Techstrong Gang – February 3, 2025

Hey, everyone. Happy Monday has, has deep seek, become deep stink. You're watching Text On Gang.

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel for Textron Gang, and we're back. It's a Monday. Happy Monday to you.

You know, we, uh, we were last week out in Silicon Valley with a special edition of Textron Gang, a Tech Field Day. We experiment with these things, right? And, uh, Steve Foskett and John Willis and Mitch Ashley and the gang out there, uh, you know, covered the tech field day event, but there's been so much going on in the world besides that, that we wanted to, glad to be back here to talk about it.

But, you know, focus still remains on, on deep seek and the pros and cons and what does it mean for our tech world. We're going to get to that and some more good stuff on AI and, and, and more. Uh, but first, let me introduce you to our gang on this fine Monday.

First of all, I'm really glad I haven't seen her on the gang with me in a couple weeks at least. She is our voice in DC and there aren't a lot of voices left in dc uh, our own Trace Bannon. Hey, trace, how are you?

I'm just excited to get to talk to y'all today. This Is gonna be fun. It's good to see you.

Thanks and welcome. So we go from Trace to Tracy. I guess she's our voice in New Mexico, but she's also our voice at the Linux Foundation and on open source of microservices and so much more.

She's CEO of Deploy hub. Tracy Reagan. Hey, Tracy.

It's good to see you. Thank you, Alan. Great to be Here.

Thanks. Great to have you. And getting out of his sick bed to join us today, because that's the kind of dedication this guy has.

He's future analyst, uh, vi, CTO, co-founder, our friend, guy Courier. Hey guy. How are you?

I'm much better, thanks. It was a rough week last week. Um, I did manage to to stay engaged.

Um, I heard there was a little bit of news in, in the AI world, so I just checked in real quick. Didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but There we gonna talk. There you go.

Well, the good news is by the time he got better it wasn't such a big deal anymore. Or maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Anyway, and then of course, uh, running the anchor la the anchor lab for us.

He's our own four by 100 guy at a Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, how are you?

Good. Good to see you. I'm high now in my, uh, fallout shelter in, I see that New York to, uh, because, you know, you don't know what the heck's gonna happen with China and this AI stuff, so Yeah.

No, no windows in that room. Right. All good.

It's all good. Um, so gang, let's jump right into it. Deep seek, has it become deep stink where every day this thing is, is peeling away like a rotten garlic clove or something stinking?

Um, you know, the latest Mike, why don't, well, why don't you give us the latest Mike. Yeah. So things are kind of crazy.

On the one hand, we have reports saying that sensitive data is being exposed inside a deep seek because there aren't any guardrails to speak of. And, uh, folks are kind of downloading this thing like crazy and all kinds of havoc could ensue. Uh, some countries, Ireland, Italy and the US Navy also are, uh, banning usage of this stuff.

But at the same time, much to my personal amazement, at least, uh, AWS Microsoft, Google and now in Nvidia are all seem to be embracing this model and making it available to customers. And you gotta ask yourself, like, did we not pay any attention to this TikTok conversation or what's going on here? Alan, from your perspective?

Well, from my perspective, you know, wasn't it Carl Mar Marx who said, or maybe it was ENGs, but I think it was Marx who said that we could sell the capitalist the rope with which they will hang themselves. This is a great example, right? I I think whether you think the deep seek relearning techniques, breakthroughs in doing it cheaper, faster, I don't know wanna say better necessarily, but certainly cheaper, faster is are real or not.

What, what's for sure that we've seen is they may be able to build an AI engine. They don't know how to secure data. So good.

And it may be because in China, you know, people who try to break into stuff get a quick 22 to the back of the head and you don't do it again after that. Um, that being said, look, the wiz researchers exposed this hole where supposedly a hundred towels in people's confidential information was, was exposed open on the internet. Um, they, they, you know, I don't believe they were the victims of a cyber attack that took them down.

I think they were the victims of too many people hitting inadequate infrastructure and service to handle that kind of traffic. I, I, I think, you know, it's not ready for pride time. It was an open source experiment by a couple of PhDs backed by a hedge fund who, whether they shorted Nvidia or not, we could discuss another time.

That's a whole nother conversation. Yes, it is. But, but that's what I, I think is here you're dealing with, you know, they, they don't have the infrastructure, processes, policies, cyber place in place.

There's, there's so much to unpack with this. Something that, just to make sure everybody understands kind of the difference here, when it's popping up on Azure, when it's popping up on AWS when it's popping up on perplexity, um, it's not pointed at the deep seek subscription, right? Right.

So there's deep, it's not quite good to the Chinese infrastructure, Right? It's not ver and, but that's what we know when everybody started to download this app and it's suddenly shot higher than chat GPT with its opening. It was pointing there, right?

So there is a, there's a SaaS option that it's that SaaS, right? Software as a service, the subscription that has suffered from that exposure, right? So that, I just wanna clarify.

Yeah, there's a problem because they were not, um, capable or not yet mature, didn't have those things in place to be able to surface something, provide that kind of service. The other thing though is well, they did something unique, right? IGI mean there's, I would say nearly, almost, they're just shy of the United States in terms of their research publishing.

