155: Let Them Eat Cake

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks number 155 for April 8th. Was it 2016? I always forget the year.

I know. It's tax time, man. I know. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Ah, taxes. Yay. We'll get to taxes shortly, I guess. Oh, we will. A big thanks to Chris and Seth from the Grime Life podcast for having us on this week. That was kind of fun.

It was actually really fun. It's nice to talk to somebody other than just you. Yeah, it is. And it's also nice to be able to say what I want to say without having Grandpa Brian always scowling at me when I say something inappropriate. Oh, that's true. They do veer to the inappropriate over there, but I like them for that. So good times. Yeah. Thanks a lot, guys. It was a lot of fun. And, you know, thanks for the massive amounts of tweets and retweets and everything that you guys are doing, which annoys the hell out of me because it makes me go look at my Twitter.

Aw, poor baby. People actually like you. I never asked to be liked, as our comments section will show. Yes, indeed. Yeah. So anyways, we mentioned on Up to Speed, which is our daily thing that we're doing, and I came back to this week, and that the NFL is basically going to be streaming on Twitter, whatever the hell that means, because, you know, Twitter is well known for being a video service.

Well, there's Periscope. Yeah. Anyways, Twitter won the rights to stream the NFL for whatever reason. Well, paid for the rights, didn't win the rights. And that made me start to think, oh, what about what's going on with that NFL tax exempt status? And lo and behold, they are actually no longer tax exempt. And you would wonder why they would want to do this. Well, basically, the economic value of the exemption wasn't worth the political and PR headaches that it has been creating since we all discovered this.

Ah. And that's pretty much the only reason. Yeah. And why were they tax exempt to begin with? It's sports. If anybody could possibly explain that to me, I'd love to hear it because there's no effing reason. No, I mean, it's mind boggling. A billion dollar a year industry. Yeah. I mean, it's not like it's Scientology or anything. Jeez.

Yeah. But as we discover later on in this program, anybody with that kind of money doesn't pay much taxes. Yes. I found an article on Medium that I think really sums up a lot of what we've been talking about. But like most articles on the subject, they do it much better than we do.

Yeah. Well, that's why we read these things. Yes. It's called Instagram and the Cult of the Attention Web. How the free Internet is Eating Itself. Most of the stuff we've talked about before, but the way that he describes what's going on with it is kind of a primer for maybe new listeners who want to know why we think the web is going to implode and eat itself at some point.

And here's just a little bit from the article. Our current version of the Internet lives and breathes off a currency of human attention with the success and failure of many Internet companies predicated on how much of a person's time they can capture. This model has reshaped much of the Internet into an attention web with companies fighting tooth and nail to own every possible moment of your time.

That's that's kind of it. And that's that's a subset of what they do with your time, which is sell things, sell your own life back to you, you know? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is everything wrong with the web. And it is what it is now. So great. This is a great article. It just depressed the hell out of me.

There was a there was some interesting math in there where like on Facebook, every single person is worth about a buck twenty five a year. You know, well, if we just paid a dollar fifty a year, we would have no ads, a faster experience, and then they could take that extra one point two billion dollars in revenue that they would be making and actually pay people to make good content.

What a concept. Paying for content. Oh, so that's so 1990s. I know we don't do that anymore. Never. Yeah. And the other thing that we like to pick on, just in case you're you're a new new listener, that would be the entire Silicon Valley Web 2.0 Economy 2.0 apps.

That's that's all problems that don't exist. Crap. This just cracked me up because I guess this is a natural extension of what's going on. There is an app called Yo Roomy. Yo Roomy. Yeah. And it's not going well for whoever created it. So he's put the entire kit and caboodle up on eBay for sale.

See, this is like to have your own Web 2.0 company. It's a it's a there's a current bid for twenty six hundred dollars right now. I think that's probably twenty six hundred. Nice hacker. Hacker's going to buy it. Anyway, this isn't new, man. People have been selling websites lock, stock and barrel on eBay since the since eBay's been around.

Oh, I'm aware of that. But I've yet I've never personally seen one on eBay before. Oh, so you just or get you. Yeah. What was it called? You serendipitously ran across this one. Yeah, this is just out of the blue. I ran across it yesterday. So up for auction is Yo Roomy app and all branding, logo, design assets, website users, 4000 active.

So, yeah, you're being sold if you're on these apps, by the way. And social marketing channels. The app is live in the app store is fully functional with thousands of active users. So go ahead and buy my failing company. Bail me out so I can pay my mom back. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. That's that's really what's going on there.

New Republic had a great article. Why are voters so angry? It's the it's the 1099 economy, stupid. And this is it documents the rise in how many people are doing contract work, how many are permalancers and, you know, perm attempts and how every time the people go out on their own, whether they like it or not, you have no safety net.

And, you know, what he doesn't really cover, I think, really is the stress of that lifestyle and how over time it really wears you down, as you well know. You and I have been doing this for a very long time. You currently aren't, but we've been back and forth.

Actually, I am. I don't. Yeah, I'm a contractor. I do not have a job. No, it's terrifying. And it's one of the realizations I'm making later on in life that, oh, man, maybe I made a mistake. I mean, it was good and it provided a lot of flexibility, but there's no safety net. There's the only reason I have a decent retirement is because I was very aware of it and socked away tons and tons of money.

There are so many, you know, health insurance. I got very lucky and found a really good broker who's always been able to find these things for me. People that end up in these situations where they are basically independent contractors are, for the most part, not doing any of that. And they are screwed in the long run.

Well, see, here's the thing, though. We're going to have to we're going to probably end up doing a show about this because I'm trying to find a couple of books on the topic. But I want to talk about retirement in general, because retirement is a fairly new concept in society. And, you know, there are a lot of Asian cultures that don't even have a word for retirement because they just work till they drop dead.

Well, they also have a strong family unit that takes care of them. There is respect for their elders. So they have somewhere to stay. Exactly. That's so there's I mean, there's a big difference between I mean, when you when you think about like the Eastern society and Western society and how we've kind of crafted these, you know, go out on your own, make it on your own and then be single.

And then we've got idiocracy and then you're you're sitting home alone, work until you die. There's you know, there's there's a lot of nuances with retirement. And I've just been researching this with, you know, one of my clients because we've had a lot of authors come on and talk about it. So I'm kind of trying to figure out what's going to happen in the next, you know, 20 years for me personally, because I don't have a retirement fund.

I don't have any I have no savings. I'm pretty much paycheck to paycheck. So no to self-change address. Don't tell Jason. Yeah, no, my little brother will catch me. Yeah, sure. Greg, can I stay in your spare room?

My sciatica is acting up. No, I mean, I think we should try to schedule the show then because I think you need to get on it because it's not too late. Yeah, no, I know. Anyways, it's really important. I agree with this article. We've seen this. This is one of the reasons that I rail at Uber because they they've decided to go this way.

And and, you know, no company in their rational mind would want to have an actual employee because then you have to do things like subsidize their health care and all the other things and give them vacation pay and all that sort of stuff. So if you can avoid it, why wouldn't you? Unemployment tax, Social Security. There's a lot of stuff.

An employee, it costs a lot more than just the salary, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. So, you know, and and it used to be, you know, we had this kind of agreement as a societal contract that, OK, we will just do this because a company will do that because it's the right thing to do. That's gone out the window and every it's fucking game on out there.

And you're lucky if you get a company to hire you. They'd much rather just have you as an independent contractor. This is a thing that waiters and waitresses have known for a very long time that if you are in that field, companies will go out of their way to ensure that you get just enough hours to get the most out of you.

