343: A Whimsical Dream

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Got a little follow-up here this week, Brian. Okay. I found an article over at Vox called The Big Business of Loneliness or Solitude or whatever you want to call it nowadays, as we talked about last episode. Right. And I've heard of this place called Tribe before in New York. Have you heard of it?

No. Okay. It's kind of like a hostel, I guess. You get shared rooms with people or you can get a single room, but all the bathrooms in the kitchen are shared. Okay. And the whole point is to be able to make friends. Okay.

Now, I don't know about you, but I've always subscribed to the notion of be friendly with your neighbors, but never be friends with your neighbors. Oh, I agree 100%. I used to go crazy because one of my ex-girlfriends who I lived with for quite some time always made friends with the neighbors.

And I was like, I don't even want to know their names. I know. Honestly, I don't. I don't. I have to. I'm the one. And, you know, once that dynamic is created, I'm the one that has to do. You know, I was the bad cop all the time because God forbid. And it's just a nightmare. Also, the other thing about this idea, I had roommates right out of college, during college, and the finest moment of my entire life was when I first moved into a place by myself.

I don't want roommates. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is, you had friends. You had a social circle. Well, it's also a really bad idea to live with your friends. Yes, it is, actually. If you'd like them to remain that way. Yes, I have a, you know, a highway of bodies behind me of people that were friends that I lived with that are no longer my friends.

And so I can see this maybe as like a way stop when you first move to a new town. Sure. I mean, there's not much difference than this being having your own roommate, I suppose. Just, you know, instead of going on Craigslist and getting a mass murderer, you're just signing up with Tribe and paying them some money and getting a mass murderer.

Yeah. I'm just wondering if there are maids involved with the bathrooms in the kitchens, because that would be nice. That would be more like a hotel. That's right. You know, that would be actually kind of cool. I might even pay for that. But unfortunately, it's for kids. You know, nobody, like nobody over 35, probably got to be, you know, stinking millennial.

Yeah. Get in there or Gen Z or whatever they are nowadays. But it's a big business. It's a pretty booming business. Now, the thing about this article that I really liked was it has different types of loneliness and they go into, you know, the science of the different types of loneliness.

Right. And actually, if you're a chronically lonely person, moving into this situation is actually a really bad idea. Right. Because, you know, social policing and people like, you know, just even just side comments about, hey, did you put your stuff in the sink or are you going to leave that spoon out there?

Can throw people off the deep end because they're not used to it and they think everybody's attacking them and things like that. But it was an interesting article because of the science in it, I thought. But this is definitely a big business. Well, who knew? Yeah. Maybe I should go find one of these places because I've been alone for a couple of days now, single parenting, and I'm lonely.

I mean, the kid's a good conversationalist, don't get me wrong, but there's only so many times I can talk about his play kitchen. That's true. That's true. But that's what Facebook's for, Brian. Yeah, I just don't do Facebook that much anymore. I wonder why. Yeah, just the sheen has come off.

Yeah. Well, I also have a bit of follow up. I've been going on and harping on about delivery drones and the noise problem that these might produce. And it appears some people are starting to actually think about this besides us. A really good article written by an acoustic ecologist.

He monitors the sound of environment and how it changes. And he's concerned that drones are taken to the air without a lot of thought for the ears of people on the ground. Small recreational drones are loud. Serious commercial drones are much louder. They have eight or more propellers. Alphabet's wing has 14. Amazon's octocopter has, well, you guessed it.

It's in the name. I was going to say, let me guess on that one. All spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute, physically beating the air to generate lift and movement. And the heavier the load, the harder they have to work, the more the air gets beaten, and the louder the sound. Drones also make higher-pitched buzzing sounds than helicopters do, which have much lower frequencies because larger motors, and they don't need to spin as fast to generate the power.

So imagine tens of or even hundreds of drones buzzing around your neighborhood delivering packages to homes and businesses. Now, will it be around the clock? He's asking questions like, should there be weight limit deliveries? Who will monitor the sound levels and how? Should there be a curfew on hours of operation? There must be a reason companies don't include the sound of the drone in their advertising materials.

And they do not. And it's probably because they don't sound very nice. No, they don't. I mean, once they're at altitude, you can barely hear them, but it's when they actually come down for a delivery that they get loud. They're going to be all over the place, right? The whole point is delivering it to your house, which means they're not just going to stay up there.

They will be buzzing in on your neighbors, the ones that you shouldn't know. So, yeah, even domestic drones can raise baseline sound pressure levels by at least 20 decibels. When each six decibel increase means loudness doubles, that means a single drone can make an area eight to 12 times louder than it is now.

And that's just one. That's just one. Yep. So this is going to be an issue and people aren't really thinking about it. And everybody's just kind of going on, you know, just like we do. That's the business model. Move fast, break things, do an Uber, dump a bunch of scooters wherever you want, start sending drones around.

And let's not worry about hearing damage or anything like that. So here it comes, everybody. What I'm afraid of is the fact that we're just going to do it and then realize, oh, we need to rein this in a bit. And that becomes very difficult. Move fast and annoy people. That's right. I'm not looking forward to this.

I mean, I do have my drone and I've flown it around the neighborhood and I'm self-conscious about it. It's like I try and do it during the middle of the day, not, you know, in the morning or at sunset when people are trying to have dinner and watch TV. Because it can get pretty loud. It can get pretty loud.

