581: Kany.A.I.

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Sorry about last week, Brian. Don't apologize to me. I enjoyed the week off. I'm sure you did, but thank you to everybody who wrote in because, good God, that was a lot of well-wishers. So thank you all very much. I couldn't keep up with everybody.

But, yeah, no, it was a bad couple weeks, but on the mend and seeing the doctors and the therapists and all the people I need to see, believe it or not. Like you told me, have a plan. You have a plan. There's a plan in place and you are sticking to it.

And I'm not a Cylon, so. Yeah, hopefully better ending. Exactly. Yeah. Don't make me throw a bottle of whiskey at the TV, Jason. No, I won't. I won't. What really sucked is, you know, cleaning up, sober, healthy, getting everything back in line, getting my numbers all right.

And then, of course, yesterday I go to Whole Foods and have a salad and get food poisoning straight out of the gate. I'm just like, I can't do it. I know. Damn you, Bezos. But part of my therapy, talking to my doctors and stuff, and it's half the therapists and half just me being fucking fed up.

No more socials. I closed out my Twitter account. I locked it and made it private and tweet deleted everything and just kind of, you know, shuttered it for now just to see how things are going to go, which we'll get into very shortly in the news. I have two thoughts about it. I have two thoughts about that, Jason.

Yeah, go for it. First off, well, thanks for leaving me with the bag because that means I'm the one that has to fucking monitor this shit. And secondly, I actually think that's a fucking great idea. I could reliably tell your mental state by what you were doing on Twitter.

The more you tweeted, the worse I knew you were. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Without a doubt. Yeah. Yeah. No, that was it. You know, you have sustained panic attacks for a couple weeks running, then your brain starts to spin out of control.

So I thought, hey, let's just stop that in its tracks. That's a good idea. Yeah. But I tell you what, it's nice. It's so nice. Yeah, it's a good thing. And I always get frustrated. And I think I even used it as the meme for one of our posts two weeks ago since that was our last episode.

It was the kid with the stressed out fucking like line showing up in his face and he's sweating. And it's like when you're trying to take a social media detox, but your job is being on social media. I think what we're going to do is a policy now, especially since if you're exiting social media.

And I do remember even a couple of weeks ago, somebody got snarky with me. Like they sent like a DM on Instagram and then like we didn't respond and they were pissed off at us. And I was like, I can't fucking monitor all these things all the time for every. And by the way, you just shared a fucking meme that everybody's seen 7000 times.

I have to comment on that. I think the blanket policy for us from now on on social media is if people write to us, great. I'll say thank you. If you want to engage with us, come to our Discord channel. End of story. And if you really want to send us a note, sign up for a Patreon account and we will talk to you all day long.

Yeah. Yeah. There you go. I just I just if you're out completely because I've kind of relied on you to to do the bulk of responses on Twitter. If you're out, I don't have the bandwidth or the patience to deal with that. So, yeah. And I don't think we don't.

Yeah. We get paid to do a podcast. We don't get paid to troll social media. So, yeah. And we've got our Discord. Yeah. And Discord is for the engagement. Yeah. I love everybody on a Discord channel or most of them. But, yeah, it's that's the easiest way to do it.

And I got to tell you, just so much more time. It's so weird, though. It's just that thing where it's like something happens to you and you just want to tell somebody and then you're like, oh, well, I don't have Twitter anymore. So what am I going to do? I guess I'll just go back to doing what I was going to do and enjoy it, you know, like we used to do in the old days.

And this this was really fun. I thought you'd get a kick out of this like two weekends ago. My friend had one of his buddies in from mainland China, who's like a big, super ding dong tech guy over there. And he gave me a tour of the mega apps in China.

Yeah. You know, like the big boys. The one app that does everything. Payments, food, rides, chat. DMV. They've got the DMV in there. Like, well, this is this is Musk's wet dream. This is what he thinks he's going to turn Twitter into when he removes himself from the pile of debt that he's put himself in.

Well, see, the problem with it is and my friend laid this out very clearly. And this is why all the millionaires are leaving China right now. All of that shit is state, you know, has the state's fingers in everything. Yes. They track you. Yes. Having one app where everything is that the state who is, you know, obviously not a fan of its citizens can track and also turn off.

You are in a you're in an episode of Black Mirror right there. Well, as we've said seven gazillion times on this podcast, the only difference between China and the Western world is in China. It's the government. And in the Western world, it's the corporations. Yep. Yep. She equals Zuckerberg.

That's about it. Yeah. So it was it was just really terrifying to see, like, how much how much they put into these things. And he's like, oh, it's great until it's not. You know, everything is fantastic. Everything's fantastic. Until you have a differing opinion from the government. Exactly. Exactly.

But, hey, that's why all the millionaires are leaving, because they they have the means. So they're going to GTFO. Yep. Yep. That's a good way to destroy your economy and brain drain and many other things. So a lot can change in two weeks, obviously. Two weeks ago, when we last did our show, I was discussing the San Francisco petition from the police to use robots as a deadly force option and how dystopian and messed up that would be.

One week ago, when we didn't do a show, they had approved it. And we had we had deadly killer robots roaming the streets of San Francisco, picking up man poo with bombs. Yeah, he's blowing up man poo. Fire in the hole! But in the week since then, it has been banned in a drastic U-turn because basically the entire universe went up and said, oh, what?

Yeah. That's a bad idea. And so they, yeah, they don't get to use their robots to kill people anymore. Good. That's that's the way it should be. I agree. Yeah. I think we're all in agreement, except for the few people who voted for this damn thing.

Except for the San Francisco Police Department, which very much wants to use robots to kill its citizens. And Oakland PD and New York City and everybody else. And the cops just like killing people. I think that's the I think that's the through line. Who knew Ice-T had it right all those many years ago?

Or was that Ice Cube? I can't remember. I get them confused. I get them confused. But you know where they did need those? Uvaldi. That's where they really needed killer robots because sure as hell the cops didn't do anything. Well, I think that was my point two weeks ago, which is, you know, if the cops aren't going to do their job, I guess we should just turn it over to the robots.

Yep. Yep. My friend Joey sent this one to me and I just thought it was hilarious. Who said it, Kanye or Hitler? And it's a stand-up gig from Garfunkel and Oates that's 13 years old. And it's hilarious. I can't say the signs haven't been there.

In the news. Well, some of this is a bit outdated, except it's not because nothing's really changed in the last week. So we'll go ahead and just run through them quickly. Quibble sent this one in. I'm sure you guys have seen the story, but I'd like to get your take on it.

Where's Twitter going to be in a year or two? And this is Chinese bots inundate Twitter with pornographic spam amid COVID protests. So there have been all the zero COVID protests in China. People standing up and saying they've had enough of this. And it's, you know, they're behind the big walls.

So it's very difficult to find out what's going on, except for local activists using Twitter through VPNs to avoid Chinese government censorship. So that's been coming through Twitter. But the Chinese government has flooded Twitter with porn and spam and using the same hashtags and basically diluting all the real content with their crap.

And, of course, you know, there's nobody over at Twitter paying attention to this stuff anymore. So yeah, pretty much. Yeah, there you go. Spam is just cluttering results everywhere since nobody cares. The other thing that they've stopped doing as we see the COVID-19 numbers rise again, they've stopped enforcing their COVID-19 misinformation policy.

So have at it, people. Misinformation about COVID-19, totally okay on Twitter again now. Yep. Yep. Oh, God. And after that, we've also got a Twitter data leak, which has exposed over 5.4 million accounts.

The really fun thing about this one is the people that started to report it on Twitter had their accounts blocked. Nice. Oh, my God. It is just doing – yeah. Twitter's just going great. Just going great.

Everything's going great over there. Yep. Yep. And so now the Twitter's janitors are on strike as well because – They obviously didn't like the sink that Elon brought in. Yeah, seriously. We're not watching that one, too. Come on.

Yeah, so there's some contract negotiations that's going on because they're supposed to be able to – like when an ownership is changed for a contractor and all this stuff with the – it's supposed to be 90 days, whatever. They can renegotiate and – yeah, yeah. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I just put this in here because to go back to Quibble's question, where you see Twitter in a year or two, literally up shit creek. It's hard to see any good outcome anymore. It really is. They're not paying people.

