Grokipedia Is Cringe

Speaker 1 The other words of the year,

Speaker 1 they were just as online. You know, Oxford's was brain rot.
If you can believe it, its first use was in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau.

Speaker 3 R.I.P., Henry David Thoreau, you would have hated TikTok.

Speaker 1 Wait, Candace, we should probably introduce ourselves. You're so right, Kate.
Hello, listeners. We are the hosts of ICYMI, or rather, in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

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Hey, Emmanuel Mayberg, what up? And Jason Kebler.

Speaker 3 Hello, hello. The merch is here.
The merch is here. Merch alert.
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Speaker 3 The new stuff, the old stuff, restock. It's a lot, a lot of stuff.
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Speaker 2 What does that process involve? You go

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Speaker 3 You have to go to the bottom.

Speaker 3 I mean, like, honestly, it involves me printing out many labels and sticking them on.

Speaker 3 these green envelopes and then

Speaker 3 digging through boxes and seeing what people ordered and send them. It's like extraordinary.
It's like it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, I will say.

Speaker 3 But I do have it down. I have a cool label maker.
I put stickers in them,

Speaker 3 which you can see here.

Speaker 2 See, and here, for all your listeners, he's flicking them around. And now he's walking up.

Speaker 3 I've got a box of stuff here. This is like stuff that I already had, but it's like I have these green envelopes,

Speaker 3 a label maker. I stick them on

Speaker 3 all with love, and then do we choose green envelopes for the brand? Yeah, awesome, yeah,

Speaker 3 yeah.

Speaker 2 We are going to become like a fashion brand that does journalism on the side, I think. Like, the merch is going to take over, don't you think, Jason?

Speaker 3 I mean, that's the hope. That's it's a stable industry.
I don't know if that's actually true, but

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 and with tariffs and everything, uh, it's just people need clothes, you know. That's true.
All right. Yeah.
Get your orders in.

Speaker 2 If you want some merch, I'm definitely going to get one of the new like sweatshirts.

Speaker 2 Very other brief bit of housekeeping, shameless plug. My book is coming out in paperback on November 11th.

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Speaker 2 Can we do another shameless plug now in the manual for a friend's book?

Speaker 3 Another shameless plug for Becky Ferreira's book called First Contact, The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens. Becky writes the abstract, which is our science newsletter.

Speaker 3 Everybody loves the newsletter. To know Becky is to love her.
She's such a beautiful, wonderful writer. I am reading this book right now and it's no different.
I don't know what I was expecting.

Speaker 3 I never really talked to Becky about the book, but it's not what I expected. It's really more a work of anthropology about what our obsession

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Speaker 2 And we are launching a new interview podcast. I mean, it's going to be on the same feed that you'll listen to now, but then you've already got a tease of this from Jason.

Speaker 2 Did an interview about Windows 10. I did one ages ago with the head of Signal.
Sam did one about Pornhub, I think, even before that. But we're going to be doing more of those every week.

Speaker 2 And I bring that up because one of the people on the show will be Becky, right, Emmanuel?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we'll do a deep dive

Speaker 3 into her book, and I'm really looking forward to that.

Speaker 2 All right. Sounds good.
Let's get to this week, this exhausting week. We record this on Tuesdays, and it already feels like it's Friday because so much has been going on.

Speaker 2 But the headline of this one that Jason wrote is, Grockopedia is the antithesis of everything that makes Wikipedia good, useful, and human.

Speaker 2 Jason,

Speaker 2 what do people see when they go to grocopedia.com?

Speaker 3 I mean, I believe it's dark mode only. Like, it's a black window with a search box, and it's just like

Speaker 3 search for, you know,

Speaker 3 it's like Wikipedia. Like, it's clone, it's a clone of Wikipedia, is what they are attempting to do.
All right.

Speaker 2 And, but what is this then? So you go there, and I'm going to do some searches while you're talking because I haven't poked around it yet. But what is Grockopedia?

Speaker 2 I'm sure people can guess from the word groc in it.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's Elon Musk's like butthurt competitor. He calls it a competitor to Wikipedia, which he calls Wokipedia.
And basically, it is

Speaker 3 an LLM that calls itself an encyclopedia. It looks like Wikipedia in many ways.
And it is like explicitly an ideological project of Elon Musk to like de-wokify.

Speaker 3 Wikipedia, which he does not like for many reasons, but the main reason being he doesn't like what his article, what the Wikipedia article for Elon Musk says about him.