I know they get really loud. I mean, I think recently they passed some sort of law about you can't do your drones on the beach here anymore. But I used to do my bike ride and I would have my earbuds in and I'd be listening to podcasts or music or whatever. But I could hear the drones over the music.

It was loud. They were really loud on the beach. And it is that particular sound that they make. A NASA study specifically found that the specific sounds that drones make are annoying to human beings. Like it's not a pleasant sound. It is. It gets under our skin. Yeah, we need some new propeller technology.

I'm thinking. Well, we did a story quite a while back that they figured out some sort of way to a kind of a drop decibel level. So hopefully the technology will get there. But again, the concern is that, you know, these companies don't seem to care and we're going to get it one way or another.

And hopefully, you know, it'd be nice if they actually did something for us for once. Yeah, yeah, those that decibel level study thing or that new stuff was for building materials, not really for drones, unfortunately. Yeah, unfortunately. I do have low sound propellers on my Mavic 2 and they definitely make it quieter than regular propellers, but it's still fucking loud.

Right. A little porn follow up. Okay. Over the New York Times, I have an article about how the UK won't keep porn away from teens. Yeah, we can. Nothing. Nothing will keep porn away from teens. Nothing at all. Nothing at all. We will find a magazine in the woods if need be.

Yes. Dino, quiet. Dino's looking for some porn. So the thing about this. Yes. As what's his name said in Jurassic Park, spanking will find a way. Absolutely. Now, they talk about the different schemes that they're rolling out in England.

And one of them, it turns out, which blew my mind. Oh, God. Is going to be run by Mind Geek that we talked about last week. Right. The horrible company that runs the Pornhub brand. Right. Now, and of course, here's the thing that they're saying is that we're just going to be middlemen.

So we are going to just kind of outsource this to other companies and we're not going to actually hold any of the information. It's still going to go through them. Let's just say, you know, Ford ran the DMV and like if you drove in in your Chevy, you wanted your license and they say, what kind of car is that over there?

Oh, not a Ford. Go in line 12 and we'll get you some stuff over there. That's just a little just a terrible analogy, but kind of to the point that you don't want somebody who runs a bunch of porn sites actually doing the age verification. Yeah, it's not in their vested interest to do it.

Well, it is in their vested interest to let everybody through. Well, that's what I mean. That's to actually do what they're supposed to be doing, which is not letting people through if they're underage or if they haven't paid or if they haven't gotten their porn license or whatever the hell we're calling it. You're spanking, spanking ID. I don't know. Yeah, spank ID.

So it's just one of those things that people really need to pay attention to this. And the whole thing is just stupid to begin with. I think we can all agree on that. Yeah. In the news.

Well, got an interesting story that across my feed, I was very excited about it when I saw it and I went and clicked on the link and it went to a site I'd never heard of before called the Space Academy dot org. And the article is it is a good name. MIT just created living plants that glow like a lamp and could grow glowing trees to replace streetlights.

OK, sounds fun. Interesting. Cool tech. As I read the article, it was very fascinating. But the key to this is the title. And it said could grow glowing trees to replace streetlights. Because none of this is there yet. And as you go to through the site and you start reading all the articles, all of which are close to science, pseudoscience ish.

But a lot of hyperbole here. A lot of just taking a little bit of information and stretching it way too far. So Internet of bullshit indeed. Although technically, yes, MIT did do this. We're not anywhere near the level that this site likes to pretend that we could be at.

OK, so clickbaity. Yeah. And I read a really interesting long form article this week called What It's Really Like to Live with So-Called Smart Devices. This is an author, Rani Mola, over at Vox slash Recode slash whatever they are these days. You can't tell what the branding is anymore. And he basically lived with a whole bunch of smart devices just to see how it would go.

So he went from zero to 100, basically. He got everything. He got, you know, smart locks, smart speakers, a dog camera treat dispenser, a robo vacuum, a smart smoke carbon monoxide detector, smart lights and smart plugs. And set it all up and tried to live with it.

And so I think this is interesting because it's the first time that I've read like a first person account of, all right, well, let's give this a go since everybody seems to be using it. And let's see how it changes my life. So he went full black mirror. He went full black mirror. The TLDR was it was kind of interesting.

Not much of a time saver. He definitely consumed more streaming media than he thought he was going to. But otherwise, none of it is very life changing at all. It was all stuff he could live without. But there are plenty of things in our modern lives we could live without as well, which is an interesting point. So what I didn't find out at the end of this article is if he decided to keep them or not.

I'm assuming he did because he didn't say. And then I got rid of everything. Right. That would be it. It's like I went back to my log cabin and, you know, yes, I went back to Walden. Yeah, exactly. I wonder if he got if there are any long term health risks with all of this, you know, EM and RF blowing through his house now.

Yeah, it's quite a lot of stuff that he used. So, I mean, you and I are deep into this world in comparison to most people, but we only have a couple items each. So, yeah, I mean, I down to a Nest and an Alexa. If you don't count the rings and the Logitech security cameras and OK, that list is going pretty quick, isn't it?

I got some I got a smart plug on my TV, a couple of Roku's, Apple TVs. Let's see here. Hmm. Yeah, I do have a lot of stuff. Yeah. But and Sonos. Don't forget Sonos and Sonos. Now, remember back when we started this podcast and we would do Amazon affiliate links and we even had a little Amazon store on our website and then all of that stuff slowly started getting stripped away from us because, you know, we're not big people.

