584: AI-Powered Unemployment

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 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 Dave is helping me out today because Brian is out this week and possibly next week.

We will discuss that when he comes back. He will be the butt of many jokes, I'm sure. But, yeah, welcome, Dave. We send all of our love to Brian and tell him that we miss him and we look forward to him coming back. But he's being well taken care of right now, handling some things that need his attention.

Yep, yep. So, last week we talked about Adobe Podcasts, right? Yeah, yeah. I got in. I got into the beta. Okay. For folks who aren't familiar with this, let's give a little rundown on exactly what this is.

Okay, last week you sent me a video that we posted in the show notes about a guy in a field who was using just an on-camera mic, and he kept getting farther and farther away from the mic. And he would compare his camera audio and then with Adobe Podcast Enhanced Audio, which is one of the features that they offer.

And I went and I listened to it, and I was just like, oh, Jesus, I'm out of a job. Right. Because I don't know if a lot of people know that my bread and butter is audio restoration for podcasts. I fix crappy audio basically for a living.

When I'm not doing this, I'm either reading audiobooks or fixing other people's audio. Well, half of my income is going to disappear in the next 12 months because I got in after watching your video. I'm like, okay, I got to hit them and get into this thing so I can try it out.

And I threw some of my crappy audio that I got from clients this week from just guests who had bad setups and ran it through it. And I sent you a sample. Did you get a chance to listen to it? I did. I did. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah.

It's impressive. I mean, but that's the – my thought on this is I think for a lot of the history that, you know, you and I have sort of been in this game, there were some tools that did these sorts of things, right? You could remove the – you could dial down the noise from a noisy air handler or something like that.

But you still needed someone at the controls to dial it in and know what to do and not to do and there were limits. Yeah, me. That was me. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And the folks who are really good at that, the folks like you, would rightfully poo-poo the one-button solutions that claim to be able to do this kind of thing because they could, but mostly they couldn't.

Yeah. And my feeling with Adobe Podcasts is that it can. Oh, it can. And then some. Right. So I took – I can't unfortunately post the video or the audio because it's from a client show that has not aired yet. Yeah.

But I had already cleaned that audio using $1,500 worth of professional tools, using iZotope RX10 Advanced, using Ozone and many other tools and, you know, some EQ and using my ear to make that audio sound good.

And within 10 minutes, I could upload the same audio and get it back. And it sounded better than what I could do. So. Better. And I was pissed. I still am pissed. Now, in your experience, have you uncovered any shortcomings in this?

Does it get tripped up anywhere? Not yet. Not yet. I've thrown everything at this thing. And every time it comes back, sounding unbelievably beautiful. It's crazy. It is crazy good.

Yeah. So, yeah. We've used the one – there's one built into Descript that they call Studio Sound, which is also quite good. And before Adobe came out with their tool, I thought that the one in Descript was kind of the – it was the one to beat in terms of single click, clean it up, make it sound better.

And it was really good at – or it is really good at getting rid of room reverb, making people who are slightly off mic sound like they're on mic, dialing in an EQ to make – you know, give them more presence than they would otherwise have.

Where it tends to fall short is – you can end up with something kind of a pumping gate, you know, where if something's below a certain level, it'll just fall off. And so you lose – sometimes you lose the beginning and ends of words or things – it sounds like something's being gated in a funny kind of way.

Yeah, breaths kind of sound unnatural, you know. Yeah. Yeah. But you're saying you haven't seen that with Adobe's version. Not yet. Not yet. Like I said, I'm actually running client stuff through it now because it's so nice. It is so nice. And it's free right now. So I'm going to keep – I'm going to beat this thing into the ground.

This show will be run through that tool. It is going to save me hours, especially with Brian's audio because Brian's audio is – I mean, I love the guy. He's got a nice setup. He's got a Mixpre 3 with, you know, a $500 EVRE27ND.

And it still sounds terrible just because his room is terrible. There's nothing you can do about it. I mean, you know, there's only so much you can get to. But, you know, I ran some of his audio through it and I'm like, damn, there's – well, I get an hour back of my life for that. So the tools are coming. The tools are definitely coming and are going to change the game.

Sad thing is, it's like, you know, podcasting right now is in the crapper thanks to the advertising drop-off. But, yeah, that's a different podcast altogether. Yeah. But I wonder also if we're going to end up with a signature sound that comes out of this.

In other words, will it be like autotune where if you have an ear for it, you can tell or not? You know what I mean? I do get what you mean. What I've got are reference files for basically every guest that I have or, I mean, every host that I have.

So I still use those very expensive tools because what you can do is you can take a sample that is the gold standard of that person. And you can use that in iZotope RX10 Advanced to do what they call EQ match. And it will take the EQ from one file, apply it to another without having to know anything.

