278: A Sinking Ship Brings Down All Boats

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We're going to Canada tomorrow. We are. Bright and early. Very, very early. Yeah. So, you know, good luck getting this show done and out before that. Well, fortunately, it doesn't have to come out till we're in Canada. Excellent. Yes, this will actually be published from the Great White North.

Yes, that's fantastic. So I finally discovered a real benefit to having an Apple Watch. And what's that? Until now, it's just been something kind of neat. But I can't really say anything. I can't say I need it. I wouldn't care if I didn't have it.

But yesterday, as I was going to the grocery store by myself with my son. By yourself with your son? That's not by yourself. Meaning no wife. No nice help. Dealing with the kid by myself, grocery shopping, trying to get back to the car, loading him back into the car, loading the groceries into the car.

Check the pockets. Check, check, check. No phone. Ruh-roh. Ruh-roh. I know I had the phone because I used Apple Pay to pay for my groceries. So I'm starting to sweat a little bit. I'm like, oh my God, I probably left it on the counter. I probably must have put it down after I paid and moved the groceries in while I was dealing with the kid.

And it was all that stuff going on. A real kerfuffle, as Jason would say. And what I realized quickly is that, yes, with my phone is out of range, or when my watch is out of range of my phone, it gets that little red thing telling me I'm not in range anymore. So I take a few steps away from the car, bump, out of range, back to the car.

I know it's in the car somewhere. I don't have to get the kid out. I don't have to run back into the grocery store. So thank God for that. All right. You know there is a little feature on your watch where it will make your phone go ding, ding, ding. I did not know that. That would be useful, too. I will now look into that. When you swipe up, there's a little thing that will make your phone go ding, ding, ding.

Just like that. Oh, even if your phone is in quiet mode? Mine was just in quiet mode. I had the sound off, and the mute was engaged. So this supersedes it. So if you need to find your phone, just swipe up. Find the little one that looks like an iPhone with big ears, like Dumbo ears coming off of it.

I'm guessing there's supposed to be sound waves. Oh, there it is. I see it. Hit that, and your phone will tell you where it's at if it's in range. Well, look at that. Learn something new every day. You do, don't you? I also learned today that I am not good enough for Instagram verification.

Well, you're not a 22-year-old person who's an influencer. I am a famous podcaster, Brian. I take umbrage with that remark. Yeah, okay. Well, sorry about that. I didn't even look into getting our official account verified yet, so I guess that's something we can do in the great white north.

Your account wasn't verified because it doesn't meet the criteria for verification. You can submit another request in 30 days. So I have 30 days to get more influency, I guess. Now, do they provide us the criteria for verification, or is that some nebulous Twitter-esque thing?

I'm pretty sure that they give you some kind of guidelines, but from what I remember, I met the guidelines. Well, luckily, they have an easy-to-contact customer service department, so this should be taken care of. Lickety-split. Lickety-split. Yep. No time.

No time like the present. So, your Apple Watch, now that you're kind of figuring some things out that are good for it, there's a new leak for the Apple Watch 4, and everybody was like, ooh, it's going to be so much better. Still looks like an Apple Watch to me, so I think it's got a bigger screen on it, which I kind of like.

I would like a bigger screen. What I don't like is more money to pay for a watch for just a few more pixels. They've also made that little red thing a little bit less annoyingly bright on the crown, but I don't know. I like the one that I've got.

I don't know if I need to upgrade. Yeah, I don't either. A little bit bigger would be nicer as we get older and our eyes start to fail. Some of the things are kind of useless unless I zoom in on them, but it's not going to be big enough to make too much of a difference, I'd imagine. So, I think Lasik would probably solve my problem better than getting a slightly larger watch.

I don't, yeah, I definitely do not feel the need to upgrade. I barely feel the need to upgrade phones at this point, much less the watch. Yeah, there's some graphics on how much more screen that you can maybe get, but we'll see. It's what it may look like, because, you know, of course, it's something that's not out yet, so we generally don't talk about that.

But since you were talking about your watch, I thought I would bring it up. And also, what I'm going to bring up is something that you brought up last week. Petro. Yes. Yes, the cryptocurrency. Reuters has been digging into it and posted a pretty long report on it.

And yeah, there's nothing there. Nothing. Well, when we say there's nothing, sales of the said nothing have already raised $3.3 billion for the government. So they say. That's a little something, so they say, yes. So they say, yes. And the Superintendents of Crypto Assets, which is the government agency that is overseeing the Petro, has no office, no one's home.

And yeah, it's just kind of nebulous right now. But I like the name, the Superintendents of Crypto Assets. It's a good name. Now, we talk about sleep an awful lot on the show because there's lots of who's-its and gadgets that Jason has explored to help him get his sleep.

I've even got some Dubaflatchies. Yeah, some of those as well. So a new study came out. And now this is where I start to get upset because I feel like since the Internet age, and I'm sure it's not just the Internet age. Well, actually, I think an argument could be made that this is just the Internet.

Since the Internet has come around, we've heard that eggs are good for us, then eggs are bad for us, then milk is good for us, then milk is bad for us, then smoking is good for us. Wait, no, probably never had that one. Step that one back. A little bit of alcohol is good for us. Alcohol, very bad for us. And we've always heard that you cannot catch up on sleep.

It is not possible. Aha! No, apparently now it is. There's good news for people who do all their sleeping in on the weekends. Subject who underslept five days and slept more during the last two days of the week had no greater risk of death than the people who got healthy amounts of sleep every night of the week.

So apparently you can catch up on sleep now. Now, if you read the rest of the article, though, it says, eh, maybe we're going to do more studies and maybe we could be wrong or maybe we could be right. I don't know anymore. That's the whole thing. Great song by Public Image Limited, though.

I could be wrong. I could be right. In the news. We've talked an awful lot about the gig economy on this show, and it's everywhere in the news.

And now a new book is coming out called Temp, How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. And it's kind of tracing things back to the 70s when this all started. And there's a new podcast on Recode with the guy who has written the book.

