280: People Are the Bottlenecks

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Welcome to Travel Weary, Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I actually feel like I've just finished, well, here we are again, a five-day show with you. Yeah, kind of. Between the flights, the night in Toronto, the four nights at Camp Walden for Fireside, the flight back, I've basically just spent the last 12 hours not around you from five days straight, and here we are again.

Here we are again. It's like, God, can I get away from this guy for just a little bit? Apparently not. So, you know, we're happy to come and do anybody's conference, hit us up, but not for five days. Please, dear God, no. That ride home was brutal. Four hours in the car, then a, what, five-hour flight plus two hours at the airport?

Yep. And fuck you, Uber. I couldn't even get an Uber home. I had to take a damn Prius taxi. I'm sorry to hear that. You were much further away. I was also in a Prius taxi, but I was home within 30 minutes. I think it took me 45. My guy wanted to go really, no, he wanted to go really, really fast.

Okay. So, he got a bigger tip for that, because I was ready to go see my pups and go in my own bed. The first shower was glorious. Oh, man, yes. I know. The things we do for podcasting. But it was a blast. I had so much fun up there. It was a lot of fun. It was great to meet a lot of the people in our little podcasting community.

It was great to meet some actual fans of our show that were even there, which was a bit shocking. And, yeah, a good time was had by all. No, definitely. And I am sad that we missed one company while we were there. And this is one of those ones that was just such a missed opportunity.

Spankchain. Adult entertainment on the blockchain was presenting there. They presented? Oh, how did we miss this? That's what I mean. They gave a presentation and we missed it. Oh, that is sad. I feel like we have not done our due diligence next year. Definitely. And what I love about this, of course, they have, you know, the booty coin, which, of course, people with.

But you keep your booty coin in. You guessed it. The spank bank. All right. Well, you got to give him points. That's what I mean. It's like it's one of those things where I want to just laugh at it. But then I'm like, OK, you guys get it. That's funny. That's really funny. That is pretty damn funny.

Yeah, there was a whole cryptocurrency thing going on at the Fireside Conference, and we managed to avoid basically all of it. And the one with the one moment in our entire show where things went a little bit weird was when we said when we did our cryptocurrency bit. And apparently a couple of people in the audience took Umbridge.

Yeah, yeah. I did hear one hiss, too. I remember that one hiss on the on the side. I'm like, hmm, OK, I wonder what track he's going through yet. But nobody came to come and pick up their free crypto coin from us. When we left, they were standing there. They're just sitting there on the desk waiting to be taken.

And yeah, we didn't get to go to any of the crypto talks. Because we were busy writing jokes about cryptocurrency. So you give it, you know, crypto giveth and crypto taketh away. This is true. We also didn't go to any of the marijuana talks because there was also a marijuana track going on because it is about to be legalized in Canada.

But I didn't have to go to any of the talks to get hotboxed. Man, that whole place smelled of weed. I think I'm still stoned. I'm fairly sure I am. Yeah, I've had a craving for more ketchup chips than I ever have in my life.

They're so delicious. Ketchup chips rule. Those things are disgusting. A little follow up. Remember the Vizio TVs that were spying on people? Yes. So it turns out that, yes, there's a settlement. But there's also a class action lawsuit coming up. And Vizio is going to be letting people know about the lawsuit by displaying it on their TV.

That seems smart. I love the title of this one over at Ars Technica. Vizio sued for making creepy smart TVs. Will notify customers via the TVs. I just like that for some reason. That is lovely. It is ironic, don't you think? Isn't it ironic? Oh, yeah.

Speaking of that, thanks, Fireside, for punking me and trolling me the whole trip with playing one of my client's songs every morning bright and early to wake us up. Yep. And, you know, in all fairness, they wouldn't have known the last day, but I kind of let them in on that. The first two days were just completely random.

Nobody know. Right. Mm-hmm. I found this op-ed over, not even an op-ed, it's just an opinion video on the Washington Post. If you want to go check this out with the link in the show notes and you're not a Washington Post subscriber, try, what is it, privacy mode?

What do they call it in opera? It's incognito mode in some and privacy mode in others, but just a private window so it's not tracking you. And then you can actually read the Washington Post for free that way. Anyway, this is a short video. It's about three minutes from my old friend, Anil Dash. And it's like, hey, Zuckerberg, well, shucks isn't enough from a billionaire.

And it just talks about back in the day, we kind of knew what we were doing when we were building these platforms. Now he's like trying to, you know, turn around and say, oh, no, we just didn't really know. Yeah, yeah. He's calling bullshit on it and say, yeah, we kind of knew what you did. So you got to you got to kind of step up and own it.

Yeah. A lot of this is based on the fact that the I believe it was the New Yorker published an extensive and intimate profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. So he doesn't do a lot of press. So this was a little crazy. This longtime staff writer, Evan Osnos, visited his home, conducted a series of interviews with him and spoke to a bunch of people in and around Facebook.

So it I read the whole profile. I don't know if you did. It certainly does not paint him in the best light. There is a lot of, oh, shucks. We didn't know what we were doing when it was quite obvious that they knew what they were doing and they did it on purpose. But I thought the most telling part of the entire profile, there's a little write up about it just over on Slate, which is the link that we have in our show notes, is about how incredibly competitive he is that he he was playing a high schooler at Scrabble.

And lost the first game. So he wrote a quick program to cheat. Oh, my God. So he would beat her the second game. You know, to have that on the app store, you could have just downloaded one. He didn't have to go write a program. Well, you know, he's him. Yeah. Oh, man.

Did you ever play Words with Friends? Oh, yeah. I still do, actually, with a couple people. Oh, my God. I didn't even know it still worked. It's still around. Yeah. There was one guy who was always just obnoxious and always cheated. So it became a battle of the cheat bots. It's like I had three different cheat bots to figure out how to beat him because I knew he was cheating.

