385: Pump Up the TikTok

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. Are you ready to go? Apparently. I am. Let's light this candle. I've been dealing with a lot of entropy recently. It always seems to happen at the same time. Just things breaking and bleh. So many things need fixing, Jason. And it's not technology for once. It's all just like life stuff. So good times.

Mine's just my body. If you can fix that, then we're in. Yeah. Well, we've been talking about UBI quite often on the show and the small little tests that have occurred. I didn't even know. Santa Monica's been trying it out for a little bit now. There was a report on KCRW, our local station here, that Santa Monica has been trying out UBI on seniors here.

Because seniors are one of the fastest demographics that's falling into homelessness. So Santa Monica is giving some of its low-income seniors a monthly check ranging from $200 to $700. So they're less likely to be forced out of this expensive city here. Rent's sky high and all that. It's gone so well, apparently, that Santa Monica is going to expand the program to include a couple hundred seniors from a couple dozen originally.

That's good. I like that. Can you guess what my problem is here? They all have to ride bird scooters to pick up their checks? No, you can't call it universal basic income unless you're universally applying it. Or at least universally to a demographic. If they were giving, say, everybody over the age of 65 registered in Santa Monica that money, then okay, you can call it universal.

If you're giving it to a couple dozen people, don't call it universal. That's just semantics. Yes, it is. But semantics are important, Jason. Words matter. Well, they used to, anyways. Yeah, I'm like, wait a second. No, emojis matter now. Eggplants matter. So Santa Monica isn't the only city to be doing this.

Stockton's been working on this for quite some time now. And they have an experiment. It's an 18-month experiment. They've got about 10 months to go. And they're finding out from their studies for $500 a month, most people are paying their bills and buying gas and food. Wait, they're not squandering it away on streaming services like everybody claims people are going to do?

Or buying, you know, heroin or meth or booze. I mean, the problem with this study is that it's a little bit skewed because, yeah, you do have that $500 a month, and it comes on a prepaid MasterCard. So it can be tracked, you know, so the people doing the experiment can track them.

Yes. The sample size, just like yours, is very small, 125 people to do the test. And there are some definitely statistical issues around their findings. But, you know, since Stockton is so screwed already, they're just like, screw it, we'll try something new. Let's give it a shot.

Right. And it seems to be doing okay. But, yeah, they're spending it on food, clothes, and utility bills, which, you know, if you're broke, that's where you need to spend the money. Exactly. Well, I'm just really glad that people are still giving this a shot because it seemed to go by the wayside for quite some time. Well, everybody, you know, the Yang gang, Andrew Yang, who's running for president, is big up on this, but he had to rename it something like Freedom Cash or something ridiculous because, you know.

Oh, God, sad coin. That's what that'll be. You get an ICO. You get an ICO. Anyway. Yeah, but, yeah, as soon as he started talking about it, I started to ignore it. Because I'm like, you're going to be gone soon. I don't need to listen to you.

You're not even a thing. Well, that is the point of these fringe candidates is to push certain things into the mainstream. We'll see how that goes. Speaking of things that might not go, Libra, back in the news big time. So Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, and eBay all quit on the same day.

It's not us. It's you, Libra. That's some big pink slips. Yeah, they're just, it's regulation. We're telling you. It's the regulators who are coming in and saying, look, man, you guys want to go down this road. We're just going to have to look under the hood everywhere. That's right. That is exactly right.

And that's why everybody's bailing, because they all got some dirty laundry. Yeah, exactly. So, but Libra is claiming that they have 180 potential replacements for the mutineers, people who are bailing. Diet coin. I don't know, man. The thing about it is, man, it's like, those were some big hitters.

It's not like there are that many of those that are just going to be rushing in to fill that void. Especially not, I mean, you're looking at, you know, kind of major financial institutions that have all pulled out. So, good luck. Yeah, we'll see how this goes. They had their big meeting in Geneva, and they actually have a board now.

So, we'll see how this goes. They have a board of directors, and Facebook's head of crypto, David Marcus, is on there. And Dresen Horowitz is Katie Juan. David Marcus? Isn't that Captain Kirk's son? Is it? You're the trivia guy. From Star Trek, uh, Ratha Kahn.

Carol, Carol Marcus, he had the affair with him. David Marcus was his son. Ah, well, there you have it. He died by Kahn. Kahn! In the news. Remember that bright, shiny day, oh, six, eight months ago, when Facebook said they're going to take things seriously, and they're going to police their own platform and gear up for the election?

I do, but, uh, you know, the news has kind of changed a little bit, so I've forgotten about that day. Yeah. It seems like things are different now. Well, yes. The last couple weeks, we've been talking about how Facebook has basically thrown its hands up in the air and said, you know what? We're not going to do any of that. You're on your own. And that is continuing.

Facebook is refusing to take down a Trump ad that is making false claims about Joe Biden, and so are YouTube and Twitter and most news networks. Yay. Well, here's the thing. I, I, I, I've had my mind changed about this. I think this is actually a good thing. All right. Because, and here's the thing.

Well, you know, now they're standing behind freedom of speech on this, but here's the thing. It's like, okay, if they start taking down everybody's ads, then you don't know who's trying to lie. So if it's an open forum for everybody, you can see how many politicians have lied in their ads and how many have not.

And people can actually do their own due diligence on it to see what kind of scumbags they're going to elect or not. Ah, see, there's the, there's the rub though. They would have to do due diligence. Well, there are a lot of people doing that due diligence. Otherwise we'd never would have heard of this story. True, true. But we read papers. When was the last time you read a paper?