But not enough that we'd have to hire you. Oh, yeah. It's a load of shit. Speaking of a load of shit, let's talk about the singularity. OK, John Jerkoff. I mean, Markoff has a lovely article in The New York Times called When is the Singularity a Probably Not in Your Lifetime?

And he discusses many different things about actual intelligence and what we know about intelligence, which is not a whole lot, actually, from the biological sense of the word. And trying to model something in code and silicone or silicon.

Silicone's a little different. Them's boobies. Those are the cone heads. Oh, you went boobies. I went Dan Aykroyd. No. At least one of them I like watching. And it's not Dan Aykroyd. Anyway, with Moore's Law actually going out the window soon, until we can get that quantum entanglement computers, you know, computers at a spooky, scary distance.

I'm positing that it's not actually going to happen for quite some time because, yeah, we got somebody that can beat Go. But that's a far cry from actual intelligence. But again, I would state to him the same thing that we learned when that happened. Best guess scenarios were that's 15 years off.

Oh, it happened. OK. Now, I would also like to point out that every time your computer turns on, it resets your microphone. We can't even get a computer to keep the microphone setting every time we turn it off and on. So I'm thinking maybe we might be a little farther off than possible.

Well, don't forget, they're selling the crappy computers to the sheeple. Yes. And later on, I'm going to have some news on and basically an AI chip that just came out, which will be fun to talk about. Look, the singularity is this interesting concept. Who the hell knows?

I do think it's sooner rather than later. I think that we are seeing things moving exponentially. Everything is surprising us at how quickly it's come to pass. So standing up there and being a contrarian and saying, well, there's no way this is going to possible. Oh, shit.

It just happened. Well, also remember, it's written by John Markoff, who is a douchebag. Yeah. I mean, the singularity is this awe-inspiring concept that it is hard. It comes from science fiction, though. It does. But so did most things. Oh, well, we're never going to get transporters. So I would like to – this is just a little favor for – this isn't even a favor.

This is payment. This is payment. But it's true. I would just like to say friend of the show, Chien, is lovely. I agree. What'd you do wrong, doctor? In the news. My favorite company in the world, Uber, has settled with California regulators for up to $25 million.

San Francisco and L.A. have sued Uber for allegedly – if you pay off, it's not allegedly anymore – misleading consumers in advertisements on the background checks of its drivers. The regulators also claim San Francisco-based Uber was out of compliance with the inspection of taxi meters and for not obtaining proper licenses to drop off and pick up passengers at the airport.

Because why should they? So now they've paid it. And this is pretty much proof of what I consider to be economy 2.0. Fuck it. Let's do it until someone gets angry. Hey, it's always easier to apologize than ask permission, they say. Well, that's not – $25 million is nothing to Uber. I know. It's a drop in the bucket.

And that's not the way that things used to be. And speaking of that, my other favorite company, Airbnb, is finally deciding that – or basically saying, hey, we want to do the right thing, guys. Here's our tax money. If you legalize us, although we haven't bothered trying to do that for a long time, and we were desperately trying to not pay any of these tax monies or regulation fees forever.

But now you're good, guys, because you want to do it. Yeah, yeah. This is revisionist history. Oh, you think? Yeah. We've been trying to do the right thing all along, but you guys are being mean and won't let us. It's kind of like they forgot about the advertisements they took out in San Francisco.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Well, whatever. I'm glad that you're finally playing the game now that you've made gazillions of dollars, and you're going to do the right thing and do what everybody else has to do, except for the people in the Panama Papers. And, you know, do what everybody else has to.

You're going to pay your taxes. Thank you. Should we get down and applaud? What do you want from me, Airbnb? Should I blow you for this? Because the press release makes it sound like I should. No, I know. That's what I'm saying. This whole thing is just – it's bullshit revisionist history. And it's all because they're in a fight with the hotel industry.

Yeah. And even if they pay taxes, and it's not even them paying taxes, it's the people who are renting paying taxes. So they're just putting in mechanisms to take money from the people. From the people that are using their service to use the system. Yeah. So then Airbnb just shifts their taxes offshore, so they don't have to pay the taxes.

Just the people who are renting the places have to pay taxes. But they've even acknowledged that there are basically Airbnb hotels. Now, a regular hotel has a lot of licensing that has to be done. You know, there's health issues. There's safety issues. Yes. Airbnb hotels are basically not really.

Yeah. Liar beware. Yeah. Caveat emptor. And bring your own fire extinguisher. And cockroach spray. And bed bug spray. Yes. So, yeah, basically Airbnb has agreed to pass on the taxes that need to be paid. And they're kind of ignoring their own corporate tax situation.

And how Airbnb has shifted a lot of their money to tax shelters. Oh, how did that happen? I couldn't understand a word you just said, but I'm going to take it that it was snarky and mean. So we're going to move on to something happier now. 3D printing stuff. We've got a couple 3D printing stories back to back here, which I think are amazing.

There's this new thing that is in development right now called the Biopan, which is going to let surgeons squirt cartilage directly into like broken cartilage. Nice. And, you know, it's. And science and stuff. Yeah. It's like stem cells and cartilage.

So your cartilage will regrow without having to take it out. And by the time they take it out, they can't put it back in because it's cartilage and it gets torn apart, putting it back. So you can't 3D print it because you don't even know what shape it is by the time you get it out because it's, you know, you can, it basically destroys it. Anyway, these guys will be able to squirt some stuff in there and make your knees work again.

That's very cool. That is very cool. It's much better than going to Thailand to get the surgery because it's too damn expensive here. So second one, MIT can now 3D print robots made of both solids and liquids. This is. Liquibot. The, the print head that they've developed has on both sides are, it's like a solid.

So you can print solids in, in the middle, you can squirt in hydraulic fluid or other types of fluids. So you can make things in one piece that are actually liquid and solid in one printing. You have to go look at these videos because they have made robots, hydraulic robots that all you need to do is stick on a motor and a battery and work right out of the box.

They are very, very cool. I will look at it. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's a fully working machine. I can't even explain it. They've got fellows. They've got all sorts of actuators all from one printing. It's cool. It is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

The second coolest thing I've seen. And also this, the one of the saddest things I've ever seen the team at ING and Microsoft have got a bunch of developers together and recreated a Rembrandt from they've recreated algorithmically, then 3d printed it.

Okay. It is a, it's an amazing video. The technology behind this is, it's stunning. And they, they made a 3d printed Rembrandt that looks pretty much like a Rembrandt. It's not exact. I mean, I could tell, I could tell some differences, you know, just you can, you can just tell, but you know, to the lay person, it's pretty impressive.

Um, I mean, yeah, as the artist in me dies a little inside, you know, I thought photography was dead. Now everything is, yeah, I mean, but this is what you're looking at a painting. So they've got a vast body of Rembrandt's work. So they could sample eyes, mouth, nose, distance from eyes, distance from nose, proportions, and then, you know, throw it into an algorithm and then come out with a, a, a reasonable fact, simile thereof.

But when you get into something like, you know, impressionistic art or like Warhol, you're not going to have that because the concepts that he came up with were, I'm like, who's going to make a damn soup can? You know? I don't know. Google's deep mind thing was pretty weird. Yeah. That was just ugly. I mean, it was just weird.