The guy can't spell to save his life. And he was coming out with 110 point words. I'm like, OK, well, gloves are off. And it just got to be silly. It's like, OK, what am I doing? I'm picking screenshots and trying to beat a cheater by cheating. It was just so much not fun. And then once you see that one person is cheating, you think everybody's cheating.

That's true. And that's why I see how that would ruin playing the game. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I quit. But anyway, I only play with some upstanding citizens. I didn't know you knew any. I have a few. In the news. Uber is in this in the news this week, Jason.

I hope you. Well, I guess you didn't get to take an Uber last night. So never mind. Forget that part. I took one to the airport, though. I did take one to the airport. Well, they are pitching a new product. Safety. Finally. Finally. They're pitching it as a new focus on safety as a competitive advantage against an unnamed other company, which they won't name, which is obviously Lyft.

This is not the first time Uber has tried that. In its early days, the company referred to its service as the safest ride on the road, which turned out not to be a good idea because they were sued for false advertising. So they're rolling out some safety features, including an expansion of an emergency button partnership with a company called Rapid SOS, which sends your location and other information directly to your local police agency.

They have another feature called Ride Check, which uses motion sensors and GPS and driver's phones and I guess in passengers phones as well to detect if your Uber car has crashed. If it senses a crash, the Uber app will prompt both driver and rider with a safety toolkit, including the emergency button. So they also have similar technology, which will allow Uber to detect what they call trip irregularities, like a long stop in the middle of a ride, after which the company will send a notification asking both the rider and driver if they are OK.

Now, most of this seems pretty smart. There are some questions about this. The immediate question is giving Uber access to this level on a driver's smartphone might mean they can monitor the drivers in ways that isn't quite kosher. But we know Uber would never do anything like that.

They would never, ever do anything like that. Hell. And yeah, so this irregular trip one seems kind of like the anti-rape feature. Yeah, that's the that's the why did you stop for an hour and now you're going again. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, we stopped for dim sum.

No, we didn't. All good in theory. All depends on how they actually use it. And they do not have a good history of not of using technology in non-evil ways. So we'll see what happens. Well, I mean, to be fair, that was in the Travis Kalanick days. That's true. But before he was gone and we got the new CEO, who seems to be trying.

Yes, sometimes. So we'll see how this goes. But yeah, I mean, it's just a PR battle right now. So yeah, we'll see how that how that plays out. And a quick hat tip to Barrett over on Twitter, who sent this to us after I had already had it in our show notes anyways. But I like to give those call outs.

Snapchat loses another executive as their stock price plummets yet again. Imran Khan, Snapchat's chief strategy officer, announced plans to leave the company, according to a regulatory filing on Monday. The company said in the SEC filing that he will stay on for an interim period and that he was not leaving Snapchat because of any disagreements with other executives.

Right. Sure. And this is a just a growing list of executives that have left Snapchat in the last year or so, including the chief financial officer, vice president of product and engineering guru, Stuart Bowers, who stepped aside in May and went over to Tesla. Snapchat has a I found this stunning.

Snapchat hasn't had a COO since Emily White left the company in 2015. They've been running three years without a COO, which actually makes a lot of sense. That explains a lot, actually explains quite a bit. So snares of Snapchat's parent Snap Inc has fell more than two percent on Monday and now trading in single digits.

Wow. All time low last week and has fallen more than 40 percent from last year's initial offering price of seventeen dollars a share, which I believe we called as bullshit back when it came up. Exactly. Now, if I thought this company had any hope of turning around, I would be buying like a mad man.

Buy, buy, buy. Yes. Yeah. But I don't. So I won't. Yeah. I'm thinking we're looking at a penny stock in about a year or two. Yeah. D-listed, D-listed. Now, you use Apple Pay a lot, don't you? I do. I do. It's very convenient. Well, now you can go to over 10,000 7-Eleven stores here in the U.S. and use your Apple Pay.

I never go to 7-Elevens. I don't know where a 7-Eleven is. Yeah. I've got one near me, but I don't ever, ever go. It's all just kind of the idea is the convenience, but it's all just overpriced. Right. And there are other stores that are more convenient than the 7-Eleven for me.

And I don't like Slurpees or disgusting hot dogs. Oh, God. That food is so nasty. When I see people come in and say, give me two slices of pizza and a dog. And I'm just like, oh, my God, you're going to be in the ER in half an hour or trapped in the water closet, as they like to say. Now, when I'm traveling internationally, 7-Eleven is a godsend.

Like in Asia, it is the greatest thing because I don't speak the language. I can just walk in, plop down, because nobody's going to talk to you in 7-Eleven anyway. So I just get my water and get out or any snacks that I need. So it's great internationally, but these are U.S. stores. So I don't know. I just haven't been able to use my Apple Pay in a long time.

It hasn't worked right. Even at Trader Joe's, which used to be the godsend, used to be able to walk in, get stuff and leave. Now you have to spend 10 minutes like putting your card in, waiting for the beep, waiting for them to press the buttons, and then you can finally leave. Yes. Life is difficult. Yes. The promise of technology has failed us yet again.

Yes, it has. Now, Right Film Sleep Repeat sent us two news articles over on the Twitter bot machine. So he said, these made him smile and cry, which I get. The first is over at TheRegister.uk. AI biz borks U.S. election spending data by using underpaid Amazon Mechanical Turks.

Okay. It's a company called Captricity, which touts AI software capable of reading text better than people, has been blamed for a bumper crop of data entry errors that misrepresent what many U.S. Senate candidates are actually spending for their campaigns. So they ran all the Senate spending stuff through this company because it's all supposed to be public records.

And, you know, there you go. So unfortunately, there are errors in more than 5,900 candidate disclosures representing over $70 million, all of them traceable to the U.S. government's conversion of paper into electronic data via this company. Well done. How's that AI working out for you? And this is just text.

