314: Everyone is Garbage

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Good morning, Brian. Good morning. It's chilly. It is chilly in here, yes. Today, it was only 43 when I came out to the studio, but yesterday was the first day where we actually had a guest in the studio to do video and it worked.

We had ex-FBI negotiator Chris Voss over to my house and we did a show and it worked, which I didn't sleep for two nights because I didn't think it was going to work. But it actually did work. So I'm relieved at that. So now I have a video studio in my garage.

Nice. And another little bit of follow-up. I talked about the guys who walked across Antarctica recently and the New York Times has a follow-up article on that called Reflections on Antarctica. And I highly recommend it. If you followed anything that these guys did, go check out that article. It'll be in the show notes. And it was pretty cool. Like, you know, when the trip was over, they, you know, one guy won, one guy lost, but they just, you know, embraced like brothers because they both went through hell and back going across Antarctica.

So it was a nice article with some really good photos of those guys. I thought it was a nice closure to that whole episode. Okay. And when we were in Canada, we got a deck of cards called FNBirds. Remember those? Yes, I do. They're hilarious. They're utterly hilarious.

But it turns out the same guy that built FN, or not built, but created FNBirds also runs the Twitter account SwearTrek that we've talked about on the show before, which makes a lot of sense. Yeah, actually, that does make a considerable amount of sense. I'd forgotten about SwearTrek, and I looked it back up when you put it in the show notes, and it's quite clever.

Yeah, no, I follow it, so I always see it. And then I just, it, like, something came around where it's like, oh, it's the same guy. Well, that's kind of cool. It's like, this guy just loves profanity. What can you say? He does. And some follow-up in the world of unintended consequences. I love these. There's an article over at the Mercury called, Why Decluttering and Adopting the Marie Kondo Method Isn't Always a Good Thing.

Turns out people are garbage, and what they like to do is leave their garbage outside of places like Goodwill, and thus, they're contaminated goods then. Right, because they're just dumping. So if you leave your bags, yeah, they're just dumping them. They don't know what's happened. You didn't do the handoff. You didn't get the receipt.

Right? So at that point, then they have to put it in their trash, and then they have to pay for the trash. Right. So you're just offloading your shit onto somebody else without any regard for what they have to go through. So people, stop being garbage people, and if you want to get rid of stuff because it does not spark any joy anymore, then take it in the door, hand it to some poor guy who's making four bucks an hour who will give you a receipt, and then somebody can actually then buy it, doing some good in the world.

Otherwise, you're just filling up landfills, and you can just put it on your curb like everybody else. Or recycle your stuff. Be a decent human being, people. Yeah, seriously. I do love all the articles that have come out, though, recently about this thing going, I can't wait to buy all your good stuff. Yeah, there's the other side of the coin where people are like, I'm getting some great stuff for cheap.

This is awesome. Please, please, do not spark any joy. Give it to me. It will spark my joy. Look, I actually, I mean, as I mentioned, my wife wanted to do this, and we did it through like two rooms in our house, and it was actually really nice to declutter and get rid of a bunch of stuff that we didn't need anymore.

But the one thing that I really took from all of this is the way she folds her clothes. That is genius. I am down with that. So I started doing that with all my clothes and my kids' clothes, and it's been wonderful. A little bit more effort, but worth it. Yeah, I think I did that when I read the book, and it's just been like a no-brainer ever since then.

Yeah. So I did get that out of the book, even though she's batshit crazy. Yeah. What are you going to do? And I found this other one. This was over at The Hustle. They did a really good article on Goodhart's Law, and it's when targets and metrics are bad for business.

When the metrics are all fake? Well, yes, that's part of it, you know, for the most part. But it's like once you give somebody a target to go for, then they just put everything else on hold and just go for that target and not care about what the job is that they're actually supposed to be doing.

Right. And it just drives me crazy when people do this kind of stuff. Remember K-locks? You know what that means? No. K-locks were 1,000 lines of code. Oh, okay. So you were supposed to be, like, when you worked back in the old days at IBM or AT&T, you were judged on your K-locks.

How many lines of code you could write in a given amount of time. Which, when somebody tells me that, I'm like, why would you want people to write more code? Wouldn't you want better code instead of just making more of it? Seems silly to me, but this is a really good article where they put together a bunch of different articles and just talk about how, you know, metrics alone for job performance is really, it backfires.

This is the law of unintended consequences. It does not actually make people better at what they do. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. You should be judged on your end product. This is crazy. But that's the world now, right? We can count things, so let's count them. Well, of course, because you have HR people who, you know, ostensibly have no skills whatsoever to give to the world.

You know my love for HR people. Oh, yeah. I think the feeling is mutual from what I've heard. Okay, that's good. That's good. Yes. No, yeah, the first people up against the fence when the revolution comes are the HR people. I cannot stand them.

But they need metrics to be able to give raises and do all this other stuff because, you know, we're idiots. And it's like, oh, if you just do a good job and you can show that you did a good job, well, then you should get a raise. That's how it should go. But you have to have these arbitrary metrics that, you know, it's like standardized testing in schools.

How's that worked out for us? Huh? Seriously, not well. No, not at all. And finally, I've got for follow up how IOT enabled scooters, bikes and cars are making streets safe. I wanted to throw my computer against the wall when I read this.

Did you get a chance to read this? I did. This is. Yeah. This was obvious. Obviously, this writer had some metrics for page views and amount of words he needed to use. Yeah. This is by Michael Gurr.

Michael Gurr is GM of manufacturing and automotive at Cloudera, focusing on and focusing on and machine learning. Oh, oh, I see. There's a cookie pop up that was in the way. Focusing on how big data analytics and machine learning is being applied within each industry segment.

Now, that's also that's that's word salad right there. That is just word salad. It means nothing. And the article that he posted also means nothing. It is a bunch of word salad. This is also the only article that he's ever written for the next web. And I would I would strongly encourage the next web to not bring this guy back.

This is it's mostly taken straight out of the press releases from scooter companies. Yes. Counting the supposed benefits of these things that have not played out well in real life. And he's ignoring that fact and chalking up all of our complaints. And there are a lot of complaints. They're all over the web to predictable initial backlash to disruptive technologies.

No, they suck and they're causing problems and people aren't using them legally and we don't have the infrastructure. So you're saying that this has to dramatically influence the reengineering of city infrastructures. Where's the money for that going to come from? We have to reengineer existing city infrastructures to be able to use these safely.

We can't. We don't. We won't. Fuck you. Remember when they said the Segway was going to cause cities to have to rebuild themselves because of the new paradigm of motions? Yeah. Yeah. Fuck you. You're right.