It was, there were a lot of eyeballs. Some may argue that some of Warhol's stuff wasn't all that great. Oh no. Most of Warhol's stuff was terrible, but it was the concept. No, this is really interesting. I mean, this has been going on in music for a little while too. I mean, I haven't kept up with it, but I remember about five years back or something like that, there was a software program that basically had been trained to write in the style of the Beatles and would knock out basically Beatles, Beatles tracks.

It was pretty cool. Oh, crap bot. Yes, pretty much. Anyway, so yeah, go, I highly recommend going and watching the video. It's at nextrembrandt.com and the Mashable article will be linked in the show notes as well. And also all three of these 3D printing articles are really good.

And what's happening in 3D printing is pretty amazing. All right, cool. Well, now that you brought the science and the interesting stuff about robots, I'm going to make it weird. Oh, of course you are. A study came out that people feel weird about touching robots' genital areas. Oh, well.

Subjects sat alone in a room with a humanoid robot that can finally control its body motions. It's the now from Aldebaran Robotics. I just, every time I see that, I want to say Aldebaran. I know. Aldebaran. Yes. And the article says a pretty cute robot. I'll let you judge that yourself.

I didn't particularly find it that interesting. But they recorded, I mean, this is wrong with psychology anyways. This is the kind of crap that I was talking about when we were talking about the psychology stuff a couple weeks ago. They put on sensors to record the subjects, physiological, basically boners. No, they said it's not sexual arousal.

It's just, you know, normal physiological arousal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Physiological arousal. So there was low arousal and quick response times when they were touching areas like the neck or ear. And I would argue that neck and ear can be kind of erogenous zones if you're in the mood. But anyways, so when they tried to, when they asked them to touch the general area, the butt and breast or the front bits, people freaked out.

Okay. Well, what country did they do this study in? I have no idea. I bet it's the US. Go to Europe. Go to Europe and do this study. Go anywhere else in the world and do this study. I bet people won't give a shit. Yeah. Everybody's way more laid back. I mean, still touching is a little bit different than just seeing.

But, you know, anyways, it's I just wanted to put that in here because, you know, robot nads. Yeah, robot nads. Well, speaking of creepy robot touching, a man built a $50,000 robot that resembles Scarlett Johansson. See, Jason, you took my article and you one up me. Of course. This guy, Ricky Ma, you got to watch the video, too.

You got you got the full Monty on this one. Yeah, I fear for this guy's safety and like just mental health issues. I fear for Scarlett Johansson. Well, I wouldn't because he's already replaced her. She's no longer required. Scarlett Johansson is no longer required.

He's got his own robot that is. I mean, this is I don't know. It's on the other end of the uncanny valley. It's not when she talks. It's bad. He's not a very good robot scientist. No, but the look is rather strange.

Wow, that's weird. It kind of looks like Scarlett Johansson, who had a stroke. A little bit. Yeah, definitely. I'll give you that. And I also find it odd that he would name it Mark 1 because Mark is a dude's name. I think there's some confusion going on here. Well, you know, he is Chinese. Maybe Mark is Scarlett and Chinese.

Who knows? I doubt that. I don't know. I'm just making shit up. Okay. That's what we do here. That's true. U.S. schools may soon be testing Adidas fitness tracker in K-12 gym classes. Okay. This is an interesting one because, of course, I always rail against anybody that's trying to do mandatory fitness tracking or any kind of tracking.

This has no GPS in it. None of that crap. It's just a heart rate monitor. Okay. And which I think is cool. I mean, because that way, the one reason I do like this is that your heart rate determines your fitness, right? So if you got the fat kid out there like I was and I'm busting 160 beats per minute and I'm just kind of jogging around the gym and everybody else is, you know, running the four minute mile and I'm supposed to keep up with them, but I can't and it's going to kill me.

Then I don't like PE. I failed out of PE twice just for that reason. So I think if they can customize these workout routines for kids so they actually get optimal fitness without the embarrassment of having to try and keep up with the jocks or whatnot.

Yeah. I think that might be fun. And you get a picture over time. Like if they have to wear these for years, you can see how they can grow and progress and it gives the teachers a better way to actually teach them, you know? Right. So I don't know. I mean, yeah, they specifically say that the security and privacy concerns are paramount because Adidas hasn't addressed any of that.

Yeah, that's important. You know, I don't really have a problem with this. I just, all I remember from PE was like go outside and throw a ball at someone. I don't remember there being any kind of like real fitness education going on in school.

No, because it was just a, it was a hellish experience for the most part until you get to high school and at least in Illinois. And I got to take golf nine times, which made me a fantastic golfer. Yeah, that's, that's so athletic. I know. Yeah. If you are married or in a committed relationship and holding onto that Tinder account for shits and giggles, you may want to reconsider that.

There is a company called Swipe Buster out there. It's a new service that basically utilizes Tinder's API. And if you pay five bucks, give the full name of somebody you want to find and give them a general location of where you think they might be. They will tell you if that person is on Tinder or not and show you their photos and bio and the last time that they logged in.

Or if you're that concerned about your relationship, get the fuck out. Yeah, seriously. Move on. Yep. And it's using the Tinder API, so you can ostensibly do this for free if you know how to write code. Mm-hmm. Smart on them for monetizing it. Yeah, yeah.

I wonder how long until Tinder revokes their API key. Not very long. Yes. I'm going to let you run with this next one. Go for it, Brian. We talked about this on UpToSpeed. ISPs are now charging broadband users a steep premium if they want to avoid usage caps. Why should I go on about this?

This is all I've been screaming about for three years on this show. Duh. Let's go to streaming. Everybody, let's stream. Let's stream. Forget downloads. Forget owning anything. Stream, stream, stream, stream, stream. Hey, we're going to start charging you up the ass for all that bandwidth you're using. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. There you go. Done. Okay. You hinted on UpToSpeed that you were going to rail about it even more, but it sounds like the same old, same old to me. It is the same old, same old. It's all just coming to pass exactly the way I said it was going to. That's all. Okay. Anti-Uber ride-sharing service Juno launches this month, and here's why it will fail.

This comes from the NextWeb. Okay. Juno plans to soft launch in New York City later this month and bills itself as the anti-Uber. It is to say it plans to hire only the cream of the crop drivers, who are mostly poached from Uber, it says, and pay them fairly for their service. Compensation packages even include bonuses and stock options.

Now, did they say they will be employees, or were they still just be independent contractors that are being tossed a few bones like bonuses? Probably, I'm guessing, still contractors. Then they're not the anti-Uber. I mean, I don't know enough about them because I tried to dig up some more on them, but couldn't really find much more because they're not launched yet.

Yeah. Let's keep an eye on that. I'm interested to see. If they actually did try to do this in a proper way, I'll be impressed, but I somehow doubt they won't. The interesting thing is this article basically breaks down why it's not going to work, and they have some interesting points.

They're like, okay, well, if they're only taking cream of the crop drivers, they're going to run out of drivers at some point. It's hard to scale, and Uber is just going to backfill with crappier drivers because most people don't care. It's just like, get me where I'm going. Yeah. As long as I don't get raped or killed. And name recognition. People just know to Uber now.

I don't know. Juno was a pretty good movie. That's got some name recognition. Is it going to be pregnant chicks that pick us up? I was going to say, do you get in not pregnant and get out pregnant? That just sounds like an Uber to me. Yeah.

Yeah. And I should have put this with the Adidas article. Yeah, I'm just realizing we didn't order these very well. No, no. We're terrible at this. People should definitely download this for free and not pay us anything. Emergency room doctors use a patient's Fitbit to determine how to save his life.