Like right now, China's a powerhouse. Well, when comes well to what they're doing, well they Into labs in basic research for 20 years. They have, and in this case, they didn't have access to Mary because they didn't have access to all the same things that we have here.

They came up with an ingenious way, right? To look at how they could pair different chip types together to get some interesting performance. But it's not, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing unless there is some kind of umbilical where every time you instantiate the model that somehow is calling home.

But we've got folks like, um, the University of Florida. They have a massive new super pod. Nvidia has invested something like $70 million.

Every student has to take two AI courses before they graduate. Everybody, you can't graduate with that AI courses. It doesn't matter if you're nursing, it doesn't matter if you're business.

But I say that because they are decomposing this model to truly understand, right? They are looking at how the weightings are going, they're looking at all the different layers and they're seeing some different things. So there's goodness there putting it out there for Alan to install in his environment, in his AWS environment.

Okay? It's up to Alan, right? But he has, doesn't necessarily know what all the risks are yet, but it is a new model.

There is some sexiness to taking a look at it, but they're two very different, different things. I do wanna ask your opinion, Alan, don't you think it's kind of interesting that it popped up when it did in terms of the US change in administration. Like, couldn't they have released it three weeks earlier or five weeks later?

I don't think they bought all their shorts in time. Well, wasn't it also announced? Was it two days after the giant government funded OpenAI, blah, blah, blah, right?

Whatever that was after, right? Project, uh, Stargate Sure took the wind, wind outta the sails of that one. It did, it, it at least temporary, it took the wind out of a lot of different sails a lot of days, right?

Yeah. Well, yeah. It's trillion dollars.

Lemme lemme, You know, tr you hit on something here, let me tie it up. So for people understand what you're saying is, look, instead of relying on the Chinese infrastructure, a lot of these places that we're seeing carrying it, if you will, are offering it as a self-hosted option. Correct.

Now, my understanding with Amazon is just for AWS I'm talking about right now, you can run self-hosted in AWS or you can plug in the Chinese one into, not Broadcom, what do they call their bedrock. You can plug in the Chinese version in a bedrock if you want, or you could run yourself hosted version. And I think the same goes for a lot of the, the, uh, web, the, uh, the cloud providers.

That being said, you know, I used to sell security software to the federal government. You sure did. You sure did.

For a long time. And back, this was in the 2000 4, 5, 6. And even back then, there was a strong prejudice in the federal government about buying checkpoint firewalls and checkpoint uh, hardware.

Because the rumor was the moad had a back door that would allow them to log into these machines remotely or what have you, would allow 'em to get home, phone, home, whatever you want to say. And that was enough checkpoint, you know, it was a lot easier to sell Cisco firewalls back then, or net screen juniper or whatever. Um, what makes you think that's not the case here?

Well, I actually, uh, am always erring on the side of the caution when it comes to national security, right? Obviously. So I don't advocate that somebody connect and say, I wanna use the bedrock version that connects to China.

Um, I also think about the IAR, right? Our export controls that we have in place. So a lot of, I'm not gonna send any of my data over there, I'm just not.

But if AWS allows me to instantiate it and I want to experiment with it, and I wanna bet my business or my farm on it, well, that's my business inside the context, right? Inside the confines of the Continental, right? So I'm, I'm not farming out my, my data Externally, but, so now you've got choice mix.

Got unit 42 out of Beijing who rents a small office in San Francisco and, and, and has the back door key into every self-hosted version. 'cause it's built into the source code, but it's open source, of course it's safe. And, uh, I see what you did there.

Yeah. You made a joke and someone, and, and unit 42 logs into your instincts outta San Francisco. No one realizes it.

There's Always gonna be waste. There's always gonna be ways to break into stuff. It's chaos.

And, you know, the faster, the better we can respond to chaos, the better. But I wanna point out here that every technology gets disrupted, right? We are all disrupted at one at some point.

And I feel like this is a disruptive moment. If everything that they say and how they've built this and the cost around it is true, then it's a massive disruption. And it goes to a bigger question that I keep asking myself.

Why are we still putting so much money into one company if in in fact we could have some PhD students create a better solution? Why is OpenAI looking at getting a $40 billion investment? There is a limited amount of funding available.

And, you know, maybe China, I'll tell you why Or democratize them when it comes to funding and Research. I, I've been in venture backed companies most of my career, and here's the rule. If you're not in the top three, get the hell out.

Money Goes to the top three. Well, this company was in the top three. This company was not in the top $3 showed Up.

They, they, they come from sort of an alien culture, if you will. Right. Though, truth be told, they're backed by, you know, my joke about shorting Nvidia, they're backed by a hedge fund, right?

The hedge fund took a, what was it, a $6 million flyer here. And, you know, if they did short Nvidia, they made that back a hundred times. Uh, I've, that could be true, but I'm, I'm still gonna push that.

We need, I believe that we are hurting ourselves in our, in the United States and our research by believing in one or two people. But, but that's the Difference. It's Either between government funding and VC funding.

