472: Trash Behaving Consistently

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. How's the fires doing for you over there, Bri? It's actually been better the last couple days. Barely noticed. Just a tinge of campfire smoke in the air, which is somebody's life going up. In flames, yes. I put a link in the show notes to what they call an ominous map of the West Coast showing the worst quality of air on Earth as these historic wildfires.

Are you awake yet? I am not awake yet. I'm not even close to it. All right. Yeah, it's really bad. I have a good friend that lives in Bend, Oregon, and she basically cannot leave the house at this point. They're wearing masks, all that sort of stuff. It's the worst air quality in the world right now, appears to be in Oregon.

Yeah, yeah. It wasn't that great out here this weekend. I went outside and we had the marine layer and I thought, oh, okay. Can't smell any fire. Let's go for a bike ride. Dumb idea. That's all I'm going to say. Dumb idea. About half an hour in, I could barely see because my eyes were burning so bad, which made for a great next couple of days, hacking up all the goo.

Fun times. Yeah, I had a bit of a tough dilemma this weekend. It was kind of, do we stay in Santa Monica where it's unbearably hot and we don't have AC? Or, but we have decent air quality because we're right on the beach and it's blowing it out. Or do I go down and see my mom where there's air conditioning, but there's ash falling out of the sky?

Air conditioning should have won. That's that. It did. Hands down. Okay. I'm like, come on, man. Had to watch the car, but other than that, yeah, that was a good call. Nice, nice. I found this one as a little bit of follow-up on our content moderation rants that we've had for years and years now.

This is a study that says detecting sarcasm is not easy. No shit, Sherlock. That was, by the way, that was some sarcasm right there. Yeah, if you want to go ahead and train your algorithm. Yeah, apparently Twitter made a bunch of changes and banned a bunch of people's accounts that said, yeah, yeah, no, you're talking about self-harm.

He's like, no, I wasn't. I was talking about that crappy bus ride I have to take. Someone please kill me. I got to go take the bus across town. Things like that. Yes, we are increasingly finding out that AI is stupid. I think we talked a couple shows back about a new company that had come out that was attempting to catalog emojis in an attempt to understand sarcasm.

So emoji use might be of some help there. But if you're not on the emoji train and you're just writing something sarcastically, they cannot figure that out yet. No, they cannot. And some of the interesting things are, like, when they do blog people for posting about self-harm, is that actually the smartest thing to do?

Because, you know, these people's friends and family might not see that tweet then, and they, you know, might not get the help that they need. Right. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Because people are reaching out on social media. Boy, we'll talk about that later, because I watched The Social Dilemma. Oh, me too. Me too.

Yeah. I don't think that, yeah, if somebody is reaching out for help and posting something like that, blocking their account or taking down the post is kind of a dumb move. Yeah, it's a very dumb move, and I think it probably is actionable after the fact if something actually, if some harm actually does come to them.

And, you know, if their account goes on some kind of, like, 72-hour ban and then comes back after the person has killed themselves, I imagine the family would have one hell of a case. Yeah. I think you might be right, but they are just a platform, Jason. They are just a platform. Never mind.

So remember about five years ago we talked about this company on our show, Dan Price, the CEO of Seattle-based payment processing company Gravity Payments, who raised all of his 120 employees' salaries to at least $70,000 a year and took a huge pay cut himself to make it happen?

Yep, he was a hero of the week, if I remember correctly. He was a hero of the week from us. There was a lot of negative blowback at the time from the decision, including executive resignations, snipping from local startups, a lawsuit from his co-founder, who also happened to be his brother, and Rush Limbaugh, who called Price a communist.

Well, hey, that's good. Well, yes, we're on slightly the opposite side of the Rush Limbaugh spectrum here on the show. Yes, we are. Yes, but basically for us, this looked like a great story of a CEO trying to do good by his employees and cut back that insane ratio that we've seen, that curve we've seen of CEO salaries versus employee salaries over the last 30, 40 years.

So he did that, and now we're five years on. I wonder how that went. How did that turn out, Brian? Well, great. Go figure. Yeah. Their headcount has doubled. The value of payments that the company processes has gone from $3.8 billion a year to $10.2 billion.

So the company is doing well. Yeah. And there are other metrics that Price, the CEO, is much more proud of. Before the $70,000 minimum wage, we were having between zero and two babies born per year among our team. Since that announcement, and it's only been four and a half years, we've had more than 40 babies.

Not bad. There have also been other benefits. More than 10% of the company have been able to now buy their own homes in one of the U.S.'s most expensive cities for renters. Before, that figure was less than 1%. So basically what we're saying here, he gave them middle-class lives.

Yes, and they're taking advantage of it. And what I really love about it, you know, and one of the employees said, and of course this is just common sense, when money is not at the forefront of your mind when you're doing your job, but it allows you to be more passionate about what motivates you. No shit.

No shit. You're not broke and worrying about it all the time. You can actually do your job better, which has now been proven by Dan Price. So he, again, he should get the hero of the year. Hero of the five years. Yeah, I was trying to figure out what a five-year could be. Hero of the life of our show.

Yes. Not a bad result. I got to say, I saw this this morning. I'm like, good on you, man. Good on you. Yeah, and this was kind of buried. I had to find this at Inc.com. This news should be everywhere. It really should be. Well, guess who doesn't want it to be everywhere?

Every CEO that makes a ton of money. That's right. Looking at you, Bezos. In the news.

TikTok, Oracle, not Microsoft, not Walmart, blah, blah, blah. Yep, that's about it. I mean, it's everywhere. Like, you cannot get away from this news. We don't really know all the details yet. It'll probably be some time. We know enough.

Yeah, we know that the Microsoft offer was rejected. We know that the Trump administration had to leap in and say, can't be Walmart because we need it to be a, air quotes, tech company. So it's Oracle. And it really isn't ownership.

It's basically a highfalutin hosting deal. Yep. And it makes it look like something's happened. Yes. Well, you know, to some degree, I suppose, the idea that the content is actually hosted in the U.S. Oh, wait, is it because Oracle has servers everywhere? Well, I think the thing that really is, you know, the giant red flag is, oh, Larry Ellison owns Oracle.

Larry Ellison does fundraisers. Fundraisers is actually pretty spot on, Jason. Yeah, fundraisers for Donald Trump. And so thereby, you know, OK, here's a softball, Larry. Let's do it. Let's get this job done. Because as soon as, you know, Oracle said, hey, guys, guys in the government over there, Mnuchin and you folks, is this cool?

Can we do this one? And they're like, sure, Larry, have at it, even though it basically does nothing to do what the original thing was supposed to do. There's no implementation of security. It's bullshit. The whole thing is bullshit.

Well, I mean, could it have gone any other way? Oh, wait. Yeah, it could have. They could have sold it to Microsoft. That actually knows what it's doing. You know what I'm happy about, though, that they didn't sell it to Microsoft because I still own a little Microsoft stock and I would like it to not tank because of this stupid deal. So, yeah, it's a it's pretty dumb, but it's done.

And all the powers that be are now feeling pretty good about themselves. And those of us that actually know what we're doing are kind of shrugging. Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing, though, is I know I know several TikTok, quote unquote, influencers who have jumped ship and have signed actual lucrative deals with our friends at Instagram to start moving over to reels.

That's right. If anything else, it has brought the talent home to America. Quite, quite well. Now, speaking of bullshit deals, NVIDIA is going to acquire ARM for $40 billion in a combination of shares and cash. Now, I couldn't give two shits about, you know, chip companies merging and things like that.

But everybody's saying that this probably is going to be a big issue because, oh, monopoly. So we'll see how this goes out. But here's the way here's why I put this in the show, because I just had to. And we're going to call this section hyperbole much.

And this comes from the founder and CEO of NVIDIA. AI is the most powerful technology force of our time and has launched a new wave of computing. In the years ahead, trillions of computers running AI will create a new Internet of Things that is thousands of times larger than today's Internet of People.