Okay. This is a really good article on Boing Boing. This has been covered on about 10 different news sites at this point. Yeah. But the Boing Boing article has a wrap up of most of them. But yeah, this guy had a seizure. And when he got to the actual hospital, they could track what his heart rate was.

They were basically able to unlock his phone and look at the Fitbit app on his phone and see when his heart rate started spiking and when they, you know, administered the medicine, what happened. And then they figured out how to save his life, which is pretty cool. Yeah.

Which is, but it's interesting because recently there have been lawsuits against Fitbit about how inaccurate the heart rate data is. So this guy just got lucky. He got lucky pretty much. Interesting. On Up to Speed, we touched on the FAA and its new decisions that it's totally cool for like under five pound drones to fly around over public locations, which I disagree with.

But immediately after that, I saw, I stumbled across Killer Drone, a bunch of, I believe, Norwegians. I can't quite recall at the moment. They're in Finland. You obviously still don't listen to Up to Speed when you're not on it because I covered this on that show too. Yes. These guys are Finnish farmers who, Jason, when you take a vacation, you take a vacation.

Oh, kiss my ass. So yeah, they, these Finnish farmers put a chainsaw on a drone. Yes. I love weaponized drones. I do too. Good times. We all love Tay a couple of weeks back, the Microsoft bot that- Tay Zonday?

Chocolate rain. No, no, you're talking about the bot. Never mind. Hold on. I'm having a moment where I'm remembering the song. That was good times. Yeah, I'm talking about the bot that was released on Twitter that immediately became sexist and racist because people are horrible.

So I, again, call it a success. I think it worked. There's an interesting article on Recode about Lily Chang, who is Microsoft researcher, that was kind of basically in charge of this and how she's running around talking about the possible future of bots and how great they could be.

I love the quote. Obviously, we were caught off guard about Tay. But it's a, yeah, that was a bad PR blow. But I like what she has to say about the possible future for this. It's a really interesting article. And if you hadn't noticed, the term bot, be it in any iteration, because there are many that are being used for it right now, is all over the place.

Get used to it. They're coming. Yeah. No, it is what it is. Like I said before, this is just an API interface. But it's the back end that is getting interesting because some of these quote unquote bots, like the pizza ordering bot, simple API, the bots that they're talking about, the chat bots that have, you know, deep learning and neural network intelligence, that kind of stuff.

That stuff is so interesting. Those are bots in my book. Yeah. Ordering a pizza, not a bot. So I've teased at this before. NVIDIA has released a new state-of-the-art chip that pushes the limits of machine learning. The Tesla P100 GPU, which CEO Jensun Huang revealed yesterday at NVIDIA's annual GPU technology conference, can perform deep learning neural network tasks 12 times faster than the company's previous top-end system.

The P100 was a huge commitment for NVIDIA, costing over $2 billion in research and development. And it sports a whopping 150 billion transistors on a single chip, making the P100 the world's largest chip, according to NVIDIA. Yeah, there's no chance that singularity is ever going to happen.

Well, we'll see. Because, hey, man, we can make the hardware. It's all about the software. Yeah, it's all about the software. Yeah, that's pretty intense. I mean, we're interesting times, my friend. Interesting times. Oh, that's the great Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times. And we are.

So let's get into the Panama. Now, we're going to do this just from the grumpy old geek's perspective. I'll lay off the political overtones. I'll just point you to a couple links for that. Let's start with the fact that the firm, Masak Fonseca, has basically said this is a hack. Then we immediately discovered that it's not so much a hack as they didn't fucking do anything for security.

They were wide open. We're talking about their client information portal was using a version of Drupal that had at least 25 known vulnerabilities, including a high-risk SQL injection vulnerability. So they were running their web mail system, which is Microsoft's Outlook Web Access, which was last updated in 2009.

Just a reminder, it's 2016. And their main site was running a version of WordPress that was more than three months out of date. And as you've heard us rail about on the show all the time, WordPress is the most stinky pile of crap ever. And if you don't keep it updated all the time, it is, it is a stinky pile of crap.

It's not as bad as Drupal and it's not as bad as Joomla, but it is, it's in the top three. It is in the top three, all of which they were pretty much running. A friend of the show, Andreas Krohn on Twitter pointed us to a leak that specifically points out that the vulnerable, the WordPress vulnerability was through the revolution slider that had not been updated in quite a long time.

Yeah, that's, that one is everybody that uses that thing got, got busted. There were, there were so many automated hacks to take out any site that was running revolution slider is ridiculous. Yeah. And if you run a WordPress site and you don't run it, but if you're interested, you can probably go back and look at your access, your HTTP logs and look at bots that are just pinging your site, trying to find those vulnerabilities.

It's kind of, it's kind of entertaining. You can just like do a, do a tail dash F on your access log or your air log at the same time. And you sit back and watch like pop a beer and watch it. And you will see all these automated attacks come through. It's kind of, kind of fun. I, I, yeah, it makes an interesting screensaver. Just let that run the background and, and you'll go, what the fuck am I doing using WordPress for my business?

And then you'll join the rest of us, except for the fact that you won't change because it's cheap and free and you don't care. No, it's no. Yeah. It's good because it's always free. And, and this, uh, this, you know, this company didn't give a crap either until now, because now they're screwed. And, uh, now a lot of people are screwed. So, uh, we'll not get too into it.

I'm just want to put some links in the show notes, uh, from Salon, the lessons of the Panama papers. Yes. The rich are different from us. They stole our money, uh, from time. These five facts explain the massive political fallout from the Panama papers. We're just getting started people. Um, and finally, uh, just for a note of levity, I found this link at the daily match.co.uk.

I love this. Britain's learn. Everything is a massive con and then they go back to work. Everyone has returned to work after learning that the system is a giant conspiracy designed to ruin their lives. After discovering that the people telling them to knuckle down and accept cuts are squirreling their money away overseas to avoid tax, then often using that money to buy many houses and thus make them incredibly expensive.

Britain said they had better get back to the office. Yep. That's about it. That sums it up. Yep. Because the annoying thing that's going to keep coming out is that 99% of what they did was legal. Yep. We'll be right back. Enjoy a word from our sponsors.

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Security? A lovely new strain of ransomware is running around. Well, there's a new strain of ransomware every week, it seems. But there's a new campaign that's going on where these people will send you an email that has very specific personal information about you.

It's kind of a phishing email to get you to click on a link to install the ransomware. But it's kind of a, it's a bill. They send you a bill with your address in it saying, we sent the invoice to your address. Click this link for a printable version and to find out payment information.

As soon as you do that, boom, ransomware, you're done. You're done. So keep an eye out for that, people. And don't click on those links. Yeah. If you get an email that says, hello, Brian, misspelled, don't ever open it. And it's pretty much that simple.

I mean, replace it with your name, obviously. If you're getting one from me, delete it, please. Yeah. If you're getting an email from Brian, then you're probably the problem. Yeah. You might be the problem then. The Oculus Rift has shift, shift. I said it's shift last time too. Yeah, you did. I was meant to say shift. I don't know why I do that with Oculus.

But there are some serious privacy concerns. Somebody has actually gone through the Oculus Terms of Service, which we link to directly in our show notes. And there are some interesting things in there, like Oculus will collect information about your physical movements and dimensions when you use a virtual reality headset.

And then it will send that all on to Facebook. Yep. They will do that. Yeah. There is software that apparently is running in the background when you install your Oculus Rift that is configured to run all the time in the background, constantly reporting to Facebook.

