585: Certified Human

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, the podcast where we channel our inner curmudgeon and discuss all things tech and pop culture. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the highly acclaimed Cyber Wire podcast. As the co-host of the Hacking Human podcast with Joe Kerrigan, Dave delves into the fascinating and often chilling world of social engineering.

But that's not all. Dave also brings his expertise as a co-host to Caveat with Ben Yellen, a podcast that explores the complex and ever-evolving landscape of law and policy, surveillance and privacy. And for those interested in the inner workings of the industrial control systems and operational technology, Dave also hosts Control Loop, where he and his team dive deep into the latest developments and trends in the field.

And every word I just read was written by ChatGPT. Oh, man. That's pretty good. I loved it. What was the prompt that got such flowery language about me? My favorite GPT prompt is, make this more interesting. And then in quotes, put whatever you want to make more interesting. And that was the intro I usually use for security, ha. And that's what it turned it into.

Okay. So it punched it up for you. Yep. Nice. Yeah. I've found one of the real effective uses for ChatGPT is summarizing things. So if I have a couple of paragraphs of just quotey quotes from people, I put them in and I say, summarize this. And it does a pretty good job of getting me started there.

Yeah. I think I'll be using that prompt on that copy because that's a little long. Yeah. Right. Right. It's ChatGPT all the way down. Yep. And even the welcome to grumpy old geeks with the inner curmudgeon line, that was ChatGPT too. The only thing that was written here is, I'm Jason DeFillippo and I'm Dave Bittner.

Nice. Everything else was ChatGPT. All right. Well, thanks for joining us, everybody. We'll see you next time. Yep. For more of today's show, log in to openai.com. Yeah. And it finally came back up. It's been down for so long. Up and down and up and down.

So a little follow-up here to our discussion last week. There are tools out there right now and people are writing them. There's this one kid from – where was he from? Oh, God. Now, I cut everything up. Oh, he's from Princeton. Princeton.

He's been working on this. Yes. Princeton. Edward Tian, 22-year-old student who will never get invited to another party at Princeton as long as he lives. Right. Yep. He created GPT-0, which is one of the ones that I was testing out that basically told me that my writing – that I'm an AI half the time.

Well, so I was going to – yeah. So that was a point I wanted to make here. So what you're pointing out here is that there are folks who are making tools to help detect if something was written by ChatGPT, which, of course, teachers are very interested in and professors and all that sort of thing. But I can't help wondering what happens if you're falsely accused.

What happens if your writing style just happens to flag whatever it is they're looking for here? Then what? How do you – what's your appeal after that? I know. That's the problem. It's like there isn't one. We're going to have to have screen recorders going on for the writing process the entire time.

We're going to have services that are going to have – that you're going to have certified human detection and verification. There's just no way around it. So if people are going to keep writing these half-assed tools – I mean this kid is 22 years old and he made it in a coffee shop during his winter break. I'm sorry, but that really does not strike me as something that is valid for prosecutorial defense.

It's like, come on, man. Well, so another question I have, again, getting back to the fact that it's ChatGPT all the way down or certainly heading that way. Can you put something into ChatGPT and say, rephrase this in a way that one of the tools designed to detect ChatGPT will not detect it?

That requires ChatGPT to know what the algorithms are that the other tools are using. So you'd have to have some kind of test back and forth. But what you can do is just keep writing your prompts and putting it into GPT-0 until it comes back clean and then use that.

So everybody has both the tools on both sides. And here's something we used to do back in the day in the 90s or maybe early 2000s back in the old blog days of movable type and gray matter and when WordPress was just getting started and all that.

We would write Perl scripts to go out and scrape people's blog posts in a domain topic that we were trying to write like SEO copy for. This is some of the – let's say dark gray hat of stuff that I used to do. And we would take those – we would take those blog posts and we would basically do a thesaurus attack on it and just change different words just in Perl.

We were writing all this crap in Perl back then. And then we would get stuff that was technically not what we took but we would still post and it would get spidered by the search engines and raise up in the ranks. So what's to stop you from just doing another thesaurus attack on your GPT output to get through GPT-0, you know?

Mm-hmm. There are ways around this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's where it's going to – I mean it – so it seems to me like what we're doing here is treating symptoms rather than the source. Mm-hmm.