And Louis Hyman, the historian who wrote the book, was on Recode this week. Or actually, I think it was last week because we had this in the show last week. And we're like, did you get a chance to read it? Nope. Did you? Nope. I was busy doing my temp work. Pretty much. But this guy is tracing back basically everything to the 70s when Silicon Valley really screwed us all over.

And how did they do that, Jason? So back in the early days when they started building chips, there was a lot, a lot of basically women coming into the workforce in the early 70s. Got treated like crap because men were dicks back then. Still are, but worse back then.

And it's kind of, you know, gone that way since then. But then they moved a lot of the work overseas. And it just kind of started the entire cycle. And I love one of the things that he says in here. He says, Uber is the waste product of the service economy. It doesn't really, it didn't start it.

This is, you know, what we get after all these years. And it says it relies on a bunch of people who don't have an alternative. Because one of the things that, you know, it's like, okay, what's a side hustle? And then what do you need to actually put fucking food on the table? If you got to put food on the table, it ain't a side hustle.

And that's kind of one of the things that a lot of these people who drive for Uber and Lyft and all these other temp gigs, Fiverr and you name it, are all doing. Because that's actually what they have to do. It's not supplemental if you need it to pay for your kids' braces or food or rent.

No, I know. I think we were talking about that when Uber ran that annoying commercial campaign where they showed, you know, some very attractive, you know, mid-30s mom driving for Uber who was only doing it to get some extra vacation money for her and her kids. Yeah. That's not the vast majority of Uber drivers.

No, not really. It's people who are unemployed and just need some way to eat. Yeah. And I think it's interesting. I thought this was really interesting. I actually did listen to the podcast. He only touched on a couple of things briefly that I think are also highly important to this when we talk about deregulation of industries, we talk about busting up unions, all of these sorts of things kind of made workers completely disposable.

So, yes, this was happening well before Uber came along or any of these Web 2.0 or gig economy jobs came along. They're taking advantage of a hole in the marketplace, which is a bunch of people who aren't making enough money and can't get full-time jobs. Talk to anybody that works in the service industry.

The way the restaurants are starting to treat them now is they can't get enough hours anymore. It's crazy. Mm-hmm. Yep. They can't make a living. And speaking of people who want to do things not for free, here's a whole bunch of people who do things for free because they're dumb.

Yeah, exactly. Yes. All these people on Reddit who are moderators who are doing it out of love or out of a hobby or interest or sincere desire have quickly found out, as you and I used to do when we would run these things for pay, moderation is a thankless and full-time job.

Oh, yeah. In and of itself because people are stupid and people are crazy and the online anonymity and all of that sort of thing and just the removal from being in a face-to-face position and just sitting behind a keyboard. Well, we all know how people act in that way. And it's horrible. So moderation, as Facebook has discovered, and Twitter is just sticking their heads and their fingers in their ears and going, blah, blah, blah, no moderation.

Nazis are fine. It's a really hard job. And it's a full-time job. And you really can't outsource it or give it to people for free. And there's a really great Engadget article about moderators that are standing up and saying to Reddit, hey, this is bullshit. We're getting our lives threatened.

Women are getting rape threats. It's crazy what people are screaming and yelling at these moderators. And they're not getting paid. They're doing it for free. Now, I understand the impulse. When I was a younger man, I did things like run BBSs. And I even got into forums and message boards in the early days of the Internet.

And I did step up and volunteer time for moderation. And at some point, I went, oh, hang on a second. I'm good at this. And I should be getting paid. And I made a decision way back when that I'm not doing anything for free anymore. But, of course, good luck getting paid for this stuff.

Right. That's the problem now. And I just saw that Reddit has overtaken Facebook earlier in the year to be the third most popular website in the United States. It's the homepage of the Internet, don't you know, Jason? It is the homepage of the Internet, which means they probably have some money. Unless you're over 60, in which case it's Yahoo.

That's true. Yahoo. What the hell is? OK. Anyway, yeah, these people need to get paid because they're sacrificing their mental health and long-term well-being for a site that doesn't give them anything. Why are you doing that? I know you're young. You're idealist.

Oh, it doesn't take that much time. I read a bunch of subreddits about people asking, why the hell would you be a moderator on here if you're not getting paid? In all of the excuses and the post-facto rationalization that they're doing to themselves to say, oh, yeah, I just like being part of the community and I got time.

You know, when the kids go to bed, I'm like, OK, where's the time for you? Besides being yelled at and threatened and all this other stuff. So I think it's ridiculous that it is ridiculous. But, you know, all these companies, as long as people are stepping up to do things for free, why would they change their minds?

Why would they pay them? I know, particularly in the music industry, that is exactly what happened to music industries online or to music and bands online presences over the last five to 10 years. Instead of paying professionals to do stuff, they found super fans who ran, you know, these crazy fan websites and basically paid them a pittance to take over the work that people used to get paid to do.

And street teams. What about street teams? All the kind of volunteering stuff. That's all over the place. I mean, we talk all the time on the show about how most companies have outsourced their almost everything. You know, they put out crappy product to begin with because they don't have QA teams anymore. They're just going to outsource it. We're going to put out the beta.

You tell us what's wrong with it. Bug bounty programs. What's that? I mean, sometimes they pay people, but most of the time it's just you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart. Now, remember back when AOL bought the Huffington Post? Vaguely. Yeah, yeah. At least they paid out a bit. They paid out 15 million dollars out of the to some of the unpaid volunteers.

But there were lots of lawsuits about people back in the day who were doing the same exact thing as these moderators on Reddit. They banded together and actually, you know, some sometimes they got paid. Sometimes it was dismissed. But at least they put up a fight and said, hey, look, we're employees.

Minimum wage. That's all we want. You know, stop it. Go have fun. Well, I do remember I was when I was when I was younger and we went through like the first blush of this in the music industry where we're, you know, record labels have kind of figured out that, hey, we don't need to pay someone for this.