Speaker 3 So this has been like one of his little pet projects for like quite some time is

Speaker 3 one, like railing against Wikipedia and then two, like funding or creating some sort of alternative to Wikipedia. But of course, you know, as

Speaker 3 denoted by the name, Gracopedia is entirely AI generated. It is not like Wikipedia at all.

Speaker 3 In terms of form or function, it's as though you just like told an AI to make something that looks like an encyclopedia and it turned out exactly how you might think it would turn out.

Speaker 2 And to belabor the question, how did it turn out then? It's just like a bunch of inaccurate crap. Like, what are we talking about?

Speaker 3 So, what it reminds me most of is Google's AI summaries, honestly. It's like you type something into a box, and then there's, you know,

Speaker 3 an article, or it's trying to like answer a question at the top. The difference is that Grockapedia is like a website, in that

Speaker 3 it has articles on bespoke topics. So, right now, it says that there's 885,000 articles available.
So, if you type in Twitter, like there's a page for that.

Speaker 3 If you type in presidents of the United States, there's a page for that. And the page is not changing

Speaker 3 based on an inquiry. So, it's not like a chat bot.

Speaker 3 It is, it's like a static website that has been created with AI generated content.

Speaker 3 It is pretty minimalist. So again, it's like, you know, black screen, white text.

Speaker 3 There's no images. There are not really links.
Yeah, there's not links in

Speaker 3 line.

Speaker 3 They have the little citations like they do on Wikipedia. So like it does say where it's taking the information from.

Speaker 3 Notably, like links to Wikipedia itself seem to be banned. There's been a few places in articles where it has leaked some of the like internal instructions for Grockopedia.

Speaker 3 And it says like, oh, I'm not allowed to cite Wikipedia.

Speaker 3 And they also have like little headlines

Speaker 3 like Wikipedia does. So I have the Twitter one pulled up.

Speaker 3 You know, it has like a summary at the top, and then it has a section called history. And it says, like, founding and early development of Twitter.
And it kind of goes on and on and on.

Speaker 3 As to like whether it's all made up dribble, I mean, I feel like LLMs are getting to the point where, yes, there are hallucinations, and surely there are hallucinations in this as well. But it's like

Speaker 3 people who have dug deep into this have found

Speaker 3 inaccuracies, but for the most part, it's like it's more that it's surface level, like extraordinarily surface level, like recitation of facts versus

Speaker 3 it just being like totally all bullshit.

Speaker 3 There is like a there is a right-wing slant specifically, and it has been programmed to have a right-wing slant. Wire did a good piece about some examples of that, but like

Speaker 3 if you if you like fell onto Grakapedia today and you started like typing things in, you'd be like wow there are some facts here interestingly like every single article is extraordinarily long which I think is probably a function of the fact that it's AI generated it like doesn't really know when to stop I think and it's in my opinion like

Speaker 3 organized really weird

Speaker 3 you know it just has things like kind of out of order it puts like important like quote unquote like important things like at the bottom of the article this Twitter um this article on twitter is like many thousands of words long for example and it's just like i don't know it's

Speaker 3 it's just a super surface level in my opinion i don't know have any of you like played around with it at all

Speaker 2 um i was just looking through what wired found and the headline of that one was elon musk's groceropedia pushes far right talking points and yeah they went through it and you know they found the entry on transgender referring to trans women as quote biological males, all of that sort of thing, kind of exactly what you would expect from a grocerpedia or one leaning in that direction or anything.

Speaker 2 I guess it's so surface level because if you start to dig into actual more of the facts and more of the nuance, it turns out that reality has a left-leaning bias because I don't know, it's just based on fucking reality and real things and science.

Speaker 2 But I don't know.

Speaker 3 So who, who, I guess, I guess what I mean by that is like, there's an entry for like the word printer, like a computer printer.

Speaker 3 And it says, a printer is a peripheral machine which makes a durable representation of graphics or text, usually on paper. It's like, okay,

Speaker 3 true. That's good.
Like, I mean,

Speaker 3 which is just to say, like, you don't go there and it's not like complete drivel. It's just,

Speaker 3 there's lots of things in here that are not. political, just as there are many, many Wikipedia entries about anything you could possibly imagine.

Speaker 3 And so like if you just type in a random word, there'll be an entry for it. And you're not going to read it and be like, this is completely like bullshit AI.

Speaker 3 You'll be like, this is just like a series of facts like laid out

Speaker 3 in a way that is not terribly useful.

Speaker 2 Right. Or interesting or anything like that.