This is just, you know, text scanning. Yeah. So basically, they scan the docs, OCR them, and then send them over to Mechanical Turk people to verify them that they're correct. Yep. So the problem is, Mechanical Turk people can be anywhere, like, you know, say the Philippines, where they don't really speak English that well.

Yes. And they're getting paid very little money. Yeah. Oh, that's fun. That's fun. Yes. But I do just love the AI aspect of that. AI. Now they're just claiming that OCR is AI and not even a good one at that. I had OCR on my Mac 2CI back in the 80s.

You were an AI trailblazer, Jason. Wow. Man, I could be at Google right now making gazillions of dollars because I knew how to run OCR software. Me too. I'm going to put on my resume now that I'm an AI expert. Yes. AI compatible. That's Brian. That's right. Also sent on this one.

Number one adware removal tool on Apple App Store caught spying on Mac users. Yeah, I was going to put this one in on security later this week, but it fits here too because it is an interesting one. It was the third highest paid app for a while in the number one paid utility.

Yeah, it's called Adware Doctor, and apparently it's been stealing browser history without consent and sending it to a server in China. Yeah, well, I mean, look at the name on the developer. Yongming Zhang is the developer's name. Hmm, okay.

You could have at least come up with a fake, you know, name that sounded at least legit. Yeah, like, listen, if you're going to buy something that gets this deep into your computer, don't go off the rankings on the Apple Store. Do a quick Google search. Find what the best one is.

Use that. Yeah, seriously. Now, I've been reading sciencealert.com a lot recently because the shit's just fascinating. I love this one. Scientists just found a way to control a single molecule for a millionth of a billionth of a second. Cool.

Isn't that neat? It's neat. It is very neat, and it was an accident. These people were trying to, like, you know, double check their work, and, like, they were getting results that didn't quite match what they were supposed to be getting. And so they found out this new way to do this. You got to read it to kind of understand it.

Actually, even reading it, I still don't understand it. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure how much I got of it, but it sounds cool. Hopefully, they will be able to do something interesting with it at some point. Yeah, and they say at the end, you know, the fundamental aim of this work is to develop the tools to allow us to control matter at this extreme limit, be it breaking chemical bonds that nature doesn't really want you to break, what could possibly go wrong, or producing molecular architectures that are thermodynamically forbidden.

Okay? Sounds safe. Yeah, sounds safe. But, hey, man, if this gets us to a teleporter so I don't have to sit in a bus going to the outskirts of Canada anymore, I'm in. Make it happen. Make it so. That's true. Now, Congress is moving forward with a dangerous attack on private drones.

Okay. No, no. First, they came for my drones. Yeah. So, what they're trying to do now is basically give blanket power to the DHS, oh, actually, I should say Department of Homeland Security, for those of you outside of the U.S., and the Department of Justice.

And these people are really, they don't really like oversight. They don't really care. But they want the power to basically shoot down any drone anywhere. Anywhere, anytime. So, the EFF is going after them. There's petitions that you can go sign. And I signed it because I believe they're doing Zod's work over there.

Or Gog's work, I should say. That's what they're doing. They're doing Gog's work. Gog's work. Yes. Well, you know, yes, we need some oversight here. We need some rules. It can't be anytime, anywhere. But I do agree with the idea that somebody needs to be in charge. No, I'm fine. I'm fine with them having the right to do that, which they probably do already.

I'm sure they do. I mean, right now, because it's under the FAA, and, you know, there are a lot of things with drones in the FAA, because they are considered aircraft. And there are a lot of really tight regulations around what you can do to an aircraft for very good reason, you know?

Yes. And so we'll see how this one plays out. But they should definitely not just have carte blanche to go, you know, taking out your maverick. Agreed. Now, you heard about the tariffs that might be coming down the line with China? Yep. Yeah, big news, big news.

And Apple has come out and said, well, you know, if you do that, your Apple watches and Apple pencils are going to cost more. Yeah, everything's going to cost more. And the government's saying, no, no, no. It's just a little tiny blip on an otherwise bright trajectory.

Now, they're like, the best way that you can fix this is to bring all of your manufacturing back to the United States. Now, you think a tariff is going to make your shit cost more. Yeah, that's really not going to work. Given the choice, I think I'll take the tariff. Yeah, yeah.

Honestly, it's going to cost less in the long run. Look, again, it's not just a simple fact of like, oh, just move all the work back here. We don't have the engineers. We don't have people coached up to do this stuff. That's it isn't just for cost reasons that that people have moved engineering and things like this over overseas.

It's because they have the talent. Well, I don't know if it's so much about engineering. It's manufacturing. Right. And the, you know, basically the pipeline for ingredients, you know. Yes, the ingredients, the sand. You've got to have all that stuff in place. And that's what they've got. They've got, you know, a massively complicated infrastructure over there to do this stuff and make it cheap.

And what they also have is really cheap labor, which we don't have. People want things here like food and insurance and trying to do it without a government subsidy, you know, because I don't. I'm pretty sure that the, you know, stop Bezos Act, as you like to call it. Yeah. Bezos.

Yeah. It would be the Bezos Cook Act not too long after that, because Apple would be sending people to the welfare line, too, if they're going to try and get their pencils made with a, you know, decent margin and decent overhead. That said, though, Apple's margins are pretty damn ridiculous. So that is a good point.

You know, Apple could just stop being so damn greedy for a little while. Yeah, but then it wouldn't be the two billion dollar company. That's, or was it, don't you mean trillion? No, trillion. Sorry. My bad. No, no worries. It's always horrible when you leave off that last zero, doesn't it? It is. It is. It's an order of magnitude.

