This Week in WordPress #252

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 252 entitled Burp. It was recorded on Monday the 15th of May, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined this week by rem. By Katie, Keith and Paul Halfpenny. It's a WordPress podcast. So you know, we talk about WordPress First Stop. Word camps are changing.

They're gonna be more about one particular topic into the future. What do we make of that? WP Accessibility Day is looking for speakers, and there's a very comprehensive article about what it is that they're after and the fact that you're going to get paid. We have a couple of pieces about block-based themes.

First up, frost is launched by Brian Gardner via WP Engine, and also Jonathan Binger is going to be building a block-based theme in the open. It's called cig, and he wants you to join him as he goes about building it over the days and weeks to come. We spend a bit of time talking about the Webby Awards and really what are they trying to promote.

Doesn't seem to be accessibility at least. We also talk about the fact that Yost has got a new leader. And then we get firmly into the discussion about ai, Google's new AI products, and the fact that Spotify has had to kick a load of songs out of their playlists because they've been created by ai. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain ssl, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.

Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and whatever, wherever you are in the world, good to that. And I hope that you are gonna be with us for the next 90 minutes or so. We generally tend to drone on about WordPress, but today we're gonna be droning on about WordPress and AI because that's become all the hotness, and I'm really fascinated by it and also terrified by it at the same time.

This is this week in WordPress. You've got to episode 253. We're always joined by some fabulous word pressy people. And this week we have Remkus. Remkus. Yes, I got it the right way. How you doing? Can we just can, let's just put the spotlight on Remkus for a moment here. Look at that. Look at Rees's.

New getup. Isn't it nice? Remkus? Last time he was with us had more. Pedestrian background, shall we say? What's going on Remkus? How what's all the deal?

[00:03:00] Remkus de Vries: No, some of us have to evolve and this is me evolving.

[00:03:04] Nathan Wrigley: I don't, I just stay exactly the same. So Remkus is a WordPress performance specialist.

He's a podcaster and a YouTuber. And you should probably subscribe to his newsletter. Where do we do that? Reka. How do we find out about your bits and pieces that you're doing these days?

[00:03:22] Remkus de Vries: I think it's in my my, my name here in in the stream. But it's r a m k.us.

[00:03:30] Nathan Wrigley: Is that what we're looking at now?

I'm looking at something slightly different. This is your new podcast. That's the home

[00:03:35] Remkus de Vries: page for my podcast. But the collection site of all links, so to say is RM K

[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: us. Nice. That's a nice URL to have. Very handy. The funny thing is,

[00:03:48] Remkus de Vries: I've had it for almost 10 years, that domain. I just never

[00:03:50] Nathan Wrigley: done anything with it.

I had

[00:03:52] Remkus de Vries: A URL shortener on it. It's still, and it's still active there, but I never used the index that php which I'm now using,

[00:03:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yay. What are we looking at here then? Because I know that recently you've had all sorts of different forays into different careers, and more recently you've decided to put out some WordPress content, specifically around a podcast and some YouTube content and what have you.

I'm looking at REMCOs, doris dot f r i f. This is that's the u Oh, is it f r l? I apologize. I apologize. My poor eyesight. I will put that into the show notes. But what's the enterprise here? You just got the itch to. Create a podcast. I know what that feels

[00:04:31] Remkus de Vries: like. I did. I felt motivated by appearing on your podcast all the time.

So yeah, I I started a podcast on my own within WordPress, and it's essentially featuring folks within the WordPress ecosphere in the broadest sense of the word. Some famous, some less famous, some up and coming, some a timers. There's lots of it already there. I have about 10 recorded, 11 recorded, and four are published now.

Lots to lots to see.

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: It's really good fun. It's always welcome having some, some new content to listen to. Honestly, TV has dropped off my radar more or less completely. And podcasting is the thing that I do. I'm sure that's not the case for everybody, but I just can't get enough of this kind of stuff.

Are you finding it challenging? Is it been dead easy? Lots of learning along the way. Lots of

[00:05:26] Remkus de Vries: learning along the way. Oh, nice. A lot. A lot. Yeah. But it's fun. It's it's a challenge I've set for myself. This is what I want to do and I've been wanting to do it for years. And as you can see I'm in my studio now.

I've put in the effort. It's

[00:05:40] Nathan Wrigley: go time. Yeah. Nice. I appreciate you joining us. Thank you so much. I'll link to that in the show notes. We'll get the URL correct in the show notes. We're also joined by Katie. Katie. Keith, how are you doing,

[00:05:51] Katie Keith: Katie? Hi, I'm good, thanks. Thanks for having me on

[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: again.

No, yeah, you're wo most welcome. Katie's got the shortest bio, which is really nice and easy to read. Katie is the founder and c e o at Barn, two plugins. Barn two make a whole suite of plugins, largely I think around W Commerce, but I think there are a couple of nonw commerce things. But just quickly you've got a brand new one, which for some reason my browsers decided to.

There we go. My browser made it look less appealing than it was going to look. Do you wanna just tell us about this quick one bit of self-promotion at the very beginning.

[00:06:25] Katie Keith: Yep. So this is our latest plugin. It's our 21st premium plugin. Amazingly, wow. I think 17 of them are Woo Commerce. So what you said was totally correct.

This one is a fairly simple but useful plugin, which basically adds the ability to choose variations and quantities on the main shop page and ly pages. So normally in WooCommerce, you have to go to a separate page for each product in order to choose options and quantities. And our plugin brings those options onto the shop page so that it's more like one page shopping, a much quicker way to buy.

[00:07:04] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, nice. I will again link to that in the show notes. It's called the page is called Add Variations and Quantity Fields to Woo Commerce Shop Page. But like I said, I'll link in the show notes. Interesting question, Katie. Is it rather now than it's ever been to come up with a new and innovative idea, or is there still like a to-do list that you've got hidden somewhere of fabulous ideas that you've still yet to implement?

Because it feels like it must be quite difficult to innovate. It's

[00:07:31] Katie Keith: funny, we still have lots of ideas because we are in there, we know what the pain points are and like I don't think there is any plugin that does this and it's a simple quite small thing. So hopefully that will be useful to people and we know people have been asking for it in terms of our other plugins.

But as we grow as a company, we're also getting a bit more confident with. TA doing a take that's already been done but our own interpretation of something. Yeah. For example, our product options plugin is a more advanced version of the official product add-ons plugin from woocommerce.com. So we are getting more confident in it not having to be unique.

It just ha has to be better or different or something.

[00:08:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate you joining us today. That's really great. And lastly, but by no means least we have Paul Halfpenny. How you doing Paul? Hello. I'm very well. Thank you. Paul is the CTO at Filter, which is a remote first digital agency that specializes in open source tech such as WordPress, Laravel, react, react Native, and Ionic.

We'll probably have a deep conversation with you today about remote working and all that kind of thing, cuz I know that's definitely your bag. And Sam Altman, he wants to have a fight with you. But we'll talk a little bit about that, but you also have something that you wanna share with us this time around.

There's a couple of pages I want to mention. It's all about something we are gonna mention later in the show. It's all about web accessibility. What's this, what are we looking at? Our marketers guide to Web accessibility. Yeah.

[00:09:05] Paul Halfpenny: We've just started a new enterprise series of guides positioned at CMOs and marketing leaders, and it's about trying to help educate them on subjects such as, Accessibility performance, core web vitals, personalization.

So this is the first of the guys that we've produced. Next one is personalization. We should be going live in a couple of weeks, and we've put together some resources on our website just about. Tools, audits, how we do accessibility things to watch out for in WebPress as well. And we're currently working with another company to produce an accessibility plugin as well, so that's in the middle of development, so we're looking forward to launching that in a few months time.

[00:09:48] Nathan Wrigley: Nice again. If you want to download The Marketers Guide to Web Accessibility, I will link to it in the show notes. But thank you. Yeah, thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. And a couple of comments of join of Common, which is always nice. First thing I wanna say though, just a bit of housekeeping.

If you do fancy joining us or rather you wanna get your friends, colleagues, relations, cats, dogs, hamsters, Guinea pigs, or leprechauns joining us, then send them to this u r l WP Builds.com/live. I was lying. Don't send the leprechauns. Nobody likes them. WP Builds.com/live and if you go there, you've gotta be logged into Google cuz it's YouTube comments.

If you are crazy enough to be using Facebook, then you need to do this. There's a little extra step. If you're on our Facebook group or something, you've gotta go to chat.restream.io/fb. Otherwise, Facebook in a remarkable show of privacy don't allow us to, see your avatar or username.

It's about the only privacy thing they appear to, to care about, which is unusual. But you have to do that. If you want to leave a comment over there and do drop in your comments as the show goes on, we do try and get as many of them on the screen as we can. Let's start off with Cameron Jones, who's now in Brighton.

He's moved all the way over for six months, I think, to pray cricket. I actually think he's here to play cricket. And he's in Brighton. I saw him in his, all of his cricket whites, a photo of him the other day. Very nice to have with us. Cameron, what was that? What'd you say? Re you

heard me?

[00:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: I really didn't.

I was talking,

[00:11:21] Remkus de Vries: I thought, what

[00:11:22] Nathan Wrigley: is cricket? Oh yeah, that, yeah. It's a sport play. Don't even go. Takes five days. Cameron loves it. That's all we need to know. Rob, Kens also joining us. Hello. He says, thank you for joining us, Mo Monday morning people, ai, what else? Indeed, Rob, that is basically what we talk about.