We're just a small little podcast. Yep. Well, pays to be big people. Amazon is going to literally pay the New York Times and BuzzFeed to expand so it can reach more shoppers outside the US. Yeah. So they're already paying all these publishers with the affiliate links embedded on their site, which works for them because they're big and they get to keep all that sort of stuff.

And we don't. And they're actually going to go all in and pay them a bit more when shoppers clicks on links on their sites and heads to Amazon, particularly if they are coming from overseas. Because Amazon is doing very, very well in the US, but they want to increase their global reach. And why not pay other people who already have a lot of money?

Yeah, that sucks. I mean, I think I pull in like maybe a whopping 30 bucks a month now. Yeah. All the stuff I do. I used to pull in a decent amount. I mean, not crazy, but a couple hundred bucks. And now we get next to nothing through Grumpy Old Geeks, especially since they killed the store functionality.

So we couldn't have a store page anymore. Thanks a lot for that, Amazon. Thanks, Amazon. There you go. Good times. Pays to be good. Pays to be big. Pays to be rich. The rich keep getting richer. I remember when I did DoIHavePigFlu.com and I made four grand in the first month off of that.

That's amazing. Yeah. Those days are long gone. It didn't happen anymore. Yeah. Sadly enough. But yeah, it's kind of crazy how much. That has gone down. And I know a lot of people buy stuff for me. And I go and look at the reports and it's like, you know, cents compared to what it used to be.

Yeah. Cents on the dollar. That's the way it works for us. And I'm selling microphones most of the time. I'm selling podcasting kits. Right. Yeah. It's almost useless now. Thanks, Amazon. Yeah. Thanks, Amazon. And speaking of Amazon, there's an article over at the Washington Post that says, Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time.

I put this in here just because it's shit we already know. And everybody's finally getting on the bandwagon. I'm starting to get really tired of talking. It is a device that you talk to that sends what you were list, what you just said to it to a company.

Yeah. Why are we surprised? There are responsible ways to supposedly use this. And yes, there are some concerns about what Amazon is actually doing. Articles keep coming out saying that it's listening, even if it doesn't get the wake word, which we kind of know isn't true. But we're not so sure sometimes how it how it understands the wake words.

And it certainly misinterprets things sometimes. But if you understand this concept again, like we've been talking a lot about these sorts of things on the podcast recently, don't do stupid shit with it right now. Don't do things like read out your social security number or talk about your health unless you know, there are specific apps that are supposedly going to be certified and things of that nature.

But we're not there yet. So just use it to find out what the damn weather is. And then who cares? Don't say, Alexa, how do I play on a murder? Because that might come back to haunt you a little bit. I'm wondering how many people played that. It just got that into their feed now.

Well, if anybody knocks on your door, right? Jason at JPD dot me. The thing about it is he does tell you how to get rid of the history. It's not going to it can't stop recording your history because it doesn't have that rolling blackout like they're going to have on Google.

Yeah. And they probably should. It would be nice. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they don't really need to keep this stuff for all time, but, you know, a day. They don't even need it for more than 24 hours. Nope. Well, actually, they do because of time zones and they have to get it to the people in the Philippines who are transcribing it to find out if what you said was actually correct.

I forgot about that. Oh, yeah. Oh, it turns out Facebook's been doing that, too. Oh, yeah. This comes from Reuters. They're basically letting people inside of Facebook or actually one of their teams actually, you know, read your posts and say things about them internally.

So then they can, you know, train their AIs and crap like that. Go figure. Here's the deal. If it's a big company and you post your shit on there, no matter what it is, somebody else is going to read it at some point. Someone's going to read it. That's all we got to tell you. You should know this by now after listening to the show for long enough.

But everybody's jumping on the bandwagon now. So I just I just had to hang on a second. Are you telling me that if I make a post on a public forum, somebody might read it? Even if it's marked as private, somebody might read it. There is no such thing as private on Facebook.

We all know that. Or anything else, because you're posting it. If you're writing it and sending it somewhere, hmm, somebody else than the intended party might read it. Go figure. And I'm trying to find more interesting things to talk about, because I'm getting kind of I've got, you know, I've got privacy fatigue.

We used to have breach fatigue. Then we had scooter fatigue. Now I've just got privacy fatigue. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. But right now, Word, Microsoft Word, that thing that almost nobody ever wants to use.

But we all do. No, I actually don't, thank God, because I don't write that much anymore. But they're going to soon have an AI-powered editor. AI Clippy. Mm-hmm. Clippy's back, baby. Mm-hmm. Oh, and this is for Microsoft Word Online.

So guess what that means. I wasn't even aware there was an online one. Well, here's the fun part. Guess where that AI is going to live? Microsoft servers. So whatever you write in, Microsoft Word Online is going to be sent to the mothership and come back with, you know, hey, maybe you should write something a little better than that.

You spelled how do I murder incorrectly. Exactly. I mean, we've got sites like this, services like this already, like Grammarly. Yeah. And this is just, you know, Microsoft doing that. There was a metric shit ton of news from Microsoft this week that I didn't get to put in.

I hear some of the headlines here. Microsoft wants to reinvent documents in collaboration with its new fluid framework. Microsoft wants you to work less. Microsoft's IntelliCode for AI-assisted coding comes out of preview. AI-assisted coding. There's something that gives me chills.

Yeah. Chills. Microsoft open sources its quantum computing development tools. Microsoft launches Visual Studio Online, an online source code editor. So all of your source code can just go straight to Microsoft already without having, you know, you can just go to their back end without passing GitHub.

Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Right. Microsoft launches a new platform for building autonomous robots. All right. Okay. Microsoft launches election verification tool. All right. Election guard. I don't.

Microsoft has historically been pretty good about privacy. Not quite up there with Apple, but probably a good second, at least in the big tech players, for sure. But they just only make the most hackable computers in the world. Well, technically, they don't make the computers, just the operating software.

Yes. Yes. And that's gotten somewhat better, but, you know, I'm not surprised that they're pushing into the cloud-based stuff. That's where a lot of their strengths are these days, that they're certainly building a robust system, and it's where everyone's going. They have to compete. So it is what it is.

I will rue the day that you can no longer have standalone Microsoft products, and it all has to be online, but it's coming. Oh, it's here. Just forget about it. You know, just forget about it. And, of course, they opened up their big developer conference. What was supposed to be this, you know, amazing HoloLens 2 demo of landing on the moon, which failed miserably, and they had to cut short.

Just like the real one. Oh, wait, no. That actually didn't happen. We actually made that one work. I've been reading those pseudoscience websites too much this week. Oh, that's right. We didn't land on the moon. Oh, what are you going to do? So, yeah, with all of the news this week, I didn't get to a lot of things, and I'm going to put a huge list of links in the show notes if you want to go see the things that I couldn't really get to, because there's some really good stuff in here.

Like, every R2-D2 beep in Star Wars condensed down into one movie. Fun times. And content moderation at scale is impossible. Facebook still can't figure out how to deal with naked breasts. Well, leave them alone. That's the way to do it. Kickstarter workers are kicking off a union organization drive.

Malvertiser behind 100 million bad ads arrested and extradited. There's so much stuff in here. All the hackers demanding ransom for hundreds of stolen GitHub accounts. Oh, and one of the biggest news coming out of the Microsoft thing, Microsoft has updated Windows Terminal.

Finally, a tabbed emoji-capable Windows command line. I don't know about you, but when- Why do you need an emoji? Emoji in the command line. Okay. When has anyone ever said, man, I wish my bash script had an emoji here?

Unless it was just the poop emoji. Delstar.star. Poop. There you go.

Media Candy. Netflix confirms that season two of Sex Education has started filming. Now, I don't recall. Did you watch this, Jason? It's in my queue, but I haven't watched it yet. This is one of my highly recommended shows that came out last year. It was very funny and a phenomenally great cast.

Gillian Anderson's in there, et cetera, et cetera. Netflix confirmed the news with a tweet, and I like this because it's very rare that you see a major, massive company kind of go off script and be a little weird with their tweets, but it's nice when they do.

And they wrote, okay, it's official. Sex Education season two filming has started. Here's to more wanking and more heartwarming moments in equal measure. Nice. All right. Well, sometimes somebody gets a hold of the passwords that shouldn't, maybe. Maybe.

And I found Netflix has stealth dropped Chinese sci-fi blockbuster, The Wandering Earth. And they announced this back in February, but they didn't, like, make a big deal about it when it dropped here. And this is, like, the third highest grossing movie in world history.

And they're just like, eh, it's in Chinese. If you want it, you go watch it. Well, that's kind of probably why. Yeah, I don't, that makes no sense to me. I don't know if it's a stealth drop as opposed to it's there and nobody in the U.S. seems to care too much. Well, I mean, considering the fact that when Daredevil dropped the final season of Daredevil, I couldn't find it, considering I'd watched and rated the thing at, you know, thumbs up and five stars for the first season.

Then they changed the stupid thumbs. Yeah. And I could barely find it. So this might be front and center for a gazillion people, just not me. Right. And so this is based on a couple of short stories by Liu Chixin, the author of The Three Body Problem, which, you know, which was two of the three bodies were the problem.

There was one body that was a one body was good. Yeah. So which is they're going to be transforming into a series on Netflix. Right. OK, that'll be fun. But I was watching the, you know, that annoying thing when you go to Netflix and they autoplay the preview for you, even though you don't want it, even though you don't want max volume.

It looks interesting. I'm going to watch it this weekend. It looks like it looks like some, you know, well-made sci fi cool graphics look great. So I'm going to give it a shot. Excellent. I found another really super long form article this week that I thought was really interesting. It's something that we discuss all the time as well over at box.

The fight for the bundle is the war for the future of TV by Peter Kafka. Long read. Interesting. Nothing that we haven't really said before. And it definitely is kind of coming down to the point that this the author is basically stating that that the bundles are going to go.

They're going to disappear. Unfortunately, what they're being replaced with is you're going to have to buy everything piecemeal and the prices are going to be higher. And I'm willing to bet that my and my bill will end up more than it is now, even though I only watch like five channels and I pay for like up to 250.

We called it six years ago. Yes, we knew that was going to happen. You knew it. What's exactly going to happen? Yeah. But hey, look, look on the bright side. Disney is only going to be seven bucks. Yeah. Well, I had that to then I have to get ESPN because I do enjoy my sports. Oh, that's right.

And I have to go get that. Yeah. Well, hardly. And there's been a lot of cure news recently. In consequence of sound dot net had a good article about the cures, 10 best deep cuts. So this is a little bunch of B sides and rarities that they think are the 10 best of the cures.

And I'm down with all of these, particularly the songs lament and fear of ghosts, which I both really love. But I would argue that how beautiful you are is hardly a deep cut. It's one of the most beloved tracks on kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, one of their biggest albums. So how's that a deep cut consequence of sound?

