525: I’m On a Boat!

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 and we're both grinning from ear to ear, but we'll get to that in a few minutes. Yep, we're on the way. First, something that didn't have me grinning. I had my second major COVID exposure experience yesterday, which is just to show you that we are not out of the woods with this stuff yet.

So my office, my company that I'm working for, everybody is fully vaccinated. We have rapid test kits at the office and we have a protocol right now that twice a week you're supposed to do the rapid test and, you know, make sure. And if you're clear, then you can go in. And if not, then you have to go home and get a PCR test and all that sort of stuff.

And things got a little lax with some folks. As, you know, human nature does, rather than taking the test and kind of staying at the front office area and waiting for a result, people would start to come in first, put down their coats because it's been raining.

And maybe put their backpack down or set up their laptop and then go take the test and then kind of forget about it and wander around and sit down and start working and all of that sort of thing. And lo and behold, somebody did one of the rapid tests turned positive yesterday.

So there was a few a few of us were in the office and we all went home. The person of interest went to go off and get a PCR test. And, you know, good news. The PCR test came back negative. So it was a false positive. But this sort of thing, you know, it's it's going to be happening.

So it's interesting. So when you went home, did you quarantine from your family? I did. I kind of went straight upstairs and just kind of hung out and tried to stay away from everybody as much as I could because it was unknown yet. Although the guidelines said, you know, that we were I was reading through as we all, you know, everybody in the office all of a sudden became we started to do our own research.

Of course. So we're starting to read through the guidelines. And, you know, it's it's things like 15 minutes of of of exposure within two meters and all that sort of stuff. And this particular person, I'm nowhere near. I've never I don't think I've only spoken to her like once or twice.

So I was like I was not terribly concerned, but, you know, you never know. And it's it's scary when this stuff happens. Yep. So you had a false positive. That's good. Yeah. Good news. Bad news. I have to go back to the office now. There you go. Oh, God. Oh, man.

I guess so many Facebook jokes. I got to wait. I want to talk. We're not there yet. We're not there yet. Some follow up. I found a really interesting series called The Great AI Reckoning over at Spectrum.IEEE.org. And I had to look it up because the IEEE stands for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Yes, it does. Yeah, I didn't know that. They approve all your light bulbs and outlets and everything. So it's a pretty good series so far. I have to say I've been going through them there. Some of them are long reads. Some of them are short reads. But I think they're doing a pretty good job over there. And I recommend giving it a skim if you've got some time for sure.

And this one just made me kind of chuckle. Former Google exec warns that AI researchers are, quote, unquote, creating God. And who knew he was racist? This is Mo Gadot. He used to work at Google in some of the special ops stuff.

He was like a finance guy. He wrote a book called Searching for Happy after his son died. I've produced a couple interviews with Mo. I've talked to Mo a couple times. He's a really sweet guy. And I really enjoyed his book, Searching for Happy. His other book is coming out now, which, of course, he's going to say the sky is falling.

We're all going to die. Here comes Skynet. Because it's called Scary Smart, the Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save the World. OK? Yeah. I'm just taking this one with a grain of salt if you see it passing around. He's like, you know, he was like watching some AI figure out how a robot arm could pick up a grape.

And then when it finally did, and then it held it up triumphantly. Like, yes. OK. OK. Create a little fear to sell some books and ship some units. Got it. So much of this stuff going around. But speaking of creating gods, I have found an interesting article. I've talked about Andrew Yang.

We've talked about Andrew Yang a couple times. Many times, yeah. He seemed super interesting. And then he got super into digital rights. And he got into UBI and all that sort of stuff. And a lot of his thoughts kind of align with our thoughts about things. And then he kind of fizzled off as a presidential candidate.

And then he got kind of uninteresting for a while as he was doing a bunch of weird shit. Like, he would start, you know, he would start like these digital forays and then kind of drop them. And then next thing I know, he's a talking head. And I kind of understand why now. And he's starting to explain it a bit.

Now, of course, you know, he's promoting a book as well. But he's talking about the things that he's talking about in his book. And he wrote this really great – this is a bit from his book that's been published on Politico. And it's when I ran for president, it messed with my head. And it goes a good way to explaining a lot of the Andrew Yang nonsense that came immediately after.

Somewhere along the way, I read or a teacher said something to me along the lines of the thing is you want a leader who doesn't want to be a leader. People that want it for themselves, not for you. And he starts to talk about how the whole process of running for president just fucks with you.

And it really changes your mindset. And it turns you into a not good person. Oh, great. Didn't he also run for mayor of New York too? Yes, he did that after. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So – and it's interesting. I think it's a really good short read.

I don't know if I'm going to read his whole book. Maybe I will. But this is definitely a good read. And he's like, we got to think about changing the way we do things because this is not healthy. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of that going around right now. Yeah. I'll probably read it because he is an interesting cat.

I want to find out if he's as interesting as he is in my head. I know. That's exactly it, right? Because to me, he was like beyond interesting. And maybe he's not. Maybe he is. You know what? You're right. I think we should both read the book. Yeah. Let's find out. Let's find out. Let's find out. Now, Brian, I also said a while back because we – you know, I was talking to our friend Chris Lockhead.

And he was like, can't you guys come up with some good news for the show? You know, like look at Amazon, how Amazon is offering free tuition to people. And I'm like, Chris, the only reason that's good news right now is because people haven't done their research yet. Well, finally, somebody has.

And yes, it was bullshit. Almost nobody takes them up on it. There are limits to how much these companies can give towards tuition, which is like in the realm of $5,000, which, as we know, ain't much. Unless you're getting like a Skillshare lifetime account or some shit like that.

Here, welcome to Linda. But they don't give people time off. I like just to get a basic degree working through your normal work schedule with the benefits they give you. It'll take you like seven to eight years just to get a bachelor's. It's like, yeah, no.

So there's the other shoe right there. Articles in the show notes. Check it out. There you go. And as we've been talking about, our podcast has been struggling a bit. And we've been appealing to our listeners for donations to keep us going. And you guys have delivered. It's been great. Yes. Keep it up.

But I think, but I got an email, Jason. We collectively, podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com, got an email, Jason, that is going to save our podcast. Oh, my God. What's going to happen, Brian? We've been asked to join Fireside Chat. Mark Cuban to the rescue.

Mark Cuban's podcast creative initiative. They are going to solve all of our fucking problems. Now, may I quickly point you out to their website and freely ask who in their fucking right mind would join that. Link is in the show notes. You've got to go look at it. We can't explain it. You have to go look at it.

This is. So, yeah. That seems legit. It seems so legit. Yeah. It's like, oh, my God. It's so bad. Oh, and we have to act now, Jason, because spots are limited. Spots are limited. I got so many emails from friends who got this exact same email. And I had to explain to a lot of them.

I'm like, have you guys heard of Clubhouse? They're like, yeah. I'm like, you know how it's failing? Yeah. Well, this is Clubhouse 2.0. Do you think it's going to fail? Yeah. Yeah. So, ship has sailed on that one. Mark is, again, slightly behind the times. In the news.