And what I love about this is this guy apparently does not watch the scooters behaving badly Instagram account because every day there's somebody who is in critical condition who is like injured for the rest of their lives because they did something dumb on a scooter. This is not making things better at all.

It's making things worse. Granted, yes. If you want to get rid of cars tomorrow and everybody just has to drive a scooter, fine. Get on it. Or dump a couple billion dollars into reengineering city streets. Sure. But where's those billions of dollars going to come from? Ain't going to come from the scooter companies.

No. That's for damn sure. Yeah. Anyways, same argument that we're making all the time. Stupid article. The only thing I really enjoyed about this article was the plug-in that brings up the related articles. So it says, read next, The Hidden Secrets of Insect Poop. I see that too. Yes. That is probably a better article.

What I also loved was the photo that they have on the front page. Now, there's a massive, like, 17-foot-tall bird scooter on a crosswalk. There's a tiny human in the crosswalk. And then there's a midget cop who's out of focus, by the way, in the photo.

I don't know what this photo is supposed to be. What is this? It's not a scooter either, because when I first looked at it, obviously because the scooter is considerably out of scale to everything else. I actually, my eye ignored it because it didn't see anything. And all I saw was a Starbucks coffee. I thought it was an ad. Okay.

There you go. No. Yeah. There's this wee little human next to this massive bird scooter. And then, why is the cop there? This makes no sense. I don't get it. This entire article does not spark any joy. It does not spark joy. French Data Protection Watchdog fines Google $57 million under GDPR.

We have our first case. We do. All right. We'll see if they can collect. That's the problem, right? Let's see. They got fined, so now what happens? Yeah. What this is about is the Android sign-up process.

Because Google is forcing you to get a Google account when you sign up for your Android phone, if you don't have one already. And they're checking boxes that shouldn't be checked automatically. And they're doing some nefarious stuff that we've always talked about that they shouldn't be doing. And, you know, there's just too many taps.

Too many taps is the way that they kind of generalize what's going on here. Just cut a few. It'll be perfect. Yeah. Amadeus reference for you people out there who doesn't see it. It's just sad because a couple years back, before GDPR, but, I mean, there were already, you know, different laws, the EU, and different things about what, you know, if you had to unselect things or pre-select things on check-ins and all that.

And I remember I was working on a project that was going to be multinational. And I remember just sitting in the meeting going, why are we going to do 50 different versions of this and have a sniffer? How about we just uncheck everything automatically and let people check them in? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want to get the data. No, can't do that. Can't do that.

Or we could just be good people. Nope. No, no, no, no. That's not how things work. Silly me. All right. Let me go write my thousand lines of code to cover all this then. Yep. Yep. And here at the end of the article, it says, finally, by default, Google ticks a box that says, I agree to the processing of my information as described above and further explained in the privacy policy.

So this is when you create your account. Yes. And broad consent like this is forbidden under GDPR. You can't do that. Right. Cannot do that, which is good, which is good. Like somebody's watching now. Finally, 25 years too late, granted, but.

And only not in our country. So, yeah. Yeah. Nothing here. Forget it. Yeah. Oh, man. So the DHS, Department of Homeland Security, has released an emergency order to prevent DNS hijacking. Right. Turns out, since nobody's home at our government right now and lots of people are furloughed and not getting paid, which is still bullshit, they had to pull people back in because there are DNS hijacking attacks that are going on right now that are pretty severe.

Wait, are you saying that when people find out that the cops aren't working, they'll commit more crimes? Go figure. Go figure. I think this was a plot point in Die Hard 3 when all the cops went downtown to go look at all the schools and the kids were just robbing everything.

It's like, oh, yeah, yeah. When the cops aren't around, people will be bad. Oh, did we mention people are garbage? We have mentioned that. Oh, I forgot about that. So this is an emergency directive which makes people come back to work and secure their DNS system. Either if they're running a third-party system, they have to set up two-factor auth, or they have to, you know, rechange all their passwords internally if they're running their own DNS servers.

Okay. And, okay, that's good. That's good. How about we just open the government again and let people go back to work? Oh, wait, that's not on the table. Never mind. So, yeah, the Department of Homeland Security is at least trying to mitigate this problem right now. So that's good. I got to say, I had no idea that they were even involved in the internet.

Well, they have their own websites. I mean, there's a bunch of DHS sites out there. But interesting. What are you going to do? Anyways, what are you going to do? So my position on genetic testing companies like 23andMe and all that has been well-established on this program. I was like, there's no way in hell I'm giving any of these people my data.

You know, the privacy protections and laws there are next to nothing. We know that they're just going to take your data and do whatever with it. And then it basically came out that if enough of my friends and not my family did it, I was screwed anyways. And basically, they've almost reached a critical mass of people that it doesn't matter if you give them your DNA or not, because they'll be able to figure it out from everybody else's.

Yeah. Guess what we found out, Jason? What did we find out, Brian? The same thing happens with social media. Oh, really? You can stay off social media all you want, but new studies have proven it's possible to create a 95% accurate profile of you from your friends' accounts.

So as long as we know who your friends are, and guess what? Because anytime you sign up with these things, they go through your phone and they get all your phone information and they know who you are and they know who your friends are and they'll get your data from other places, even if you're not on Facebook or Twitter, you can opt out all you want, but they're still going to be able to profile you and they probably are.

Yep. Kind of knew that one. Isn't that sucky? That's no real surprise. No, I mean, we've kind of known that anyways, but here's the first study that's actually, you know, kind of confirmed it and they put together an algorithm that does it. So that is, you know, that is out there and admitted to, as opposed to Facebook and Twitter and everybody else who aren't admitting that they do this and have this.

Now we know, of course, they do. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, sign off all you want now. Doesn't matter. Game over. Doesn't matter. Yeah. Resistance is futile. Yeah. Stay off the internet. If you don't want to be, if you don't want to play, you know, what is it? The only, the only option is not to play from, from war games.

So, yeah, we live in the world of the whopper now. So, I love this. Amazon has built an electronic vest to improve worker and robot interactions. So, apparently there were problems when people would go in to work on robots where they would get, you know, run over by a robot.

And because the robots weren't smart enough to know that anybody is there. So, this vest, which basically is a pair of suspenders and a tool belt, it's not really a vest. I don't get it. But, um, it's got sensors in it to let the robots know to go into slow-mo mode when humans are around, which is a good idea.

It's pretty cool. It's not a bad idea. No, it's not a bad idea at all. I feel like you're playing laser tag. It kind of is, yeah, with your life. And, uh, but the thing that got me about this is there is a department at Amazon called Amazon Robotics because they use a lot of robots in their warehouses and, and they're going to have flying robots soon, which is interesting.