And Peter Ingersol always drops in the weather report from Connecticut and today it's a chilly night. He's at a chilly night. It's currently 11 degrees centigrade, 52 degrees Fahrenheit, under partly sunny skies here in Connecticut. It should get to a nice 24 degrees centigrade bo That's what we like. I bet I bet it's hotter where Katie is though cuz she's she's in the middle of the med.

If memory serves we've got smiling, waving people and then we've got Courtney Robertson all the way from GoDaddy who's saying hello. Hi there. Reka has learnt the secret to podcasting, says Rob. Stay ahead. Nice peaches here. Thanks Rob. And so are some other people as well. Happy Monday says Michelle Frache.

And that's it. That's all the comments that we've got from now. But yeah, keep dropping 'em in. Really would appreciate that. Let's get on with the show. The first thing to mention is that we have a website, it's called WP Builds.com. If you fancy keeping up with the content that we produce, just put your email address into there and click subscribe.

And then we'll send you two emails a week when we produce the podcast, which th this basically this thing on a Monday. We repurpose as a podcast tomorrow. You'll get the audio for that and then we'll send you one on Thursday when we produce the podcast there. Sincere thanks to GoDaddy Pro. They keep the whole thing propped up.

They've been sponsoring us for absolutely ages and bravo to them. Hated it. Very sincere. Thanks to them for keeping the lights on over here, frankly, and really appreciate that. Okay, let's get stuck into it. Right? Word camps are subject close to, I imagine all of our hearts but word camps are changing.

Sarah Gooding writing this week, following on from some announcements that came from word Camp Central. I believe it was Angela. Is it Angela? June? I won't say Angela. Yeah. Angela Gin. Saying basically that the format of Word camps is going to change during the pandemic for obvious reasons. It just dropped off a cliff.

The interest maintained itself a little bit online, although I'm not sure how many of those we were all able to stomach turning up to the online events as the only opportunity. Now they're back in person, but I don't think they're back with the kind of numbers that we had prior.

If you're looking at 2018 and 2019, those numbers I think were significantly greater. The attendee numbers were greater. The attend, the actual events that were put on, there was lots more of them. So the question really is how do we get this revived? How do we bring it back? And so what they've decided to do is put the whole word, WordPress word camp event thing into a jar, shake it up and see what comes out.

And the idea really is to have smaller events, so meet ups and that kind of thing with a different single focus. So rather than it just being the normal formula of show up, there'll be a d. Diverse range of WordPress topics plus prob possibly a contributor day or afternoon or something like that. The idea is to go deep on a particular area.

So that could be, I dunno, something like workshops as here workshop on conferences, networking events. Not quite sure how that would be different from just going down the pub, but there you go. And this is what's being proposed. You can imagine some people love it. The idea of doing one thing and doing it really well.

A lot of people are thinking, actually, hold on. I like how it is already. Can we just leave it alone? I should say that there, there's not really any talk of change in the flagship events and by that Word camp, us, Europe, and Asia. They, I think they're immune. They're just still gonna be in the format that we've got going at the moment.

But yeah, big changes are thought little word camp and meet ups and things like that. And RECU, we probably should have said in the intro that Recu is, was one of the founders of Word Camp Europe many years ago. And he's been involved in the team. So he is, got a lot of history and a lot of no doubt.

Interesting thoughts about this. Did you read this and what did you think about it?

[00:15:37] Remkus de Vries: I read it, yeah. So to my knowledge the goal that is outlined here has already been expressed prior to the disappearing of offline events. So it's a, as far as I know, it's a long standing wish. And I think there's two, two important components here.

It serves a crowd that prefers to have a single focus. Which I think is if you start counting as the larger group of people we could target. It's also the group I don't think is coming to meetups and work camps at the moment very much. And the second part is where there's the crowd that wants to see a diverse set has been catered to for the last.

So if I look at Work Up Netherlands, which I also co-founded the very first three, four editions were very focused focused on bloggers, focused on developers, focused on whatever we, at that time thought was good to focus on. That sort of has blend into a generic work, Kemp. And we're now seeing the wish to Des and ourselves as well to specifically go into different topics as well. So work of Netherlands this time in in September we'll have a focus on e-commerce and page builders, for instance. So I think that makes a lot of sense, but I think we need to also be very careful that we're not splintering up too much, which I, which is, I think the largest concern here.

If we're focusing on a particular group, we're not focusing on another group. So if the goal is to get as many people back to in, inside of meetups and work camps, then I think it needs to be a mix of the both. And I think the, just the flagships and being generic and the rest being specific, I think that's too easy of a decision to, to make.

I think it needs to be more than that sort of split. Do I agree that there should be more focused types of work camps? Yes, absolutely. The idea that it has to be couple of hundred people is something that's never been the attend, right? There's. There's been a word camp, I think 25 people, 50 in in Ventura, California, probably 10 years back.

Yeah. And that's a good example of what it also can be. It doesn't have to be a behemoth like Word Camp Asia or Word Camp Europe. It's, that's never been the goal. Per se. The goal has been to connect, at least from from your working up your perspective. The goal has been to connect to people, the hallway track, so the networking part, I like.

That's something that needs to happen more anyway. But yeah I, it has good points, but it also has downside. So it depends on what your ultimate goal is. The ultimate goal is to reach the crowd that you're not reaching So far, this might be a way, but it does, I think it should be a compliment com complimentary thing, not necessarily an exclusionary

[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: thing.

I think I probably missed that point. Sarah pointed out in the article, I should say also that Sarah Gooding was the person that wrote that article, and I would link to it in the show notes. She made the point that, yeah, the intention was to find. New people who perhaps haven't showed up so far. Maybe that will work or not.

Paul, I wanna turn it to you if that's all right. Because obviously being somebody that's in charge of a bunch of people you send people to these kind of events. In other words, do you reach into your pocket to pay for them? And are you more likely to reach into your pocket to pay for an event where it really does, like the topic just coincidentally aligns with what your agency are doing?

So we've seen web accessibility. Yeah. Maybe is a new thing for you or a thing that you're gonna focus on. Are you more likely to focus your staff going to, I don't know, an event in Holland or Italy or something where web accessibility or something in your copy book is going on?

[00:19:48] Paul Halfpenny: I think we're sending a big group on one of that group going to work Camp Europe this year.

So there's nine of us going and actually we're going to. In a group of that size to allow people to cross pollinate between things that they may not see in their day-to-day lives. So actually we find that Work Camp Europe quite useful for that group. But I was gonna suggest that I think it, it benefits when you have additional events like either side of a work camp maybe.

So one thing that you know, was really part of our attention at Work Camp Europe, at Work Camp Asia was the Enterprise Gap meetup that was run by Human Made and x wp. And they're doing that again at Work Camp Europe this year. And I think, there's also events taking place around AI and they might be online events, but I think that's where they could be add-ons to what already happens at work camp.

I don't think we'd spend, send that number of people to a specific event. Like just an AI for WordPress event, you might send a couple, but actually the bigger work camps are great for sending a wider range of people. So project managers, developers, client people, and getting them to go to different talks and different things.

Some might be going to ones on content, some might be going to ones, some development, some might be going to ones on culture, and that's really important to us.

[00:21:15] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Same question really to Katie. Obviously Reka just mentioned that, was it Netherlands word? Can the one with the woo Commerce focus.

I apologize, Reka, I forgot. Yeah, that's the, that's Work Camp Netherlands. Okay. So the word Camp Netherlands is gonna have a focus on a sorry woo Commerce. And there was one other topic as well. Are you more likely to send Katie some of your staff to that one, because that seems right in your wheelhouse as opposed to something generic.

[00:21:43] Katie Keith: It would depend on the location. So for me and many other people, I believe the main value of Word camps is the networking, meeting people, learning from people, building partnerships, connections, learning from other people, all of that. And so it mentions in the article, networking only events, and I'd actually be more interested.

In that than a topic specific event because you can learn about topics in so many different ways through online resources and things. Whereas the meeting people in person is the, I'd say the unique thing about Word camps. So I'd be more inclined to send my team to a. Word camp that covers everything or was just networking.

So for example, there'll be seven of us at Word Camp Europe this year and two at Word Camp us. So we tend to choose the flagship ones, where the team members are. So I'd be more interested in enhanced networking opportunities which they're not really doing at the moment. They're letting it happen organically.

So for example years ago in I think it was Paris in 2017 or something, they had a speed networking event. I think it was organized by Tribe as they were then. And you, it was like topic specific, but networking. So they had a marketing people networking, a product, people networking, accessibility, people networking and so on.

So you could network with people that were interested in the same things as you. So for me, that would be more valuable than going to talks about particular topics, for example,

[00:23:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting. Rem cuz it, you mentioned it would be a shame if it also, if it splinted everybody just from our little round robin here, the four, the three of you, it does sound like you've got slightly different agendas in all cases.

So yeah, we'll have to see how this works out. I, to be honest with you, I think I like Katie because it's just me essentially, and I'm just looking for content. I go there to record people content. It really wouldn't bother me which one of those it was. I could probably attend any of those and that would be fine.

But I, I get the point that, a, where you are, you don't wanna put people on long distance flight if you can avoid it, but b, the topic yeah, we'll have to see how this works out. A corollary to this, which isn't linked to this, but I have a memory, and forgive me if I'm speaking out of turn, I have a memory that there's also a bit of a push to bring speakers in to speak at these events that aren't necessarily a.

Connected with WordPress. Does anybody remember that story from a couple of weeks ago? Just bring people in from

[00:24:22] Katie Keith: industry about us, isn't it? Where can, is it us looking at that? Yeah.

