free market capitalism is that everything gets better for everyone. Whether or not that happens or not is some macroeconomics person’s job to figure out. But from my perspective, if something becomes open source, it’s a good thing. I came here to open source everything. I open sourced 3D Movie Maker.

I used to play 3D Movie Maker back in the day.

And they’re like “Why?” They literally asked me what the business reason was for open sourcing 3D Movie Maker. And me and Jeff Wilcox wrote “It’s delightful.”

[laughs] I love that. “It’s delightful.”

And they were like “Okay, let’s do it. Are you going to do the work?” “Yeah, we’ll do the work.”

Yeah.

What’s the business value in open sourcing DOS? Yeah, it’s delightful.

Yeah.

Software preservation.

Yeah. Goodwill, preservation… Why not…

Why not? Because people don’t do stuff on the internet just because it’s awesome. Just do it because it’s awesome.

Break: [28:59]

What’s left to open source then?

Windows.

Oh, my gosh…

Is that coming? Is that gonna happen?

No, but it would be cool. What if I open source – I’ve got to start small, though. We’ve got to do like Windows 3.1. And Windows 95. You’ve got to raise the boiling point of the water until they don’t notice.

Right.

You’re on the inside, so you probably can’t answer this question… But how much do you like Windows?

Well, see, this is the thing, man…

[laughs]

Here’s the deal.

He can’t answer it.

I would put it like this… How much do you like JavaScript?

Listen, I want to tell you before we even answer this…

No, I’m going to answer it.

…this is not an attack, at all… But please, understand my perspective. I have been a non-Windows user for 20 years.

Recently went back to Windows, and loved it. Except. The positive things –

Oh, yeah? What did you not like?

[32:10] I think that there’s some semi-user hostile things where you just inject it with certain things…

Oh, this is good.

…that’s just the Microsoft way…

No, dude, let’s fight. This is great. I love this. First, let’s talk about this. First, you said “How much do you love Windows?”

Yes.

And you said “You probably won’t be able to answer this.”

Can you answer it? Watch me.

Okay, let’s answer it then.

Alright.

Do you like JavaScript?

I mean, sure.

Alright. Do you like English?

Sure.

Alright. You’re, like, cool with it, right?

I’m cool with English.

Do you feel that English and JavaScript are really doing the jobs that they need to be doing? Alright, do you feel that those are the languages that we deserve?

I don’t know, I’ve never thought of it.

Are there any better languages, that are like better at like poetry, or love, or haikus?

Oh, for sure.

Are there other cooler languages?

Sure…

Like, Finnish. Finnish is a pretty cool language. Why didn’t that one win?

I don’t know.

So English is this language, it’s the one that we have. It’s the language of the internet.

Right. It’s malleable, that’s one reason…

But it also steals ideas from here and ideas from here…

Right, which is kind of malleability…

…like, you know, [unintelligible 00:33:04.08] and burrito. These are all borrowed words. JavaScript. Like, someone makes it –

Bidet.

Bidet, another good one. Fillet. I heard someone’ – yeah, my wife calls it fillet. She says it’s a fillet.

Oh, okay.

Everyone pronounces it differently, and these are all different things.

Tarjay… Target is Tarjay…

Yeah. Jacqueline Pinay…

There you go.

It’s when you go to JCPenney. But it’s fancy.

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Jacqueline Pinay…

Yeah, it’s true.

Never heard that one.

Yeah, because we’re very fancy.

I like that.

So the point I’m making is that languages grow, operating systems grow, they beg, borrow, and they steal from Xerox PARC, or from here, or from there, and all these different kinds of places. But people will go and say “I don’t like Windows”, like they have some kind of generational pain, because maybe they tried Windows years ago, they don’t like it… I like Windows, but I also don’t like the advertisements, or I don’t want like Candy Crush in my start menu, and all kind of stuff like that. So I have scripts to strip all that out. So I’m always –

Which one did you use?

What’s that?

The Titus one?

I use one that Clint Rutkas wrote, that basically – I use Winget. So Winget is like apt-get, or Homebrew… So you can say “winget configure” and then you can set all of your settings in Windows.

No way…

So it’s kind of like dotfiles for Windows.

Yeah. Do you have a YouTube on this yet?

I could do one probably.

Please do. I’ll watch it.