So, yeah. So, Tim Cook, just stop being greedy. Give back to the peoples. Right. But, no, don't do that, actually, because then my stock price will go down. See? It's a tightrope, man. It's a tightrope. It really is. I found this one in TechCrunch, which kind of just made me a little sad.

Hoodline raises $10 million for its hyper-local automated data newswire. So, what they're trying to do. Now, just hold on one second. Have we not been discussing the major problem in the last year or so with Facebook and news and all of that sort of stuff is this automated shit that's being pushed out at us, right?

Kind of, yeah. Okay. All right. So, maybe we shouldn't go further that direction? Well, you know, the reason that I put this in here is because I used to have a company that did hyper-local news. It was called Metblogs, and it was run by the peoples. Yes. We had people writing the news, and they were on the ground, and they scooped a lot of places because we had people on the ground, and it was fun.

It was a ton of fun. And one person that was on our board of directors was one Joey Ito of the MIT Media Lab. Well, Joey led one of the rounds of financing on this. Oh, man. Yeah. I'm like, if you gave us $10 million, we'd still be around.

That is a good point. We'd probably lose it all, and you'd never see any of it again. But I guarantee you, you're not going to get any more back on this either. Anyway, so it says at the bottom, That is a very strange number because that means they probably don't have many editors at all.

It's like the exact opposite of Snapchat, which only has people posting shit and got rid of all their engineers. That's true. That's true. Well, I do not like this, Sam. I am. Well, and the funny thing is, it says, One of the guys from there, I can't really pronounce his name.

He believes that as it scales, it will be bringing in fewer editors and more engineers. At this point, it's about growth now that we have figured out what our bottlenecks are. People apparently are the bottlenecks, so... People are the bottlenecks.

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Media Candy. Brian, since you and I just got off a couple long flights, we are going to revive one of your old favorite segments. Drunk on a Plane movie reviews. Yes, because we both did have some cocktails on the plane, and we both watched movies.

Yep. So my first review is Isle of Dogs, the new Wes Anderson movie. I don't know if it's all stop motion or computer generated or animated. However they did it, it was a beautiful, beautiful movie. I'm not a huge Wes Anderson fan, generally. A couple of his movies I can tolerate.

And, you know, I'm just not a huge fan of his type of stuff. But I loved this movie. I completely and utterly adored it. And because, obviously, because Dogs. Well, that's, see, I looked over and saw that you were watching it, and I was just like, oh, God, it's because it's Dogs.

I did not know this was Wes Anderson. I am a fan, so I'm going to have to go back and watch this now. Yeah, out of all the Wes Anderson movies, I think this is, like, maybe my second favorite. Okay. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it. While you were watching that, I was watching Baby Driver. I never got to see that when it came out by Edgar Wright, part of the, you know, one half of the team that brought us all the wonderful Cornholio trilogy.

Is that what it's called? Cornetto, not Cornholio. I like Cornholio trilogy better. That's my judge. It was okay. It wasn't great. And I've got to say, it was really weird to see Kevin Spacey. Because this came out before Kevin Spacey had to go away.

So, seeing him as a main character in the movie kind of bumps you out of it a bit. It was artfully shot, I would say. I just didn't think the story was all that great. I have to concur. I'm not a fan of that movie. And I'm a huge Edgar Wright fan, as you know. Yeah. And, yeah, this one I just thought was weak.

The whole, like, you know, tie-in with the music thing and, you know. That's, you know, that was the artfully shot bit. And it was clever. Yeah. But it just felt like a long music video with not much of a story. Absolutely. I have to concur. So, my next one was Tomb Raider, the new one.

Yeah. The thing about this movie was, I didn't think it was that bad. I give it a solid B. It's way better than the Angelina Jolie one. That was, you know, a travesty. And this one was at least fairly decent.

And it's modern. And it's not based in, like, woo-woo stuff. You know? It's not about the supernatural, which I really liked. That's a plus. Yeah. It was just a really fun little action movie. And she reminds me of, was it Daisy Ridley from the new Star Wars movies?

That look is, like, hot right now, I guess, in Hollywood. And she looks kind of just like her. This is the girl from that AI movie, right? Where she was the robot? I guess so. Yeah, I guess. Ex Machina or whatever? Ex Machina, yeah. Ex, yeah. I like that movie. Very beautiful girl.

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, that was definitely a plus for the movie. But I didn't mind the story. I didn't mind the casting. I give it a solid B. I actually enjoyed it. And I hope they continue to make them because they left it on, you know, this is like a setup movie. So I'm really hoping the next one will be even better.

Right. Okay. Well, I didn't find too many movies I actually wanted to watch on the flight. So I delved into the TV section and I had had just enough alcohol, I believe, to finally let me do what I said I would never do, which was watch the Orville. Now, it wasn't just you pressuring me to do this.

A friend of the show, Dr. David Teeter, sent multiple emails about how I should be watching the show. So I gave in. I watched it. I watched the first four episodes of the show as part of my flight. And I've got to say, I am shocked that Paramount has not sued them because it isn't kind of like Star Trek, the next generation.

It fucking is Star Trek, the next generation down to the fonts being used. Told you. It is. It's straight up. If you just like I need to get what's that? What was that program that puts other people's faces on stuff that they're using on the interwebs?

Oh, yeah. Celebrity porn. If I just use that program and put Picard's face on them and put blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and just replace all their faces with the next generation cast, this would be a whole new season of the next generation. But it's a good season of next generation, don't you think? I liked it.

Like, I'm going to go watch more of them. Like, fuck, I hate it when you're right. I know you do. I know you do. The downside for you is that they just keep getting better, actually. Okay. It was good. I really enjoyed it. The cast was good. The stories are good. But again, the whole time I was like, how is Paramount not suing them?

Yeah, I'm sure there's some under the table deal going on somewhere. There must be. There has to be. I can't. It is so copyright infringement. It's insane. Yeah. And I also hate it when you're right. And unfortunately for me, you're right on this one, too. I watched Solo on the flight out.