Speaker 2 To zoom out, you said, you know, Musk makes it because he doesn't like his own Wikipedia page and that sort of thing but there's like a more there's a broader context here right in that even some lawmakers have issues with wikipedia like tech ruse like what's been the recent context in people on the right or or kind of all over the place um but especially on the right having issues with wikipedia what's the context there Yeah, so, I mean, Wikipedia is this very international project.

Speaker 3 And as such, it operates in a lot of countries that have authoritarian governments. And it has a lot of like anti-censorship aspects to it.

Speaker 3 You know, there are millions of editors worldwide and they're in countries all over the place. So it's not like that American-centric of

Speaker 3 an organization.

Speaker 3 And so they had to try to like resist censorship in Russia, in Turkey, in like a lot of countries all over the world.

Speaker 3 And interestingly, like one of the biggest threats to the Wikimedia Foundation right now is coming from the United States.

Speaker 3 And there's been a lot of discussions like at the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the foundation that runs Wikipedia and its related projects, as to like where they should be holding conventions and things like that now.

Speaker 3 You know, they do them internationally, but there's been discussion about like moving some of them outside of the United States because one, a lot of people who want to come to them can't get visas.

Speaker 3 There's talk about like,

Speaker 3 should it be backed up elsewhere? Like, that sort of thing, just because

Speaker 3 Republicans in particular have turned their sights on it. So,

Speaker 3 the background to it is for many years, like, rich and powerful people have not liked how they are portrayed on Wikipedia.

Speaker 3 There's an entire industry of something called paid editing, where it's like reputation management companies try to edit Wikipedia pages to,

Speaker 3 you know, like

Speaker 3 make them more palatable to rich and powerful people this is like extremely against the rules of wikipedia so for years there's been like this idea of reputation management on wikipedia it's extremely against the rules to pay someone to edit or to just like edit your own page there there was like this um

Speaker 3 account on Twitter before Musk ran it that was like called Congress Edits. So whenever an IP address from within Congress was caught like editing Wikipedia, it would show what it was.

Speaker 3 And it was very often like Congress people changing their own pages and things like that.

Speaker 3 And one of the big like bulwarks against this is the fact that it is a group project and like human beings are maintaining this.

Speaker 3 And there's like, there's a bit of a hierarchy to Wikipedia where like if you're a really well-respected editor, like you can quite often like get your own way and that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 And so a lot of the people who edit Wikipedia, I mean, they're from all over the world, but a lot of them are like based in in Europe or they're based in Africa or they're based in Asia.

Speaker 3 And they're like editing pages about like the January 6th riots or the 2020 election and things like this. And it's like

Speaker 3 they're not, they're not willing to bow down to the false narrative that the election was stolen or whatever.

Speaker 3 And so Wikipedia has become a target of Trump, of the administration, of people who are saying like it has a liberal bias. It

Speaker 3 reflects reality,

Speaker 3 the reality that, um, you know, the election was not stolen and things like that.

Speaker 2 It's obviously reminiscent, Grockopedia, of something I only just learned actually existed when I listened to, you know, our friends at Remap and they mentioned something called Conservapedia, which I, again, never heard of, launched in

Speaker 2 November 2006.

Speaker 2 and well i'm actually reading the wikipedia page about conservipedia and it just says it's an english language wiki-based online encyclopedia written from a self-described american conservative and fundamentalist christian point of view i mean it sounds like grocopedia is basically the same thing in that it's ideologically driven not that it's necessarily exactly the same ideology but i mean

Speaker 2 it's not far off. It's going to be interesting how it develops and grows over time, I guess.

Speaker 3 I was gonna bring it up as well, and I wanted to pull an article, but for me, Conservapedia is not loading. Is that true for you also?

Speaker 2 I couldn't get it to load. So then I went to the Wikipedia of

Speaker 3 Conservapedia.

Speaker 2 I mean, do you remember that coming out? I don't. I think I was too.

Speaker 3 I haven't heard of it until Rob Zackney mentioned it on the remap podcast as well. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. Did they hug it to death or did it go down?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm not sure.

Speaker 4 All of Remap's listeners crushing Conservopedia.

Speaker 2 It's just funny that.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 Um, but I mean, it's funny, there's been like many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many attempts to make an alternative to Wikipedia.

Speaker 3 And often it is under these grounds of like, we need a conservative version of Wikipedia. We need

Speaker 3 it's it's often like people who

Speaker 3 were Wikipedia editors for a long time who were getting a lot of their edits rejected because they were trying to insert like insane shit into specific articles.

