392: Half Man. Half Delorean.

This episode is brought to you by Hover. Go to Hover.com slash GOG to get 10% off your first purchase. And get your domain today. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We were going to have an AirPods Pro review from MXV this episode, but unfortunately he got snowed in yesterday because apparently the white devil is falling in Chicago. So I wasn't about to stick around and wait for his review because I, you know, I got the Bezos pods.

Right. And I've been working with those for a while. And yeah. Not so much. Not so much. I, they're good for certain things when you do want noise canceling and really good audio quality, but for day to day, not so much.

That's why I skipped on the AirPods Pro because I don't like things all the way in my ear canal anymore. It turns out. Okay. I'm pretty much used to the AirPods. Right. So I can hear around. So I went and bought the AirPods 2. Okay. They were on sale yesterday or the day before yesterday on Amazon.

They were $40 off. That's not bad. No, no. So I got the, uh, the AirPods 2 with the wireless charging case for a buck 60 instead of a buck 99. Oh, there you go. It's like you put a down payment on your replacement, uh, AirPods 2s in a year.

That's exactly what I did. So, uh, yeah, the form factor is the same. Basically everything's the same except a little bit more, a little bit more talk time, twice the talk time, which will be nice. I haven't tested it yet, but I've got some calls later today and we'll see because yeah, my regular AirPods now, I'm like, hello, this is, that's it.

That's all I get. So, um, yeah, I just, I caved in. I'm like the AirPods, the AirPods pro are just too expensive and I don't want them shoved in my ear. If I want noise canceling, I've got the, the Bezos pods now, which do sound surprisingly extraordinarily good.

Excellent. Well, I mean, that is good, but, uh, I'm sad to hear it's not a good review. That means I will not be getting a pair anytime soon. Well, yeah, they're too heavy and the size is too big for at least my ear holes. I'm on the smallest one and it feels literally like I have a broomstick shoved in my head.

That's unenjoyable. No, it's not. Especially when you want to wear them like all the time. Yeah. So, uh, I threw out a question to Twitter the other day and haven't really gotten any good replies yet. So I'm going to throw this out here. If there are any copyright lawyers listening, I'd love to hear from you.

And my question was who owns the copyright on algorithmically generated art? If I go to a website and set a few sliders and the computer generates a new piece of art, is it mine or is it the programmers? That's a good question. I don't know. Um, I do know that the owner is not the AI behind the generator because we've had the famous test with the monkey who took the photograph.

And, um, the, the copyright case came down on, it has to be a human being that can own copyrights. Animals and, and other inanimate objects do not own copyrights. Um, my personal guess would be it's the programmers, especially since you probably went signed off on a TOS that says they own it.

Yeah. A lot of these things don't really have TOSs yet though. You know, people who are putting these things out, it's just like, Hey, try out our new gizmo. And I'm just like, Oh, that's kind of cool. If I want to use that in a project, can I, or, you know, is there a licensing process or what the deal is with it?

So it's just one of those gray areas that I would like somebody that actually knows what they're talking about to possibly chime in. Right. Yeah. My, my guess is it's going to end up being the programmers you're in the gray area right now where they haven't staffed up their legal departments at these companies yet. So, um, use it while you can.

Yeah. Seriously. Uh, we've talked about customization quite a bit and how it is a lost art and gone the way of the dodo. Well, Facebook is throwing you a bone, a little tiny baby bone. Now this isn't exactly, they're not my spacing it up here, but, uh, you will soon be able to change your, your tabs, get rid of tabs that you don't like.

And also you'll be able to turn off the evil red dot. Okay. This is, I assume is, is for the, uh, mobile app. I believe it was for the, uh, the website. Uh, I wouldn't know cause I've been using Facebook purity, the, the plugin that you turned me on to ages ago, uh, since day one, which lets you do all sorts of customizations, which for me just means turning everything off.

Right. And expect that to break very soon if this is rolling out to the website, because you know, every time they make a change, then Facebook purity dies as a painful little death. It goes, eh, the Dom has changed. And I've also got a little bit of follow-up here coming back to Amazon.

Um, I was in this weird dystopian nightmare this morning with a baby shark playing on repeat and my wife basically losing her mind trying to get my son to eat blueberries. And he didn't like these blueberries because, well, three-year-olds are just picky in general, but he generally loves all fruit and particularly blueberries.

But he wouldn't eat these because they were too big. Now, I'm not saying things have changed at Whole Foods since Amazon took over, except things have changed at Whole Foods since Amazon has taken over. These organic, these, there are no way these are organic blueberries.

They're the fucking size of cantaloupes. They're, they are not organic. They can't be. If they are, I want to go to this farm and I want to see what kind of special dust they're cropping over there because they're insane. Anyways, the point being, I saw a story and I figured you could do a little recon on here.

I don't know if I've mentioned I actually went over to the Amazon bookstore that was local to me, which was half books and half Amazon gear. But we're going to have the first non-Whole Foods Amazon grocery store opening up next year in your neck of the woods. It will be in Woodland Hills, California.

All right. Well, then I guess I'll have to go check it out. Yeah, so it's not going to be one of the cashierless Amazon Go convenience type stores. This will be a full on conventional supermarket, not branded with by Whole Foods. So I'm wondering if Amazon is priming to kind of get rid of the Whole Foods branding eventually.

Probably, probably. Now, the interesting thing about this, I, my roommate has actually mentioned this, but she thought there was another Whole Foods opening up. So I'm going to have to find out where this is going to be, because apparently it's where a Toys R Us was, if that helps at all. Toys R Us? Yeah, that's what the, well, link's in the show notes, Jason.

Read the deets. I am. I'm looking at it, but there's no, there's no address in the actual TechCrunch article. So it's been so long since there's been a Toys R Us. I'm trying to remember where the hell one was. Right. Yeah, well, I'll definitely check it out when it opens. And I am prepared to be disappointed.