I’ll make you one. So this is a Copilot PC. We’re looking at two Macs right here… And it’s got everything that I need, it turns on and off, I can put it in my bag without it getting hot… All that kind of stuff that Windows laptops have had a bad history with. I think people have this kind of like remembrance of Windows 10 years ago.

Yeah.

Sure.

And it’s like “Ah, Windows killed my pappy…” [laughter] You know what I mean? During the browser wars… And they’re just kind of like this is ongoing generational pain.

Yes.

But yeah, I don’t want a little advertising in my start menu, I want my start menu to be clean, you know… But it is now, but I do have to do a little bit of work. So I’m always pushing for that kind of stuff. But then if you look at your Macs, I would challenge you on like Finder hotkeys. Or like take a mouse away from a Mac user, and watch them struggle.

Because they’re going to immediately go into the command line and do everything from there. Because you all don’t have hotkeys –

What’s wrong with command lines?

But that’s not really an operating system anymore, from a UI delight perspective. Being able to go and do hotkeys like that, and move around like this… That just doesn’t exist on a Mac. I’m jumping around inside of my Windows machine for those of you who can’t see this… I would challenge someone to like open the Finder, copy a file to another folder, or to a shared folder, without using the mouse. So like those kind of things –

Copying to somewhere else could be hard.

But you know what I’m saying…

I use Raycast, so it adds some things to Windows…

But you had to add it.

Yeah. And that’s true, too.

Exactly. And I use the new command palette, which is like Raycast.

I think the new command palette is pretty awesome. There’s a lot of things you’re doing I’ve never done before. This zoom in thing…

So you’re watching me do a lot of cool stuff. It’s pretty cool.

Yeah. Drawing on it, and making faces… Did you just say “I love you”? Oh, gosh… [laughter] Scott Hanselman loves Adam Stacoviak. Yes!

[36:08] And then there’s click to do type stuff… So right now I just held down the Windows key and the whole screen just turned color, and I can go and summarize or create a bullet list from information that’s on the screen…

This is dope, man.

There’s a lot of cool stuff that’s going on… But people don’t want to use it because they’re like “Well, I hated Windows 8.”

Well, let’s work on that. The reason why I asked that question was not because I’m a hater.

No, I don’t think you’re a hater.

It’s because I’m actually a recent convert, where I say “Why not both?” Why don’t I have a Mac in some of my more creative environments…

Yeah. Well, yeah. I’ve got my iPhone…

And I love building PCs, you know? So I love to build that kind of stuff, and I’m like – my AI playground is a Windows machine.

Oh, for real?

Running Ollama. Yeah.

Oh, really? Have you tried LM Studio?

Not yet.

Oh, man. So good.

So I’m trying to explore. And Windows took me there, because I didn’t want to run Linux proper in that case. I really wanted to play with Windows. And WSL - that’s where we’re going with this, is that WSL is this ability to bring these worlds together, which I just thought was super, super-cool, what WSL has done for Windows, in my opinion, for those who want to be Linux junkies, as well as typical, everyday PC user.

Yeah. So for example, right now – again, doing a little bit of color commentary for those who are on the audio aspect of this here… I just am at the command line, and I type in Z, and I’m using some tools here, like Oh My Posh, and you can see that I’ve got a very colorful command prompt… That’s my blood sugar. I’m type 1 diabetic, so that’s an actual real-time readout of my blood sugar. That’s the fact that I’m on a dev drive, so that’s a refs, a reliable file system. I’ve moved from the C drive to the D drive. That is a different file system that’s faster.

I’ve got a bunch of modifications that I’ve made to make Windows delightful. You can see now I’m going to jump into a folder and see my Git repository mentioned right there… I’ve got icons and color in my directory… We just released an editor. If you’re familiar with things like TurboVision, we’ve got an editor that’s like Nano, but prettier, so you don’t get stuck in Vim and have to reboot your computer because you don’t know how to exit…

And then being able to go like this - I’m just going to pull the command prompt down and hold down Alt while I push Ubuntu. And then on the right-hand side here I’m popping Ubuntu up next to this, and then running something like Htop… And then from here, I can go and type the GIMP, if I have the GIMP installed, and then that’s going to jump out. And now I’m running a Linux app directly. And I’m on ARM this entire time.

Yes.

So for folks who can’t see –

Why is that a big deal, being on ARM?

Because I didn’t notice that I was on ARM. The great thing when Apple moved to the M class chips was that nobody noticed. There was a moment there where it was like “Apple Silicon or Intel? Which one do I want to pick?” And now we’re getting to the point where everything just works. So you can’t really tell what’s an x64 executable and what’s not.