It will sample one, create a fingerprint, and then apply it to other files. That's what I've been doing because it does sound a little flat. But it's flat in a good way that you can then enhance. You know, so I think there's still going to be – there's still, you know, for the editor, there's still going to be some – you know, there's going to be some human interaction because you're still going to have to edit.

You know, you're not going to have – you're not just going to take it, run it through, and put it out. So you can still put your own flair on it, but it gets you 95% of the way there without spending two hours running these massive filters on it and removing – you know, like stripping dialogue from the background and things like that.

And it's kind of like Photoshop now. It's like, you know, in the old days, you'd sit there with the, you know, the path tool, you know, cutting people out. But now I literally – I open a photograph and I hit select subject and it does what used to take me an hour and it does it better.

Right. With one level of undo. Yeah. Yeah, seriously. So I think that – I think what I'm really looking forward to with these tools, because I want to talk about AI in a second and other AI tools, is that it's going to free us up to do more story, more things like that.

Yeah. And then we get to chat GPT in a second and then that fact is blown out of the water. For us, I think what we're excited about with these kinds of tools is we get so – like, you know, we – I think I did – I ran a little – I ran a little of the numbers through one of the scheduling packages that we use here.

And last year, I did about 800 interviews in 2022. Good Lord. Yeah. So that's – it's a lot. Yeah. But these people are calling in from every possible location and situation that you can imagine.

Oh, yeah. So to have a tool like this that allows us to drop it in, get us to that 90%, 95% point with no effort. Yeah. Zero effort. Yeah. I mean, the audio team is just going to rejoice because that's – sometimes that can be the fun work, but usually it's not.

But, you know, it's interesting to tackle a new problem and see if you can do it, but it quickly becomes kind of drudgery. So you can take away the drudgery. That's great. What I'm always a bit hesitant to embrace – I remember back in my broadcast TV days, it was during the era when they were bringing robotic cameras into newsrooms and studios.

So instead of having camera operators, instead of having a camera operator at every camera, you had a single operator controlling all the cameras. And the advertisements for these robotic camera systems said things like, and this system will allow you to free up your employees to take on more meaningful tasks around the – yeah, yeah, right.

That's what's going to happen, you know. Sure. Sure it is. Yeah. So what is your outlook then for yourself in terms of being able to bill for that cleanup time? Does it just mean you have to come at it in a different way?

Yeah. I think that that is definitely – you know, AI is going to literally eat my lunch on that one because that was – you know, I do bespoke cleanups for people. They would just send me stuff and I would spend the time to clean it up and just send it back to them clean. And that was a huge part of my business.

It is going to be gone. I can still do that for them, but it's going to be – it's like, okay, I used to be able to bill for two hours, you know. Now I'll be able to charge for half an hour. And most of that time it's going to be downloading and uploading the file and waiting for it to finish. That's going to be most of it.

So that part I think is going to be – it's definitely going to take a chunk out of it. So I'm looking at diversifying my revenue streams, which I think is going to be what a lot of people are doing with all of this new technology that's coming out around, you know, the generative AIs, the text AIs, the image AIs, and things like that.

There's going to be a lot – and, you know, especially the voice AIs. Part of my diversification is moving into voice acting and voiceover work. And what I'm seeing now is there is a lot of discussion right now about how you write your contracts in that world for use for synthetic voice or using your voice to be trained against a synthetic voice that can be used in the future.

And it's interesting to see that people are – at least in that world, they're embracing it. They're not sticking their head in the sand. They know it's here and there's nothing they can do about it. It's not going to go away. So I think at this point, people are, you know, figuring out – at least the smart people are not sticking their head in the sand, like I said, and figuring out how to work with this going forward to make sure that their skill sets can still remain intact.

Because I also see with – and you tell me if you think I'm wrong on this one – a lot of, you know, just grunt writers who just pound out blog posts every day for, you know, 25 bucks a post, their job is gone. Their job is actually gone. What we're going to see is we're going to see people turn into prompt writers.

They're going to be master prompt writers, just like master Google searchers were back in the day, and fact checkers. I think fact checking is going to be huge because a lot of the stuff that comes out of these AIs is just not – you can't trust it without another human's eyes on it to go say, hey, is that actually true?

You know, because you don't want to just run something through like GPT-4 that's coming out, which I don't know if you saw the size of the data set that they trained it against. It is going to be incredible. It is like – it's like over a thousand times better than GPT-3, and GPT-3 already is mind-bogglingly good.

Yeah, I mean a couple things come to mind. I've seen – just this past week I saw one of the – I can't remember who it was now, but it was one of the big publishers. A name you would know is already using generative AI to create those kind of just vanilla informational sort of articles.

They're already doing it. Yeah, we've seen that since GPT-2 came out. A lot of news organizations were just taking – what they would do is they would like throw in a press release and have it rewritten by the AI, and then they would put that out as a post that they wrote, you know? Yeah, yep, yep. And there are a lot of people that used to make, you know, not the greatest living but a living doing that.