When I'm a VC or a PE person, and I've got investors to answer to, I'm not playing Johnny Appleseed and trying to go trees all over the country. I want to bet on the winner. And you look at like the Andre, Andre Andreesen Horowitz model, the Andre, Andre Mark Andree in, in Horowitz's model is they pick one player in a given market, they pick a market they, they think is gonna be big.

They don't care if it's the best player. They're going to give them that player enough money to bury everyone else and get way out ahead. And so they'll capture a substantial share of that market, and their investment pays off.

And they became the most successful VC in Silicon Valley on that premise. And that's, that's, and maybe It doesn't work anymore. Well, no, maybe VCs, You know, a lot of people say VCs are, what's wrong with this whole thing?

That's what I'm saying. You know, it's, we're not democratizing the, the funding to create the disruption ourselves. So we're gonna get disrupted by somebody else Supposed to be democratized.

Hold on, Hold on. Go ahead, chase. I'm gonna come back to that guy.

You've got something to say. Well, I, I know, I feel like two topics are being mixed here. Mm-hmm.

So I wanted to ask a question of everybody, because Alan, the, the, the scenario you described, we went from security to, to funding in VC and competition and all that sort of stuff, sort of seamlessly. And I think those are really different discussions. I wanna get back to the security question.

Um, first of all, uh, let me just point out that Nvidia has a NIM for running, uh, uh, a deep seek. Um, so you could air gap a, a, a, a small system and run it. Yep.

Yep, yep, Yep. Uh, but that put the, put that aside. You described the scenario, Alan, of, of like, you know, using Bedrock and one of these services and all that other sort of stuff, you know, that it, it's not fully mature.

I who said that? My question is why run deep? Seek why?

I think deep seek proved, not proved, I shouldn't say proved, is demonstrating the possibility of training models. This is what a quarter trillion parameters in, in, in R one or two, right. Um, large models, uh, without these giant investments in Harvard.

Great. Okay. But I, I've, I'm investigating deep seek.

I've used it, but I don't know why I wouldn't use that. It's kind of perplexity or copilot or, I, I use a smattering. So that's my question to everybody.

Why use, why, why do than to validate that it works? Why do Marts deep factor to a flame? Well, I wanna, so there's so many pieces of this.

So I wanna answer from a, from a security perspective, it's more than that. I'm, I'm jokingly said that umbilical, but Alan brought up a poten, you know, that potentiality of getting into, um, tapping into it, we can't lose track of the site that even our US based models, there's poisoning of the models there. It's a real thing.

And we're working after. How do we get rid of that? Well, do you really believe, um, you know, taking a step back, being a, um, you know, yay, go USA, do we really believe that China was looking after the types of things that we would want to make sure were secured from that model, from a poisoning perspective?

Som some of my concerns around it actually have to do with the training data that the actual data itself, which we don't, don't worry they open ai. Yeah. Well, that's what they're saying.

Yeah. And I don't, I Have, we get, we're gonna get that. What I'm trying to, what I'm trying to ask is, you're an enterprise, you are an organization, g, novelty, whatever kind of organization, you're, It's novelty, right?

Well, yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. It's great.

Mean I've a novelty. If you're in, if you're in the tech or r and d, you might want to take a look at it and you'll pretty quickly find, that's perfectly good model. Uh, yeah, that's fine.

However, whatever it's prominence and then mm-hmm. You like, it's not preferable to me. Well, but that, I wanna tie that back to something that Tracy asked about, or Tracy mentioned, um, was about, you know, the fact that OpenAI is a proprietary model.

Why are we putting our, all of our eggs basket? So some of the research I did over the last year was looking at hundreds and hundreds of peer reviewed studies. And what blew a frigging mind was how many of them are using a model that has sourced out of OpenAI, but why, why is all the, well, we believe that part of that is free accessibility, right?

The free version, the things that people can get after for free. It isn't, wasn't the necessarily the GI coming from GitHub, it wasn't looking at philanthropic, it wasn't looking at the others. It was around their, their specific models.

So there is, uh, a research domination that we have to think about on the US side of the house, right? On the US side of the house. The other thing that this should really shake up, and I kind of like it, the models that we say are so wonderful, and it may help us, right?

We've built massive industries around this. They're proprietary. I don't get to see inside open AI's model this, shake things, shakes things up a bit, right?

Yes. We're in a capitalist society. Yes.

We wanna make money. It's just like big pharma. Why do they make a, why do they make a, a, a new drug?

It's not because they just wanna be altruistic and help the humanity. It's 'cause they're gonna make money off it. OpenAI makes a lot of money off their models and on keeping them proprietary.

This kind of shakes things up. Yes, there are open source models, there are, but this kind of takes something that has had in kind results open sourced in kind results to something that is hyper proprietary. So I think I'm, I like that shakeup.

But to guy's point with a little bit of pragmatism, um, you know, it's okay to be excited by the hype and, and and such, but we have to be ready for what's gonna come downstream. Uh, Alan, I, you, you named it, And it's important that we just demystify some of these technologies. And when I, when I read that story, it was like, okay, we're taking some of the mystery out of what OpenAI does, right?