Because they’re so fast.

Because it’s so fast. And I can go and hit Docker, and then load up Docker on this particular machine, and spin up Kubernetes, and then do all this kind of work… Bring up Ollama… And then I’ve got the NPU. So right now I’m opening up the task manager and dropping it in here. Let me go ahead and turn this off. This was on Always on Top. So now I’m inside of the task manager, and I’m showing the gentlemen that we have a CPU, a GPU, and an NPU. So if you look in here, I’m zooming in… I’ve got my 32 gigs RAM, my CPU… This right here is where AI can happen. So I can run small language models on the neural processing unit, which means I could do airplane mode work. I’m on an airplane, and I’m doing AI work. That’s cool. All those things are going to get better. Now, it’s not perfect, but it’s getting there. It’s getting pretty cool.

Why is that running on the NPU?

Ah, so if you think about the processing units, the PUs (I’ve just made that up)…

Right, you’ve got the CPU, which is the central processing unit…

Central processing unit. That’s your general purpose running stuff.

[40:11] Operating system, garbage collection, RAMs, all that stuff.

It’s your orchestrator.

Yeah.

Then you’ve got your GPU, which is really good at triangle math… So you want to run a game, your GPU is going to do that. Or if you’re going to run Ollama or something like that, depending on whether or not you want to target that… But your GPUs tend to be hot, and they tend to use a lot of power. We all know that you drop an NVIDIA into a machine, you’re going to have another power supply, 750 watts. I’ve got a really nice NVIDIA at home, I’ve got a 4080 Super, and it also heats the downstairs, which is nice.

I think I have a Corsair 1500, I think. I over-provisioned.

You over-provisioned.

I was afraid.

So you know, you need that power, right?

I did not want [unintelligible 00:40:52.20]

I’m talking heaters.

The human brain uses 20 watts of power. Why am I burning a thousand on a GPU?

We’re not quite there yet.

Now, an NPU is a coprocessor, a neural processing unit, that’s good at a certain kind of math. Certain kind of tensor-based matrix math. It’s a super-efficient thing. So you don’t run your video games on the CPU, you run it on a custom processor. But you would be sad if you had some – I’ll just say like a Snapchat filter. You know, that feature that moves your eyes to make it look like you’re looking at the person on Teams, or whatever…

Yeah… It’s kind of creepy.

It is kind of creepy… But your iPhone’s been doing it…

It’s kind of fun, though.

…the fun part is that your iPhone’s been doing it for years and no one ever thought it was creepy.

Oh, really?

But when Windows does it, people are like “Hey, what’s going on, man?”

When’s your iPhone doing it?

Your iPhone started doing it around iPhone 11, when you were on FaceTime. They move your eyeballs. It’s called gaze correction.

Oh. I’ve never used FaceTime.

Well, there you go.

[laughs] “I’ve never used FaceTime.”

Now you know, right?

I don’t think I have, I just realized.

The point is, let’s say that gaze correction was a thing…

Oh, that’s hilarious.

…and then you look at your CPU and you see 20%. And you’re like “20%?! I don’t want to give up 20% of my CPU for this.” You want to offload that to something that’s going to use less power, less heat, and it’s going to do it really efficiently. And that’s what an NPU does. Now, I was teasing you guys at the beginning… I don’t know if we have that B-roll about how old we are. And I think I’ve got 10 years on you. How old are you, sir?

46.

Okay. So we’re a little bit more contemporary. So I got six years on you. Do you remember the 486 –

You were born in ’73.

January ’74.

Okay.

Do you remember the 486 DX?

No.

Okay. So the 486 DX and the 486 SX differed in a really interesting way. The DX had a coprocessor, meaning it could do floating point. And the SX didn’t. So then Intel’s sitting around, going “What are we going to do? This one can do floating point.” And Microsoft is just like “Hey, what about Excel? We can make Excel better if you have a coprocessor. And people will buy this and it’ll do cool stuff.” So then people who don’t need a coprocessor save money, they use an SX. People who want a coprocessor and they want to do floating point, they get a DX. And Excel ran better when you had that.

Then we had things like the Intel MMX instruction set and different instruction sets… Those instruction sets have largely been kind of hidden from us. Your computer just gets faster when a new AMD or a new Intel chip comes around. An NPU is a coprocessor. It’s an AI coprocessor. So you have it, it lights up, it works better. So you can run Ollama, or AI Toolkit, or LM Studio on the CPU. It’s fine. It’ll maybe do some number of tokens per second.