We can get people to do this for free. Things were a little more complicated back then, obviously. So they really quickly discovered that, oh, these free people, they don't actually know how to program or do anything, which you still needed at that point. Right. But it was definitely like I just couldn't believe how many people are willing to to work for free.

And I would just try to contact these people and going, you realize that you're devaluing the entire industry by doing this. Your work is worth money, and if you are willing to do it for free, it kills everybody. Sinking shit brings down all boats. Damn it. Especially if you're on the boat.

Yes. I feel you, bro. I feel you. Yeah. What I'm not feeling is how these fringe groups now is what they're calling them. You know, people like the Alex Joneses and the Nazis and all these guys who have been kicked off recently of all the social media platforms and sort of kind of.

Except for Twitter, of course. Well, no, he got hit seven days. I thought he had a seven-day ban or 14 days. But anyway, here's something that I'm finding hilarious. All of these people have gone, quote, unquote, underground to their private groups on the same services.

So, oh, I can't have a public Facebook group, but I can have a private Facebook group. Right. So I can still use your platform because those are page views and you're still going to advertise to me no matter what I say on there. It's just not open to the public. Right. Unless somebody comes in and says, hey, can I join your private group?

And you go, sure. What's how does how is that not still just a public group? Especially since the way that most of these things work is is by having the true believers disseminate the information. So you're still you've still got a platform for your true believers to give them stuff that then they go and post publicly.

These echo chambers are getting worse and worse and worse. And when it's, you know, making these people go underground, but still using the same platforms. So everybody's still there is it's actually going to have, you know, a worse effect. I think over time. Right.

If you're going to kick somebody off your platform, kick them off your platform. If you're not, then whatever. Let them let them let them let them play. Well, they're trying to have it both ways, you know. Well, yeah, they want the page views, but they want to be seen as people who are doing the right thing. Exactly.

And you can't you can't have both. Yeah. Now, we've talked a lot about universal basic income UBI in the past. And Wired has a great article about Y Combinator, which has been trying to do some UBI experiments for quite a long time. Now, the TLDR on this article is basic income is hard.

Lots of rules. Lots of rules. Lots of rules, lots of trying to figure out how we can actually get some accurate data that isn't tainted or weird, because some people will have UBI, some people won't. Basically, they were hoping to have a UBI experiment up and running three years ago.

They're still not there yet. They're still trying to figure it out. At least they've got the money. At least they're giving it a go. And there's a good wrap up about everybody out there that's trying to do UBI experiments right now. But it's it's pretty interesting. And hopefully they can get this one off the ground, because this sounds like they're really putting in the groundwork to make this a decent study.

But they're having a lot of problems getting it going. How shitty would be it would be to be in a control group for that? You get the fifty dollars a month. Everybody else gets the fifteen hundred. It's like, don't give me. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, it's interesting that they're still trying after, you know, all the different things.

And I thought one thing that was very interesting is they have to figure out a way where the IRS won't take all the money. Yeah, we have to have some sort of tax tax laws that tie into this, obviously. So considering if in the long run the income is coming from taxes, you don't really want to have an orberist going on here.

It's like, OK, everybody pays the taxes. We give the money to the poor. The poor then have to pay taxes back so they can get more money to pay back the poor to take. There is the theory of the Mobius. And speaking of money in Silicon Valley, there's a growing trend, some some from Y Combinator, where they're trying to use algorithms for debt collection.

So if you do owe somebody money instead of giving it to you, they want to take it back. OK, this sounds like they're trying to lighten up the debt collection industry and make it sound nice. Yeah. You know, I don't know if you've ever had a debt collector come after you. No. Well, I have. And it sucks.

It sucks a lot. Thank you, Steve Jobs, wherever you are, for adding block call to my iPhone. That is the greatest thing in the world. They're block number. So many block numbers on my phone right now. But they're going to send emails and use, of course, AI and machine learning to figure out, you know, how what's what's what's the best way for you to pay back your money?

Well, I mean, OK, certainly there could be some disruption in the way it's done. We don't need Dog the bounty hunter coming after us. There are probably better ways and nicer ways to go about it. It's always been a kind of very angry industry. So that's that's a plus. But the real disruption here to me seems actually a lot of people in that industry are going to get fired and replaced by ML.

See, here's what I was thinking. If you want to really disrupt it, what you do is you send all of the Uber drivers out there with, you know, you get them deputized to be collectors. And, you know, they can be the bounty hunters, you know, since they don't have to go through any criminal background checks, what could possibly go wrong?

Exactly. That's what I'm saying. So when somebody gets in an Uber, they can then look up all their debt records and then they just get charged for, you know, a portion of their debt plus the Uber ride. Gotcha. Because then they're going to have the credit card numbers. You know, it's just a way it's it's a way to cross pollinate.

I think the totally get these two industries bird can get on board and we can garnish bird rides. Exactly. Yes. I think I think we're on to something here. I think we might be. And here's another thing we'll never do anything about. Of course not. And speaking of people losing jobs, UBI and all that sort of thing, a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute study of 800 occupations across 46 countries found that by 2030, over 800 million people will be losing their jobs to automation.

That's one fifth of the global workforce. A further one third of that global workforce will need to retrain if they want to keep their current jobs. That is quite a lot. Researchers from Oxford University found that 47 percent of U.S. workers have a high probability of seeing their jobs automated over the next 20 years.

What's the good news? Well, they also revealed that 53 percent of American jobs and four fifths of global jobs are unlikely to be affected by advances in artificial intelligence and robotics in specific fields. Those fields being, and drumroll please, this is what you might want to be studying for, the creative industry.

All right. Which I got to tell you, artists, singers, and musicians, they're already making no money. Yeah. Thanks. Streaming. And all of that. So I don't see that working out very well. Maintenance foreman. So basically running the robots. Okay. Yeah. Hairdressers. All right.

People's hair will keep growing. Yep. Therapists and social workers. Because everybody's going to need some therapy because everybody's so damn poor. Yeah. And depressed. Teachers, which are ready, as we know, are totally overworked and underpaid. So that's going to go well. Yep. Healthcare workers. Fair enough.