Our combination will create a company fabulously positioned for the age of AI. Now, trillions? Really, dude? Come on. Well, I mean, I'm assuming he's thinking about, like, every light bulb is a fucking computer. Still. No. Come on. No, it's a little over the top.

Yeah. I mean, you figure, OK, there's like maybe 1.6 billion is the number that I've read recently that processors that they have out in the marketplace right now. 1.6 billion. And a trillion is a thousand billion. Got a long way to go before you hit that trillion number, buddy.

I don't think there's enough sand on the planet to make a trillion computers. Little tiny ones. Little teeny tinies. Little teeny tiny nanocomputers running around in our bloodstream and controlling us. Yeah. Yeah. Our brave new world. Our brave new world.

That's right. And I found this one fairly interesting. A researcher kept a major Bitcoin bug secret for two years, he says, to prevent attacks. All right. OK. Two years. That's a long time to keep it to yourself, I guess. And he only finally let it out there.

Like, they fixed it in Bitcoin, but there are many, many forks of Bitcoin. And they didn't tell anybody who was, you know, they told them to fork off, basically. And somebody else finally found the bug. And it, you know, retroactively affects all these other cryptocurrencies.

So he finally came up and said, hey, guys, here it is. OK. Go fix it. You know, like, what was he doing all that whole time? Why? Hmm. Two years. That's two years to spend trying to figure out a way to exploit it to make himself money.

Is my guess. That's probably it. Or at least, you know, set up all the shell corporations so he can buy that island that he always wanted. You know. It's his retirement plan. It's his retirement plan. It's all I'm saying. It's his retirement plan. All right. Well, we've got somebody else who needs a new retirement plan.

One of the Internet's largest hub of QAnon conspiracy theorists, QMap, went dark this week after a fact-checking group uncovered the identity of the developer behind it. Now, normally, I'm against doxing. Normally. Actually, this really wasn't doxing in so much as it was.

If you want to keep yourself anonymous, you probably shouldn't register the company that is registered as your sole identity as the person who is running everything and is the developer for the apps and is also the domain name registrar.

Should have taken a cue from the Bitcoin guy and taken that time and set up those shell corporations beforehand. Yes. So an investigation by, and I haven't checked out this site yet, but obviously I need to, logically.ai. I know. I saw that, too. I hope they called the investigation QMap quest.

That would be nice. Identified Jason Galinas, a financial information security analyst based in New Jersey, as the developer and mouthpiece for the site. And basically, it just got shut down and he's disappeared and he's not making any comments. He does not want to get involved.

He wants to stay out of it, probably because he doesn't want people, like, showing up at his house thinking that he might be running a pedophile ring and said he's just making a pizza. Hmm, what goes around comes around. Yeah. What frustrates me is he managed to run a Patreon account that rakes in way more than we do per month.

I think we got to get on this Q train. I think so, too. Welcome to grumpy old Q. Exactly. Now, getting on with digital personal assistance. You know, we have the lady in the tube. We got the lady in the disc. Now we have the lady in the frozen food section.

But, you know, if you want a lady in the kitchen that could maybe, I don't know, run your stove. We have a new company out there that is actually trying to make eye recognition. Or, you know, just vote for Trump. Make America great again. Get your wife barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

Okay. Not where I saw that one going, but. Oh, God. This is a new prototype from Synapse, a division of Cambridge Consultants. And it's called Hobgoblin. Okay. I don't know why they called it Hobgoblin.

You'd think if you were working in tech right now, you'd want to avoid any association with Cambridge. That's true, too. I think I would have renamed that company. Yeah, you do. Oxford Consultants has a nice ring to it. Something like that. Something like that. So, basically, they have a demo on the site, and it's a stove.

A cooktop, as they call it. Also, hold on a second. Hobgoblin? Hobgoblin. That also does not sound pleasant. It doesn't. That's what I'm saying. That's where I was going with it. Like, okay. I'm thinking, you know, just a Marvel supervillain going on with that one.

But, yeah. Anyway, so, get back to the cooktop. So, it will now know, if you tell it to turn the heat down or turn the heat up, it will know which burner you're looking at and can do it automatically. And in the demo, I found this amusing in the demo.

Because the guy comes back in the room after his pot of boiling water has boiled over, and he tells it to turn the heat down. Now, you'd figure if this thing had visual recognition, it would know when your pot's going to boil over. And crank down the heat a little bit. Turn it down. Exactly.

All right. These guys are really missing the technological, you know, loophole there that they can exploit. This AI is saving us the crucial step of adding, say, the word, turn up the heat on the oven or turn up the heat on burner two. Yeah. They're saving us those crucial steps of those extra couple words, yet they can't figure out how to, like, say, stop the oven from starting a fire if you're not paying attention to it.

That's pretty much it. Yeah. Okay. Uh-huh. Yeah. Talk about something we didn't need. I just also love that it's called Synapse. I don't know if you remember the movie Antitrust from way back in the day. Oh, man. It's from 2001. It was – I actually enjoyed this movie quite a bit.

It had Tim Robbins and – was it Ryan Phillippe in it? Okay. You should go watch it. It's pretty – it's a pretty fun techno thriller, but it's very internet-y for back in the day, and it was pretty prescient on a lot of things. You think it's internet-y for back in the day? The alternative title was Conspiracy.com.

And Startup. Uh-huh. Yeah. All right. But the guy runs a very Microsoft-ian type of shop. Okay. Because this is long before Facebook. You know, when Facebook comes out, we get the circle, which was garbage. Antitrust, I actually like as a movie. I actually think it was a fun movie.

You know, there were some hackerisms in there, you know, that weren't so great. But, yeah. I think that has legs, I believe. I own it somewhere. I should dig it up. But if you've got nothing to do late at night, pop on Antitrust. Tell us what you think.

All right. And over at Mashable, I found something that I thought was just, you know, kind of interesting. How to blur your house on Google Street View and why you should. I don't know if anybody really should. But because, you know, it's really not hard. I can see there being reasons. Well, here's the thing.

It's like you can see all the houses around you. So, you know, it's not for directional purposes because you can still find out where the house is on the map. You just can't see it.

So I guess if you are in over, you know, from out of state and you're trying to plan your stalking or your robbery on a house and you want to get the lay of the land, you can't just go and look at it and on Street View and figure out where, you know, the possible security holes may be where you can shimmy over the wall with your grappling hook and sneak in at night and steal somebody's underwear or murder them.

Those are the two options you have. So, but it tells you how to do it. And I'm just wondering why. Wondering why. No, I would do it. I think I would. I probably will now that I know that this option exists just because because I don't it's the same argument that we've made in Security Hog a zillion times.

I don't I don't want a ring camera. My neighbor's ring camera pointed at my front door and my front windows. I don't want my front windows from whenever Google decided to run their van down my street to capture whatever's going on in my house. Right. But I know where your house is in Google Street View.

You can't see it. Well, there's only. Yeah. Okay. Jason, here we go. An apartment building. It's ease of access. Obviously, you know, somebody can go to town hall and they can pull the permits for your house and figure out and get the layout of your house. Or you could make it super easy for them.

Look, I know, like, real estate now. Real estate, a lot of people, a lot of real estate agents do video. Obviously, they do drone footage as well, which is something that we talked about many times on the show. But they'll do video tours of the home and they'll put it on YouTube. One of the first things you should do if you buy a home is contact your real estate agent and say, can you please take down the video tour of the house I just purchased?

Right. That should not be up on YouTube. And this is kind of similar. Yeah, but, I mean, we live in influencer country, Brian. People might like to see that. They're like, here's a tour of my new home. Well, yes, but we also spend the entire time on this show talking about how influencers are stupid.

That's true, too. That's true, too. So, yes, if you want your house out there, then by all means, have your house out there. I personally will go the other way. No, thank you. Now, since you currently live in a non-house, you live in a condo and have other roommates. I wonder if only one person in the building has to submit this request to get the front of the condo building blurred.