Well, how's that different from the doohickey that Microsoft sells with their Xbox? It's always on and always listening to you and sending data back to Microsoft. I didn't say that that was a good thing either. Okay. I'm just making people aware of the fact that if you're using, if you're feeling all smug and superior wearing that stupid thing sitting around in your place, you are running a system that is always monitoring, tracking your physical movements and sending that info off to Facebook so Facebook can sell more shit to you.

See, I don't understand how that even matters. It's like, okay, I turned my head left, I turned my head right, I looked up, I looked down, you know? I mean, if they can correlate it with worlds that you're looking at, then they might have Which they will be able to. So, I mean, but still, it's like, okay, I'm out on the beach. I'm looking around the beach. Great.

I looked at a seagull. Oh, crap. Here comes some seagull ads. You know? I mean, of course, in the future, they will be able to figure out a better way to do something with it. But, you know, in these early days, I don't even know what they're doing. I think, I'm sure this is future-proofing their TOS for the days that, where they really can do something with your data.

I agree. Okay. Okay. Clear chat. Yes. Heard of these guys? Not until you put it in the show notes. They're brand new, and they're going up against, it's kind of like Slack meets Dropbox, but in an end-to-end encrypted environment. All right.

It looks pretty cool. I'm going to sign up for it and give it a shot. And they're... Of course you are, because I just got used to using Slack. Well, I didn't say I was going to invite you, asshole. So, because the big thing with Slack is they've already been hacked, and most companies are putting more and more company-specific and private data onto Slack.

And these guys are like, eh, you might not want to do that, because a lot of places have, you know, regulatory concerns where they have to be encrypted. Yeah. And so, like, banks. Banks can't use, like, Slack, I'm pretty sure. At least I seriously hope they can't.

I would hope that they aren't. Yeah. Look, Slack is great. It's free. It's awesome for small organizations that don't have, like, really important data involved in them. But, yeah, if a bank is using this, I'm never going to that bank again. Yeah, Slack's free for some use cases.

But, you know, in a company-wide environment, you know, company I work for, we pay for Slack. We spend a lot of money on Slack, actually. It's not cheap when you have to get into the per-user-per-year pricing. It's like 30 or 40 bucks a user. ClearChat right now is in beta, and they said, well, we're in beta, it's free. And I looked at their pricing, and their pricing is actually very competitive with Slack and is better than Slack.

Right. So, I'm going to definitely give it a shot. And hopefully their UI is just as good as Slack, because Slack does a good job with all of their apps and their web interface. Yeah, I agree. I've quite enjoyed it recently. All seven messages we've sent back and forth.

Seven messages we've sent back and forth. But it's cool. Security researchers have basically killed the CAPTCHA. Finally! Yeah. So, that is dead and gone. They were able to, let's see, they had a 70.78% success in cracking CAPTCHAs in less than 19 seconds.

The one by Facebook, they're able to get at 83.5% certainty. So, CAPTCHAs are now officially useless. I mean, how are they doing this? Are they actually doing machine reading on it? Because in the past, you'd have armies of people on Mechanical Turk cracking them.

Yeah, well, as they say, another middle class job is gone as CAPTCHA crackers are beaten. So, yeah, this is all, they don't get into the specifics, at least not in the article that I read about how specifically they're doing it, but it's basically a CAPTCHA killing bot. Good. Yeah. Good.

Not that anybody's going to switch to anything else. Yeah. Anyways, hack of the week, at least if you're a Los Angeles Densian, the LA Times has been compromised and people are basically selling off the shell access to the site. Nice. Again, guess what they're using?

WordPress. Yeah, they're using WordPress. So, yeah, WordPress security was brought to our attention earlier today, they say. Unfortunately, it's too late. Events.LATimes.com is the way they got through. And, yeah, so if you'd like shell access to the LA Times site, it's out there.

No, I don't, because who really cares? Yeah. Yeah. Just another WordPress hack. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And the Pentagon has basically stated that it is unclear on who is supposed to be responsible for defending the U.S. against a cyber attack. If the U.S.

military normally has one thing down pat, it's knowing who's in charge. However, when it comes to handling a massive cyber attack on the country, the Pentagon isn't quite sure who should be issuing the orders. Well, of course not. Which is, yes, fucking fantastic. Well, look at the competing agencies. You've got Homeland Security that's trying to make us safer.

You've got the FBI and the CIA who are trying to actively exploit all of our technology. Then you've, I mean, you've got CERT, who's watching everything. And the NSA is too busy tweeting us back to be doing their job. Yeah. I sincerely hope you realize that wasn't the real NSA.

Yes, I'm aware of it. They are using a photo of Agent Smith. Yeah. You know, sometimes maybe somebody over there had a sense of humor, but that is definitely not the real NSA. But it was still funny as hell. Oh, yeah. It was great. So while the Pentagon is trying to figure out at least how they're broken, the bug bounty program that we've talked about a couple weeks ago is finally open for business.

And the DOD is a little caveat to joining the program. Yeah. You have to submit to a background criminal check. Well, I think that's fair. And why? To ensure tax dollars are spent wisely is what they're saying. Bullshit.

That would be a first. Yeah. Because I'm thinking they could skip the criminal background check at the beginning and then let anybody join and use that as, remember those, like it's probably one of those John Walsh things where they would send, you know, people that had warrants out for their arrest.

You want a boat, come pick up your boat and then they would get arrested. You know, they could get black hat hackers to join the hack the Pentagon thing and then just go round them all up. It could be, you know, one of the world's greatest honeypots. But I think they screwed the pooch by saying, now we're going to do a background check first. Yeah, they probably did.

I mean, that's a Corolla. That's an old Corolla joke. If you want to get all the deadbeat dads and make them pay, you should just announce that there's free Raiders giveaway on a Monday at noon and everybody that shows up just throw in jail. Yeah, that's about it. I saw one, I saw one of those specials where they got 175 guys in one go, which was, but it was, it was kind of sad because a lot of them brought their kids to pick up their prizes.

So the kids like were left all by themselves and they had to call child services or the other parents. It was, that was an unintended consequence. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, stupid people breed. Yeah. Tell me about it. The army wants you to make it soldiers pocket sized drones. The army wants something a bit smaller than those big ass drones, like, you know, the phantoms that you got to carry around.

They want something that'll fit in the pocket of your cargo pants under a pound. Got to fly for 20 minutes and charge in under two hours. All right. So I think they should just go to Fry's personally, but yeah, you know, this is not hard to find.

So I guess we'll spend a gazillion dollars on it instead. Well, no, they're just, they're, they're tasking the public on this. They want, they want the public sector to come back and say, Hey, you guys got something that we can use. And the only thing that they really want is it's got to be quiet. It's got to send back real time video so they can like look around corners and see where the bad guys are, but it's got to be quiet.

I have not heard a quiet drone to date. No, that, that is the, that is the big engineering challenge. Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll do an audio test because my drone came this week, but the weather in LA has been kind of crappy. So I haven't been able to do it. And you know, my dog's been sick, so I haven't left the house.

I'm going crazy, but I do have a drone and here's the crappy thing though. Boing Boing sent me, uh, they sent me the bling drone, not the black drone that I wanted. Mine is white and gold is a white drone with gold propellers on it and a gold windshield on it. I love that.

Thank you. Boing Boing. Cause now I get to make fun of Jason endlessly. Here's the funny part though. I actually kind of like it better than the black one. It looks kind of cool. Of course you do. I got Snoop's drone. You should get that gold iPhone too. I just might. Okay. Uh, if you are in the Philippines, 55 million Philippine voters are at risk after their personal data was leaked.