All right. I think I'm just going to sit back for a little bit. Okay. Go, Jason. So, I just, before we dive into it, I do have to say that my hats go off to Twitter yesterday for one of the greatest tweets of all time. They just said, hello, literally everyone.

I don't know if you went through the responses, but boy, did every brand try to pile onto that. Oh, I couldn't. I didn't even, I mean, there were, I mean, was it 500,000 retweets by the time I looked at it? It was just like, no, hundreds of thousands of comments. I will say, though, you know, joke's kind of still on you, Twitter, because the only reason everybody was there is because everything else was down.

Yeah, yeah, you're seriously like the third choice at last call, you know? Yeah, there's no doubt that you're the uncoordinated kid getting picked last for volleyball here, kid. Yeah. So, we have several links in the show notes about what happened and, you know, why Facebook went down and the whole trio.

And it was just, I think Cloudflare did a... Conspiracy theories are the best, though. Oh, of course they are. People lost their freaking minds about this. Yes, of course it happened right after the whistleblower. Sure, okay. Yeah, it is possible. It is possible a disgruntled employee did fuck up the BGP route.

But I would say that that would be the case, except the fact that they've done it multiple times already. This isn't the first time. Oxum's razor here, people. Yeah. Oxum's razor. Yeah. They fucked up and they put... And again, whatever happened to the decentralized internet, nothing at Facebook is decentralized.

One fuck up can take down the whole ship and that's what happened. So, and I was reading... I was reading... Well, I read the Cloudflare breakdown this morning, which was really funny when you compare and contrast that to Facebook's actual response, which said, shit broke, sorry. But Cloudflare literally broke it down by how BGP works, how DNS works, how the cascading issues happened, how DNS went to the shit for a lot of people because there were so many Facebook requests that couldn't get, you know, resolved and things like that.

But I did see a really good response from somebody who was actually on the mitigation team on Reddit. And they're like, okay, here's the problem, guys. We've got three layers of shit that's going on here. We've got guys that can get into the Knox and actually, you know, get access to the routers.

We've got guys who can kind of mitigate them and tell them where it goes. And we've got this other set of guys who are the ones that can actually fix the shit. None of them are in concert. None of them are where the other people are. And most of this is happening because we're running on a skeleton crew because of COVID protocols.

Outside of the fact that they couldn't communicate with each other because all Facebook employee communications is done through Facebook tools only. Exactly. All of which were down. You know, Brian, I've worked for a lot of corporations and there is always a separate domain for all corporate communications.

It's on a separate network, you know. Not here. This goes back to the 90s. Even when I was working at Paramount, we had Paramount Corporate, which was a completely siloed separate network from anything else that was on the internet because, you know. Forward facing, internal facing.

And there's this thing called SPOF, single points of failure. Your fucking domain is a single point of failure. I'm sorry. So, you know, you have to out route around that. So the smartest guys in the fucking world, as they like to call themselves. But, you know, Brian, never mind.

Never mind. They do like to move fast and break things. Always remember. They broke themselves. Always remember. And of course, the most meta thing yesterday was, is Facebook down? Was down. That was so good. That was so good. So did you watch the 60 Minutes interview?

No. I've watched clips. Okay. Most people watch clips. Yes. But here's the thing. And I just want to say this really quickly before we get into this too much. Facebook. Everything that's coming out of the whistleblower here. Gotcha. Okay.

Panama Papers. Everything that's coming out in the news about the Panama Papers now. Pence and the January 6th Capitol riots. Everything that's coming out about that now. We knew all this shit. Uh-huh. We've always known all this shit.

It's just what? Now it's documented? Now we have proof, Brian. Now we have proof. We have the burden of proof. That's exactly it. Because, I mean, this is the biggest we fucking told you so that we've ever had on this show. I mean, we've had a lot of them too. You know, it's gotten to the point where it's just blasé to say, yeah, we fucking told you so.

Six years ago, check out episode four. And we told you about this. The algorithm has a fucking body count. We told you about that. You know, all of this shit is stuff we already knew. But now we have documented proof that they knew too. Which is the fun part.

This is the fun part. You know? So I watched the 60 Minutes piece. I watched the extras. And then this morning, I sat through the, you know, the congressional testimony from the whistleblower, which was just fun. Every single one of these congresspeople and senators and whatnot were basically making fun of Mark for not being there and going sailing today.

That's it. That's all they talked about. And all I can think about is that goddamn Old Spice commercial where the guy's like, I'm on a boat. Oh, man. It was just, it's just been so much damn fun. It's been so much fun. The thing with Facebook, particularly in the last two years with their PR and with the way that Sheryl Sandberg is leaning out of it, not leaning into it.

And Zuckerberg is always jet skiing or riding a hover foil or something anytime anything bad happens. At first, I was like, do you just not get it? Are you stupid? Is your PR team just stupid? And what I've come to the realization of is they're fucking arrogant and they really think that they are bigger than everything.

I have another theory, too. I think that Zuckerberg spent enough time with Trump to say, if you say it enough times, people start to believe it. And if you say we did nothing wrong enough times, people will believe it, except. Well, it's worked for them so far.

Yes, except now there's a little bit of difference and Mark doesn't have nukes. Trump had nukes. So there was there was a definite delineation of power there. You know, we get baby pictures from Zuckerberg and hate speech and genocides and human trafficking and all this other fun stuff from from Mark.

It's the gift that keeps on giving Brian. But I was going through the SEC stuff and looking at some of the some of the charges that points and charges. Yeah. Oh, it's bad. So it's bad. So, yeah, this is that's what really made me happy.

That's what that's the when I saw the SEC charges. I really got excited. I really got happy because otherwise it's like, yeah, you know, it's bad for them that all this info is coming out about how they knew that it was fucking up kids. Because when you start fucking with the kids, that's when you have a problem.

You know, that's when that's when everybody that's that's when we join hands across the ideological aisles. Unless you're a Catholic. Unless you're a Catholic. Unless you're a priest. Yeah. Sorry. You know. Yeah. No, I mean, it's funny because, you know, everybody's like, oh, Facebook shares are going.

They've gone down. Well, guess what? They're already on their way back up. Yeah. They're back up. They're already bouncing back up. We're not going to hit them financially. I do think this is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back eventually. Eventually. Because these processes take years. Yes. But you are going to, WhatsApp is going to get, it's going to get broken up.

WhatsApp is going to get spun off. Instagram is going to get spun back off. There's, there's, there is no way Facebook will continue to exist as the entity it is now anymore. And that's one thing that really good came out of the testimony this morning, because I caught, I missed most of it. I caught a little, I missed most of this segment, but I caught the tail end of it where she was giving actual advice to, you know, Congress about how to do regulation on this.

And she said, you need people that have worked at these companies when they're done with their tour of duty to join the regulatory boards for the government, because they know how it works and they know what, what can be done to fix it. And I'm like, exactly. Fuck, that's it.