I'm sure they didn't think about such things, and I'm sure that that would be the case. You should try it. Give it a shot. See if you can get it done. I will. All right. Yeah, and then I'll try and do it for somebody else's apartment just for fun to see if I can get somebody else's house blurred. I don't think that's illegal. No, I don't see why it would be.

Oh, man, it would be great if I could get the White House blurred. That would be awesome. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's get on to people. Experiments for the week. Good times. Yeah, that's right. And I put this one in here just for fun. 35 extremely specific things that were once so normal, but that we all forgot about in about 10 years.

Did you get a chance to go through these? I did. I ran through this list. It's very funny. Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to go through them all because I think everybody should go read it. But it's fun. It's a fun list. And the whole way through, I'm like, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

And in a phone could be listening to me moment, but I realize it's just the fact that I had just read this article and I was thinking about it. I immediately saw this article, Gateway PCs are back. The dream of the 90s is alive at Walmart, the Gateway PC brand, and its cow-spotted boxes basically went away pretty much for good in 2007 when Acer bought it.

But they are back. The branding is back. There are two-in-one devices, laptops, and tablets at multiple price points exclusively purchased from Walmart. So, yes, things that we've completely forgotten about sometimes do come back. Interesting, yeah, because I've got two Acer monitors and an Acer PC.

So, I guess that was just the remnants of Gateway. Maybe if I stick a cow sticker on them, it'll be cool again. You'll feel like you should go hop out on your skateboard? Yeah. Go back in time? Yeah. God.

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So, Brian, it's been a couple months now. You still haven't watched Hamilton, have you? Well, funny you should mention that, Jason. Okay. We were down at my mom's house, and the wife was finally like, Well, why don't we watch Hamilton? And I'm like, All right. Let's get this over with.

You know, I'm... All right. I'm not a fan of musical theater at all. I never figured you for that. I really dislike musical theater in general. I know you're a big fan. My wife is as well. So, I'm like, All right, fine.

So, I fire up the Disney Plus spot. And I have to search for it because it's no longer trending because it's been so long. And I finally find it, and I bring up the front page, and I see two hours and 40 minutes. Told you it was long.

Of musical theater. Even my wife was like, No way. We can't do that. We'll watch it in chunks. So, over the course of three nights, we watched Hamilton. We did about 45, 50 minutes of each. Oh, it was rough going.

That first hour, not so great. Really? I love that. I thought the first hour was my favorite. The first hour sucked. It was horrible. I didn't even want to go back. I did love the second hour, the whole bit. Yeah, that was good. Very funny. There was a lot of humor in it, so there was a lot of pathos.

The end of it was all right. You know, I know the Hamilton story. I can see this being fascinating if you didn't know Hamilton at all. Didn't know the whole backstory. Didn't know everything about him. Very well done for musical theater. It was probably the most enjoyable musical theater experience I could possibly imagine having.

Particularly because I was at home watching it. My wife looked at me at one point and said, You wouldn't have made it 30 minutes into this. You would have left the theater and told me your back hurt or lied about something and just found the local pub. And I'm like, yep. Oh, God. So, I watched it.

I'm surprising. It was good. I'm a surprising review. No. Did you expect anything else from me after seeing it? It was good. I never would have saw it in person. See, but that's the thing. In person, it's so much better. It's great on TV, but in person, it's fantastic.

If you like musical theater. Right. And I do. So, there you go. And I'm not a huge fan. So, it's funny. It's like, it's actually a better review than I thought I was going to get out of you. So, you actually made it through. Yeah. There we go. And enjoyed the middle bit. Yep. Have you watched any of Ted Lasso yet?

I have watched all of Ted Lasso. God damn it. I was so mad last night. I got to the end of episode seven and it's just like, nope, got to wait till Friday. I am so pissed off at them right now. Yeah. Okay. Dear fans. Dear fans of the show who recommend this damn show to us, let us know when it's fucking run its course so we can go back and watch it.

Don't make us wait. I'm actually looking forward to, I'm enjoying the fact that I have to wait a few days because I burned through all of them in two nights. Yep. Same here. Now we have to wait to get to the end of the season. We have three weeks that we have to wait. I'm okay with that. So, I really love this show.

So, all the people that told us to watch it, you were spot on. I mean, there's everything about it is wonderful. I like the jokes on Kansas specifically. I like the jokes on Americans in general. I like the jokes on the English. I like the jokes on soccer. Everything in here is so right up my wheelhouse.

It's unbelievable. I love soccer. I'm an Anglophile. I'm an American, so all of this stuff is wonderful to me. And the fact that it's done so pleasantly, like there's no anger or pointing of fingers or meanness in the jokes.

It's just funny, but comes from a place of love and respect. And that's so rare these days. Yeah. I was trying to put kind of like a wrapper around and I was just thinking, you know, it's like for a sitcom, it's like Mrs. Maples.

You know, it's very much like Mrs. Maples. When I'm done with an episode, I'm happy and I want the next one. You mean the Marvelous Miss Maisel? Maisel. I keep calling her Maples. Yeah. You wrote me and said Maples and I was like, I'm not aware of the show. I'm sure he'll tell me about it. Oh, yeah. No, the Marvelous Miss Maisel.

But I figured that's kind of what you meant. Yes. Yeah. It is very similar in that you walk away from it feeling pretty good about humanity. And God knows we need that right now. Yeah. Then you go back and remember, oh, shit, it's fiction and everybody hates each other. Yeah.

It's a very well done show. I'm very impressed by Apple. It's probably not enough for me to redo my Apple Plus subscription. But, you know, since I've got Apple Plus now, I'm happy I'm get to see the show. Well, just buy something new next year and you'll get another free year.

I'm due for a new phone. So, yeah, there you go. Well, October for that. Today is the big announcement for the watch and the iPad. So next month you get the new phone, you get an extension. And then by the time, actually, you might have to buy, you know, it might be the iPhone 14 by the time they can go back in the studio and make another season or go back to England.

So speaking of other shows, I watched part of The Vow, a NXIVM story. The problem with this show is the guy who is the, you know, the brainchild behind it. Yes. There's a couple of issues here. One, he's a terrible filmmaker and he's using this to stretch his filmmaking wing.

So a lot of it feels like film school. Oh, great. Bad film school. My two of my roommates in college were film students. I've seen enough student films to basically last me the rest of my life. Yeah.

Yeah. This is this feels very much like that. The other part of it is it feels like I'm going to cover my ass story because, you know, the main guy has been convicted and is waiting sentencing. The woman from the Seagram's estate is awaiting sentencing.

And it just came out today that they want to throw the book at her twice as hard as the as the maximum sentence generally is because she's like the Ghislaine in the, you know, the Epstein story. Right. I mean, this story is insane and it's worthy of actually a really good documentary.

And it touches on some of the other things that we hold near and dear, like two, I think two of the people, one for sure, one of the girls from Battlestar Galactica was involved in this. Two of the girls from Battlestar Galactica, two of my favorite girls from Battlestar Galactica are in it. Yep. And Alison Mack from Smallville, who is awaiting sentencing as well.

But yeah, it's like this is Scientology 2.0 and Epstein 2.0. With extra sex. Yeah, I mean, the thing about this is if, you know, and if you if you if these girls had watched any of these other documentaries, they probably wouldn't have been roped in. But, you know, and, you know, I'm kind of up to speed on my culty behavior because I know I know Stephen Hassan, who has written many books.

He's he's an ex Mooney who's written many books and linked to his stuff is in the show notes. And he actually helped me out when my brother was going down a cult rabbit hole for a while. And we pulled him back by his by his bootstraps and he didn't know didn't go down that road. Thank God. So, you know, this is but I'm watching this.

I'm like, there are so many like how people still fell for this shit not that long ago. I'm like, come on. Did you have you never like watched a cult documentary? Have you never seen anything on Scientology? This is 101 shit that this guy's doing. He's a bullshit artist.