So, we're all going to have to wear these vests. Yeah. If you can get ahold of one of these vests, then you're, you're ahead of the game. Totally. Yeah. So, how long is it until somebody hacks one of these things and, uh, figures out how to get it out to everybody? So, when, when the drones do come, we have very slow drones, very slow drones.

Right. Now, WhatsApp has made a move to restrict the propagation of fake news. Right. What they've done is basically said that you can only send messages to five people now, five people max. You cannot spam a list, you know, of thousands of people like you used to be able to do.

Right. And this is because there have been some really terrible things happening because of WhatsApp. And, and by terrible, I mean, there's a story that I found when I was researching this about an Indian village that turned into several Indian villages that turned into lynch mobs because people were sending fake notices about people who were visiting their village and said that they were there to kidnap their children.

And people were killed. People were killed because of this, which I think the company should be held fucking responsible for, which is, I mean, it's a platform, Jason. I know it's just a platform. Oh, but it just, I mean, it boils my blood to hear stories like this where people are just literally, you know, attacked, dragged from their cars and hung because somebody sent a message that had no basis in fact whatsoever.

Right. And these people who are just fucking stupid, back to garbage people, believed it and then killed somebody because of it. It boils the blood, honestly. So, so at least WhatsApp is trying to mitigate this.

But yeah, I don't know if it's going to do any good. We'll see. Yeah. Cause you send it to five people, they send it to five people and then boom, you're back to where you were. Yeah. No, that's how it goes. We're going to have links to both of these articles in the show notes. I'd highly recommend everybody go read the, the BBC article on the lynch mob incidents in India.

If you really want to know what the hell's going on over there, because a, there's some evil people and some dumb ass motherfuckers over there. That's all I'm saying. Right. And popular WordPress plugin is hacked by angry former employee. This one, this one put a smile on my face.

I thought so. I thought you really enjoy this one. Yes. The WordPress multilingual plugin had a contractor who stole the database, left the back door onto their website so they could, so he'd get back in and hack the website with his SSH keys and then basically pinged everybody on the list, which is like 600,000 paying customers for this plugin.

And, and just said, Hey, there's a bunch of security vulnerabilities in this thing that I told everybody about, but they're not fixing. So here you go. Great. So they rebuilt their website, put it back up and to get rid of that guy's, guy's issues.

I'm sure they all, I don't think they rebuilt their website. I think they just invalidated all the SSH keys and just rebuilt those. I highly doubt that they actually did anything beyond that, but probably not. We know how this works. People are lazy. Exactly. Yeah. They said we, we, we rebuilt our server from scratch.

Bullshit. You didn't know you didn't know you didn't. But this guy's, if, if they know who this guy is, which it sounds like they do, this guy's going to jail. I mean, this is, this is one of the dumbest damn things I've ever seen. It should have been in moron of the week, but I had to put it in the news because it is also security related and, uh, yeah, man, what a dumb ass I've been, I have been drunk and pissed off before and have done stupid things.

Yeah. Hence the, uh, the mutual appreciation society that you always have with, uh, human resources. Exactly. Yes. Yes. And Paisley park. I got, I got fired from Paisley park. Prince fired me because I sent an email from the wrong AOL account and it showed my IP address, which was the same IP address that I was sending the other emails to Paisley park from saying that you need to fix this.

Well, yeah, that was my own damn fault. So I cost the company $25,000, but surprisingly they didn't fire me, which, uh, was, was crazy. But yes, people do stupid things on the internet and this guy did a really stupid thing. You can't, you cannot do this. No, the computer fraud and abuse act is actually a thing.

And you hacked into their website, you defaced their website and you stole their database with their passwords. This shows actual physical damages that they're going to have to pay for, which means you sir are going to jail. Yes. Yes. Unless he's in Croatia, which means nope, not going to jail.

And from the, from the language in the, the page that he put up, pretty sure he's in Croatia or Romania or somewhere in Eastern Europe. Right. Ah, okay. Well, let's switch back to over to the, uh, resistance is futile, um, theme that I've been kind of running with a little bit.

Now I know, I believe, I don't know. I don't think you're a fan of Kashmir Hill. I don't know who that is. Oh, I thought this was the writer over at Gizmodo that you always complained about whenever I had one. Oh, is this the one that always writes the Facebook articles? Cause he has the same doing new ones now.

Oh, okay. She's moved on. I need you to give her a chance cause she's doing something kind of interesting. Reporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and intention and used a custom built VPN to do it.

Here's what happened. Now, uh, I'm only read the Amazon one. I thought I'll get to the rest at some point, but the Amazon one is kind of funny because you think Amazon is just, you know, store. I, if I don't want to use Amazon, I just don't shop on Amazon anymore.

Right? No, not that easy. Um, obviously there's echoes. She had one. She couldn't do that. She couldn't go to whole foods anymore. And as she discovered, as she was going through this process, so many websites host through Amazon web services. Now it's impossible. You cannot use the internet without using Amazon.

Oh yeah. I know Amazon has become. I mean, Netflix hosts on AWS. I, you can't, there's so many sites. I mean, everything it's, it's, it's AWS is like 90% of the internet now because it's so easy to host there. Then you've got, uh, was it, uh, what's Microsoft's one?

And then you've got Google's. You just can't even know. It's impossible. That's, that's what she discovered. As she set up her custom VPN to block everything, Amazon, including anything that came from AWS, she said 99% of the web was completely unusable. I either couldn't go to the site at all because it was completely hosted or images would be missing or video would be missing because Amazon's using, you know, people are using Amazon as a content distribution network, blah, blah, blah.

It's amazing to me that Amazon has become that big, but it has. So it was really interesting article and I'm looking forward to seeing how she does with the other deck giants. Yeah. I mean, it's, it, it doesn't surprise me. I mean, if she wanted to just get rid of amazon.com, that's fine. But trying to block AWS is, that's a, you know, that's futile, utterly futile.

You cannot do it because everybody uses AWS. It's so easy to spin up an instance on AWS and build it, build your website on it. And it's cheap. That's why everybody uses it, you know? And that's why like, you know, I think a third of Amazon's profit comes from AWS alone.

So, which is, which is also kind of scary. Now that I think about it, I'm like, oh wait, I didn't even think about the fact that they control the entire internet. Yes. Right. It is a little scary. Yeah. A single point of failure, people. What happened to monopoly laws?