[00:24:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's a whole can of worms. Yeah, it does seem curious, doesn't it? Because there's a lot of heritage and history and networking that goes on and it would be, I don't know, there's almost like a little pecking order or working your way up the ladder in a sort of sense.

And you get to speak at these events because you've got a heritage of doing things and what have you. I'm over egging it, but yeah, it'd be interesting to see how that goes. But, okay, so we got a few comments about that. First of all, Cameron says he's not sure if this will really solve anything.

Word camps could already do this EEG, WP Campus, but the standard format they took was because they worked. He goes on to say, I'm all for specialist events. They're a good idea and we need more of them. But trying to mandate it, we'll only alienate already struggling communities. Interesting. I agree. And then, thank you.

Yeah. And then Rob can says, the other issue is flagship work camps need to increase allowed numbers of attendees. That would help as well. There is no reason with the pandemic behind us that they cannot do this. I guess the ceiling there is maybe the ceiling, excuse me, I've just put another comment on one second.

Is the ceiling there maybe limited by the venue itself? So for example, at Word Camp US, they had a ceiling, but that was the pandemic, wasn't it? They kept it at 600. But I think that in Word Camp Europe, there was a ceiling of, just how many people that building is allowed. Yeah. Under its, yeah.

Yeah. And then David. Hi David. I don't know that name, so forgive me if I say it wrong. David Lutz, subject-based word counts could be easier for finding sponsors. Ooh, good point. And I know that finding sponsors is a hot topic at the moment. I, my understanding is it's harder than it's ever been for Word Camp Central to find the big sponsors that they need.

So maybe that's, yeah, a good point. Okay. That was an interesting chat. Thank you for joining me on that one. Let's move on. This is about an event by coincidence. This is WordPress Accessibility Day. If you are keen to speak at Word. Press Accessibility Day, which is on September the 27th, 2023. The call for speakers is now open and they've got this page again.

As always, I'll link in the show notes. There's no point in me reading out the URLs, but I this article because not only are they laying it out very clearly what it is that they want, they're very clear on the kind of speakers that they want, the sort of the topics that they broadly think might be of interest to their listenership.

But they also go into the description of what they think a good talk would look like. The exact number of minutes that you need to be stood up, including the amount of minutes that you need to spend. Taking questions and all that kind of stuff. There's an option to put together panels if you want to do that.

But also, and I think this might generate some interest rather than a typical word count where everything is on a voluntary basis, if you are one of the speakers who is accepted, they will throw in $300 for the session. It's gonna be paid directly to you. It says, you just apply by yourself, not as part of a company or what have you.

So yeah, if you've got a panel, it says that it's up to you to decide how you want to share that money out. But it looks like a panel would still receive 300, not 300 each, cuz you know, you could. Get really carried away that I've got a panel of 90 and we're gonna bankrupt the event. So if you wanna propose a talk the floodgates have opened.

1st of May is when it all began, and you've got until the 11th of June. So thinking Capson, you've got about four weeks. I just wanted to raise that as a community thing, but I don't know if anybody in the panel wants to talk about it. Can I add something to this? Yeah,

[00:28:18] Remkus de Vries: please do. It's slightly related.

There's I mentioned this in my newsletter going out went out on last Friday. There's Ali Collective, which is initiative by level here in the Netherlands. And they have courses up for anyone not yet fully comfortable in. What do I need to do to make a site access accessible?

There's a great course that they offer and next Thursday is, or this Thursday is International Accessibility Day or something like that. And on that day they're making their course as accessible as possible for anyone so you can essentially pay what you can afford.

[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Rimkus, will you drop the link into the little private chat and then I'll make sure if you can find it, that's great and I will mention it, but if if you Google,

[00:29:16] Remkus de Vries: Ali Collective, which is spelled a one one Y Yeah.

And then

[00:29:22] Nathan Wrigley: collective, you'll find it. Okay. Thank you. That's, yeah, that's great. And it sounded Paul, like you wanted to get in there as well. I

[00:29:28] Paul Halfpenny: just wanted to ask if it was an online event

[00:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: or, okay. That's a good question. It wasn't clear. It's got it, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. You'd have thought it would've said that right at the top, but I don't see that. I bet somebody in the comments will know, but I do not know. Let's hope that somebody in the comments is paying attention and actually knows. I don't know. I'm sorry Paul can't help you.

I thought the

[00:29:54] Paul Halfpenny: amount that they're willing to pay for a speech is quite good actually. Yeah. I dunno what in relative terms is good,

[00:30:00] Nathan Wrigley: but it, yeah, I mean I guess if you are doing it as an online thing then it may very well pay for a proportion of the time it takes to make it. But if it's a, yeah, if it's a real world event, and you've gotta get on a plane or a train, then yeah, probably goes into insignificance compared to that.

But yeah, anybody can tell us. That would be really helpful. Let's go to the hive mind of the comments that would be really useful. Katie, anything or shall we move on?

[00:30:25] Katie Keith: Just that, yeah. It's interesting they're starting to pay people. It does seem to be a bit of a trend that they're going in that direction because Word camp us were talking about that if they brought in external speakers, I'm not sure how external speakers have a higher value than people from the WordPress community financially, but it's an interesting development anyway.

[00:30:46] Nathan Wrigley: Just, I've went to the about page by the way. So it's the 2023 dot WP accessibility.day. Nice u r url, by the way. Slash about, and it just says it's a 24 hour global event, so I'm guessing it's online. Either that or the organizers are gonna have fully red eyes by the end of it. It's virtual says.

Cameron, thank you. That's really helpful. Bravo. Thanks for that. Great. Okay. Great. All right, let's move on. Next one is WP Tavern. Once more. This is I think this is a piece of news which we've covered in the past, but it does seem that like it's been rebranded and thrown together as a new release.

Brian Gardner, who you'll remember well, WordPress users from a while ago will remember the fabulously popular Genesis framework, which it felt like more or less everybody used for a period of time. Brian. He now works for WP Engine, but just prior to joining WP Engine, he really got into the block space and he'd released a I think it was a theme framework at that time called Frost.

Then when he went over to work at WP Engine, they took it on board and so they've re-released it now. He had it as a paid offering, and now my understanding is it's completely open source. You can get the entire. Thing and it looks like a really nice, credible offering. If you wanna get yourself a site up and running, it's fairly opinionated and it's design, I dunno if you can see the screen, but lots and lots of 90 degree angles and bold colors butting up against bold colors.

So blacks against whites against really vibrant blues. There's a lot of options in the, I wanna say customizer, but the site editor to just change these globally as a little video from Twitter, which shows how that's really nicely implemented. Little background gradients change when you do that.

So rather than it just changing the buttons or the titles or what have you, you get this real different feel to the homepage and so on. So anyway, it's out. It's released with a ton of patterns. I think there's about 40 for 35 something. Oh yeah, there you go. 36. And if you are looking to get into block-based sites, this looks like a really nice way to go.

Bravo, Brian Bravo, WP Engine. Open to the floor. Reka, Katie, Paul, anything to

[00:33:10] Remkus de Vries: say? I think it's always been free for fir first off, uhhuh and it's very complete. But I think yeah, I think it's a beautiful way to learn how to actually build full site editing themes. Yeah, same goes with the one Mike McAllister released oie.

Oh, ollie wp com. Love that one as well. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. So between the two these two, you have a lot to learn and you'll end up producing great functionality as native to workers as you can. Yeah.

[00:33:44] Nathan Wrigley: He says here that frost was in, so this is Brian in the comments. He said it was initially launched as a paid theme in the summer of 2021, but I don't think it lasted for anything more than a matter of weeks, so it went on.

I've never seen the paid version. Yeah. I don't think it, I think he was picked up by WP Engine more or less immediately. He was on the show talking about it, and then it felt like the next time he was on the show, he was employed. And it was only a few weeks later apparently fairly lightweight.

There's something somewhere in the comments, somebody inspected it all, and there was very little 99, 99 90 lines of p h p, 300 lines of c s and then the theme js on file. A lot of heavy lifting done by very few lines of code. Paul, Katie, anything. Yeah,

[00:34:27] Paul Halfpenny: I was just gonna just echo what Rutgers said in terms of learning that's the most important thing as we come and navigate into the block based era.

One of the things that, that we've been doing over the last couple of years is bringing people up to speed and the best way to do this. And it's still a continuing pattern where we, it's useful to see something and then learn from it rather than have to go through the documentation yourself and try and work it out for yourself, and I think what Brian does is brilliant.

I think that the attention to detail is incredible. Yeah. And it's quite minimalist as well, so you can build upon it and you can leverage it. So absolutely great that it's out there. Yep. And the more resources that you can, I find it easier to go and find something and then go, okay, that's, how did they do that?

Rather than trying to work through the documentation myself.

[00:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting. Remkuss mentioned this other one by Mike McAllister called oie. I'm gonna, I'm gonna put it up cuz I think it's really curious what he's done here. So this is his theme. It's called o I dunno if it's called oie, wp or just oie, but the r l is oie wp it comes with so many patterns.

I w yeah. Here we go. There's just like this carousel on the screen, sorry if you're listening to this, but there's a carousel of all of the different blocks as a block patterns that he's throwing together. Again, beautifully designed very nicely Dom, but if you look at his homepage, what do you, something curious about that rather than show off about the theme.