I'd like to nominate man inside my mouth or halo or babble in its place. Now go listen to some pure B sides. OK, I think I have them all. Thanks to you. Yep. Somewhere on a hard drive that hopefully hasn't failed. It's OK. It's all on Spotify. All right. Oh, good.

Then I can throw away all my old hard drives that have all my music on them or not. So I watched the Predator even after your your review. Yeah. Wow. I would like my my time back on that one. Why did they make it?

I don't even understand why they made it. Who greenlit it? Who decided that this was going to be a good thing to do to add to the canon of the Predator? I think that they did it for one reason. One reason only. They had to figure in a way to say, get to the chopper. They said, get to the choppers and stole some motorcycles.

Yeah, that I chuckled at that one. I chuckled at that one. And the rest of it was what a waste of time. Yes. Well, I've also been struggling through the Grand Tour. I finally got through Episode 9 last night. Episode 9 had one good bit in the middle where they talked about the moon landings and he got to drive Neil Armstrong's Corvette down the space shuttle runway.

I thought that was a cool segment, but the rest of them were just I got to tell you, I cannot wait for the next season when it's all just trips. I am so done with their setups in the studios and all that. Even though I do kind of like Conversation Street, believe it or not, I just don't like the, you know, just all the scripted bits.

Yeah, the scripted bits are horrible. They're just horrible. Yeah, they're just not funny. No. What are you going to do? Go back and watch Top Gear reruns. That's what I'm going to do at the library.

Brian, the age of surveillance capitalism, which we've talked about for two weeks on the show. Yep. I've had to put it down. Oh, OK. Good. I can't finish it. I am not even close to a quarter of the way through, and I'm just depressed all the time. That's the problem.

Every page makes me more and more maudlin. I'm like, it just makes me feel like, you know, we have no power left. We have no agency. And I'm like, OK, it just makes me want to give up and say, here, Google, have it all. Here's my photo library.

Just go. Just do whatever the fuck you're going to do, because there's nothing we can do about it, which is, you know, basically true. Basically, yes. I mean, there's nothing in this book that I could say is wrong so far. That's the problem with it. There is nothing in this book that I don't agree with so far.

I think I'm going to have to put it down as well, and I need a palate cleanser, and maybe I'll dip back into it here and there as we progress. But wow, it's good, and it is dark. Yeah, it's darker than most. It's darker than our show.

It's darker than most fiction. Yeah. Which is, you know, that's a heavy feat right there. Yeah. So speaking of palate cleanser, I found a new book by Daniel Suarez. I just can't. My fingers are crossed every time he comes out with a new book, and I'm always disappointed.

I just can't quit you. I can't quit him. I can't. He did so good with Demon and Freedom TM that I just, I have to. I have to. So this new one is a little bit different. It's about 20 years and 25 years in the future. Okay. In like 2033 or 2034, something like that.

Mm-hmm. And it's, of course, billionaires talking about mining asteroids and space mining and things like that. Okay. And so far, I got it. I'm like halfway through it. And so far, I got to say, if you wouldn't have told me, I would never have known this is a Daniel Suarez book because I'm liking it.

I'm liking it a lot. Right. Okay. Well, that's good news. I mean, I enjoyed his first two books immensely as well, and I thought it was diminishing returns after that. But if he's figured out something, swapped things up a little bit, and he's writing a decent book again, I would love to read another Daniel Suarez book that I enjoyed.

Wait till I finish. Wait till I finish. I'm not going to dive in until you're done. I will wait for the message from you saying, go for it. Because a lot of his books tend to fall apart at the very end. Although you could tell me, don't bother reading it. Like I told you, don't watch The Predator, and I could just do it anyways. That's true.

That is true. I did tell you not to read that latest Christopher Moore book, but you did it anyway. Yeah, I did. That was so disappointing. He's one of my favorite authors, and that last one just did nothing for me. Yeah, if you're playing along at home, it's noir was the book.

So if you are a fan of Chris Moore, you can skip that one with the extreme prejudice. Moron of the week. My moron of the week are humans. Okay. It's pretty much it. That's all we got left. We're just going to go broad now.

Okay. There was an article on the New York Times called, Humans are speeding extinction and altering the natural world at an unprecedented pace, which basically just says we're screwed. Yeah. Yeah. I read this article. It's getting a lot of play, getting passed around quite a bit.

It's almost, well, actually, it's more depressing than the book that we were just talking about being super depressing. Yeah. It's not looking good. It's not looking good at all. Yeah. Yeah. The stuff we've been talking about is, you know, internet crap.

This is like real stuff. You know, we're losing biodiversity at an insane rate. And I've noticed this when I drive across the country. In the 80s, when we used to go on road trips, you couldn't go for a tank of gas driving across the Midwest without having to spend half an hour cleaning the dead bugs off your windshield.

The past couple of times I've driven across the entire country, there's been barely a bug at all. I can't remember the last time I like went through even maybe one or two bugs, but I remember that as a kid too, just like driving down, not even like crazy weird places, just here in L.A. driving and just being covered, like going through massive bug things and just your entire windshield is covered.

And that is not, that is distant memory to me. Yeah. It's all gone. It's, you know, and for a while I'm like, oh, that's great. No more bugs, no more mosquitoes. Oh, wait, birds eat mosquitoes. No more birds. Yeah. I don't like bees, but I like food.