So, and I think the more we demystify it, the more we all believe we could go write it as well. And if some college students with $6 million did it, why not? Yeah.

So Mike's dying to ask a question, but I just, I read the white paper. Most of the math is far, far over my head. Mm-hmm.

But, um, for me, yes. The, the, the thing is they're, they're claiming, they're saying they used a different training method. It's not feed forward.

It's, yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's slightly recursive. It's et cetera.

Like, you, you gotta read. I don't want to get into those wonky details that's of abiding interest to the AI industry in terms of development. Mm-hmm.

Yep. As far as Does anybody, nobody's talking about that really. Go ahead.

Sorry. Does anybody find that the irony, a little rich here that if I understand this correctly, open AI is saying that they quote unquote distilled their AI models without permission, the very open AI models that were created using a lot of data without permission? Well, yeah.

Oh, yeah. I, well Do, as I say, I think we Saw that immediate Do as I do, as I say, not as I do. Yeah.

Anyway, guys, we're, we're, we're over over 20 minutes on this one. I'm gonna need to end it off. I wanna end it with this though.

If you wanna get a little more, it, it, it has certainly disrupted permanently or temporarily. It's made a big splash in the AI market. Our friends at Futura have, uh, a little paper.

They put, I think it came out Friday, uh, deep Seek disrupts AI market. You can get it over, I think John Schwartz probably covered it over on Textron ai. You can check out the article and the link to the paper there.

So go have at it if you'd like. But we're gonna take a break here on Textron Gang. We got more AI to talk about.

But let's talk about AI and testing. You're watching Textron Gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT, leaders and practitioners worldwide.

Our secret impactful content that sparks awareness, engagement, and top quality leads with us. You'll access editorial websites, streaming videos, virtual events, custom content analyst research, and more. Join our satisfied clients.

Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey, everybody, we're back and we're talking about AI and testing because, well, last week we saw Perforce has a new tool that eliminates the need for building your own scripts.

Uh, harness is talking about putting an AI agent in front of their chaos engineering tool. And now AWS has extended its platform to include the ability to generate tests. So everybody's kind of going down the same path here.

And one of the things I do like about this is I'm reminded of that, uh, a woman who said, you know, when they were talk, talking to her about AI and its ability to create art and do all these things, she says, I don't want AI to create art. I want AI to clean up the kitchen so I can go create Art Trace. Is this the roughly the equivalent of that?

Are we gonna use AI to create the test because nobody wants to clean up the applications anywhere? Well, gosh, there are two completely divergent topics that I'm not gonna cover, because the first one I'll talk about for just a second, and then we'll put it and put a pin in it. If we are helping people to truly write decent software, they're starting out understanding requirements in the first place, right?

Kind of the big R vision of those things. First place that you go is understanding how is it gonna be tested? You don't go straight to code.

So there's that whole thing that we need to talk about. And the, IM the impact of having a, a holistic testing mindset end to end, not just as a Chevron that follows build, right? That's one of the problems with the whole modern DevSecOps, little continuum.

It says that we just test in this one place. So pin in that right over there. I love the concepts.

I love what's happening with moving from, Hey, we're gonna gen code, gen code, gen code to, we're gonna leverage this in a way that can help us to generate some assets. But there's also another really important part of this right there. When you're using generative ai, there are two big buckets of ways that you use it.

Eye roll, you use it to generate things, okay? Eye roll there. But the other thing is augmenting human reasoning.

So it, it really serves this wonderful purpose. I like it better for testing, because there was a report that came out, and I'll have to, uh, find the actual report and send you guys. So we have that in the, the link and available to people.

47% of organizations have automated their testing. So that means 53% have not, that should make jaws drop. So things that we can do to improve it, hell yeah.

Now remember that all tools, no AI augmented tool is immutable and is perfect. But this gets us a, a lot further along the path. One post that I'll say, or one nugget that I'll, I'll share is right now, if you're trying to use it to generate your code, and also trying to use it to generate your tests, if you're actually generating tests from it, you wanna be a little bit careful about that because you have no verification, right?

You've got AI on both sides, and right now, today, six months, it'll be different. But today that's a little bit tenuous. But there's so many awesome ways to set it loose to help, to help the humans with the testing.

It does a lot on its own. But again, at the end of the day, you're gonna have the humans in the loop. So trace, I know that you spend a lot of time and, you know, dealing with this, right?

In every endeavor that you, you go down there, there's testing involved myriad types of testing. And One of the problems with the scripts, so per force is going down the right road. I, you know, I've advocated for getting rid of scripts and the builds process for how long now?

30 years. Mm-hmm. I've been taking, talking about that.

Um, because scripting is very static and it can adapt. Uh, and when you talk about 43% of the companies, uh, have implemented automated testing, uh, it means that they've put a, a, a group of, uh, testers who have some development background who can write these test scripts. So, you know, one time I was talking to an individual who was really loved as Build scripts, by the way.

And I think they're gonna really love their test scripts. And to Mike's description or Mike's analogy of being the artist, they believe their art is in the scripts. They really love their scripts.