But nobody's going to be able to afford healthcare. Exactly. And that's where it comes in for me that I think this whole problem is going to sort itself out because everybody will be out of a job. They can't afford healthcare. Everybody will die off. The population will go down and the machines will take over. This is how this is all going to play out. That's it.

We're done. All right. Boom. Drop the mic. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and shut it down. 23-minute show today, people. All right. Is there anything else besides healthcare? No, that's basically it. That's the stuff that we know we're not going to lose, at least in the next 20 years.

All right. Sweeping up after the robots in the factory is pretty much what it's going to come to. That's what it's going to come down to. Now, we talked a lot about Twitter and how we despise it at the moment and all the problems that they're having. There is an alternative, apparently, which some very dedicated people have gotten off Twitter and gone to.

And we've talked about it way in the past when it first launched. Mastodon. Mastodon. Yes. It's basically a decentralized Twitter. Mm-hmm. From what I can tell. That's exactly what it is. I've tried to log into it. It's quite daunting to begin with. And I don't know what the hell's going on. And very few people I know are on there.

But it is there. And it seems to be gaining a bit of publicity and traction at the moment. But then again, so do... I can't even remember the name of that social network that started with a V that was super popular for two weeks. I don't know the V one, but there was App.net back in the day. There was Ello, of course, that we were talking about.

Yes. Oh, wait. Oh. It was run by, like, the shady Dubai guy. Oh, God. I can't even remember that. There's so many of them. And for people at Fireside, we are giving away two of our old microphones there. And when I was packing them up to ship up to Canada with us tomorrow, one of them I wrapped in an Imsi shirt, if you remember Imsi.

Oh, I remember Imsi. They got really mad at me. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So you won't only just get a microphone if you win. You will get a free Imsi shirt. A vintage Imsi shirt. Yeah, yeah. This thing with Mastodon, it's a little difficult to get set up because everything is, like, in different places and you have different nodes that you can, you know, sign up for.

I was going to set one up for us, but then realized, oh, I'd rather do something else. I'd rather do something else with my time. Exactly. Yeah. So the article talks about how they're dodging government surveillance and Nazis, you know, because that's kind of a big deal with the Twitter right now.

But what I've got out of this, and correct me if I'm wrong, Jason, is the technology doesn't actually do anything to stop them. It just allows you, when you're running your own node, to basically ignore the nodes that the Nazis are on. Correct. So they're not taking a stand and saying no Nazis on Mastodon.

They're just saying, hey, moderate yourself. If you don't want them, take off their node. Mm-hmm. Pretty much. Good. Glad I nailed it. Yeah. It's not that difficult of technology to do. The only, this has been around in several ideas for 15 years. We always wanted to do this with blogs and things like that.

But nobody thought that there was going to be pickup on it because it was too difficult for people to set up their own nodes. Things have gotten easier now with cloud computing. And you can just, you know, pretty much do a couple clicks and set up your own node and just do a quick install of it. Right. But yeah, this is just multiple server-to-server communications.

It's like a bunch of BBSs talking together. It is more, I think, honestly, if you go back to the BBS days where, you know. I was thinking like Fidonet and things like that. Yeah. That's exactly what this sounds like. Kind of. Yeah, exactly like that. And it's just, you know, it's just a little faster and a little more new. But the concept, I do believe, is the same.

Now, the problem I have with this article is, as you can see in our show notes, I'm not going to put this up for the general public because it's such a gross picture. There is a, there's an ad that says, four signs you're about to die of a heart attack. And this was every single ad on Slate, in every slot, different sizes, every page.

I've got to say that targeting is working really well. I mean, it is just, it's this picture of this fat guy's leg with, you know, like sock marks on it. I tell you that they listen to our show. They're stuck on the episode where you refuse to get your foot fixed and it ballooned up and they're targeting you.

That's it. They are targeting me. I'm sure about that. Oh, man. Yeah. I don't know what the hell went wrong there, but I haven't gone back to Slate. I don't want to go back to Slate because I just don't want to see that. Funny, though, because your next article is from Slate and you put it in. I know, but this was before that, surprisingly enough.

The global internet is being attacked by sharks, confirms Google. Sharknado. It is. Well, the final Sharknado is out, so they have to do something for food, you know? And so here, just for shits and giggles, I turned off my ad blocker for Slate and I'm scrolling down, I'm scrolling down, I'm scrolling down.

There's no ads. Oh, I get $20 off my next order of bananas with Amazon Fresh. And there's one of those. There's two of those. There's three of those. That's the only thing I can do now on Slate is order bananas off of Amazon. Well, you know why you're only getting one or two ads.

It's because we're good at blocking our tracks and tracings and there's only so many things that they can serve us that fit our profiles because we clean everything out. Uh, yeah, I don't know where the bananas come from, but I'll take them. I like them. They know you drink a lot. Potassium next morning. I do need the potassium.

I tell you, they got you dialed in. They really do. Man, the interesting thing about this article is, so yes, Google has confirmed that sharks are eating the cables and they have- Well, look, you don't get a lot of meat off Tara Reade, so you got to eat something. Seriously.

Yeah. So what they've done is created protective yarn. So, you know, Tara Reade needs that sweater of the polyethylene yarn so she doesn't get eaten by the shark in the Sharknado. And it's just a, it's a fun read. It's very, I was, you know, I thought it was interesting that the sharks were causing problems.

Uh, we talked on the show a while back about that incident in Cuba at the embassy about the diplomats who were basically, you know, they had this mystery illness. Yeah. Well, it's coming out now that, uh, it was a theory in the beginning that, you know, there might've been some crazy sound weapon, but now it's looking more and more like it was a microwave weapon.

Right. And the New York times has a great article on this basically attack and some of the science behind how it could have actually worked and how the brain actually can hear microwaves. They've got this guy, Alan Frey, who kind of came up with the original science way back in the sixties on how the, the, you know, the temporal lobe can pick up certain frequencies of microwaves and you can actually hear a sound.