They're moving in beds. They're turning it into a hotel, which they're not allowed to do. Well, they've quite literally turned it into slave labor. The people that are still working there are the people on the – Yeah, the H-1B visas. Yeah, the visas and they can't leave. Everybody else – anybody that could leave has left.

Yep. Or we're fired. Or we're fired. So it's just a mess. You couldn't have left at a better time, Jason, is what I'm saying. I know. And the other thing that made it really easy, too – I was like, I checked out Mastodon. I'm like, no. And then I got the thing from Post, like Post News. They let me in and I looked at it and I'm like – Yeah, I logged in twice.

I was like, I don't need this. I don't want to do this again. I've been down this road. My heart's been broken too many times. And ain't nobody got time for that. I got a business to run, you know? So I'm just – I'm done with it, man. It has been much nicer for the past week or so that I've been off. So I'm just telling you.

Elon's making it really easy. Making it really easy. Want to hear about another thing he's fucking up in a completely different company? Oh, please do tell me. Let us not forget he is also CEO of Neuralink. I forgot he was actually CEO of that dumpster fire. Well, he still is.

And he said they had their big thing, their big event. And he says they expect human trials within six months. I bet they're all going to be on H1 visas. That's right. People doing these human trials. It's been six years since Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter CEO Elon Musk co-founded brain control interfaces, BCI startup Neuralink.

I can't believe it's been six years. It's been three years since the company first demonstrated its showing machine-like implantation robot, which is straight out of Brazil. Two years since the company stuck its technology into the heads of pigs. And just over 19 months since they did the same to primates, an effort that allegedly killed 15 out of 23 test subjects.

That's news that I didn't hear before. Nevertheless, why should that stop him? Yep. Got to break some eggs. They held their third Show & Tell event last Wednesday. And he said, we think probably in about six months we should be able to have a Neuralink installed in a human.

Yes, it has killed 15 out of 23 test primates. But let's go ahead and stick it in a person now, right? Yeah. Got to move fast and break things. I think the FDA might have something to say about that. Yeah. I don't see this happening anytime soon.

Oh, God. I saw this next one over at the New York Times, and it just intrigued me. NFTs on the decline elsewhere are embraced by some museums. And I'm like, okay, I can get that. I can get behind that. You know, museums, they just want to have collections of what's going on at the Times.

You know which museum this is? The only museum in the world that should have NFTs, Jason? And you live in the same city in which it exists. Okay. The Museum of Jurassic Technology. There we go. You've been there, right? Like, it's amazing. If you're ever in L.A., you got to go.

Yeah. No, it's fantastic. It's fantastic. But the thing about this article is you have to scroll down about a little, about halfway, and you get to see this photo of Daniel Birnbaum, the artistic director of Acute Art. And he says, I think we're in a moment of transformation, and it has to do with these new digital mediums.

Well, what gets me is the photograph of this art snob. Either he's asleep and dreaming of electric sheep, but it looks like he's gazing longingly at the Oculus 2 on the table, and he wants to fuck it. That's what it looks like to me.

Am I wrong? Am I wrong? I'm sorry. I've been watching The White Lotus, so I'm getting – we'll talk about that in a second. But that just reminded me of a scene in there. Just look at him. It's wrong. It is wrong. Okay. Well, there's been more FTX fallout, you know, because if one crypto tree falls in a forest, it tends to take down all the rest of them around it, which is exactly what's happened.

BlockFi, which was a crypto lender, has now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy because basically they were – there's no better way to say it. They were giving each other reach-arounds with your money, and now that all the money is gone, they're dry. Yeah.

I mean it all comes down to making fake – well, I'd say they were making fake currencies, but they were made extra fake currencies. And once those all kind of disappeared, then everybody's leverage went away, and it's like – it is a tower of dominoes or however you want to – whatever.

Now, I just want to focus on these last three paragraphs, and if there are any accountants that listen to this show, I would love a deeper dive into this from any of you. It noted that recoveries from FTX are likely to be delayed given the company's bankruptcy process.

In addition, BlockFi says, has $256.9 million in cash on hand, which should provide sufficient liquidity to support certain operations during the restructuring process, such as paying employee wages and continued benefits. In a court filing, they estimated that they had more than 100,000 creditors – wow – and consolidated liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion.

So, you have liabilities of somewhere between $1 billion. Oh, just spitballing. Somewhere between $1 and $10 billion. What's $9 billion amongst friends? Yeah. But you only have $256 million in cash on hand, which should be sufficient. Yeah.

Okay. And what fucking universe do these people exist in? The brosphere. I just want to slap the shit out of them. All of them. Yeah. Yeah. I was actually just talking to a mutual friend of ours about the FTX ex-CEO.

And I'm like, you know, this guy really seriously needs security because somebody is going to kill him. The smartest place for that guy to be right now is jail. He should actually march himself to jail for protection. Well, I think he might be there very soon. Yeah, he's definitely going to get perp-walked.

There's no doubt about that. Especially if he keeps doing these podcast interviews. Idiot. Oh, did you see the girl from Alameda from her Tumblr profile a few years ago? She was like, you know, she's like, I'm trying to make my profile, but I don't know where to put in quirky, fun personality.

Should I put that before or after wire fraud? And I'm just like, oh, my God, these people were in a different fucking reality. There's no shame. There's no shame. There's no reality at all for these people. Well, Meta has also been hit with a $265 million fine or million euro fine for failing to prevent millions of Facebook users' mobile phone numbers and other data from being scraped and dumped online, according to the Irish Data Protection Commission.

The irony there, of course, being is that's exactly how Facebook started, scraping information and dumping it back online on their own site. That's right. Now they're supposed to protect against that, but they didn't, and they're in trouble again. Yeah, I just, I don't know how you can stop scraping, you know?

If you could, then we wouldn't have that. Well, wait, hold on. Isn't Facebook supposed to be a walled garden? Oh, yes. That should stop the data scraping. Well, guess not. Guess not. Imagine that. And DoorDash is laying off around 1,250 corporate employees in the latest instance of belt tightening in well-known tech companies.

Shocking that a food delivery service universally hated by both the people that use the service and the restaurants that they take the service from. Everybody hates these companies, and they're not doing well because everybody hates these companies, and we're no longer terrified to go get the food ourselves.

Speak for yourself. The numbers in here in L.A. are getting bad. So I use DoorDash this week. That might be good news. Yeah, I use DoorDash this week. But here's the upside for DoorDash. Now they have 1,250 new drivers. That's true. They're just moving people from the blue collars to the – well, I guess the white collars to the no collars.

Yeah. The T-shirts. Yeah, T-shirts. That's it. Yep. And another company, one of your favorites, Jason, Deliveroo. Deliveroo. Has left Australia. Basically, the chief executive told creditors the food delivery company has no viable path to profitability as riders, drivers, restaurant operators, and customers await a second creditors being determined whether they will see further compensation or any money.

Well, Uber, are you listening? Oh, my God. I don't know how to do Deliveroo in an Australian accent. So I guess I won't even try it. But we saw this coming. Come on. Yes, of course. There's too many of these companies around. There's not that much market share.

As the pandemic ended, except until it comes back, obviously people are just going to stop using these services. And the restaurants hate it because they're getting fucked. The consumers tend to hate it because they get cold food that comes upside down. Like it's just – it's not a viable business.

Then again, I've been saying that about Uber for 10 years. Yeah, well, they're eventually going to run out of money and will be proven right. But these guys, it's like, yeah, people – look, it was great during the pandemic to be able to do this stuff. But the pandemic is mostly over now and people really want to get the hell out of their house.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Like I will walk down – like we're talking – it's fucking cold here. I will walk down and get the food. I will get in the car and go get the food because all these delivery services suck and the charges are ridiculous. All of a sudden, my bill has doubled now.

Yeah. And the restaurant's not getting that money. The driver's not getting the money. Who's getting the money? Deliveroo's Australian CEO. That's who is getting the fucking money.

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I think I missed the latest episode. Still decent? Well, the latest episode is the finale, so there's only eight. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I have not seen the eighth episode. I got up to seven. Okay. Well, next week when you talk about – when you get up to number eight, we'll have a chat.

Okay. We'll have a chat. You know what's going to happen, Jason, is I'm going to find out that actually I was two glasses of wine in, and it was the eighth episode, and I just didn't realize that – and then I'm going to come back next week and go, I'm really fucking pissed because I didn't even realize that that was the end, and here we are.