Yes. In the news.

Brian, you've been very happy with the way Microsoft has been getting their action on lately. And you keep saying that, yeah, Microsoft is doing good things. They're doing good things, right? They seem, they seem to be doing so. I mean, there's, there's your odd blips where, where they do things that are tad questionable. But of all the major tech companies, I think you've got Apple and Microsoft that are, that are giving it the good old college try to be decent corporations.

Well, Microsoft is now going to honor California's new privacy rights throughout the entire United States. I like that. Yes. Yes. To be honest, though, it's probably just easier financially and, and technologically to do so because otherwise you'd have to build multiple systems.

That. And also, I think that I was watching Inside Bill's Brain a couple, like two months ago. Right. And Bill was, he's still very mad at the United States government for all of the antitrust crap that he had to go through through Internet Explorer. Fully deserved, I might add.

Fully deserved. So that was, that was a load of crap. So Bill Gates can shut it. Yeah. So I think Microsoft is gun shy about going up against the government in any way, shape or form. So they're just going to try and end around it and say, hey, we're just going to do this. Even though they, they take several digs at Congress in here quite a bit.

As digital technology becomes more and more essential in our day-to-day lives, the lack of action by the United States Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation continues to be a serious issue for people who are concerned about how their data is collected, used and shared.

And they have a couple more digs in their blog post about it. But this is a good thing, I think. I fully agree. I'd like to see more companies do this. And I think we will, because if you look at the bottom line, also, you know, if you look at the way the winds are blowing, we are going to have a nationwide version of this at some point.

So you might as well get on board now. Yeah. And Microsoft is going to work with their enterprise customers to make sure that they're compliant with both GDPR and CCPA. So that's good. I mean, honestly, if you're a big enough company and you're global, you've already had to deal with GDPR. So just roll it out across the board, people.

Get on board early. Be a good company. Get on the privacy train. Toot, toot. Now, let's talk about people that are definitely off the privacy train. We've talked in the past a bit about smart TVs and how they should basically be called spy TVs. I've got two Samsungs.

They are both smart TVs. Back when the whole brouhaha came out about how they were spying on us and all that, I turned off all the features and I turned off auto update because we all know what auto update does. It generally switches everything. So back to default settings that they like, not your default settings.

Did you put a piece of tape over the camera? I don't have cameras on any of my TVs. I refuse to buy those. That you know of. That I know of. Yes. So yeah. So I haven't checked recently, but I'm assuming since I have auto update off and I haven't touched the settings, they're all they're all not tracking me.

But so let's just talk about a bit about what's going on. What I didn't realize how widespread this actually was and that in 2017, the FTC in the state of New Jersey, there's New Jersey news again. We'll get to that later. Actually next week. Vizio, $2.2 million suit against them and alleging that they tracked consumers in minute detail without their knowledge or consent.

On a second by second basis, they collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. What's more, they identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts added all up and they captured as many as 100 billion data points each day for millions of TVs.

For millions of TVs. I know, right? Like, we knew this was going on, but as I was reading through this, and even though this is old news, 2017, I'm just staggered by how big big data is and what these people are getting. Yeah, I didn't realize the scope was so broad on that.

That's crazy. So they had to pay up. And according to the complaint, they also pushed updates to older TV sets, which would now enable them to collect data on users as well. And of course, they sold all this data to third parties, obviously. Is it just me or is $2.2 million a pretty measly fine for what they did?

It's nothing. And the crazy thing about this, and I think we mentioned it at the time, but manufacturers are looking to have to charge premiums for dumb TVs to make up for the advertising revenue that they lose when they show viewers targeted ads or sell the data. You're going to have to pay more for a stupid TV moving forward.

Yeah, that's, I mean, I don't get it. I don't get it. What happened to just buying a TV like it used to be? And we're old, Jason. We're old. Yep. So they're doing all this stuff and they're definitely doing it more and more now because they're trying to get data from younger voters and cord cutters and cord nevers, people who use smart TV data, et cetera.

And I just slipped in the voter thing there without the main point of the story, which is it isn't just advertising companies that want this data anymore. It's campaigns. Now they're not doing it directly themselves, but as the lead up to this next election, they're having, you know, their third party companies that they go and buy data from getting all your TV data to see if they can start doing some pattern recognition and matching and figuring out where to put their advertising dollars.

Yay! Ah, nefarious little bastards. Yeah. So campaigns or third parties working on their behalf now work with providers such as Vizio, Roku, Dish Network, and DirecTV to match their list of voters and customers against each other. Dish Network and DirecTV confirmed this.

Roku has not responded at all, although the company has posted a listing for a political ad sales account manager. So yes, they're doing it. You know, you, of course, I, you know, my, my entire ecosystem in my, my house is Roku TVs and Rokus and Roku sticks and boxes.

So I guess you're going to have to dig in there and see if there's an opt out anywhere. I'm sure there's not, but here's the thing. I don't really use it for anything that has advertising on it. So yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I don't know, but still it's annoying. It's really annoying. And speaking of people using data that they shouldn't, well, Google.

New Project Nightingale gathers personal health data on millions of Americans. Right. Oh, yeah. I guess this is exactly what you were talking about when you said you don't give a crap about Fitbit being acquired by Google because they have all your data anyway. Exactly. So I'm like, they know everything.

Yeah. The data involved the initiative that encompasses lab results, doctor diagnoses, hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, including patient names and dates of birth. Yay. Yeah. This is with Ascension, the second largest health system in the United States.

And Ascension hopes that they can mine the data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients. Yep. Yeah. They're not doing this to make you any better. They're doing this to sell you more shit.

Yeah. And share the information with your health care providers so to up your premiums when they figure out you're at a risk group. Yeah. You want to know the annoying part about all this? It's HIPAA compliant. Yep. They're not doing anything illegal because- They're not doing anything illegal yet.