Shit. So, yeah, just, you know, just anecdotally from just watching how things have changed over the past 40 years. It's kind of crazy how, how, thanks, Monsanto. Let's just say that. Thanks, Monsanto. All right. Well, I will continue your theme of it being humans that are the moron of the week, because there was one article that I think even beat the New York Times one, which is important, or one story anyways, that I have seen everywhere.

And people, the fact that humans shared this more than the New York Times article is a little depressing, but they did. And I guess it's kind of funny. Okay. So somebody tweeted us about when we talked about Game of Thrones a couple of days or a couple of shows ago and said specifically, I haven't seen anything yet, so can you give us an exact timestamp of when I can go back in so I don't have to get any spoilers?

Spoilers coming. Go ahead and skip ahead about three minutes. Now. Okay. So in the latest Game of Thrones episode, there's a Starbucks in Winterfell, apparently. In Winterfell's main hall, Tormund sloppily toasts Jon as Daenerys watches nervously in the background, concerned that her lover slash nephew could challenge her for the Iron Throne.

It's a stressful time for the Khaleesi, and apparently she prefers to calm her nerves with lattes instead of wine. Yes, there was a continuity error. There was a screw up. Somebody left a cup of Starbucks coffee in front of her during the shot. And, of course, HBO had to reply to this, and it said the latte appeared in the episode was a mistake.

And they said Danny had ordered herbal tea instead. Ah, not even coffee. So there you go. Herbal tea. That was the mistake, of course. So, yeah, this is, I mean, if you haven't seen this one already, be amazed. Yeah, I think there's a, I mean, this stuff happens all the time, and it's happened on Game of Thrones before, too.

I remember there was a, there was an uproar because somebody was wearing jeans in a, an extra was wearing jeans in some shot once a while back, too. We'll go back to, like, the Ten Commandments all the Roman soldiers have watches on. Feedback loop.

Over at Patreon this week, we got no new subscribers. Bupkis. Bupkis. Nobody loves us anymore, Brian. That makes us sad. Makes us sad. But over at PayPal, Bobby G's Chicago Eatery gave us some, gave us some coin. Thank you, Bobby G's.

Seed Jubbling and James Norton also gave us some coin. So thank you, everybody. I will have to stop by Bobby G's Chicago Eatery if I ever make it back to Chicago. Yeah, I've got no plans to go back right now, but when I do go back, which I certainly will at some point, I will have to look up Bobby G.

Probably to live. Fuck you. All right. Over at Twitter, we got a bunch of stuff this week. Brendan tweeted us. Your discussion about tracking of purchases made me realize even cash isn't as anonymous as it used to be. Retail stores are implementing facial recognition in their locations and could easily map cash transactions to specific individuals if they aren't already.

Yep. Here comes dystopia. Yeah. Yeah. That's not too tough. Not too tough at all. And right. Film Sleep Repeat writes in the future is here and the worst of all we feared. And he sent in a little thing about deep fakes and I put in a link to The Verge on this is about the Jordan Peele, Barack Obama PSA about deep fakes.

Yeah. And it's pretty good. It's pretty good. They actually showed it on regular TV last night, but they had some bits because, you know, yeah, yeah, he calls President Trump a total incomplete dipshit, but coming from the voice of Obama. So go check out the video. It's pretty good.

Yeah. And Barrett sent us a link saying some guy modified his room, but a swear when it bumps into shit, which is funny. It's clever. It's clever. But the problem with this is, as I read through the article, it's not that hard to do, apparently, but you have to gut your Roomba so it can no longer clean.

And then he put a bunch of stuff in there instead, which is kind of defeats the purpose. I want one that says shit, but still cleans. Yeah. He could have just put the Raspberry Pi on top. Yeah. But unfortunately, that's where his cat sits. So he couldn't do that. Okay. And TJ writes in, I thought you'd like this. And it's a tweet about if Arya Stark was a Jedi and shows some of the film with, of course, her with a double lightsaber.

Yeah. Pretty clever. Darth Maul style. And Eric wrote in, Tesla's new use, and this is a link from the register over in the UK, Taylor Drift. Finally, a use for AI emerges. Cyber smut star films. Oh, okay. Sorry. It's supposed to say fucks like it, but.

Okay. They did a little clever thing with their title there, but a porno in a Tesla with autopilot all on and warns, I wouldn't recommend it. So there you go. Uh, I think we called this, we said that, uh, auto driving cars and auto driving taxis will be the most disgusting environments in the planet.

And they're going to be. Yeah. You know what we should go into? We should go into the plastic seat cover business for Teslas in a self-driving car because they're going to be, they're going to have to be hosed down quite a bit. Yes, they are. And Viet writes in, can you imagine if everyone's Google search history ever became public?

It would be nuts. Yes, uh, I can imagine that and somebody imagined it quite a while ago. So check out this book called the truth machine, a novel of things to come by James L. Halperin. This was written well before we were in our current nightmare dystopia, but the basic concept being what if all of a sudden we invented a machine that, uh, basically could reliably tell if you were telling the truth or not, and it gets into the societal implications.

And that would be much the same as everybody's Google search history all of a sudden becoming public. Yeah. I bought this book a long time ago and it's on my Kindle, but I never went back and read it. Uh, you read it, right? I reread it and I thought it was still phenomenal because again, it's, it's not about the technology.

It's about what happens. So it's, it's dated, it's dated technologically wise, but it is spot on in terms of, uh, dystopian depression. Okay. Just what I'm looking for. Yeah. I don't know if I mentioned, I'm trying to get away from things like that.