They're shit out of luck now. They're done, you know? Yeah, yeah. The other thing I saw this morning, I was cruising around over on Mastodon, and somebody said – and I wish I had the toot in front of me to properly credit them, but they said,

chat GPT is mansplaining as a service in that it will provide you with information that is factually incorrect but say it with absolute confidence and no regard for the level of expertise of the audience to which it is presenting it.

And I think that's right on. I think, you know, because – It's close. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I've certainly caught it making errors, making basic factual errors, but it just presents them as if they are true. It doesn't hedge anything. That's why I think we'll need fact checkers, lots of them, you know?

Yeah. The other thing that I've noticed, though, I've been putting in – this is where it gets, like, creepy creative. I would put in just a few prompts about some things to get some show notes written for a show. And then I got a little crazy. I'm like, hey, what if – here's a premise for a show.

Give me back, like, a log line for it, right? And I've been doing this with, like, script ideas that I've had for some audio dramas. And it will come back, and it will name the show for you. It will come back with, like, a really good name for a show. I'm just like, damn, I didn't even think about that one.

That's actually really good. I've done that, too. I've said, give me a list of 20 names for a podcast about XYZ. And they're not bad. Yeah, well – Here, check this one out. This is a tweet that I made earlier this week.

Listen to the dreary musings of the Grumpy Old Geeks as they lament the state of the world and all its woes. A podcast as dark and gloomy as the Ravens call, brought to you by the masters of melancholy, the Grumpy Old Geeks. That was written by ChatGPT when I said, give me a plug for Grumpy Old Geeks in under 200 characters.

That's what it came up with. And I'm like, masters of melancholy? I like that. Mm-hmm. The other thing I think about here is – and you could probably relate to this. I remember back in the very early days of digital imaging when digital photography was first starting to become a thing.

And then, of course, digital video as well. But at the outset of that, there were a lot of people who were heavily invested in film and, I'll say, emotionally invested in film and all of the wonderful, organic, analog things about film.

And I remember them saying things like, well, digital will never be as good as film. And my response to that was – and usually I would just say to myself – would, no, it's going to be better. Yep.

And I think you can argue – you can make a case that that is true from the point of view that digital imaging has far greater technical capabilities than analog film does and what it can do.

Also, the fact that there's nobody doing R&D on new film. Mm-hmm. It's done, right? All done. Yeah. So, there are still – look, please don't write me letters. I understand all the great things about film and why people love it and those are legitimate things and there are things that film does that digital does not.

But I maintain that for most people and most of the uses in the world today, digital is better than film. And I think that's where we are with ChatGPT where we're at that early point where you can see where it's going.

Yeah. And you can say it may not be there yet, but there's nothing holding it back from getting there. It's in the post. It's in the post. Right. Yeah, because, I mean, look, you're talking to a guy who spent a couple years in college and, you know, cut his teeth on, you know, silver.

You know, I had silver on plastic, silver on paper. I went to college for photography and all we did was film. That was it. Yeah. This was right when digital photography just started to come out. And the first digital pictures I – the first digital scans I had was a VHS camcorder hooked up to an Amiga, you know, on a stand.

Yes, yes. So, back in those days, as into film as you were, what was your attitude to digital when you were a film guy? Couldn't come fast enough. Really? Well, I got to the point in college where I was – I got allergic to all the chemistry.

So, I ended up having to bow out of photography because I was getting these two-week-long migraines and I couldn't get out of bed. And it turns out I was an idiot and I'd be sitting there souping my prints in the bathroom – not in the bathroom – in the darkroom.

And I would – I was a kid. I wasn't paying too much attention. I would, like, you know, have my hands in the fix, wipe off the print, come out and eat a sandwich. So, I was basically poisoning myself the whole time. But then I moved into computers and here I am.

But it was – it's one of those things where I had the first Apple Quick Takes. I've had every digital camera along the way just, you know, waiting for them to get good enough and now they are. And I've got an F3 and an F4 that are museum pieces in my studio.

You know, Nikon F3s and F4s. Right. Which I could – My wife recently came to me with a little tiny Pelican case that she had found in a closet somewhere. And she said, what is this? And I opened it up and inside was the first Kodak digital camera that we had ever purchased for the company.

It was actually made by Kodak. I want to say it was, like, two megapixels. And we bought it to gather textures for 3D rendering. Right. That's what I did, too. I use that all the time for those. Yes. Is that right? Yeah.

We did a lot of that back in the early days. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But Kodak, they had a shot at it. But, you know, classic story. You know, same sort of thing. Why was it not Sony who made the iPod? It's because they had too much legacy stuff to protect.