Even deaf people could hear it, which I thought was pretty neat. Um, but yeah, it's, it's a really good article on, on just the science behind this and some of the politics behind it because they think that this might actually be what, what's been done to them, which is crazy that they're, especially in Cuba of all places, you don't think of like, you know, technological space weapon capital of the world since like everything is, you know, a, you know, a fifties car that's barely keeping together.

Well, I'm pretty sure that Russia might've been involved in that a little bit. You think maybe a little bit. You think maybe? Could be. Now here's finally a good use of AI, at least if it works. Yeah. Except for the fact that there isn't AI either.

So it's a good use of machine learning. Yes. No, no, no. Today we're introducing the next step in the fight for child sexual abuse, cutting edge artificial intelligence that significantly advances our existing technologies to dramatically improve how service providers, NGOs, and other technology companies review this content at scale.

Just to clarify, this would be the fight against child sexual abuse, not for, right? Correct. Yes. Okay. Just checking. Because that'd be a pretty weird move for Google to make. Well, you never know in this climate. I mean, I know they've removed do no evil from their sayings, but I didn't think they've gone that far.

It's a strange world. I take nothing for granted anymore. But yes, Google is trying to decrease the amount of images that people are actually subject to. And because the biggest problem now is like, you know, they find an image, they can fingerprint it and then scan for that fingerprint, which is standard technique for trying to find images that you want to get rid of.

But now they can use AI to scan the images. It's, you know, it's, it's pedo recognition software is what it basically is. Now, are they basically just pulling these images, finding them, deleting them, removing them in, in whatever way Google actually ever actually deletes anything?

Or are they targeting the people that are sharing them? Well, you know, that I don't know. I have no issue whatsoever with, with an AI thing going through, trolling through the web, finding these things and just deleting them, removing them, pulling them out.

What I do have a problem with is, is machine learning and AI that hasn't been tested yet, fingerprinting people because I want to know how many false positives there are and things like that. Because any, anything like this will being, being accused of anything like this will ruin your life, whether you did it or not. Right.

And this isn't for public consumption, you know, they're saying it's for service providers, NGOs and tech companies, and probably at some point law enforcement, but as service providers, like if I'm running an ISP, I would want this because I don't want some asshole putting kiddie porn on my servers. Hey, safe harbor, man.

I'm just a platform. Well, still, I don't want, I don't want to be sucked into that. And so I would like to have this software running just to, you know, even give you a heads up that says like, you know, okay, scan all these directories of all the servers and find out what's on them.

And well, just like we talked about with moderation and all that, just flagging, flagging of images. Right. Perfect. And then I'll have my employees look at it, which I underpay and who live in, you know, the Philippines, come back and tell me if it's kiddie porn or not. And then I can come to the local law enforcement, have you kicked off.

That's the way things should work. How they work. You are such a sucker with your ISP hiring people in the Philippines. I have free moderators. So we'll see how, how this is going to play out. But I think it was an interesting move that, hey, you know, this is, I think this is a good use of the technology we can get behind.

Yeah, exactly. Come on. Now, this one kind of, I thought was interesting. NASA explores product endorsements and rocket naming rights because great. They have no budget anymore because our government gutted their budget. So you might as well just get rid of it completely and turn this over to Bezos and Musk Incorporated.

Well, yeah, I mean, no, this is just another idiocracy of vacation of the country. Yep. That's what it comes down to.

Media candy. I have been checking out some new stuff on Netflix, Brian. Okay. I found a new documentary called Follow This. Okay. It follows BuzzFeed reporters. Sounds exciting, doesn't it?

It does. Oh. So the first episode was on ASMR, which stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Have you heard of that before? I have. I hadn't. But what I had heard of is misophonia, which I have a mild case of.

So when this show started to kick in and they were making lots of mouth noises and licking noises, I tried. I couldn't find my remote fast enough to turn it off. So, you know, the ASMR video thing is a whole, like, subgenre online.

If you Google it, you'll really go down a rabbit hole. I did start to Google it. Now, the funny thing about it is on the video, you know, how on Netflix now they have those really annoying full screen video trailers whenever you're just going through different shows. You can't turn that off.

You can't. It's annoying as fuck. Not as annoying, though, as the cute blonde that they have who is, like, licking some fake ears, I think, is what it was. I had to turn it off before I could really figure it out. But she's got a Zoom H4N that she's, you know, got in front of her.

And she's got the microphone pointed the wrong damn way. If you're in the business of making sound for people, you'd think you'd know which way to point the damn microphone. Fair point. Fair point. So I did watch a couple more. I watched the Black Survivalists episode, which kind of was just like Survivalists.

It didn't need to be a Black Survivalist episode. Except they happened to be Black. Exactly. There was literally no difference. And it was a good episode. But what I'm finding here is I've got the same problem with this as I have with Vice News, where they're making it more about the journalists themselves than they are about the actual topic.

And it drives me crazy. We are in the me, me, me generation. I miss the days of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. I really do. Those guys were classy as hell. And they didn't really care how many likes and tweets they got. This is true. But I got to say, you don't have to miss Dan Rather.

He is all over online. And I highly suggest following him on both Twitter and Facebook, although you're not on Facebook. I'm not on Facebook and maybe not on Twitter for much longer. But that's another story for a little bit later. But, yeah, I do watch Dan Rather's videos and read his pieces when he puts stuff out.

Because he's still great. But, I mean, I saw him on the nightly news when there's three channels. Yes. Well, we are old. Well, and good news for me, because I stopped watching this show and didn't care, and I think you tapped out as well.

Mr. Robot will finally end after season four. That's it. Yeah. Yeah, finally. I, you know. I don't even know what happened. I tapped out after season two. So, I'm done. I saw the last season, and, oh, man. They could have wrapped this whole thing up in one season.

But. I liked the first season. I think they should have wrapped it up there. That's what I mean. They could have wrapped this up in one season. It didn't need to keep going. But I'll probably watch it just to have completion. Okay. You can do that, and you can tell me what happened. I need something for the show. I guarantee.