Well, digital papers. There you go. And the people that don't, they listen to podcasts like us. So give them the skinny on this ad. All right. Well, there you go. The Trump campaign has released a 30 second video ad accusing the former vice president of promising Ukraine money for firing a prosecutor investigating a company with ties to Biden's son, Hunter Biden, essentially the false conspiracy at the center of the impeachment inquiry President Trump is now facing.

So no different than any of his other lies that it's on Twitter, except this is a packaged ad that's being blasted in the face of everybody that doesn't use ad blockers. Oh, ad blockers. Everybody should use those things. Yes, they should. So the Biden campaign asked Facebook to take the ad down because it is patently untrue.

But the platform said, nope, we're going to leave it up. And it doesn't actually violate any of Facebook's policies, which I suppose is true. It, you know, you can't stop people from lying, but you could not take their money for it. Well, here's the thing. The Biden campaign can sue.

That's why we have libel and slander laws, you know, they can sue. True, true. Facebook's also in the news this week because I still haven't found any anybody following up on this report yet, but Facebook seems to be locking out users who file complaints about fake accounts.

So, and it doesn't, it's not just politics. It's all across the board. So if you go in, you say, hey, this account's fake. In about, you know, 30 minutes to an hour, your account can be blocked. And of course, when you go and try and talk to Facebook, nobody's going to answer you.

And when you try and do this security check that asks for your ID to say, yes, I'm really this person. Well, apparently there's a bug in the form and people can't even finish. So they're just locked out. Shoddy programming is locking people out. And of course, there's no customer service to go to. Exactly.

So I found this over at Bleeping Computer and nobody from Facebook has gotten back to them. So it is a developing story. All right. Also developing or underdeveloping, Uber has laid off another 350 workers. Yeah. They're saying it's difficult, but necessary.

They've, they're losing so much money. They need to, you know, they need to really tighten the belt. And this one is just, I mean, it's like, you know, less than a percent of their workforce. So are you saying that not giving birthday balloons wasn't enough money saved? Apparently not.

You got to get rid of the people who have the birthdays now too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is not surprising. You know, they, they're in trouble. They're, they're a failing company. No matter how many billions they're considered to be worth, they are a failing company. They spend too much money.

They don't make enough. And at some point you got to stop being a unicorn. You got to start being a real goddamn company. Yeah. So we'll see, uh, Toyota just gave them, uh, another billion dollar or part of a billion dollar investment for the self-driving unit. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see, but the layoffs are from the self-driving unit, which is interesting.

It's not all the self-driving unit, but they have, they have made cuts there as well. Right. Interesting. It would make more, it would really make more sense to have Uber just take all that money that they're getting in and just reinvest it in a self-driving company instead of trying to roll their own because it's obviously not working guys.

No, it is not. So maybe it's time to cut that cord. Yeah. Well, maybe it's just time to cut the self-driving cord for a while anyway. Go back to the lab, please. Yeah. And I saw some news that I know is probably going to bother you a little bit, or at least directly affect you.

Samsung has decided to stop making Blu-ray players. Doesn't affect me in the least. I thought you were a huge fan. Oh, okay. Well, I am. I've got a, yeah, an Xbox one that has a Blu-ray player. At some point, I'm sure they will stop making them as well because, you know. Oh, yes. So that's going to happen. So your much-prized Blu-ray collection is going the way of the Dodo, apparently.

They look good on the wall. I'm going to keep them. And, you know, I like show art. I like show art a lot. And most of the time, all of these Blu-rays that I have here right now have all been digitized at the highest res you possibly can. So they're sitting on my Synology. So whenever I want to watch one, put it on in the background, I go to the Synology.

My Blu-ray shelf on my bookshelf is for dusting only. That's about it. For dusting only. Excellent. Yes. Yeah. Well, there's a good article over at the Wall Street Journal when this came out. They basically did an opinion piece and they found one person that is very into having actual physical product and one person that does not give a crap and is all about streaming.

So you get kind of both viewpoints. And it was very good. I mean, the person who is into having the Blu-rays and all that is very much like you. It's all just like, I like this. It's a point of pride. This is my life. I've invested time and money in this. And it's a cultural accessory that helps you establish your sense of identity.

And it's good to have it. And the only argument he didn't get into, which is my big argument, is I liked having a curated collection that I could view easily. And it is very difficult to do that in digital media. So he didn't mention that, but I would say that's a big one.

And the against is, of course, the theoretical that you'll have access to underground gems that otherwise would have stayed hidden. There's just so much more streaming available than you would ever get at a video store or anything like that. Yes, but again, it's the curation aspect and it's the discovery aspect.

It's so damn hard to find things other than through word of mouth these days. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, there's just too much shit to go through. Exactly. And, you know, I'm old. I don't really care that much about it anymore. It's like, I like having what I like.

And, you know, if a new movie comes out, I'm probably going to watch it once and I'll be done with it. But the old classics that I grew up with, I want to see over and over again or just throw them on the background because they're like a warm blanket. Right. And so I, you know, here's the deal. It'll just make it easier to find Blu-rays at your local, you know, garage sales or whatnot.

We had an article not too long ago where we were talking about a guy who, was going around buying up CDs and restocking his whole collection with those, which, you know, you can probably get those like a buck per metric ton. Pretty much. Yeah. Unfortunately, they're probably all scratched. That's, yeah, that's the problem.

Remember, haven't you had those little things that you had to put the solution on and then you'd turn it and it was supposed to clean it, but it would always make it worse. Yes. Never really did anything. Yeah. The, the, I don't know if you did this one, Carmex was the greatest trick for fixing scratch discs.

Carmex worked perfectly. You put some Carmex on it, rub it down with a cloth and boom, back in business. There was a handy life hack from 1990. Exactly. Nowadays, what you want to do is you want to do the Carmex, you want to wipe it down and then, you know, use it as a coaster so it doesn't stay in your table because nobody's got a damn CD player anymore.