So my roommate and I have decided now that it's it's kind of ramping back up in the news. We're going to go back through it and finish it, but we're going to fast forward the film school parts. And there's a lot of film school parts. But fortunately, there is because when when they when they do this guy recorded everything when he lived with them and he was like the main documentarian for the whole cult.

So he recorded every phone call, recorded everything. So there is a lot of dialogue with subtitles with, you know, just random visualizations. Yeah, that's the part that's very film school. I suppose he didn't record any of the parts that would end up on Pornhub, did he?

No, I probably not. Probably not. But I'm only an episode and a half in. So I'm going to we're going to try and empower through it. But the story itself is is wackadoodle. And this guy had the best access of anybody in the planet because he was one of them, which is why I come to the covering your ass part.

Right. So I got a link in the show notes to check out Stephen Hassen stuff. Great guy and talks about cults. So if you've got friends or family who are thinking about joining a cult, go read his books. Right. Then I watched The Gentleman, Guy Ritchie's new movie that I like.

It was around the time when it was still in the theaters and then COVID hit. And it's like, oh, man, I didn't get to see it. So it's finally out on streaming and you can go pay for it and buy it or go to Sweden, whatever you want. You're probably never going to watch it because it stars your buddy, Matthew McConaughey. Yeah, I'm out.

Yeah, he's really good in it, though. He's really good in it. Yep. And it's got Charlie Hunman from Sons of Anarchy using his actual accent since he's British and a ton of other people that you would recognize. I thoroughly love this movie. I love I'm a mark for Guy Ritchie movies. I I'm a fan.

I do like Guy Ritchie movies as well. But I just have my I have two filters in my life. My my Matthew McConaughey filter and I have my Red Hot Chili Peppers filter. Anything involving either of them, I'm out. Well, obviously, your musical theater filter, too. Well, no, I sat through Hamilton.

Hamilton. Well, you had a wife for that. So, you know, it was that was a joint thing. I think she dragged you and you would have never watched it on your own, period. Ever. Yeah. So let's get to the elephant in the room. Mm hmm. The Social Dilemma. Yes. I watched it as well.

We took a break from Hamilton one night and we watched The Social Dilemma. My wife turned and looked at me after and said that was absolutely the most depressing thing I could have ever possibly watched in 2020. She's never listened to our show, has she? No, she doesn't listen to the show. Of course not. OK, because all of the main people on the show are heroes on this show.

So Tristan. You had Tristan. You're not allowed to say Tristan. It's Tristan. Yes. Jared Lanier or Lanier? Lanier, yeah. Lanier. It's Jaron Lanier. Lanier. By the way, just a quick aside. If you were picking someone to put front and center to try to convince mainstream middle America.

Go with Tristan, not Jared. Yeah, don't go with Jared because something about the gigantic single dreadlock coming off the back of his head is probably not going to speak to mom and dad middle America. Yeah, and I've known people that have met him and done interviews with him.

And apparently he does smell like you think he smells. Yeah. Not good. Not good. Stick with the books. Stay off the video. But yeah, I thought it was enjoyable. The dramatizations I thought were actually very well done. Yeah, I was going to say that as well.

That was my biggest concern going into this. But it was actually it served the purpose of the story. It wasn't overdone. It sat there and just kind of supplemented everything that they were telling us. So I thought that that was very well done. In general, there's nothing new here.

If you've been listening to our show, this is everything that we've been talking about. And one of the best reviews I saw the day after I watched it was basically, I'm paraphrasing here. The social dilemma scares the fuck out of people and makes them want to throw away their phones as they type that into their social media profiles.

So will it change anything? No. Does it make a bunch of people aware of what's going on? Yes. Yeah. It was when I first started to watch, I had to watch it in two chunks because I fell asleep like at the end for the first chunk. And it was trying to get number seven in the US. And when I went back the next day to catch the end of it again, it was trending at number six.

So it was trending upward using the algorithms, using those algorithms. I have to say that three-person algorithm demonstration that they did in the dramatizations. That was genius. Genius. It explained things so well for the layperson.

And that was absolutely the favorite part for my wife. She thought that that was absolutely stunning. And it perfectly illustrated exactly what all these social networks are doing with us. Yeah, it took them an hour and a half to do what we can have, which we haven't obviously done in seven and a half years.

You just go, everything's wrong. And they're like, well, why? Maybe you should use different words. Maybe we should use different words. I don't know. Whatever. Everything's fucking wrong? How's that? There you go. That's it. But yeah, I give it a wholehearted thumbs up on that one for sure.

It was very well done. Okay, let's get back to some more depressing algorithm news. YouTube has unlawfully violated kids' privacy. This is in England. So the UK is coming after them for basically the same stuff that they did here.

Now, here we always talk about how the fines are basically nothing. It's the sweet and low budget for two days at the Google Hub. Because it was a $170 million settlement here on COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

Well, in England, they're a little bit more strict. They're going after $3.2 billion with a B. Oh, good. Yeah. So, and basically YouTube's retort is, well, kids under 13 shouldn't be using it.

And they're like, come on. Because you can watch stuff. Yeah, it is what it is. Look, I do understand that response, which is, you know, this is on the parents. We're just a platform.

We provide a service. Children should not be signing into YouTube if they've – we created YouTube Kids, which, by the way, slightly better. My kid has been using YouTube Kids for months now. Your algorithms are not as good as you think they are.

A lot of shit gets through those cracks. I catch it all the time. Really? So it doesn't really solve the problem. Yeah, it's all the crazy-ass Russian stuff. As soon as I start to see – I start to – because I always keep – well, I don't keep the window open 24-7. But I keep a history window so I can see what he's been looking at.

And, you know, it's like Frozen, Frozen, Frozen. Okay, that's great. Paw Patrol, Paw Patrol, Paw Patrol. That's great. Then all these Russian names start coming up. And I'm like, oh, boy. Here we go. So not that any of them are bad. You know, they're just trying to make money. They're repurposing videos. But, I mean, there are bad ones out there.

I don't need to deal with my son seeing Elsa from Frozen being beheaded. I'm sure there's a video like that out there or having sex or whatever. I was going to say, yeah. You know. A little gangbang Frozen style. Yeah. That's for me to watch. Just kidding. Speaking of things for me to watch, while we're taught this subject, here we go.

Hey, everybody, parents, a new Paw Patrol movie is coming out. Actually, it's already out if you want. You know what Paw Patrol is if you're a parent. And it's fine. It's not the worst show ever. It's okay. I've really kind of come around to it. So there's a movie. Paw Patrol Jet to the Rescue is available for purchase now and can be found on Amazon.

And I believe it's coming out on Nick Jr. at the end of this month if you don't want to pay for it. So you have to go to YouTube for Paw Patrol Sturgis gangbang? Pretty much. Is that what you're saying? Okay. All right. Stuart Copeland of The Police. Now, I like him.

I like him. I generally like him as a person. Yeah. He's a good guy. He's done an audible original about his secret life of his dad who was a CIA spy. He's a nine-parter. And the problem is I got to part three and it was decent.

It was kind of meandering and rambling. And there's a little too much police stuff in there for my life. But I got to this point in episode three where he's doing his voiceover and he's actively eating something. Now, Brian, I have misophonia.

And if you don't know what that is, it's one of those things where I basically turn into the Hulk when I hear too much mouth noise. That's why this show is edited and produced to within an inch of its life to remove mouth noise. Yes, because you are insane. Well, I can't stop you coughing, so it's the least I can do.

But, yeah, I'm not insane. It is an actual thing. I've had this forever. But now that I work in audio all day, every day, it has gotten much, much, much worse. And I've mentioned it on the show a couple times. There are shows I can't listen to just because of the mouth noise, the smacking and all that.

And then ASMR, you want to torture me? Put me in a room, play Red Hot Chili Peppers with an ASMR in between soundtrack, and I will crack. I'll give you all the information. I'll give you the nuclear codes. I don't care. You can have it. So when I hear somebody eating on a podcast, it drives me insane, and it's an immediate delete.