Once again, we need our lawmakers to step up here. And neither patients nor doctors have been notified. Great. Well, if they get the Wall Street Journal, they've been notified. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't go to the doctor, but I'm guessing a lot of people- Yes, we know that. A lot of people that do are probably going to be very upset about this. I'm not thrilled. I'm not thrilled at all because I'm certain my data is being batted about. Oh, I'm sure it is. Well, I don't know if you go through Ascension.

That's true. I don't know either. I bet nobody knows. Like, now we're going to have to figure that out. It's all a black box. I mean, healthcare is the new AI. Yay. Stuff goes in, stuff comes out, and we have no idea what happens in between. Yeah, well, they are going to be using AI to give you doctor recommendations and things like that.

Awesome. Another awesome one this week. A viral tweet about Apple Card leads to Goldman Sachs Probe. Well, this one is interesting. David Hennemeyer Hansen of 37 Signals fame. He and his wife got Apple Cards, and he apparently got a 10x credit limit than she did.

20x. 20x. Oh, wow. 20x. Man, it even got higher. Yeah. And they apparently, you know, filed joint tax returns and share the monies and everything. And his wife even has a better credit score. And his wife even has a better credit score.

Yeah. So this really kind of poked the bear. So, yeah, yeah. They're going to be investigating Goldman Sachs on this. As they should. As they should. This is a PR nightmare for them, and it's ridiculous. I'm sure it's had something to do with a machine learning algorithm.

Men are better. Of course it does. Of course it does. And it even hit Steve Wozniak, you know, who is still, you know, still works at Apple. And he said that, you know, he got the same type of deal. He's the one that got the 10x.

That's probably why you got it confused. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He got the 10x. And he said Apple is partly to blame because they should have been doing their due diligence on this. So they should share responsibility. Good for Steve. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure somebody should have been looking into this on Apple's side, but at the end of the day, it's on Goldman Sachs' shoulders as far as I'm concerned.

You know, Apple gets a black eye on this, but it's Goldman Sachs. Yeah, totally. It's their algorithms that did it. Yeah. Now, over on YouTube, we've discussed in great detail many, many times their questionable moderation and their lack of, you know, actual standards across the board and et cetera, et cetera.

My son is far too young to be into the YouTube generation, and I'm far too old, so I don't know too much about all these crazy YouTube channels that get, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of people. But apparently there's this guy, Markiplier. Do you know this dude?

No, I do not. All right. Well, whatever. He had a site or he had a YouTube channel, and he does stuff, probably playing games. And apparently a ton of his fans all got banned for simply spamming emotes. Are we using emotes as a term now? I guess so. I guess we are. While voting during a live playthrough of an interactive movie, a heist with Markiplier.

So they didn't really do anything wrong. They did what apparently people do on other channels all the time, such as Twitch and things like that. You spam with emotes. But it's against the terms of service, so a whole shit ton of his fans got banned. And as he explains in a video calling these people out, it doesn't just kick people out of the chat.

It affects their entire Google accounts. They've lost videos, channel memberships, or access to other important services they need, all because they spammed several emotes in one line. He also blasted YouTube for claiming that appeals were carefully reviewed, noting that there was at least one instance where someone succeeded with an appeal and was almost immediately banned again for seemingly no reason.

Yeah. So this is basically just, once again, highlighting the complications and limitations of YouTube's approach to moderation. Obviously, it's too damn big, so there's got to be some automation going on. But the human watchers of the machines are not doing a very good job either.

Well, Brian, I have a problem with this on one level, as ex-programmers. Yes. Now, if I give a free-form field for somebody to put some stuff in and post to a website. Yes. And I have terms of service that say what they can post. Yes. I can filter that input.

Pattern recognition. Before it actually goes anywhere. And when they hit send, they say, this is against terms of service. Stop it. Yeah. That's exactly what they should be doing. If they keep trying to do it, then I can freeze them out and not let them comment. Easy enough. I don't have to let everything.

A little programming common sense matter, Jason. I know. I'm like, you made YouTube. You can't filter your own comment streams. You can't stop it before the horse leaves the barn. I'm sorry, but that is easy. Exactly.

You can have an entire simple subset of rules that you can modify and change as you change your terms of service that just checks through all the inputs and gives people warnings. Yeah. It would save everybody a lot of headache. Why?

I mean, am I missing something here? Because this just seems so drop dead brick dumb that why isn't this implemented? I don't get it. I don't know, Jason. I just don't get it either. It's the first thing that you and I would have built into this. I would have been asking, all right, so what can and what can't we do?

Okay, let's filter out all the cuss words. Let's build in a, what, five, ten time warning system. And then let's still not even delete their account. Let's put it inactive for a week or two. Or, you know, go to YouTube jail. Like, people go to Twitter jail. Why is this so hard? You get a time out, you know?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I just don't, I don't quite understand how they're just missing the easy things, you know? Oh, God, stupid people. Anyways, more YouTube news, speaking of. YouTube is coming out with new terms of service on December 10th.

Oh. Well. And? What an opportunity for them to implement some of the things we've discussed. Well, these are terms. This isn't a programming update. But here is one line that has everybody's panties in a bunch. And I would like to say that I would like to call this addendum the grumpy old addendum to the YouTube terms of service.

Mm-hmm. YouTube is under no obligation to host or serve content. That's right. Yes. They are just a platform. Why have they not explicitly said that in the past? No one knows. So, I mean, this comes down to the whole COPA thing that they got nailed with by the FTC.

Right. But all these changes that they're making. This is, I guess, the fourth change this year. And, you know, it's just so obvious that why isn't this, like, this should be on the homepage. It's not a public service, people. Yeah. It's not a utility. It's not, you know.

You aren't paying for it. Yeah. This isn't, like, an amendment to the Constitution. This is, hey, our company, our servers, our time, our dime. If you want to be a dick, we can take it down. Yep. So, boom. No shirt, no shoes, no service.