That's the problem right now, right? Like, I haven't seen. I have not. I've been a very bad media consumer this week. Although, not really. I'm still working my way through Better Call Saul and Dark Matter. I'm well into the third seasons, which are the last one for Dark Matter and the last one on Netflix for Better Call Saul. I still like both shows quite a bit.

Better Call Saul is absolutely fantastic. If you haven't watched it yet and you were a Breaking Bad fan, it's well worth it. And Dark Matter, even though they continue to upset me by having episodes that are straight-up tropes that every single sci-fi show has ever done, including there is the theory of the Mobius.

When time becomes a loop. When time becomes a loop. They had a Groundhog Day episode. But I like the characters. I like the concept. I like where they seem to be going with it, which is basically A-Team in space. Yeah. Okay. I'm sad it got canceled, and it'll be coming to a conclusion.

Now, I didn't skip ahead, and I don't know, and I don't want to know. I don't know if they wrapped it up or if they left it open and just got canceled. That'll bum me out to no end if that's the case. But it is what it is. I'm enjoying the show. Now, is that on Netflix or was it on another channel? It was originally on sci-fi, got canceled.

Netflix bought the rights to it, but not to continue it. So they just have all three seasons on Netflix. Oh, okay. So it was probably, yeah, don't hold out hopes that it was canceled well. Oh, well. And in strange news, I was reading this on TMZ this morning.

The strange news is not that I read TMZ in the morning, but that is kind of strange. Richard Hammond from Top Gear, and what's the one we don't kind of like? Oh, the Amazon reboot, the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour. You know, it's so memorable, I forgot it.

Yes. His whole family was robbed while he was in Saint-Tropez by people who gassed the house while they were sleeping. Wow. If that not the craziest thing, this is, I mean, it's like, you know, it's Ocean Saint-Tropez. I can't believe this. They actually had CCTV of people gassing them, breaking into their house, rummaging through everything.

These people woke up, their wallets, their keys were gone, all the drawers were open. Like, people had, like, rustled through them to find stuff. And a neighbor had the same thing happen to him. And apparently, this is, like, a thing in Saint-Tropez now. Because Johnny Depp apparently needs more money for wine and scarves.

So, he has to go around robbing other people now to get scarf money. That is pretty crazy. I mean, Richard Hammond, this guy just has, like, the worst and best luck simultaneously. Dude, he's got the worst luck. He's got the worst luck. He almost dies in multiple crashes. This happens to him.

But he also has the best luck in that he's, like, a multimillionaire with next to no talent. That's true. That's true. I mean, he's got nothing, really, other than he's mildly amusing with those other two guys. Exactly. He sure as shit can't drive. We know that. No, he can't. Well, that is a crazy story.

And that is pretty terrifying. And thank God it was just burglary, right? Like, because if you're knocked out, you're knocked out. They could have woken up dead. They could have woken up anything. At the library. My quest for classics has kind of gotten off the rails a little bit because I heard a podcast this week with Sam Harris called Digital Humanism with Jerome Lanier.

I always get it mixed up. Lanier? Yeah, Jerome Lanier, because we covered one of his books long ago on the show when we first started out. And he's got a new book called 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Right. And the episode on Sam Harris was great.

It was fantastic. It covered everything that we have ever said about why this shit is evil. And it all comes down to the algorithm. That's really what it is. The algorithm is about manipulation. And he has a great acronym in here.

It's called BUMMER. Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent. That's how he kind of lays these things out. That's pretty good. It's a short book. If you get the audio version, it's only like four and a half hours. But for me, it's an echo chamber book because it says everything that we've already said about what it does to people, how it manipulates people.

And once you put the algorithm in the feed, all bets are off. There's just nothing there that you can trust. Exactly. And that's why we need algorithm-free social media. Good luck. Or that's what he says. Let's just cancel your account. Get out of here. So I highly recommend that book.

Right. Now, I have been stuck with Christopher Moore's NOR for a while. No, you too. Yeah, this is why I haven't had a book in a little bit. I just keep going back to it. I get another 10 pages, and then life happens, and it just doesn't call me back to it. But I saw that you had posted this book by Jaron in there yesterday, and I was like, it is short.

It's only 146 pages. I can probably burn through this tonight, and I'll have a book, and Jason will be really, really happy with me. And then I looked at it, and I went, 10 bucks for 146 pages. That's actually pretty pricey for what it is. It's a short book, and I think his previous book was like 807,429 pages, and it was about the same price.

I feel like I'm getting screwed here, but I need a book. So I bought it anyways. And we're almost a good 20 hours later. It has still not appeared in my Kindle library. Oh, no. This is the first time this has ever happened to me. It is just it's been purchased. It's in my orders.

It's in my digital orders. It is not on any of my devices. And, of course, the message sent to Amazon customer service has not been responded to yet. So I attempted to read a book last night. It did not happen. So I will probably be reading it on the plane next to you tomorrow. Okay. Well, yes.

We'll have something for next week. Although next week, I have another book that I sent you that I think is actually going to be better. That book is The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. This is about the post-millennial generation and how all of this, the way speech is being controlled in universities, is having such a horrible backlash effect.

And we've talked about it on the show before. And this was from Greg Lukanoff and Jonathan Haidt. Now, Jonathan Haidt, I should say. He was on our show, The Jordan Harbinger Show, today when we were actually recording this on Tuesday because we're going to be on a plane tomorrow.

So this is out now. I'll put a link in the show notes for it. Great episode. So I highly recommend both the podcast and the book. But I'm going to – well, I haven't read the book yet. But I'm going to recommend it anyway on the strength of the podcast. So I'm going to have this for next week for sure. Moron of the Week.

Our Moron of the Week was submitted by Lukewarm Diet Soda Enthusiast over on Twitter. Great name. Great name. He sends us a link to abc6onyourside.com. Columbus Man Starts Movement to Fight Scooter Regulations. Donovan O'Neill is starting a grassroots movement to prevent more regulations.