And the rest is history. Yeah. I mean, Kodak invented the digital camera. So, that's how that goes. It's like, you've got to ride that wave, man. You've got to know where the future's coming. So, I'm just – You want my Kodak digital camera? I'll send it to you. No, thanks. Okay. I don't even want my Nikons anymore.

I'm just like, I have too much junk. I don't know if you had a, you know, a fun display shelf or something, but I understand. Yeah. You've got enough crap. Exactly, exactly. Damn, I was hoping to get rid of that thing. I'm sure you can get $5 on eBay for it somewhere.

Yeah. Yeah. Because somebody – that's the thing. It is somebody's rosebud, right? Exactly. You know, everything out there is somebody's rosebud. That's why the F3 and the F4, I got those on eBay. And, like, I think I got the F3 for $80 with the drive.

It still works. Checked it out. It works great. The F4 is in beautiful condition, and that camera, when it came out, was $2,000 in, you know, 80s money, 80s and 90s money, and I got it for $150 with shipping because the thing weighs, like, 18 pounds.

Right. It's crazy. Right. Yeah. It's so funny. Like, I put the batteries in it, and I put the film in it, and I'm like, where's the on-off button? Or where's the switch for the on-off? And I'm like, oh, wait. It didn't have an on-off switch. It was just – you put the batteries in, and it worked. It never turns off.

I'm like, oh, that's right. It's just a move for the motor drive and the meter. It's like, oh, man. Right. Right. Yeah. Good times. Yeah. Well, JetGPT is – I guess kids are starting to use it to write malware now, which is kind of interesting.

Yes. Yeah. In fact, just earlier today, I was recording Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, and his story was about this, about how folks were – and I forget which – it was researchers that, you know, one of the usual suspects here – actually, I have the script right here.

It was folks at Checkpoint were running this through its paces. And one of the funny things about it is when you try to get ChatGPT to write malware for you, it will first say, oh, I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.

But if you ask it in the right way, you can get it to do that. Basically, if you say, I know you can't, but if you could, what would you say? And then it's happy to do it. So, it did. Yeah. I tried to have that – I tried to have it right in my obituary, and they're like, no, you can't do that.

And I tried every variation, and it was pretty slick about trying to do that. But I'm like, come on, man. That's interesting. Yeah. They've got some pretty interesting guardrails up about what you can and can't do. And I think they're getting better at people end-arounding the – you know, doing the circumlocution to get to the answer.

Could you just ask it to write a tribute to you, in other words, as if you were receiving a fabulous award? Here's the downside of ChatGPT. It doesn't know who I am. I don't have a Wikipedia entry, so it has no baseline. But it knows everything about Grumpy Old Geeks, and it knows my name, and it knows Brian's name, and it knows your name.

But it doesn't – like, if I ask it for me specifically, it won't say, he's the host of the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast. But if I ask it about Grumpy Old Geeks, it knows about me. So that's where it's like – it's not really intelligent. It's putting words together on – you know, based on frequency that it sees in its models.

So it's not – you know, that's the thing. People think it's intelligent. It is not intelligent. It is still machine learning, but it is still just creepy good. But, you know, that's kind of how we work. It seems to know who I am. If you ask who I am, it'll say that I'm the host of the Cyber Wire, and then it has some other sort of florid things to say about me, which is very nice, and rather than – because it's certainly – you know, there's plenty of bad things it could say about me, but it holds back.

So I appreciate that. That's very nice. Very nice of it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting. Huh. Yeah. This is going to be – this is going to be an interesting next couple years, I think, for sure. Unlike crypto, this actually has uses. Well, crypto did have uses if you were a criminal.

I give it that. Or shyster. Yeah. Again, Joe and I were talking today about how one of the tells for bad phishing emails has always been wonky English. Oh, man. You can just run anything through this and say, please check this for good English or rephrase this in perfect English, and it'll do it.

And so I think that tell is going away. It's gone. It's going to be harder and harder and harder. So we'll see. I mean, people are coming up with detectors for this, but I've run some of my copy from some of my old blog posts through it, and it thinks I'm a robot.

So maybe we are all in the metaverse or in a simulation. Maybe Elon was right. I don't know. I saw this one and just had to – I had to put it in here. Police app exposed secret details about raids and suspects. Did you guys cover the Sweep Wizard story?

Yeah. I actually reported on this yesterday. Not in a whole lot of depth, but it just seems like this particular app left a whole lot of information hanging out there, including confidential stuff that shouldn't have been shared.

Yeah. So the point of this app is so that law enforcement in a multi-jurisdictional environment can coordinate their raids together or any of their takedowns, right? Mm-hmm. Which is better than – I guess better than a group text thread, you know?

Probably better than that. Right. Hard to get worse. Yes. So now here's where it really gets funny. This is a mission called Operation Protect the Innocent, which was basically a kitty – they were taking down a kitty porn ring, right? Going after 600 suspected sex offenders.