Right.

Then you do it on the GPU and it’ll do twice as many tokens per second. But it’ll be hotter, it’ll waste a lot of power. Or you can do it on the NPU, and it’ll do even more. I think this NPU does 40 trillion operations a second.

Okay.

[43:47] It’s very specific. It’s not a CPU, it’s a tensor-based AI coprocessor. So if I were to go into something like this - I’m just going to grab a folder here. I can run the AI Toolkit, but I think on this machine here, I have a copy of LM Studio, Language Model Studio. This is just a partner. They’re very nice folks. My buddy works there. So I’m loading up LM Studio here, which is kind of like Postman for AI. Just like the Microsoft AI Toolkit, you can get that for free, or Ollama, or Foundry Local, which we launched. I can open up Foundry Local and I can say “Hey, I want to run a particular model.” I’m going to load up LLaMA. This is a 3 billion parameter model. Okay. And then I’m going to open up the Task Manager, and we’re going to see this local model. I’m going to switch it actually into airplane mode, because I think that’s important to show… Because sometimes people do demos and you don’t believe them, because you’re like “Yeah, this guy’s full of crap.”

Yeah, “He’s pulling a quick one on us.”

Okay. So now, look at this. So now, suddenly my NPU has three gigs of memory used up. You can see the moment there. Now I’m going to say “Hey, AI.” Let’s say I have some hand issues, so I’m going to dictate… “Hey, tell me a long story.” Hey, stop talking. I’m dictating. There we go. So I just said “Hey, tell me a long story.” I’m going to hit Enter. I’m in airplane mode.

You’re going to light that thing up.

All that work is happening there, in the NPU. Look at my CPU, it’s at 12%. CPU is chillaxing. You’ve got more than one processor in your machine to do the stuff that you want to do.

And why is this better? This inference – this is called inference, right? This inference - you’re running the model, you’re asking a question, it’s inference. In this case, it is doing generative pre-trained transforming, and inference is a piece of that pipeline of work that is being done.

You’re not training the model though. This is a whole different –

I’m not training. In this case – oh, that’s a great point. I would train it on the GPU, and I would squish it down, I would distill it down to its fine-tuned bits, and then I would give it to you. So another great example, there’s a company called Cephable. They’re a partner. And he makes an application for people who are disabled or differently abled to be able to play video games and control their computers.

Let’s say that you have mobility issues and you can only move your face. And you want to make it so moving your eyebrows up hits the Space bar. So you have a camera going at 30 frames a second, 50 frames a second, 60 frames a second… Who does that work? CPU, GPU or NPU? Well, I want that to be instantaneous. If I’m playing Mario and I’m going to move my eyebrows and I’m going to jump each time the Mario guy goes, I want that to be 20 milliseconds, 10 miliseconds. But if I send it to the cloud, that’s got a privacy concern, there’s issues there… If I’m going to do it on the GPU - well, I should be doing graphics in the GPU. If I do it on the CPU, then other background work can’t happen. So he has a custom model that runs on this Snapdragon processor that is going to do that work there. So all the work happens entirely privately, locally, in minimal time, using no other resources, and it’s showing an orchestration of this work. So then he can have custom accessible controllers, he could smile… Moving your eyes and smiling - these could all control the computer, entirely local on the machine.

Or another example would be an app called Pieces, Pieces.app. The fellow’s walking around here somewhere… He’s got like a Copilot for programmers that is the space in between your apps…

Yes. He’s here?

Yeah, he’s here, dude.

You should introduce us.

He’s so cool. I’ll introduce you. He’s the best.

What do you mean the space between your apps? What do you mean?

Pieces is great. So –

We’ve got to be able to work together. We’re sponsored, so we’ve been trying to get them as a sponsor…

Oh, dude, I’ll text him right now.

I think we’ve had attempts, and stuff like that, but there’s been some – I’ve been a fan.

Yeah, he’s the best. I’ll text him. “Hey, you should come hang out with the Changelog in podcasts area C.” Okay, I just texted him.

Awesome.