I had my first ride last week and I loved it, said O'Neill. I rode three times this past week and it's been great. However, when he heard the city put in new scooter regulations, he wanted to take action. He created a grassroots movement called Scooter C-Bus, which stands for Scooter Customers Organized to Oppose Temporary Excess Regulations.

Okay. Rolls off the tongue. Hopefully we can hold back on any future regulations or be part of a constructive conversation with anyone who may feel the need for more regulations, said O'Neill. Hey, come to Santa Monica. Walk down one street and you'll see the need for regulation. The city's new regulations will make companies get permits to operate them in the city.

The scooters must also be parked in an upright position and can't be parked in the street. Riders cannot drive the scooters faster than 15 miles per hour. That sounds draconian. I know. My God, the Nazis have returned. So anyways, this guy is fighting that. He is actually not the moron of the week of the story, though.

No, this is where it gets good. The moron of the week is somebody who supports him. I'm totally with him, said Jacob Ellis. It's something fun. It's exercise and you can get around and do a lot more things. Let's define exercise. Let's examine that statement. How is getting on a motorized scooter exercise?

You know what's exercise? A bike, a regular scooter, and walking. That's exercise. Yep. You moron. Finding the scooter is a little exercise. That's how you... I suppose that could be a little bit of exercise, but it is definitely not exercise.

This is... And then we wonder why we have an obesity problem in this country. So... But we do have some breaking news on this, as we've set to record. Donovan O'Neill, who set up his own Twitter account, ScooterCBus, has liked the comment and wrote us directly saying he would love to join our show, Jason.

Oh, yay! That's never going to happen. Yeah. No, all of our listeners do not want to hear one more time all the reasons for regulation on these scooters. They just enjoy the stories about them getting kicked out of cities. I get so many DMs every week about how they're either getting kicked out or let back in.

And both of them are like... When somebody's getting kicked out, it's like, woohoo! When somebody's let back in, it's like, ah, shit! So, I think the public is pretty much on the side of, ah, shit! I think it's ass shit, and San Francisco and Santa Monica leading the charge for regulations, and we're going to see how that goes, and hopefully we don't have to talk about these damn things every week anymore.

Feedback loop! Over on Patreon, we've got some new people! Derek, Brian, Dan, Caleb, Mike, Travis, Andi. Would that be Andy? I don't know. Could go either way, right? It's A-N-D-E. Cool spelling. Yep, cool spelling.

And Andrew wrote us, since they're so loved, bird scooters have made it to North Carolina, specifically Greensboro. I used to live in Greensboro. How cool is that? Well, look at that. And Jim wrote us over there as well. Hey, guys, here's something that's driving me crazy that I'd like to hear your thoughts on. I keep seeing people who list their job title as React Engineer or JavaScript Engineer and like that, and now I'm seeing job openings posted with similar titles.

I've had this discussion with a lot of devs, and opinions are all over the place. Here's the thing. The way I see it, React, blah, blah, blah, or any framework, is not an engineering discipline, and if you don't have an engineering degree, you are not an engineer. Otherwise, I can buy a blender and put Milkshake Engineer on my resume, right? Anyways, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

P.S. I am not an engineer. I'm a lowly web developer, and that's what it says on my resume. You know, from when Jason and I came up, totally agree. We were programmers. We weren't engineers, but it does seem to have shifted. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, if you can write code and go to one of these stupid little code camps for a weekend, you're obviously now an engineer.

I hated when I was referred to as a software engineer because I was no such thing whatsoever. Yeah. You know, I read a bunch of books, and I tried a lot of stuff, and I worked really hard at it, but never went to engineering school, so I was never a software engineer. I was just a programmer.

Yep, I agree, and that's how I feel about it, too. But what I will say to you, Jim, is if that is the trend, and if people are getting hired by saying they're an engineer instead of a programmer... Do it. ...you say you're a fucking engineer. Say you're a fucking engineer. Exactly. Yes. Take the money. This is what's the Ghostbusters line.

If somebody's asked you if you're a god, you say yes. No doubt. And over on PayPal, a friend of the show, Sean, has a very generous donation, and he's glad to see we've cut this to two times a week. Yeah, and Eddie also gave us a donation.

He says, great show. All I want answered is what are the logistics of the podcast, i.e. where are you guys doing the show from, what gear do you use, and stuff like that. You keep podcasting, and I'll keep listening. Jason's put together a bunch of stuff, so he'll put some links in the show notes about the gear that we use, and we both do it from our homes at the moment.

Yep, we've done it from our homes for quite some time, because it got really uncomfortable when we actually had to look at each other and do this. Yeah, it's much easier doing it without being face-to-face, so next Saturday's broadcast will be interesting. We'll be looking in opposite directions. But also check out jpd.me.

I've actually started putting up some Twitter AMAs, so you can ask me questions on Twitter for stuff like that, and I list some of the gear that I use there, too. And Sven writes over on PayPal, grumpy greetings from Germany, so thank you, Sven, for the donation. Thank you.

And Gabriel gave us a $6.66 donation at PayPal. I know it's not much, but it's the first month since Maria, I didn't dip into my savings, and I wanted to show my appreciation for you talking about the Maria Shit Show in Puerto Rico and for donating to charities on the ground there. Shit's still terrible, but making progress.

If it was up to me, I'd get the fuck out, but family and stuff. Anyways, thanks, and keep up the great work. Hopefully, this is the first of many. So thank you so much, man. You do not need to donate to us, because I know you guys are in a lot of troubles there still. Yeah. We appreciate it. We do appreciate it. Keep your money. I mean, I think most of the money that you've ever given us in the past has gone back to Puerto Rico charities, so I know that I've donated a bunch, and if need be, I'll keep doing it.

But next time a hurricane comes by, just like, you know, duck. Can you do that? Yeah, I hear that as well. You have the whole island duck. Duck and cover. That was the one instruction we got for nukes back when I was a kid. Justin also over on PayPal gave us a donation.

