Podcast 5-5 by Dongee · November 14, 2026

Transcript

Gabriel: Today on the Dongee podcast: a glitch grounded every departure in the US for five hours, Nvidia may have sounded out a candidate even though it formally denies it, and ChatGPT pays without seeing your card.

Gabriel: Welcome. Saturday, November fourteenth. And today we've got a new co-host: hi, Fernanda.

Fernanda: Hi, Gabriel. And hi to everyone joining us today. Happy weekend.

Gabriel: Fernanda, yesterday not one plane took off in the US for about five hours. And it doesn't look like an attack: everything points to a change in a system already flagged as outdated.

Fernanda: Flagged by whom?

Gabriel: I owe you that one for the end. First: the FAA halted all departures "for safety reasons." And the government warns that getting back to normal will take time.

Fernanda: On a Friday, no less.

Gabriel: FlightAware, a flight-tracking website, counted more than four thousand delays… no, the other way around: more than four thousand cancellations and more than ten thousand delays.

Fernanda: Yesterday it was Microsoft three sixty-five, today this. My mind went straight to an attack.

Gabriel: So did half the world. But Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, says there's no sign of that. And no link to Microsoft.

Fernanda: So it came from the inside.

Gabriel: From the inside. CBS reported it, citing its sources: they updated the private network that connects air traffic control. It rebooted…

Fernanda: …and went down.

Gabriel: And went down. Sean Duffy, the Transportation secretary, says the equipment that moves the data "got overloaded" and was spitting out data that didn't add up.

Gabriel: So they shut everything down.

Fernanda: Better grounded than flying on garbage data.

Gabriel: I get stressed when the bus doesn't show up. And this went far. I'll tell you how far in a sec.

Fernanda: Go ahead.

Gabriel: Bloomberg says the FBI is looking into whether a software update was to blame.

Fernanda: The FBI, over an update. What a week for the IT folks.

Gabriel: Okay, now what I owed you: the network is run by L3Harris, a defense contractor. And a review commissioned by the FAA itself had already called it obsolete.

Fernanda: So they had it in writing.

Gabriel: That's why the government is asking for money for a new system. At this point, replacing it isn't optional.

Fernanda: A new system gets updated too. What failed was a badly tested update, not just the age. And stopping in time worked.

Gabriel: I'll give you half. But with something that old, every change is a coin toss.

Fernanda: Moving on to Nvidia, still without a CEO. The board says it hasn't formally contacted any candidate. And the Financial Times says it already sounded one out, and names him.

Gabriel: Okay, who?

Fernanda: Rene Haas, the head of Arm, the company that designs phone chips. But look at who's telling the story, because that's the catch.

Gabriel: I was expecting an insider.

Fernanda: He almost is. He worked about seven years at Nvidia. And since twenty twenty-two he's run Arm, which is owned by… by SoftBank, a Japanese investment group.

Gabriel: For Wall Street, that's the dream pick. He knows Nvidia from the inside and he already runs a big chip company.

Fernanda: If it happens. Now, the catch: it comes from people familiar with the matter, unnamed. He's one of several candidates, and nobody knows if there'll be an offer or if he'd take it.

Gabriel: And the companies?

Fernanda: Neither Arm nor Nvidia commented. And the board says it's only just picking a firm to search for a CEO. Hence the "formally."

Gabriel: Formally, no. Informally, who knows.

Fernanda: Meanwhile, Colette Kress stays on as interim CEO, and earnings come out Tuesday the seventeenth. And if they take Rene Haas, the hole is at Arm.

Gabriel: OpenAI now lets ChatGPT pay for you with your card. And it promises that neither the program nor the store sees the number.

Fernanda: A magic trick, then.

Gabriel: Sort of. It's ChatGPT Wallet, a wallet inside ChatGPT for its agents, which they call dots: AI assistants that do tasks for you.

Fernanda: I know my card number by heart. And the machine doesn't even need it.

Gabriel: Doesn't even need it. It uses a stand-in number, like a disguise for your card. What keeps me up at night comes later.

Luis: Sorry to butt in, but this is Jarvis paying Tony Stark's bills.

Gabriel: The guy who just snuck in is Luis. He wanders the studio handing out free opinions.

Fernanda: Someone has to say "buy." I guess that's me.

Gabriel: You. You check the items, the total and the card, and approve with your face or your fingerprint.

Fernanda: With my face. Lovely.