I watched it with you. I saw that you started it and I started it again, too, because I like that movie so much. I enjoyed it thoroughly a second time. I enjoyed it thoroughly the first time. And when I got home, I bought a copy of it so I can watch it on my big TV instead of on the back of a seat that was bouncing up and down because some giant dude kept like, you know, having a seizure and rocking back and forth.

But it was it was fantastic. It was a great little heist movie. Right. It's amazing. So you'll have to tell Bittner that when we talk to him on Friday. Yeah. Yeah. Because God knows he'd never listen to the show. Now, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love the casting. I mean, there were some spots in there where I was just like, man, he does look like Harrison Ford.

Like, yeah, they just think when the angle hit just right. I was like, wow, good job. Yeah. He kind of nailed that half smirk. Yeah. Every time he would do that, it was like, OK, I get I get this. I'm in. Definitely. So that ends our drunk on a plane movie reviews.

Canada edition. Yes. I've been watching the center since I've gotten back. They started season two. I think I mentioned season one when it first came out. But season two is like three quarters of the way through. And I binged a couple or maybe halfway through. I binged a couple of them when I was trying to recover from the trip yesterday.

And this is Bill Pullman's best work since zero effect, which effectively he's playing the same character 20 years later. But it's it's awesome. It is. It's creepy. It's got there's a cult involved this season and it's shot beautifully. If the pacing is really slow, which I really like.

And I don't know. There's just nothing about the show that I don't like. I highly recommend it if you're into that kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, I'm looking at the cast looks pretty good. It's got Carrie Coon from The Leftovers in it. Actually, that's I liked her a lot in that show. So maybe I'll give this a go. Yeah, no.

And definitely start with season one. It was it's really good stuff. Honestly. Now, Iron Fist season two has dropped. I'm going to give you my review of this movie and I'm sorry, series, and I haven't even seen it yet. I don't know how this. Yeah, I was about to say I just I loaded up Netflix last night because we're my wife and I are still working through Better Call Saul.

And I saw that season or Iron Fist season two was there. And I was like, how? And I saw then I saw you put in the show notes. I was like, there's no way he stayed up all night and watched the whole thing. You know why? Because I'm never going to watch it because it's going to suck. I'm just going to tell you right now. There's no way to save that series. I guarantee I still haven't even finished Luke Cage.

I'm never going to finish Luke Cage. I just couldn't get into it. I will watch the shit out of more of them when they're all together. What do they call that? The Defenders. The Defenders. I will watch that. Luke Cage is one of my favorite characters. I just couldn't get into the series again. I don't I will watch one of these episodes.

Okay. I will do that for you, Jason. Okay, I appreciate that. Just tell me if it's still as much of the suck as before. Because the problem with it is Iron Fist. I hate the guy. Yeah, the main character is the problem. I love all the subsidiary characters on Iron Fist. I just can't stand him. Yeah, if they just gave him less time, then it'd be even better.

Yeah, his little ninja girl sidekick. She's awesome. There's a bunch of people in it that are awesome. Everybody but him. Okay, moving on. And in the rules, fuck the rules department. SoundCloud is just gasping for air, going to, you know, make it to their next saving round of financing.

And so they have new personalized playlists that they're sending out every day. Problem is, they're using a metric shit ton of unlicensed mashups. Of course they are. Yeah, because, you know, nobody wants to play by the rules anymore. Well, you know, the funny thing is, if they probably would have started this way, they'd be a huge company.

Right. But they actually tried to follow the rules, which really screwed them, destroyed kind of their business model. So I think this is the Hail Mary, since they're going to go out of business anyways. They're like, we're going to pivot. We're going to be illegal. Like, we should have been in the first place. And hopefully that'll work. Go long. And we're going to throw a Travis Kalanick.

See if we can just break the rules and make it work. Basically, yes. That's what I see happening here. And finally, in media candy today, Parts Unknown, the final episode starts airing on September 23rd. I saw the commercials this morning. Wow, that quickly. Yeah. Okay. So set your DVRs if you don't have them set, or if you even want them, if you care.

I'm going to watch them, so it'll be interesting. Yes, I will as well. At the library. In our live show, Jason talked a little bit about a snippet from 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier.

I had not finished the book at that point. I worked through it while having some downtime while we were in Canada land and stuck at a camp with no Wi-Fi. Actually, here's a little behind-the-scenes secret. Everybody, we had Wi-Fi in our cabin. You're going to get us lynched.

I finished it. It was a great book. He said everything that we've been saying for five years on our show, except he said it better than we do. Yeah, because he's smarter than we are. Yeah. That's about it. I highly recommend reading it. Everybody needs to read this book.

If you're listening to the show, you need to read this book. Is it going to make me delete my social media accounts? No. But it certainly made me think about it for 10 seconds. Yeah, that's about it, really. I mean, it was great. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like 144 pages.

You can get through it in, you know, like a day, day or two. It really lays it out. It lays it out. The algorithm is the problem. Yeah. I mean, and also, the really nice part about it is he lays out what the solution is. And he basically says, if we do this, it will fix all the problems.

But we'll never do that. So, nope. Moron of the week. Jason Foe over on Twitter sent us, is there a hashtag for Moron of the Week? Hashtag MOTW. I like that. Well, feel free to use that, listeners.

And he sent us a link. Texas officer kills man in flat. She mistakes for her own. Yeah, this made the news. So, a Texas policewoman went into a house that wasn't hers that she thought was. Saw the person who lives in the apartment there and shot him dead. Derp.

Yeah. Fortunately for them, they handed the local police office, handed it straight over to the, you know, the Texas officials. So, the state police are handling this. And I saw a follow-up on this this morning where they're probably going to be throwing the book at her. Big time. Yeah. As they should.