That's it right there. You know? And, and here's the other fun part about that is that there's going to be a lot of ex employees for some of these companies real soon, because I think a lot of people are seeing that. If they, if they stick around right now, and this is my, this is my message to any Facebook employee right now.

If you're on the fence, if you think that you can stay and fix it, you can't. Not right now. It is going to be a mess. No, the culture, the culture is broken. You have to leave. And it's going to be a long time. You have to leave now. I think there was, there was a long, dark night of the soul for a lot of people the other day when everything was down and employees specifically.

I think a lot of employees were going, hmm, well, maybe, maybe it's time to move on. Maybe, maybe I sucked enough at the Zuckteet and made enough money because God knows it's good money. I think a lot of people are going to leave. I think we're going to see a lot of resignations. And I think it made a difference to the casual user.

I think Facebook's, I think Facebook's usage is going to plummet in the coming months. I think a lot of people realize that they don't need to keep refreshing their feed. That six hours without it was actually kind of nice. Yep. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see.

The thing about it is it's like, we had this before with everybody getting dissatisfied with their job there after the, after the first election, after the second election, after the Capitol riots, everybody there felt like shit. And a small portion of people did have the cojones to leave.

I just want to point out that look at what happened to all of the people that hung on to Trump until the end. Remember the news stories about how they were unhirable? I think you might be in that case if you stick around much longer, because this is not going to get fixed right now. There needs to be, they even said on, on the, the testimony today, Facebook needs to declare moral bankruptcy, clean house and, and fix it.

But the biggest problem is Mark. Zuck and, yeah, he's got to go. Shale Sandberg's got to go. There's no doubt about that. And to your point earlier, I think the big difference here is the fact that we now know that they knew. I think a lot of Facebook employees were able to tell themselves, you know what?

These were just bad decisions made in the heat of the moment. What we know now is no, well, they were bad decisions, but they were done on purpose because of financial reasons. And I think, I think a lot of people in there still know that and still took that paycheck because, I mean, there's only one whistleblower right now.

She had all the documents, all those documents were on the company intranet. You know, it's not like people couldn't find them. Not like people didn't know. Well, they couldn't yesterday for six hours. Yeah, that's true. That's true. But, you know, I, there's a, I'm not going to say the N word, but, you know, there is a, a famous term about, uh, I was just following orders, which did not fly down the line.

So, you know, just, I know this is not as serious as that, but it's getting damn close. We're talking genocides. We're talking human trafficking. And, oh, that's the one thing that I wanted to say. You talk about getting hit financially. They, it has come out that they have been lying about their numbers and how much they're charging advertisers and how much they're delivering to advertisers.

Again, nothing we haven't known. We, we, of course, we've, Brian, we've known all this shit for fucking ever. Nobody listens to us. We're not, we're not cute with blonde hair with a bunch of documents because we've never actually worked in the belly of the beast because we have fucking morals. But, yeah.

Sorry. Good times. God, that felt good. Okay, good. All right, what you got? Let's do some more frivolous stuff. Donald Trump is suing to get his Twitter account back because apparently he, he missed the big party yesterday when everybody was on Twitter because he still can't be there.

Can't be there. Yep. So, he has filed suit in, guess where? Florida. Florida, of course, seeking a preliminary injunction of the ban while he works to having his account permanently reinstated. He is arguing, as expected, that his ban violates his First Amendment rights because of Florida's new social media law signed in by Governor Ron DeSantis earlier this year, which is, which was based on you can't kick public figures and politicians off social media.

Of course, the courts there have stopped that law from taking effect on the grounds that it likely violates free speech laws. So, you can't really base your lawsuit on a law that has been struck down. Just saying. I know. Well, that's the problem because he didn't know that the law had been, you know, knocked down because he's not on Twitter.

So, he can't see the latest news, you know. We have an information lag here going on. Yes. And in an attempt to have some good news again for our good friend Lockhead, fiend of the show Barrett wrote in and he says, sure, not enough, but simply glad someone is making an effort, although they could do more to help others become carbon neutral.

And this is a story about Google. Google Maps is getting a few new features to help people better understand our dying planet, our burning planet. The first is a fire layer in the main map view, which lets you see the exact boundaries of wildfires just as easily as you can look up current traffic patterns.

So, you know, stuck on the 405 or about to die, easily both there on a map for you. It says this will bring all of Google's wildfire information together into an easy interface. It'll pull information from the National Interagency Fire Center here in the U.S., and they want to expand it with other government agencies starting with Australia in coming months.

They've also announced they're going to expand their tree canopy tool that it launched in 2020, which this uses aerial imagery with computer vision AI to generate a map that shows tree coverage in cities. This is important because there's a phenomenon called urban heat islands where miles of asphalt and no shade from trees can cause cities to be significantly hotter than the surrounding areas.

So there's a lot of theories that we can reduce global warming and make cities more livable just by planting the fucking trees that were there to begin with. Planting the trees and also not making the roads black. Yes. That's a major one. And they've also – I saw some news about the whitest white ever paint ever made, and I thought Donald Trump, but, you know, they should call it Trump.

No, Trump's followers. And supposedly that's going to get rid of the need for air conditioning because it's so good at reflecting heat and all that sort of stuff. Except every pilot in the world is going to start crashing into each other because they can't see from all the reflections. But after reading that, I did a quick Google search because I remember reading something about Google.

So the Google one hand giveth to climate change and on the other hand fighteth climate change. Apple, Amazon, and others back groups trying to kill U.S. climate legislation. So basically all the big companies because, of course, it's going to cost them money. They're backing corporate lobby groups and organizations that are battling U.S. climate bill, according to a report.

That's despite those companies all making pledges to reduce their impact on the environment and adding tree canopy tools. The United States Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and Rate Coalition are three of the biggest lobbyists and business groups that oppose the $3.5 trillion budget bill, which includes measures to fight climate change.

And, of course, they've dug in to see who is giving these people money. Everyone, Apple, Google, and Alphabet chief executive Sundar, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Microsoft, Disney, you know, the usual people.

The usual suspects. I don't see Zuck in there. We'll give you a tree canopy. I don't know. Who cares? He's sailing. He's on his boat. He's on his boat. So, you know, Google, you can add things to your maps. But how about you stop fighting the climate change bill? Please, please. Please. Thank you.

But it is raining somewhere in China. I saw this tweet thread and it just tickled me pink. I'm just calling it It's Raining Drones. And this is some video of a drone performance where the drones literally start dropping out of the sky.

And the theory is that the company that lost the bid for this light show started jamming the other company's signals so their drones didn't know what to do. And they're literally just – it reminds me so much of the WKRP episode on Thanksgiving.

Turkeys. The turkeys. As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

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Media candy. Quick shout-out to our friend of the show, Eric Hunley. He's got a new show with Mark Gruber. Do you know Mark? Have you heard of Mark before? No.