I think you'll know. I think you'll know. Okay. It's got a definitely interesting ending, so we'll have a spoiler-laden version next week. Well, after the two glasses of wine and watching whatever episode of the peripheral I watched, you had texted me and said, you really need to watch the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, and I texted you back and said, no, I fucking do not because I hate the MCU and I could care less, but I had been two glasses of wine in, so I watched the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special,

and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Totally enjoyable. Short and sweet and Kevin Bacon-esque. I mean it just – I didn't know it existed, and I was just bouncing around the Plex server that our show fan – or from – it's a Plex server in Germany that one of our show fans gave me access to.

Yes. I think he's in New Zealand, but it just happened to show up there, and I'm like, what's this? So I hit play, and I watched it. It's funny. I pay for Disney+, but I watched it in an illegal stream from Germany because it just happened to be on my TV. This is the world we live in.

Yes, this is what court-cotting has brought us. Thank you, everybody. I thought it was thoroughly enjoyable. I loved it. It was fun. It was a lot of fun, and the reason it was fun, it focused on two minor characters and Kevin Bacon. Yep. And it had nothing to do with anything else, and nobody cares about anything else.

And Deadpool didn't show up, and Thor didn't show up, and it was fantastic. It was just fun. Yeah. Yep. Then I went down the Mickey rabbit hole again, another documentary. I think I've run the well dry on the documentaries with this one.

Mickey, the story of a mouse, which is basically the story of Mickey Mouse. Any good? Yes, of course. I'm a Disney file. I loved it. Definitely. You know, it started with the very beginnings of Walt Disney and what Mickey Mouse was, and vaguely racist and fucked up and kind of sexist, and how Mickey has changed with the times as society has changed.

It was really cool. Very interesting. Cool. Yeah. Very cool. And Wednesday. Oh, Wednesday. So I was not going to watch Wednesday either, and that was another one that you told me I absolutely need to watch. I just watched the episode with the big dance, the raven.

Oh, the dance, yes. Yeah, that was last night's episode. I fucking love this show. It's so good. Dude, it gets better all the way up until the end. This is one of those shows that is just a slow burn, and it is one of the most well-written mysteries that I've seen in a long time.

It is just, it's so well done. I have nothing bad to say about it. The casting is amazing. The acting is amazing. The writing is amazing. The music, Goo Goo Muck. I'm not in a million years would I have thought a cramped song would feature on a major show.

I'm watching Goo Goo Muck, and she's dancing like I used to, like my girlfriends used to dance when I was 14 at goth clubs. I mean, unbelievably good. Like, I love this. It's so good. So much fun. I was totally not going to watch it, and then I'm just like, God, okay, let's just try one.

And then when I saw the first thing that came up is by Tim Burton, I'm like, well, now I'm interested. So I'm like, you had me at Tim. Which is actually not something that you can say reliably anymore, by the way. Tim Burton's had some stinkers recently.

He's definitely had some stinkers, but I think he has redeemed himself with this one. It feels very old school. Oh, yeah. Like I tell you, it just keeps getting better and better and better. Yeah, I'm really enjoying it. I can't wait to finish it up, and I'm glad to hear that there's a season two coming.

Yeah, fantastic. Well, yeah, that was the reason I watched it. Because the news came out that it was the most watched show on Netflix and kicked off Stranger Things. I'm like, really? Well, there must be something here. Still haven't seen the last season of Stranger Things. It was good.

It was good. Yeah, I'll get into it at some point. The problem is the episodes are an hour and a half long. Yeah. So that's the biggest hurdle. I don't have that kind of time. Yeah. Ain't nobody got time for that? And then I finally watched one episode of This Is Pop.

It's a streaming series on Netflix. I think there's six or seven episodes that kind of delve into different aspects of music. And I watched the episode called Hail Britpop, because I'm a huge Britpop fan. And I've been trying to get this Mickey Barini from Lush, who they actually started a shoegaze.

They were kind of lumped in with Britpop. But whatever. We could argue that all day and all night. She'd been talking about it because she has a book out. I can't get the book here. It's only out in the UK. I cannot get the book. Driving me nuts. Anyways, she had posted that she was also in this documentary, so I went to go watch it.

It's about 45 minutes long. I love all this music so much. It was great. So I just thoroughly enjoyed it. So if you're ever a Britpop fan or into the music that came out of the UK in the 90s, this is for you. Awesome. Great watch. Very cool. And my roommate and I watched Knives Out, the original one, because all the hubbub is about Glass Onion right now.

Yes. And I forgot this was directed by Rian Johnson or Rian. Destroyer of Star Wars. Yes. Yes. Destroyer of all children's hopes and dreams. That guy. Actually, not any children's hopes and dreams because kids like those movies. Destroyer of old farts, original Star Wars fans' dreams.

Yes. Exactly. Exactly. But this is the second time I've seen this movie and I love it every time I've seen it. It's so good. It's a solid movie. I remember watching it. I didn't want to. My wife wanted to. And I was like, all right, fine. And yeah, it's just really good. Yeah.

So I'm really looking forward to the next one, Glass Onion, which it's in the theaters now. I hear it's better. Really? Yes. Wow. Okay. Well, that's a plus because I didn't know how they were going to make it better because I thought the first one was damn near perfect. So, all right.

I'm excited. I'm excited. One movie I saw that was damn near not perfect was a movie called Memory, which came across my Amazon Prime recommended for you feed. Stars Liam Neeson and Guy Pearce, and it's directed by Martin Campbell, who has done movies like Casino Royale and The Mask of Zorro, two of my favorite movies of all time.

Yeah, he has apparently gotten Alzheimer's or something because, good Lord, this thing was a piece of shit. It was terrible. For the star power that they had in it, it made no sense half the time. Continuity was terrible. The story was just boring.

No, they phoned the whole thing in. I mean, this was a paycheck for these guys because they certainly weren't in it for the art. It was a mess. So, skip memory. I shall. Since The White Lotus Season 2 is out, I finally went back and started to watch Season 1 because I'd never seen it.

I love Season 1. Thoroughly enjoyed it. It's so good. Right before I came in to record, we just finished Episode 4, so we're cooking right along. But, my God, the music is so good. The visuals, so good. And then you get to the acting and the story.

It is amazing. It's just the right touch of quirky humor and weirdness. Yeah. Yeah, it's really well done. I have not watched Season 2. Yeah, it's like if I liked Wes Anderson. It's like an enjoyable Wes Anderson. Yes. Yeah.

So, my wife is watching Season 2. She's doing that while I'm watching Wednesday and all this other crap that I've watched. And she was like, do you want me to wait and watch it with... And I was just like, nah, just go and let me know if it's any good or not. And she's like, nah. So, I think it was, you know, lightning in a bottle was Season 1.

We'll see. Okay. Because I've heard mixed reviews. I heard the first episode is kind of slow and weird. It starts weird, but then it picks up later. But, I don't know. Season. Yeah. But the first season was great. Absolutely phenomenal. You're going to enjoy it. Yeah. I am definitely enjoying it so far.

And when I was hunkered down in bed the other night, I watched the new Neil Brennan Blocks special on Netflix. Mm-hmm. This guy is so goddamn smart. It's ridiculous. I just... I love his delivery. I love his jokes.

They're very well thought out. I just... I really enjoy his work. And I really enjoyed this special. Even though it was mostly him complaining about, you know, his personality traits and things like that. I still... There was still a lot in there that was really funny. And his Chris Rock joke. I mean, I had to pause because I was laughing so hard.

I was like crying. I had to get tissues, snot running out of my nose because that one Chris Rock joke was so fucking funny. And it's just... It hits you a little bit later, but it's good. Are you a Neil Brennan fan? I've never really seen anything. I've heard the name a few times.

I know people... I've heard you mention him before. A couple of my other friends have said he's good. You know what? I haven't watched a stand-up special in ages. Like, I really need to go back. This is when I'm going to wish the search on our GOG.show site worked better because you've talked about so many stand-up shows recently or like with at least within the last year.

And I probably have not watched any stand-up. So I need to go back and get on that. Yeah. He has... His first stand-up special was called Three Mics, which was really good. This new one's called Blocks. And this new one's directed by Derek Delgado. Okay.

Remember him? He did that one crazy special on Hulu. He was the magician. He's the magician. The magician. Yes. That was fantastic. Yeah. He directed this. So it's kind of got that same kind of feel and vibe to it. Okay. But it's really good.