Kind of interested to see that he's actually showing off about full site editing. So the learning piece is obviously really crucial to Mike cuz he's really, he's showing the Gutenberg UI as part of building it. So he is showing the styles panel and he's showing all of the blocks lined up and how he's done it.

Th this is really great. He's got it on GitHub at the moment. I dunno if he's got a plan to put it into the repo, but at the moment it's on GitHub. It's submitted.

It's

[00:36:25] Remkus de Vries: already submitted. Good. Great. This one goes for Frost as well. I think that's supposed to end up in the WordPress theme directory as well.

[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, just another beautiful project. So Frost is Brian Gardner's. Ollies is Mike McAllister and they're both worth looking at. I linked to Ollies in last week's show notes, but we didn't really talk about it, so I won't link to it again. But you can go to last week's episode if you want to, Katie, anything to her.

[00:36:48] Katie Keith: Yeah, I was impressed about them making it free. And in particular, refunding the people who previously paid, I'm slightly less impressed. Now you've pointed out that it was only premium for a matter of weeks, cuz it was probably only one or two people or something. But yeah, the sentiment is good that they're proactively contacting people and refunding them because the resource is now free.

Yeah, I thought that was good.

[00:37:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really nice. Oh, some more comments. So basically just people saying hi, isn't it? I don't think we've got any substantive comments, just one from. Atif, sorry if I've pronounced that wrong. The block editor. Sorry if I'm controversial and you all love it, but I can't stand it.

There's always there's always what, we welcoming other opinions. I get it. I know it's not for everybody. I know lots of people who won't go anywhere near it and I fully get it. All I can say Atif is if you do try it, it may have moved on a little bit since you last tried it, and there are now some really nice initiatives making use of it.

It's come a long way since WordPress 5.0 is considerably better. That being said, came emptor. If you want to do full site editing or just site editing, it still has a lot of limitations. You're probably still gonna get more mileage out of that tried and trusted classic thing, even for things like. I don't know, menus and stuff like that, but, okay.

There we go. So that was OIE and Frost. We're onto another block-based theme. This is just such an interesting project. I had to mention it. This doesn't exist, but this is a project which Jonathan Boer from Automatic Wants to exist. And I'll just paraphrase, he, Jonathan does a lot of the content [email protected], and he, one of the pieces of content that he wished to do in a live setting was he wanted to make a block-based theme.

But being Jonathan, he was quite upfront about it and he said, I'm not a designer so I could build a theme. But I think essentially what he was saying, reading between the lines of nobody will want to use it because it won will be fairly ugly. So he tweeted or he social mediad something and said, can I, can somebody who's better at design than me?

Give us a hand. And he got a reply. He got a reply from Emily rap rapport, and I dunno if that's report or rapport. But she came back with a bunch of designs and you can see them on the screen. Beautiful. Like a lot of things offset, like at quirky angles, but really nice designs. And Jonathan, over the next period of time on his Twitch channel I dunno I haven't got the link to the Twitch channel.

It's probably embedded on the page in here somewhere. He's gonna slowly but surely, hour by hour. Build this out. And so if you want to be like Mike McAllister and you wanna be a little bit like Brian Gardner and you wanna build your own block-based things, we're having a clue where to start, then Jonathan Boer is gonna help you out.

He reckons it's gonna take quite a long time as it's just little slots here and there and everywhere. He's hoping to have finished by the end of 2023, which is great. It's, but it's gonna be a long project in little tiny chunks, which is probably the best for everybody's brain. But he's gonna call it cig.

And it's gonna be a new block-based theme, but it's gonna come slowly. But show, I just thought that was a really curious initiative for people. I don't do block-based themes, but if I did want to do it, I kinda the idea of hanging out on a weekly basis with probably the same handful of people.

We'd probably end up cracking jokes and wasting loads of time, but it would still be quite nice as a little enterprise each and every week. I think this is such a cool little project over to you if you've got anything to add.

[00:40:44] Paul Halfpenny: I think it's really interesting. It proves that not everybody can do everything in WordPress.

Yes. I think sometimes it's just this idea that if you use WordPress, you should be able to do everything. You can design and you can develop, and there's a lot of people who can do that, but not everybody can. And you need somebody with, specialist design skills sometimes to come up with the thinking, when you started

[00:41:09] Nathan Wrigley: filter Paul, I dunno if you started filter, but when you were at the beginning of your freelancer journey or agency journey, how many times did you tell the client, yeah, oh yeah, I can do that. And then leave the meeting and go, I have no idea. How am I gonna do that?

[00:41:26] Paul Halfpenny: I think most of the challenges of being part of an agency is exactly that conversation actually.

Yeah. Because you're always being pushed to do something. That you've not done before. Yeah. And that's, that's why I love being part of an agency. Yeah. Cuz we get to come up with solutions and we get to do things and that's, yeah. And you also get to delegate

[00:41:45] Nathan Wrigley: it. You can do it.

[00:41:46] Paul Halfpenny: I, many years ago, I used to be the person that, that was doing those things and actually as you grow up and he grow, Cray and older I think you have to recognize that you can't do it all yourself anymore, and you get to a certain size and suddenly, we do have developers and designers and project managers and business analysts and things like that, that are all responsible, and I weighed in every now and then and go, oh, I can do all of this.

I, I, I used to do it. And then after about five minutes I'm just like, oh my God, this is really hard. Can somebody take it off me and

[00:42:20] Nathan Wrigley: do it properly? I'm not taking it personally, Paul. But in that last little diatribe there, you said you've gone, going gray and you've got to assert the size.

It's it all. It happens beginning to tie together and weigh in. I think it was also, oh yeah. So good morning, mark. Thanks for joining us. Mark West Guard. I still think, mark, I still think I've got a little graphic here somewhere. Yeah. Look, this is approved by Mark West Guard. There he is. Mark's joining us.

Katie, anything to add, Reka, anything to add to this?

[00:42:56] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think it's a really good example of why there is still a future for themes, although differently because the design is missing. Yeah, you can physically do different things with full site editing and blocks, but you do still need a designer to create a professional looking design for your website.

And so I think that there will always be that role and even though the industry of themes is evolving and I also think it's a really nice example of building in public because it's not just the process that he's building in public, it's the whole conception of the idea and finding somebody to partner with.

So it's a real kind of cradle to grave example of a project building in public.

[00:43:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I just like the idea of doing it based upon what the crowd tell you each week. Presumably it'll morph into presumably that design, but I bet it goes. Pear shaped a few times and goes off the rails a little bit now and then, but good luck, Jonathan Remkus.

Anything?

[00:43:55] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, what I like about this is that if I look at how I learn, I look at what something is already there, I dissect it and I play with it. I change something and I, oh, okay. So that does that and, move on. But I recognize that's not how everybody learns. And so what's Jonathan?

Knowing him from what I've seen in his streams and and he's most likely going to start from scratch. Yeah. So he's going to process all the things that are to learn in the in between. And I like that. So that's a different way of learning. It's a slower pace, obviously, because he has to figure out every single thing.

For instance the themes that Brian and Mike have released, they have fluid typography in there. Now you can dive all into how does fluid topography work? But if you have an example of how it works, that works better for me personally to learn. Yeah. Jonathan most likely is going to figure out how it works, explain how it works, and then build it.

So there's a different approach and I like that. So that there's a more diverse way of learning. Cause we don't all learn in the same way.

[00:45:05] Nathan Wrigley: Just to let you know, the, he's got three things out already. He's got develop your first low code block theme, and then he's got a developer's guide to block things, part one and part two.

They're linked to in the article. But in terms of when this gets going, not entirely sure, but he's going to, as he builds it, he's gonna have a GitHub repository open so that the amendments that he makes week by week will be freely available to everybody. So yeah, nice little project. Again, I'll link to it in the show notes.

The URL is too long to read WordPress Companies in the news lately. Yost has been in the news a lot lately. Did somebody just burp? I was wondering that

[00:45:47] Katie Keith: was that

[00:45:48] Nathan Wrigley: you, Remkus. Did you think you'd muted yourself? Cuz I have to say that was quite the, that's great. On that is the episode title.

It's just gonna be called Burp.

You'd press hilarious. That's great. Do it again periodically. Enjoy the rest of the session. I can, but I won't. Oh, you've really knocked me off there. Yost, a company has been in the news lot for all sorts of different reasons. They've been bought out by New Fold Digital, not that long ago. They had Yost himself stepped down.

Then Marika more recently stepped down and Ty, I believe that's how you pronounce it, he's also stepped down. And so I guess that left a bit of a vacuum. And we have somebody who stepped into it. I confess. This is not a name that I'm familiar with. Let me just pop the article on the screen. This is easy to read.

The URL two, it's yo.com/meet/kimberley/cole. I've just remembered the burp and it sent me off again. And she's now the new leader. At Yost, my understanding is that she has a different background. She's become, she was appointed the general manager of New Fold in Europe recently, but she's now stepped into the role.

I dunno if this is a role that she's gonna amalgamate with other roles or if this is now her unique role, but I've not encountered her in the WordPress space. Forgive me, Kimberly, if I'm if I just haven't been paying attention. But yeah, curious that the Yos team has now got some new leadership reka.

I dunno if you are able to want to wish to or just avoid the topic altogether. Or you can just burp if you like. You are never gonna live that down mate. That's fine. That's fine.

[00:47:37] Remkus de Vries: Tell us about, I moved forward, I had to let it go and I mute myself, but Hey, I'm only human. Yeah, it's

[00:47:45] Nathan Wrigley: okay. I get it.