No service. Yeah. So, I just love that. Everybody's like, oh, no. Yeah. Oh, God. Anyway. Speaking of big companies removing things, Instagram is going to start testing like, you know, like, hiding like counts here in the U.S.

And I love this in the ad, the tack onto this headline on TechCrunches, which could hurt influencers. Oh, no. I love. You might have to do something real for a living. Get a fucking job, you lazy bastards. Now, I love this because somewhere down here in the, buried in the article a bit, they're talking about when they tested this in Japan, only in Japan and for, only for influencers with 1,000 to 5,000.

1,000 to 5,000 followers, right? 1,000 to 5,000 followers. Or 100,000 to a million. That's not an, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or 5,000 to a million. But 1,000 to 5,000 followers does not an influencer make. That's somebody with a mildly okay popular account.

I mean, that's nothing. That's absolutely nothing. I've got 1,000 Instagram followers. Am I an influencer? Hell no. You're a mini-fluencer. Yeah, that's about it. So, you know, it changes based on culture, I guess. But, yeah, everybody's so upset that, you know, they've been selling their soul for the likes, and now that's going to get taken away from them.

From all the books we've read about all this stuff, and all the psychological studies that have been made about this stuff, this is a very, very good move. It will make us all happier. Do it. Get rid of it. Take a chance. Let's see. Take a chance, chance, take a chance, chance.

So, I think this should be mandatory across all platforms, but now that we've got the science. We have to have ways to measure things. Yeah, we've got the science. Or at least make it a toggle that I can turn off if I don't want to see the likes. I don't care. No customization, though, so forget about it.

Forget about it. Now, we've talked also a lot about our coming robot overlords, but apparently some people are hitting some speed bumps, as it were. I'm going to say Adidas, because I've said Adidas all my life, but I do know it's supposed to be Adidas. Adidas?

It's the guy's name, and that's how he said his name. Oh, but you know what? The guy that created the GIF pronounces it JIF, so screw him. Well, I'm not ever going to call it JIF, and I'm going to always call it Adidas. Yes. They are abandoning their robot-staffed speed factories in Germany and Atlanta.

Both facilities, which are run in partnership with the German plastic specialist Ochschler, will be closed by April 2020 at the latest, the company said in a press release. They did stress, however, that they will be adopted by two suppliers in Asia, where manufacturing is traditionally cheaper later this year. So they're basically moving the robots from the Western countries to the Asian countries.

Okay, why are they doing this? They had hoped that speed factories would accelerate production and reduce both the cost and time associated with shipping, but apparently they ran into a lot of hiccups with it here. And also, people were starting to complain, and unions were starting to organize and say, hey, hang on a second, you're getting rid of our jobs.

Well, they're going to get rid of the entire factories then, so there will be no jobs. At least the robot repair people should have had some jobs. I know, this is your one shining hope for future professions, Jason. You always come back to the robot repair people. Exactly. As soon as they make robots that fix robots, though.

But then those robots will need... It's not going to be robots all the way down. Yes. Robots are people, too. Oh, and Twitter is in the news. They are drafting a deep fake policy that would label and warn, but not always remove, manipulated media.

You know what? Twitter is really good at drafting a policy, but never implementing it. Where's my Donald Trump warnings that we were supposed to get? The special emoji or whatever, the emote that they had prepared to let us know when a trigger warning was coming in from the president. That was a policy they drafted?

Yeah, I don't know, but they did give us mute filters, so I do have basically every politician on the planet in my mute filter, so I would never see that. But the thing about this is there is a survey that you can go take, Brian. I recommend you go take the survey. I took the survey. Okay. And I filled it out as you would think I would.

So if that one's just going to get trashed, they're going to be like, this guy's too angry. Discount. Well, I did leave a little note at the end because there is a little free-form text box. Because you can't not, because I know you. And I said, please, if you are going to implement this, please implement it, unlike your other policies that you seem to pick and choose from when you want to use them or not.

Yes. So if everybody puts that in there, then maybe we'll get some change. Doubt it. But, yeah, it's open for, you know, open for public feedback right now up until November 27th. So if you want to, there will be a link in the show notes to the article that will take you to the survey.

I suppose in the survey there's no option for, I would prefer that you actually just completely remove deep fakes. Yes, there are many of those options. Oh, right. And those are the ones that I selected. There you go. That's what I'm saying. They're asking if we should label them, remove them, or a mix of both, depending on the harm that it's going to cause somebody.

It's actually a pretty smart survey. So I do, I honestly recommend going to fill it out because they did put some thought into it. And the hits just keep on coming for Facebook. Not that it ever matters. No, it really doesn't. An anonymous memo alleging ongoing racism at Facebook is circulating inside the company.

Well, I think that that is a misleading headline because it is circulating on Medium, actually. Which would not be, as far as I know, Facebook does not own Medium. No, I'm pretty sure. It is not Medium by Facebook, all capitalized. Yes, with rainbow colors now. I'm pretty sure Evan Williams still is the man behind Medium.

But yeah, it's a pretty damning piece from 12 people who used to work there and some that work there. And it's not good. And I love this. If this post gets any outside attention, the response will be met by M-Team as, We view diversity as important.

This behavior is not acceptable. And we will increase our efforts to make things better. And then the cycle will repeat. Facebook is not doing the best it can and it will continue to be hostile to people of color as long as middle managers and ICs in majority groups are not held accountable.

The result of this negligent, hostile, and aggressive behavior from Facebook managers and representatives in HR has caused a significant decline in our physical and mental health and made it significantly difficult, if not impossible, to continue working. Sounds like they need to parachute Ariana Huffington back in there.

What do we need? The heaven room or what was the room that Ariana made? I can't remember what she called it, but obviously it did fuck all. Yeah, because we're going to have some Uber news in a bit. Yeah. Fun times. And finally, speaking of our robot overlords a little bit earlier, I saw this.