He says, Did I hear correctly on the last podcast you're sending your personal info to Facebook to get verified on Instagram? Daring. Well, so, see the beginning of the show. Didn't work. Yeah. Over at Twitter, Stuart wrote us, Be careful in Toronto.

And he sent us a link to crack.com. Five crazy dangers of sex you had no idea existed. He says, look at number three. You can get STDs from sex robots. Of course you can. If they don't clean them well enough. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. You wouldn't borrow a friend's fleshlight, so why would you bang a publicly accessible sex doll?

Again, though, like I said, Jason, it is literally opening the day that we're in Toronto, so you could be first in. Oh, man. Literally. Literally first in. I could christen the whole place. How gross would that be?

Right film sleeper Pete writes, I want the podcast to use kerfuffle once per podcast. Done and done. Done deal. So if the license renewal is based on careful parking, they'll all be paying for people to ditch competitors in the bushes. And I guess this is another tweet about scooters.

Yeah. We'll see how that goes. Yeah. Urban warfare. Yeah. Yeah. Nathan writes us. Waze is doing ride share. I stopped using Waze a while ago, but they sent a screenshot where you can actually, I guess, in San Antonio, they started to roll it out. So we'll see what happens.

I haven't seen too much in the news on that, though. Not on Waze, but we talked about San Antonio last week as rolling it out. But yeah, I haven't seen anything about Waze. I think killed my phone every time I used it. And my 6502 writes in an open source blockchain effort that addresses scaling issues by altering a common consensus algorithm.

It's in buzzword. Bingo. That's pretty good. I'm sure they're going to get funded. Exactly. Yeah. And Paul writes us. Your favorite scooter company is in the Baltimore inner Harbor. Yay. David writes in, Hey, I'm binge listening to your old shows. I'm sorry. Don't do that.

Been listening to you bang on about Seneca. What do you think of Tim Ferriss's Tao of Seneca? Should I try to find more academic versions or is his good? I actually edited some of that. So I think it's good, but yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's a good, good version.

I'm sure it's fine. I dropped off the Tim Ferriss bandwagon a long time ago, but this isn't his own espousing of health secrets. So this is just Seneca. So I'm sure it's great. Basically, he hired somebody to read Seneca because there was no audio book version of it. So he put it out there and gave it away. So it's, yeah, I mean, I would just personally go get a paperback copy of it and a highlighter because that's the way to read Seneca because there's so much good stuff in there.

You're going to want to highlight a bunch of it. Right. And nerd rewind wrote us LA County library cards should give you access to overdrive and or Libby. Libby gives access to digital and audio books. So there are a couple of different solutions out there for a renting of books and audio books. If you have a library card, which is pretty cool.

Cool. And MM86 writes in, Hey guys, I finally downloaded the M one finance app. Thank you, Brian. And I wanted to try and experiment with real money that you did in hunting unicorns last year. Which stocks did you guys pick? Unfortunately, the program that we use to track it has removed us because we haven't had any activity for over a year.

So I couldn't find what Jason did, but I did remember that I had PayPal, Sony entertainment, electric arts, Apple, and Microsoft. So I had Nvidia, Tesla, Netflix, uh, INTC. Is that Intel? I think. And Cisco. So I did, did decent with it.

I think over the course of it, I mean, you won, but we both did good. I did win, but, uh, yeah, we did good. Yeah. Yeah. Nvidia, like I've, I've invested in, in real life has done really well, but I don't know where that, when that's going to cap out, but I got in right before they announced that they were putting chips in self-driving cars, which, but you know, yeah.

Uh, over at gog.show, Mr. Jar Jar writes us. Uh, so I'm glad we now have your approval on privacy.com. I was on the fence about it for a while. Can you guys please recommend something similar for email? If you're aware of such things, of course, AKA disposable one-time email addresses, love the show.

Many thanks and stay grumpy. Uh, isn't that just Gmail? Yeah. Gmail is a pain to sign up for. There are a ton of them, but the problem with them is they go away so fast. Um, you know, because a lot of people will use them for nefarious purposes and then they just get shut down. Uh, I don't have any off the top of my head.

I'll look around and see if I can dig some up because I know I used to use them every now and again. They basically just give you a quick hash. Um, I think Hushmail was the one I used to use a lot, but I don't know if there's, I think they went moved to a pay model, but I'll take a look and see what's around. And if any hackers are out there listening, you know, you know what kind of services we're talking about.

Shoot me some links. Yes. And Rob says, since you guys use one password, this should be a really helpful feature when iOS 12 comes out in the next couple of weeks. Okay. So this is actually really cool. You can actually pick one password is just the general autofill and your Safari passwords. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. That is nice. That is very nice. Also, this about one password and crossing the border might help you guys when you head up to Canada. And this is a travel mode for one password. We talked about this before. We've talked about that in the past. And I think neither of us are paranoid enough to, well, maybe Jason will have it turned on.

I'll report back next time. No, I'm going to be getting up at three in the morning to get to the airport. You think I'm going to have time to turn on anything? Especially not even myself. I'm just going to have them shovel me into the plane. Yeah. Over at iTunes, we got a five-star rating from the Czech Republic.

How cool is that? Named Scourge Spoilsport. Love the show. A Bright Star in the World Filled with Nonsense. Love the new twice-a-week format. And the never-ending grumpy humor. All right. Well, thank you, Scourge. Appreciate it. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and a snarky review. And steal your friends' phones and install us when they're not looking. Oh, and even better yet, next time you're at the Mac store, go to every single display Mac and load up iTunes and subscribe to us there. That's a good one.

I like that. Hmm. Guerrilla marketing. Closing shout outs. Want to give a shout out to friend of the show, Ryan, who just reached out and contacted me saying he has an extra ticket for the Dodger game tonight if I'd like it for free, except I have to be up at three in the morning to go to Canada so I can't go.

Aw, poor baby. But thanks for the offer. I would have liked to have gone. Yep. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever.

If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 278. From there you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and we'll talk to you from Canada next.

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