I really enjoyed it. And our search works great on the new website. Once we got out of WordPress and we moved over to pod pages, the search works fantastic now. Good. Okay. Nobody tweet us about finding something anymore. Search for it. Don't be lazy. Yeah. There you go.

Look it up. RTFM. And I watch a lot of guys' grocery games since after my stroke. That's like every night we watch like one or two episodes and we're up to season four. It's like what I do with diners, drivers, and dives. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much.

And we went linearly from the beginning because we watched a lot of them in quarantine when they were doing the triple G from home, which was really fun. But then we got into the show and I've always just had questions about how they do the show.

And I found a 15-minute video called What the Cameras Don't Show You on Guys' Grocery Games. And it's a behind the scenes of how they do the show, what they do with the food, all the other stuff that I just always had questions about how long it takes to do an episode. It's well – if you're a fan of Guys' Grocery Games, go check it out.

It's just fun to see how much production goes into that show that you just don't see. How the sausage is made, Jason. Exactly. Exactly. Caps and doodads. Fuck Dropbox. That's all I got to say.

I felt that way for years. It's a hundred bucks a year for that shit. Well, I use it everywhere. It is the backbone of my operation. Yeah. And it has worked fantastic. And the great part about it is I have one machine that has an external hard drive that is always syncing my entire Dropbox library, which is like 2.8 terabytes.

So it's always in sync. So I always have – like I can pick it up and I have a backup. Well, they've got a new change coming with their new version. You cannot pick the location of your Dropbox folder anymore. It will now go into home, library, cloud storage.

Great. Easy to fucking find. But the other thing about it is you cannot use external drives anymore. That's bullshit. It's so lame. And they're saying it's because of a change in macOS, that they are no longer being able to do it because it's no longer supported by macOS.

I'm like, okay, well, that fucking sucks. I switched over one machine, the machine I'm on right now. It is kind of seamless because the way they do it. But the fact that I can't have an external drive is just like, well, damn, that really sucks because it's always like me hedging my bets against Dropbox falling off.

The planet, but I don't know. So I think I'm going to be looking for a new workflow substitute at this point. But damn, it's a bummer. You're just going to have to get yourself an ass. You've got one of those. Yeah, but I work with people all over California.

So it's easy for us to just swap and like keep the same folders in sync for all the clients that we work on. And it's just so much easier. But I mean, we can probably still do that. But this whole no external hard drive just chaps my dazzle. You know, we're just heading back to the days when we need to get the wired connection into our closet and we put our servers in there again, just like the old days, Jason.

Get that T1 line. Oh, God. We're going back to CyQuest and Zip. That's it. I'm just going to start shipping. I'm going to get all the ex-Deliveroo drivers to just drive around my Zip disks and my CyQuest drives. So it's that time of the year when Spotify releases their big old promotion where you can basically showcase all the data that they collect on you on everything that you play

all throughout the year, except nobody's really sharing Spotify's version because a 20-year-old California student created a viral Spotify festival poster app that is vastly more interesting and more popular than what Spotify actually did.

Have you seen this? I'm assuming you have at this point. Yes, I have. It's awesome. So a 20-year-old USC student, my alma mater, thank you very much, Anshay Sabu, he made this great little thing that just basically pulls your top, I don't know, 15 or 20 artists and sticks them in a very Coachella-style festival lineup.

And everybody loved this thing for about a week and a half and then everybody had done it and it was done. So, you know. Yep, that's how it goes. Yeah, the way these things go, but very fucking clever. So well done. And Spotify should basically hire this dude. I wonder if he used any AI because the AI world is getting very interesting this week.

Yeah, yeah. I'm actually holding a little bit. I have some commentary, but I'm going to hold it for next week. But yeah, go ahead. Let's get into it. All right. Because, I mean, the big things that are out right now, the new chat GPT came out. Played with it this week. It's stunningly good.

It is? Okay. It actually is. Like, if we were in high school or college right now, you'd never need to write an essay again. This thing writes it perfectly for you. Journalists almost, I wouldn't say journalists are out of business because their business is actually finding the facts and getting the interesting information and the scoops.

But in terms of actually copywriters, out of business. Immediately. Done. Yeah. We know a couple of magazines already that have been using GPT-3. They put in a press release and then basically GPT-3 rewrites it as an article with all the facts from that press release and that shit goes out all the time.

You know? Yeah. It's unbelievably good. Yep. Then next thing comes for the real writers. Then comes for the code. And oh, dear. Yeah. Next to the podcasters. Yeah.

Okay. You still got to seed it. You got to seed it with that line. Yeah. Yeah. That's all about seeding with the line. Remember back in the day when Google first came out and like knowing how to do a Google search was a very, to quote Liam Neeson, a very specific set of skills.

Yes, it was. It still is if you know what it could go about. Well, that's the future right now. It's going to be the very specific set of skills to be able to put the right seeding things into these AI systems. Yep. Nope. That's some of the great ones that people that share.

And that is the nice thing about MidJourney too is because you can see all the prompts that people are giving it and you can learn from those prompts and see what generates what. Yep. And that part is at least interesting. Yeah. I have many, many things to say about a lot of this.

This stuff can mess with your head is what I'm finding out. If you look at enough of this generative AI art, you will have nightmares about it because this really is, it is so stuck in the uncanny valley so much of the time. It's like planting itself in your head.

It's not good. I don't think it's very good for anybody at all. No, I think it's really bad right now. People are getting way too into it. That's the problem. It's hard to find somebody that's casually into doing this. People are either all the fuck in and they're getting warped and insane or they're just like, I'm not paying attention to it.

I'm not, I don't even know it exists. I'm very envious of those people. Or they're just like, like you and I, which is like, we're putting on our blinders. Well, no, you, you do it. I put my blinders on. I'm like, I'm not getting into this. I'm not going to look. No, I've played with quite a bit of it. I even did some today because I still have my mid journey account.

So I was playing around with it a bit today. My friend, Bill Snebold, who does all the movie poster stuff. He's a master at it. And I want to, I want to have a conversation with him about it because, you know, he's a professionally trained artist and he just seems to spend his entire days on there now and just make some of the most incredible stuff though.

I remember, and I'm sure this translates very well to the visual medium, but going back to talking about like the, the, the chat bots and the writing bots that, that are out there, the AI systems and the one I played with, I was reading an article about, uh, from a really well-known journalist that I really like and respect.

And he was like, you know what? I, I write my article. I take my paragraph or like, I'll take my opening sentence of a paragraph and I'll drop it in there. I'll see what it comes up with. And there'll be one or two lines in there that are actually better than mine. So I'll pull those and I'll put them in and I'm using it to make my work better, which is a really interesting way to approach it.

Right. Mm-hmm. Yep. And I mean, I mean, it's not that much different. Well, I guess it's a slightly different because I mean, I use Grammarly for everything now, which is, you know, not as in-depth as that, but I use it, you know, it's a writing tool to make my writing better. So this is kind of the same thing.

Just a little bit more. It kind of is. Like it's just, and again, I want to get into this a little bit more next week when I'm going to do a hopeful and uplifting episode. Oh, okay. So it's going to be a very special episode of GOG. So, uh, who's the guest host? Cause it ain't going to be you.

It's going to be drunk me. Okay. That's perfect. It's good. We can have a ring in the new year. Yeah. Um, so the next thing that came out this week was the big hubbub, not hubbub, but the big push that everybody's doing their Lenza avatars to make them look like a superhero.

Yeah. Okay. Whatever. Um, but then people figured out it was really easy to make, uh, make some naked people from it. Yep. Uh, I've seen many of those images. Yep. Um, yep. And I've tried not to, by the way, I've tried not to, and I can't not see them.

Because they're everywhere. Everywhere. And I love this title of the headline over at TechCrunch. Prisma Labs, maker of Lenza AI, says it's working to prevent accidental generation of nudes. Now the keyword there is accidental. Because a lot of people are doing it very much dentally.

Yes. Not accidentally. The Prisma Labs teams point out that there are two issues here. By uploading explicit images, the users train a particular and individual copy of the model that the company claims is deleted once the generation is complete. And these images cannot be used to train the model further.

Bullshit. In other words, if you upload porn to make porn, that's kind of on you. I'm going to say, if you're uploading porn to make porn, of course it's on them because that's what they want to do. So, and Lenza is not cheap.