So we have a cultural problem as well. And I've watched that cultural problem for a very long time. And maybe now that AI is cool.

I mean, open makes, open make, uh, Meister was a rules based. It was a knowledge base that we generated all build scripts for Ant or whatever you needed to build a script for. But people would, like, we wanna, you know, we, we we're the shoe makers.

We wanna make perfect shoes. We love our scripts. So we'll see how, how developers embrace this, this kind of technology.

'cause I feel, I, I really feel like it, it, they will feel it takes something away from what they do, but it's the only way to go because there's so much more stuff to write than a test script. And in terms of the stuff that, um, you know, testing, uh, generated code, uh, I, you know, I keep in touch with my niece who took her first job and she told me she could generate 6,000 lines of code a day, which I think is insane. But she said she wouldn't, couldn't really use it because she didn't have the time to debug and test it.

And when it's generated, it's a lot harder. So if we have more AI doing that kind of work, it will make it easier to use these tools. So, you know, yay for perforce to talk about getting rid of scripts.

Thank God, thank God. Let's do more of that. And I'm happy after, you know, this whole last year I talked about where's AI and DevOps.

We're finally starting to see something come up. Well, I also thought you'd be happy Tracy with, uh, harness getting in the game here because mm-hmm. I know you're a, you're, you're a, I love chaos engineering.

I do. I think it's fascinating and I think it should be applied to so many other things, including security. So, yeah, I was, uh, you know, I'm, I'm glad that harness is going down that road because most companies are really struggle with putting, setting up game days for doing chaos engineering.

And this will help a lot. And I, you know, it's an, it's an area that I think companies should really focus on. How do you, how do you stand up a system if something broke and bring it back to health in a few minutes?

Not an hour, not two hours, not a day, and not even 20 minutes, but instantly, We know you, you bring up the idea of what's the developer impact. We're seeing some pretty interesting stuff. I think I've, I've chatted a little bit with, uh, uh, with Mike about this before.

Right now we're in that point, we're in a, I'm not gonna say a transformation, I'm gonna say a transition where developers are creators, right? We create things, software engineers, we create things, even test and just create things. And we're going from being creators to being reviewers editors.

And here's where it gets just a little bit dicey with newer incare. If you've just learned the English language, I probably won't give you a formal journal publication to peer review. Not yet.

'cause you need more practice with the human language. We're seeing that with earlier in career. Don't care what their age are just earlier in career folks, because they're not getting to decompose in the same way.

So that's just something, whether it's test scripts or any other thing that's being generated where we don't get to practice that, that decomposition that we, that we did before. So I think that's just a, an interesting nugget to, to throw out there and to keep involved in this conversation. Yeah, it's like losing the ability to navigate through a command line.

Mm-hmm. How many, how many developers know how to do that? It's coming back, it's vote now.

Oh gosh. What, What, what do, what do our students do? Right?

It's, it's kind of the, I mean, what's the core sensibility of, of software development? Is it, I mean, there's there of course, it's ability. Maybe I know even from, you know, back when all we had was cli there's something, there's, there's this user experience aspect to it.

There's also this sort of functional, you know, in backend front end is what you call it now. Um, but I'm not sure the core sensibility is your, your, your passionate belief that Python is the, or g or whatever is the future. And yet, that seems to be so much of the, the culture and the discussion is the, the tools, the tricks, the languages and so forth.

I think that, that, when AI can start to do a lot of these things, then it, they, it, I I, my answer to Mike's question is yes, it's doing the dishes so that the, you know, editing, supervising, whatever of like, how do you put, how do you put together good, you know, good piece of software, good app module, good service, whatever it is, um, uh, with understanding how the whole stack works. Um, you can, you know, pay more attention to that and less attention to, uh, the, how, I guess, am I starting to disagree with myself saying that? But Yeah.

Well, sorry. It gets into, so we're going to be, it's not, I understand that we're saying that we're gonna automate the, the tedious stuff away, but there's going to be a point where we're creating, I call 'em this digital platform. We're creating these digital platforms where anybody can walk up to it.

Uh, I'm, I'm a, I'm a sailor. I'm a nurse, and I can say, these are the things that I need. I need some software that will do this.

500 billion, 500 million developers by 2030. Exactly. Exactly.

And they're not going to be, we're not going to see development in the same way that we're seeing it now. We're going to see software engineering. We're going to be at the intersection of the data scientists are plugged in with the data.

Engineers are plugged in with the software engineers who are creating that middleware, right? So that the humans can generate the software that they need. We'll get into this software flywheel, but you guys brought up a whole bunch of different things here.

I wanna, I wanna track back something you said, guy, uh, about, you know, the, and, and Tracy, you had foot stomped this as well about getting rid of the test scripts and how great it is to get rid of the test scripts. Again, transition. I think we're going to see in highly regulated industries, whether it's government or whether it's, we're going to see that lag a bit because of the auditability.

So they're going to need those tools that aren't using scripts. They're going to need to see the auditability of that test. And if, and so I think we have a little bit of a challenge on that front can be solved, but a little bit of a challenge.