[47:53] So Savo is his name. So Pieces will watch the work that you’re doing, and instead of like Recall, where it’s looking at the screen, it’s actually looking at the clipboard in your tabs and stuff, because you’re installing extensions. So if you use VS Code, you install an extension. You use Edge, you install an extension. You use Jira, you plug in an extension. And then as you’re working, you go “Hang on a second… Wasn’t I talking to so-and-so about that on Tuesday? What was that I was looking at? Oh, you were on Stack Overflow, exploring bubble sorts, so I can get that information for you.” So it’s permissively watching that stuff, and then the work happens locally…

Nice.

…using tools like Ollama, or Phi, running on the NPU.

Gotcha.

All that work happens locally. So suddenly, things light up on the co-processor. So that’s the promise. That’s the idea.

I think it’s kind of cool.

That’s a cool idea.

That is super-cool.

Break: [48:39]

So I want to do that at the network level in my house. So my house has private AI…

Yeah, you can totally do that with Home Assistant.

So how does this apply?

You could do that with Home Assistant. So let’s say that you Paulus Schoutsen’s Home Assistant with the Nabu Casa company. Paulus made a Home Assistant - what you would do is you’d make a Home Assistant extension to talk to one of these APIs. So if I go into like Foundry Local, Foundry Local starts up a local server running entirely here, in airplane mode. But let’s say we block access to the internet, and we have only the intranet available. Then I want to be able to talk to local hosts, one, two, three, four, or whatever… It makes an Open AI-compatible REST endpoint. So then you can talk to the local model. Everything stays inside your house. You would use the NPU or the GPU, or whatever you have. You’ve got a good computer already… So I would use like–

I have a GPU only.

Yeah, so use that.

It’s an RTX 3090.

There you go. That’s great. [unintelligible 00:50:41.14]

So you would do that over the NPU.

I would use what you have.

Of course. But like –

So if you have an NPU, use that.

Adam wants to buy some new stuff.

He wants to buy new stuff.

“What should I buy?” [laughs]

I want the best stuff, so yeah, I was trying to understand…

It depends on the best stuff. So it depends on the best stuff. If you want to run small models, an NPU is the best speed, the best –

For a laptop.

For a laptop.

Okay. I understand.

And I think in the future we’ll see this on desktops.

You think so?

Oh, yeah. I don’t know how it’ll look like, but –

How small is small?

Well, so I think that – if you look at how Apple Silicon is… What they call an SOC, right? It’s all in a system on a chip. You’ve got Intel NPUs, you’ve got Qualcomm NPUs. It’s just going to be another section of the chip dedicated to doing that. And then the Onyx runtime will just light up. So just like you have TPMs, and GPUs, and your machine just goes, “Oh, you’ve got one of these? I’ll do better because you have this thing.”

It’s kind of like that motherboard chipset that’s on there, right?

Yeah.

It’s like, when you buy a motherboard, the reason why it gets upgraded to do like 10-gigabit Ethernet versus not, or like 2.5 or 1, is because there’s a chipset that can handle instructions, and you could do things like RAID, and NVMe, and how many PCIe slots can you configure…

[52:00] So each generation of system adds new op codes, effectively. Like, we talked about the early days 30 years ago with the 486, then things like MMX, the multimedia extensions for the Pentium, etc. Some of them make it on the front page of a non-tech RIP, and some of them don’t. NPUs, I think, are the next thing, because everyone’s going to have NPUs. And then the Onyx runtime and runtimes like it will hide that from us… Just like you don’t really think about whether you have an NVIDIA or another 3D card; things like DirectX hide that from you. So you’re going to have a layer on top of that work. Yeah, it’s cool.

That’s cool.

But I like the idea. You really nailed it, because I use the Home Assistant example. It’s great, because Home Assistant is trying to be private Alexa in your house, that you can run in airplane mode. And by an airplane mode, you pull the wire for Comcast cable to your house…

Right, privately.

…can you still do stuff? Can you still turn the lights on and off? I’ve got a Raspberry Pi running a Home Assistant, and then I’m going to swap it out for a Home Assistant Green. Then I get a plug-in to go and talk to the NPU, and I get within a new private voice systems. Nabu Casa just came out with a private voice – their own Alexa.

Yeah.

And now I can be like Scotty in Star Trek, and go, “Computer, please turn on the lights.” And it’s all local.

Okay. I love all that.

Is this a good brain dump? I don’t know if [unintelligible 00:53:24.07]

I want to go to there.

Do you like that?

I want to live this life.

I want Star Trek, The Next Generation. And that’s the challenge though, right? We’ve got that level of tech, we just need the sophisticated culture and society to go behind it.