[00:47:47] Remkus de Vries: No I'm not familiar with her, so I'm, I have no other comment than I'm sure that she's she's a good choice and she'll help yours propel to the next level.

[00:47:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you very much indeed. Yes. The usual thing she said in answer to the question, will there be any significant changes, she says, as I'm new to the WordPress word, WordPress world, I will be first listening and learning from the amazing Yos team, our customers, and the community.

My main focus will be to understand our customers needs and see how we can better serve them. It's it's what you might expect, just don't change things too radically and we'll see how the leadership changes. Katie and Paul, I don't know if you've got anything on this. It seems like a.

Maybe you don't.

[00:48:30] Katie Keith: I just think it's an interesting sign of the ongoing professionalism of WordPress and making it run more like a business. Obviously ster at the forefront of that anyway, but bringing in business leaders from outside of the community it's, you wouldn't actually have seen that so much five or 10 years ago.

[00:48:50] Paul Halfpenny: I think that's a great point. And actually, I'm interested in what the direction will be because it's a big change from where yest was. Yeah. And I think it's so important to WordPress. It's, it, I think when we build sites, we have a collection of 10 to 15 kind of default plugins that we put on a, every single site that, that for one reason, another kind of fix some of the missing bits of WordPress that we.

And Yos is one of those. Yeah, that's our kind of go-to SEO plug in. That has been for years. So it'd be really interesting to see if they think change things like, what features you get for free, what pricing there is for the model and what they can add to it.

[00:49:41] Nathan Wrigley: I think search engines are such a difficult thing to predict at the minute.

I think for the last decade or more, it really has just been chasing the algorithm and trying to back, reverse engineer what the algorithm is doing and then creating a product around that. I just really don't know what search is gonna be like in the future. And I dunno whether it'll be a search engine list or whether it'll be some kind of chat interface.

I use a search engine now. I've decided to just bin Google for a bit and see what that does to me. And so I've paid for a search engine called Neva. Which is N E V A. I've mentioned it a few times on the show. They've been scraping the internet for five years and they were doing the AI thing before Bing got chat, G p T and all that.

And so you type in something and then it would create this unique AI paragraph with footnotes to where they'd scrape that particular content. And I just, I do wonder if in the future we're gonna be looking at a search engine list or if we're more gonna be asking for the answer to the problem.

Just the one thing, going for the AI re result at the top. And if that's the case I think SEO is gonna be, Yeah, a really different game. Anyway, sorry. Total aside. Good luck, Kimberly. And yeah, and then we've got some just laughing emojis. I wonder what inspired that. Cameron.

Cameron can't stop laughing and bur press yes this week in Bur Press. Let's go with that. Jonathan Courtney says, just going back to that previous piece, Jonathan is also starting into an entire learning pathway for developer curriculum for Learn wp Okay, so not just one thing on the go. Many things including What's what are you doing now?

You doing, he's gonna hijack the rest of the show? No, it's bodily noises. You've got a road caster. You could fill that little pad up with all the noises of the circus. Yes, I should have used that one. I was thinking of other ones. Bodily noises. Okay, let's move on. Okay, so every, is it every year?

I think it's every year. The webs come around. It's a bit like the Oscars for the internet and there's always a whole load of things, but I just thought I'd show a few things off. This is a piece on WP Engine's blog. It's called WordPress Wins Big at the Web's. I don't know if WordPress did win big at the web's or if it was just designers of websites.

One big at the web's, but I'll just show you a couple and I don't know. I. I'm really conflicted about this award because, or these awards, because as I'm about to show you the site's, I don't know, maybe I'm being uncharitable. So here's one, right? So here's one. We've got one called Give a Grad a Go.

And this is what it looks like, giving it a demonstration there fairly as you'd imagine, it's a bunch of rows, and to, to me it looks like, a respectable website, but there's no sort of, there's no sort of wiz bangy stuff. So there's that. Then another one was called RCA Records.

This is quirky. Have a look at this as you move around your mat. That is quite an interesting little effect. You really have to be watching it. But as you move around the the sort of the typography changes if you move left and right, the width and the spacing of the fonts changes.

And if you move down, you've got lots and lots of. I'm gonna say stuff which pg ne from a U I UX perspective she'll be like screaming at the screen at this point because you don't seem to have any agency as to whether or not this scrolls or doesn't. We've got videos in the background. We've got scrolling text and all of this kind of stuff.

Look, text moving around and we've got a transparent header and all of that. And then there's another one here called AI model. We'll be talking about a model, and this very importantly has three squares. Which you can move around on the screen and it makes the photo look different. So I don't know what to make of this.

Okay. I guess it's a bit like an award ceremony for the music industry or something. The pushing the boundaries is gonna get the results. But what do you think about this? Is this the right enterprise? Are we rewarding things here just because they look glamorous? I do wonder what the accessibility requirements of these websites are.

I don't know. But anyway, bravo to the companies that have won. But I just don't know what to make of these awards. I bet everybody wants to avoid this topic.

[00:54:31] Paul Halfpenny: Actually just a push. We won a webby. I know it was an agency I used to work at. I didn't work on the Protect too much. I'm not gonna take any claim for it at all.

It was for yo sushi. And it actually, I think, it was one based on how we approached the menu and delivered the menu and creatively it was quite nice looking back. It was, not accessible in the slightest I don't think, but but it seemed like a vast award ceremony, with a gazillion categories.

And we won a very small category on hospitality sites or something like that. It was nice to do it, it was nice to,

[00:55:14] Nathan Wrigley: but does it give your, does it give your agency a bit of a leg up in the same way that, let's say you won a Grammy. Or you want an Oscar, you are more or less guaranteed work for the next decade, aren't you on the back of that?

Or at least sales for the next decade? Yeah. It didn't work for

[00:55:28] Paul Halfpenny: that agency, no. Okay. It was really nice and it was something to shout about, agencies the agencies like live and died, particularly in the creative industries about which awards they win. And, dna, N A D, black Pencils, things like that, that, that's really important to the reputation of the

agency.

[00:55:49] Remkus de Vries: Is there, is the web a thing you have to pay for to enter the,

oh, is it

[00:55:56] Remkus de Vries: probably, because I know of most of these types of awards, you actually pay for the thing and you get awarded the payment instead of, oh, is it

[00:56:05] Katie Keith: one of them? They're really dodgy and they create a category for everybody who would pay basically.

I don't know

[00:56:12] Remkus de Vries: If this one is, but I know a lot of those awards agency claiming they've won. I know a few of them are, just pay three K and you have an award. Oh,

[00:56:24] Paul Halfpenny: I see.

[00:56:26] Nathan Wrigley: I think this is different. This is been going

[00:56:29] Paul Halfpenny: for a while. Big, a big thing. So this is pretty global.

[00:56:33] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting though, because I do wonder, sorry, apologies. Sorry.

[00:56:39] Paul Halfpenny: I just gonna say that there are those things around, and actually I think that's why the bigger age the bigger award ceremonies are quite important because it stands you out because it is industry

[00:56:50] Nathan Wrigley: recognized. Yeah. The I just wonder what the incentive is.

In other words are we looking at a website, which is beautiful? If you are fully cited and have access to a mouse and all of the normal conceits of a web user or I wonder what the kind of experience would be for any of this. For somebody who was using, I don't know, assistive technology, it'd be interesting and I wonder what the goalposts are.

Peter Ingersol makes the point that he's, I guess he's quoting from the website about the Webby Awards. The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the internet end quote. And then his comment, his pithy comment is, I don't think so. Oh yeah, that's right. We do an award ceremony every year on WP Builds where if you pay us, you will win.

But we who's the point? Hang on. Wait. It's not as bad as it sounds. You don't pay us anything. You have to give the money to Big Orange Heart and then you have to send us the receipt. And if you send us the receipt, then we'll guarantee you win whatever segment you want. You self-certify.

I don't know, I, me, it might be greatest WordPress or something like that. REMCOs category is now sealed forever. But you seal Yeah, that's right. You send me the receipt and then I will stick you up. We do it every year. We have done for two years. And so yes, you buy your way into victory, but it.

That's, can I take for the record?

[00:58:30] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. Can I take, for the record, that was a mild burp, like that was on the line.

[00:58:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Redecorating is required if you do the the regular. Regular. It really is, honestly, we're never gonna live this down. So yes, we do that kind of thing, but it's for a good cause and you get, what you're getting into at the very beginning.

Yeah. So I'll be raising that probably a little bit later in the year to raise money for big orange art or whatever charity is going at time. So that's the web's. You can go and look at that. I'll link to it in the show notes. Okay. It's time. We've had just about an hour and we haven't really mentioned AI very much.

So now's the time. Probably the rest of the show will go into this. Sam Altman, who is the c e O of OpenAI, has decided that remote work was a silly experiment and one that we really should now repeal. I don't think he's trying to claim that, during the pandemic everybody should have been going in, but I think he's saying as it was forced upon us, and it was a, an experiment which we tried to run, now is the time to decide that was a mistake.

It this article, which I'll link to, it's over on Fortune. Hey, by the way, little trick if you come across a pay walled article like this and you're using a browser like Brave Built into the URL bar is this little article view. If you just enable the article view, you just get the whole article. Nice. I did not know that.

But minus the minus all the pictures, it just shows you the text, which is what I wanna see. Anyway. I don't need to see the pictures of Sam Altman. So you can just turn that on and off. That'll probably now last about a week now that I've mentioned it. But for now, if you go to any of those paywall things and.