But I was having a, actually, I was on the phone this morning with my buddy Pat deis and we were talking about what, how, where things are going, talking about agents and agent and what's gonna happen in the future. And we talked about the big, everything is going to track back to the spec. Now, we didn't talk about what the spec is 'cause it could be dozens and dozens of different things.

Our software developers, our software professionals are gonna have, need to be heavily invested in, in that part of it. And that's also going to feed those tests, right? It's also gonna feed harness, it's gonna feed the other tools that are being improved with this stuff.

There's just so much amazingness out there right now, but yeah, so much amazingness that's out there right now here. Here's, here's kind of a take on it though. Um, I personally think that when we look at AI and good uses of AI app testing is probably one of the best in the whole software supply chain, you know, life cycle.

There's no reason we shouldn't maximize a use to, uh, to do testing. I think it, it just lends itself, I think the same way a human could render a script. The AI will render a script too, and it'll be fine from a compliance point of view, but at this transitionary moment where we are right now, I am hesitant to let AI generate code and then let AI test that code.

I won't Right? Without, without having some human in there at some point, especially if it's anything mission critical or really valuable, um, That's a strong recommendation, Alan, that I make constantly over the last year do one or the other, but not do Both. Or now, right Now.

For now. Right. Right.

For now, because we don't have that verification, right? We don't have the verification and validation. We don't have the confidence is what we don't have.

Right. Trust, because we know it's not, it's not at that level yet. Right.

Okay. Can't that be in the pipeline? I mean, I don't, I don't isn't You can have both, but not without the human intervention.

You don't want to just release, right. Even even release it to qa, honestly, like, like it no developer involved. So, so, Oh, come on, guy.

What's the answer? It depends. Yes, it Depends.

It depends. It gonna, depends on your industry, it depends on your context, it depends on your workforce. It depends on the maturity, it depends on how old the software is and the quality of the existing software.

All these things. So, yes. Mm-hmm.

And right now, if somebody says, we're starting on our journey, where should we go? I actually say your documentation. What's the qual?

That's, that's what you have enough documentation that's low hanging flute. And then let's go to testing, and then we can go backwards from there. Because when you focus on testing, especially if you're focusing on you humans being involved, and I'm not talking about this completely automated tools, which are awesome, right?

The autonomous tools. But if you talk about helping humans to get better at using the tools themselves, have them focus on testing, it still is sexy, right? It's still is sexy even to a developer to say, Hey, can you evaluate this code base?

Can you tell me where I have testing? Plus, can you help me understand unit tests and to end tests, right? As it sees the bigger, brighter context.

Yeah. Start with testing. Absolutely.

Tracy know those words. Well, you know, as they stay, the more, the more things stay that, that change, the more things stay the same. Isn't that what they say?

Um, we Seen, yes. The French saying that my French wife says is stupid. So I'm, I, so we've, We've, software has changed and changed and changed over time, but we still are writing software the same, to be quite honest.

We are, we still code it, we still, you know, manage it. We still test it. We still, you know, go through all of the same steps and those steps aren't going away.

So while developing, it might be scary to think that a developer AI would generate code and then test code. The reality is, is that when, as right, right? Today, developers still want control.

I have faith that they will continue to want control. They're gonna generate code, just like we might generate a document and they're gonna go through and they're going to read it, they're gonna learn it, they're gonna understand what they just generated because they have to deliver it. This is what I'm hearing from the developers, the new developers that I'm talking to.

Um, so yeah, testing would be a good place. And things like scripting, the problem is with those test tools, scripting can be a bit challenging. And not all testers are developers.

And so that's why we have a gap and how much automation's being done. So, and I really don't, you know, I hate to use the term AI to say we're generating scripts. You can generate scripts without it.

Oh, shoot, we've been generating Stuff for 20 years. I was generating my co bojo 20 years. So it's nice to put them two letters in front of it, but it doesn't mean that's what it's doing.

So let's just realize that we still have to go through the same dev process no matter what, what happens. And we won't always catch things. All right.

So for now, for now, the, We're gonna take a break. Not changing here. We're gonna wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

The script huggers. Your night meeting will be next month, Colorado. Okay.

We are, we're gonna take a break right here. We're gonna come back and let's talk about conflicts of interest. Is there such a thing anymore?

com is the number one online destination for DevOps education and community building. com covers all aspects of DevOps, including DevOps, best practices and tools, DevOps culture, DevSecOps, business impact, continuous testing, continuous delivery, and more. com has the largest collection of original DevOps content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts, and more.

com to learn more. com where the world meets DevOps. All right, folks, we're back with our final topic of the day, and I think there was so much noise in the world that nobody noticed, but Elon Musk is now partnered with Visas so you can conduct transactions across the X platform.

And magically Donald Trump came up with a similar idea for his, uh, social media platform. I'm not sure if those two are discussing these things as they go along, but it all came together in the same week. Guy.

What could possibly go wrong with That's one that allows you to conduct any type of transactions. Wow. Where to begin?