He was on TV for a while, did some stuff. They've got a new show called America's Untold Stories, where they explore history and pop culture that is often unknown, obscure, or overlooked. That's on YouTube. Link will be in the show notes. Go check it out. We love Eric and – well, some people love Eric.

We got a mixed bag when Eric hosted last time. But, yes. Yeah, he batted 50-50 with our audience. He batted directly 50-50 down the line. I did watch The Problem with Jon Stewart, episode one.

Did you get a chance to watch it, Brian? I have subscribed to Apple Plus again because my wife's show finally came back, the morning show. So, we were a go. So, yes, I have many Apple Plus shows to talk about right now. Excellent. So, I thought The Problem with Jon Stewart was – me?

Eh? It wasn't funny. It wasn't funny. It was – that's the problem. He's trying to be serious and funny at the same time, and I think he's rusty. I'm going to give it a couple episodes, but – Yeah, he's definitely rusty. You can tell. I don't – I also didn't like the trope of here we are in the writer's room explaining what we're going to do.

Didn't care for that whole approach, you know, the whole behind-the-scenes thing. I actually thought that was the most interesting part of the show. It was the most interesting part of the show, but, you know, you can't make a show out of that, and I don't like it being used to hang the show on, personally.

Hopefully, it was just for episode one. Yeah, we'll see. I don't know. See, I haven't had HBO since I've gotten to Toronto, so I've had no real time with Bill Maher or Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver. And I've kind of come around to your view on this. I don't need sadness porn.

Talking about shit I already know and bumming me out, and that's what this show was to me. I already knew all this. It was a well-researched, well-done, deep dive. It feels more like he's trying to be an updated Gen X 2020 than he is trying to be a comedy show.

And I know they kept saying we're a comedy show, and in their behind-the-scenes bit in the writer's room, they alluded to funny bits. None of which were in this show, because it was just sadness porn. Okay, I gotta say, the Ken Burns bit was funny. Yeah, that bit was funny. That was the only funny thing in the show.

But that was it. The How to Make a Burn Pit segment was terrible. Yeah, I mean, for the most part, I don't know. I mean, I'm glad he's out there. I'm glad Jon Oliver's out there. I couldn't give a flying fuck about Bill Maher. But I'm glad they're out there talking about these topics for people who aren't as in the know, and it might get some movement.

But whatever. Again, I'll give Jon Stewart the benefit of the doubt, like you said, because it's one episode in, and he does feel rusty. But he, last week tonight with Jon Oliver, is a far superior show, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. Well, I mean, they've had... The student has become the master.

Totally. But they've also had, like, what, six, seven years to hone that show to perfection? You know? Yeah. Jon's coming out of living in a barn, so it's going to be a little different. You know, I still like him, but I don't know if I'm going to... If I look at the topic list, I'm just going to go on a topic-by-topic basis, because if it's going to bum me the fuck out, I don't need to watch it.

Yeah, or maybe I'll just watch the monologue and not watch the deep dive and skip to the end for the Burns burn. Yeah, yeah, they've got to keep that. That was the best part of the show, by far. Okay, so now that I have Apple+, I have watched a couple episodes of Ted Lasso Season 2.

More of the same, and it's a very, very good same. It is. There are twists and turns in this season, so you definitely are going to want to... There's one more episode left to the season, and it gets deeper, finally. I was happy about this.

Definitely, the show gets deeper as it goes. We got up to the Christmas episode, and that was about to come on, and my wife was like, I'm not ready to watch a Christmas episode yet. Oh, you're just at the beginning. You're just at the beginning. Yeah, yeah, we're just at the beginning. Oh my God, yeah, so much happens. The Christmas episode is the best Christmas episode of any TV series ever, though.

That's the... I mean, if you have to wait until Christmas, I feel for you, but you might want to sneak it when she's not around and just get caught up. But yeah, I mean, I am waiting with bated breath for the finale in a couple days, because yeah, it changes the show quite a bit.

Okay. All right. Now, I watch Foundation. I told you not to. Hold on. I'm not done. I've watched the first three and a half episodes right now. It got a little late last night, and I had to stop it. Because I had read all the awful reviews, because so many people had told me it was horrible, I went into it with the expectations of, you know, falling into a pile of frozen winter shit.

I was not expecting a goddamn thing. I liked it. Oh, no. I don't... It's not foundation. Foundation light, at best. It's beautifully shot.

I mean, they have spent more money than God on this. They probably spent what Zuckerberg lost yesterday on this show, because it's just... Temporarily lost, let's say that. Yes, temporarily lost. It is beautiful. Some of the main story arcs of Foundation are there.

Some of the solutions that they presented to make it more... As been pointed out many times, Foundation is not a story about characters. It's about society and, you know, things of that nature. And you need characters for a TV show.

So how they've chosen to approach that is interesting to me. This is a gazillion times better than that Ridley Scott abortion that's on HBO. See, I thought they were about the same. I was about the same. No, no. This I'm intrigued by. And as you keep going on, the character...

If you didn't get past the first two episodes, all those characters are now jettisoned. We're on to another next generation and it's completely... It starts to change. Oh, okay. And I'm sticking with it. I think it's pretty good. And the one thing that stuck out to me, you said that you really liked the music. No, I hated the music.

I hated the music. Oh, I thought you liked it. Oh, okay. No, see, here's the difference. Let me explain real quick because there's a difference here. I like the actual music. I did not like their use of the music. The use of the music was, I thought, heavy-handed and a little too much for a brand new show.

And it made everything... It's kind of like the sighing from the captain on Discovery where she's like, oh, she gets too deep too fast. You know, it's like we're on the first date. I don't need to hear your life story. Come on. Let's get into it and then give it to me.

I like the music. I think the scoring is beautiful. I just did not like the way they used the music in the story itself. Gotcha. Understood. So, but when I was thinking about the fact that you said that you liked the music and I was watching the opening credits of the very first episode and the name jumped out at me.

And this is probably why you like the music. Bear McCreary, who did Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, Black Sails, and The Walking Dead. I've never seen Outlander, but... He's also done some other shows. I just picked the big ones, but BSG. Those are the good ones. He did all the music for BSG, which was amazing. Black Sails, amazing.

The Walking Dead, I've never even... Yeah, I guess, yeah. Now that I think, once you say The Walking Dead, I'm like, okay, the theme for The Walking Dead is pretty fucking good. Yeah. It's better than the show for most seasons. So, okay. Okay, good, good. Okay, so things change after episode two, you say?

Yes. Okay, because I've only watched the first two episodes. So, I'll give it a shot. I'll give it a shot then. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. Like, divorced from Foundation, I'm finding it to be a very good sci-fi show. Okay, okay. I just, the, in the first, I don't know if it was the second episode, but the hanging scene reminded me way too much of A Handmaid's Tale and made me think that, oh, God, this is just going to be more sadness born from, you know, a deluded emperor.