And, have a look cuz it's not, you're running the JavaScript. I don't know how it works. But anyway, so he's basically saying, can we get back to work now? Can we go back into the office? The proximity to other people brings a function to creativity. It enables all sorts of things that's being stuck on the end of Zoom calls and what have you don't allow for.

Now, I know that Automatic, for example, is a fully distributed team. As far as I'm aware it always has been, always will be. I know Paul Paul filter your agency. Forgive me if I misspeak, but I think you are distributed entirely as well. What do you make of this? Do you think that it is time to call that experiment a day and get back into the office?

No. Nope.

[01:00:58] Paul Halfpenny: No, he's wrong. I could tell a hundred percent wrong. There is nothing I enjoy more than not getting on the train into Central London five days a week and get him back again. I quite like it was a really nice time when we used to commute into London. I worked in Pennington, I worked in soho. You know it, it's a nice place to be.

I get that. It's fantastic. We used to say when we were there, we'll look back on this in a few years time or 10 years time ago, we used to work in the middle of soho, like how amazing g out for a beer after work and I watched a lot of films on my tablet going backwards and forwards, but I used to leave the house.

At quarter by seven in the morning sometimes before the kids had got up, I didn't see them go to school. And that was to get into work by nine. It used to take me an hour and a half door to door by the time you walked to the station, got on the train, walked, got on the tube, then walked to the office.

It's an hour and a half, right? And then I ended up leaving earlier, and earlier to get back home for a decent time. So even if leave at work and the court past five, you still wouldn't get back to almost seven at night by which again, you've missed, miss your kids lives. And I just started doing less and less of it before Covid.

And when Covid hit, I was like, come on we're done. Let's go remote first. Can I ask you,

[01:02:19] Nathan Wrigley: how do you combat? Because I can imagine that if you put a bunch of people into a room and they're creative people and they've got to do creative work, whether that's coding or, designing, what have you, yeah.

I imagine there is some. There is some truth in the fact that just the fact that they're all bumping together in the same room thing, sparks will fly. That might be difficult to create elsewhere. How do you create that atmosphere? How do you do that online? There's

[01:02:46] Paul Halfpenny: trade offs. I'm sure Katie will know this as well with her team.

But the, I think we, we have reg, regular standups. We have daily standups for each of our projects where everybody's coming together to talk about issues with it. And that happens every single day. We are on Slack a lot. We do a lot of Google meet meetings. We do a lot of Google Zoom meetings and yeah, there'll always be a little bit, but you're gonna fail because of that, but then the trade offs are that you don't have people that you know, are all having to force to go into London, or we're only able to hire people from a specific geographic area. And it just works better for us. I value the time outside of work as much as I, I really enjoy work, and I do a lot of work outside of work because I'm genuinely interested in what I do, but I think it's really important that we have a work-life balance and we get to see our kids and we get to see our partners and our spouses and our family, and I just don't think it's worth the time spending on a train going to London and back.

[01:03:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just quick, back of the postcard calculation. You've saved 60 hours a month? Yeah. A month of just sitting on trains and, tubes, which with the best will in the world is actually quite a demoralizing enterprise, isn't it? It's not like you're economists getting onto the train, it's busy and you come outta that whole thing feeling agitated and frustrated.

Whereas now you get an extra hour and a half in bed, you get to see your kids at the other end of the day. There's a certain levity which is in your life from all of that. And so Sam Altman, what can we say? You I'm sure for your team it's gonna work, but yeah. Anyway, REM sounded like you want today.

[01:04:38] Remkus de Vries: I wonder if Sam has kids or or a relationship that is where he has to be away from. It's just weird for somebody to come out and determine that this is how it should be for everybody. That's right. I'm not allowed to use sweat words, swear words here now, but I'm. I'm very tempted though.

[01:04:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You could package it up in a noise if you'd like. Oh, no, he's gonna oh, I'm scared. Yeah. Okay. So Remkuss and Paul firmly in the Sam Altman is Ron Category. Katie, what about you? Yeah,

[01:05:17] Katie Keith: me too. I actually tweeted about this morning because I disagreed with what he'd said. I specifically said it was easy enough for him in Silicon Valley having access to the best tech talent in the world.

Some of us are based in I, I started the company in the southwest England, nowhere near any major city. Now I live on an island in the Mediterranean. I do not have access to the best WordPress plugin developers and other roles that we need locally. It's. It depends on where you live, and yet I can hire, the best people in the world from wherever they live.

Yeah, we are on Slack all day. Like Paul said, we keep in contact, we meet up at work camps and things like that, and I totally accept that there are benefits to being together in person, but there are a lot of disadvantages, of course. And. I remember when I had a normal job before I started my own business.

I used to hate working in an office. People would come and talk to me about the weather and things, and I'm a really motivated, hardworking person that was just trying to get on with it. I don't about what I'm eating for lunch or something,

[01:06:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think that's a really important

[01:06:33] Paul Halfpenny: point you end up having.

There's all sorts of different people, right? And people thrive in different ways of working. I'm not for politics at all. I hate office politics. I can't stand out, just not interested. It doesn't do anything for me. But I know that when I've worked in offices before or gone into other companies, you can see that happening.

And it's it can be quite awkward. For some people to work in that kind of environment. There's a lot of like rules that happen in those environment. What are you wearing to work today? Or, ooh, so and so spending an extra 10 minutes at lunch or, all of

[01:07:10] Nathan Wrigley: that stuff is,

[01:07:11] Paul Halfpenny: yeah, is ignored when you work remotely.

And I feel slightly hypocritical in the fact that, I actually in an office in Letchworth where I lived, that's separate to my home. Just because I work remotely doesn't actually mean that I'm working from home 24 7.

[01:07:28] Nathan Wrigley: That's interesting. So you, whilst I love

[01:07:30] Paul Halfpenny: my kids, they're quite loud and actually benefit from being able to move around.

So

[01:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: you've got an office for you. Oh, for me it's very close to home. That's interest. Yes,

[01:07:43] Paul Halfpenny: exactly. Yeah. It's in town. And then we also have an office at home, but my wife works remotely as well, so some we share that office. Yeah, so sometimes we might be there. I also go to the coffee shop and work cuz sometimes I do need to people and just be around people and that perks me up a bit as

[01:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: well.

So I think it's interesting how quickly, given any change in life, I think it's really interesting how quickly we become accustomed to it and it becomes the new normal. But cast your mind back to the, so this comment from from Steve illustrates it perfectly. He is got a 10 step commute now from his home office, whereas previously it would be an hour each day.

So it sounds a lot like you Paul. Guess which is better for health and wellbeing? Cameron? Possibly even more extreme. He was spending three to four hours a day. Commuting sounds broad, broadly similar to what Paul was doing. And now that you're not doing that you're just, you're in what you're in.

And so it's easy to forget, but just remember that Sam Altman with your helicopter and your chauffeur driven. I dunno. Yeah

[01:08:54] Paul Halfpenny: It's not on the train into London, it, the train not London is, yeah. And people commute and drive and get stuck in traffic and that's not a healthy Yeah, either.

It's not good for an environment.

[01:09:05] Nathan Wrigley: Rob cans works at home is often a co-working space or coffee sh coffee shops somewhere. Even work on a regional transit sometimes. Yeah. I do like the idea of of yours, Paul, of getting a dedicated space which is close to home, allows you to allows the kids to scream but you don't get impacted.

The other alternative is to download a piece of software called CRISP and then yeah. And then doesn't matter. Do you know? That would be interesting. Remkus, sorry to divert the conversation again. If you installed CRISP and then tried to burp into the microphone, I just wonder. What would happen if it would be taken down the crisp void or not?

It's some AI based software, which allows you to move on. Nathan, move on. Move on. Yeah, sorry you don't wanna me here. Let's let us indeed do that. We're gonna keep on the theme of ai Google this week. Had, or last week I should say, had their developer conference, Google io and some, I dunno if you saw somebody threw together a montage of Sun Sundar, pinch Chai or Pichai, I dunno how you pronounce it.

The c e o of Alpha. No, he is the CEO of Google, not Alphabet, and, or maybe he is Alphabet now, I think. Anyway, he, they put together every time that he said the word AI or something equivalent to ai, generative ai, and they threw it together in a video. The video lasted about two minutes of him just going ai, ai.

In other words, AI is all the hotness for Google and they are coming for chat g p T. And as you'll see in a moment, they're also coming to, write your code for you as well. So this is the first announcement. This is something called Palm. It's an acronym, and I've forgotten what it stands for. But you are now able to use this, I think you need a sort of developer account or something, but it's basically Google's alternative to chat, G p T four.

The claims are that it does everything quicker. It's bigger, the language model is bigger, but it, I'm not sure if that's born out by the data at the moment. But the point is, if you thought chat g p t was good, there's now a rival good thing. And you just wonder how quickly these two things are gonna compete against each other.

Because chat G P T four, I think has probably had a six month head start and has wowed everybody. And that's the only thing that we've been talking about. Whereas now we're gonna have these two things, presumably in tandem, just trying to out AI each other and and kill us all the more quickly. And then there's an article that I'll link to showing you the Google developer docs, and then this is probably the more interesting piece for.

People who listen to this podcast, they have got a, an AI coding assistant, which is either called Cody or Studio Bot. It's been likened a bit like GitHub's co-pilot, except that rather than completing code for you, you show it something and you ask it to iterate on it and give you suggestions for how it might be improved.

I think the idea of this is that certainly on Android at the moment, if you're an Android developer, you just. Tell it what you want it to do, and it goes from the ground up and you iterate from there. So the conversation that we have every week is something along these lines. Are you fearful for your jobs?