Every registered voter in the Philippines is now susceptible to fraud and other risks after the Philippines commission on elections, snappily titled Combelec, uh, the website was breached on March 27th by a hacker group and its entire database posted online. Good times.

Nice job, Philippines. Nice job. Uh, well, we have, uh, extradited a Romanian hacker. Marcel Lazar has been extradited to the U S. Uh, he's accused of hacking social media email accounts, uh, of many of the country's officials and family members.

Lazar hacked into the email and social media accounts of high profile victims, including family members belonging to former U S presidents, an ex cabinet member, a previous member of the U S joint chiefs of staff and a past presidential advisor. So we got them people. Nice. Okay. Well, we got one.

And that's the thing I'm just telling these guys, you're going to get caught. I mean, that's the, that's the, the evilness of trying to be black hat on the internet. It's hard unless you're in a, in a country, which you'd think Romania would be one of the countries where it'd be really hard to get them out of.

And it may be, he went on vacation, but yeah, it's really, it's really easy to get caught. Yeah. I mean, you know, you can hack away all you want. Um, you're probably still going to get caught even if you don't try to do anything with the data or monetize it in some way, shape or form. Uh, but if you do that, you're definitely going to get caught.

Yeah. I think the only safe place to be right now is Russia. Seriously. I, it's funny. I was reading a story that's not actually in the show notes cause I lost the link, but there are ransomware botnets now that will actively, uh, filter out anybody that's in the Soviet or in, in, you know, Russia or Russia favored countries.

So you, they won't do ransomware in those countries, only all the other countries. Uh, that right there is, is a little telling on where, where the source of the problem is coming from. Yeah. Uh, and in scary news, uh, we've talked about the, uh, the flights that the feds have been making over all the cities recently.

And nobody really kind of knows why, uh, the, uh, this is a very scary one. Buzzfeed, Buzzfeed news is, has done a new investigation called spies in the skies. And it's actually really good.

And, uh, they've made more than 3,500 surveillance flights in just four months. Yep. And they've got maps of everything and where they're going. And, uh, when the Sacramento bombers went off, it was Sacramento, right? Yeah. Uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, they had, uh, Homeland security and the FBI had a plane up there in no time flat circling the actual site, circling the homes of the, the bombers.

It's nuts. It's nuts how these guys are just always up there now. Yeah. Doing what nobody knows. We just don't know. Nobody knows. We have no idea. Awesome. But in, in, in more funny news for the week, I'm going to wrap up. I'm going to wrap up with something funny.

Okay. On Tuesday morning, listeners of KIFT in Breckenridge, Colorado were treated to a radically different programming menu than they were used to a hack by an unknown party caused one of the station signals to broadcast a sexually explicit podcast related to the erotic attraction to furry characters.

Oh boy. Yes. And that wasn't the only station. There was another one in Livingston, Texas, uh, a couple different ones, but somebody got the fur cast podcast and hacked into, uh, basically hacked into the system to that they use for, uh, sending out digital content over the airwaves and we're playing a furries based podcast.

This is the best part. Uh, all in all the fur cast aired for an hour, possibly to Jason McClelland owner and general manager of the KXAX radio group wrote an email. During that time, they talked about sex with two guys and a girl in explicit detail and rambled on with a vulgar language, not really having much of a point to the podcast.

Kind of like us. Oh, yes, that's true. But, um, he finally wraps it up by saying, I'm assuming there was no real reason for this hack. I think lulls, I think somebody, somebody did that for the lulls because that's pretty good. If you gotta, if you gotta put a podcast up there, if it's not ours, the fur cast is pretty good.

Yeah. Put ours up first, um, and then move on to fur cast. Yeah. We can at least use the press. These guys are probably blowing up right now. A big thanks to contributor FC MGMT LLC for contributing to us on PayPal, uh, with the short message, keep up the good work.

I can only assume that you're a Panama based corporation. And thank you to our new Patreon subscribers, Rachel M and Bridget Carey Davis. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And Grim Harrison asked on Patreon, has anyone taken the time to compile a list of book reviews from the app library section of the GOG podcast?

And I'll ask, has anyone? Because we haven't. Yes. No. Yeah. Maybe if somebody wanted to do that and send it to us, we'd post it. But, uh, you know, it takes time, man. And we're putting a lot of time in already. Yeah. Between the new show and this, it's just like trying to go back to 155 shows and granted on the last like 75, we split everything up.

So you can't just go to at the library, but those first 75 to maybe a hundred shows, uh, it's just mixed. They're mixed in. Yeah. And we did talk about books, but so it's a, there's a lot. Also part of the problem with that is, uh, uh, you know, a book reviews. Well, we didn't actually ever give them like, we don't have a rating system.

So you'd actually have to type out what we said about the book. So yeah, it's just books we've mentioned because, you know, half are crap, half are good. So, yeah, I mean, maybe moving on in the future, we should actually do some sort of rating system. So, so, you know, just like, you know, five, five grumps or something like that.

Five grumps. I don't know. Just spitball in here. Uh, but no, nobody's done that. It would be cool. But, uh, yeah, it's just, it's a time thing. If this were our full-time job, we'd be doing it. And you can just search for the name of a book. If there's a certain book you're looking for, the search on our WordPress site until it gets hacked works just fine.

Exactly. Thank God we're not using the revolution slider. Yes. Um, so you made a, uh, lovely post to the, about our Patreon page, about the NSA yesterday and the NSA replied. Yes. For the win. Uh, yeah, I've been, I've been tagging, uh, at NSA for, for funny Patreon posts.

I'm well aware of the fact that it's not the real account, but they actually got back to us. Very funny. Yeah. So thanks. Uh, Moss 6502, uh, retweeted, uh, Federico Vittitti. I'm done with Italian names. You should take all those. Federico Vittitti. Sorry guys at Grime Life.

Um, he would like us to take on this controversy. With today's updates, TextExpander is becoming a paid service. Here's what you need to know. Uh, do you use TextExpander, Jason? I use it every day. And it's, it's not, it's not the fact that it's a paid, well, it is a paid service. The, the point here is service because before it was paid software.

Now it's a subscription service. Okay. So you have to pay like 49 bucks a year to use TextExpander. And they have to, then you have all of your snippets right now can be hosted on iCloud or Dropbox, which is great. Syncs with all of my devices. Now you have to have a TextExpander.com account, which is where all your snippets will be stored because they wanted to go with businesses and teams who can share snippets.

Right. Which I think is probably about 0.001% of the actual TextExpander use case out there. So I think they're solving a problem that they don't have to be able to, um, charge more money on a yearly basis. You know, instead of just doing an upgrade a year that you have to sign up for, they went this idiotic route.

And they went, they went the Adobe route, which I can't stand. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I'm, you know, I look, I'm all for people making money. I have no problem. I think, you know, we'd be hypocrites if we said otherwise. I mean, I want TextExpander, if it's a useful product to make money and to have people pay for it.

I hate subscription services. Yeah, me too. Uh, so I'm going to keep TextExpander 5 until it stops working or they fix their, you know, their idiot ways. Yeah. There you go. Uh, and at gadlaw6 said, uh, interesting. Downcast hasn't updated your podcast since December.

Thought you dudes gave up because apparently he finally saw one of our tweets. Thanks. Thanks algorithm. Yeah. So I just tested it on downcast. It worked fine for me, but maybe, uh, gadlaw6 used the actual direct RSS feed and use, instead of using the downcast, uh, directory to subscribe, which is possible.