This made the rounds. Watch a herd of MIT's mini cheetah robots frolic in the fall leaves. They want to show that these aren't just solitary creatures. Yes, they can move in herds to kill us all. Nightmare fuel. It's total nightmare fuel. I mean, obviously there's nothing really to be worried about here.

We are way far away from them all rising up and killing us, but it's pretty goddamn creepy. When they all come out of the leaves. Oh, God, that was. And you haven't even seen the Black Mirror episode with the robot, the black and white episode. No, and I don't want it.

If you saw that one, you definitely would have a little PTSD after watching this. I was just like, oh, God, that's not good. That's not good. That's not good. Yeah. They are really good at backflips, so they can, you know, maybe we can have Cirque du Soleil robots. I was thinking they could take over Stomp.

Can't say I ever saw that one. Oh, it's really good, actually. It's a bit fucked out. I mean, it's like 20 years old, but it was awesome. Oh, God. Brian is hip to the musicals that I'm not. Wow. That's a change. Speaking of that, I got tickets to see TM, the one that you love so much that you tried to force on me 7,000 times.

Hamilton. Yes. I'm going to see Hamilton in LA. Oh, nice. Mostly because my wife wanted to. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Hover. Building your online brand has never been more important, and your online identity begins with your domain name.

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It's Disney Plus Day. Woo-hoo! The Mandalorian is out. Half man, half DeLorean. And he's got personality. Yeah, it's out. I saw, judging from my Facebook feed this morning, there are many of my friends who are unmarried and do not have children that stayed up until 3 a.m. when the service officially launched and watched The Mandalorian.

Loved it. All of them across the board. Yeah, haven't seen a bad review yet. Haven't seen a bad review yet. Except for Disney Plus itself. Yes, they're having some problems. Which is not surprising. I mean, you know, scaling to the level that they probably had to do with everybody downloading the app on multiple devices, because that's what you have to do.

I'm sure they're just getting slammed. Yeah, but they knew this was coming. Yes, but are you really going to spend the money to up your infrastructure that much for one surge that'll take one day? Yes, they should have. Yeah, it's coming into Christmas, too. They're going to need more than this, and especially every time an episode drops.

So, yeah. And I could have sworn that they bought a company that was really good at this when they were starting their whole Disney Plus saga. Right. It was like the company that was doing streaming for HBO and stuff, and you'd figure after the whole Game of Thrones problems they had at the beginning, they'd have this figured out.

I'm sure the demand is just massive. Oh, it's got to be crazy, yeah. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I realize, okay, so, how far did you get with everything? Have you installed? Have you done anything? Did you get your free packages, et cetera, et cetera?

No, I'm not touching it. Okay. It's all you, man. Yeah, I did. The thing about this is, here's why I'm not doing it. There's one show that I want to watch, The Mandalorian. I'm going to wait until the whole thing is done, then get my seven-day free trial, watch it, and then kill it. Well, apparently they also announced a brand-new Marvel show.

I didn't see that news because I could care less about Marvel stuff, but I know you're into it. Yeah, same. No, I'm not. Okay. I gave up on it a long time ago. I make as much fun of it as you do now. Yeah. Well, I have gone through the process. When I woke up this morning, I had to wait for my kid to leave because if I turn on the TV, then it's like, I want to watch TV, and I'm never getting him to school.

But once he left, I had about 40 minutes before we were going to start the podcast. So I went around to my various devices, and I downloaded the Disney Plus app, and I signed in with my account, and mostly it worked. It's weird how, well, obviously, it would work this way. Like, sometimes I was able to sign in perfectly, no problems.

Another time, I got the same error message that everybody online is complaining about. Eventually, though, I got everything up and running. So I've got the app running on both my TVs and my iPad and all that sort of stuff, and it looks really nice when it works. But the main thing, you know, because I'm me and I'm anal, I'm like, okay, well, I also have, well, okay, I'm not going to do Hulu Plus because I've got my free Hulu, or they don't have Hulu Plus or whatever it is.

Hulu. I've got that already through Spotify. I'm not going to mess about with that. But ESPN Plus, I'm excited about that because all of Germany's games are always on ESPN Plus rather than on broadcast, which annoys the hell out of me. But now I have ESPN Plus as part of my Disney Plus subscription.

All right. Let's sign into that. What a clusterf. I have a link in the show notes to the Help Center page, which I didn't find after multiple Google searches until I finally found a Reddit thread that was discussing how difficult all this is, about the different ways that you can activate Hulu or streaming ESPN Plus that will work with your free Disney subscription, because God knows they couldn't make it easy.

It's a pain in the ass. It's a brave new world. And the fun thing is I already had an ESPN account because I have the ESPN app that I use to monitor sports things, and I have it customized to the teams that I want to follow and leagues I follow. I have to, of course, sign out of that and now have a new account under my Disney Plus sign-in information.

So now I have to redo all my ESPN subscriptions. You can't merge accounts for whatever reason because that would be too difficult, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is a pain in the ass. Link is in the show notes if you're scratching your head trying to figure out how to make all this work.

It's a pain. Fun. You use Verizon, don't you? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I put a link in the show notes how you can get another free year of Disney Plus if you have one of their unlimited packages. Wait. Does it pile on?

Like, can I add the Verizon year after my Apple year that I've already got? I do believe you can. Okay. All right. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah. Basically, the subscription you pre-purchased will be paused, and it will automatically resume after the free year is up. Bingo.

All right. Sweet. I'm going to get some extra time here. Nice. There you go. See, I'm looking at this whole Disney Plus thing. They're like, it's got 700 movies and all this stuff. And I'm like, I've seen all the movies that I want to see. Exactly. You don't have a kid. If you have a kid, you are getting Disney Plus.