Katie, are you fearful that in a year or two's time it'll be relatively straightforward for anybody to speak into a chatbot and say, I want to be able to, take the Woo commerce plugin that you mentioned a moment ago. Basically describe from the text on your homepage for that plugin what you want to happen.

And a chatbot like this will give something plausible, fairly decent back at them, therefore, undermining all the what hard work that you've been doing. I'll hand it over to Katie first.

[01:12:50] Katie Keith: I'd say no, it's the execution. All the plugins are G P L. Anyway. Anybody could, that's good point. Take our code and make, either make a few changes or legally credit us in it and release it as their own.

It's all about the execution, the marketing, the positioning, things like theme testing as well. The, with the Express Shop page plugin, we had to make sure that it would work on all themes. I'm not sure how a chatbot would've done that sort of level of rigor in the testing in different environments and everything, so I don't really see it.

I see it as less of a threat than the people who are knowing our plugins and distributing them for free, which I don't see as much of a threat either, because it's all about the execution.

[01:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That's a good point, and not one that I'd given any thought to be honest. Yeah, good point. Paul Remkus,

[01:13:40] Paul Halfpenny: I see it as a big opportunity, to be honest.

I think there's a lot of people that don't understand it. I think that's key. And I think a lot of people struggling right now with understanding what sort of changes will come about. And obviously there's a little bit of fear around it. I think that'll settle down in a couple of years.

I think it's incredibly powerful in terms of what it can do. But, change, PT only has data up to 2021. Google Pub still doesn't really tell the truth all the time. It doesn't do everything. I think, it is a lot comes down to. How, what data it's been trained on. And obviously Google has data access to certain types of data open AI doesn't have access to and vice versa.

I thought it was quite interesting that I don't think Google Bug was released in the eu. Was it? I might be

[01:14:33] Nathan Wrigley: wrong. It wouldn't surprise me if you were right. That strikes me as the, as exactly how it would be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And

[01:14:41] Paul Halfpenny: I think that's the key. And I did read somewhere about, the more.

The further this goes, the less transparent they'll be about where the data's coming from. Because, what data is that being trained on? Because arguably, you could say you have the ability to say that's my data. You can't do that. I thought Pearson were really interesting.

They came out and said that they were getting a little bit annoyed with people trying to use their course data to, to run AI models and they were gonna stop that and sue anybody that did because that was their data. So I think ownership of that content is gonna become a really core issue in the next couple of years.

[01:15:24] Nathan Wrigley: Mark West Guard who knows a thing or two about this, he's he's put in, I am absolutely confident the AI will never replace the ability to build a complex plugin. Paul is right. There is so much misconception around ai. Yeah. Thanks Mark. Remkus anything?

[01:15:43] Remkus de Vries: I think we're we're in the middle of it and we need to recognize that we're a very small percentage of the total.

So I don't know how big it is, but I'm thinking one to maybe 3% of people out there having access to the internet actually understand chat j p t and know how to use it in a way that is productive. So I think it's very hard for us to determine what we can and what we cannot do with it given the rate of the progression we've seen in the last six months.

And project that four or five years on. I think there's a lot of stuff that can be replacing stuff that we do. But having said all that I fully agree with Katie in terms of it is your own unique interpretation of what you can do with it that makes it an a valuable thing or not whether Google is decided to jump into this as well, but I'm very curious what Amazon's going to do, what Apple's going to do, because it's not just going to be the two that we see now.

And with that, I think there's a, there will be a long list of opportunities more than there are threats, but there are threats. Absolutely.

[01:16:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think one of the concerns that I have is that the fact that the. The big players at the moment. So Google and CH and OpenAI and probably the ones coming around the corner, like you said, Remkus apple, presumably Amazon and a variety of others.

I imagine they're based in. Capitalist systems where the intention is, is to create profit. And I do wonder if that the race to create things which might get out of hand or can be misused by people who have nefarious intent. And we've already seen certain things where people have been able to derail the guardrails that have been built into open AI just because they're ingenious and they want it to do things which it shouldn't be allowed to do.

And that strikes me as potentially something which we need to get a hold of. If somebody were to able to, I don't know, with the help of the of a chatbot, be able to use CRISPR or something to alter the gene structure of human beings, that doesn't strike me as a particularly great thing to allow any human to have access to.

But given the race to do it, I wonder how impressive the guardrails will be. Yeah. I think

[01:18:18] Paul Halfpenny: The need. So in turn, globally, I think the truth is really important. Yeah. And I, there was there's a trial going on at the moment around Tesla and the, they're trying to, they're talking about Elon Musk saying something about full, drivability of the cars and whether it's safe or not.

And I think the lawyers for, or Tesla came to the table and said we can't really prove that. He said that even though the video of him and on the internet saying it, and their legal argument was deep folks are so good, you need to prove that he didn't say it. Wow. So it, and I, whilst I think the judge has gone, no.

Don't be silly. I think it's a really interesting point. You get to the point where, you know, things like that and you can see it with the Screen Access Guild, what they're doing at the moment in terms of striking the contracts that are being put in place where, you might sign away your rights for your voice to be used in perpetual.

Yeah. Because you have started in one film, for instance. I think that's where the biggest danger is. I think for people like us who work and build things, there will always be a job there to do. It's just that your job might change slightly. As an SEO consultant for instance, rather than going and finding lots of links in a manual search, you might stick it to chat G B T and go and find me some domains that I can get back.

Links to do. And actually you are learning how to use the models for the people that don't know how to use it. So it just becomes like an easier way of doing your basic standard functional task. But like Katie said, you can't, it, it's not gonna be able to invent something that that Katie's team could do and go, do you know what?

There's a, there's something missing there, and we can fill that hole and if we add this amount of imagination that we can bring to the table to do it in this way, that's different to everything else. Yeah. But that's the real benefit of human ability and imagination.

[01:20:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There's always room to the sanguine, isn't there?

So yeah, that's, I do

[01:20:29] Remkus de Vries: think that the, having the idea that is the unique thing, understanding how you want to implement it comes from that. But the actual building will most definitely be something you can start portions of in an automated way. And as we progress, that will become more and more automated because it doesn't make sense to write something.

Just because you know how to write it, if there's a tool that does it for you in exactly the fashion that you do it. So if you have, so we're right now working with AI that have a data set. There are that we have no control over, but what if we have a data set that is entirely fed by us. So whether that's writing content or whether that's writing code or anything else really but that AI learns how we do things, how we look at things.

Then there are way more patterns in this, the things that we do than you realize. And an AI can extract that. And that is something that portion of the work is most definitely going to be more and more automated. And yeah, that's inevitable. But the uniqueness, how you interpret it, how you build it, what you have included, whatnot, what thoughts behind it, the ux, the ui, the whole thing.

Could an AI come up with something? Sure. But you need to have it very well instructed in what you needs to be. But it still can't think of something new other than learn from patterns and go okay, there's a, I can see it over here, that they have it, but you don't have it. So if I see that idea here and present it to you, it may look like something new, but it is not new.

Yeah. Yeah.

[01:22:07] Paul Halfpenny: It's like the industrial revolution, isn't it? Yeah, I know where factories took off. And

[01:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: I also wonder how in Britain, how it's gonna be just part of a news cycle. I dunno. Five years ago it was all about Bitcoin and then it was all about the metaverse and now it's all about ai and maybe something else will come along, which will peak our interest.

Thank you for your comment, Barry. He says AI is great for solving simpler coding issues. Co-pilot is great. He's a great example of how it works to aid me as a developer. If you're a configurator, only do simple coding. I'd say AI will replace that fairly soon. We've also got him carrying on more complex systems.

Plugins will be fine for a long time. And then we have a counterpoint. Krishna says, we have seen how social media has affected us. AI is more powerful than social media. Just beginning to think about five to 10 years from now. I read a really interesting article this week actually and I can't remember the nuance of it, but it basically went like this.

Somebody used a journalist used AI to discover the contents for an article that they were writing about an individual. They didn't carry out the necessary due diligence, and they attributed certain quotes to the person that they were writing the article. They then published that, and because they were an authority, guess what happened?

The AI then consumed it as truth. And now if you ask the AI for quotes about the person in question, it now pushes those out as fact. Based upon him as a historical source. So it's it's compounding the problem. This is the kind of quirky thing that, that bothers me is that we just get into areas where it's very difficult to untangle what's true and what's not speaking of true and what's not.

This is a fascinating piece. Spotify have. Have been caught on by this in a certain sense. This just didn't seem to be something. This is so left field. I just didn't imagine this as a story, but here we are, Spotify ejects, thousands of AI made songs in a purge of fake streams. So to paraphrase, some people have been just promoting AI to create songs for them, and then they've been putting them out into Spotify as original works.

I don't think they're claiming that they were written by a, an already bonafide artist. I just think they were pushing whole albums of content and getting listens. And because they were getting listens, a proportion of the royalties went their way. I doubt anybody made a great deal of money out of it, but it's just fascinating that Spotify had to intervene because they got the big platform.

And if loads of people. Sorry. If one artist is suddenly able to push thousands of songs out in the space of a few moments and make it viral, I just thought that was really interesting. I dunno if you want to comment on that, but it's definitely of a piece that we've just been talking about. People are gonna game it.

Yep. They, here you go. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is how,

[01:25:14] Paul Halfpenny: sorry. Now after you Please Ladies trust,

[01:25:18] Katie Keith: it says that the main thing they were purging was that they were using the people that are uploading these fake songs. Were also using bots to add fake listening figures oh, so it gets worse Yeah.