Well then just, you know, go read a Berenstain Baird book. Oh, great. Bring that back. Over at gog.show. Don't bring that back. Over at gog.show. Jan writes in, hello geeks. Love your show. And the last show you mentioned autonomous driving.

I recommend this article about problems, which airplane companies did have to solve in the age of computer assisted flying. Tesla may lead the way in the autonomous driving systems, but I'm skeptical that even if they offer a car that is able to drive itself, we will see it on our roads anytime soon. Uh, and this is a Jalopnik automation transformed how pilots fly planes.

Now the same must happen with cars. And it gets into the fact that automation isn't necessarily the autopilot. It isn't a full autopilot. Pilots still have to do quite a lot of stuff. And I think we'll probably be the same in cars. And we agree with you. We've all been saying it's not going to happen anytime soon. Yeah. And if you think that autopilot is the key, just ask Boeing how that's going right now.

Yes. Johannes writes in, hey, Grumps, just my two cents regarding your security ha rant on Facebook in episode 342. I fully agree about Facebook making the word privacy a meaningless shell of a word. If you think Facebook will contend itself with just metadata in the future, you're missing the big picture, though.

They're announcing end to end encryption, but they own the ends, i.e. the respective apps. So it's absolutely meaningless. This is reinforced by the fact that they're adding dedicated desktop apps, etc., which makes zero sense in 2019, except if you're planning to get a larger trove of data on someone than what a browser window would allow.

It also allows them to get around ad blockers in browsers, because unless you have a network level blocker, the dedicated app is going to always serve ads. Grumpy regards from Boston. Yep. There you go. Well, I mean, the promise of end to end encryption is that they don't get any of it.

Yeah. Yeah, that's the promise. And if it's found out that they are actually getting the data from you and sending it to themselves, then that basically breaks down. Then absolutely nothing will happen the same way it always does whenever we find out whatever bullshit they've done. They will get a billion dollar fine and continue doing what they're doing, then they'll promise not to do it again.

And by the way, if you want network level ad blocking, go get an Eero at Eero.com slash GOG. They have network level ad blocking with their Eero Plus product, which you can get for a year with $100 off. Yes. And John sent us a link.

Thought you might like this comic, the ultimate stupid online quiz. And it was quite clever. Link is in the show notes. I will have to check that one out. Paul writes in. Hi, I'm a longtime listener of your show. And even though I'm not old, I'm definitely grumpy. I live in Spain and recently published an article in a local magazine about my time working with Glovo, the Spanish version of Uber Eats.

Thought you all might be interested. And it's called The Rise of Glovo and the Decline of Labor. Yeah, thanks for sending that in, Paul. I read through it. It's I really enjoyed it. There's this one particular paragraph that I particularly liked, so I'll read that one. But it's a good read. These new platforms create a new power relationship between itself and its workers and between itself and society, allowing it to avoid things that we expect of most members of society, such as taxes, decent labor conditions and a basic sense of responsibility for its actions.

This new dynamic has proved extremely dangerous in the United States, where a dystopian world has taken place in which basic worker protections are a whimsical dream and extreme exploitation is the norm. Nailed it. Yeah, whimsical dream. That's what we that's what we have right now. A very whimsical dream.

Quibble writes in, what is Firefox doing? All my add-ons are blocked, not disabled like Chrome does from time to time, but blocked. What the hell? Will I ever understand how any of this stuff works? I give up. I'm going for more beers. I think you had a few beers beforehand because there's some stilted writing here, buddy. Yeah.

There was something I originally came to bitch about, but now all I can think about is Firefox ruining my internets. Oh, man. Yeah, definitely had a few beers. Firefox has pushed a couple updates now to fix their broken add-ons because they had an expired signing certificate.

Whoops. Yeah. Somebody forgot to do their job. We've talked about this before. This has happened again and again. People leave and nobody remembers where the certs are. Did you? Is it under the couch? Check the cushions. We have certs. Yeah.

Stick to opera. It's better. Eleanor writes in, hi, guys. I've recently started looking into becoming a server administrator since my current position has started leaning me towards doing the work of a tech god. I'm going back to school to achieve the degree that will get me the proper pay for the position I'm at at a different company. I only have a few semesters left.

I'm wondering what is the best way to learn how to manage these servers, both Linux and Windows. I'm a learner by experience and I'm looking for a place to go that provides me with something like a broken server that I have to fix. I'll just go troll Amazon Web Services. Yeah. Just hit up S3.

There you go. How did you guys go about learning what you know? I feel confident that I can do the work for these positions, but Google is still a big part of my life and with the tests that they give you for the positions, sometimes Google is not available. Please help. There's a couple sites that you can go to.

ITPro.TV has a ton of Linux stuff and I think Windows. stuff as well. And there's also Microsoft Virtual Academy if you want to work on Windows stuff. Yeah, it's I learned by doing, you know, we learned by doing and we fixed it. Yeah, exactly. There weren't even books when we were doing it.

Yeah, there were there was no HTML book when we started. And the only the first book that I bought was learn to program Pearl in 31 days, which I got through the first four years of my career on and I never finished the book. So, yeah, it was a different time when we came up.

And ye olde Stack Overflow still has a special place in my heart. And Mad Mike writes us, hey, guys, I found a website for parents and teachers regarding internet safety that is probably more applicable to some of your listeners, but I wanted to pass it on. It's a one stop resource to help explain how to talk to your kids about internet safety and some basic resources like what is Snapchat?