You're taking Tylenol for your cancer. Yeah, it's going to kill the pain but you still got cancer. So how do we get up to the point where we're not getting cancer? Where does – is this an inflection point? And I believe it may be into how we handle education and communications and I know lots of people who have been – my son's company, he was telling me one of his coworkers has been using chat GPT to basically write all of his business emails.

Yeah, there's a lot of people that are doing that, business emails, press releases, all sorts of stuff. Right. But we got a story about seeing that in a little bit, you know, that they got busted for it. Right. And it comes back to what I was saying before. It's like we're going to have prompt writers and fact checkers. That's going to be the future of it.

And I did have a really good conversation with a friend of the show, Chris Lockhead, yesterday because we were talking about this stuff and he was discussing our conversation that you and I had last week about this. And it comes back to where do we as humans provide value along the chain because that's what we really need to focus on.

It's like, OK, yeah, when we were discussing how the Adobe podcast editors are going to like, you know, take away half of my job. Well, the other half of my job is actually, you know, being a good story editor, being human, finding the things that sound right and work right for the story that you're telling that a computer is not going to be able to do.

It can get you 80 percent there, but that extra 20 percent is where humans come into play, you know, and that's really where we add value along the stack is the humanity side of it. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of people are going to be losing their jobs over this for sure.

But, you know, the people who are really, you know, good at what they do will find ways to bring their humanity to the table to actually provide value again. So, yeah, that's a that's a powerful insight. Give my best to Chris. If you talk, I haven't talked to him in a while. Just please say hello.

If you I do think of him from time to time. Good guy. Yeah. Well, you just did because he listens to the show. There you go. I found this other this other site, which is basically it's a GitHub repo called Awesome Chat GPT prompts.

And it's it's it's cool because it's just a collection of prompt examples that people can, you know, get started with. And it's just a list of them. There are a couple other prompt repository sites out there as well that I'm seeing pop up. And to that point, I'm also seeing a lot of you remember when I hate to say it, NFTs came around and then there was the explosion of NF toosh bags.

Well, there seems to be a lot of that going on right now around these generative AI types of systems. And people are starting to build other systems on top of it, too. I saw one this morning about organizing your prompts and being able to test them in a like in almost in an IDE type of environment.

And I'm like, OK, now you're starting to get a little a little much there this early in the game with that. It's like they're just throwing everything at the wall because a lot of people are getting fired, which we'll talk about. So there's a lot of talent on the streets with nothing to do right now. So they're trying to, you know, sit in their basement and whip up some of this stuff.

And we're going to see a lot of that stuff come through and a lot of failures on that, I'm sure. But it's an interesting time. Yeah, it is. And I saw a particular prompt here that caught my attention that I thought was kind of funny. Why don't you play the part of the person asking the prompts and I'll play the part of chat GPT here.

What happens when Pinocchio says his nose is going to grow? When Pinocchio says his nose is going to grow, it is a reference to the story of Pinocchio, where the character's nose grows longer whenever he tells a lie. The growing nose is a metaphor for the consequences of lying and serves as a reminder for the character to be truthful.

So if Pinocchio says his nose is going to grow, is he lying? If Pinocchio says his nose is going to grow, it could be interpreted as him lying. In the story, Pinocchio's nose only grows when he tells a lie. So if he says his nose is going to grow, it could be seen as him admitting to telling a falsehood.

However, it could also be interpreted as him warning that he is about to tell a lie and wants to avoid it. Or it could be a figurative statement and not related to him telling a lie. If Pinocchio's nose only grows when he lies, wouldn't he be telling the truth in stating that his nose is going to grow? An error occurred.

If this issue persists, please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com. Broke the brain! So what this is pointing out, obviously, is if you – what's the word for it?

What's the word for an internally illogical puzzle? Kobayashi Maru almost. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But – So it's like a recursion loop that – an infinite recursion loop sort of because it keeps asking itself and then just breaks itself.

Right, right. So I don't know if this is just a coincidence that OpenAI gave up on this or did it actually – you know, somewhere in their server rack is did a server burst into flames when it got caught in this illogical loop or this, you know, endless loop, I guess.

Endless logical loop. But I just thought it was funny. It is funny, definitely. I'm going to try that again when it comes back up. But I also had a thought too. What happens when these things keep scraping the web and all of the output on the web has come from these generative AIs and it gets pushed back into itself, you know, as more people are using these services to build their websites and things like that?

