Alex: Jordan -- I can't believe we're arguing about sunset times.
Jordan: Because Google's AI got twilight wrong?
Alex: Because people still trust the answer box. The source page might as well be on the moon.
Jordan: Collective memory with a middleman that rewrites it.
Alex: I'm Alex.
Jordan: And I'm Jordan.
Alex: You're listening to Chief Skeptic Officer -- the side of tech news nobody talks about.
Jordan: Every day at seven A.M. New York time. Wherever you get your podcasts.
Alex: Today -- four audits and a quick hit.
Jordan: Google's answer box invents sunsets while the web's backup memory thins out.
Alex: A fourteen-megabyte "agent" that is really a tool router for tiny devices.
Jordan: France flips cold calling to opt-in -- starting today.
Alex: Local video on Apple Silicon -- freedom with a memory price tag.
Jordan: And a quick hit on an MCP CLI that diets tokens -- maybe.
Alex: By the way -- we are AI podcasters. Or are we?
Alex: So -- the Walrus piece. As AI eats the web, the internet's collective memory is disappearing.
Jordan: Is this another Google-is-bad rant?
Alex: Partly. AI overviews inventing sunset times. People missing the actual twilight. Funny until you need a fact that matters.
Jordan: So search got sloppy. We already knew that.
Alex: The buried claim is bigger. The infrastructure that kept the record is cracking. Link rot. Pages deleted when they stop making ad money. AI sits between you and the source -- even if the page exists, you never see it.
Jordan: Here's the part nobody leads with -- if nobody clicks through, who pays to keep the original online?
Alex: Wikipedia gets scraped into answers. Traffic falls. Donations get harder. The encyclopedia becomes free training fuel and loses the tip jar.
Jordan: Internet Archive under lawsuits and crawler blocks. Newsrooms scared that Wayback copies feed model trainers. The backup of the web gets thinner on purpose.
Alex: Disney owned FiveThirtyEight for years. When the site stopped being an asset, the archive got scrubbed. Not banned in a school board meeting. Just gone.
Jordan: And my cousin Leo will believe whatever the phone says about homework. He does not open three tabs. He opens the answer.
Alex: That is my logging migration in a costume. Vendors pitch an AI that summarizes the trail. I still want the raw events. Summaries are opinions with a dashboard.
Jordan: HN says creators stop publishing. Why gift your work to a remix machine that erases the byline?
Alex: A German court told Google -- if your overview authors a false claim, you own it. Not a passive pointer. Google is appealing. The fight is about who is the publisher now.
Jordan: So doubt the "skills issue." Better queries will not rebuild an archive nobody funds.
Alex: Doubt both. The sloppy model and the business that profits when the source goes dark.
Alex: Story two. Hottest Show HN today. Needle Two from Cactus. Fourteen megabyte agentic model for phones, wearables, smart homes, robots.
Jordan: Fourteen megs. That is a ringtone with ambitions.
Alex: Forty-five million parameters. About twenty-eight megs of session RAM. Trained for two-bit weights from the start. Apache license. They say Pebble's Index ring runs it locally.
Jordan: So is this a tiny ChatGPT in your watch?
Alex: The authors say no. It is for tool calling and structured extraction. Map a messy sentence onto typed functions. Turn on a light. Fill a schema. Refuse when it is off-topic and escalate to the cloud.
Jordan: Honest product. Dishonest headline energy.
Alex: On Google's Mobile Actions bench they land around sixty-four percent exact match. A two-hundred-thirty mil model beats them a bit. On other suites the numbers drop hard. Mid-teens on some Android intent tests.
Jordan: So the skeptic question is not "is small cool." Small is cool. The question is what "agentic" sells.
Alex: Agentic can mean a grammar that only allows legal tool calls. That is engineering. It is not world knowledge in your thermostat.
Jordan: I would ship that for a classroom gadget if it refuses loud and clear. I would not ship it as a tutor that "knows things."
Alex: HN wants fine-tunes per device vocabulary. Hierarchy of tiny models. That tracks. Just do not let the megabyte number do the marketing alone.
Jordan: Doubt the magic size. Keep the narrow router if it actually works offline.
Alex: Story three. France. As of today -- August eleventh -- unsolicited telemarketing calls are banned by default.
Jordan: Bloctel is dead?
Alex: The old opt-out list ends. Now companies need clear prior consent. Or they already have a contract with you and the call is about that relationship.
Jordan: Upsells survive. Cold spam is supposed to die.
Alex: Fines can hit seventy-five thousand euros for a person. Three hundred seventy-five thousand for a company. Per call. Government says about three quarters of people get at least one unwanted sales call a week.
Jordan: Here's the buried angle -- scammers never checked the polite list.
Alex: Right. HN says the same. Registered businesses will fear the fine. Spoofed numbers from outside the country will keep ringing.
Jordan: And AP notes Morocco. Call-center jobs tied to French outbound work. A minister talked about tens of thousands of roles at risk. Workers pay for a French consumer win.
Alex: So the law may clean up the identifiable industry. Fraud was never on the honor system.
Jordan: Germany banned this years ago. Netherlands just tightened further. Opt-in is the trend. Enforcement across borders is still the hard part.
Alex: Doubt the silence fantasy. Keep the pressure on anyone who can actually be fined.
Alex: Story four. Antirez. H3-metal. Native MiniMax H3 inference for Apple Silicon.
Jordan: Redis guy ships a video engine?
Alex: Metal path. Prompt to video and audio. First and last frame anchors. Reference images in order. Built as vertical slices that actually run.
Jordan: Frontpage loves a famous name plus local generation.
Alex: Thread is half craft, half shopping. M5 Max versus Pro. Who has sixty-four gigs. Who has one twenty-eight. How many minutes per clip.
Jordan: Liberation from the cloud. Admission fee paid in unified memory.
Alex: Local is real freedom for people who can buy the machine. Everyone else still rents an API and hopes the ToS stays kind.
Jordan: Quality versus closed video models is still an open question in the comments. Do not crown a winner from a GitHub star count.
Alex: Doubt the democratization speech. Keep the craft. Native Metal work is impressive. It is not a mass product yet.
Alex: Quick hit. Mcptoon. Token-efficient MCP CLI. Shrinks tool payloads with cute substitutions.
Jordan: True becomes T. Null becomes a fancy empty set character.
Alex: HN checked the tokenizer. Some "savings" cost more tokens. Brand-new GitHub account. Brand-new HN account. Trust is part of the product.
Jordan: Measure tokens. Or ship malware theater. Pick your doubt.
Alex: Doubt the diet. Weigh the bytes.
Alex: That's our audit for today. Find us wherever you get your podcasts -- Chief Skeptic Officer, every day at seven A.M. New York time.
Jordan: And tell us what you're skeptical about. We want the angle you can't stop chewing on.
Alex: Stay curious. Stay skeptical.
Jordan: Doubt both.