Um, I should probably tweet him that because we'll retweet him. Yeah, definitely unsub and re unsub and resub and it will work just fine. I just tested it. I've tested it on pretty much every podcast player I can get my hands on. I actually bought, uh, what was it?

Uh, oh man, there was a bit like a PCAST. That was another one. The one that everybody, the most people use on iOS and it just says cast. Casts on, uh, on the icon. I can't even remember what it was, but it's the big one and I, it's terrible. I don't know why people use that one.

I stick with downcast or overcast, but cool. And though, and it works on those and it obviously works in the iTunes feed store. Yes. Which is what I use because I'm lazy. Uh, and from grumpy old geeks.com, we have a couple of comments. Uh, the first from Seth Nicholas Stevens in a recent conversation about Snapchat.

Did I hear y'all refer to 11 year olds as millennials? You know, people up to the age of 21 right now aren't considered a part of the millennials. Yes. You're that old. Uh, get back to us when your generation has a name then kid. Yeah, seriously. Uh, if you want to, it would be the, I don't even know what to call you.

Yeah. We, you don't have a name. So, uh, what, what are we supposed to do here? Call the algorithm, have the algorithm, give them a name. Yes. You're the algorithms. That's your, that's your generation. Perfect. I love it. Or maybe we should just call them the APIs. Okay. Marco Masenzio writes in, you guys got to F and see this.

The juicero. It's all that's wrong with the internet startups, the world, humanity. Love the podcast fellows. P.S. It's not that the middle class is dying. It's that as usual, people who refuse to keep up with the times of going unemployed only because blacksmiths were going unemployed. It wasn't a good reason.

I hope to continue going around in horse carriages, get on with the program, drop that crap, JavaScript, PHP, or whatever junk it was you were doing and learn. Some modern coding technology, buddy. There's plenty of work for you too, Jason. All right. You want to go first or should I? No, I did.

I learned a new skill. I'm podcasting. That's what I'm doing. Yeah. So we are moving with the times. I don't agree with you that I think this is a vastly different situation than back when the blacksmiths were going unemployed. Oh, that's what the piano player said when the, you know, the player pianos came out.

Okay. Yeah. Whatever. I'm just, you know, channeling Cory Doctorow there. I do think it's funny that you're, you're concentrating all your ire on Juicero as being everything wrong with the internet and humanity. I actually think Juicero is more juice than most Kickstarters or startups that we've seen. At least it actually does what it says.

Well, no, it actually doesn't juice anything. It probably ships. It's well, I recommend going and checking out the, uh, the daily or the morning dump podcast where he talks about the Juicero because it's pretty damn funny. This thing costs like seven or 800 bucks. And all it does is you have to buy bags of juice from them and it squirts out bags of juice.

That's it. It doesn't juice anything. It's a bag squirting machine. He's like, why don't you just buy the bag? Stick a, stick a, uh, stick a knife in it and drink it. Or no, just make it like a giant Capri sun. Just stick a straw right through it and then just suck out the juice and save yourself seven or 800 bucks.

I had a Capri sun in years. You know what? I stopped because they kept squirting me in the eye. I could, I'd never got the hang of the Capri sun. I was, I was scarred as a kid. You get enough lemonade in your eye when you're a kid with a Capri sun, you never want to touch those damn things again. This is the second time we've talked about you being scarred as a child on this podcast.

Do you, are you, do you want to lay down and talk about your dad? Uh, well, no, I wouldn't. My dad was fine, but he just wasn't around. So we can start there.

Okay. I'm just, they had threw me off of everything. That's awesome. Okay. Good times. You can find us on Twitter at GOG podcast on Instagram at grumpy old geeks or on Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG. We have a website at grumpy old geeks.com, which is running on WordPress where you can listen to shows, leave feedback, or better yet ask us questions that we can read on the air.

If you have friends, please tell them about the show. And please, if you like the show, drop us an iTunes review. They really do help us out and only take a minute or two. Just go to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes and it'll take you right there. At the library.

Based on your continued recommendation, I finally read the atrocity archives laundry files, book one by Charles Strauss. And not a fan, you know, I like the concept enough to keep going, but the book felt a little all over the place to me.

I felt like there was a main plot that they kept dropping away from and then doing different things. It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad. I liked it. I think I'd much prefer if we're going with this whole, like there's this whole like magic and demons out in the world and we're channeling them in.

I think I prefer the series that I was reading, which I'm totally blanking on the name on now. Did you finally finish that with the milkweed series? Yes. The milkweed series. No, I have not. I like this one because it's like, you know, they're using computers and math to summon demons and keep them away. I mean, that's definitely a cool and interesting twist. I enjoyed it.

I just found myself, I found it to be more of a struggle than most books that I read. Like, yeah, I will second you on that one. The first book is the hardest to get through. Okay. They do get a lot better, but the first book, yeah, it's hard. Yeah, I totally get that.

I understand that. I mean, that's Stephen King's, the whole gunslinger series. The first book is rough, but after you get through that, it's a fantastic world that he's built. I think there's, he did really interesting world building with this. So if the next one is a bit easier and more fun, I'm totally in. Yeah. And they just keep getting better.

And like I said, the latest one isn't about the main character from the other books. It's about another character, but I thought I'd still, and I think that's his best book yet in the series. So I really love, I love the series. I like how it's written. I like the concept behind it.

It's fun. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, it's definitely worth keeping on with because it's, he does build a good world in it. But yeah, that first book, you can definitely tell he kind of had some trouble getting through that one. But if all in all, I really liked the laundry files. Yeah. I mean, I liked it enough to download the second and I'll start reading that this week.

So it's good to hear that it actually picks up a bit. Software, apps, and gadgets. You use your Moleskine all the time, don't you? I do. And I saw actually an article this week that once again reminded people that the best way to remember something is to write it down physically.

I love my physical Moleskine. Okay. Well, now you can get one with a digitizing pen. Well, now you write it down and then you can have it in your computer. It's like, you know, we like, you know, Moleskine has gone back 10 years to the same thing that was out 10 years ago with the digitizing pens that nobody ever used.

Everybody hated. And they're just finally getting caught up with the times, I guess. Yeah, I guess. I mean, you're right. Nobody ever uses them. It's insane. In fact, I actually randomly did see one person using it like two weeks ago. And I was like, look at that. You never see that. How stupid. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's 200 bucks for the kit. I don't know if it's going to fly, but I guess my gut says it's going to flop. I'm guessing no. Yeah. I'm with you on that one. And I would like to, I forgot to put this in the notes, so I'm just going to throw this in here. I got the iPad Pro, the 9.7 incher with the pencil.

Wow. Yeah. I saw your machine. Oh my God. You're all over the moon about this right now. It is so fast. This pencil, I've been writing, I've been like writing notes down in the morning, like, you know, because I was trying to do morning pages where you just write a couple pages on paper, handwritten in longhand, and just to get it out of your head.

But I've been doing it with a new note-taking app with the pencil on the iPad. Right. And it's just like writing on paper. I mean, it's, I mean, granted, you don't have the tactile response from the paper, but this thing is almost zero lag. And I'm using the GoodNotes app, which is, which is made for the pen, or it's like, you know, the best pencil-based note-taking app so far.

Right. I love this thing so much. It is so, such a beautiful machine. It is so fast. And this pencil, I was, I was blown away. I tested it at the store to make sure I really wanted it because I was just going to return it. If I ordered it and if I didn't like it, I was just going to return it.