My back is just like rock hard and tense right now because it's just I think about it, and it makes me angry. I really get rage. And I know a lot of people that have the same thing. So if you'd like to learn how to remove that from your podcast, you can hire me to do that for you.

I can teach you how to do that. Anyway, speaking of shitty audio, Penn Sunday School. Yes. I like the show. I do like the show. But during the pandemic, it has been god-awful. They've got their quote-unquote audio engineer, Reddy Rich, who is a crotchety motherfucker.

I have tried to email him and give him tips on certain things, and he's like, I'm already using iZotope Rx. He just yells at me, like, get off my line. He's way grumpier than we are. Yeah. Way grumpier than we are. And this last run, they had an episode.

It was a two-parter with one of the writers from Bill and Ted. And the second part of the episode, they didn't get any audio from the guest. So they took the – he basically Frankensteined it together, which sometimes you have to do.

And in the parts where he couldn't find the audio, he actually read what he thought the guest was saying. And I'm like, guys, we have the technology for this. And they're like, no, we don't because they're using Skype and trying to get local recordings and things like that.

I'm like, if anybody at Penn Sunday School wants to learn how to do this properly because we're remote, all the other shows I do are remote, and we sound like we're in the same room, I can help you. But – and if you don't want to call me right now, just go to StreamYard.

StreamYard will fix all your problems. That'll be the easiest one, but it's just maddening when shows of that caliber who make a hell of a lot more money than we do do it way worse than we do. Well, you know, we've said many times on this show the quality doesn't seem to matter very much.

Well, there it is. There it is. There it is. And I got a little bit of news. This probably could have waited until apps and doodads, but I was kind of – I was interested in it, and I think our listeners might be as well. You can now print using your lady in the tube. All right. It's kind of cool. You can actually – you can buddy them up together, and you can use voice commands to print all sorts of documents without extra apps.

Obviously, of course, it's not terribly useful because you can't print documents saved on your phone or your PC or anything like that. But if you do your shopping lists or to-do lists or things like that through your lady in the tube, you can have them printed out for you just using a voice command. I'm enjoying the print a coloring page option, particularly during COVID lockdown because, my God, it buys me five minutes if I can get my kid to color something.

And now I don't have to go searching through all the crazy pages on the web for them, which is unbelievable. Like, how people try to monetize everything is unbelievable to me. Like, just coloring pages. My God. The pages of ads and the – now you have to click through this and click through this and click through this to actually get to a coloring page for a kid.

Jesus Christ, people. So, yeah, you can do a lot of this now through just your lady in the tube, which is kind of a no-brainer. I'm glad they finally did it. It's funny. One of the things I really liked about the social dilemma, there was the one girl who was saying, it's like, we used to do really fun and cool things on the Internet, and now it just feels like a shopping mall.

I knew you. I knew that one would stand out to you. Yeah. Nailed it. Nailed it. And I love this one. Lady in the tube. Print graph paper. I'm like, the cost of ink and paper in your home thing. You could buy a pad of graph paper, and they don't even say what type of graph paper because there are hundreds of types of graph paper.

I'm sure you can delve into more specifics through the link in our show notes. I'm sure you can. At the library. A while back, I reviewed The Dispatcher by John Scalzi.

It was basically an audible original. It was only a couple hours, about three hours, narrated by Zachary Quinto, who is Spock. In the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies. He's really good at audiobooks. He's got a great voice, and he does a really good job with the characters.

But a new one came out this week. It's called Murder by Other Means, and it's the second book in the series. It's a little bit longer, not by much, but I went back, and since I couldn't really remember all the salient points from the first book, I went back and I listened to both of these in the same day before my eyes started burning and I had to run in the house because I was on my walk.

It's fantastic. They're both fantastic. So if you are an audiobook listener, I highly recommend both of these. They're pretty cheap, so go grab them if you can. I hate this new trend that everything comes out on Audible first. It's driving me nuts because, you know me, I like to read. I'm sure it is.

Well, here's one for you that comes out on the same day. Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline. This comes out on November 24th this year. I don't know how I feel about this. That's what I want to get into with you, but I did check first up to see if it was going to be like a staggered release like the new Bobaverse book's going to be, and it's not.

It is everywhere, same day, all platforms. Now, I am with you on this one. I am torn. I am very torn. You know, it's okay. I loved Ready Player One. It's one of my top books, probably. It's definitely one of my top sci-fi books of all time.

His follow-up sucked. It was absolutely horrible. Armada was garbage. So I understand running back to the well and trying to cash in on your early success. We'll see. He's got to write the sequel, man.

Yeah. We'll see. Come on. We'll see. You know, he's had to make bank on Ready Player One. Well, of course he did. Yeah. I mean, it sold well, and he sold the rights to it for a movie. Yeah. Or he didn't make bank on Ready Player One because he probably got his first-time author deal. And didn't quite cash in as much as everybody else did.

And he's like, hmm, I have leverage now. I should write a sequel. Well, the proof will be in the pudding, as they say. So we will have to read it and see what happens. Yep. November 24th. All right. I actually did finish a book this week.

I just can't talk about it. Okay. That's mysterious. Well, one of my friends is a published and known young adult author. And she has written her first adult novel. Not a young adult novel. One meant for adults. A fiction. And she has just finished it.

And she's passing it around to friends, family, and whatnot to get thoughts on it. So I read that and wrote back with my series of thoughts and fixes and opinions and small stuff like that. But I can't talk about it until she actually publishes the book. Okay.

Well, if it's a friend of yours, maybe you can have her on the show when she publishes the book and you can do an interview. Not really tech stuff, but you never know. Why not? Promote her. Okay. Fuck it. Moron of the week. And because it has to happen and go no other way, the Moron of the Week is here in California.

No, it's not a car chase, believe it or not, but probably should have been chased by the police. This car is driving down a California highway at speeds of over 60 miles per hour. Obviously not in Los Angeles, where you can never get over 10 miles an hour. But well done. Yep. So this video has gone viral on TikTok.

And it shows a Tesla car on autopilot with no one in the driver's seat and the passengers partying and listening to music and drinking up booze, including your favorite, White Claw, Truly Four Loco, and Natty Light Seltzers. Yeah. Yeah. See, this is why I stopped drinking the White Claw.

Because things like this seem like a good idea. Shit like this happens. Yeah. I think the worst idea here is that they're listening to Justin Bieber. That's pretty bad. Yeah. That's pretty bad. They should have got pulled over just for that. And they have the time to, of course, caption their video when your car is a better driver than you. Feedback loop.

Over at Patreon, we've got some new subscribers. Jesse, Jason, Rick, Greg H. And Greg writes, shame on me for freeloading for so long. It was due to how lazy I am. Not that I had any desire to make you guys work for too little reward, like I'm some executive and you're some kind of Gen Z-ers.

Well, thank you, Greg H. And Greg R., who also donated on Patreon and wrote in, you have brightened up the past six months for me like nothing else has. It's hard to concentrate on a book, movie, even long-form articles these days. But a podcast, especially one laced with humor like yours, is just the right medium to distract me from the doom and gloom.

I'm an immigrant to the USA from the old Soviet bloc and your brand of fatalistic humor, the end times is here, so we might as well make fun of it, is right up my alley. Keep on pushing back against despair and keep up the good cheer. We all need it right now. Thank you so much, Greg. Greg's. Yes, the Greg's.

Thank you to the Greg's. And over at PayPal, we've got Martin, Andrew, Natalie, Raj, John, Linda, Nathaniel, and Jonathan. And Jonathan writes, Hey, Grumps, I want to talk about facial recognition. When did anonymity become a right? I know you guys have the Bill of Rights and all the bullshit that comes along with it, but I wasn't aware of any right to anonymity.

Anon is a damn asshole, a cunt, the lowest form of human protected by the mass of other humans and the low chance of having to answer for their crimes against society. Whew, there's some words. If I want to protest something, I sign my name to the petition, show up in person to the rally. I am putting my voice in my vote with others to push for an agenda I believe in.