Oh, that's right. There aren't any. Yeah. Now I thought this one should actually go in more on in the week, but there's, I guess not. It's kind of news. Facebook is investing $7.5 million into an AI ethics institute. In Germany.

In Germany. In Germany. Auf Deutsch. Yeah. Which is good, but ironic that a company that has absolutely no ethics whatsoever is investing into an AI ethics institute. Now, granted, it's AI. So, that's good. We've been talking about how this needs to happen and people need to get more into it.

So, yay Facebook. How about some ethics with your company now? Yeah. Researching them for AI. Yeah. Let's have some people ethics, please. Yes. That would be nice. Yeah. Ain't gonna happen. The last story I found for news I just thought was kind of clever and funny and interesting because we've talked a lot about, you know, concerns over blue light and eye strain and all that sort of stuff recently.

And this article talks about that people have been complaining about this since Victorian times. They're concerned that new innovations like mass printing was blamed for an increase in eye problems and is responsible for failing vision. So, it's been going on for a really long time and the science isn't entirely out yet.

So, we don't really know. But people have been complaining about new technologies destroying your eye health for an awful long time. Well, as somebody who just went to the eye doctor this week and came out with four prescriptions, I'm thinking maybe it might be true because I'm blind as a bat now.

And I have to have two pair of glasses and two pair of progressive glasses, which I cannot stand. One for standing at the computer and one for when I actually leave the house. It's redonkulous like how bad my eyes have gotten. It's, ugh. So, and what do I do all day?

Stare at a fucking computer. Stare at a screen. Yeah.

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Media candy. I watched a crap load of stuff this last week, so let's get into it. First off, we know Star Trek Discovery has come out, first episode. I thought it was really good. Yeah, it was. It really was. I was shocked at how good it was.

I know. So here's hoping to a decent season. We shall see. Yeah, no, the new captain was great, and everything about it was just like, it was fantastic. You got to see the Enterprise, and they set up the whole Spock thing going forward. I just had a ton of fun watching it.

Yep. More power to that theory that the first season of any Star Trek show always sucks. Yep. But hopefully that won't be the case with Picard, but we shall see. Yeah. First episode of the Grand Tour also came out on Amazon, and since I'm not doing an Amazon detox like that one writer was, I watched it.

It was okay. I'm looking forward to the next season when they abandon the tent and just do the adventures. Conversation Street. Was there an episode of Conversation Street? Because I haven't watched it yet. No, they did get rid of that. Oh, okay. Oh, man. I like those interstitials. I thought they were funny. Horrible.

Absolutely horrible. Grace and Frankie has come out on Netflix. I've watched the first three episodes already. It's as funny as always, so highly recommended. Highly enjoyable. A new show called Sex Education is out on Netflix right now. Gillian Anderson is in this as the mom.

Oh. Oh. It's very good. You've piqued my interest. Yeah, it's a really good show. It's quite funny. It's quite clever. You know, there's lots of boobs because I know you're into that thing. So I'm into that thing. Yes.

Yes. So it's really funny. It's actually quite worth watching. I think you'll enjoy it as well. Okay. And for some reason, I watched Annihilation, the movie with Natalie Portman that was a kind of sci-fi that came out of sci-fi that came out last year. Yeah. And? Yeah. I don't get it. It's got two stars.

I will not watch anything with two stars. Sorry. It has three. I see three stars. Okay. There are four stars. I, uh, it felt like it should have been a sci-fi movie. It ends with a vague kind of what the hell happened ending.

Um, it's beautifully shot. I just didn't care much for it. There was not enough of interest there to, to maybe the book is supposed to be good that it's based on. I don't know. So, but, uh, the movie, meh, meh, meh, pass on. And, uh, going back to people are garbage. I also watched the Netflix, uh, documentary fire.

The greatest party that never happened. Not the one on Hulu, which other people have watched. I'm dying to watch this thing. I've gotten so much. I got so many emails about this thing and, uh, we covered it on feedback Friday for the Jordan Harbinger show coming out tomorrow. And I am dying to see this thing.

Watch it. Uh, everybody is garbage. Everybody is garbage in this. Uh, the guy that throws the festival is garbage. Ja Rule is garbage. The Instagram social influencers that promoted the party are garbage. The people that bought tickets to go to the thing are garbage.

They're all fucking garbage. Everyone in this documentary is garbage. Oh God. And I mean, and talk about schadenfreude and just enjoying other people's misery. Fuck them all. Okay.

Well, that sounds, that sounds like it is funny. Okay. And yeah, I'm glad that guy is in jail and I hope he stays there. And yeah, it's just insane. Now more people are garbage, but getting their just rewards. R Kelly has finally been dropped by his record label. RCA about time.

15 year relationship. It's a little late, but better than nothing. So, and, uh, if you want to block all of our Kelly from ever playing on your streaming service, Spotify is now there to help you at least through their mobile app. They've added a new feature. Don't play this artist. So I've immediately tested that out and put on the red hot chili peppers.

I'm now in my dream world of never, ever having to hear a red hot chili pepper song. As long as I'm going through Spotify. Yeah. I was going to say, didn't never turn on K rock then because, oh my God. I know it's great. Well, the problem with like, with, um, especially like, uh, what's the station on a serious exam that the first, first wave or something like that.

Billy Idol is played out of proportion and the, and the pretenders. I don't have anything against the pretenders. I do have a lot against Billy Idol. They're played so out of proportion to what they actually were in the eighties. It's ridiculous. So I need to start blocking them as well. What do you have against Billy Idol? Shit.

Just horrible shit. Pop songs. They're, they're not good in any way, shape or form. Uh, Adam Sandler's impression of Billy Idol is better than Billy Idol. Okay. That says a lot. Right there of Adam Sandler is better than the actual Billy Idol because Adam Sandler is not good at anything.

No. Uh, and in somewhat good news, the expanse, uh, season three is going to start streaming on Amazon prime video, February 8th. The only good news about that is they are announcing that there will be the fourth season at some point later this year. Yes. Oh, I'm so looking forward to that.

Me too. What a great show. Oh yeah. Really good show. I dug in and watched crazy rich Asians this weekend. Great movie, right? It was fantastic. I absolutely loved it. It was, it was a four tissue ending. I even knew that what, I knew what the ending was going to be, but I still, you know, from the instant that movie started, this was so formulaic.

It was just disgusting. It's like, it was well done formula. It was. So I'm like, okay, this is the Asian love. Actually, I get it. All good. Fine. I know what's going to happen. And I had my tissues at hand because I know I was going to be, it was going to get dusty in the room.