And so the LAPD was leading this up. And they used this app, Sweep Wizard, and put in everybody's details and everything. Now, here's the funny part. They were using a free trial of the app at this massive rate. I'm like, do you guys not have like 20 bucks?

Can you not pay for the app? Right. But so they put in all of this information, and apparently it was all ass to the wind. And people could go and – I'm sure it was like probably some API endpoint that was not very well secured, but apparently the LAPD didn't even know about it until Wired got in touch with them and said, hey, do you guys know about this?

And they're like, oh, no, we don't. Or they may have and are playing dumb, but this is one of those things where it's like they should really have better operational security on an app that is going to have all of this information when you're dealing with law enforcement. And the fact that nobody in law enforcement actually vetted this shit is just – it's a head-scratcher.

It's a total head-scratcher. Yes. And if I were the defense attorney for any of these folks who are being accused of these crimes, I'm sure I'm reading all of this with great interest. Yep. Yep. I mean, I'm sure it might – I don't think it's going to get anybody off, but it may have some reduced sentences for leaking some information.

Possibly. Possibly. But still, it's not good. You know the people who really have a case are the people who were innocent and got caught up in this, and their lawyers are going to have a field day with this because that's major. That's major.

Right. It's going to cost them a lot more than it would have if they would have just paid for the damn app so the company would have had the funds to actually do their security research to lock down their app. That's right. Jason, as it so often is, it's pay me now or pay me later. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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So this week, I checked out a movie called The Pale Blue Eye on Netflix. It just came up one night when I was just scrolling through, and it's got Christian Bale in it, so I was fairly surprised. I'm like, I'd never even heard of this.

And it just popped up on my doohickey. And it's apparently in some theaters. This is one of those movies that they're throwing out there for Oscar noms, I'm sure. Oh, okay. Well, because, I mean, January is generally when they dump the stinkers, right? I guess.

Maybe. But it's not a stinker. That's the great part about it. This movie was awesome. It was great. It's about a detective who was hired to investigate a murder at West Point. And one of the cadets at West Point is Edgar Allan Poe. So there's this great interaction between the detective and Edgar Allan Poe as a young man who is very cool, very creepy.

And the casting is awesome. I mean, they nailed Edgar Allan Poe in this. I don't know what they did with him, but, man, he looks just like every etching or drawing you've ever seen of him. It's fantastic. But Christian Bale, awesome in it. He's usually pretty awesome.

Wouldn't want to work with him, but I love watching him on the shows. And it's directed by Scott Cooper, who I don't know off the top of my head. But I got to say, this thing was incredible. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it.

It is one of, because I'm a murder mystery kind of guy. Like, old school murder. I'm a Poirot, you know, Holmes kind of guy. So this really took me back to that. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it, and I highly recommend it. I see Gillian Anderson's in it also. Yes, she is.

And it took me a few minutes to figure out it was her. She's really, really good and really creepy in it. It doesn't really look like that. I mean, I don't know if they aged her up a bit to make her look a little bit older. But I caught her voice before I got her face. Which was interesting.

Isn't that funny when that happens? And that happens to me a lot. Because for whatever reason, well, I guess for obvious reasons, I'm very tuned into voices. And that happens to me all the time. Especially, like, my wife and I like to watch old sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Bob Newhart.

And sometimes there'll be a guest star on one of those shows, and I'll go, I know that person's voice from somewhere. Like, where do I know that person's voice from? One time it was the actress who played Ursula in The Little Mermaid. But it was 30 years ago. And I'm going, I know that voice.

Where's the voice from? Yeah, isn't that interesting? Well, I have to check it out. I like a good murder mystery as well. So, a hot recommendation from you, huh? Yeah. Oh, 100%. 100%. Love it. You know, 10 thumbs up.

Or 15 thumbs up if you're using one of the generative AIs. They can't figure out thumbs yet. What else you got? Yeah. Brian, last week, recommended 3,000 Years of Longing with Idris Elba. And, I think it's Jessica Chastain.

No, no, no. It's, oh, one of those other crazy actresses. Her name is Tilda Swinton. Oh, Swinton. Yes. Tilda Swinton. Yes. Fantastic. Fantastic little movie. He was totally on the nose with it. You can't really say much about what it is. But, I mean, from the trailers, you can see Idris Elba plays a genie.

And it's really good. It really reminded me, it has the aesthetic of Baron Munchausen, the Terry Gilliam movie. And it has a lot of feel like that. And surprisingly, it's an R-rated movie because there's lots of nudity and stuff like that in it.

But the story is great. It's taking you some places and you don't know which is which. You just have to watch it to kind of get the gist of it. But I 100% thumbs up recommend this movie for sure.

You mentioned the nudity, as you put it. My son Jack and I have been making our way through The Boys. Oh, lots of nudity in that. Well, so he's already watched all of them. So we're watching them together. And at the beginning of the episodes, it quite often says, you know, this episode contains nudity, violence, strong language, adult situations.