Nope. No, I have, I did get one, it's in a box that's like a USB CD DVD player just in case for that one disc at one time. Well, see, I didn't go that far. I just figured if I absolutely positively need it, I can probably get one same day from Amazon.

I ended up getting that same day from Amazon because there was one time when I needed it and that's, I've used it once and it went back in the box and now it's sitting in a box in a closet somewhere, but I know it's there. I don't have to worry about that one. Oh man. And some scoot scoot news.

Oh joy. Yeah, another Uber ex-exec has decided to start his own company now. Just what we need, another scooter company. Yeah, this one is a, it's a micro-mobility autonomy company. He wants to make all of the scoots out there able to drive themselves back to their charging docks.

What could possibly go wrong? So, I mean, we've talked about them trying this out before, but this is the first time we've seen a third-party company that is out there trying to do this and I love it. If you don't have a three-world scooter that can stand on its own, you get like robotic training wheels that will automatically come down when it's in autonomous mode and then they'll flip up when the riders are on it.

Yeah, and they're saying, because there's also some other stuff they have to put on. It's like a couple pieces of equipment, two phone cameras, a piece of radar, a processor and a motor. Another motor, apparently. So, I just love this with the robotic training wheels.

I'm like, how long do you think those are going to last? Not long. I mean, the one thing I like about this is he does come, the CEO does come out and say, we only want to deploy in cities that want this and have given us written permission. If the cities say yes, then the operators say yes. Okay, good. But, I mean, there's so many different, again, we don't have the infrastructure for this sort of stuff.

Where are you? You're going to have to put in parking zones somewhere for these scooters. Well, that's what you always wanted. You wanted docks, Brian. This would make it so they have to have docks. Well, good. Get on it then. But you're going to have to do more than just get permission from the city. You're going to have to work with them to establish these areas.

This is a full-on city planning issue. It's not third-party companies just going, all right, look, these little things are going to scoot over to that corner and park themselves. No, you've got to go work with city planning. It's a big deal. Brian, nobody does that anymore. I know. Don't be silly.

But this is why it's doomed to fail. I mean, come on, man. There's no city engineers, no city planners. It's just like, eh, wherever it goes, it goes. Yes. So my issue with this, I love it. It's called Tortoise, which is a terrible name. Horrible. Terrible name.

Also, this is not a product. This is a feature. Right. This is something that any of the scooter makers can just do themselves, which is what they were doing already before these guys came out. There's no way that this thing lasts. It's going to get, they might get to beta, get a few units.

It's out there with somebody. And one of the scooter companies is just going to buy them. Yeah, pretty much. And that's it. You know, or the main people who make all these stupid scooters anyway are going to start sending out units with that already built in or buy three-wheeled scooters. Because I'm sure the turnover rate on these scooters is massive.

They, I mean, what do they last? Like a month or two at most in the wild? Definitely. Certainly in this city. Yeah, seriously, before they're in the canal or the ocean or on fire. Yep. So, you know, just replace everything with three-wheeled scooters. Or how about this? How about don't replace them at all and just go away?

That'd be wonderful.

Media candy. So, Brian, I've been sick for like what feels like a month and a half now. Yes. So, I've been, my media ups, like upswing on my consumption has been ridiculous. So, I did watch El Camino, a Breaking Bad movie over the weekend.

All right. I have never seen reviews so split on something before in my life. As I've been, I've been considering watching it. Half the reviews I read are, it's amazing and wonderful. And it's just like being back and watching Breaking Bad again. And the other half are like, it's horrible.

Don't ever do this. Just leave your memories as they were. See, the interesting thing here. I want you to look at those reviews. Like if you can sneak back at them at some point and see if the men really like it and the women really don't. Okay. Because we had a, we had a split review in our house. I completely adored it.

I thought it was fantastic. I loved the pacing. I loved just about everything about it. My roommate thought it was meh. And she, you know, she was just like, yeah, it was okay. I don't see what the big deal was about. I'm like, I loved it. Everything about it was great.

But, you know, it's, I didn't know if it was a guy girl thing. So, I'd be interested to see if any of your reviews have that same split. Well, I'll be able to tell you shortly because my wife and I will watch it at some point. I haven't watched it yet because she hasn't had the time. And there's no way I'm going to watch this one without her because she'll kill me.

So, you won't have a wife. Yes, exactly. So, I've got a, I'm going to hold off a bit, but I'll be watching it. And I will report whenever we do about this, if the split continues. Yeah, I'm curious about that because I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I might actually go back and watch it again because there's a lot in there that I, you know, might have missed.

Because I was on a lot of cold meds when I was watching it. But we would see, I was going to say we could, we could say that I was the one on cold meds and she wasn't. But we were both jacked out of our mind on DayQuil. So, it doesn't really matter. Awesome. Well, a trailer for Lost in Space Season 2 has dropped and I quite enjoyed it.

I forgot how much I actually liked that show. Yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, me too. So, it'll be returning to Netflix on December 24th. Dropping the full second season, of course, so we can all binge it. But it looked good. It was a nice little trailer. Yeah, I'm actually kind of excited about it.

It looks really, really good. So, hopefully, they'll stick with the same quality of script writing for it because that's really what it comes down to. I mean, it's a pretty show, but, you know, there are a lot of really nice pretty shows that don't have a pot to piss in when it comes to stories, like that Katie Sackhoff one.

Yeah. I know you liked it, but I just didn't. I wouldn't say I liked it. I just didn't hate it as much as you did. You thought it was more tolerable than I did. Yes, I found it tolerable. It's your Mr. Robot. Yes, which I can't stand anymore. Yeah, I couldn't stand her show, and I can still stand Mr. Robot.