You know, it costs a couple bucks a month through the app. So, who cares? If to them, it's like, okay, if this is a one-off use case, by all means, have at it. That's what they're paying for. Yeah. Yeah. Adult's going to adult. Well, and children are going to adult too because let's talk about unstable diffusion for a second.

Yeah. Yeah, these guys. These guys. They took stable diffusion, which is the normal text-to-image AI, and then, yeah, broke it. Basically just broke it so they could make the nudes. They basically pulled off the restraints.

Yeah. Yeah. The guide rails that were in there, they just ripped them right off. Yeah, and they're making their own data sets and things like that. So, there is an unstable diffusion Discord group that you can join, which I did because I would not recommend it. Okay, Pete Townsend.

I have unsubscribed from the unstable diffusion Discord channel about 30 seconds after being on it. I looked at it and I'm like, oh, this is just fucking nightmare fuel. It is. It is. Just the bits, the bits from unstable diffusion that have bubbled up far enough into the ecosphere that I would actually even see them, which is way higher level than you, Jason, because you went straight to the source.

The bits that have bubbled up just high enough for me to see it puts like 4chan, it makes 4chan look like Disneyland. Well, I wouldn't go that far, but it's close. It's close. I spent a lot of time on B on 4chan. That will fuck you up too. I don't recommend that either.

But yeah, it's just, it's wrong. Everything about it is just wrong. Yes, as you said, it's early days, but... Well, the problem is, the problem is, again, it's just showing how broken we are as a society right now.

And just when these tools go into the masses and the masses do not give a fuck anymore and there's no morality and there's no societal, there's no shame anymore about anything. Like, people are proud of this shit. Like, where are the grandmas slapping these people upside the head?

Ain't no grandmas anymore. Grandma's got her own channel. That's weird. Grandma's on Twitch. I think a lot of these people that are diving in, like as you said, these people are going all in. I bet that I could draw a very straight line between crypto bros to NFTs to generative AI.

Well, it's all the same thing. It's escapism. It's, I'm not, the real world holds nothing for me, so I'm going all in on this shit. Sad. It's kind of sad. Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah, at least in my day, we had to learn Photoshop to make this stuff. Come on.

And it didn't look that good. Well, some of it looked a lot better. At least my stuff did, but, God, I'm still thinking of this one image that I saw that I will not describe, that I need to get some brain drain-o to get it out of my head. I really do.

And just finally, Adobe Stock is going to start selling AI-generated artwork, as long as each piece is labeled as generative AI. Okay. I'm assuming there's going to be people curating these, but we'll see. Who knows?

It's Adobe. You never know. You know, they probably have an AI looking at the AI. Yeah. Oh, God. Apple has abandoned their plan to check your iOS device and iCloud photos for CSAM imagery. Well, I mean, now you'd have to prove, did it come from unstable diffusion or is it a real photo?

Exactly. That's going to start to become very problematic. It is. It is. But here's the upside to that, though. Maybe these guys will get what they need out of the generative AI and stop touching kids. Possible.

Possible. Not probable. I just said possible. Not entirely sure it's a good solution, but we'll take it. It's a solution. If it stops one kid getting touched, then, you know, it's doing its job. Look, here's what I...

In the same way that there are maps of people that have gotten in trouble with law for these sorts of things before, and you can look them up online, and it's very public, I would love to know if my neighbor happens to have unstable diffusion installed in their system. I would like to know that very, very much.

Okay, well... As a child. I had unstable diffusion installed, and I'm not so... You are not allowed around my child anymore. I've never been allowed around your child. Your wife's like, he's still here? Get him out of here. She's the smart one of the family, by the way.

That's true. In Apple's new... Besides the CSAM abandonment, they're going to roll out karaoke. Didn't see that one coming. Why not? I don't know. It's going to make DJ's bars' gigs a lot easier, and it'll be fucking huge in Japan.

Oh, yeah. So, why not? And Korea. And don't forget South Korea. Yeah, not everything is for the U.S. marketplace. That's true. That's true. Because, I mean, you can kind of do it right now with the lyrics. They do a pretty good job with the lyrics, but this new one is definitely amped up.

You will be able to play it on newer iPhones, iPads, and the latest 4K Apple TV. Nothing for the Mac. It's cute. It's a clever little thing. Why not? They can do it. It's all... All the pieces were there. Somebody over at Apple was smart enough to go, why don't we just offer this as a service?

Okay. Cool. But I think the best part about it, though, is the level slider. So, you can, like, sing along or you can go solo, you know? I think that's a fine choice because most of the time you don't want most of those people doing karaoke going solo. It's not a good thing.

Very true. Not a good thing. We talked about the Microsoft Activision merger many times, and I think I said many times, I can't believe that they're going to let this thing go through. Well, turns out, the FTC has come around and said, no, this probably should not go through because it might cause customers harm.

And as a Call of Duty aficionado, I don't want Microsoft to own it. Right. Yeah. Because I'm playing on my PS5 now. Fuck Xbox. We have too many massive companies. I mean, this could be a whole... This is a whole other topic about how we're consolidating every single fucking thing, and we're just letting, like, five people run the entire world.

But, yeah, block this. Of course block this. Why... Microsoft, make your own fucking games. They do. And it's their biggest business unit, you know? Exactly. So leave it that way. They're good. They're good for now. You're fine. Let it go. Yeah. Let other companies exist, people. Yeah.

This thing with Activision, because, you know, the issues with the old CEO and all that shit, and, you know, there's a lot of stuff behind that one. But, yeah, I don't want Microsoft to own Activision. I mean, Microsoft makes fine games. So does Activision. Let them make them separately, please.

Yes. Nothing wrong with that. Speaking of games that I like, I played The Tower, Idle Defense Tower. It takes a while to get cooking. It's definitely... So I put it down and came back to it a couple times, because I saw some people that were really like, oh, my God, if you love Tower Defense, you're going to love this game. And I'm like, I didn't get it at first.

I did pay for, like, the $599 bonus to get rid of some annoying ads and, like, a little coin bonus. So I didn't put a lot of money into it. But it took me a while to find, like, learn the game and figure it out. And now my highest level is $419, and it takes about an hour to play that one game.

Now, here's the fucked up part. I looked at the rankings for the weekly tournaments, and there's somebody that got to, like, level 14,000. And I'm like, how? How can... There's no time in the day for that. So I don't know. But I got to say, I mean, it's no field runners.

It's not, like, pretty or anything. It's very Tron-like. You have one single tower, and stuff comes at you, and it's resource management. It's all about resource management. Was there Olivia Wilde in it? No, no. Sorry. Okay, then it's not Tron-like enough for me. Yes. But it's good. It's a fun game if you like tower defense games.

If you don't like tower defense games, if you're not, like, psycho about tower defense games, don't get it. Okay. I won't. Because I'm not. At the library. You take a week off, Jason, and I read three books.

Oh, my goodness. Along with watching all that TV. I know. I had free time for once. Wow. It was amazing. Anyways, not entirely true. I'd been reading Outland, which is the first book by Dennis C. Taylor, author of The Bobiverse, for quite some time.

I finally finished it. It was fine. You don't need to read it. No, you don't. No, you don't. It was fine. Yeah. Just go get a Bob. Go get a Bob book. Yeah. And then, obviously, as you heard from Media Candy, I was getting into music and the Brit pop era and all that sort of stuff.

I found out that one of my favorite bands that everybody likes to crap on and nobody realizes how genius they were, Jesus Jones, the lead singer Mike Edwards, wrote a small little book, Death Threats from an Eight-Year-Old, The Story of Jesus Jones. I would like to say it's not the story of Jesus Jones, it's the story of the rapid rise and then the equally rapid fall of Jesus Jones, but it didn't really...

I would have liked to have read a full book. This is probably about 100 pages, 150 pages or something like that. It was a short little thing, but really enjoyable. And I fucking love the band and I love that era and loved hearing about it. The one thing I will say about this, if you're one of our younger listeners, and I know nobody really wants to be a musician anymore because you can't make any money and it's not cool, but if you were thinking about it, don't read this book because this is the most depressing

book about the music industry I've ever read in my entire life. These guys had a number one hit all over the entire fucking world. Right here, right now is still played constantly. Yep. There's no money. There's no respect.

They got dropped. The labels fucked them. The papers fucked them. Like you could not, you would, as a 15 year old, I would have dreamed of having a career like Jesus Jones. And now that I've read what it actually was like for the lead singer of Jesus Jones, he was miserable and hated every second of it and was treated like shit constantly.