To be trending. And so I think that was the main motivation. So I'm not sure what their stance is on AI generated music generally, if you're not gaming it. Did you,

[01:25:41] Nathan Wrigley: did any of you see, again, getting back to Google, did anybody see the, I can't remember what it's called. It's called something like Google LM or something like that.

The Google ai, which they launched in a little while ago, but d but demonstrated it in Google io this week where it's a little bit like chat. G p t. You just give it a text prompt of the kind of music you want it to produce, and you wait a matter of seconds and it produces it. And in a sublime bit of cool internet wizardry, somebody made a video and they did it.

And then they, they clicked the button and they were videoing the whole thing. And then they pressed, generate, waited a few moments, and then never gonna give you what By Rick Asley was played. It was pure genius. It was wonderful, Rick rolling through audio, but it the demos that I saw were sublime.

You waited a few seconds and it was certainly. Good enough for like mute mood music. I'm not sure. It was the kind of thing that I'd want to listen to and it was dedicating time to listening to music, but there was nothing offensive or weird about it. But it was more on the sort of techno side.

There were no lyrics in there. It was, yeah, it was really interesting. Okay. I think this is the

[01:26:53] Paul Halfpenny: perfect explanation for Ed Sheeran music. I

[01:26:58] Nathan Wrigley: think that Not a fan. This is not a fan, are you ok. I

[01:27:02] Paul Halfpenny: dunno, all his albums seem the same. I don't think all the songs seem the same. It seems like this explains everything he is.

And ai Yeah. As a Depeche Mode fan maybe makes music like Depeche Mode. Do I say, I'm fine, aren't I? I've You should get into

[01:27:20] Nathan Wrigley: that trial actually. I do that. Get into that Google trial. See if you can sign up for it and get it. See if it can replicate some Depeche mode stuff. Cuz that would be really interesting cuz I know you are a hardcore Depeche Mode fan, so you'd be in a really good position to notice whether or not it had any of the.

Proclivities of an actual Depeche mode track. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, last piece. I know we're almost outta time. Thanks for sticking with us. Katie threw us a bone this week. Right at the end. She's got a piece, it's on WP Beginner, it's called Headline Analyzer. A confessor didn't have time. A lot of time at least.

Anyway, to look at this I'm gonna hand it right over to you, Katie. What's this? So

[01:27:59] Katie Keith: it's a new tool that they've released, I assume they developed it to scratch their own niche and then released it. So you put in your headline ideas and it gives you a score based on various factors, like how appealing it would be, how attention grabbing seo is it the right length, or that kind of thing.

But the thing that struck me was, How old fashioned it seemed to because it didn't mention Yeah I got that. I didn't actually manage to test it. I tried in two browsers and I got cookie check made.

[01:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, dear. Yeah. I'm in a, I'm in an incognito tab with all sorts of nonsense going on, so it's probably me.

Yeah. Sorry.

[01:28:37] Katie Keith: No, I got that twice. Yeah. Maybe they haven't tested it yet, but the concept of it, I thought it was funny that they didn't use any kind of AI in it because you can use chat g p t or something to generate headline ideas. You can give it your keywords and so on. And so I thought it was interesting that it actually felt like a tool that I might have seen five years ago rather than now.

I wonder whether they'll iterate it and add AI elements or anything. How

[01:29:05] Nathan Wrigley: does this differ from an SEO plugin where it would do similar lifting? Is it just because it's standalone? You were curious about it. It's just sitting on this domain all by itself.

[01:29:15] Katie Keith: Yeah. And just the fact that someone's even bothering now without the AI kind of thing.

Yeah. To get it more trendy, as much as anything and get people talking. I thought it's interesting to see more traditional tools being released. Yeah,

[01:29:29] Nathan Wrigley: it's like artisan. We're gonna do artisan seo. There's no ai. Involved or actually gonna do it ourselves. The the piece is over on WP Beginner because it's on the show, I will make sure that it gets itself into the show notes, unless either of you two fellas have got anything to add.

We will call it a day.

[01:29:51] Paul Halfpenny: The only thing I was gonna add is just like the cost of people using AI, because everybody will want to put you, you to put your own API key in and, using the API costs money and. There's a load of tools being thrown up around this. I just wonder how many are actually being used in anger and what people are paying, that kind of thing.

There's a slight difference between using chat G B T and using the web interface to, get it to, to create, some text for you or using what dally for images. But I just wonder using it

[01:30:27] Nathan Wrigley: and spending money. Yeah. I've put in my API key into a bunch of tools on open AI just to see, but I'm not a heavy user, but it I've probably had a hundred different prompts and typically I then when I get the reply back, I then ask it to give me more in, in-depth information.

That's usually my stock response. Give me more detail or something like that. And I think so far with a hundred or more prompts, I think I've racked up a six US cent bill. So it's killing me. He feels like a, it feels like a lot, but that's text. But I presume as soon as you start getting into, here's an image.

Okay. Iterate on the image and another time and give me it in, I don't know, high definition and all of this kind. I imagine that does start to ramp up, but I

[01:31:10] Remkus de Vries: use it a he heck of a lot more. And I am paying the plus thing for Jet G pt. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Me too. So I use it a lot at the spreadsheets and stuff like that.

So I combine stuff and see what it says and then value that and then move. So I have a lots of chains of generating stuff. Some of it is seo, so for those of you listening, that's probably the first thing you want to see where you can use it. But there's a lot of different types of solutions you can play with that require you to really bulk generate a lot.

And in those scenarios it makes sense to, to have a paid account where you have a faster response. Chat G p t for now with the plugins and the live URLs and all that. It makes sense. I don't know if I'll keep it. I don't know. I can't I'll live in Europe, so I can't play with Google's version just yet.

So I, I don't know what that's going to change. But for now paying for it, it makes a lot of sense for me, for my scenarios and I don't know how many, but probably on a day-to-day basis, I'm probably in the 30 to 40 single prompts and then a lot of automated stuff. So for me, it works to pay for it.

[01:32:33] Paul Halfpenny: Do you use lots of different services? So do you do you, and is there a discernible difference between them? So cuz we're in the uk, we could access Bard and I enabled it on like our Google workspace account. Yeah. Which is great. And then you can put the same prompt into chat G b T and Bard and go Okay.

That, that's quite a dis discernible

[01:32:51] Remkus de Vries: difference. Yeah. I've played with the with the Bing version the chat j p t version. But it's mostly from what I see the prompts themselves are where the magic is. Yeah. I don't see the, so I, again, I'm not a lot of, I don't have a lot of experience with with the Google side of things or really very different types of ais.

But in terms of getting the results you like or the things that you expect to see and they're not what you expect them to see, playing around with that is the interesting part because that's where you learn how the AI works. A lot of people think that the AI part, the artificial intelligence is like a literal thing.

There's zero intelligence, there's absolutely none. It does what you ask it to do, and it does it because it knows how to read patterns. That's it. The intelligence in my book is something that we're adding to it. I don't think it's an a I don't think it's a live intelligence as such.

[01:33:56] Paul Halfpenny: Katie, are you putting anything in your plugins?

[01:33:58] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. No, it's good. At the moment,

[01:34:01] Katie Keith: we haven't come up with a relevant use case. I'm using it for a lot of marketing tasks, such as writing article outlines and things like that. But, and my developers are using some of the tools just for the small functions and things like that, which they'll then incorporate into the wider code.

But we haven't come up with a use case for any of our plugins in terms of functionality that our customers can use that we haven't, I dunno if we're a bit slow or whether it doesn't seem relevant, but we haven't found any particular AI features that we felt would add real value to our plugins.

[01:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: Some AI is subject, which is gonna keep on giving. It's when a GI comes around that we need to worry. But as Reka says, when we're nowhere near that, Yet, we'll say gi AGI is artificial general intelligence, and that's the mark where you can just give it any random task and it will figure it out. So basically it's, it, imagine a human baby.

You, they can just figure and over time they can just learn without being instructed to learn. They just learn. There are some already, I

[01:35:07] Remkus de Vries: understand newsletter called guard mode space. Okay. If you look at that, that it, there's some really neat stuff happening, but was, it's not as powerful as you think it could be.

No.

[01:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: But

[01:35:19] Remkus de Vries: it's most definitely more powerful than people generally know how to do with prompts.

[01:35:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a

[01:35:25] Paul Halfpenny: amazing Are we at Terminator level? That's the question. Once we get to Terminator level, that's what we need to start to

[01:35:32] Nathan Wrigley: worry you, right? Yeah. That's when we go with Sam Altman. We go back to work at that point, back on the bus and starting, we're all commute to a Scottish island or something like that and just all gather threat.

That's it. That's what we've got time for. I realize I've kept you for a little bit longer, but I appreciate it. Thank you for joining us Remkus and Katie and Paul. Hopefully you'll come back on the show at some point in the near future. Thank you to everybody who made a comment. The show is a lot better for the commentary.

Peter, I realize you had a bit of a little moment there with the With the Webby Awards. Sorry, I missed those comments, so I didn't put them on the screen, but I did notice them. And thanks for your commentary. I appreciate it. One last little thing just before we go, the somewhat humiliating wave of the hands, if you're all able to give us your hands and give us a wave, I will make that the album up.

That's absolutely fabulous. Thank you so much. We'll be back next week and have a good week. Enjoy. Stay safe. Bye-bye for now.