That's what I was trying to say. It's like, since I don't have a kid, I've seen the movies already. I'm not going to rewatch them. So, it's, you know, for normals who don't have kids, then it's fine. Skip it. Yeah. And I have to say, as I was sitting around with my wife this morning discussing all this stuff, she finally went, all right, so hold on a second.

We're paying for cable. We have Hulu. We're paying for Netflix. Now we have Disney Plus. The nightmare scenario that you and I have been discussing saying was coming has come. It's ridiculous how many subscriptions you have to have. It is totally here now. I've got to figure out a way to get rid of cable because it's absolutely stupid.

So, we're going to sit down and we're going to do the math. We're going to look at all the programs that we actually watch and care about, and we're going to try to figure this out because it's ridiculous. I mean, I'm complaining to somebody who is privileged enough to be able to afford it all, but it's stupid how much I'm paying for this stuff. The funny thing is, while you're sitting down to calculate how much money you're going to save and what you have to kill, also calculate what your hourly rate would be if you were actually working during the time that you were doing.

that, and just to have a baseline on how you're screwed no matter what you do. Yeah, and it's all so complicated, right? That's the other. It's so complicated. Thanks a lot, world. Welcome back to Sweden. I talked about the end of the fucking world season two last week.

I think I've turned into you a little bit, Brian. I got halfway through it, and I'm like, this is too depressing. It's a depressing show. I read through. I watched the trailer for season two just to see if I was. I'm not going to be interested, and I was just like, nope, not going to happen. Yeah, the longer it goes, the more uncomfortable it is, and the less I like the people that are in the show.

Right. I'm like, there's really nothing redeeming about this show at all. It's actually uncomfortable porn. So I just got rid of it, dumped it from the queue, and we'll just skip. They should have just left it at season one, honestly. Season one ended just fine.

It was, they got what they deserved at the end of season one. I didn't need a season two. I didn't make it that far, so I don't know if there was a good end there. But it's a popular enough show that obviously they're going to continue it. Too bad. Yep. Well, speaking of good shows that I am excited about, Westworld has dropped its first trailer for season three.

It gives absolutely nothing away except you kind of know where they're going to go with it, sort of. At least how they're going to come back from how Westworld season two ended. I am very excited about this. Did you watch the trailer? I watched the trailer, I went to the website, and I signed up for notifications from the fake company, which I love because that's the stuff we used to do when we were doing marketing back in the day.

That's what I was thinking, too. This is the kind of campaign that you and I would have came up with to work. It's awesome. Yeah. It made me a little giddy. I'm like, I love it when they're doing this stuff again. Yeah, very cool. Made me love the web. We'll see how it plays out. They probably won't do shit. Yeah, it'll probably suck. Anyway.

Speaking of things that are probably going to suck, Fantasy Island has a movie reboot coming, and the trailer dropped for it. I could not be less excited. Did you watch the trailer? I did. Yeah. Failed on every front. It's not even Fantasy Island.

I mean, it's just not. No. It has none of the kitsch that actually made the series worthwhile. Yeah. The Malcolm McDowell version that ran on TV for a season, it was so much better than this. Yeah. That was so great.

It was so great. I really am bummed that that never got picked up for a second season. But this just looks terrible. I mean, flat out terrible. It really does. It looks horrid. Speaking of things that looked horrid, Sonic the Hedgehog. Remember when that trailer came out a couple months ago? Vaguely, yes.

Yeah. And there was basically just universal backlash. I'm like, what the hell is that? Nobody liked Sonic. I mean, it really was disconcerting how badly they did Sonic. So what did they do? Went back and re-rendered the whole movie with a completely new Sonic.

And I got to say, they fixed it. I actually enjoyed the trailer. You know what I actually find disconcerting? That there was actually fan outcry about a fucking Sonic the Hedgehog movie. I think everybody watched it just for fascination's sake.

And everybody's like, what? I only watched the trailer because I heard it was just ridiculous. Yeah. It's the same trailer, but they swapped out the actors, which I guess you can do nowadays in the land of CGI. You sure can. Yeah, it looks much better. I'm surprised.

I'm surprised. And I'm just going to throw this one in here because this was just a fun find. I found this on HBO when we were looking for something to watch on Sunday. It's a movie called Cold Pursuit with Liam Neeson. All right. Now, I figured it was going to be another, you know, taken rip off or, you know, revenge thing with Liam Neeson.

And it kind of was that a little bit, but it was done. Did he have a very special set of skills? He kind of did. He drove a snowplow. There you go. But it was really tongue-in-cheek and very funny. It was really funny because at the beginning, we're like, I'm watching it with my roommate and we're like 20 minutes in and she's like, we were laughing at some of it.

And she's like, the bad guy is just silly. I don't like him. I'm like, he's not supposed to be real. It's supposed to be funny. And then she's like, oh, oh. And then we just watched the whole thing and it was hilarious. Loved it. So if you're just looking for a fun action movie that just doesn't take itself too seriously, Cold Pursuit.

You could do worse. At the library. I'm reading The End Is Always Near, apocalyptic moments from the Bronze Age collapsed and nuclear near misses by Dan Carlin, our friend from hardcore history.

Now, quick question. Are you reading it or listening to it? I'm listening to it. It's Dan Carlin. So it's basically just another podcast. It's an 11-hour podcast, which is shorter than some of his other ones. Yes. This podcast, you can go buy in dead tree form at your local bookstore, though.

It's really good. It's really good. I listen to it before I go to bed, which is not the smartest thing to do. How's your dreaming? Very, let's say, apocalyptic. I was just like, most of the time I listen to Dan Carlin before I go to bed, and I do have crazy dreams because of it.

But this is really good. I'm really enjoying it. I'm almost done. I've got about two hours out of the 11 to go and waiting for the wrap up on it. But it's fascinating. It's a fascinating walk through history and makes you feel really small when you hear about how much death and destruction and mayhem has gone on before us.