Although, I've got one in the can on the DVR, so that, you know, every week is a crapshoot. It might make me stop, but with this much in, I don't think I'll stop. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've got some overthinking at Nerd News.

I found this on Business Insider, which I thought was great. Warp speeds in Star Trek are achingly slow, and a simple animation by a former NASA scientist proves it. So, James O'Donohue, who is a former NASA scientist, animated warp speed velocities in the solar system using the Enterprise spaceship.

He posted his video on Twitter earlier, I think, last week. And the animation shows it'd take nearly 10 seconds to reach Pluto and 18 hours to reach the nearest star at close to maximum warp speed. The planetary scientist says he feels despair about the distances and speeds involved in space travel, and in part made the animation to make everybody else feel as bad as me.

So, I think this guy's title at NASA had to be Chief Wet Blanket. So, I'm like, you're a dick. He's a true grumpy old geek, Jason. I know, I know. We should have him on the show. Yeah, I watched the animation, and it bummed me out, too.

I was like, we are never, ever, ever getting to another planet. It's just never going to happen. Not going to happen. No. There will never be a Star Trek future. Nope. But, hey, you know, take what you can get. Seriously. That's why it's called Suspension of Disbelief. Have you seen what we get?

This planet sucks. Well, we'll talk more about space travel soon. I got another story coming up. I did go back to Goliath Season 3. Right? You never got into that, right? No, I haven't watched it. I've had a couple friends tell me it's really good, but I can't stand what's-his-face.

Billy Bob Thornton? Yeah, I'm not a Billy Bob fan. And since it's all basically him being him, I don't think I'm going to enjoy it. I wasn't really a fan of his before I watched the show, and I thoroughly enjoy it. He's changed my mind about him. But I'm just happy Season 3 is not in that damn hotel in Santa Monica anymore.

Especially since I went to the bar when I was doing jury duty, and I found out how crappy that bar actually is. It totally ruined the first two seasons for me. I'm like, the food here is terrible. God, it was so bad. But I'm a couple episodes into Season 3 and actually thoroughly enjoying it.

All right. At some point, maybe I'll give it a go. Eh, you probably won't. No, because I really don't like him. If you don't, then, you know, that's fine. It's like that show, it's not Chef, but the new one on Netflix with the guy that we both don't like.

Oh, yeah, yeah. The Swingers dude. I can't remember his name. Yeah. That Iron Man, Mr. Iron Man. Yes. I finished the second season of that one, and I enjoyed it as well. Okay. You know, I liked it better than the first season, because the first season had Gwyneth Paltrow in the first episode.

Yeah, baking her vagina eggs. Oh, God. And Bill Burr was in that one, too. And I'm like, even Bill Burr couldn't save it. That's how goopy it was. All right. But, yeah, Season 2 of that was actually quite enjoyable. They get out in about quite a bit, but worth the watch. Anyway, moving on.

We got some blockchain news, Brian. Oh, joy. Now, I don't know if this site is pronounced audios or adios, because it's probably going to be going adios pretty soon. Right. This is a blockchain-based music streaming service that says they finally pay attention to indie artists' needs, and it's also full of pirated shit.

Sweden in the blockchain. And here's the lovely side effect of everything being on the blockchain. If somebody posts a copyrighted song, they can't remove it because it's on the blockchain. You know, sometimes you do want to get rid of things.

Yeah. Sometimes you want to be able to edit, particularly when you're dealing with copyright issues. Oh, oh, Brian, Brian. No, no, no. I'm sorry. This isn't editing anymore. It has a new word. Hmm. You cannot be deplatformed. Ooh. Because everybody's a fucking platform. Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

And what are you going to do about this shit? These people won't be around much longer. And they're trying to skirt the copyright laws, saying, technically, we don't host it because anybody can sign up for the service and run a node. And the nodes are the ones that share all the files.

It's, you know, it's distributed file sharing. It's very much like, not BitTorrent, but Napster. Yeah, I was about to say, it's like a high-end Napster. Yeah, exactly. You know, thievery for the rich and famous. So I don't know if this is going to be around very long.

I do not believe that the music labels will be very fond of this. Yeah, but I mean, like I said, they're trying to skirt the copyright by saying they're not a platform. So the labels are going to have to go spend more money on lawyers to get these guys taken down, which means less money for the artists. So at least my wife will be busy.

Yeah, that's true. I'm like, so Audius, you know, yeah, yeah. The best intentions go to hell with the rest of them. Yeah. And well, how often do you go to movie theaters these days, Jason? Unfortunately, not as much as I'd like to. Well, you don't have to anymore.

AMC Entertainment, the largest theater chain in the world, will soon be offering movies to stream at home, according to the New York Times. We kind of knew this was going to happen. Well, I mean, every studio on the planet is already going to be doing this in the next six months. So is Netflix already.

So is Amazon. So why do we need another one? Well, they'll get it a little bit sooner. They're going to basically put in things that are just finishing their theatrical run, but before that window where they show up on the current streaming services, they've made deals. So kind of like they're kind of like they're airplanes.

It's an airplane streaming service where they get the movie just before it goes on streaming and you can stream it at home. Okay. So they're basically leveraging their position as the theater owners to strong arm the basically the studios into giving them an exclusivity window so they can also sell it and kick back.

I see what they're doing there. Bingo. Bingo. Yeah. Makes total sense for them, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Until one day that the theaters aren't necessary anymore because nobody goes out. But we know people still go out. I mean, people spend billions of dollars a year at the theater. So. Not as much as they used to. But yes, there's something to be said for the communal experience and the big movies and the big screens.