Now, Jason, you know I love crypto. Oh, I know you do. And I love baseball. So, I'm so happy to announce that two of my favorite things have come together. At MLBCryptobaseball.com Yes, the Major League Baseball Network has decided to make crypto coins out of a bunch of players.

And you can get them as giveaways when you go to games. Or you can purchase them to collect them and put them in your crypto wallet. Now, you know, I wish I would have had this information while we were still at the conference.

So, I could have gone to all the crypto bros and said, doesn't this mean anything? I mean, baseball is giving away crypto tokens. And you still think that this is a real thing? And I'm supposed to take you seriously? No. Well, come on, man. After CryptoKitties, it was just a matter of time.

It was just a matter of time. So, it's nothing more. Crypto is nothing more than a marketing gimmick now. That's all it is. I mean, they're kind of cute. If I go to a Dodger game, I might get a Justin Turner CryptoCoin. Where would you keep it? In my...

What was the porn one called? Oh, the Spank Bank. In my Spank Bank. Wait, I'm not putting Justin Turner in my Spank Bank. That's weird. That's weird. No, kind of gross. Okay. And we actually talked about this one on the bus ride up, but it didn't make the show. A couple accused of swiping homeless man's donation will likely be indicted.

That's the breaking news on this one. Kate McClure and Mark D'Amico, basically, they're asking the judge to kind of put the civil case on hold right now because they have to find a new attorney because their current attorney can't represent them in a criminal case, which is probably where it's going to go to.

Right. So they raided their house, basically took their BMW and anything of value and all their computers. And the couple originally said there was $150,000 left of the money, and they were withholding it because they were concerned Bobbitt would blow the cash on drugs. When Bobbitt filed suit against the couple in August, a judge ordered the couple to turn over what was left of the money.

But by then, Badway told Bobbitt's attorney nothing was left of the $400,000. People suck. Kickstarter in the balls. Kickstarter in the balls, yes. It's not a GoFundMe, it's a GoFuckMe. Yep. Feedback loop.

We've got a couple new Patreon subscribers, Mark, Joseph, Eric, Eric, Eric, and Mark. Thank you, guys. Thanks, guys. Over at Facebook, Mike wrote us, Hey, Grumps, I have another question. It's a two-parter. If everyone stopped having kids for 10 years, how many people would there be in 10 years?

And part two is, if every couple had only one kid, how fast would the population drop by half? Not exactly a tech question, but it seems like a game theory or AIs and learned machines would enjoy playing out. Thanks for adding a little algorithm to my otherwise arithmetic day. Okay. I have no idea.

I think there's a lot of variables that we would have to talk about. If we stopped having kids for 10 years, do we still have sex? Or do we have to have stop having sex for 10 years? Because when that 10 years is up, there's going to be a lot of kids immediately, I would say. Or a lot of suicides in between now and then.

Yes. So, yeah, you know, I don't know. Thanks for writing us. Yeah, I don't like it. It's too early for math. I don't like homework. Sorry. I really don't like homework. Yeah. Over on Twitter, Gwydian writes in, Wouldn't the first warning sign of a fraudulent ICO is that it is an ICO?

Yes. Yes. And he sends us the ZDNet article. Oh, man. And Quantum Leap writes in, Trend Micro, thank God I'm only using this one at work. I got Kika at home. It seems the App Store new review method isn't going as well as thought. And this is apparently additional Mac App Store apps have been caught stealing and uploading your browser history.

So it wasn't just the first one. There are more. So there's more of them now. Yes. And Moss 6502 sends us, Dude, there's a podcast about scooters. Micromobility. Yeah. Micromobility explores the disruption to urban transport that comes from new electric, lightweight utility vehicles.

Using the history of computing as a framework, we unpack how e-bikes, scooters, and more will change how people get around cities. Lovely. Yeah. Can't wait to not listen to that. Unsubscribe. Over at GOG.show, David writes us, this is the, I wonder if this is the same guy.

This is the second time that we've been asked about this. Do you work for DuckDuckGo, David? What do you guys think of DuckDuckGo? I'm trying to de-Google my life, even deleted my non-work account, and I'm using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. It's definitely not as good as Google. I'm curious, given your stances on privacy, how you feel about it, use it, etc.

It's definitely not as good as Google. Yeah, that's it right there. So we use Google. You know, we do the best we can with switching off all the things that you have to switch off on Google to try to claim back some of your privacy. You know, private browsers, all that sort of stuff. But I tried to use DuckDuckGo for a while.

It's not as good as Google, and I don't have the time to waste. That's the thing. We both did an experiment for like a week or two, maybe a year or so ago, maybe two years. Who knows? It all bleeds together. But yeah, the consensus was, yeah, I'm trying to find things, so why am I going to use a search engine that can't find things as good as the one that's standing right there in front of me?

So. Yes. That was pretty much it. Peter writes in, Howdy Geeks, can't start off this message without saying I love the show. And then he goes on to talk about how he's moving into a new apartment and got a new, or actually not a new, he got a 2012 iMac and an early 2011 17-inch MacBook Pro because he's an IT intern and asks about SetApp.

Now, SetApp is one of those subscription software services where you can get anything that's in there to, you know, run on your Mac. It's $9.99 a month. So you have to look at the apps that are on there, what the cost is to just buy those apps versus to rent them for a year.

And I went through the list and there's a couple on there that are okay, but for the most part, you're going to save money by just buying the app and waiting for the upgrade cycle if it's something that you really need. Like iStat Menus is on there, that's one that I use, and there are a couple utilities. CleanMyMac is really nice, but for the most part, that's just a bunch of crap apps.

Yeah, that's a lot of stuff that I would never use personally. But, you know, it is what it is. Just do the math on it. Sit down and do the math and you can figure out whether it's worth it or not. And you can also figure out if you're doing the math how many people would have if we didn't fuck for 10 years. That would be appreciated. Yeah, get on that one too.