And that turned me off. No, they move away from that. Okay, good. And, again, none of this shit was in the books. Like, because nobody, there was no human stories or contact. That's not what the point of the books was. That's not what it's about. So, it's just a different show. Isaac Asimov has never written a sex scene in his life, and there's a lot of fucking in Foundation so far.

A lot of fucking in Foundation. I wish we could use that as a show title. I'm just saying. Oh, God. Well, Billions wrapped up their season yesterday, or not yesterday, a couple days ago. And if you're a fan of the show and have seen it, you will know what I'm going to talk about.

I'm just going to do this in broad strokes. The show is fundamentally changing, and there are reasons behind it. And a couple, I tell you what, I will cover the ending of this season when it starts up again in January. I think that'll be the safe spot. So, you have until then for me to cover that.

But there were some things that happened, and there are reasons that things that happened in the real world that facilitated the end of Billions the way it happened. And it'll be interesting to see what they do with the show. So, all in all, satisfying, I thought. I thought it was satisfying.

I'm still going to watch the next season, and it's still one of the greatest shows out there. The season was a little hunky because of the COVID, and they had to change things in the end to make the ending work. So, if you're watching the second block of this season, and you're like, eh, this doesn't make sense.

I think you're trying to stretch a spoiler-free review too far here. Well, I'm just saying, if you're watching, if you're into Billions for this last chunk, and you haven't gotten up, and you think things are wonky, there are reasons that things are wonky. So, I did watch The Many Saints of Newark. Did you watch this? No, because I liked Sopranos for what it was 10 years ago, and I don't think I want to go back to it.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's technically pre-Sopranos, but I had to resuscitate a Twitter account that I have not touched since 2014. I have at MovieCritic on Twitter, and I'm going to start writing there again because it's just too much damn fun.

So, here's my 280-character review of The Many Saints of Newark on at MovieCritic. The Many Saints of Newark. The spirit of St. James Gandolfini couldn't save this turd cannoli. David Chase delivered the opposite of a masterpiece in this disjointed tale of stereotypes and cliches, where the only saving grace is that Michael Gandolfini did Daddy Proud, one star.

That covers it right there. Won't be watching that, then. Anybody else that tells you that it's anything better than a one star is going through the rose-colored lens of The Sopranos and did not actually watch it for what it was, a shitty movie. Okay. Cups and doodads.

Amazon tells Tesla to hold its beer in contest for stupidest robot ever built. That's from the next web. That's a great headline. And even over on Futurism, creators of Amazon's new robot secretly admitted it's terrible. Yes, this new upskirt robot from Amazon, $1,000 upskirt robot, with a cup holder, nonetheless, is just the dumbest thing I've seen in a long time.

So, Brian, thoughts? I don't understand who the target market is. Just because you can build a thing does not mean you should. Ask Facebook, if they know. Yeah, portal. Facebook. I'm sorry, not even Facebook. Facebook. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't get it. I don't get why anybody would want it. It reminded me of the robot from Rocky. Or was it Rocky 2? Or when they jumped the shark with the creepy robot. There was a funny article over on Slate, a brief history of adorable, vaguely creepy robot dogs from Ibo to Jibo to Astro.

Yeah, fuck that product. I love the Ibo's. Ibo's are great. I just couldn't afford them when they were out. I always... Probably get one on eBay. Yeah, no, there's a huge aftermarket for Ibo's. Those things cost a fortune. All right. Yeah. A guy I knew in San Francisco, I can't call him a friend, but a guy I knew, Phil Terone, and he ran like an Ibo shelter and he had like 20 of the damn things.

Oh, man. And I thought this one was interesting. Doctor uses iPhone 13 Pros, I can speak good, me talk pretty one day, macro camera to check patient's eyes. Apparently the camera's good enough. It's a damn good camera. Yeah, it's got to be a damn good camera.

I won't know because mine arrives probably about the same time the iPhone 14 comes out. I got about another three to four weeks before mine comes out. So, we'll see. But I'm looking forward to giving it a shot. No, the really interesting thing about this article is the idea that the camera is so good, you can take a picture of your own eye and just send it off to your doctor without having to even go into the office.

I know. Isn't that fantastic? It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, I just... Can you imagine what your junk is going to look like? The NFT of my balls will be so detailed. Oh, my God. Every poor isn't easy.

Sure, you can copy and paste, but don't you want to be the true owner? Don't you want to own my balls? I have so many show titles, so little time. I know. I know. Oh, my God. I have talked about Grammarly in the past about how it's like, oh, privacy, blah, blah, blah.

When I was on my hippy-dippy privacy bullshit, I'm like, oh, God, everything I write is going to go to their servers, and they're going to have everything I've done. I said, fuck it, I got a Grammarly Pro account, and they're doing great for me now. I'm writing a ton of stuff, and they really helped me.

So, a friend of the show, Bob Fogerty, who does our VOs, is a grammar Nazi. That's what we call them, yes. And so, this is my anti-Fogerty tool. So, I'm writing a lot more, and he's going to see it, and he's going to say, why did you put that apostrophe there?

You know, it's not possessive. It is, Jesus Christ. But anyway, I love you, Bob. You know, I love you. But now I have protection against the dark arts of the Grammar Nazi. It's worth it so far. It saves me time, gives me really good suggestions.

It's like $140 a year, something like that. But it integrates with almost everything. The only thing that it doesn't integrate with, which I'm okay with, actually, is Spark, my email client. I actually don't want to be sending all of my emails off to Grammarly.

No. That's what I don't want. But there is a Grammarly editor in the thing. So, if I want to just punch something up, I can do it. Or I can just write an email like normal, because emails are not war and peace or les miserables. You know, it's like, okay, where's my fucking files, dude?

You owe me some waves. Come on. That's pretty much my emails. I found another little open source gadget called Keycaster. You can get this one over on GitHub, actually. And what it is, is when I'm doing demos, I did a logic demo for a friend.

And what it does is it pops up the key commands you're typing, all the keys that you're typing on the screen. It's basically a key logger that everybody else can see, you know? Sounds great. What could possibly go wrong? Exactly. So, it just shows what the things are doing.

So, if I'm in logic and I'm doing key commands, they can see what's there. And then they can go back and replay the recording and see all the crazy stuff that I do to get my job done. And it's free. It's open source. I'm sure it's sending shit off to the mothership, whatever. But that's why you buy Little Snitch and you make sure it can't get to the network.

Anyway, Keycaster. It's a good little app. And I found this, which is really fun. Twitter Advanced Search. I can't – you have to – there's a link in the show notes to pop it up. You can really dive down on a lot of different info from different people.

It's really cool from different accounts. Did you check this out? No, I didn't get a chance to look at it. It's really detailed. You know me. I'm not a big Twitter user. I was one of those people that showed up yesterday. Yes, yes, yes. Welcome, Brian, it should have said. Yes.

So, it's really cool because it just shows you all of the different things you can search for, different ranges, different accounts. If you're doing any kind of research on Twitter, this is the tool. So, it's literally just twitter.com slash search dash advanced. But there's a link in the show notes because I think I tried to type it in and it gave me some issues when I tried to just type it in.