When I was in Chicago, my friend Demon and I, we would go to a movie every week. And it was a friend of what? Demon. His name is Demon. Yeah. Okay. El Damone. We called him El Damone. But we would go every Wednesday. We would go catch a matinee, you know, spend 10 bucks, skip the popcorn. But they did have beer.

So go there, have a tall boy, sit in the theater and see what's new. It was enjoyable. And, you know, they had the recliners and, you know, you get to pick your seats. It was kind of like, it was a Midwest version of the Arclight. Right. So you have really nice seats, but then you have a 400-pound woman sitting next to you eating nachos in a plastic bag that you want to stab in the face.

So there is the ups and the downs. So some days you get the nachos, some days you get the silence. Right. Yeah. But it's a smart move on their part. It's just, I wish the studios could just skip them and do it. But this is a strong arm move from AMC.

I finished Greg Bear's Legacy, which is technically Eon series book three, but actually it's a prequel, so it's relabeled as book one. Okay. Shouldn't it be book point five?

I don't know. So it is what it is. So it's the third book in the series and it's three total. He finished writing these a long time ago and that's that. There will be no more. This was Diminishing Returns. I really enjoyed Eon, which is book two, but technically book one.

Book three, Eternity, which is technically book two, was not as good as book one, which was technically book two. And this one was the worst of them all. So it was Diminishing Returns on the series. I still stand by the first book, Eon, which is the only book that I'd read previously, which is what made me go and get the rest of the series, should have just left it with the first one.

Okay. Yeah. I'll stick to the first one if I get around to it. Yes. First one was great. Everything after that. In fact, it really did. The first one really did remind me, and I forgot to bring this up when I first talked about it. What was the books? The Long...

Remember? The Long Universe or all that sort of stuff. Oh yeah. The Long Earth is what it started with. Yes. Eon, very similar in concept to that. So it was really interesting. Oh man. I haven't thought about that Long Earth series in a long time. God, they were great, weren't they? I want to go back and reread those, I think.

Those were... I just got chills thinking about those. That was such a great series. Yeah, it really was. Yeah, just such a mind fuck, you know? Well, you will enjoy the first... You will enjoy Eon then. I definitely think you should read that one. Don't bother with the rest of the series. Okay.

Easily done. I don't need more shit to read. Which you'll see here in a second. First book I read this week was A Curious Mind, The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman. Interesting. Brian Grazer was on a couple podcasts that I listened to recently talking about doing the rounds to promote it.

And it sounds very interesting. Actually, he was promoting his new book. This is his previous book. Oh, okay. Yeah. So yeah, I found out Jordan Harbinger tuned me on. He did an interview with Brian Grazer. So he was just like... He was a cool dude. Very cool dude. So I'm like, okay, I'll check out the book.

And it's an okay book. It's short. It basically goes around a lot of his career. It's kind of a biography at its heart. But it talks about these curious conversations that he has with lots of very famous people.

And it's really fun. Some of them, he just basically gets like shut down in the middle of it. People walk away from him like, you did not prepare for this at all. We're leaving. But for the most part, it's a cute, fun little book if you just want something light to, you know, break up the monotony of all the sci-fi and crap that you're reading.

So I enjoyed it. I like Brian Grazer. He's a character. A very smart dude. Done a lot of stuff. Now, this next one, Brian, though. This one is in our wheelhouse. It's called Rebooting AI, Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.

All right. Now, I found out about Gary Marcus because I was listening to Penn Sunday School, and he did a two-part with him. And the premise of the book is that, well, we're just not there. We're not going to be there. AI and machine learning is completely going down the wrong track.

You need to burn it down and start from scratch if you want to have actual artificial intelligence. And, you know, step by step along the way, they tear down just about everything that's out there. And, I mean, very intelligent guys. Very intelligent guys.

And they say that, you know, in the future, this is what we're going to have to do. These are the hard problems we're going to have to solve to make this stuff work. And it's an incredible book. I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish because it's everything that we've been saying for the most part.

Hey, Monte Carlo and decision trees and, you know, the silliness of deep learning, which is just, you know, pattern recognition and all that good stuff. Yeah. Here's the thing that really bummed me about it, though, at the very end. It dawned on me. We are going to be so long gone by the time that any of this is even remotely like a nascent thing anywhere.

Brian, we are going to be so dead and in the ground. We're going to be dead and in the ground before there's anything even remotely resembling the beginnings of AI. We're going to be dead and in the ground before there's anything remotely resembling an autonomous car network. We're going to be dead and in the ground before all the stuff that we're being promised all the time, every day.

Yeah. Well, if you read the New York Times, that might just be next week, but so that's why I stopped reading a lot of that news. Anyway, it's it's a really sobering look at this stuff. And I have to go back to the the radiologists who we've been dissing and say, yeah, sorry, guys, you're right.

This shit ain't nowhere near where it's going to be, except unless you're a pigeon. Yeah, that one. I'm also I'm like halfway through this one and I just wanted to bring it up. It's Last Tango in Cyberspace by Stephen Kotler. Stephen Kotler is not really a big fiction guy.

So I thought this book was going to be more of his other stuff, you know, just, you know, making humanity better type of thing because he was beginning to flow for a long time. And he's written a lot of nonfiction books that are, you know, pretty well respected. Right. And so when I when I got this, I got this one is like a pre-release from somebody ages ago, the audio book, and I hadn't gone back and listened to it.

So I finally did it last night because I couldn't sleep because of migraines. And I pop it on. I'm like, this sounds like an audio book. His books usually aren't like this. They're characters. What the hell? And then I'm like, oh, it's a novel. Right. And it's a techno thriller.