Insert Jason's comment here. The site is called WebWise and it appears to be an Irish site. It is terrible. It is one of the worst websites I've ever seen. The content's good, but it's pretty ugly. Oh, and you can't even copy and paste anything from it. I tried to copy out the what the site is about and you can't.

Terrible. And the font colors are just contrast people. Contrast for internet safety. Don't go to WebWise. Also just finished Mark Goodman's Future Crimes and I'll be going to build my cabin in the darkest forests of Canada now as far from Wi-Fi as possible as if I needed another reason to drink.

Some recurring themes occurring in the show here. Yeah, apparently we've infected our listeners. Uh-oh. At first I thought this was a Mark Goodman was like one of the original MTV VJs, but that was a different guy, right? I was thinking Mark Goodman, Bill Todson Productions from the all of the old TV shows back in the 70s and 80s.

Yeah, I don't think I've got it in me to read another 600-page book about how everything's screwed. I'm telling you, man. I'm telling you. Mark writes in, Hello Geeks, one, two of your favorite internet personalities have converged over at the New York Times and it's an article called Jack Dorsey as Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley.

The Twitter chief executive is tech's foremost manfluencer, guiding his followers towards optimum cognitive performance or at least hunger. Yeah, I read that. That's as much of that article as I'm going to read. That's it. You don't want to. It will very much upset you.

Yeah. Yeah. I really do not like Jack Dorsey at all. And secondly, stay at home dad's rule. I did an involuntary one year stint as primary caregiver when my children were little. My biggest regret is not enjoying it more. I never got used to the sideways glances from the room moms at school.

Wait, hold on a second. You mean they're not checking me out? That's what I thought they were doing. I thought I was getting the signal. Ah, nope. Not this week, buddy. Look, I totally get it about the biggest regret being not enjoying it more. I try to remind myself of that every day. It's a struggle because kids are annoying, but I'm trying to enjoy it as much as possible and just keep that in mind.

1030 says, how many times have you stood in line at Chipotle or a similar takeout place only to be ignored by the counter staff busily filling online orders? I feel like shouting, hello, real person here, will make me instantly old. Like it's the Gen X, get off my lawn, stay grumpy. I agree.

I agree with that. Every time I'm in a business and instead of taking me who's standing right in front of them ready to give them money, they pick up the phone because it rang. Screw you guys. I'm going home. Yeah, I went to a Mexican restaurant not too long ago and I'm waiting to get seated.

The woman has like the menus in her hand and she's getting ready to go. And some asshole from DoorDash comes in and says, pick up. And she says, oh, just wait a second. Picks up an iPad, looks it up, takes the time, finds the bag, hands them the bags and then seats us.

Yeah. Like, excuse me. We're right here. You lost 5% on that one. Yeah. And Ersbo writes in, in a recent episode, you mentioned restaurants being too noisy. If you slash your listeners are interested, the podcast 20,000 Hertz episode number 61, Dining on Decibels does a fine job going into all of the contributing matters to the problem.

You guys are awesome. I am glad to be your patron. We are glad to have you. Thank you. We are definitely glad to have you. I'm going to check this one out. Sounds like a cool podcast. Yeah. I like the name, Dining on Decibels. Good one. Daryl writes in, hello, a friend of mine is thinking heavily about investing in Kinesis or Carrot Bar, which involves using Bitcoin and guaranteeing its value with gold backing.

Your thoughts? Love the show. Well, my first thought is either burn the money straight out or just send it to us so we can continue making wonderful shows. I would appreciate that. Yeah, so I did put in an article for you to Ethereum World News about Stablecoin and how it might be reaching a market saturation point that you can pass on to your friend.

Now, just because we haven't talked about this in a little while, let me fire up my little my app here and let's see how my cryptocurrency is doing. My initial $60 investment is now worth $17.46. Woohoo! All right. Winning. Yeah. I thought you were going to fire up your hate machine there for a second.

Oh, it's your phone. It is the same thing. Same thing. And over at iTunes, we have a couple of ratings this week. The first from a nom, nom, nom, nominous, clever, five star. I hate them. Guess what? You can hate them, too. I highly recommend listening to their biweekly podcast every week so you can fully grasp how much I truly love them.

It may take a few years of listening, but it's worth it. They're loathomely loathsome. In the end, you may end up like me and hate sponsor them with a few dollars just so that you can keep the hatred alive. Stay grumpy. Trademark. Nice. See, now this is how you do it, people. This is how you do it. Snarky. And Jason M41 writes in, enough for another five star.

He says, take your five star. Great podcast from one grump to another. 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. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review like those.

Closing shout outs. Quick closing shout out to a friend of the show, Seth Miranda. He has launched Adorama XP over on Twitch, the website where you get to watch people play games. I popped in this morning and he was playing a little Mortal Kombat 11, which I would like to play.

But I'd have to go buy one of those big sticks because I just do not have the dexterity to play on those little crappy controllers. I grew up on cabinet games. Damn it. I need a big stick and big buttons to mash. That's right. Cabinet games. God, I miss those. They were fun. And my shout out this week is to single parents.

My wife has been at a music conference in Nashville for a couple of days. I'm on my final stretch another 24 hours and she will finally come home. Thank God. I don't know how you single people do this. It's insane. And a big shout out to a friend of the show, Colleen, who is raising two boys by herself.

You're crazy. I'm going to send you some wine. You need it. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillipo. And I'm Brian Schulmester. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. It costs 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 343. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. But no Amazon store. Stay grumpy. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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