Speaker 3 And they're like, I'm just going to start my own one. And then they do it and no one does it.
And no one goes there because, in part, there's this just incredible collaboration of Wikipedia.

Speaker 3 Like, why would you, you're not going to be able to take millions of people from this like objectively very good and powerful thing and get them to do the exact same work somewhere else for your,

Speaker 3 ideological project. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Sam, do you still have Conservapedia in front of you? I can't get to led.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Do you want to know what it is? Yeah, what are we looking at?

Speaker 4 It's a pretty bare bones frame website, but it says, I mean, there's a list of popular articles at Conservapedia.

Speaker 4 The top articles, there's a bunch, but there's Evidence for Christianity, Great Flood, The World Denial, American Civil War, Free Market, Tchaikovsky, Unplugged the NFL.

Speaker 4 Anxiety is one of the top articles.

Speaker 4 Most anxiety can be the result of a misunderstanding or rejection of fundamental truth. I sought the Lord and he heard me and delivered me from all my fears.

Speaker 3 Psalm 34:4.

Speaker 3 Amen. Yeah, I was with him in the first half.
And then

Speaker 3 Black Hole, feminism.

Speaker 4 It's just like a bunch of stuff. And then there's a list of in the news what MSM isn't fully covering.

Speaker 4 Ireland elects anti-EU warmongering, anti-NATO expansion president, setback for worst college majors.

Speaker 4 Stephen Smith, Trump is coming for black sports organizations, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3 Etc, et cetera.

Speaker 2 I find it funny that there's often, you know, the idea that Silicon Valley is, they think they're making something new, but it's like, oh, yeah, you know, we did the boring tunnel and it's everybody can get in there.

Speaker 2 It's like, dude, you just made a bus or whatever. And like, they can't even make a new right-leaning Wikipedia because Conservopedia already did that like 20 years ago.

Speaker 4 You can work for Primseropedia. There is a job listing.
Fill out an application. What's the job? I think it's not paid.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay. Well,

Speaker 4 why would you like to join? And then there's an empty field. Additional comments, optional.

Speaker 3 Well, neither. That's it.

Speaker 2 Neither is Wikipedia, of course.

Speaker 2 But that brings me to the final thing I just want to ask Jason, which is that, look, the actual point of your piece is explaining that Grocopedia is the antithesis of everything that makes Wikipedia good and reliable and important.

Speaker 2 I mean, just I'm sure everybody knows, but what do you mean by that? It's the collaborative nature you were talking about. Like, what is it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I've said this before on the podcast, but I think that this is the

Speaker 3 biggest group project in the history of humankind, like global project. It's a non-profit organization.
It's incredibly international.

Speaker 3 It's for the most part very posi vibes, and it's proven itself to be like incredibly resistant to these efforts to attack Wikipedia

Speaker 3 because it has all these like rules and norms and guidelines that are

Speaker 3 like they have been set up over the course of literally just many, many years and like probably the most annoying meetings of all time. Like if you go to the talk page for any

Speaker 3 article, you'll see people just talking about how to word something or like, does this article actually belong here? Or they'll discuss like, should a comma actually go here and that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 And that is like pedantic and annoying probably for a lot of people, but it also

Speaker 3 makes Wikipedia Wikipedia, like it makes it this incredibly human thing. And Emmanuel has done a lot of reporting about how like Wikipedia has been pretty good at resisting AI, for example.

Speaker 3 And that's partially because you have the collective labor efforts of like all of these people who care very deeply about this thing, who are volunteering to do it, and they don't want to see it taken over by AI.

Speaker 3 And so what Grackopedia is, is this like extremely low effort,

Speaker 3 like not even, it's not even a competitor to it. Like I said that in the article, because it's just like so half-assed.

Speaker 3 It's like you told an AI to go scrape a bunch of shit, and this is what we've turned up with.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it doesn't seem that Grocopedia is, as you say, particularly high effort at all. It's sort of just churning it out and pulling out on the internet.
Well, we'll see how it develops.

Speaker 2 We'll leave that there. And after the break, we're going to talk about the end of Windows 10 and the environmental impact that's going to have, but then a bunch of other stuff as well.

Speaker 2 We'll be right back after this.

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Speaker 2 All right, and we are back. Jason wrote this one, but I want to ask Emmanuel and Sam something first.
The headline is: The end of Windows 10 support is an e-waste disaster in the making.

Speaker 2 Emmanuel, can you explain how you're updating your PC at the moment? Like, what does that involve for you?