So, uh, there's, there's so many, there's so much context here. I I don't even know what to pick first. Like, first of all, um, when Elon took over x Twitter at the time, uh, he almost immediately, uh, made it known that he wanted x to be the platform for everything.

Just like Mark wanted Facebook to be the platform for everything. And one of those things was payments. It it, it's kind of a natural in some ways you would think, like these are communications media and, uh, uh, one-to-one and one to many and all that other sort of stuff.

So talking about a guy who made his first fortune in PayPal. Exactly, yes. I, Let's, let's not lose sight of that.

So This is an old idea. It's an old idea. And I think that that the track of Twitter half blown up and losing a lot of its, you know, participation and all that sort of stuff for political reasons that I'm not gonna get into here.

Um, you know, it's sort of comfortable circle a little bit with the ent rise to political power in a sense. He, he has the, the political muscle right now to, to help get the kind of deal he he wants from a visa or from anybody. And similarly to the president of the United States, having the political muscle to find somebody to back, uh, what is it?

Truth do truth fi or something. Truth fi, also payment or no, an investment platform. Um, so what could possibly go wrong?

I, I think, um, similar. It's what's really funny, the other piece of context is, um, we get, uh, the, uh, AI announcement followed by, uh, uh, Elon saying that's never gonna work. So, you know, you have sort of, sort of, you know, pairs of like parallel paths here from the president and from Elon Musk.

I, I wonder what's next? That said, these two are really different animals, really different. Um, the partly because one is a sort of payment and communications, like I said, it's an, it, it, it's a plausible extension to both Elon's background as well as to, uh, you know, the kind of medium that XX Twitter is.

Uh, and Visa itself is also a, a certain kind of a communications network as well, verified and so forth. Who's gonna use it? X users are gonna use it.

Who are X users at this point? A lot of them are Elon fan people. Uh, that's just kind of how it shook out, uh, whose guy came in.

There are other methods for communication and so forth, but are people gonna migrate into X because of this? There's lots of ways to, to, you know, to pay And be paid. There's a nugget that came out this morning, guy that you'll like, it just, there's just an article that was posted.

I just put it into the, the chat for us to be able to share with folks. It says Bezos is boosting his ad ads on X. So are there gonna be followers?

What other kinds of interesting things are gonna happen? They lost people, but they're been starting to gain people back. This is the echo political environment.

We're in the United States right now. Oh yeah, yeah. This has nothing to do with David.

So we really haven't had a president of the United States before, even Trump's first term, who was, who was actively and openly engaged in business. Oh, B******t. Trump has been doing this sort of thing.

Okay, you'll explain which, which other presidents have done this, but Trump this, to me, truth do Phi is the same as going back to Trump shuttle, you know, uh, Trump Towers, Trump branding, Trump vodka, pit, Trump, you know, like all these sort of things. A new line of business where people who are attracted to him and to his brand, no judgment, just saying, attracted to him and his brand, they can do the same kinds of investing that they do elsewhere. Only now they can do it within this culture and within this Milia and Rep gets his take from it, as does his partner Schwab, who is essentially using Truth Social as a channel partner, as Schwab uses, or TD Warehouse uses other channel partners to gain business.

Alan, I would love to hear your perspective as well. You and I and Mike, we are old New Yorkers. We've known Trump forever since he was, you know, the son of started real estate Times and quarters before you moved up to a hundred dollars bills and stiffing contractors.

Yeah, sure. But that, that being the case, I'm not even gonna talk about it as a New Yorker. I wanna come at this.

You know, I was a political science major, history major college, spent a lot of time looking at and learning about the American system and, you know, the Federalist papers and the founding fathers, the separations and different levels of government. A a bedrock belief in our government is it was a good government principle. We weren't here to enrich the monarch and, and make his treasure room bigger.

Wait, can I get a clarification? When you said b******t, you were saying what's happening? His b******t, or you're saying what I No, I'm saying in his first term, he, he, he did what?

No, president. It Wasn't, it wasn't open in this way. That's the only difference.

It was, It wasn't open in this way. Everybody who came to Washington had to pay the Trump hotel tax. Did you forget if you didn't stay at the hotel, you didn't get a meeting?

That's pretty damn open. There's not pre-social or tough Brand. I'm not, I'm not even gonna argue that.

Let me, let me get back to this. A bedrock of our government is number one, we're not here to enrich the monarch. There is no monarch.

Number two, everybody is equal under the law. Everybody's equal. There are that, that means that we don't discriminate against anyone.

But no one is above the law. And no one should have the, to wield the power of the office for their own private enrichment. That is, that used to be in the America I grew up in, loved that that was, even if sometimes it didn't necessarily work that way, at least on its surface, that was a given.

When a president or anybody came into office, you know, they had to set up a blind trust. They weren't allowed. The, they weren't, you are not allowed.

When, when the King of Saudi Arabia comes and gives you a gold plated knife or dagger, you're not allowed to keep that gift that goes, that belongs to the people of the United States of America. All of a sudden, in addition to everything else that we could talk about, everything else, till the cows come home, we've decided it's okay to allow this, whatever it is, come into office and enrich himself at our expense. And make no mistake, it's at our expense.