I knew it. I just knew it. So I had my tissues ready and it did not disappoint. It was a very fun movie. Excellent. You'll be happy to know a sequel is coming. Of course it is. Of course. Well, there's three books. It's based on books. Oh, okay. Well, cool. So then there'll hopefully be two more movies.

So I'll get some more tissues. I watched Bohemian Rhapsody on Sunday. How was it? It was. The pause tells me almost everything I need to know. That means to me it should have been good. It wasn't.

No, it actually, it actually was good. I did enjoy it. What it did was gloss over almost all of the facts of Freddie Mercury's life. Oh, yeah. You know, I've seen many documentaries on Freddie Mercury and his entire, you know, path through life.

And they cut out basically all of it. Right. Well, authorized by the band. You knew it wasn't going to have any real dirt. Exactly. This was to make the band look good. So, but it did. And I enjoyed it. And Rami Malek was fucking phenomenal.

He was phenomenal in this, in this movie. I mean, he nailed it. By the end of it, I'm just like, dude, kudos, man. You did a really, really good job. Now, I'm not so much a Mr. Robot fan, but man, you are a good Freddie Mercury. Mr. Robot sucks now.

But yeah, every now and then I quickly gets taken down on YouTube, obviously, because copyright. But you search for it every now and then. Somebody did a side-by-side of his performance in the movie versus the actual footage of Freddie Mercury's performance. Was it Live Aid or whatever the big centerpiece is?

Unbelievable. Yeah. Seeing them side-by-side. Unbelievable. Yeah. No, he nailed it. And that was the only thing. We actually fast-forwarded the last 15 minutes of the movie just to get to the end because they do the entire Live Aid concert. And I'm like, I just watched this like a week ago with the actual Freddie Mercury.

So I don't need to see it again because I wasn't a fan of the set list that they did at Live Aid. So like they did a bunch of songs that I just, not my favorite out of their entire catalog. So I'm just like, eh. And my roommate was just like, yeah, we don't need to watch this. So let's get to the end where they show the flashcards that tell everything that happened after.

So we did that. That was fine. But it does, it starts and ends at Live Aid. It doesn't go into his death or anything like that. But all in all, though, I really fucking enjoyed it. I mean, I had a smile on my face pretty much the whole time. So.

Right. And knowing his history and everything, I thought that what they needed to do to make this a good movie, they did it properly. They actually did it properly. So and moving on, though, I watched a new show that I did not know existed called Mythbusters Junior.

And so Adam Savage is back and he's with a bunch of kids basically doing Mythbusters. All right. And I watched one episode of it. I watched episode three. And I have to say that this new series is better than the last three seasons of Mythbusters, period.

And the kids who are doing or busting the myths are completely better than Carrie and the entire B team. They're awesome. They're awesome. These kids are whip smart. They're excited about what they're doing and they are like coming up with novel solutions for the problems that they have to, you know, fill.

And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I'm adding it to the DVR. So I feel like Mythbusters is back. Adam is like a side character in this. He's not the main crux of the show. It's the kids who are busting the myths. And watching them, like, come up with these, the problems to solve.

And these kids are smart. Like, you know, they're 15 years old in college. You know, these aren't, these aren't regular kids. These are the cream of the crop kids. And I highly recommend it. It was fun. It was a ton of fun. So you get, you can get your Mythbusters back.

Jamie's nowhere to be seen because they hate each other. Adam's back and he's like a bit character, which is perfect. Totally perfect. Leave him on the side. And I recommend checking it out, especially if you have like, you know, young kids. Definitely have them check this out because it's a blast.

It's a total blast. I will give it a go. I knew it existed. I just figured I wasn't going to like it. So, no, you, I trust me. I think you'll actually enjoy it quite a bit. Okay. And Nightline is actually coming out with a documentary called The Dropout, which is the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, which I am more, more human garbage.

I'm just talking about your total human garbage. I am so excited to hear this. They dropped the first episode of the podcast today. We're recording this on Wednesday. So this, this episode will come out tonight. So you'll, you'll hear it tomorrow on Thursday. But the podcast is out there doing a six episode.

The podcast, but the actual documentary on Nightline comes out tonight as well. So, so it'll be probably if you have, uh, you know, on demand with your cable subscription, you should be able to check it out or catch a rerun. But I'm, I am really looking forward to this because I want to see how terrible she is.

Cause I think, I think at a gut level, she's pretty fucking terrible. Me too. Yep. And then finally in media news, YouTube channels are selling for millions, which of course makes me absolutely sad.

Oh, yeah. So yeah, these top tier YouTube channels are basically being sold to conglomerations who are trying to get a bunch of channels under their belt and, you know, start to become TV channels, you know? Yeah. TV networks. That's, you know, or a movie studio or recordings to, uh, you know, recording, whatever.

So yeah, it makes sense. They're, they're, you know, why not band together? Yeah. And a lot of people are just selling the channels and walking away. Like, you know, as part of the deal, they, they can't be on YouTube anymore. It's like, Oh, well, you're going to sell us your channel and then just start another one. No, you're banned from YouTube from now on, if you're not going to work with us.

So it's like, right. Take the money and run. I'd be good on you. Good on you. Yeah. And it's, it's one of those consolidation things that's going to keep happening over and over again because the independent publishers are very worried because YouTube and Google have a history of just saying, ah, screw you guys.

I'm going home and kicking you off the platform, you know? Right. And there's even a quote in here. You're at the whim of the ever changing algorithm or a random support email address, which is true. You build your, you build your house in somebody's backyard. We've said it many times. Can't get pissed off when they turn the sprinklers on and run you out of the yard.

So a lot of people are just kind of taking the money and running now, which I think is probably smart. This is the best deal they're ever probably going to get instead of, you know, humping it for another 20 years, getting just cheesy ad money. It's going to keep going down.

It's a race to the bottom on YouTube. So that's what, that's what people are going to do. Or us. Yeah. Or podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're doing this till we're dead. At the library.

I've been watching far too much TV, obviously, and movies, so I did not finish a book this week. But I did get some great news. Bill Bryson is coming back with another book. The Body, A Guide for Occupants. I've loved all of his books, including the most recent, A Short History of Nearly Everything. His book about the housing stuff was great.

So I'm very excited about this. He's a wonderful writer. So this should be really good and really interesting. Looks like it'll be dropping on October 3rd. So we have a bit of a wait. Yeah, a little wait. But it's worth it. Because, yeah, the original, A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of the best books ever written. It is fantastic.

So you have to get the unabridged version if you're doing audio or read the full book. Or actually read the book. Yeah, well, you know, some people just don't have time. I know. Maybe, I don't know, dyslexic. Yes. So I like the audio book. But the unabridged is fucking long, but it's great.