It's not right yet. It is very, very reminiscent at the beginning of Case Pollard and the Big End Trilogy from William Gibson. Three of my favorite books. Well, one of my all time favorite books, pattern recognition and two of my.

Yeah, they made maybe the top 30, but pattern recognition is right up there. So there's a lot of this stuff in there. Like, yeah, you know, Case Pollard was a cool hunter in pattern recognition. The main character in here, Lion Zorn. Oh, God. What a name.

Yeah, they talk about it at the beginning, but he's an empathy tracker. So he's had augmentation to his mind so he can he basically traces empathy. And he uses that to basically figure out if something's going to be a thing or not. So his job is to walk into a room and say yes or no.

If something is going to be a thing, which is exactly what Case did in pattern recognition. Like, here's a logo. Is it good or is it yes or no? She can say yes or no. But it goes into designer drugs and it's basically, you know, two days past tomorrow type of sci-fi.

I'm enjoying it. I made the mistake of going over to Goodreads and seeing the slew of one star reviews. Oh, dear. But I think that they're wrong because I think that these are a lot of people that were looking for a regular Stephen Kotler book.

And we're surprised by coming to a novel. Keep in mind, the fun thing about a novel is it can be ruined in the last couple pages. It all depends on how he ends it. Here's the funny thing. Everybody said that the middle of the book is what sucked. Everybody liked the beginning and the end. So I'm walking into the middle of the book now, so maybe I'll have the same reaction.

But for the most part, at the beginning, I'm really enjoying it. So it's a maybe for me on Last Tango in Cyberspace. And my next book up, not very techie, little political, so I'm just going to leave it here. Stephen Hassan, a guy I know, sent us a copy of his new book called The Cult of Trump.

A leading cult expert explains how the president uses mind control. Stephen's no joke. He is a cult expert. And I read the first or listened to the first hour of it and had to turn it off because I was starting to get the PTSDs.

But yeah, if you're into that kind of thing, if you're into cults and mind, you know, mind control, it might be a book for you. I'll have a short review for it at some point because, you know, trying not to get political here because even I get annoyed when I listen to tech shows now and they talk politics.

So I will save it to you. I'll give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I think I could not read this right now much in the same way that I had to take a break from watching Breaking Bad when I had my skin cancer episode because one cannot watch something about cancer when one is dealing with cancer. I will have to wait until after this administration has gone to read anything like this.

Okay, so it could be one or five years. We'll figure that out later. Please, God. Could be a couple months. Moron of the week. My moron of the week is SpaceX. Oh, boy. We root for you so much. We root for you very much.

It is not Elon Musk who is my moron of the week, but SpaceX. All right. I found this over at Business Insider. It's called Inside the Awkward Tense and Heated Private Meeting Between Elon Musk and Texans, whom SpaceX is trying to buy out to fully realize its vision to reach Mars. Brevity in a title, my man.

Brevity, please. This is the story of what's going on in Boca Chica Village, which is a small neighborhood right next to where the big, giant, stainless steel dildo that Elon has built out in Texas that is supposed to take people to Mars is housed.

And it turns out that they basically need to buy out the town because the FAA has said, yeah, these guys are way too damn close to the launch pad. It's like a mile and a half from the launch pad. And even when NASA was doing shuttle launches, you had to be at least three miles away. Yeah.

Not like if that rocket went sideways, you were going to be able to run at all. But anyway, my moron of the week here is SpaceX, their main team that picked the location for this because they should have seen this coming. Yes, they should have. If there are people there. And I feel bad for the people that live there because it's mainly a retirement community.

It's like 10 to 20 homes. Well, maybe they figured they just all turn off their hearing aids. Yeah. Well, they burned to death because the rocket blew up. They were. They did have a plan at one point to shuttle them back and forth to hotels like 20 miles away. Oh, Jesus. What? That's stupid. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, okay, we're going to, we're going to take you to a hotel 20 miles away and you can watch the launch on TV and see if we destroy your home. Great idea. Fantastic. I love it. Sign me up. Well, the thing about it is they, the, uh, they're, they've come in with these, you know, notice to relocate things and say that, you know, this is a non-negotiable offer.

We're giving you three times appraisal. Now get the fuck out. Right. And they're not taking into account that some of these people, these are their dream homes that they've been building for their whole lives so they can retire in their custom built properties. Right. You know, just by doing, you know, getting the comps for the neighborhood and looking at whatever, they're getting screwed and that they're saying as much.

Right. And the fact that, you know, the notices they get from SpaceX say non-negotiable. Well, they had a meeting with Elon Musk after his big press conference, which they, they conveniently moved all of the townspeople away from the microphone for and put them in a room somewhere where after, you know, they met with Elon after the whole Q&A and they were pissed off.

They're like, well, we would have liked to ask some questions too. Like what the hell are you people doing? Severely bad optics. Oh my God, it's terrible. It's like, come on guys. It's your SpaceX, you know? Do things right.

Do things right. There's 20 houses here. You know, even if you, even if you bought them out for 10 times the amount of the house from, what was it? Boca Chica? I mean, even if you gave each person a million dollars, that's $20 million. That's a drop in the bucket. That's one engine that, you know, didn't go through Q&A right.

Come on. So, it was funny where they asked, like, hey, can we get a free Tesla thrown in? And Elon's like, look, man, I'm the CEO and I still have to pay for him. So, at least it sounded like Elon was trying to do what he could do. And it sounds like everybody was exhausted at this meeting.

But it was an interesting read and it's something I hadn't been following before. But, yeah, whoever is running this entire program at SpaceX is definitely my moron of the week. Agreed. Feedback loop. Over on Patreon, we have no new subscribers.