And then I tried it at the store and it is so responsive and so fast and it feels really good in your hand. All in all. Yeah. All in all, this is one of the best buys I've had in a long time. And I've got the new keyboard case. It was backordered. So it's coming soon. Tested that out at the store too.

I was typing full speed in, in like seconds. Awesome. Yeah. I'm not upgrading anytime soon, but good to hear. Yeah. When you do, I mean, by that time you'll have the iPad pro two in about, in about three weeks, you know, as they keep up. So I got the 32 gig wifi and I'm in love with it.

It is, it is hands down the best iPad I've ever owned. Excellent. And in VR news, I don't know how you pronounce this one. I'm going to pull a Brian. I think it's called the aura. I'd go. I don't think it's raw. Raw. I was going to say, the Marines made this one.

I'd go aura. I think it's the aura. Yeah. And I could just go back and watch the video that I watched this morning and they will tell me how it's pronounced, but that would take too much work. This is a live 360 degree video camera that is made for VR. Okay. It's not cheap.

No, it is not cheap by any stretch. It's 3,600 bucks retail. You can get it now for 1,800 bucks and you can, you know, you can basically stream from this thing to the internet or wherever it's going, whatever headset you're going to. Yes.

You can put it up live on Facebook and annoy people with their videos. Not, not Facebook yet. Facebook doesn't, doesn't support it yet, but they, I'm sure they will at some point. Yeah. This thing is pretty cool. Like looking at the, I watched the video. It's pretty neat. I gotta, I gotta admit, but I mean, for the price point, it better be.

Yes. You know, it better be. And just, I liked the, the way that they were using it to do like, you know, live news reports. So you can actually be at the scene and then look around the scene and see what's going on around you. And at some point you'll probably see the news guy talking to the news camera.

And then you'll see some guy run by and grab the tripod with the camera and make a break for it. But since there's no camera, man, there's nobody to protect the camera. But it's neat. I think it's a neat camera. And I think these things will be getting better and better. Cause right now you can get the Rico theta for about 350 bucks, which is kind of cool.

I mean, it's a handheld one and I've seen video from that and it looks pretty good, but you, you know, you have to use their, their software and stuff. The GoPro jump. I haven't even seen that. That's a $15,000 rig though. Wow. That's a big one. It's got 16 GoPro cameras on it, man. And there's a couple other light, light rose got one and a Nokia has got one too, but those are the big boys.

This is, this is like, you know, this is like the pro-am version. If you want to, if you're like a decent photographer who wants to do like nice quality VR, but you're not doing it for a TV station, this looks like a good stepping stone for you. Cool.

Media candy. Netflix is going to be raising their prices. Bandwidth prices are going up. Streaming prices are going up. Interesting. Yes. Well, Netflix is also has to, you know, grease the palms of the ISPs to get their bits faster.

So you got to pay to play. So that, that extra two bucks a month. And this is only for the, the base streaming package. If you have the high-end streaming package, which is $11.99 a month for now, it's not going up. That's the one I'm using because it has four devices, which is great. So the premium plan is going to stay the same, but the, the base package is going up by two bucks in the next couple of months.

All right. Interesting. And in great news, Sherlock season four. They're filming. It'll be back soon. Okay. You're not a Sherlock fan. Nope. Haven't watched it. Loser. I'll get around to it. Yeah, sure. Sure. You probably, I probably won't.

The rogue one, a star Wars story trailer dropped this week. We talked about it on up to speed. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. And in the, is this really 2016 news? People are pissed off because there's a female lead because people are assholes. Tough shit.

Yeah. Tough shit. Let him be pissed off. I don't care. Yep. I don't either. She looks amazing. It looks amazing. I can't wait for this movie. It should be fantastic. We'll see. I got some music. There's a band called school of seven bells that have an album out called S V I I B. It's Vib.

And the single is called a blaze. We'll have the YouTube link for that and the direct link to buy the whole album in our show notes. It is a great band. This is like a bunch of millennials that grew up listening to shoegazing and curve and all the stuff that I like. It's a little more pop than I usually prefer, but I love it.

I'm totally into this album right now. I'm listening to it nonstop. I am also listening to Underworld's album, Barbara. Barbara, we face the shining future because I am seeing them next week and I am also seeing Lush next week. So we have links to all of these stuff, all of these stuffs. We have links to all the current singles from these guys in our show notes and all the current releases.

OK, quick question on the Underworld album. Yes. You talked about it before, but I can't remember your review. Is it thumbs up, thumbs down, medium? Total thumbs up. Love it. OK, cool. I will definitely pick it up. Five grumps. Are you kidding me?

Love it. For some reason, I just seem to have been sent or came across a lot of headphone stuff this week. And OK, first off, I don't even know what these are called. I've tried to actually look into this more and I can't find out anything about it.

There's just a video for them on futurism.com with the headline, these headphones will help you become a better athlete by transmitting electrical pulses. No, they fucking won't. Let's electrocute your brain, make you run faster. This is a complete load of shit. How about Lumosity?

Remember how they promised to make your brain better and faster through a bunch of games and then they got sued for it because they fucking doesn't. Did you check the date on this to make sure it wasn't April 1st? There's no date. There's no nothing. And no, it wasn't April 1st because I actually didn't see it posted until like yesterday.

OK. So I don't know if anybody. Halo headphones, I guess they will cost $750 when they ship. I cannot find any more information about this anywhere on the web. It's just a load of crap. So there you go. And then the second set of headphones I came across, this is a Indiegogo campaign.

These are being billed as the first smart headphones with laser lights. They're called Glow. As of right now, I tried to play the YouTube video on their Indiegogo page and it's listed as private so I can't see it. Way to go. Yeah. Good job, guys.

And it's the first and only laser headphone because, you know, headphones aren't obnoxious enough. They're it's just dumb. Yeah. So the reason they're called laser headphones is because they have like glow sticks and the wires. It's a glow stick headphone. Yes. Yes. It's a glow stick headphone, which is great when you're it says run the night.

OK, here I am. Mug me. Exactly. Idiots. Just stick with the Sennheisers that we reviewed a thousand times that we both love to death. Link in the show notes. And this one will just, you know, kind of make you cry. Some pups pull in twenty thousand dollars per Instagram post while you work like a dog.

This is the big business of dogs pimping stuff on Instagram. There's there's actually a place called the Dog Agency. What the fuck are we doing with this podcast? I don't know, but I've got a dog and damn it, I need to get her on this.

Well, take a picture of your dog, send it to me, and I will make that the cover image on Instagram for our post. Have you seen my Instagram lately? Yeah, it's all just a dog. How's it making any money off that? No, but I don't need to send you a picture of my dog. There's a thousand of them on Instagram.

So pick your poison. OK, make me work fine. Yeah, work like a dog, bitch. And not pulling 20k. I am happy that baseball is back. I was enjoying my L.A. Dodgers a couple of days ago.

So fantastic. You know, 274 games to go. Yeah, something ridiculous like that. But I'm right. It's almost as many books as there are in Dune that we get to suffer through. So great. We get to hear about baseball all year until your kid's born and then it'll be just kids.

I was thinking of rereading Dune. Yeah, I'm sure you were. Thanks again to Seth and Chris from Grime Life for having us on. And that was a blast. Links in the show notes to check that out. And remember, Chien is lovely. Thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo and you can check me out at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Schilmeister and you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus.

Grumpy Old Geeks is a partially fan-supported show. Check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash gog. We really appreciate your support. If you don't want to or can't donate but still want to support the show, please go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars or tell a friend about the show.

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