Yep. So I did read a book this week. I read Cesar Millan's Lessons from the Pack, Stories of the Dogs Who Changed My Life. And I'm sure I can hear the eye roll coming from Santa Monica right now from you, Brian. No. Okay.

Yeah, maybe a little bit. A little bit. Yeah. No, but it's a really good book. It talks about, you know, lessons that can be learned from having dogs, which I agree with basically everything in this book. Because I've had dogs that have changed my life and saved my life. So it was a really good book.

And I'm reading this because tomorrow morning I am going to meet Cesar Millan at the Dog Psychology Center up in Santa Clarita. And I am giddy as a schoolgirl about going up there. I wanted to go up there for years. And fortunately, little Bam Bam, one of her trainers, is a trainer at the Dog Psychology Center.

We actually went to the website and looked for the one person that had a picture of a Rottweiler with her and called her up and said, hey, can you come train a Rottweiler? And she has been Bam Bam's trainer for a couple of years now. There was a hiatus because she unfortunately had breast cancer, but she beat it. And when I got back here to California, we called her back up and said, come on back out.

And I've been chatting with her. And then that got us to go be able to go interview Cesar Millan tomorrow. So I am so excited to go do this. So I recommend the book. It is it is actually a really good book, well written and has a lot of good life lessons. So I'm just I'm just I don't want to drive to Santa Clarita because Santa Clarita is in the middle of nowhere.

It's almost a Palmdale, for fuck's sake. Who have fun with that? Who wants to go to Palmdale? And I got to be there at 10, which means rush hour. Yay. I don't know how I came across this article because it's on runnersworld.com.

And I kind of subscribe to the Val Kilmer real genius theory of running. You know, do you run only when chased? So I'm not I'm not a runner. I can't run. My knees are shot from skateboarding for 20 years. But a British runner and cyclist and mob hit man has been convicted for the murders of two rival gangsters in part because of his GPS watch.

So they actually found his Garmin 4Runner. And did some forensic analysis on it. And while he didn't wear it to actually commit the murders, he did wear it when he was going to scope out the scene and figure out his escape routes.

Right. Yeah. So you might want to leave the GPS at home when you're going to go plan to kill somebody is all I'm saying. That's probably a good idea. Yeah. Not the smartest, smartest guy there. No. So he is going to jail for a very long time.

I think he's going to think he got life for the two murders. Right. But it's still a fun story. Now, I'm not sure who is the moron specifically in my moron of the week, because it's somebody that works for the White House and their social media that that doesn't realize that, you know, you can actually check things in the world these days.

So President Donald Trump supposedly hates fake news, but he seems to have no problem with fake photos. At least that's what Gizmodo has discovered when it started carefully looking at the images on Trump's official Facebook and Instagram accounts and discovered photos of the president that made him look thinner and more built.

And yes, they've also made his hands bigger. Gizmodo found at least three instances of altered photos published since October 2018. So dismissing any suggestion that it was a one-off event. So somebody has gotten the order to Photoshop some of these photos and make him thinner and make his hands bigger.

Nice. We do realize that people check these things these days. It's out there. It's a record. We can find out. Oops. Oh, well. Big hands. Big hands. Tiny, tiny, tiny. Something else. Brain.

Feedback loop. Over at Patreon, we've got a couple new subscribers, Mark and Brody. And at PayPal, we've got Jeff, Joseph, and Mark and Steven, who writes in, Hey, fellow Grump Geeks, I'm a longtime listener of the show and love what you guys do. I live here in the UK and find that most people I talk to either don't understand technology or care about their privacy, so it's great to listen to you guys rant.

Well, thank you. Unfortunately, I work for the NHS, so spare funds are scarce, but I wanted to drop you guys a couple bucks for your hard work and hope to be able to donate some more in the future. Keep up the good work. Well, thank you, Steven. We appreciate it. We do. We appreciate it a lot. And, you know, with all the Brexit news that we're seeing, hopefully you will have some money at some point.

It's not looking good. Not looking good at all. Not looking good. Yes. Over at Twitter, Kyle writes us, which domain is more expensive? And this is a thing he found via Boing Boing, which is a domain pricing game. Did you play the game? Which is quite funny. How'd you do? I got it mostly right all the time.

I did. I got six out of ten. And yeah, I didn't do so well, even though I'm a domain. I didn't finish. I did like five and I got four out of ten. I love that when you keep going, there's the link to keep going, says, why am I even still here? I thought it was pretty funny. Yeah.

Some of the prices on these are absolutely insane. So that's great. Yes. And James writes in, yes, the voice kid of Mr. Bill Daniels is still alive. People my age will know him as the teacher, Mr. Feeney from the TV show Boy Meets World. And yes, he should voice every automated thing ever. Mr. Dom writes us and says, I don't see the swastika in the Slack logo.

But then again, I like the look of the new logo. Well, you're wrong, Mr. Supremacist. You're wrong, Mr. Dom. Yes. You know, I have to be honest, though. Actually, I was tainted a little bit because I saw Jason's drawing where he illustrated the swastika before I actually saw the logo in and of itself.

So it's impossible for me to not see the swastika now. Yeah. Yeah. So, Mr. Dom, go check out the go check out the photo on my my Twitter feed at JP Def because it is you can't unsee it. I'm sorry. And Ross writes, did you watch Shameless last night?

They had those shitty old scooters you're always talking about. No, I have not. I Shameless is one of those shows that I have been like banking. It's like one of those shows that I'll eventually get to because a friend of mine is an extra on there all the time. And, you know, she's always going down and she's like, I was on Shameless again this week.

I'm like, OK, great. I just don't care enough to go watch you be an extra on a show. But I watched the first episode of it when it first came out like long, long ago. But then I also heard that the the female lead left because they wouldn't match her pay.

And that kind of makes me not want to watch it. So I don't know if she like settled with them and is back or whatnot, but I don't want to watch a show where, you know, Showtime won't pay her the same rate as the other stars, which, you know, I kind of have.

I don't know what that would that would that be called ethics for that. But, yeah, I don't know. So maybe I'll check it out sometime. Right. Media, a media shot. I think I'm getting that right. Wrote us or send us a link to the Telegraph.

Uber plans to develop self-driving electric scooters and bicycles. Oh, God. Self-driving electric scooters and bicycles. Yes, they have hired they're hiring a micro mobility robotics team to develop scooters and bicycles, which can drive themselves around cities in order to reach customers and charging points.