There are obviously cases where anonymity is required, whistleblowers and child abuse victims for a start. The only case where protesters should be protected by anonymity is where the government is fundamentally corrupted, which, given your current circumstances, is definitely a valid argument.

But you have cunts in pickups driving around with masks on, assaulting pedestrians. What weak piece of shit does that? America has no excuse for not being the greatest country in the world, but right now you guys are the drunk uncle at the wedding. No shit. Everyone is a bit ashamed of your behavior, but we mostly like you most of the time.

Get it together. Go vote. I know you don't have a real democracy, electoral college, gerrymandering, vote suppression, etc., but come on. Okay, rant over. I love you mofos, and you brighten my day with every episode. Stay grumpy. Well, thank you, Jonathan. That's a lot to unpack there, but thank you.

You know, anonymity isn't a right, as far as I can tell. We didn't need laws for it, because there didn't used to be cameras on every street corner pointing at you with facial recognition software on them. So, there you go. Paul writes in, good day from down under, grumps.

Firstly, I feel sorry that you're all still in lockdown here in sunny Western Australia. We've been out and about and COVID-free for some months, unlike our neighbors in Victoria, whom have had quite the bad run with it. While we still have some limitations, for the most part, we are enjoying life. Secondly, many LOLs in episode 471.

The James Hetfield's fire bad from the YouTube classic Metallicops brought back a flood of memories of Napster and the whole mistake on YouTube. Yep, now I feel old. Thirdly, Jason, if you're so broke, stop buying shit. I buy shit for work. That's what I do nowadays.

Fourthly, shocking. And finally, have you a beaut bonds a day. I hope I got that right. And he says, P.S. I don't Spotify, so I can't be the only listener. Now up to 15 at last count. Yeah, no, I buy shit for work now. And also, have you never heard of retail therapy?

I need anything to get me through these dark and troubling times. I'll actually spread out my Amazon purchases during the day, so I have more packages that come that I get to open. It's like Christmas every day. Thank you, St. Bezos. And Barb writes in, somewhere you mentioned GDPR is the reason for don't sell my personal information forms, etc.

That is all CCPA, not GDPR. The convoluted steps for do not sell is thanks to the California state AG rules. We asked them to simplify the steps, but they chose not to. Not thoughtful regulation. Well, Brian, take away. Take it away. Tell her how she's wrong. I'm not sure what specifically you're referring to, and obviously neither do you, because you couldn't give us the specifics.

But GDPR was first and affects more people than CCPA for any international company, so we tend to just use GDPR as shorthand. Obviously, if you're here in California and dealing with a California company, it would be CCPA, but if you're not, then it ain't. Yeah, CCPA is basically a clone of GDPR, so you can get your personal information, and you can ask them not to sell it and things like that.

But yeah, GDPR was first out of the gate. Yes, it was. And DoomBase writes us, this looks like a story for Jason. I tried to do my best British police siren on that one.

And this is a Twitter link with a picture. This delivery driver is actually an undercover Met Police UK officer. I couldn't actually find an actual story for this. To be honest, I didn't try that hard. I did. I did. So if you go down a little bit farther in the list, there's a link to another Met Police officer who's fully strapped out, got his bike shorts on, his Deliveroo shirt, his helmet, and his police belt, and they're arresting somebody.

So the thing about it is we have to do a little bit of research and due diligence on this because he may have actually been a Deliveroo rider because that's what you have to do to make ends meet nowadays. And then he just got called in for a bust. So we don't know if they're – however this works, you shouldn't be able to rep Deliveroo on an arrest.

But maybe the arrest was sponsored by Deliveroo because we do live in idiocracy times. We kind of do. Today's police are brought to you by Netflix. Exactly. Your safety is our first concern. Thank you from DoorDash. Would you like to roll into the next crime?

Yes. Here's the next suggested crime for you. Oh, my God. And no one writes in, absolute dumbasses. Custom Borders Patrol at JFK. Not patrol. That's the thing.

It's Custom Border Protection. Protection, right. Yes, that's it. At JFK sees his counterfeit Apple AirPod earbuds. And basically, they show pictures of 2,000 counterfeit Apple AirPod earbuds from Hong Kong destined for Nevada and say that if they'd have gotten through, the MSRP would have been $398,000.

The problem I have with this is, and I think this is what no one is saying about being absolute dumbasses, those boxes were not branded by Apple. They were an off-brand. They were not actual, you know, counterfeit Apple AirPods. They just happened to be white earbuds.

Yeah, they're earbuds that are off-brand earbuds. So, yeah. Yeah. And if that's not what you were thinking, no one, sorry. Moving on. That's what we're thinking. So, there you go. Over at GOG.show, Ralph writes in, hi, Grumps. My sympathies with regards to the huge fires in California.

It's not like there wasn't already plenty to be grumpy about. Saw this article about the successful completion of an underwater server installation test by Microsoft. I've been reading about the concept for years, and it's good to see a positive test outcome. Hope the air clears up soon. Stay healthy. Stay grumpy. Mike?

I thought that was from Ralph. I'm very confused. Okay. Not sure who wrote us that one. Okay, Ralph and Mike. Whoever sent it in, thank you very much. Yeah. It's a cool little story. Back in 2018, Microsoft sunk a data center to the bottom of the Scottish Sea, plunging 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage, 117 feet deep in the ocean.

They brought it back out. They've said it was a success. And they said, actually, the data centers didn't run into any issues, and they ran better than they would have if they had been on land, which is kind of cool. So I have questions about this. Because they say that making this box waterproof so the water can't get in made everything work because it wasn't in, like, an oxygen-rich environment.

Can't you do the same thing and just not put it in the ocean? I know that there was the cooling issue is what they were looking for. Right. But you can still pump water around it. So you put a box in a big aquarium, you pump some water around it, and go. So pump that out from the sea instead of putting it down in the sea where it warms the ocean water and, you know, might screw up the marine life.

That's the one thing that they don't talk about is, did this affect the marine life in the area? So that's the other question I had. That's what I would like to know because we are shitting on the environment every chance we get right now. And, you know, that's one of those things that I'm curious about.

But it's cool that it came back up and they had, yeah, the success rate of the servers or the fail rate was less than would have been on land, which is cool. I think that's nice. So, you know, that means less. You don't have to send a diver down. You have to recycle. Well, that too. But you also don't have to, you know, it's less hardware that you have to recycle later on because they've, you know, gone out of life of service there.

But, yeah, I mean, this is like good on one hand, questionable on the other. So I want to know all of the facts until I can say go put them everywhere, you know. All right. This next one we've got, we don't know if it's who it's from. So it's probably for Mike because we may have copied and pasted improperly.

But we do that from now and again because alcohol. This is e-bike versus scooter versus moped. And he says, I'll start with the TLDR. In general, if it has two to three wheels and goes more than 30 miles per hour, it's registered as a motorcycle. That's all we need to know. So the giant paragraph of text.

Yeah, the TLDR did it. So thank you, random stranger. Yes. And we got something from Alex. It said, I guess I'm the AR guy now. And it was a link to an image that showed basically an AR screen of the Metro map, basically, and said, how cool is that?

But then later on, he discovered, oh, no, it's a Snapchat filter created by a student. It did seem too neat to be official. And then links to the actual story. Awesome Snapchat filter shows how we'll navigate the Metro in the age of AR. And, you know, that should be existing. It should be official.

It's pretty cool. It is really cool. And they should, like, anybody who has, you know, a public transportation system, what they did was they put the card in front of it. And then you could, he had a 3D map that you could move around and see it. The thing about it, if it got to be an official one and they could do the full AR, you could see where you're at.

And then you could tap on where you want to go and then it could pull up schedules and which trains to take and how to get there in the most efficient route. You know, that would be the next step of it. But as a proof of concept, it's cool because all this guy really did was he did recognition on the Metro card and then overlaid a, you know, like a transparent PNG and put it in a 3D space.