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I'm a lifelong loyalist to windows

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 as anyone who uses windows knows over the past it's probably like three years two years now uh

Speaker 3 microsoft has been pushing people uh increasingly more aggressively to windows 11 from windows 10 and i think last week was the last security update, which,

Speaker 3 again, as a lifelong Windows user, this is the most aggressive transition that I think I've seen the company make. Like,

Speaker 3 I think it's still the most used operating system in the world. I think there's still machines out there running 95 and 98 and 2000.
Yeah, like I mean PC.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But it's like ATMs and like, I don't know, probably whatever manages our nuclear defense and stuff like that. But

Speaker 3 because it's so widely used, there's, you know, probably decades of support after they move on to the next operating system as a user i never felt so aggressively pushed to like you need to get the new one

Speaker 3 and i honestly wouldn't but my computer started crashing so i went to update windows and the first thing i see is that my computer is not like

Speaker 3 uh i forget what the term it didn't say like i didn't meet system requirements is what it says which uh as a gamer like you

Speaker 3 what you hear is like your computer is not good enough for Windows 11, which is ridiculous.

Speaker 3 But that's obviously an error, right? Well, it's not an error. The thing is, is that you have to, Windows 11 only works with TPM 2.0.
TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module.

Speaker 3 It's basically, I think, the way it works is like, it's a chip on the motherboard that handles some like cryptographic

Speaker 3 keys so it could do things more secure on like a kernel level.

Speaker 3 And I had to like update my motherboard so it could run that.

Speaker 3 And then that means updating the BIOS. And then I could update Windows so I can update my GPU driver so I can like play Battlefield 6

Speaker 3 confidently without crashing. But I'm still crashing.
So it was all for naught.

Speaker 3 I shouldn't have updated.

Speaker 3 But I guess it's good because now I get the security updates.

Speaker 2 Sam, are you going through this as well as like a fellow PC user?

Speaker 4 I mean, going through it is not really the word for it. It's more that I, that I've been getting pop-ups from Windows for about a year saying you need to upgrade to

Speaker 4 11.

Speaker 4 And then I hit ignore and it keeps getting more and more aggressive. And I keep hitting ignore and telling it to fuck off forever.
And it finally.

Speaker 4 got me like i just i didn't want to have like a an un updated pc because so you've done

Speaker 4 yeah it's yeah it's done um the deed is done very sadly it's fine it's totally the same it's you know it's like not a big deal dude our start menu is in the middle well you can move that i moved mine but yeah i've when i saw that i was like this i would like flip the table but um that's the only difference that i can notice so whatever it's fine um

Speaker 2 so i legit have not used windows since windows 98 i'm not even joking and i used to use it a lot so i'm rarely out of the loop but what i do understand is that some, I mean, a lot of people are very protective of Windows 10, right?

Speaker 2 Like people love Windows 10 for some reason. And they like,

Speaker 2 why is that? Why are people so attached to it?

Speaker 4 It works. It's a good OS, man.

Speaker 3 It's a good OS. It works.
It does what you want it to do. It doesn't crash.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a super stable.

Speaker 3 It's a super stable OS, probably the most stable that I've ever used. I would say that like every iteration gets more stable, but that's not true.

Speaker 3 There are like notoriously bad ones, like Visco or whatever. Right.
I think that you're baiting Linux users right now.

Speaker 2 Well, by saying this is the most.

Speaker 3 If you use Linux or Unix,

Speaker 3 please don't email him. Don't even talk to him.

Speaker 3 He'd love to hear from you. He would love to hear from you.

Speaker 2 I mean, since you bring it up, and I've made this joke a couple of times, like in Slack and stuff, but I feel like Jason is so close to becoming a Linux user, like so close, because based on this article and,

Speaker 2 you know, the environmental impact of Windows 10, et cetera, I feel like you're getting so have you, have you done it before, Jason?

Speaker 3 I downloaded Ubuntu on an old laptop one time and I used it for a few minutes and then I couldn't find a driver for something that I needed that I'm sure I could have figured out, but I like aborted mission immediately.

Speaker 3 I do think that Linux is probably incredibly usable.

Speaker 3 That's not the type of thing that I'm into. Like, I mean, that's not the type of like frustration that I want to deal with.

Speaker 3 I want to deal primarily with like hardware-based frustrations versus like software-based ones. Yeah, you want to do that.

Speaker 2 You want new tech or new interesting gear or repairing old interesting gear. You don't want to be in the command line going, why the fuck is it not updating my packages?