Right. OK, you know what? You know, we just need monorails. You know, I go to Disney in Florida and I ride the monorail and it takes me where I need to go. We just need monorails everywhere. Forget it. Forget all this self-driving. That's right. And this comes from Stricky Oxford University bans Huawei from research funding over security concerns.

Yeah, Huawei's in hot water. We all right. Oh, God. Justin writes us the imperfect science of genetic testing. And this is a link over to the CBC. Twins get some mystifying results when they put five DNA ancestry tests to the kit.

Wait, take that. Take that one over. Take that one over. Tits to the test. You can leave that in if you want. I think it's funny. It's fucking cold in here. I'm like my teeth are chattering a little bit. All right. Let's do that again. Justin sent us a link over at the CBC, the imperfect science of genetic testing.

It is twins get some mystifying results when they put five DNA ancestry kits to the test. I don't write that down. All right. Yeah. And this is pretty funny. It does. It's all over the map, even though they're twins. And they got different results from different people.

And yeah, basically a chief geneticist at one of the popular ancestry companies admits it's kind of a science and an art. In other words, it's bullshit. It is bullshit. It is bullshit. Oh, God. And Hilly tech writes in DNA discounts and solid troll on crazy Americans worthy mention in the next show.

And this is the Aero Mexico commercial where they kind of troll the people of Texas with some DNA tests and says, hey, if you're Mexican, we'll give you a discount on flying to Mexico based on the percentage of your Mexican DNA. And I love this ad. I saw this a while ago and I'm just like, yeah, that's that's pretty epic.

Well done. And the people change their mind. They're like, what? I can get a discount. I'm going to I'm going to Mexico. Yeehaw. I'm Mexican. I want me a burrito. I love that ad. They did such a good job on it. And Jordan wrote us asking what we think and sends us a link to something.

We're at Hacker Noon Podcrypt Automatic Fear Fair Peer to Peer Podcast Donations with Ether. No, no, thanks. No, pass. No, I'll take real money. Yes, I want actual money. Pretty pleased with sugar on top. Can I have actual money?

Yes. And over at GOG dot show, Barrett writes in 1200 safety cases per week. Overwhelmed Uber investigator memo says. And this is a link to CNN where people are basically like losing their shit because they used to be Starbucks baristas and Chipotle managers.

And now they're investigators for Uber. Hmm. Yeah. They're remember. Remember that background check issue that Uber had? Maybe they want to have some background checks on their investigators. Oh, my God.

Right. Ed Jensen writes us. Hello, fellow fossils. I'm always happy when I hear you encouraging your listeners to use a password manager. KeePass has been my weapon of choice for many years. But like so many other humans, I can be lazy. For the last few years, I've been letting Chrome suggest and manage my passwords for me. I'm signed into Chrome so that password information is synchronized to Google for safekeeping.

Do you have any comments or opinions on using Chrome to generate and manage passwords? Are you aware of any particular security risks? I do have two-factor authentication enabled on my Google account and use Google Authenticator to avoid stolen SIM card SMS attacks. Thanks for being awesome. Other than you're just putting everything into Google, I mean, I'm sure it's fine.

No, whatever browser I'm using, like I'm on Chrome right now. I mean, I'm on Opera right now. So I store my passwords in Opera. I store my passwords in 1Password. And when I was on Chrome, I stored my passwords in Chrome, too, because it makes it easy to migrate browsers over and do things like that when you get new machines.

I don't see a problem with it as long as it's a long enough password. You know, that's it. It's, you know, go 13, 14 characters minimum. And if you want to do passphrases, that's even better because they're at least memorable. But, yeah, I don't see a problem with that at all.

Patrick writes in, since you both have been talking about health-related studies and what's good for you or bad for you lately, I thought I'd pass along a YouTube channel that I found interesting. It appears to at least try to understand studies in the larger context and to identify which studies are valid and, in some cases, who's funded them when trying to make sense of the results and or present recommendations.

And it's a YouTube channel called Healthcare Triage. I will definitely check that out, and the link will be in the show notes. Very interesting. I did take a look at the channel. It's interesting. I'll be watching a lot of those. So it's a mess, right? We can't get we can't seem to get good information anywhere, and everything is always contradicting everything else.

So anything that helps is good. Yeah, and I'm sure this will all be contradicted next week. That's the problem. Perpetually Grumpy writes us, hey, Grumps, was wondering if you could make a recommendation for an affordable web host. I'm sure I've heard you answer this question before, but I'm lazy and can't be arsed with trying to find the right episode or sift through your show notes.

He then gets into some specifics about what he's doing, so we don't need to read that. I appreciate any advice you might be able to provide and love the show. Maybe if my business actually makes any money, I'll be able to throw a few shekels your way. Who are you using these days, Jason? Well, for actual web hosting, if you're going to spin up your own server, Linode is who I use.

You've previously mentioned Amazon Web Services. AWS is a pain in the balls. I don't use AWS anymore. Linode is what I generally use if I have to spin up a server. There's another company out of Canada that I've been trying called Node Host. There are super cheap hosting, and the way that they can do that is they just know that how their resources are allocated, and you can get a server for like, you know, four bucks a month.

It's super cheap, and I've been testing it out. Photoaday.com is run up there. Unfortunately, I haven't posted a photo a day. I posted four photos and then got really busy with work and trying to make money so I can retire someday. But Node Host... So, you're a photo a day site is like almost every other blog on the internet.

Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Completely abandoned. I just haven't left the studio for so long. I'm like, if you want to see what my garage looks like, I am down for that. But it's like a building with a bunch of moving blankets stapled to the wall.

It's not really that exciting. So, yeah. But I did set it up. I set up WordPress on Node Host and got it done in like 20 minutes, and it was super fast. And honestly, I would even skip Linode. Just go to Node Host. They're great.

I will put a link in the show notes. So, hopefully, you get a little bit of cash. I get a little bit of cash if you sign up, if you know what I'm saying. Well, he also leaves us with a story. So, he did send you a little bit of cash already. He says, when I was younger, my family and I were at a fair where the Humane Society was adopting dogs.

They had a dog there that was a few years old, a mutt, and not really getting much love from anyone else, who all only seemed to be interested in the younger puppies. While this older dog was a little rough-looking and timid, he seemed to have a good disposition. So, that's the one we adopted. And that's why I chose Team Jason on M1 Finance.

All right. Yoo-hoo. So, he tossed you some bucks. I appreciate that. I'll take it. And Travis writes in with a story from ABC News. It's a report that Snap fires execs alleged sexual misconduct. So, yeah. Snap has fired two executives pretty quickly, you know, out the door.