And we all say to each other, there's something for everyone in this show. There is. Yes, there is. Let me tell you that I am very much enjoying The Boys. And I know I'm late to this particular party, but we're about halfway through the third season.

I'm liking it a lot. It is an interesting experience to watch a show as graphic as The Boys with your 16-year-old son. Oh, I bet. I'll just say that. There's times when I just kind of, I don't know, she'll make you a little squirmy there.

I mean, we're pretty open about things. And so it's, there are times when I kind of shield my eye, like cover my, oh, my goodness. Well, we're not going to talk about that part of the show. Yeah, yeah. I can see that.

But, you know, I mean, these kids, these kids today in high school, there are no mysteries about things. None. Because they have all the world's information at their fingertips. So it's not like you're going to get a question like, what does that mean, Dad? Or what's he talking about? Probably the other way around.

You ask, what the hell are they talking about? Let me explain to you, Dad. Yeah, I don't understand that bit of slang. What is that? Oh, oh, oh, oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you seen All the Boys? Yes, I'm caught up.

Season three was hard at the beginning because there was some stuff at the beginning was just like, I don't need to be seeing this like this. And I fast forwarded some bits of it just because I knew where they were going and what they were going for. Yeah. It's just, you know, shock value.

And I just, I skipped a bunch of stuff. But all in all, I thought, you know, the first couple episodes were a little bit meh. But by the halfway point, it really kicked in and I loved the rest of the season. I thought it really ended well. Okay. Well, I'll look forward to that.

Yeah. I'm looking forward to season four because I think it's the last season. Oh, okay, good. I think. I think. Yeah. That's what I heard. All right. No, definitely digging it. And I dug into Jack Ryan season three. I've got one episode left. It's decent.

It's decent. It was a little confusing at the beginning. Me and my roommate were both a little confused, but we finally got the hang of it, picked up. And it's really well done. It's beautifully shot. It's interesting that Jack Ryan is now Jason Bourne. That's the conceit that they gave into on season one.

It's like, okay, he's not going to be an analyst. He's going to be an action analyst. And this is the guy from The Office, right? Yeah, yeah. Whose name is escaping me right now. I was thinking Tim Keserinsky. I'm like, no, different guy. All together. John Keserinsky.

John Keserinsky. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Something like that. But yeah, yeah. The skinny guy from The Office is Mr. Buff Jack Ryan. Okay. But it's really good. It's really good. I recommend all three seasons. It's not, you know, it is not, you know, the Bourne Identity level good.

Yeah. But it's the Bourne Identity 2 level good, I think. So definitely worth watching when you're done with the boys. But first, check out The Pale Blue Eye. That one I really, I really recommend. That really got me going this year. All right. Good. We'll check it out.

Oh, man. Well, Dave, thank you for stopping by today. I really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Anytime. And like I said, we'll look forward to having Brian back. But great to catch up in the meantime. I'll see you soon. In the news.

Big thanks to Dave Bittner for stepping in for Brian for a little bit longer than he had to. And I really appreciate it. And he will be back to fill in for Brian for the whole show next week. So hopefully he hasn't started 17 new podcasts and we'll be good to go. I do have a little follow-up here.

Since Brian is not here, I thought I would play with him a little bit. I saw this article called The Vinyl Comeback Continues. Vinyl album sales in the United States have grown for the 17th consecutive year, according to Luminate, which is an entertainment data company. 43.5 million LPs were sold in the U.S. last year, which is up more than 48-fold compared to 2006 when the vinyl comeback began.

If you remember when we started this show back in 2013, which I expect almost no one to know about because anybody that listened to this show back then is probably long gone. But we have been joking about the vinyl resurgence for almost 10, actually for 10 years now.

And it still keeps going. It is going up and up and up. But you have to remember that it is only less than 5% of the actual music sold in the entire world. But these are U.S. numbers. Here's the odd part that I thought was really funny.

Luminate has found that only 50% of the people that buy vinyl actually own a record player. So I think that is very interesting. So apparently the kids nowadays are listening on Spotify, but they're going to go buy the album and either keep it on the shelf or, if they were smart, they would rip it open and look at the liner notes, which is what made albums great.

Liner notes. Remember those? Lyrics, behind-the-scenes stories, photos, things like that. So hopefully that's what's happening, which would be – I could get behind that. Microsoft is back in the news, not for the Activision thing this week. We're not going to talk about that. We have joked about the HoloLens deal with the Army in the past and saying that, yeah, this is a bad idea.

Let's strap goggles onto our soldiers and send them out into the wild. Well, there was a big test last year, and it turns out that basically they're bad. They're very bad, and they're probably going to get people killed if they are not fixed. Well, the Army wanted to buy a lot more of them, and our terrible government at the moment actually did something right, and they said, no, hold the phone.