It's not that great tech. No, but it's cool. Yeah, it's cool. And the possibilities are really cool if you take this idea and run with it. So hopefully somebody will. And Russ writes in, oh my God, is away ever a crap show?

Just what we need. Another space show with a crew of emotionally adolescent idiots. I'm with you, Russ. Hey, I enjoyed it. And I just got to point out, Russ, that if you had a show full of emotionally stable, completely on keel people, that would be a very boring show. Just saying.

You need that. Anyways, moving on. Highlander says, good day, Grumps. I noticed in the intro that you talk about what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Well, lots to talk about there and lots of blame to go around. Yes, we know. We're here seven years on. Still here doing it. Yeah.

Have you thought about talking about how some people can be real idiots when it comes to their use of social media? Highlander is obviously a new listener. We've been doing that for about seven years as well. That might be entertaining. You'd think, but, you know, not that many people listening to us, so I guess it's not that entertaining.

Some people thought I was crazy when years ago I chose not to get involved with social media. Now I feel like I haven't missed anything. Most of the show, apparently. Yeah, exactly. But thanks for listening, Highlander. Yes. All right.

All right. Okay. He wraps it up here. I may be a little rough to say this, but I'm not a fan of Arsebook or its creator, Snark Fuckerberg. Love the show. Keep on grumping. Snark Fuckerberg is a good one. I do like that. That's good. And Eddie writes in, forgive me for my incoherent email, for I have been imbibing.

Oh, man, after our own hearts. Yes. 250,000 COVID-19 cases from Sturgis? Really? You got sucked in by story with amazing numbers. I listened to a pulmonologist on the radio yesterday that said their model was flawed. Their cell phone data they used were from areas that already had high infection rates.

I can't really explain my argument in an email, but just read more sources on a story. Anyway, I love your podcast and never miss an episode. Brian, you need a real vacation, my friend. No argument there. Where should I go? Yeah. I can't go anywhere. I can't go anywhere.

I guess I should have gone to Sturgis because it obviously would have been safe according to Eddie. Yeah. No, I mean, after the stories we've seen with them doing the cell phone tracking that made us all just throw our hands up and go, wow, we're fucked. We're done.

I'm going to go with the cell phone data over one pulmonologist, and I would like to see that model. But Eddie didn't give us a link to any stories that we have to go research. Eddie is actually right. I read a lot of the follow-up after that story broke. You have to understand, Eddie, that when we went to record, that story was just breaking.

So we read it. It is a guesstimate, but that's kind of all we really have because you know what? None of the bikers at Sturgis were turning on their contact tracing apps. Somehow, I don't think that they downloaded them. Yeah, I don't think so either.

So we kind of got to go with the guesstimates, and that's what it was. So you're kind of right, kind of wrong, as we all are these days. Yeah, and pro tip for anybody who tells us to do more research, send us some links for the stuff that you've done research on, because you've obviously done the research. So help a brother out.

We Google enough already. Damn it. That's true. So, yeah. One of the best ways to get your point across is not to say, I can't be bothered to find anything that backs up my opinion, but here it is. Yeah, exactly. Adelante writes in, hey, guys, in episode 470, you mentioned you guys use Vivaldi, since both of you use mostly Apple products.

I was curious what you do for mobile browsing, since Vivaldi doesn't exist on iOS. Is there a way to sync a different browser with your desktop? There was a period of about six episodes in a row where I was trying to frigging figure that out, and I ended up just throwing my hands up in the air. I use Vivaldi on my desktop.

I have Google Chrome as well. I use Google Chrome on my phone, so if I need to share things back and forth, that's what I use. I just use Safari, mobile Safari, on all my iOS devices, because I don't do that much mobile browsing. Right. You know, what it mainly is, is I use Reader on my devices to scroll through the news stories, and if I like something, I send it to Pinboard, and then on my desktop, I go through and then do all the stories there.

But I don't sit around and browse much on my iOS devices, because there's no fucking point, because I don't leave the house. Well, I try not to do it on purpose, just because I don't like to be on my phone that much. Basically, the only reason I ever use my browser on my phone is if somebody has texted me a link to something while I'm out.

Yeah, pretty much. So, yeah, that's about it. Yeah, and if it's something I want to remember, then I just use the share screen. I use an app called Pinner that ties into Pinboard, which just saves all of my URLs. It's like delicious from the old days, but better. Because, yeah. And Dazzle Ship writes in, Hi, guys.

I've been listening for three years now, and I enjoy hearing your rants and comments as I drive through the Scottish Highlands, where I work supporting IT projects. That didn't work. I should stop that now. Yeah, you should stop. In the many whiskey distilleries up here. Let me interrupt here really quickly. Dazzle Ship, you do not need to go to Patreon to support the show.

You need to send us some whiskey. Send us some whiskey, my friend. On show 470, you mentioned how memories of photographs that had been uploaded to Facebook were being displayed, sometimes of unpleasant events like a gravestone or a friend that was involved in an accident. I'm no fanboy of Facebook, but here's the thing.

If folks don't want to be reminded of bad stuff, don't upload the photo to Facebook in the first place? Stay grumpy. I hate that argument. I hate that argument so much. Sorry. Sorry, Dazzle Ship. I love you. Thanks for listening. And I love what you do for a living. But that's a horrible argument.

That's just dumb because Facebook and what we're using Facebook for, what we've decided as a society that we're using Facebook for isn't just – well, I guess it is for influencers. The happy bullshit. It's for everything. You're sharing your life with your friends that you may not see or talk to all the time.

And that should include the horrible things. I posted stuff when my father passed away. And I don't mind being reminded of it, again, if I choose to be. But I don't want it thrown up in my face. That's it. Yeah. This automatic nostalgia shit that they do and they just send it to you because they think it's going to generate clicks for them and it's more time on the platform that you might share with somebody.

That's the whole impetus behind it is that you're going to share that little widget that they just made for you with your friends and say, look, you were in this with me two years ago or three years ago, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if the person that's in that video is dead, you can't fucking share it. So what's the point?

And it just makes you sad. So, yeah, that's the point of it because, yeah, when something happens, it's like my grandmother's funeral. I posted pictures of her when we buried her. And, you know, I don't want to be reminded of that unless it's her birthday and I want to be reminded of it.

Yeah. But that's on me. That's on me. Not for them to decide. Agreed. Joseph writes in. Actually, he sends us a link from Insider. TikTok creators are pretending to be Holocaust victims in heaven in a new trend dubbed trauma porn. And then writes in, and people think that Jason is offensive.

Meh. Beat this. Yeah, these guys got me beat. Yes, they do. They win. Beat this. Joy to the world of influencers. Looks like the story is back from late August, but I don't recall hearing about it. So I figured I'd drop you guys a line. Have fun. In a new disturbing TikTok trend involving young people pretending to be Holocaust victims in heaven.

In the videos, creators appear to be wearing makeup that imitates burns or bruises while explaining how they died in Nazi-run death camps. Other versions show people acting out representations of the genocide of Jewish people during the World War II. In some cases, using the background image of the Auschwitz concentration camp network. What the fuck, people?

Yeah, seriously, just go watch Schindler's List. You don't need this on TikTok. I mean, I suppose on the plus side, they're not being Holocaust deniers. That's true. That is actually true. You got to find the shiny side of life. Find those. Oh, God.

Yeah. This is one of those things where it's just like, I don't know. It's like, okay, they are bringing awareness to the Holocaust. That's fine. I haven't seen the videos, though, so I don't know if they're doing it poorly. Yeah, I don't know. You're the one with TikTok. Get on it. Do your research. No, I've deleted TikTok a long time ago.

My roommate's the one on TikTok, and I'm not going to ask her, hey, can we watch some Nazi crazy people porn? No. Don't want that in the algorithm. No, we don't. Annie writes in, I know I'm a bit late, but you guys were talking about how no one uses Goodreads anymore, but not where I live. It's still popular.