But over at PayPal, we have Michael, Linda, Art, and Chris. Thank you guys so much. Thank you so much. Over on Twitter, David writes, regarding Instagram hate on episode 371, try 500 pics for photocentric social media. I'm following a number of photographers I like there.

Yeah, I used to have an account there. There was a reason I stopped using them. And I think it was basically because their export sucked. There you go. Yep. I need export. That's it. And Bear writes, and does Brian need one of these yet?

And this is the video for the father and son podcasting microphone that was on SNL this week. It was very cute. Everybody in the world has sent it. But, yes, it was a very funny little bit. All right. And Bonut2443640, who still has zero followers, has come around to me, apparently.

He says, Brian, I think you won me over with your disgust on canceling Sirius. That shit gave me PTSD. Stay grumpy. All right. Brian, you're moving the needle. Moving the needle, buddy. Next thing you know, Bonut is going to be donating. Don't get your hopes up there.

Third in Command writes in, what the actual fuck? Stalker found celebrity by studying the reflections of her pupils in photos. And this comes from Japan. Yes. A man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion of stalking a pop star by studying the reflections of her pupils and photos she shared on social media and using Google Street View to find out where she lived.

So he was able to basically blow up the high resolution images that she posted and used all that to figure out her apartment, where she worked, where she lived. And then he attacked her. I want to know what service she's using, because obviously she's not posting to Instagram because those things don't scale.

Nope. So I have no idea where she was posting. And probably some, you know, crazy raw Japanese service where you can post 40 megapixels. Because if you're looking at the reflections in the in the pupils, that's going to be you need some resolution for that. Yeah.

It's interesting, though, that it's actually happened now in the real world, because we remember we had talked about like people taking high res photos could actually like you could pull somebody's fingerprints from it. Yeah. Yeah. They even mentioned that in the article. The first one we talked about was the Chaos Computer Club did it. I think it was back in 2015.

Yeah. And you could basically sit somewhere with a DSLR. If somebody holds up their hands, you can take a high enough resolution picture to pull the fingerprints. And I mean, these things are crazy. I've got a Nikon D810. And yesterday I was out in my yard and there was a hawk like five houses down on the top of a hundred foot tree.

And I wanted to see how big it was. And I took a picture of it, zoomed all the way in and got a pretty good shot of it. I think it's like, you know, 30 some megapixel sensor on it. And I mean, you can see detail that is incredible with these things. So, yeah, it doesn't surprise me that if she's posting super high res photos, that you could pick that stuff up.

There you go. Over at GOG.show, Grant writes in, congrats on securing your website with an SSL cert. Let's Encrypt is one of the best things to happen to the internet since you guys. Stay grumpy. Thank you, Grant. Yes, that was a nice side effect of moving over to our friends at WordPress.com.

TJ writes in, you're using an escalator wrong, was channel hopping and found a rerun of this. Strange sentence. But he's got a couple of links here. One is eaten by an escalator, man, machines bite back. And he said a few scary ones, a sad fatality and a nomination for Moron of the Week.

And the next one is 10 pints. Freddie said he regrets nailing his nuts on the tube escalator. Okay. I'm going to pass on looking at either of these. I get tripped out by escalator things. So I want, I looked at them. Very funny. Okay. Yeah. Very painful, but very funny.

I've seen the one where the woman died before and I don't want to ever see that again. So I'm good. I'm good. But the links will be in the show notes if you're into that kind of thing. All right. There you go. Tony writes in, and I have to admit, I think I'm going to need some clarification from Tony on this. Just listened to your cast echo chamber and I felt compelled to write you guys immediately.

I'm a 49-year-old man, father of two young 10-year-olds. I have worn many hats in my life from management to business owner, and I hold a commercial driver's license. That said, I currently drive for Uber as I transition to my next phase. Now here's where I'm going to need some clarification, or maybe Jason, you'll understand this.

For you to say Ubers are basically tape mobiles is rude and extremely offensive to me. Okay. I'll stop you right there. Okay. For you guys to say Ubers are basically rape mobiles is rude and extremely offensive. Oh! Spell check! Well, no.

Tape is actually spelled properly. Yes. Well, yeah. I don't know what... Okay. Rape mobiles is rude and extremely offensive to me. I hate blatant statements and 100%. I'd appreciate a response. Love the show, but this bit leaves me shaking my head. Well, since the phrase is apparently rape mobiles, I'm guessing that was Jason's.

Oh, probably. But I'm guessing. I'm sure you chimed in on the positive for that. I'm sure I did. Well, I don't believe we just said... I'm sure we didn't say all Uber drivers, but we've been banging our heads and yelling and screaming about the lack of oversight and the lack of background checks, and Uber is getting better at that.

But until they didn't, they were bad for a long time. Right. But this is in response to when we were talking about the security oversight that they have at Uber and the people who are in charge of taking the complaints from people who have been raped in Ubers. And it is, you know, it's a problem.

So, yeah. I mean, yeah. Granted, it's called hyperbole. Sorry. It's a show, man. Come on. We're trying to... I was going to say we're trying to lighten the mood, but that doesn't really lighten the mood. Not really. Today, we're going to talk about rape mobiles and the scourge of our women.

Okay. Yeah. No, there's just a lot of rapes in Ubers and Lyfts and taxis. But it seems that my big problem is the fact that Uber has a division of people who are supposed to be tasked with customer safety, and all they care about is protecting the company.

They're more covering it up than anything else. Yeah. Since they're not allowed to even call the police. And Quibble writes in, I'm drunk on wine and fuck Tim Cook. Great show today. Smiley face. Blizzard 2. Doesn't matter. They eased up some. Still seems really lame. It's like canvas bags meet loot boxes.