They wanted $400 million to buy up to 6,900 of them this year, and they suck. So what they have done is they have actually pivoted a bit. They're going to use $125 million from last year's money to work on version 1.2.

So that's not that great. They also got another $40 million to help develop the new goggles. But, yeah, everything that the soldiers are saying is it doesn't work, makes them sick, hurts their neck.

Not anything that you would want to have happen to our highly trained forces that are out there in the wild actually trying to do their job. This seems like something that is not going to fly, and you just put it on your shelf next to the Oculus 2.

The difference between the Microsoft Army HoloLens and the Oculus 2 is that the Oculus 2 will not get you shot. Well, we hope not. And this next one comes from Dan. Appreciate that, Dan. Proof of delivery photos for many Amazon packages publicly accessible for months.

Now, this is if you are getting packages up in Candenadia. There is a company called Brunswick News, Inc., which was owned by another company and then got shifted around and moved and bought. But, of course, there was an unsecured Amazon AWS database, which had all the tracking information, geo-coordinates, and the photos of deliveries.

So, while the actual names and addresses weren't there, the geo-coordinates were there, but a lot of times there were addresses on the photos because of the label on the box. So, you could actually find out who lived there, or you could actually just Google it and probably figure it out on your own.

But that's bad. And we've seen over and over and over again, Amazon AWS is like giving a handgun to a toddler because eventually something bad is going to happen. And this just is proof positive that it just keeps on coming and coming and coming.

Now, New York City schools have decided to ban chat GPT, citing fears about safety and accuracy. Or, you know, cheating, like we would like to call it in the past. I don't care about safety and accuracy. I call it cheating. And they said, no, you're not going to be able to access chat GPT from our school computers.

Well, obviously, like most schools, are not that smart. Because, you know, kids these days, they have their own devices. They have VPNs. They have cellular data connectivity. Or they could just do it when they go home, since there really isn't a way to tell if kids are using chat GPT right now.

Like Dave and I mentioned, we're going to have to have people who are prompt writers and fact checkers in the future. I think teachers are going to become fact checkers and digital sleuths at this point. So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But this is just this is an empty threat, meaning nothing at all.

And I've mentioned on the show several times over the decade that we've been doing this that I hate software patents with a passion. Software patents are evil, evil, evil, evil. IBM has been the top patent holder or patent creator in the United States for decades.

This is the first year or last year was actually the first year where in 2022, they dropped off the top spot. And basically, Samsung came in and took the spot. And Samsung did 8,513 patents last year. And IBM only did 4,743.

That's a lot of patents. Samsung, yes, they make hardware. I can get behind hardware patents because, you know, there's a lot of R&D behind that and it's very difficult to do. I'm sure they have software patents in there, too. But, you know, IBM. Who uses IBM stuff anymore?

I mean, this is not 1982. I don't get it. But I guess they're still in business. I know they were doing some blockchain stuff. Wonder how that's working out for them right now. And Dave and I didn't bring this one up, but we should have. Microsoft's new AI can simulate anyone's voice with three seconds of audio.

Now, they're calling it VAL-E, a neural codec language model that builds off a technology called Encodec, which Meta came up with back in October last year. Now, they do some craziness with how they model the voice.

And I listened to some of the demos and they're not great yet. This is very, very early days on this stuff. Very early days. Now, I find this interesting because they used an audio library that was put together by Meta called LibraLite.

And it's got 60,000 hours of English language speak from over 7,000 speakers, mostly pulled from LibriVox, which is a site where they do public domain audiobooks. So anybody can go into LibriVox, you know, find a project that's ongoing and read for a book that eventually goes into the public domain.

Now, I see the performance going into the public domain and that person's performance. And you can do, you know, since it is public domain, you can take it and do whatever the hell you want to with it.

But I do not believe, and we're going to have to find some lawyers to actually have a chat about this at some point, taking that person's voice and then training an AI on it so that person's voice can then be replicated by a for-profit company is pretty much, I'm sure, not what anybody signed up for when they started doing LibriVox books.

Because I personally would have enjoyed doing some LibriVox books because it's good practice for, you know, reading audiobooks, which is what I do in my spare time now. And I would be pissed off if I found out that Microsoft or Meta had taken my voice and created a synthetic version of it without my permission, without any contract or anything.

So I went through the LibriVox's terms of service, and there is nothing in there. It is a website that looks like it was built in 1992. So I think that they're going to have to get with the times on this. And I'm going to ask around about this one because this is kind of important. If people are taking these works from people who have obviously not said that you can use my voice for, you know, generative AI or because it didn't exist when they made these books.

Nobody thought that that was going to be a thing when they read these books. And now their voice could end up being, you know, the voice of your car or something like that if they're actually very good at it, which is possible. Because some of those LibriVox books are decent. Most are not.