Yeah, totally. There’s a lot of glue that needs to happen.

A lot of people.

One more request for you is this… Back to the reason for my question about your like - or dislike, which is not a dislike - of Windows.

Yeah. I’m non-denominational. I have a Mac, too.

Yeah. There you go. It’s this - I just saw a bunch of very cool developery stuff on your Windows machine. It does not come like that.

Yeah, neither did your Mac when you installed the things you installed.

No, it didn’t. But I don’t know how to get there.

Sure. Okay, I’ll do a YouTube for you.

Where is the best – yeah, I want to go from zero Windows, brand new, fresh Windows Pro… Because who would not go Pro? Because you have a reason to go Pro. You need these extra features.

So what would you want on your Windows machine?

I want a command line…

A cool command line.

I want to be able to SSH into, and from… I want to SSH out and in to that machine…

So you want WSL, you want power toys, you want the command palette…

And I want how to know how use those things, too. That zoom in stuff you did…

You like that?

…all those things you were doing. I want those things on the command line, when you’re in PowerShell, I believe…

I will do a video for you.

I don’t need the blood – well, blood sugar could work for me too, I suppose. Why not. Because everybody could use that –

Well, while you’re at it, you might as well show how does the blood sugar part work.

So I’m type one diabetic, and I have an open source artificial pancreas built on top of a hacked Dexcom glucose sensor in my arm right here.

Okay.

And a hacked Omnipod, which is here in my right arm. And I’m using a piece of open source software called Loop, that is managing my blood sugar. That’s my blood sugar right there, in real time.

Wow.

And then that hops over to here with Bluetooth. Then it goes up into CosmosDB in Azure, and sits on an open source tool called NightScout. NightScout is an open source database that makes my blood sugar available to myself, and then gives me a REST API. So then Oh My Posh is the command line tool that is showing all of my Git repo, and all of my details and stuff like that… And Oh My Posh calls that API every five minutes. So then as I’m typing and hitting Enter, and typing and hitting Enter, it’s refreshing my blood sugar every five minutes. Now, I’m in Seattle now, but I live in Portland. There’s a thing called a DAK board that I have, which is effectively a 17-inch 1080p monitor with a Raspberry Pi inside, that has Chrome running in kiosk mode, that shows a Google calendar, all the kids’ homework, the temperature downstairs, family pictures, and my blood sugar.

“And my blood sugar.”

So then I’ll get a text from my family that say “Hey, dad’s having a low blood sugar. Can you check on dad, is he okay?”

[56:10] That’s cool.

And that’ll happen when I’m overseas as well. I could be 10 time zones away and they can watch my blood sugar.

That’s so wild.

Yeah, man.

Yeah. YouTube that, too.

[laughs]

I have, yeah. It’s all out there, brother.

That has to be out there.

We’ll put that in the show notes then.

Put that in the show notes, Alexander/AI.

Yeah, you hear that? You agent you…

We’ll give Alexander an access to our AI.

Last question from me, because we’re hitting up against your time, Scott…

We did… We ran out of time?

Well, not out. We can hang out as long as we want to. I just want to be respectful of your time.

Oh, yeah.

You’re 52, by your own admittance…

Oh, my God…

You’ve been doing this a long time… You just got very excited about a whole range of things, which I appreciate…

Yeah, I’ve been living like that for a while.

…and I just wonder how you stay not jaded, or cynical… Or how do you maintain the excitement after all these years? …and I’m sure the ups and the downs, everything.

Do you remember Tiny Captain America, when he’s getting his butt kicked in Brooklyn, and he hasn’t gotten to be Big Captain America yet? And they kick his ass, and he’s sitting in the back of the… And he’s like “I can do this all day.”

Right.

You know, I just try to think about those kind of like men who inspire me… So like Tiny Captain America, Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross, Ted Lasso… Even at his lowest, Ted Lasso was still trying to say and be positive. I think it is beholden upon me, given the luck that I have experienced in my life, to be the first out of college in my family, to be able to get to this position in a company, to be of some minor renown online, to lend my privilege and lend my level of privilege to people, and to be excited genuinely about things that are worth being excited about, and to be critical of things that are worth criticism. And in the current state, I’m on the inside of a big company, so it’s my responsibility to be positive, tell them what’s BS, tell them what’s not BS… Until someday I’m on the outside of the company, and then I will continue to do the same thing.