Now. You're right, guy. You and I are never gonna go on truth social and you Schwab file or whatever the heck it's called.

As a matter of fact, if I had any money in Schwab, I'd pull it out just because they did this. But what Chase just said about Bezos is a perfect example. Everybody wants to curry favor.

And Elon Musk is in a position where he's gonna decide what gets spent on this government. And, and AWS and Amazon and Blue Origin, or whatever his space thing is called, is all very near and dear to Jeff Bezos. So of course he's going to suck up to Elon Musk, and of course, Schwab and his daughter or granddaughter, whoever the heck it is, is an assistant treasury secretary surprise, is gonna suck up to Donald Trump.

As a matter of Fact, all of Big Tech has. Mm-hmm. Now we can call in our first American oligarchs.

Right? Maybe that's what This is. And the question really that yeah, that's what this is.

And the real question is why are we not, um, making, why Are we riot in the streets? Why aren't we out? Why isnt Congress standing up and saying, no, this is wrong?

Because they're 'cause the Republicans, they're sucking on the same tee. Yeah. That's why, Yeah.

The Republicans have become okay with this. And he, he was very vocal in not publican Early part of December, not the Democrats. Everyone should be up in arms In early December.

In early December, he, Trump was interviewed, I think on Meet the press, and he said he could not divert, he could not divert his investments. He said he, he couldn't do ITT Trust divest it. He couldn't divest it.

Well, Because he, and he Said he wouldn't even know how to divest it. No. He said there's no way he could divest it.

He just had no, you don't to dive this. You could put it in a blind trust. I don't think he's gonna even try to do that this time.

And like he said, it's very open. Open. He said he would not Tracy, he was lying.

He was lying. He can do it. There are ways to do it.

Of Course he can. He was lying about the 2025 project he is lying about. So, you know, the D-N-I-D-N-I people who are in the, you know, the TSA, he lies all the time.

But watch what he does. What he does is he's not going to do it. So, so mark me on this.

All that crap that happens on the Silk Road and all those illicit transactions is moving over to these platforms and people are gonna start using these things to do all kinds of things that are illegal. And they're just gonna be out in the open. 'cause nobody's gonna be tracking who's selling what, where and when on these things.

I think that's right. And I think, Alan, my response to, to, to what you're saying is that I, I, I agree with you a hundred percent about, um, the need for, at a minimum, the appearance of, of, of neutrality and objectivity, but also separation, like you say, good government separation. I believe in that completely.

I, I think that I, I don't, I know that the level of cynicism, um, in general in the electorate of the United States, it's very high. And that the general response that I've gotten to making statements like that is, well, everybody's done it. Yeah, I know Biden is, What about Obama are even worse?

They're worse. Not just 'cause they do it more, but because they lie about it. And at least we have men.

Well, Shouldn't gone jail. Honesty and openness about it. Now, that's Menez gone 11 years.

You know what, for doing. So again, I'm a history major. Let me tell you something.

In the 1880s, 1890s after the Civil War, right? The robber barons, the van, the Gil, the Gilded Age, well, it was a little before, it's the beginning of the Gilded Age, before it got really Giled. But there was a time not just where people were making tons of money, but that government got really, I mean, started with Andrew Johnson who came in after Lincoln.

Everything was for sale under Andrew Johnson. And, and it didn't get, you know, grant did a decent job, but he was a adjunct. And then it, it went pre progressively downhill from there.

And until the first time we, well, it's, it wasn't the first time. 'cause we've had third parties, but a third party president won the election. The talking about Teddy Roosevelt Party, Teddy Roosevelt, you know what he ran on?

Clean up government, good government. Mm-hmm. Clean up government put in, You know who, who had that message before him was Democrat, Grover Cleveland.

Yes. The former New Yorker. He, He ran once then was out.

So it was like a 30 year movement that culminated in presidency in the beginning of Antit, Cleaned it up. Now, the best we can hope for as Americans is that the stench of this becomes so rotten and stinky that we wake up, come to our senses and we get some sort of good government movement here that may start at a local level and work its way to the federal where, you know, what I would like to see, I member of Congress has to put their stocks in blind trust. Let's take the insider trading out of this.

They cannot go chase, you know, this being in the beltway, you can't go work for a contractor with, for three years after you leave government. You can't be running commercial entities while you're serving this government. And you can't have quasi people like what Elon is right now, have any kind of say in things and access to top secret and everything else while he has commercial business going on with the US government.

And until we do that, this whole thing is a farce. All right. Sold.

I think, I think we're gonna have to close this out guys, but alright. Roosevelt speaks softly and carry a big stick, Right? Absolutely.

Good old Teddy Roosevelt, the hero of, was it San Juan Hill in Yes. Cuba. Yep.

The Rough Riders. The rough riders. Spanish American War or get crazy.

I was not a history major, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express recently. So I know Mike loves the history though. All right.

We gave you a little history, a little of this, a little of that. But we're done here on Textron Gang for this wonderful Monday. We'll be back tomorrow with more gang members, more news, more discussion, and more fun.

Until then, is Alan Humma. We're out.