Speaker 3 Or something like that? Yeah, yeah. which uh i mean maybe that's a an outdated uh view of the usability of linux no it's pretty on point

Speaker 3 i would say i mean

Speaker 2 i used linux uh

Speaker 2 well because i couldn't afford like a mac a mac was like too expensive when i was like freelancing i i used like a used

Speaker 2 think pad for like 200 or 300 pounds or something. I remember I actually brought it to the office once when I was using cubes on it, like a secure operating system.
And I think I showed it to a manual

Speaker 2 or Jason the other way around, but one of you then called the other one over, like, come check this out.

Speaker 2 Come look at Joseph's stupid laptop because it was like a big brick with those red little mouse pads in the middle, like in the keyboard.

Speaker 3 I love that thing, but

Speaker 2 it became too much of a pain in the ass, and I moved to Mac.

Speaker 4 I think we were all sitting here trying to think of the word for the little red thing. What is it called? I forgot.

Speaker 3 Clitorus. That is what it is.
That's the only thing that I can see. I know.
Nipple. Yeah.
No, there's a word.

Speaker 3 It's called the red dot. The

Speaker 3 thing.

Speaker 2 Is that what it's called?

Speaker 4 Trekpoint. Trekpoint.

Speaker 2 Oh, yes. There might be something like that.
So

Speaker 2 the reason I went down that little Linux.

Speaker 3 Wikipedia calls it a pointing stick.

Speaker 2 What does Grockipedia call it? I know.

Speaker 3 I got to look it up.

Speaker 2 Conservapedia as well. Conservopedia is not fucking touching that.
They don't want anything to do with it.

Speaker 2 The reason I went on that little tangible Linux is because I'm sure a lot of people, because of this Windows 10

Speaker 2 end-of-life, end of security updates, are probably going to move some of those devices over to Linux, right? And have you heard people doing that, Jason, since you published this piece?

Speaker 2 a couple of weeks ago like people telling you that oh yeah we're actually going to do that we actually are going to move to linux or

Speaker 3 uh yeah i mean a lot of people commented on that story. That was like an incredibly commented-upon story, uh, I think because a lot of people said, Well, can't you simply move to Linux? Um,

Speaker 2 there's so many different ways people will find to say that,

Speaker 3 but I mean, it's true, they're like, I, I, you know,

Speaker 3 my computer or my wife's computer or whatever can't uh upgrade to Windows 11, so uh, I have installed

Speaker 3 you know a stable version of Linux and it will provide me many years of uh

Speaker 3 functionality after this.

Speaker 3 I was speaking in a third person Emmanuel.

Speaker 3 There's also been a lot of people who say that, well, you could do this for a computer or sorry, if you run like a fleet of them, for example, like it's not as easy as saying like, well, why doesn't the IT guy just install Ubuntu on like a bunch of on a thousand computers for fourth graders or whatever.

Speaker 3 It's like a lot of them are operating under specific contracts

Speaker 3 as we talked about on an interview podcast with Nathan Proctor, which maybe you have listened to, but you should go listen to if you're interested in this.

Speaker 3 A lot of them have like security

Speaker 3 guidelines that are binding. And so it's like, if you work for a local government or something, like if you're not able to get the latest security updates, you have to get rid of those computers.

Speaker 3 And so that's what's happening to a lot of these.

Speaker 3 I've also heard of people who have figured out how to update Windows 10 computers to Windows 11 when

Speaker 3 technically they don't meet like the minimum specs and they're not able.

Speaker 3 It's like go to the command line, delete XYZ thing, and you can just do it anyway, which I also don't think is a solution at scale.

Speaker 3 I think that by and large, like we're talking about a lot of computers that are either owned by people who don't update their hardware very often or enterprise buyers of hardware

Speaker 3 that are,

Speaker 3 you know, kind of bound not just by the hardware that they have, but by different contracts and different laws and regulations and things like that.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 again, people can go listen to that interview if they want a bit more detail.

Speaker 2 I'll just very briefly give people some context now, but the numbers are something like 400 million computers can't be upgraded to Windows 11.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, what are they going to, what's going to happen to them? Are they going to become scrap, landfill, Linux machines without Wi-Fi or audio? Who really knows? I guess we'll see.

Speaker 2 But yeah, definitely go check out the interview if you want more from that. I just wanted an excuse to hear about.
Emmanuel and Sam's upgrading disaster, but it actually sounded like Sam's went okay.

Speaker 4 I just kind of wanted to.

Speaker 4 get a PC, dude. Get good.

Speaker 3 Build it.

Speaker 2 Absolutely not do it.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 3 Let's leave that there.

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