How many mathematicians listening to the show? Okay, so Ryan writes us, Hey Grumps, it's been a while since I've written to you all. Last time was in regards to the chemistry of ice cream sandwiches not melting. Oh yeah, I remember that. This time, yeah, I remember that too. This time, I want to give you a bit of information about cell phones, microwaves, and your head.

After hearing about the microwave auditory effect, I briefly took a look into it. The main effect here is far less interesting than the New York Times article would have you believe. That effect is heat. The same effect that warns your leftovers is the same that causes the audio effect. Microwave ovens add far more energy to your food than a cell phone does to your head.

A cell phone can raise the temperatures of your head by approximately 0.1 C. That's Celsius from Canada land. According to an article titled The Health Hazards of Mobile Phones, this isn't much, but we're now in an age where we're working to understand how small stimuli can affect your health over time. Personally, it's probably not much unless you're very sensitive.

Example, you get tons of migraines. As for how you get sound out of this heat, it's due to how the ear works. Pressure differences. If you remember ideal gas theory, pressure, okay, we might just put the rest of this in the show notes. It is a lot of science here. The interesting thing about this is we were kind of having a conversation with the host of the Foodist podcast, Daria Rose, on our long drive back to the airport.

And she scared the crap out of us with food in general and everything because what was her line, Jason, exactly? All I see is poison and death. Yes, all I see is poison and death as she talked about stuff. So I might send her an email asking her if she'd be interested in doing an article about microwaves and how that can mess up our food and us.

So we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah, I think she's got better things to do, but we'll give it a shot. Neil writes, in your software engineer discussion reminded me about the story of the man fined $500 for crime of writing I am an engineer in an email to the government. Be careful calling yourself an engineer.

Even if you have a degree in engineering, you may get fined by the state board. This is over on Motherboard. Yeah, so yeah. He sent a link over on Motherboard in September 2014. Mats Jarlstrom, an electronics engineer living in Beaverton, Oregon, sent an email to the state's engineering board. The email claimed that yellow traffic lights didn't last long enough, which puts the public at risk.

I would like to present these facts for your review and comments. And he did a lot of math. There's a math guy. This email didn't get him a meeting. He got a threat. The Oregon State Board of Examineers for Engineering and Land Surveying responded with this dystopian message. The ORS 672.020 parentheses one and parentheses prohibits the practice of engineering an organ without registration at a minimum.

Your use of the title electronics engineer and the statement I am an engineer create violations. And he was officially fined $500 by the state for the crime of practicing engineering without being registered. Remind me not to move to Oregon. Yeah. And Barrett wrote us heard the software engineering versus developer argument.

As a software engineer, I see the difference being that developers code to a spec that they have usually no input on, whereas a software engineer is involved in how the code is architected and how it will interact with other systems. If that's the case, then we're engineers. We're engineers. Yeah, we're engineers. Nobody gave us a spec. You know?

Nope. The spec was from the sales guy. Make that blink. Okay. Yeah. That was about it. Joanna writes in, Hi guys, question. I have to store tons of docks in the cloud for my job as a college instructor. I need to be able to reach them regardless of my location. About a year ago, I bought more storage on Google Drive and then was shafted since it doesn't sync anymore.

I still have a lot of storage there, but it's updated. No sync quality defeats the entire purpose of my purchase, and I also use free Dropbox, but I've run out of space there and their annual fee is astronomical on an educator's budget. What would you do in this situation? Much respect for you both. Um, hmm.

Well, couldn't you, you could conceivably write off your Dropbox subscription from your taxes in theory, which may help or may not. You know, if you're looking for a long-term cheaper solution, the cheapest thing I could think of is get a flash drive and carry that around with you everywhere because that's what we all did before there was a cloud.

Zip disk. Get a zip disk. That's what I, I still do that. I have a small USB drive that I keep in my backpack for, that's got all my work stuff on it because it's way too much to put up on a Dropbox and try to keep synced. Um, or you can go the route that Jason did for a while.

You can spend the money once on a box that you can just set up at home that you can connect to from anywhere and keep your own private cloud that has stuff on it that, uh, you know, it's a one-time cost for you and that's that. Yeah, it's a big cost though. I think over time it's not really worth it to do the Synology route for that because it's going to cost like a thousand dollars to get something decent up and running.

No, not Synology. I'm just thinking we talked about something a couple years back where you could just buy a little box that you plug in that gets on your interwebs. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just basically a storage drive that you can access from anyone. Yeah, just get like a little cheap. That's going to be like a hundred bucks that you spend once. Yeah, but then you've got to worry about tunneling through and, you know, then you've got to put it outside you put it in the DMZ and all this stuff and it's a little technical so I don't know what kind of educator you are but, um, yeah, that's weird that you can't sync with Google Drive anymore.

I guess you have to have a business account. Oh, that's what it was because I just had to go through this because I just got a business account and the Google Drive file sync only works with business accounts now. Yeah, that's a tough one but, honestly, I do what Brian does. I've got a two terabyte USB drive that I keep in my backpack.

It's encrypted so if it gets lost or stolen nobody can open it but for the most part that'll cost you like a... And make copies of it frequently. Yeah, yeah. That's why you buy two and you just sync it when you get home. Yeah, you buy two, you leave one at home and you carry one with you. Yeah, get Carbon Copy Cloner at home. When you just plug it in they should sync automatically and keep the one at home in a fireproof box.

So I'm glad we gave you a very simple answer to your very simple question. Yeah, I mean that's certainly the easiest and cheapest method and it will work for you. Not everything needs to be in the cloud. You can just carry it with you. Yeah, buy a drive and there's no subscription. Yeah. Mad Mike writes us, you've discussed frequently your frustration slash exasperation at understanding how one becomes verified on Twitter.