The music industry is a fucking flaming cesspool. Well, yeah, we knew that for a long time. Yeah, of course we knew that. But this book, I've never had it spelled out so clearly. The only reason to read this book is to realize how shitty the music industry is.

And it is fucking phenomenal at portraying that. All right. As you know, I'm a huge Jesus Jones fan. So, and I'm not a fan of the music industry. So I think I'm already going to... You will love this book. You will love this book, actually. Okay. Yes. I think you would enjoy it a lot.

Okay. Maybe we'll check it out. It's worth reading, but it will destroy any passing thought that you had that music was glamorous and cool and awesome. No, I never had that. No enough musicians to know that. Yeah. And then I was like really into the Britpop thing.

And basically, I really just want to get the Ricky Bereni book from Lush and I can't get it. But so I was just like, okay, okay, let me go find a book about Britpop. And I found The Birth and Impact of Britpop, Misshapes, Scenesters, and Insatiable Ones by Paul Laird. What I should have done, and I think this is another case of two glasses of wine when I was searching for a book, was look to see if Paul Laird had actually written anything else ever.

He had not. And this is a fucking steaming pile of shit. And it is basically this guy pissed off that people didn't like the bands that he liked and the popular bands sucked and he didn't like them and fuck them. Okay.

So it was a one man, like it must have been self-published. Uh, it's a one man grudge against, uh, 30 years ago music that just was released now. I'm like, boy, William Shatner from Saturday Night Live came to, came to mind immediately. Get a life.

Okay. Well, pass on that one. Yep. I got Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter, Then, Now, and Forever by John McWhorter. I heard about this book on Penn Sunday School because it was something very interesting that he was saying about, um, how swears come from different parts of your brain than regular language.

And I'm like, hmm, I'm, I'm curious about that. And, uh, it's a fantastic book. It really is a fantastic book because it comes from a linguist's point of view, not like an anthropologist or anything, but it's just, it's really cool. It is a really cool, short little book. Um, I think you would dig it for sure.

You know what, what's really fun. I'm going to definitely read this now. The funny thing is I didn't read this at all. Like I saw that you'd put in some books, but I didn't scan them or read through them at all. And I was reading an article today. Maybe it was by this guy. I should go back and look, uh, that was talking about how cuss words and curse words universally, regardless of language and way before, like it would, there were fucking planes or anything.

We didn't get around like these languages were all separate, but universally cuss words use the same consonants universally. Like it's just, we, there are certain sounds to the words that we use when we're making, when we're cussing and we're, when we're pissed and we're angry and all that sort of stuff.

And it's just, I was just reading the article and I was fascinated by it and I had to give it up because I was actually supposed to be working. Uh, but I get, I, I'm going to go back and find the article and see if it relates to this since this is a book that's out now, but yeah, I want to read this. Thank you for giving me my next book. So it's cool.

There you go. You have it. Um, goblin mode has been chosen as Oxford word of the year for 2022. I had never heard of goblin mode. I would like to point out that it's two words. Yes, I know. That was, I was going to get to that. I was definitely going to get to that. Um, yeah, it's, I, I don't know.

Uh, I just, I'd never heard of it before. And, uh, had you? I had not. No, no, no, no. Uh, what's really annoying is metaverse came in second in a hashtag. It came in third. So they're really just giving up the ghost over there at Oxford. Yeah. Word of the year is two words.

And the third one is a hashtag. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, okay, there's that. Okay, but I read through what goblin mode actually is. And I kind of, I guess it kind of makes sense. I mean, people like that have not really come out of like pandemic and COVID living and just like have basically given up on anything and they're just sitting there also relates directly to the fucking lunatics that are getting into all the AI fucking porn art.

Yeah, pretty much. And all of that. They're all goblin mode. Unapology, unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations. Boom, nailed it. That basically, all of them, all of them, the bit bros, the fucking AI people, all of it.

Yep. Yep. They're all stuck in goblin mode. There you go. Daniel Suarez has a new book coming out called Critical Mass. I have pre-ordered it. It's the follow-up to a book, right? It's the second.

I don't know if this is a follow-up. That's the thing. Because his last one was, oh, what was it called? It's called Delta V was the last one. Yeah, this is a sequel to it. Because I was looking for a new book and this came up in my feed and I was about to buy it until I found out it wasn't available to be bought.

And then I was like, oh, and then I was reading through the thing. It was like the follow-up or the sequel to Delta V. And I was like, did I read Delta V? Shit, I don't remember. And I had to go back into my Amazon account and I saw, oh, yes, I did read Delta V. It must have been very memorable. I remember it. It was pretty good.

Okay. So, you know, I'm looking forward to the sequel. So, it'll be good. It'll be good. I might have to read the last two chapters of Delta V first. Because I don't remember shit about it. Yeah, there's definitely going to need to be a synopsis somewhere.

I need a Cliff Notes version first. I can't remember anything we've read on this show. Once we do the review, I forget that it has ever existed. So, like all the books I read and did book reports on, couldn't tell you a damn thing. Got a five on my AP test on Anna Karenina, and I couldn't tell you a damn thing about that book.

But I got a five. Perfect score. Didn't you get hit by a train at the end? I do remember that part. Yes. Yeah. That's all I remember, though. I don't think if I wrote that, I would have gotten a five on my AP English. No. Spoiler alert. She gets hit by a train. I found that out. I think I heard that on No Such Thing as a Fish because I never read that book.

I got like nine-tenths of the way through crime and punishment, and I just couldn't take it anymore. It was enough for me. It was too much punishment. Yeah. It was way too much punishment.

Security? Ha! Welcome to 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. Dave is also the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy, and surveillance and privacy, and control loop, where they discuss ICS and OT.

And I mistimed my breaths. It's been a while since we did the intro, so I forgot where to breathe. Yes. Yes. It happens to the best of us. I find the same thing. Like an out-of-shape athlete. Yeah, pretty much. Or a little too much liquor store ramen.

I think that would be the case. Let's start with some breaking news. When I saw this across my feed, there is no person in the world I thought of more than you, Dave. The Muppets Christmas Carol extended cut is coming to Disney+. Now, this is something of a legend, apparently, according to the quirk and the ways in which the film was released.

There is a lost song, When Love Is Gone, which was cut from the original theatrical run, put back into the VHS copy, where it became a fan favorite, and then was re-cut out again once the Muppet Christmas Carol hit DVD and streaming. So nobody's seen this from quite some time unless they still have a VCR.

But if you hit play in Disney+, you will only get the short version again. You have to go to the extended features to be able to see this extra bit. Right. Probably because of lawyers, I'm guessing. Probably.

Yeah. I have to say, I think Muppets Christmas Carol is excellent. I'm a little biased against it just because it's a post-gym era bit of Muppetry and I just can't help myself. But what I think really holds Muppet Christmas Carol together is Michael Caine's performance.

Yes. And because he is completely dedicated, 100% in, playing this straight. Oh, he's all in. Muppets are real. Yeah. And he's amazing. He just plays it. There's no winking to the camera. And I think that's what makes it.

That's what grounds it. So if you haven't seen it, it's worth checking out. And I know a lot of folks, it's part of their regular Christmastime rotation of things we must see up there with Elf and Die Hard and some of those movies. Oh, yes. Team Die Hard. Agreed.

Yep. It's been a while since we've been together. So I thought maybe do we want to do an Andor wrap up? I have seen the entire series. I'm keen to hear your thoughts. Sure. Yes. Yes. I'd given up hope. Yes.

I enjoyed it very much. But a new hope has emerged. Yes. I was waiting for somebody to pick that one up. Very good. Very nice. I enjoyed it very much and as did my family. I think for me, this is the grown-up Star Wars that I'd been hoping for.

This felt like a series targeting adults and I just – I thought it was really well executed. And it made me wonder – like think back on Rogue One to how much was that really targeted towards adults because I think that was another excellent bit of Star Wars with the same kind of sensibilities that this show had.

But I left it feeling really gratified and looking forward to the next season, I guess the next and final season. But I thought they did a great job of putting us in that world and showing us things we hadn't seen before and making it feel like it fit in the Star Wars universe without breaking anything.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think back to my initial thoughts when I was a couple of episodes in going, do I really care about, you know, what janitors and people that just live in the universe do if they don't have lightsabers and Jedis and they're not part of the bigger picture?