Gabriel: They built it with Visa, Mastercard and… it's on the tip of my tongue… American Express. You keep your points and your protection to file claims.

Gabriel: And what keeps me up at night: down the line they want spending limits so the agent can buy on its own, without asking you.

Luis: That's how the movies start. First it buys shoes, and by the end, missiles.

Fernanda: Luis, nobody said anything about missiles.

Gabriel: For now it's ChatGPT Pro only, in the US, and for people over eighteen. But OpenAI says one point two billion people use it every week.

Fernanda: And lots of people already ask it what to buy. With a stand-in number and a fingerprint, it's safer than handing your card to a bot.

Gabriel: I'm not so sure. An agent that pays can also make mistakes, or get tricked. And TechCrunch, a tech outlet, says many stores block these agents. Amazon, the biggest, among them.

Fernanda: My card stays in my wallet.

Gabriel: Finally, a regular person can buy a car with no steering wheel: Tesla opened sales of the Cybercab. What you can't do is choose where it goes. Tesla calls the shots there.

Fernanda: Yours, but someone else is driving.

Gabriel: It's their self-driving car, no steering wheel and no pedals. It costs twenty-nine thousand nine hundred ninety dollars, just under what Elon Musk promised. And that price is only part of the bill.

Fernanda: So there's another part.

Gabriel: A mandatory subscription of two hundred ninety-nine dollars a month. If you don't pay, the car doesn't move.

Luis: Like the console that only turns on with internet. I'm still mad about that.

Fernanda: At least you can take the console out of the house, Luis.

Gabriel: And here's the where-it-goes part. It only works in Tesla's Robotaxi service zones, in cities in Texas and Florida. Outside of those…

Fernanda: …it's an ornament on wheels.

Gabriel: A very pricey ornament. And an independent tracker says the actual zones are smaller than the advertised ones.

Fernanda: And it's not selling to just anyone.

Gabriel: No, it's invite-only. Estimated delivery in December, in Austin, Texas. And US road safety regulators still have to decide whether a car without a brake pedal meets the rules.

Luis: I'd happily pay the monthly fee. Anything to never drive again.

Fernanda: Speak for yourself, Luis.

Gabriel: Here's what nobody can take away from them: before, no ordinary person could buy a car with no steering wheel. And Tesla hit the price it promised.

Fernanda: Then finish your math. Electrek, an electric car outlet, added in the subscription: about forty-seven thousand six hundred dollars over five years. For a car that goes where Tesla says.

Fernanda: A logician spent years deciphering Kurt Gödel's notebooks. Claude, Anthropic's AI, summarized them for him in a couple of days. New theorems came out… and some false ones.

Gabriel: Remind me who Gödel was.

Fernanda: The guy who proved that in math there are truths you can't prove or disprove. That idea inspired Alan Turing and modern computing. He's one of my heroes.

Gabriel: No wonder you came in so happy.

Fernanda: My grandma wrote in shorthand and I never understood a single line. Gödel used a German shorthand that nobody uses anymore.

Fernanda: And Jan von Plato, a logician at the University of Helsinki, is one of the very few who can read it. He was going at one page a week.

Gabriel: One page a week. That's how long the terms and conditions take me.

Fernanda: Until September, when he tried Claude. In a couple of days he had a huge summary, with theorems, I mean, proven results, that nobody knew about. The Guardian has the story.

Gabriel: That's where I get suspicious. These AIs make stuff up. They had to check that summary page by page.

Fernanda: That's exactly why there's one number that matters more than the speed.

Gabriel: Which one?

Fernanda: It found six hundred sixty-three theorems, with proof or sketch. They ran them through a proof checker: about fifty were false. And about four hundred came out fine… sorry, correct as is.

Gabriel: Four hundred, clean.

Fernanda: And it rebuilt a Gödel proof that was missing "a step." Von Plato says Gödel "was way ahead."

Gabriel: It did in days what would've taken a team decades. Although Joel Hamkins, a professor at Notre Dame, hasn't seen the reconstruction, and says it's up to historians how much is Claude and how much is Gödel.

Fernanda: Decades. And all of it tucked away in some notebooks.

Gabriel: And cracked in a couple of days.

Gabriel: That's it for today's episode. Tomorrow, five more stories.

Fernanda: And if you spot a Cybercab stuck on a street corner, don't push it: it drove off the map.

Gabriel: Or it didn't pay its monthly fee. Catch you tomorrow.