So I’m nothing if not consistent, and I do that because I think about “What would Mr. Rogers do? What would Ted Lasso do? How do you be a kind, empathetic leader in a time when it’s challenging?” So yeah, man, I can do this all day.

Well said. [laughs] I love it.

How much more time have you got? Can you give us five more minutes?

Yeah, brother, I’ll hang out. I’m chilling.

Maybe an extension to the –

I have a talk, but it doesn’t matter.

Yeah, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter. An extension to that, I would say then - can you speculate to the how many more years in your career at Microsoft? If there ever is a next for you, what is next?

Oh, I’ll teach high school science.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

100 percent. If you go to my LinkedIn and you go down to Volunteer, you can see I’m on the board of a historically black college and university for their business school… I volunteer at a number of places, like Digital Undivided, and Hidden Genius Project… I’ve joined a board of a company in New Zealand… I’m investing small amounts of money into little companies… And I think trying to send the ladder back down, while simultaneously teaching kids… I used to work at Portland Community College, and I used to work at Oregon Institute of Technology, which is a state college in Oregon. I think it is beholden upon me to help the young people. So I’ll just go and teach school. That’s the plan.

Cool. Science.

Science, man.

Science…!

10 years, 5 years, whenever?

Jerod knows [unintelligible 00:59:56.20] January 22nd, 2029.

The day, that day.

Yeah, I’ll turn 55.

That’s it, huh?

You’re peacing out.

Yeah. And my wife will retire in June…

[01:00:08.12] Everybody knows that? Like, it’s a thing? Like, “That’s when Scott’s gone.”

I just think it’s a good idea.

That’s cool.

It’s like George Costanza… You just leave on a high. “Goodbye, everybody.”

Always leaving them wanting more. That’s what I say.

Yeah, that’s right. Leave them wanting more.

Love it.

I’ll just – I’ll be around. I’ll just, you know… Trying to push things forward, right?

That’s cool. What I think more so is the intention.

Intentionality is a theme in my life. Deliberate practice.

You’re definitely living by intention. You know where you’re trying to go, which is - by that time frame, if we don’t see you doing that, we’re like “Something’s changed drastically.” You know what I mean?

Yeah.

But I don’t think that’s going to be the case.

I just think it’s cool when there’s people who have been around a long time and they’re still here. You know who you should have on your show? It’s Larry Osterman. Do you know Larry?

No.

Oh my God, you guys. Go and see Larry –

Do you want to help us get some guests?

Yeah, I’ll be your sourcer. I’ll be the agent that will – I’ll be your podcast agent.

[laughs] There you go.

Larry Osterman is a sweetheart of a guy. I think he’s like Microsoft employee number 36. He’s been here for 40-something years… And his office is just Lego. He doesn’t need to work… He’s just got all the Lego.

[laughs] “He’s got all the Lego.”

And he’s the guy who wrote “The volume control on Windows.”

Okay.

That’s the level of awesomeness. This is a guy who had a – he was down the hall from Bill. And he calls me a couple of months ago and he’s like “You know, Build sounds really cool, but I’ve never been to Build. They don’t really let the devs go to Build.” And I was like “That’s BS. What do you mean they don’t let the devs go to Build? Build is all about the devs.”

It’s all about the devs, yeah.

And I said, “You should be in a talk.” So he’ll be in a talk with Kayla Cinnamon, talking about Windows Developer Tools… And he is just a delight. I had him on my podcast 20 years ago, talking to him about 20 years as a programmer.

[laughs]

Now he’s 40 years a programmer.

You’re due.

Why doesn’t he stop? Because he’s having a good time.

He loves it. I mean, I assume…

Like, Dave Cutler, who wrote the Windows NT Kernels, working in Xbox… Why? He doesn’t need the money. He’s trying to make things better.

Yeah.

So for every sense that there’s people not wanting to make things better, there are people honestly trying to move the industry forward. They’re interested in making the industry better.

Right. Not only that, but back to the AI conversation, they’re staying creative. Like, he wants to keep creating, I assume.

Yeah. Making stuff.

Yeah. At my house right now, I was working on this cool Apple 1 kit from smartikit.io. So I built an Apple 1, a 1970-something, ‘77, a Wozniak Apple 1, and I mounted it on a board… I’m building arcades at home, 3D printing… You’ve got to stay frosty. Keep the brain cells going.