I'm sorry. It's not funny, and it's a lot worse than loot boxes. I never thought Apple sending Tencent all my URLs by default would ever be a thing. Last post. Pinky swears. Thank you, Quibble. I'm glad you are having a good night. Do believe he passed out after that one, because it was his last post. Yeah. Hefe Seen My Shoe sent us a link to the Casa Smart Wi-Fi light switch slash dimmer, and he says, not sure how it works with the Hue light bulbs, but if you watch the Magic Show GIF at the bottom of the page, the dimmer appears to adjust on the switch in accordance with the app.

I have the regular switch, and it's a button switch that sits on a single position, so there is no discernible difference between on and off, with the exception of the light being on and off. Also, this works with the Eero Mesh Network to ID the 2.4 GHz signal automatically, where with other brands, Cough Cough Wemo, I had to do a bunch of tomfoolery to get it to work.

Great show. Keep doing what you're doing. Are you going to pick this one up? I'm thinking about it. It does seem to do what would need to be done. I need to, you know, show it to the wife first and say, what do you think? Okay. We'll see. Yeah. All right. Barrett writes in, pump up the volume, doesn't have legs.

Rewatched it about a year ago, and it's cringe-inducing. Well, thank you. Saved me a watch. They should redo it as a young podcaster. Oh, my God. Yeah, except podcasting isn't even going to be a thing, so you've got to find something new.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Pump up the TikTok. Fasha writes in, hey, Grumps, I just listened to episode 383. Many thanks for the tip on the Dead Can Dance group. Your previous recommendation was quite good as well, the church. I enjoy the witty banter. Was it just me or my early commute this morning?

I thought I heard some sound issues. Sounds like feedback, statics, blips. In any case, long-time listener and Patreon contributor, stay on the grumpy side of life. Yeah, that was an issue with me using an old laptop, and there was a bad connection. So I cut out almost all of them, but there were some that I had to unfortunately leave in, and I was too sick to do ADR on it, which is what I would normally do.

I tried, and it's like, no. It's like, my head was so stuffy. It was better to have a buzz and a bleep than it was me to redo those, and I had to keep some of the bits. But I, trust me, I cut out about 10 minutes of those, so it was just a, yeah, bad connection on an old laptop, because unfortunately, I was having technical issues.

Sorry about that. All apologies. Project Princess writes in, hi guys, I purchased a few domains on hover.com slash GOG. All right, that's what I like to hear, Project Princess. Now I want to create a web page using one of them. Which web host would you suggest? I think it's HostGator, and I've searched your site but cannot find it.

Please help. It is not HostGator. It is definitely not HostGator. No, that would be another show that I used to work for. Not this one. HostGator has never paid grumpy old geeks, so no. Oh, I personally like Node Host if you have some technical chops. It does take a little bit of technical chops to get it up and running if you want to build like a WordPress site or something like that.

I also use Node Host for my one remaining site. Yeah. Otherwise, I recommend if you need the easy stuff done for you, wordpress.com is what we moved GOG.show over to.

I can't in good conscience recommend Squarespace because it still isn't an unintuitive clusterfuck, but anybody out there who's still building sites, shoot us some recommendations for Project Princess here because everything that I've got basically boils down to go get a Node Host account and figure it out.

But because it's cheap and fucking amazing service and we love those guys. Anthony and Node Host are on my top list of best places to host a website. Agreed. And ExaltedGod writes us, some scoot-scoot news here, wanted to drop this your way, there was a private security researcher that reviewed the Bird Scooter mobile application, link to the app analyst, beyond the number of poor security designs, and to make this more hilarious, someone created a script based on this article that will ring any scooter in any given radius.

And this is a link to GitHub, the Bird Whisperer. Going back to the app analysis, yeah, so he sent this to Bird, he made them aware of the issues found on October 2nd, and they will not trigger any new changes based on the findings. He said it's generally a safe application, but basically there's just not a lot of security built into it.

You could track people if you knew what you were doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Figures. Yep. Figures. Oh, man. Over at iTunes, Brian with a Y says, Grumps, not chumps. This is a five-star. I look forward to each episode.

These guys are an excellent addition to your podcast lineup. The show is well-organized and prepared. Brian with a Y or an I and Jason Tackle. It's it with an I. Tackle news like true grumpy old men because they are. I'm glad I found this show and will continue to listen as long as they stay on.

Stay grumpy. Thank you so much. And Charlie X5 also gave us a five-star rating. Transplant from JHS. I'm assuming that's the Jordan Harbinger show. Yep. Missed hearing Jason talk on Feedback Friday, so I decided to check this out. Man, am I glad I did.

Useful, easily digestible tech news. And these old geeks are kind of funny, too. Jason? Well, I'm going to let you take this one, Brian. I don't do it with the panache that you do. Deliveroo! There you go. Well, I'm kind of wondering about Charlie here. I still do Feedback Friday with Jordan, unless they're having me record it and then they cut me out.

You've been editing it out, Jason. Hey, man, the check's still clear, so if they want to pay me for doing nothing, I'm down for it. But no, I have not missed a Feedback Friday, except for when they have a guest come in. But even then, I still do those and I do all the ads on the show, so you should still hear me.

But either way, welcome aboard. Welcome aboard. We're glad to have you. And if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review.

Feedback loop. My closing shout out of the week is to Vicks VapoRub, back from the 70s. Oh, I love you so much. Slather it on and sleep like a baby. But just wear a t-shirt that you don't care about because I forgot it is the ruiner of good t-shirts.

But anyway, man, if you got a cold, Vicks VapoRub is the shiznit. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schillmeister. 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 few bucks and we'll love you forever. If you don't like Patreon but still want to support the show, you can give a one-time or recurring donation by just going to GOG.show and clicking the PayPal button.

Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 385. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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