But most of these, just check them out sometimes if you want, you know, free audiobooks or just get an Audible account, I guess. This last one, you're going to have to actually go to the site to check the link. This is a very interesting one. They found the footage of the Thanksgiving Day crash in San Francisco where a Tesla Model S basically crashed on the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

It crashed because it was running the full self-driving, the new feature that had just come out. It had just come out and the guy was using it and the car decided to, oh, turn on its turn signal, get in the left lane and stop. Just stopped in the middle of the bridge, big pile up, lots of injuries.

And you just have to watch the video to see how bad it is. And, of course, this is right after it was released. And Elon is being Elon saying it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. And we keep saying, no, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not.

The more I see Teslas on the road, the scareder I get when I am actually out walking because they're terrifying now because nobody knows who's doing what. And everybody's playing with the things and you got your, you know, your giant iPad. Look, I know I'm being, you know, chicken little.

The sky is falling. The sky is falling. But as these stories keep coming out about how Teslas and the full self-driving and the autopilot don't actually work, just, you know, be scared of these things. Just kind of, you know, give them some room. And if you're actually a Tesla owner and a Tesla driver, keep your damn hands on the wheel and your foot, like, by the pedals because these things don't work that well.

Go check out the video. It's in the show notes. Apps and doodads. Got a couple quick things here real quick in the apps and doodads. For Christmas this year, I got the Ember Travel Mug 2 as a Christmas gift from my dear friend Chris Lockhead and his awesome wife, Carrie.

And this is a mug, a heated mug, of course, with terms of service and an app and the whole nine yards, which, you know, when I got it, I opened it up. I'm like, thank you. I have a dual-duty gift here. I have show, I have, you know, material for the show because now I have a mug with a Bluetooth app on it.

And it's a mug that I can use. And it turns out that this is one of the greatest gifts anybody has ever given me because I am in front of my computer talking all day. And while I'm talking, I'm sipping on tea and my tea gets cold all the time.

So I have to go refresh it or microwave it or, you know, just top it off with hot water. It's just, it's a pain in the butt. Let's just say that for an eight-hour session, you go through a lot of tea. This keeps my tea at the perfect temperature of 145 degrees, which is 62.5 degrees Celsius.

And it works beautifully. It works beautifully. It is not cheap. I think they retail for 200 bucks. So unless you really need the actual heating element to keep your stuff warm, which I guess probably might be an edge case.

It's got a great sealed lid on it, hand washable, nice power station that you can just plop it on, like basically a powered coaster that sits on my desk right now where I'm talking to you from. I love this thing. It turned out that I thought was going to be the biggest joke, turned out to be one of the greatest gifts I've ever gotten.

I use it every day and it is making my life fantastic. I love it. So check it out. The Ember Travel Mug 2. Link is in the show notes. And I was playing around with Clash Royale, Clash Royale, GOG.showclan. Shout out to my guys over there. We're doing good this week.

We're doing good. If you want to join, we've got some slots. So open up Clash Royale and just search for GOG.show. We do have a minimum threshold that you have to have played up to before you can join. But, you know, we've been around for six years. So it's a nice group we got going on over there.

But I had my iPad Pro on my desk and I had forgotten that I turned on, I think it's called Sidecar, which is where you can use your mouse and your keyboard on your iPad if it's close enough to your computer. So I started playing Clash Royale with my mouse on my iPad and it worked out great.

And then I just went back to work doing the other thing. The only issue that I found, and maybe somebody can track this one down and tell me why this doesn't work. And I've tested this on multiple iPads with multiple keyboards running the same sidecar setup. There is, Shift does not work on any of my keyboards.

Doesn't matter which one I use. Caps Lock works, but Shift does not. So if you actually want to use any symbols, you're kind of screwed. But, you know, using the mouse to play games on an iPad is kind of nice. I got to say, for some of the games that I played, it is actually kind of nice.

So that is an interesting workaround. Give it a shot. If anybody out there knows why the damn shift key won't work, let me know. It's driving me crazy. And I am very, very curious. Closing shout outs! Sorry for the short show this week.

Dave will be back with me next week so we can have a full show in, you know, full force with the full grumpitude. And Brian will be back the following week after he is done with whatever he's doing. So, over at Patreon, we've got Martin, Blake, and Tom.

And Tom wrote, where else can you get Star Wars Universe updates delivered during a security hot segment? Here, Tom. Here. And over at PayPal, I think this is a short list because Brian has been AFK. We'll pick everybody else up on the PayPal next time.

But we've got Benjamin, Ralph, Miles, and Sherry. And over at the tip jar, we've got Linda, Jeff, Christopher, and Theodore. So, thank you all for donating and keeping the lights on here because it means the world to us. And it's the only way we can keep doing the show. So, until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Jason DeFilippo.

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 584. Go watch that Tesla screw up traffic on Thanksgiving.

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.

Stay grumpy.

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