Building arcades like you’re building out the actual…

Yeah, so I bought an arcade at a bar, that was an old trivia game… I’ve got a whole 11-part series on my blog about it. I pulled out the CRT, I put in a new screen, went to a metallurgist and drilled new holes, got new joystick and everything…

A two-player, or a four-player?

It’s a two-player.

It’s a two-player.

And then I’ve got my – look, see? I’ve got my arcade 25-cent slot here on my keychain…

Oh, nice. That’s rad.

I’m showing them my insert coin to play…

So do you throw an emulator on there, or what do you do?

So I’ve built about 12 of these. I’ll take one and gut them… I’ve got Pi arcades, small ones… I’ve got one from Monster Joysticks that I made… I’ve got one called a Pi Girl… It’s a Game Boy, but a Pi Girl. I got from Adafruit and I 3D-printed a Game Boy case…

Rad.

Like, all that kind of stuff teaches you something every time you make it.

Absolutely.

[01:03:45.08] I’m building a Raspberry Pi tank right now… And then as the closing keynote at Build, we borrowed a robot from Hello Robot and we’re going to take a Windows ARM, put an arm on ARM, and it’s going to get me a Diet Coke. We’re going to use everything that we learned at Build to teach a robot that I need a soda.

Love it.

That’s our closing keynote. And why?

Because it’s awesome.

Because it’s awesome. There’s no reason why. “Wait, what business problem are you solving here?” Dull, dangerous, or dirty, right? I’m not going to get a Diet Coke myself, like a savage. Are you serious?

[laughs] Like a savage… Robot, fetch me that Diet Coke. You know what I want.

Give me a Diet Coke.

I’m not going to tell you what I want, you already know. I’ve taught you.

Is a Diet Pepsi okay? No. No, it is not, robot.

Just give him an eyebrow waggle.

“You know me better than that…” Yeah. That’s awesome. So if I were to build a singular arcade – like, you’ve done 12. So you’ve got a variety of experience.

Do you want to build one from scratch?

I want to build one from scratch…

I do, too.

I want to build the best one though. So what would I… Which one’s the best?

Oh, man…

If I was just going to have one. Now, I can’t really…

I’ve got an idea.

Hold on, let the man answer here.

Depending on how much you want to build… There’s a company called Polycade.

Okay.

The Polycade Sente, that has a lovely system that you can mount on your wall. It literally hangs on your wall with what’s called a Z-bar. That is posh. And it has a NUC, a network unit of computing from Intel underneath it. And then it comes with modular joysticks, and you can get a Tron joystick, or you can get things like that. It’s glorious.

Oh, that’s cool. I’m looking at it right now.

A little spendy, though.

Yeah.

The cheapest way to do it is to find a broken arcade machine. Preferably Street Fighter or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But if you have a small space, depending on how much space you want to use, get an Arcade1Up machine. You get either the NBA JAM or the Street Fighter versions. Then you swap the guts out of the Arcade1Up, and there’s a whole Reddit dedicated to putting Raspberry Pis inside of modified Arcade1Up machines.

Yeah. I was gonna say, it’s probably way less hardware than they used to have.

Way less hardware. And it’s basically a 60% sized arcade.

Yeah.

Yeah. So lots of choices. What is your suggestion, sir?

Yeah, what are you thinking?

Well, I figured you’ve done it a couple of times… I was going to say, what if we had a gathering where we all built one together? Like in a day.

A hackathon.

Like videotape it, make a YouTube series out of it…

Yeah, we’ll do a Pi arcade.

Have some fun doing it, you know…

Yeah, that’d be sick.

Source them, get a co-located space…

We could partner with Adafruit, because they have like pre-cut… You could make like a Pi arcade about this big, like a desktop size… You know, the bar sized ones… We could call Lamore and PT over at Adafruit and figure something out.

See? And then when we’re done with it, it just sits there and we’re like “Okay, somebody crate it up and send it to Nebraska, or to Texas, where I’m from. Send it back home.”

Yeah. Give it to the children.

But do it to get together. Like, to either give away, or build it for yourself… Or just for the views, for the people, for the education…

Because it’s cool.

Yeah, because it’s awesome.

Yeah. Cool idea.

Alright, I’m getting yelled at on my phone now.

Thanks, Scott. This has been awesome. We appreciate you sitting with us and spending extra time.

Yeah, of course. This is fun. I hope this gives you what you need, and I hope that you don’t make Alexander work too hard.