So, that's that. That's all I got this week on apps and do ads. There you go. Oh, Brian. I saw this one and I just had to laugh. This is a DeFi bug accidentally gives $90 million to users.

Founder begs them to return it. Once again, we're screwed by thinking something is dumb and not joining it. Could have had a cut of that cash. I know. About $90 million has mistakenly gone out to users of Compound, a popular DeFi staking protocol, and the founder is begging users to voluntarily return the tokens.

Now, guess what happens if you're not in a regulated environment? Because you know what? If a bank spits out about $10,000 accidentally into your account, you need to return it or you go to jail. You guys, fuck you. Here's where it gets fun.

This is why this guy, what's his name? Robert Leshner. Robert Leshner, the founder of Compound Labs, is a fucking moron. He says to the people who got the money, keep 10% is a white hat. Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS and most of you are doxxed.

So, he's asking you nicely to return it, but threatening you at the same time. It's the iron fist in the velvet glove. Well, Robert Leshner, if I was one of the people that got part of that $90 million, I would say dox away, you dumb motherfucker.

Because... I'm setting aside this amount for my taxes, and fuck you. And fuck you in a goddamn dumpster fire. You know? That is not how you ask for some people to give the money back. I know you've read the news and you saw that hackers have given, you know, money back recently.

But, uh, that's not how you do it, dude. Seriously. Do the right thing, or we're gonna come for you, motherfucker. Do the right thing, or you're dead. Asshole. Security?

Security? Ha! We are back with Security Ha with Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy.

And finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence. Hello, Dave. Hello, gents. Good to be back. Good to be back. Ah, so I've got a little follow-up from last week. Mm-hmm. Brian, you, you, uh, brought us the, uh, the Imagineering story in our Disney Ha segment.

And, so, I, I, I started watching it last night. It's really good. Really, really good. Mm-hmm. But I have another Disney story that ties into the Imagineering story. It's pretty fun. So, uh, Brian, you introduced me to another gent named Brian, Brian Blondel.

The, uh. Yes. The improv genius. Mm-hmm. Well, he bought a house across the street from me about two years ago. And moved in. I warned him. Thank you. Ah, yes. Well, so, apparently, about a month after he moved in, some woman came by and said that, uh, she used to come there on Christmas and she would like to see what the inside of the place looked like.

You know, she came there when she was a kid. Right. And so, he showed her around and she said, oh, yeah, um, uh, my grandfather built this place, or uncle, uncle, her uncle built this place. And he was one of the original Disney Imagineers. Hmm. So, Brian got to, got to looking around.

Uh, he pulled up the building permit and saw it was, uh, originally done by FX Estentio. Now, if you watch the Disney Imagineering episode one, you will know that that gentleman, who goes by X, uh, coined or wrote the song, Yo-Ho, A Pirate's Life for Me.

Yes. Oh, wow. Indeed. Isn't that cool? I thought that was pretty damn cool. I think our mutual friend, Brian, has an ethical obligation to do pirate theme for Halloween. Yes. So, I'm going to put, uh, Xavier's, uh, information into the old, uh, show notes here.

So, now, is there anything about the house that would, uh, indicate that it was, you know, formerly owned by a highly creative person? It is a very unique layout. It's really cool. Um, but beyond that, I don't think so. I mean, it's not, I mean, there's no, like, literally pirates hanging from the ceiling or things like that.

But, uh, it is for the neighborhood. Secret underground, secret underground dark ride or something. Although we don't know about, maybe, maybe Brian just hasn't found it yet. So, yeah. You know, it's fun. It's funny because it was such a different time back then, especially as you watch the series, the Imagineering story, uh, people's freak flags start to fly a lot more as time moves on.

But back in the day, these guys were buttoned down three piece suits into work. They may have been incredibly creative and imaginative at their job, but they were very straight laced, you know, kind of normal. Now the, the Imagineers, I mean, one of the guys, the main guy has got like this lobe piercing that hangs down to his nipple and like, it's insane, but like, you know, yeah, but it's interesting because you look in this neighborhood and, you know, since we're, we're across the street, but like all the houses on this side are all kind of the same.

You know, there's not a whole lot of flavor in this neighborhood. So his definitely stands out, but, you know, I was just thinking, man, ka-ching, the value just went up a little bit for, uh, if he ever sells it. Right, right, right. You know? Has a nice little pedigree now. Yeah. I mean, only in LA can you get a cool story like that.

It's like, oh, the guy who, you know, did the damn pirates, he did like the story and the, uh, the song, uh, built this house. It's just neat. Yeah. I find that. You get a lot of stories like, you get a lot of stories like, like that in LA. Like I knew somebody that was renting Charlie Chan's old house, uh, been like up in the hills and stuff like that.

It's, it's pretty, it's pretty unique to LA kind of fun stuff. Yeah. And when I used to live in Los Feliz, I'd keep driving down the street and like Walt Disney's house was, his original house was literally across the street from my place. And right down the street was the, uh, the bungalows where they did Steamboat Willie. And they were still, they were in disrepair, but, uh, they were there and people were living in them, which was kind of cool.

And, you know, famously my place in Santa Monica was just down the street from the, uh, the house that was used for Three's Company. Come and knock on our door. Yes. Yes. And, uh, you know, I, I hear tell that Martin Short's house is just down the street from me here. Oh. I'm totally kidding about that.

It's just, you know, a friend of mine, um, a friend of mine, uh, is the owner of a restaurant here that is, uh, inside of one of the old manor houses that goes back a couple hundred years.

Uh, it's called the Elkridge Furnace Inn for folks, uh, around this neck of the woods. You might know it. It's a fine dining establishment, but, uh, not long after he bought the place, uh, an elderly man who had grown up in the community came to talk to him and said, uh, I want to go show you something.

And they went down into the basement of the house, which is where the, the kitchen is now for the restaurant. And, uh, this gentleman said, do you know what's behind that brick wall? And the new owner said, no, what's behind the brick wall?

And he said, well, when I was a kid, um, we used to play in this house and where that brick wall is now, there was a tunnel that went down to the river that runs behind the house. And, uh, legend has it that that tunnel was part of the Underground Railroad and that this place was part of, you know, housing escaped slaves.

Um, and in fact, at the Elkridge Furnace Inn, there's a, uh, there's some historical stuff there, there are, uh, restored old slave quarters that were on the site. So it does align with, uh, how things were, but, um, it's just interesting, you know, to have somebody just come to you and say, oh, by the way, this house, uh, you know, just sort of to your story, Jason, you know, somebody from the old days comes and says, there's more to this house than you knew.

Yeah. More than meets the eye. Yeah. That's cool. At least he didn't say seven of my old babysitters are behind this wall. Yeah. Well, exactly. Yeah. It's kind of, uh, right. You're right. Yes, exactly. But how cool it would be to have a secret tunnel out of the basement of your house to, to, uh, the riverside nearby that as a kid, is he going to knock down the wall and like, you know, put a door on it?