Also about the comment you made that Goodreads looks like an outdated website. What about your website? It looks older and more basic than Goodreads. Oh, I beg to fucking differ on that one. Jesus Christ, Annie. What the fuck? Yeah. You want to throw down? Yeah. Beg to fucking differ on that one.

Regardless, I love the show. I just had to defend the website. Without it, I wouldn't know what to read, especially with no bookstores around. No hard feelings. Stay grumpy. Hey, Annie, you could defend Goodreads without, like, smacking us down. Seriously. I'm just saying. Like, you didn't have to make it personal.

I mean, I know it's not a great website, but it's better than Goodreads. Jeez. But you can't share your books on it, Jason. No, I can't. Well, we do every episode in the show notes. We share our books on GOG.show. All right, thanks for listening, Annie. I'm sorry you don't like our site.

Max writes in, I recently spent the entire weekend moving my parents to LastPass because I found out their passwords were extremely weak. What gave it away? The post-it note on the side of the monitor? One, two, three, four, five. This was a pain in the butt changing every password that they made them showing them how to use it.

Sorry, that was difficult to parse. Some websites it doesn't automatically fill, and they freaked out, and I had to drive over there to show them what to do when it doesn't autofill. I still can't believe my parents' bank password was of their kids' names and two numbers. Are you sure you want to write people with this information? Because they probably haven't changed it.

Well, he fixed it. He fixed it. I'm just saying. Maybe not a fix the Domino's account. I'm just, you know. Have any of your grumps gone through the struggle of trying to protect your family like this? Yes, we all have. We've talked about this at length, and we've talked about it with Bittner, and we've kind of all come to the conclusion that there's only so much you can do before you throw your hands up in the air.

Yeah, and we've been talking about 1Password since the show started, and we've been trying to protect the internet for seven and a half years, and nobody listens. So obviously, nobody listens because you went with LastPass. But yeah, Max, yeah, the struggle is real. Yeah, it is. It is. It's good luck with that.

So the problem is, you know, these things don't work perfectly, right? And I have the struggle with my mom all the time, and my mom has made it now a running joke that as soon as I show up, everything works perfectly, but if I'm not there, then it doesn't. And that does seem to be true, so. Yeah, yeah, I get that too.

Neil writes in, talking about what you can try with the lady in the tube at the Amazon Fresh store, try this. And you say, lady in the frozen food aisle, what is 100, 100, 100, 100 in Welsh? Hope it is loud. Yes, we covered that story when it came out years ago.

It's very funny. Yep, yep. Signals are all red, writes in. I heard you mention the social dilemma on yesterday's show, and you guys didn't seem too thrilled. We came around to it, as you've probably heard by now. Just wanted to let you guys know it is at least worth a watch. The drama portion of it is minimal and basically is just there to translate how social media manipulates people into an easy and to understand visual representation for those who are addicted to social media and don't understand what the interviewers are talking about is a very small part of the film.

Let's just say the film got my social media addicted partner, who did not understand in the slightest why I value my privacy and don't have any social media accounts to actually stop and think for a minute. It's definitely worth a 1.5 hour watch and aligns with a lot of what you guys talk about on the show. Keep up the great work, guys. Thank you.

I agree. And I bet your partner is still on social media. Yeah. Yeah. I did love at the end of the movie, too. It said, like, follow us on social media. Just kidding. And then it popped up. Just kidding. That was pretty funny. Peter writes in. Got this email from G Suite today.

Hello, Administrator. We are writing to let you know that starting October 13th, 2020, Google Drive is making a change so that its trash behaves more consistently with the rest of our G Suite services with regards to automatic deletion. This means that any file that is put into Google Drive's My Drive Trash will be automatically

And he goes on to say, what are the odds Google is really deleting stuff after 30 days? P.S.

Deliveroo! I think the odds are fairly good that it's actually deleting stuff because I've been on tech support calls with them trying to get stuff back that people have accidentally deleted. And they're like, we can't. It's gone. We really actually do delete it. I'm like, come on, guys.

You set visibility to zero, right? And I've actually told that to Google support. And they're like, yeah, a lot of stuff we do, but not this. So your files are gone because they don't want to suck up their drive space because it costs them money. I would just like, as an aside, to nominate for Phrase of the Year 2020, trash behaves more consistently.

Trash behaves more consistently. That would be 2020. Yep. Gabriel writes in, hey, Grumps, been listening for over two years, and this is the best podcast I listen to. In fact, this is the only one I listen to right away and never miss an episode. Thank you for keeping it going, and I'm proud to be a Patreon supporter.

Thank you. I had to mention something for Dave and you all to discuss. As a former listener of Reply All, your comments are very accurate, and I, too, am not a fan of their show. Being an avid listener of the Cyber Wire, the new music has been quite a bit of a change, and I'm getting used to it. However, is it just me, or does the new music that plays during the ad sound eerily similar to the Reply All music?

Check it out, and I bet you'll be surprised at how similar they sound. Every time it comes up on the Cyber Wire, I feel like I got tricked into listening to Reply All. I hope this provides you three with a lively discussion. Thanks for the snarky and intellectual look at all things tech. Well, Dave is not here to respond to that, unfortunately, and I have not listened to the music.

I've never actually listened to Reply All. Good for you. Yeah. And I will not go back and listen to Reply All to find out the veracity of these claims. Look, I'm not surprised at all that music would sound similar because, in general, people are working from sound banks that they've either purchased or completely free.

I do know that for the Cyber Wire, wasn't it written? It was written by somebody in staff. Yeah, yeah. He was an actual musician. So if Reply All sounds similar, that's just quinky dink. Over at iTunes, Lilisil writes in with a five-star, thanks for grumping.

Hi, guys. Greetings and a big thanks from Switzerland. I stumbled across the show while I was searching for podcasts about security two years ago. Since I am an even older, maybe not as grumpy, kind of geekish guy working or gal working in IT for more than 20 years, I absolutely enjoy the shows.

Love your humor and the rantings about politics. Thanks for the many great inputs about the apps to use, audiobooks to listen to, haha, audiobooks, and the great furry security section. New title. There we go. Learned a lot, laughed a lot, too. Also, I enjoy the friends of the show that brings nice changes of subject and perspectives.

Grump on. Just do not talk about dog training, as I am a clicker trainer and hate Cesar Millan. He is a dick. So just stop it. I know you won't. But just so you know, cheers. Well, I have to talk about Cesar in ages. Yeah. I'm coming around to your side of the thing anyway.

So there you go. If you want your question or comment right 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 review and toss us a five-star and snarky review. And keep clicking those stars on Overcast because we're working our way back to you, babe.

We've moved up four slots. We're at 26. Now that song's going to be in my head all day, and I like it. So I'm fine with that. Okay, good. Yeah, I love that song too. But yeah, we're at number 26. We're at 26. Hey, we're better than America. We rank higher than the United States.

Closing shout out. Closing shout out to our Clash Royale clan. We're kicking ass on the new clan wars thing. So I just want everybody to know we're number one over there. That's right. And we've been kicking people off. So if you want to join the clan, just make sure you got 4,000 crowns or medals or whatever the fuck that is that we require you to get in and keep an eye on it.

We're posting over at the Discord channel every now and again when we have slots open. So you can check that out at GOG.show slash Discord if you want to join in on the chat there. But we're doing really good. I'm proud of the team. All right. And hey, shout out to the Discord people. I haven't taken a look recently, but I know we're well over 300 people over there now.

And a lot of people having some lively discussions that I sometimes get involved in, but generally don't. You know, I pop in every day or so and bounce around when I'm not editing all day. But yeah, it's a fun group of people over there. And until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. The show is a labor of love, but your support keeps the show going. If you like the show, please visit GOG.show slash donate to help us out. We'll love you forever. Or you can visit GOG.shop and pick up some good old-fashioned GOG swag. If you can't do that, then please pass the show along to a friend.

Word of mouth is the only way the show grows, so spread the grump far and wide. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 472. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, buy our swag, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

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