But I did totally come around to it. I did really enjoy it. And to your point, I do think that this was very much targeted at adults. Like I was – I remember thinking at one point, would 11-year-old me have enjoyed this show? And I think the answer is, fuck no. I would have been bored out of my mind.

But adult me really did enjoy it. So, you know, they're being pretty smart about targeting different demographics with the shows now. Yeah. Yeah. And I liked the final post-credits sequence there where they put a button on it and tie it into Rogue One and by extension A New Hope.

It was just really nicely done. Well, I guess I have to go back and watch that final credit sequence because I missed that. All right. No spoilers. No spoilers. But you'll enjoy it. It wasn't exactly a shock.

It didn't come out of left field. OK. No. No. But it's a nice little aha. OK. That's enough. I'll go watch it. I'll watch it. OK. All right. And one last little bit of Star Wars business here. We were talking about Star Tours recently and I came across on YouTube the original video press kit for Star Tours when it launched, which I believe demonstrates that Anthony Daniels, above all, is a team player.

And I'm not sure how much he's a team player and how much does he just simply have – not have other opportunities. But he's very much playing along here with – as C-3PO with the original launch of Star Tours. And it's just fun to see the kind of, I guess, hokey nature with which they – they were dedicated to the bit of this being a new opportunity to go on a Star Wars journey.

I do like the fact that we look back at it now through the lens of hindsight and see it as hokey. But at the time, that was dead serious PR. That was cutting edge. You know. It was not meant to be hokey at all. It was serious. But I also – my other favorite thing about Star Wars is the fact that Anthony Daniels, C-3PO and Kenny Williams, R2-D2 are the Shatner and George Takai of the Star Wars universe and that they absolutely can't stand each other.

Right, right, right, right. Yeah, what I've heard is a lot of that is on Anthony Daniels' shoulders that evidently he's not the easiest person to get along with. But that's only rumors and speculation that I've heard.

But I've heard it from enough people who are close enough to it going on and being around it that I tend to think that it's probably true. Also, the fact that what else have you seen him in? People aren't clamoring to have Anthony Daniels appear in their projects.

I was about to say, so he's the Shatner, but Shatner was also T.J. Hooker and many other things. So he has managed to get past his being a dick. Anthony Daniels, not so much. It's funny. On the latest Jim Jeffries – I don't know about that podcast. They cover Star Wars and Jim is surprisingly good at the Star Wars trivia.

But they did talk about Anthony Daniels a little bit and something about like I'll put the suit on when the midget goes in the trash can. It's like kind of – Oh, man. Yeah, that's a different time. Different time, different time. But that was a good episode.

I recommend checking that out if you haven't heard that one. Yeah. Oh, one other quick little thing. My son sent me – Jack sent me a panel from the original Mad Magazine parody of Star Wars, which I owned.

In fact, I think it was probably the first issue of Mad Magazine I ever bought. I can just picture myself begging my mother to buy it for me at the local Safeway because it was Star Wars. Right. And there's a frame in there where – there's a running gag throughout it where R2-D2 would beep and boop and bop and then they would have a translation for what he was actually saying.

And there's a point where C-3PO says a bunch of things and R2-D2 says something along the lines of, if things couldn't get worse, here I am stuck with a robot. And he uses a slur for a homosexual. Again, different times.

Different times. Different times. Yeah. My son said to me and was like, what the fuck? Yeah. It's different times. Different times. It was a different world back then. Yeah. Not that long ago. No, not that long ago.

Speaking of not that long ago, Radio Shack and what the flying fuck is going on over there. I keep getting – Is there an over there? Yeah, there is an over there. I keep getting – Like that idiot bought the brand and then turned it into a crypto play. And I keep getting all of these emails from them like, hey, we've got this new in stock.

We've got this new in stock. And I'm like, what do you mean? You know why you're getting those emails, Jason? You bought a battery from a Radio Shack back in 1982. That's right. You gave them your name and address. Pretty much. You gave them your name and address. They found me across the metaverse. That's right. And it's kind of crazy.

And right now, the banner is missing that was there the other day because when I went the other day, there was a big banner across the top that said, Radio Shack is a 100-year-old brand embedded into the global consciousness. And we are going to lead the way for blockchain tech to reach mainstream adoption by other large brands.

That is now gone. And now it's just a bunch of junk that's drop shipped from China that you can buy. But I do believe if you go to Radio Shack.org, I believe that's where they put – yep, that's where it is. They moved all the crypto stuff to Radio Shack.org.

Must be a schism in the company. Yeah, yeah. I think the douchebags that bought it figured out that nobody wanted their cryptos, so they had to start drop shipping stuff to actually make ends meet. But yeah, it's like it is confusing over there at the Radio Shack nowadays.

It would just be awesome if you went through the checkout process and then like somebody popped up and started asking you for all your information. And could you give us your address, please? Yes, yes. Yes, that was my favorite part of working at Radio Shack was asking people for their names and addresses every time.

And we got – we were ranked on how many of those names and addresses we got. Yeah, yeah, it sucked. But, you know, I was thinking in the past couple of weeks, I was sort of sitting here reminiscing. I think I was looking through some old computer stuff and looking at some old TRS-80s.

And I got a little bit nostalgic for that feeling I had when I was probably 11 or 12 years old and I used to walk into a Radio Shack and just the feel of that place and the smell of it that I'm sure it had. And so many things in there that I aspired to have and get and buy and I'd walk around and look at things and, oh, wouldn't it be great to – someday I'll be able to afford a Model 2 TRS-80 and all that kind of stuff.

And, yes, eventually I did end up working at Radio Shack when I was in college. So check that one off of the list of dreams accomplished. I did have a good time there. But I just miss it. I miss that sort of place which doesn't really exist anymore.

It got me thinking that could someone do a mock-up Radio Shack in a resort town or something like in Orlando? Could you have – Like the last blockbuster? You could have like the last Radio Shack or something like that? Exactly, exactly. Just for those of us who are looking for nostalgia, could go in and get your Battery of the Month Club card and give someone our name and address on the way out.

Just for fun. There's two stories I think of when I – that kind of gave me that same feeling. One was Egghead Software, which I don't know if it was a national chain or not, but we definitely had them. Yeah, we had them. Okay, yeah, yeah. And I just – I remember begging my parents to take me to Egghead and I could get the latest text-based game and that sort of stuff.

And then, of course, the only recently departed Fry's Electronics. The corpse of the Valley Fry's is right down the street from me. I drive by it all the time. It's still there, turning it into luxury condos at some point.

But it's been empty for like two years now. But yeah, I miss that place a lot. Yeah. Walking around your local Best Buy just isn't the same. No. No. And I got to say, I don't have a Radio Shack story, but Kinko's in the 90s was I think very similar to that.

They don't have those anymore. But man, did we have fun at Kinko's. Open 24 hours a day, making zines. We had – I was in desktop publishing. Our friend Bob ran the – was it the DocuSign or whatever? Or DocuTech. It was this giant monster that did 11 by 17, trifold, all sorts of stuff.

It was so much fun. Yeah, I mean you and I – or at that age, especially like college and whatnot, you would maybe have a printer at home. But if you needed to like put together reports and all that stuff or you were doing zines or you were throwing a party and needed to make copies of flyers, man, you went to Kinko's.

That was – Yep. Party stop central. Yeah. Just to be able to print in color was a thing. Yeah. Yeah. Two of the best years of my life, I got to say. And we would – since we all worked overnight, we would definitely hit the wine keller beforehand and knock back a few pictures of the house stout before we went to work.

And there may or may not have been several nights where there was a quote-unquote water break in the back and we had to close the shop for two hours for an impromptu nap. But yeah, that may or may not have happened. But it was fun. The old days. Well, nowadays, the kids are keeping the dream alive with their computer repair businesses.

And we all knew this was happening. But a new study has come out that shows just how screwed you are when you hand your laptop over for repair. Now, this was a somewhat small study, I have to say. Did you guys take a look at this one? Yeah.

I read through it, yeah. I'm not shocked or surprised by this. It's – people suck. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Isn't this kind of the modern equivalent of the guy at the photo mat looking through your photos? Exactly.

Exactly. And making copies for themselves if they wanted to. Yes, of course. Personal use. Yeah, well, you know you're in trouble when you get a wink when you pick up your photos from the photo mat. Nice bachelor party. Yeah.