No, I don't think so. I don't think so. And on the, and, and, uh, on the tunnel side, there's nothing left there. So whatever it is, is either, you know, eroded away or collapsed or was filled in. So who knows? Like I say, legend has it, but, uh, who knows if it's actually true, but it's a fun story. It is a fun story for sure.

Uh, I don't even know if this is a story anymore. I saw it and I thought it was pretty funny. Apple AirTag zero day weaponizes trackers. And I was looking into it. It seems like an interesting attack, but it seems kind of hard to pull off. Uh, did you guys cover this one, Dave?

Uh, not only in passing. Um, I don't think it's anything that, uh, anybody's losing sleep over. The use case is sort of niche. So, um, it's interesting. I suspect we'll see Apple patch this, but quick. Um, but, uh, I, I don't see it being a really big deal.

It's interesting that it went out into the world that, uh, there was a cross-site scripting problem with AirTags from the get-go. That's kind of interesting. Yeah, because that's been out for so long. It's just standard check. Like somebody just must not have checked off that box. Like, right.

Yeah. You didn't check for that? Cause that's pretty normal. Yeah. Yeah. I want to look into what it takes to hack these things. Cause I've got, I've got a couple of them sitting around just not doing anything because let's face it. I don't leave the house, so I don't really need an AirTag to track anything that's been lost.

Where is it? It's coming from in the house. Just like everything. Yeah. Oh, it's so annoying too. Cause I got this new iPad mini and, uh, it's got find my turned on and I forgot to turn off the notification.

So every time I drive to the store, every device on me starts going crazy. It's like, you left it behind. You left it behind. No man, no man left behind. Go back and get it. Or iPad mini. Yeah. But I got to say it works. I tell you that it works.

There you go. Yep. I'm like, uh, maybe a block and a half away and everything goes off. So it works pretty good. Works pretty good. I know someone who's thinking about putting, uh, an AirTag on her cat, uh, because her cat runs away.

They are. They're the perfect size for a name tag. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can get them engraved too. So that's it. Oh, there you go. Yeah. It seems like, uh, just get her phone number put on it. And you know, if you found my pussy, call this number. There you go. Show title. Oh man.

Uh, this next one I saw at the next web and I just, I'm just shaking my head. It's QR codes could be the next target for cyber criminals. Here's how to protect yourself. And I'm just like, um, yeah, come on. Yeah. Right up there with fax machines. I mean, I get why the articles are being written.

And like main QR codes have gone somewhat mainstream in terms of, you know, the fact that even our parents now have to scan one to get a menu somewhere. But, uh, yeah, it's kind of ridiculous. So, yeah. And I mean, I, we covered stories how they were getting big in, in Hong Kong and China for payment.

And people were, you know, circumventing them with the, the super high tech, uh, sticker hack. Yes. The sticker with a different QR code. Yes. Yeah. Which I, I actually, uh, printed a few stickers and put, uh, a GOG URL and, uh, pasted it on some bird scooters a while back, but, uh, nobody, nobody ever fell for it.

So I didn't even mention it on the show. I'm like, if it worked, but I put on some tracking code to see if, you know, what URL they went to. And I was foiled, I was foiled by people who recognized the fact that it was a sticker and peeled it off and used it, used it anyway. Yeah.

I was at a restaurant, uh, just last night and they had their, they had a QR code, uh, laser etched onto the table. Uh, fancy. Presumably would lead to the menu, but I wasn't going to check it out. I'm no fool. Might've been a restaurant where Jason had been before.

Who knows? Exactly. I got my little pocket laser etcher, you know, just pull it out and look. Make it look official. You need a pretty steady hand. No, no, no. They, they have the little boxes that you could literally put on a table because you can, that's how they, you can get your laptops etched.

So it's just a little standalone unit that you just place on something and it'll etch away. So if you make it look official enough, that's pretty good. You order the blackened chicken. So nobody's thrown off by the smoky smell. Yeah. I always wonder just how much esoteric knowledge Jason has in his head just to begin with, or did he actively like go down the dark path and like research all this to figure out the best ways to like hack everything?

Cause it's like, oh yeah, they go, of course they have these little etchers that you can just put down. I think it's a little of both. It's a little bit of both. You know, if I wasn't so terrified of jail, I would, I would actually be, be a problem, but I just can't go to jail. So, uh, but you know, you can get around those ones that are etched in the table.

If you bring like a little, uh, uh, it was an all bring an all and just kind of make extra little dots on it. Right. And that way it'll just, it'll basically, you know, screw it way. It'll screw up the table. So if they catch you, you're probably on the hook for the table, but they can't fix that.

Then they're going to have to like sand it, spackle it, and then do it again. Bring my battery powered Dremel tool. Yes. Yes. I use one of those on my dogs every, every couple of days. They're great for the paws. All right. Yeah. I'm glad you explained that. Well, and the, the iPad mini case, cause that thing was so damn sharp.

I had to Dremel that too, but Dremels are fun. Yes, they are. All right. Bad actors were able to infiltrate the accounts of and steal cryptocurrency from around 6,000 Coinbase customers. They exploited a multi-factor authentication flaw according to Bleeping Computer.

So there had been some large scale phishing campaigns targeting Coinbase users. Obviously it's the biggest player out there in this. So no surprise there. And some users may have fallen victim to these emails, giving hackers access to their usernames and passwords. But even those who had gone that extra step to do things properly and had multi-factor authentication switched on were compromised because there was a flaw in Coinbase's system.

So even if you do everything right, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be safe because the people that you're doing it with may not have it done correctly. Good news. On the plus side for this company, and I am very impressed by this, they obviously, they fixed the problem. And as soon as it learned about the issue and they're reimbursing everyone who lost cryptocurrency from the event.

So good move there. Yeah. Unlike our moron of the week. Ooh. Yes. Yes. We will get to that or however the timeline works. We've gotten to that one already. Yeah. Okay. There you go. And a little bit of good news here. I saw this and, you know, it warmed the cockles of my jaded heart.

The Biden administration plans to bring together 30 countries later this month to discuss ransomware threats that are being posed across the globe. So it'll be a virtual meeting and, you know, they're actually trying to do something here. That's nice. Yeah. Right? They are. I think it'll be interesting to see who's not invited or who chooses not to show.

But I suspect what we're doing here is trying to establish some agreed upon norms so having gone through this process, we can then go back to the usual suspects and say, okay, here's what we all agreed on, so knock it off.

And some of those norms might be that, hey, we all agree that if the ransomware doesn't stop, we're going to start addressing it by other means, which could be either, could be, yes, I believe the term of art is kinetic.

Yes, a kinetic response. Yes. Wow. Well, at least somebody's using those Microsoft machines. That's right. You remember those? Okay. No. Wah, wah. All right. Never mind. Let's see. We got this story from Ed.