And the real lesson is none of this is guaranteed. Anything can go wrong spectacularly at any given time. And yeah, then we're back to the Stone Age. It's not really a feel-good book, but it's interesting.

It's really interesting. Yeah. And after he finally got that book out the door, he finally released another podcast. Super Nova in the East Part 3 has come out. So I've been listening to that recently. I need to go back and just listen to that one from the beginning because there's so much time in between. I mean, it's like, is this the wrap up for that series?

I don't know because I haven't gotten to the end yet, but I'm guessing probably not just because it's him. So in 2024, when we get a new topic, Dan Cohen. Well, he did say at the beginning the reason that there was such a big delay was the book. So hopefully it won't take quite so long for the next big topic.

Yeah. He also did that VR experience in between too, which some show fans have gone to and said was really cool. So it's one of those VR things where you have to go to a place to do it. Right. I'm also reading F dying, how cheating death kicked my ass into loving, learning and living my best life by Dan Nitro Clark, as well as gladiator.

A true story of roids, rage and redemption. Also by Dan Nitro Clark. Dan's a friend of mine and I'm working with him on some podcast stuff. So I was going back and reading his books and they're really good. Really fun. Yeah. Gladiator is about his time on American gladiators.

And it's fairly interesting. That guy had a fun life, I got to say. And I finally finished The Body, A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Great book. Okay. I got bored. I got really bored.

I liked it. I liked it. It was interesting because so many of the topics he got into are various things that we've actually discussed on the show because of the technology aspects of it. But it was very good. I mean, it's Bill Bryson. What's not to like? I like the way he writes. I think for a Bill Bryson book, I need a road trip.

I really like listening to his books on road trips. I loved Home. That one was great. But I need a road trip to do it. Okay. I love his books. Oh, I say you need a road trip. I thought you were talking about him because so many of his books are about him taking road trips. No, no, no. I really like listening to his books while I'm driving across the country with, you know, just on the open road.

And his books really just kind of work in that environment for me. Well, you are well overdue for a move back to Chicago, so. It just started snowing, man. Screw that. Hells no. And I also read another book called Darwin Cipher by M.A. Rothman.

I'm not so much going to review the book here as I'm going to review Amazon's recommendation engine slash AI. Okay. I'm over it. I don't know why the engine has thought. I just like boring sci-fi books that follow the basic formulas and have the perky young lady and the esteemed professor.

This is just boilerplate sci-fi. There's so much boilerplate sci-fi out there right now, and that is all Amazon's engine kicks up at me. Also, probably because I was doing the Kindle Unlimited subscription, which I'm going to cancel because the books that are free are free for a reason. Yeah, they are.

It's really working out for my roommate, though, because she likes trashy novels. Well, there you go. And there's so many on it. Yeah, well, all of the free books, because, you know, once you pay the subscription, you kind of scroll through and go, well, what's available under Unlimited? And all the sci-fi books that are under Unlimited are basically trash sci-fi.

So I've got to cancel that, and I've got to get my ass to a real bookstore and look through the aisles. Well, you should come out this way. We've got a really nice Barnes & Noble out here in Calabasas. They just closed the Barnes & Noble at 3rd Street Promenade. I took my kid yesterday, because yesterday was Veterans Day, and he had no school.

So I took my kid to 3rd Street Promenade. I parked at one end because they have a children's museum. Then I hiked that 3-year-old's ass all the way to the other end of the promenade, where the bookstore used to be, just to find out it's closed. Oh, man. Well, you could have taken a bird scooter all the way back to your car.

Not allowed on 3rd Street Promenade, and they police it. Oh, my God. Actual policing. I know. Go figure. Moron of the Week! Oh, Brian, do we have a Moron of the Week this week? Yes, we do.

When you thought Uber's CEOs couldn't be any dumber. Hold my beer, Kalashnik. Yep. Dara Khoshwashawi, he basically equated the Jamal Khashoggi murder by Saudi operatives to the death of a woman who was crossing the street and was hit by their Uber self-driving car.

Little different there, buddy. He's like, we all make accidents. Aw. Aw, this guy accidentally got shot 10,000 times. And then dismembered and shoved down a well. No, an accident was, yeah, your driver was texting and you turned off all the safety features of your car before you set it out on the street.

That was stupidity. I don't even know if it qualifies as an accident as opposed to gross fucking negligence. No, this guy is just getting raked over the coals for this, as well he should. Yeah. That's ridiculous. Feedback loop.

Over on PayPal, we got some new donations from Michael, Ralph, Christopher, Mark, and Blair. And Blair says, finally, this is back pay for the year of listening. Thank you, Blair. Very generous donation. Thank you. And Gregory also writes in and gives us a donation. Long overdue donation.

Thanks for your curmudgeonly good humor. Cheers me up on weekend morning, even when news is depressing. Well, that's what we shoot for here. That's what we shoot for. And a bunch of people wrote us about New Jersey. And yes, I forgot this as well, because I've flown into the New Jersey airport and then just taken public transport into Manhattan.

So that's what a lot of people told us. It's very, very close to New York City, to Manhattan, et cetera. So it's easy in and out. So it makes sense to stay there and just commute in and out. Although that does basically just say you're a glorified hotel as a city. But thanks for everybody that wrote in and the clarification on that.

I totally, I, my New York geography and Jersey geography, all that. I have no sense of geography for there. I've been to New York City twice and that was enough. And over on Twitter, Jeff writes in, my child took my phone and ordered two toys off Amazon. Parenting in 2019.

Beware, I've been hacked, lol. My kid isn't smart enough to do that yet, but he has deleted multiple apps before and destroyed my wife's photo album by burst mode. So I don't know how he found that out, but there's burst modes of the floor all over my wife's phone now. Well, all you got to do is hold the button down.

So it's pretty, pretty easy. Oh yeah, that's true. They switched it. That's right. Yeah. Has he figured out how to, or he hasn't figured out how to order anything from your lady in the tube yet? No, no. But he has, he is getting very good at asking for songs. It's pretty impressive, actually. Yeah.