So not surprising. Again, this is – it's – you know, you think about this sort of thing and you kind of go, oh, it's not surprising at all. But just a couple weeks ago, we were talking about how Android had that feature that basically locked the phone down and they couldn't get access to your personal documents.

And, you know, it's more and more important these days because the stuff is so easy to copy now, right? It's so easy to search and so easy to copy. And if you don't lock your stuff down, you know, you've got to trust these people and generally they're not trustworthy. Not trustworthy at all.

So yeah. How many more stories we got to have before somebody like figures out a way to do this without giving over your credentials to your main account? Well, I was thinking like on – for example, on a Mac, could you simply have another user account and allow the repair folks access to that account?

You'd have to do this before the machine breaks. But if you could have a secondary user account that doesn't have all your personal stuff in it but still give them access to the system, would that be at all useful or do they need access to your stuff? I mean you can still make them an admin and they can't see your stuff.

Right. But they can – what they can do is they can change the password to your account, then go in and see all your stuff. Yeah. But the problem is they can't change it back after that. It's not something that they have introspection onto what the old password was. So they could do it and just say, oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I had to reset your password.

We had to reset your password, yeah. Yeah, and then you know you've been duped as it were, literally in some cases. Well, I've got another story that is about horrible human nature, horrible people doing horrible things to people who are trying to do horrible things back.

A new and trending TikTok challenge requires you to film yourself naked while using TikTok's invisible body filter, which I suppose you are already trusting, which is kind of silly. But hey, you're going to go do that? By all means, go do it. People are into it, and you're theoretically being obscured, and they really do promise that it's not unfilterable.

But horrible people have decided to fake that they do have an unfiltering method. So if you want to see a TikToker actually naked that has done this, you will go and download the software, which is, of course, fake and is malware, and then you're fucked.

Clever. Comes around, goes around. Very clever, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So not surprising. And the other story I have, which is a little bit outdated at this point, but again, it just goes to show you that, I mean, who do you trust anymore? You want to do the right thing, you go and you get yourself a password manager, you make the mistake and get the worst one out there, which is LastPass.

And the place that holds all your passwords had a security breach. Again, this was what, number three? It's at least the third for LastPass. I mean, LastPass is absolutely wretched. It's horrible. So not surprising that they're the ones getting hit here.

If you're using them, I suggest you switch. GOG.show slash 1Password is where you should go to get the best deals on 1Password today. Just saying. Yeah. So there you go. Be careful out there with your passwords.

And use reputable companies, not ones that everybody craps on. Fair enough. I know you guys have been talking about chat GPT elsewhere on the show, but I was wondering if we wanted to take a couple minutes and discuss it here.

Sure. That was another deep dive into horrible human nature. Yeah. I've been playing with it here. Some of my colleagues here at Cyber Wire, my colleague Brandon, I know he's been playing with it. And boy, is it fun. Yeah. The chat one is stunningly good.

I played around. I got curious about it. I'm not really interested in the image one. And that's where a lot of the horrible human nature stuff is coming out because of people. There's only so much you can do with chat. I'm sure somebody's already made a Nazi AI out of this thing, of course, because somebody has to.

But I did play around with it because I thought it was cool and interesting. Would it be Kanye AI? Oh, hey. Just saying. Wow. You're on fire today. Yeah. I played around with it and it was, you know, some misses, but overall stunningly good.

Like we were talking about it earlier, like college essays are done. Like you don't expect a kid to write an essay anymore, right? Because this thing will just shoot it out. Right. Well, and also you can ask it to solve a math problem and show its work.

Show the work. Yeah. And it will do it. It will show you all the work. Yeah. So there's that. I was wondering to what degree could you detect that it's being generated by this because it does create its text from whole cloth every time.

It's not just regurgitating the same thing over and over again. Yeah. And it turns out some folks have created an output detector and I included a link to that in the show notes here. I like that the domain that this is hosted at is called huggingface.co, which I suppose is an alien homage or alien homage.

Yeah. So this was created for GPT-2 and chat GPT uses GPT-3 but evidently this detects it. I ran a few things through it and sure enough, it does detect it with great confidence. It seems to know whether or not it's created by the AI or not.

I don't know how it does what it does but could this be a way for teachers? Yeah. There you go. It's AI all the way down. Then you just start to get into the, well, exactly how many changes do I have to make before I can fool the detector? You know, so I changed five words, 15 words.

What was the whole thing about back in the early days of the internet, Jason, where if we appropriated an image, how many times we would have to change it before it was legally ours to use and all that sort of stuff? Yeah. Which nobody, I don't think, ever proved in a court of law or anything.

It was just one of those urban myths out there for designers in the early days. Well, and at what point will you be able to say to the chat bot, say, I want you to create this essay and do it in such a way that the output detector cannot detect it and it will be able to do that?

Yeah. Then it's whack-a-mole, right? Yeah. We're an AI whack-a-mole. Yeah. So, yeah. But I thought, I was very impressed by it. I'm kind of, at first, I was very against all this AI sort of stuff and I'm kind of turning the corner on it a little bit.

I'm seeing some potential positives and definite like leaps of human innovation coming out of these things. But then I go and read stories about the image stuff and then I get really depressed again about human nature. Yeah.

Yeah. Goblin mode, baby. Goblin mode. Well, I think for a lot of writers, they're probably feeling the way that portrait artists felt when photography became a thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like, you know, what is this going to do to my well-being?

Or website programmers when Squarespace came out. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Well, it decimated the industry, you know? Yeah. It definitely did. Like, there's no doubt about it. Like, overall pay went down. The number of people available to make a living doing it went down. And that'll happen, obviously.

Like, there's always a need for high-end writers and that will always be a thing. Although, if you ask most people to try to write books and when you start to look at the statistics on that and, like, most books sell, like, three copies, maybe not so much.

But, yeah. I mean, certainly, like, if you're a smaller company that was using a copywriter even on a contractor basis and now you have access to this, you may not be contracting out any more of your copywriting. Right. Yeah. Just imagine – just generating corporate blogs.

This is perfect for that. Yeah. Yeah. I think you have to have somebody fact-checking it because it does get the facts wrong pretty regularly. Yeah. And sometimes it goes a little Kanye. Yeah. But, okay. I mean, it still saves time and money. So, whether – ultimately, whether or not that's a good thing, it is a thing.

And it's not going away. And putting that genie back in the bottle. Yep. Yep. Yep. It's fascinating. All right, guys. Well, that's what I have this week. Good catching up. Jason, I'm glad you are feeling better and I hope you continue to head in the right direction. Yeah.

Well, thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much. All right. And we're sliding into the holidays, Dave. I don't know if you're around next week, but actually I won't be able to make the Friday show. So, if I don't talk to you – But I will. Happy holidays. All right. Very good. Talk to you soon. Closing shout-outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got Thomas and Rod. Thank you so much. Over at PayPal, we've got Benjamin, Charlie, David, Jonathan, Judge, Matt, Matthew, Nikolai, Oliver, Simon, and Thomas. Thank you all. And over at the tip jar, we've got Adam, Andrew, Ann, Christopher, Dan, the big spender with a $50 donation, Daniel, Jeff, Ken with the $20, Linda, Mario, Matthew, and Nick.

Thank you all so much. Jason, you went through and put these in alphabetical order, didn't you? BB edit. Copy, paste, sort. Yeah, don't do that because I try not to put Matt, Matthew, Nikolai, and Nikolai together in the same fucking order because it's hard to read.

Thank you. Oh, it sounds great though. You got the hang of it. You figured it out. Thank you, BB edit. Yeah, you figured it out. Look, you got through it in one piece. God damn it. You need a fucking AI to do this stupid podcast for me. And farewell to Christine McVie from Fleetwood Mac who passed away in the last week or so.

Fucking great songs, man. Yep. Can't argue with that. Yeah. Can't argue with that. And my friend Steve Delamater just dropped his new EP, so you can go check it out on Spotify, called Super Steve's Holiday. Quick little three-song EP. Steve's one of my buddies who obviously has not read the Jesus Jones book about the music industry yet.

No, I guess not. Because he still has a glint in his eye that he's going to be big in the music business. All right. I don't know if that's where you want to be. Pass him a copy. Yeah. Or just talk to anybody who's ever been there. Yeah. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Showmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 581.

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