And I don't even know anymore if it's like they fired them or they quit because that C-level suite at Snap seems to be just kind of a revolving door. Yep. You know, it's just like, hey, you got a job at Snap.

Is your resume already up on LinkedIn? Probably. Yeah. Booker writes us, if it's available in your area, try sonic.net for your gigabit fiber. They've been shadowing AT&T in California and are a much better deal and a less evil corporation to deal with. We have a choice of both in our neighborhood, and I've never heard any complaints about Sonic.

Checked. Not available for me, unfortunately. Oh, that sucks. I will check later. But since we already have DirecTV here, I think I'll probably get a better deal from AT&T because it's like all in one. It's bundled. It's bundled. Ben Patrick writes in with a couple links about Steve Carell's new show that is based on the new Space Force that Donald Trump wants us to have, and it looks pretty funny.

I definitely recommend checking out the trailer. It's not really a trailer. It's a teaser, but it's still funny. Yep. Ben writes us, in the lower left corner of your site, has anyone ever noticed the smiley face down there? I used to put a random period in the middle of a page that would hyperlink to PDFs, flip books. You should make that thing clickable for some kind of Easter egg.

We will do that with all of our time and creativity. Well, we're not going to do that because what that smiley face is, is the WordPress stats GIF. So we don't even post that. We don't even see it. Brian and I don't even see it because we're logged in. So we don't get that thing. So I went to a private window and I popped it up and I saw it.

I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the old WordPress tracking GIF. So, yeah, we're not going to do anything with that. Sorry, we don't care about Easter eggs anymore. We're too goddamn old for that. Yeah, we're too old. He also writes, I understand Brian's perspective. What streaming Pandora, Spotify, et cetera, has done to the music industry.

But my Pandora on random has played artists that I had no idea about. I enjoy their music and bought tracks from iTunes or saw a show. OK, so what do I think about that? I agree. Popular artists aren't getting their due from these services. But what about the little garage band guys?

They're not really getting much money either. In fact, I just listened to a really interesting podcast that was talking about how performing rights are trying to get there. There aren't there aren't universally there's not like a UPC code for a song. And what's happening is songs are being misidentified and people aren't getting the money right now.

They're trying to solve the problem, but it's not working great. As far as like things like, you know, Pandora and random and finding new artists, there used to be something called radio that did that before it got entirely playlisted. And K-Rock only played the Red Hot Chili Peppers and all my previous complaints from earlier in the show.

So I don't have a problem with Pandora. A lot of people really enjoy it. And it does seem to be the new radio and way to find the same thing with Spotify playlists and things like or artist based radio stations that the algorithms put together, which is it's nice. It's nice to find new music that way.

So it's great. I just want everybody to get paid. You know, I listen to Pandora all day long. The one thing that irks the shit out of me about Pandora is because I listen to it through my Sonos. There's a four hour limit on Sonos and Pandora. So the music will just stop randomly.

So you have to, you know, either open up the app or walk over to your Sonos and press the play button again. It is really annoying. But yeah, I listen to Sonos, listen to my Sonos with Pandora all day long because my roommate and I have like a shared playlist that we just kind of curate as we go.

And it's like, oh, thumbs up, thumbs down. And we've, you know, curated it for a couple of years now. And it's really good. We find, we find a ton of new music from it and we, we really enjoy it. Cool. Phil Doe writes in, all right. I used to visit Sweden all the time, but since paying for content got easier, I let the skills lapse.

Now I find myself unable to find some content on any service or I have to sign up for stupidly priced memberships to see it. Please guys, where do I go now for those sweet magnet links I need? Also let Dave know I feel bad for calling him Klittner. Well, we will let Dave know.

I use a private tracker personally. I can't really give that out on the air because it's, you know, what you call private. I'll drop you an email though, Phil Doe. I've discovered that Google is quite good at finding these things. That is true. Just use Google.

Type in the show name and torrent. And yes. And there you go. You're good to go. Brian writes this. Millennials don't even know what Pearl stands for. Pearl's a fucking acronym. You blew this millennial mind. Good. Johannes writes in, dear grumps, I have an AI failed to report.

I'm not sure if this is real or major trolling, but it's entertaining either way. The what's new section of the Yelp app for iOS for the most recent version reads as follows. And this is on January 14th. We apologize to anyone who had problems with the app this week. We trained our neural net to eliminate all the bugs in the app and it deleted everything.

We had to roll everything back. To be fair, we were 100% bug free briefly. Grumpy cheers from Boston. Well, thank you, Johannes. Thank you. And Bo writes us with a link to a YouTube video. The worst demo at CES is quite funny.

He says, AI laptop. Does it talk to me to keep me company while I work? Does it watch what I'm doing and make recommendations like Microsoft Clippy? Does it stop me from making bad business decisions or buying Bitcoin? No, no and nope. It gets me 10 plus frames per second in a pre-recorded game clip and renders videos in 10-year-old software at the same speed as a non-AI laptop.

Wait, what? Yeah. Okay. It's quite the demo. Yeah. And Barrett writes in, reading through the how millennials became the burnout generation and all I can think is that the idiotic writer got massively in debt getting her PhD and could only manage working at crappy BuzzFeed.

Something should have told her that she lacked skills long before she even went for her master's. Just getting yet another degree isn't going to make an untalented person more talented. Too many people expect to get their dream job out of college now and fail to see that, one, they've never worked a job before, and two, they might need to spend a few years doing shit work before they manage to work their way up to anything close to what they expected.

Also, you can register to vote online. You don't even need a stamp. The author couldn't even research this fact. Well, Barrett, high five. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. We did not get any new iTunes ratings this week, so help us out. People. People.

We got, you got to leave us some snarky reviews that we can read on the show. Come on. Get on it. Chop, chop. Damn right. 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 do. Head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review.

Closing shout outs. And a quick shout out to a friend of the show, Dr. David Teeter, who had to fly into L.A. for work briefly yesterday. And we were going to try to meet up and have a beer. But unfortunately, we couldn't because the timing didn't work out. But next time, man, let's get together.

Yep. No. Yeah. He called me, too. And unfortunately, my shout out goes to Chris Voss. Well, not unfortunately, the shout out. But unfortunately, I couldn't meet up with David because I was meeting with Chris Voss, who is an ex FBI negotiator, like one of the top tier FBI negotiators.

And he was the first person to be in my studio to do an interview for The Jordan Harbinger Show. And it came out great. And Chris is a lovely human being and smart as a whip and fairly intimidating, I must say, because he is FBI. So he has that FBI vibe. But look for that show coming up on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

And until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. 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. Pass 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 314. There you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. This episode is sponsored. Try that again. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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