You should make sure that, you should make sure that passcode is on there just, just in case he accidentally. Yeah, I think you're right. And I've now's, now that he's actually that good at it, I'm going to explore that kid mode that they have and see how that works too. So anyways, moving on, Moss 6502 writes in, I've been reading similar headlines since I was a grumpy young geek.

And this is from ISP review. This time there really are no IPv4 internet addresses left. Thank God there's IPv6. 25 years I've been hearing this. Yeah. But this time, really, really, really, Jason. I know. This time the Rolling Stones are really going to retire too.

Yeah. Come on, guys. And over at GOG.show, Adelente. Is that how you say it? Adelente? Sure. Close enough. Hey guys, how is Dr. Titor doing? Hopefully they found the ones responsible and gave them a good wood shampoo. No, no one was ever caught, unfortunately, but he's doing much better.

Much better. I just talked to him the other day. I asked because I binged all of your episodes on a trip last year, but I didn't catch it when you first mentioned he was attacked a while back. But this guy was a guest on your show way back in episode 12 or 13. Clearly, you don't do guests anymore. But can you make an exception? That interview was wow.

I don't know, man. That interview and the various things we talked about off air scared the shit out of me for like eight months. Yeah. Yeah, that was the Upward Spiral episode, I believe. Oh, yeah. Upward Spiral of Progress or something. I'd definitely have him back on if he wanted to, but we'd have to have a reason or something specific to talk about, right?

Hey, we could just do it for shits and giggles. That's true. He's just hanging out. I'll give him a call. All right. We'll figure that out. Eric, the accountant, writes us, another AI clickbait for you. And after soaking up some grumpy knowledge for a while, my next thought was that the source announcement for this article, written by real scientists, probably didn't mention AI.

Machine learning, yes, no mention of AI in the source publication. The rehashing of source knowledge to announcement to newsertainment to unreadable garbage is disturbing. Yes, it is. It's all about the clicks, right? And this is from newatlas.com. AI tech predicts time and place of lightning strikes. The system is currently about 80% accurate.

Given how deadly and destructive lightning can be, it would certainly be good to know in advance when and where it was going to start. A new artificial intelligence-based system could help utilizing nothing but standard weather station data. Is there anything else interesting in this article? Not really. Not really. But the point is that they're getting better at predicting our lightning strike.

Yeah, using the big data and figuring it all out. And machine learning, which was the whole point of this. Not artificial intelligence, yes. Yes, considering the scientific paper doesn't mention AI. Yes. And Blair writes in, immediately made me think of the show. And this is a tweet.

Now, this one's a little adult. So, hang on to your hats. This one's a little adult, kids. So, skip ahead if you're going to be triggered. I'm going to give you 10 seconds. It should be noted really quickly. We did not write this, nor did we find it.

We did not write this. It was sent to us. Yes, we are just the messengers here. And this is a tweet from Anna Mercury. Who appears to be a porn star of some sort. Yes. Whenever my boyfriend comes inside me, I get ads for Plan B and birth control, which means my fucking iPhone from across the room hears me say, come inside me, and immediately gets to work on those targeted ads.

Glad you thought of us. Okay, you can bring the kids back in now. All right. Quite funny. And from Scott, we have former Facebook employee breaks NDA on Reddit. Lots of juicy fun info. And this is from a Reddit thread. People with expired non-disclosure agreements. What's the juicy info you can now tell us?

And the link goes directly to the Facebook guy. You know, I read through it. I wasn't particularly... I didn't think that there was anything terribly surprising in there. Did you? No. Well, I thought it was really funny how, like, this was about a data center visit by the Zuck himself, and that he'd never really been to one of their, you know, homegrown data centers.

And he was treated like, you know, a head of state was visiting the White House. Yeah. Like, people were sent home that might ask the wrong questions. Everything was scripted. And I did like that he said that, yeah, he's really short in person. Surprisingly short. Yeah. But it was also done anonymously. So you always got to take that with a grain of salt or three.

There's a lot of anonymous stuff going on right now. I wish people would put their names to it. That just gives it so much more gravitas, in my opinion. Yeah. But there's also that thing called NDAs. Yeah. There's that. Yeah. I'm okay with the, you know, I'm going to live vicariously through anonymous right now. All right.

And Steve writes in, you probably had this already, but one option is a Raspberry Pi. There are cases that will hold a plug-in camera, and you can power with Power Over Ethernet. And this is how to make a smart security camera with a Raspberry Pi Zero. I watched the video. Wow, that's a lot of work.

But it's cool. I think their choice of using wood for the case was a little janky. Right. Oh, but, you know, you can't go to Radio Shack anymore to get those plastic enclosures that you could get for experiments and stuff like you could in the old days. Yeah. We do miss Radio Shack.

I want Bittner's Radio Shack story on next episode. Yeah, yeah. We're going to have to hit him up for that one. But, yeah, it's a pretty cool video. You can do it. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you have the time to do it or the inclination to do it. If somebody was selling these, then I might consider it.

But ain't nobody got time for that. There was Python involved. If there's Python involved, I get the heebie-jeebies. Yeah, unless it's Monty, I'm out. 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 snarky review.

And please do. We didn't get any iTunes reviews this week. That kind of was sad. Well, it's because we read them all on Thursday. Friday. Oh, that's true. That's true. It's only been three days. It's only been three days. Closing shout outs. And it's a little late, but this is an after shout to all of our veterans here in the United States.

My grandfather served. My father. And served proudly. As well. Yep, I still have his wings from his time in the army. So, yeah, hope all the veterans had a fine Veterans Day and thank you very much for your service. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schellmeister.

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 that PayPal button. Turn off your ad blocker.

That sometimes blocks it. Your support really keeps us going and we'd really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 392. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

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