Good morning, Grumps. Just finished listening to your latest episode and didn't hear about this attack on VoIP providers that is impacting my office and seemingly plenty of customers globally. And this is bandwidth. CEO confirms outages caused by a denial of service attack. This was reported last Monday. And the problem is, you know, there are so many downstream providers now, people hopping on other people's main lines to, you know, basically rebrand and offer cheaper services

and things like that, that, you know, if somebody attacks an upstream provider, all the downstream providers take a dump. So, yeah, that's what happened there. Yeah. And I don't know. I know you guys were talking about the Facebook outage earlier. I don't know if you covered the downstream effects of that, how just like it, in addition to Facebook, it sort of hosed DNS in general because there were so many, because Facebook has so many beacons on so many websites and none of those beacons could hit what they were aiming for.

And so it caused the regular DNS providers to see huge spikes in the inquiries that they were fielding. And every website that uses login with Facebook was having a bad day because that didn't work either. Yeah.

So there's all sorts of follow-on effects from Facebook going down, you know, none of which had a tear fall up out my eye on, I got to say. Well, tears of laughter. Yeah. I was pretty giddy all day.

I do have to say. Most people I know were. Yeah. Oh, karma is so fun when it actually works. Yeah. And Jay wrote in right up your alley. If you haven't covered it, it's worth watching till the end where the most Dave Bittner discussion point will be.

And I have not made it to the end of this. I started this as a YouTube video, How China Conquered the Keyboard. I got about five minutes into it. And it seems really interesting. I just ran out of time. Did anybody actually get the chance to watch all of it? I have not yet. No. Okay. I do like how he did. He did call Dave 8-Bittner.

I thought that was good. Yeah, that's good. That's a new one. Yeah. Really? Yeah. That's a new one. I don't, you know, I don't know. No one's ever called me that before. And believe me, there are so many, I, there's so many things that rhyme with bit that I've heard many.

I'm sure you have. Yeah. But no, 8-Bit is new. So hats off to you, Jay. That's good. I like it. Well done. And I'm hesitant to even bring this up because, you know, it was such a fun discussion last time. But both Matthias and Tyler had comments about file systems.

Matthias writes, you're both wrong about file systems. Everything is a file. Everything else is just magic dust to make it easier for humans. And I am leaning towards the iOS workflow. I shouldn't need to know where I put the file. It should just be there when I open the app I'm about to use. I can see problems with that approach, actually.

And Tyler writes in, great episode. It's funny listening to you all talk about file systems. Some good points all around. However, I can't help but point out what might be obvious. AWS S3, object storage with no directories, and I'd be willing to bet, implemented without a B tree.

Almost certainly a tree. Try. I'm not sure what that is there. S3 is an A-flat system that exists today and is used extensively. The future is sure to be weird, and it's coming fast. Well, I agree with that last point. Count on it. Get that printed on a T-shirt. Yeah, I forgot about S3 and how interesting that was at the beginning to try and fake a file tree system.

Right. But you can. It still kind of works. But hey, here's the deal. Dave and I know jack shit about file systems, which it has got to be obvious from our discussion last week. Yeah. That's never stopped us from having a lively debate on this show.

Oh, absolutely not. We wouldn't have a show. In that tradition of talking out of our asses. God, if we only talked about what we knew about. Yeah. So, back to Star Wars. Yeah, exactly. Names of obscure Muppets. Yes. Probably get more traffic than this podcast does.

Mm-hmm. Oh, that is true. That is true. Mm-hmm. Time to pivot. All right. Well, I think that just about does it, huh? I think so. I was desperately trying to think of an obscure Muppet name and it came up totally blank.

That's because they're obscure and we need Dave to come up with one. Mm-hmm. We did last time we talked about Lou Zealand. Yes, Lou Zealand. That's my personal favorite. This boomerang fish act. Yeah. Yeah. He's a good one. All right. All right.

He's warming up to your clothes. I'll be tightening this one up in post. Yep. Count on it. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got some new subscribers.

Sven, Jeremy, Dave. Oh, come on. A cattle. A cattle. A cattle. Yeah. A cattle. And AJ, who switched over from PayPal and even more people upping their pledges. And now Matt. But thanks to everybody.

A note from Matt that I haven't gotten the chance to paste over because my paste isn't working for some reason. So let me just read this really quickly. Hey, guys. Love the show as always. I know you thanked me as a supporter in 2019. But I was wondering if you could give my app a quick shout out. And it's right.as. So it's basically a less shitty version of Medium.

I'd appreciate it. No problem. We will always give shout outs to our patrons. How do you spell that? Is it R-I-G-H-T or W-R-I-T-E? W-R-I-T-E. There we go. W-R-I-T-E-A-S. All right. Not A-S-S. Dot A-S. Right. As is a totally different product. Mike Pence is involved in that.

Anyways, over at PayPal. Simon, Matt, Michael, Nikolai, John, Judge, Jonathan, Matthew, David, Nicola, Doug, Melissa, Shaleen, and Anthony with the big $50 donation. Every time I read off PayPal, I'm thinking it's the gospel according to Gog. I know. It is. It is. And over at Stripe, we've got $10 from Frankie G, $5 from Matthew S, and another $5 from Glenn B, another $5 sub from John L.

Actually, all those are sub subscriptions. We love your subscriptions. We've got some more subscriptions. Anne Q with a $10, Mario P with a $10, and another $10 from Linda M. So thank you all so much. You are literally what's keeping this show going, and we appreciate every damn bit of it.

That's right. And nobody at iTunes this week. That's okay. We'd prefer money to words. Yeah, fuck them. I don't care. That bit we just read, definitely better than iTunes reviews. Fuck it. That's right. That's right. I got no real closing shout-outs other than Let's Go Dodgers.

I may be sitting in Toronto, but the Dodgers are my team, and they made it to the postseason. So pretty thrilled about the next month of baseball. All right. Maybe you can send me some tickets, and I'll go in your stead, and I'll FaceTime you. But I don't have any tickets. Oh, okay.

Or you can just watch it on TV, and I can stay at home and stay out of crowds and not get COVID. That's exactly what I'm going to be doing. I can make hot dogs cheaper, and yeah. I'm going to use all the Stripe donations to buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and I don't care if I ever go back to Dodger Stadium.

Or America. Because I'm not rooting for the COVID. It's funny, though, that I do have to say that you go to Canada, and you get more COVID exposure than you ever did in the U.S. I know. I don't understand how the fuck that's happened, but there you go. Both have been false positives. So technically, I've had no COVID exposure.

True. So there you go. Until next time, I'm Brian Shalmester. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help keep the lights on, and we'll love you forever. No, we really, really will. You can also help us by sharing the show with your friends and enemies.

It's easy and absolutely free, especially if your friends have open wallets, because we could use that, too. Shoutouts for this episode are at GOG.show slash 525. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans.

You can also 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 snarky review and preferably five stars. But we'd prefer you go to GOG.show slash donate, as we've just made abundantly clear.

Stay grumpy and, Mark, stay on your boat. Hope it sinks.

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