A better question is how does one become a friend of the show? Frequently you will refer to someone using that honorific. How many bags of maple cookies does it take to get you referred to as one? Note, I have supplied Jason with zero bags so I'm not implying I should already have that status. Enjoy your time at Camp Walden. For some reason I heard you say it was in British Columbia.

No. It was Ontario. And today I find out you're going to be in my backyard more or less so keep the damn noise down you crazy hippies and if you need a place to escape let me know. Well if you had Wi-Fi we would have been there. If you had Wi-Fi we would have been there. Friends of the show generally they tend to actually be friends in real life.

Some people that have just been kicking around for five years that we've gotten to know stick around you'll make it. Yeah. Basically you can send us money that always makes us happy. You become a friend of the show immediately if there's money involved. Yes. You could buy your way into being a friend. Yes. We're kind of like New Zealand. You can get citizen status by just spending money.

No just chat it up with us. That's what we do. We talk to everybody. Rick writes in mention of Santa Monica triggers this song in my mind. It's by it's Fat Boys can make it in Santa Monica. I don't know. By the nitty gritty dirt band. I've never heard that before. Me neither. So yeah there you go.

Tim writes us ha ha whoever thought putting bike sharing in Manchester was a good idea needs having their head seen to. And this is an article over at the Beeb. Crime hit Mobike suspends Manchester sharing scheme. Bike sharing firm Mobike is to pull out of Manchester after losing 10% of its cycles each month to theft and vandalism.

The Chinese firm said too many had been stolen dumped in canals and bins had locks hacked off or had been set on fire. That's some dedication set it on fire. Now see this is this is what we need to do with Bird here. No I was a friend of the show speaking of which Fergal who was originally from Ireland and has recently moved back once told me when Bird we've always gotten arguments about Bird here he said there's no way that this company could ever exist in Dublin because everybody threw it in the river and apparently that is what's happening in Manchester as well.

Santa Monica just needs a river that's all. That's right. We got an ocean. I have seen a few set on fire. Oh that's nice. Actually they weren't set on fire they just exploded. Yeah I think they just exploded. Scott writes in hey guys I've heard you question how Yahoo still generates as much traffic as it does.

I think I remember hearing a while back that a lot of it was due to fantasy sports and fantasy football. Keep up the great work. Yeah that was it for quite a long time. Yahoo was one of the few places that still kept fantasy sports and fantasy football stuff going but now everybody's got apps and there are different companies that basically exist just to do it so I don't know if Yahoo still has such a strong stranglehold on that.

It was the only thing that they basically had cornered a market on but I think that market has sailed. Over on iTunes we got some five star ratings this week. The first from Derek Nickel. How much is too much? I catch myself laughing like an idiot on my drive to and from work and then I learn something.

Great show guys. Thank you. And we got a five star from Alan Palin. Twice a week now be still my heart. Love the show. Love the discussion points and I love the bleak outlook. I'm newish to the world of IT and this really helps keep me in the loop. All right. Thank you. 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.

If you're so inclined please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. Closing shout outs! Once again a shout out to all the fireside peeps the people that ran it the volunteers the staff at the camp the people that attended it was a great time and I'm still cold.

See I've had the opposite effect I am hot. I got used to the cold and like now it's you know in Southern California so I'm just like sweating profusely even with the air conditioner on and standing naked in front of it going make me cold! Nope.

No. So everybody was so nice to us there a large part it was Canada and they're very nice and since we are recording today it is September 11th I believe the 17th year 17th anniversary of September 11th I wanted to read this story once again it appeared up on Mental Floss and it's you know with all the shit in the world it's nice to have some hope and hear about some nice people so this is September 11th and the hospitable people of Gander Newfoundland which is in Canada in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks our Canadian neighbors sprang into action

to help clear American airspace of any other potentially dangerous flights this action was known as Operation Yellow Ribbon and in those uncertain first hours after the attack it was hugely helpful the mission also made a tiny town in Newfoundland world famous for its hospitality Canadian authorities began diverting flights heading into the US to various locations around Canada to help neutralize any lingering threats but the task was a tricky one it wouldn't have made much sense to pull flights away from American airspace only to route them to Canada's major centers so they had to find so the ideal landing spots for these planes had to be relatively remote

while also having a large enough airport to accommodate all the traffic as luck would have it Canada had just tested an airport in Gander Newfoundland the tiny town only boasted 10,000 residents but when it lacked in size it more than made up for an airport capacity the Gander International Airport had previously served as a refueling stop for transatlantic flights and had served as a staging point for U-boat hunting flights during World War II they ended up getting 38 flights in the wake of the September 11th attacks second only to Halifax's 47 diverted flights landing all the planes in Gander was easy

figuring out to do with what to do with the 6,700 plus passengers and crew members who were stuck on the ground until flights resumed was a bit tougher towns of 10,000 people aren't exactly built to accommodate suddenly 66% population surges so they didn't have hotel or restaurant capacity to take in all the flyers their population may have been small but the town was also immensely hospitable to say the locals bent over backwards to accommodate their unexpected guests would be a gross understatement when flyers stepped off their planes the citizens met them with homemade bagged lunches

the town converted its schools and large buildings into temporary shelters and when those lodgings filled up citizens took strangers into their own homes medical personnel saw patients and filled prescriptions free of charge when the stranded passengers finally got to fly home a few days later they couldn't believe how wonderful their Canadian hosts had been and in 2016 to thank the town for its role in helping thousands of temporary transients in the wake of the attacks New Yorkers gifted Gander with a piece of steel from the World Trade Center's South Tower pretty cool huh?

that is pretty cool well done Canada until next time I'm Jason DeFillippo and I'm Brian Schulmeister 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 or at GOG.show slash 280 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 soon

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