Do we get to like some kind of homogenization tipping point where everything is just the AI talking to itself and reinforcing what it said before? Right. You know, at what point do the humans become irrelevant and just taken out of the loop because everybody is just using these things to write their own stuff?

I wonder if we'll end up with an AI version of historical lore. In other words, George Washington did not actually chop down the cherry tree, but we all know that story, right? And he said, I cannot tell a lie, ironically.

It was me. And so we know that story, but we also know – historians will say that that story was made up. They know who made it up. They know the biography it was made up in, but it's a story that resonates and we – you know, people when teaching children about George Washington, they want him – they want people to think he's an honorable man, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So we know that story and most people accept it as being true even though it's not. And I wonder if that kind of thing could slip into this where something becomes common knowledge only because it is inserted so often in the AI's responses to things even if it isn't actually true.

Yeah, you know, in misquotes and things like that, like the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results attributed to everybody from Mark Twain to Einstein to – Yep, yeah.

One of my favorite ones to debunk. Yeah. And, you know, those things – yeah, it could be self-reinforcing to the point where, you know – well, granted, truth is fungible right now anyway, so this might make it a little bit worse. Who knows? What we need is Snopes.

We need – we need the – everything needs to be trained on Snopes to start with and then go from there. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's – like I said, it's an interesting time. I'm kind of excited by it. This is the first time I've been jazzed about technology in a long time because it's not stupid crypto or dumbass NFTs or, you know – there's no blockchain with this.

I love it. I love it. Yeah. It is interesting. I wonder – yeah. Again, I wonder if we are at – if we are witnessing some sort of important inflection point for the human race. Not to overstate it, but I think we may be.

There's an interview this week that I missed. It's just – it's long and I didn't get a chance to watch it with the head of OpenAI. And he's saying that everybody that is getting all excited about ChatG or GPT-4, you know, they're just preparing for disappointment because it's going to be disappointing.

Right. You know, every – all of the – apparently all of the stuff that people are saying that it's been trained on, he's like, no, that's bullshit. He literally said, that's bullshit. It's going to be better, but it's not going to be the be-all, end-all, you know, to change the world. So – Yeah. But, you know, things are moving along.

Speaking of things moving along, I put this in here because I know you're a Corvette fan of the new Corvettes. Yes. Yes. They have the new E-Ray, a little play on Stingray. It took me a second to get that one. I'm a little slow, but it looks pretty cool except this one is going to start at $104,000 as opposed to the new gas guzzler that looks cool but is half the price.

Yeah. You know, if I had that kind of money that was just – I'll say this is the first affordable sports car and I think $60,000 is the kind of thing where, you know, someone in my or your station of life could swing it to make it happen.

If you wanted to prioritize it, you could probably find a way to make a car like this your own. At $100,000, we're talking about something a little different here. But I do like this car and I have never been a Corvette fan in the past.

I think all of the kind of stereotypes, the Sam Malone owning a Corvette sort of thing has kept me away from them. But I do like this car and when I saw the thing about the E-Ray coming out, I couldn't help thinking to myself, this car would look really good, painted up to look like the Mach 5 from Speed Racer.

It would, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if I were to get one, I think – and if I were – gog.show slash Dave, donate to – Dave's Corvette fund.

Yeah. Who needs Stormtrooper armor? Buy me a $100,000 Corvette. Just if I find the keys in my mailbox here, I'll go out in the parking lot. I'll know someone loves me very much. But it would be fun to get it wrapped. I don't like the steering wheel though. Yeah, yeah. It would be great. It would be great. But yeah, you have to change the steering wheel.

The square steering wheel thing is just not cool. Not cool. I agree. I agree. I think a lot of – I think of these sports cars, they're kind of cutting off the bottom of the steering wheel to make it easier to slide into the seat, I think is the justification for it. Yeah.

The other thing I think about though, you know, I've had an SUV now for I guess four years or so. And before that, I only had cars. And I just think about like getting in and out of a low-slung car like this, you know, like I'm not getting any more flexible.

So would I have to ooze out of it, sort of pour myself out, roll out of it and climb up off the ground to get in and out of a car that's this low to the ground? I guess it would be worth it, but I don't know. Well, I had a car like that.

I had a 300ZX for a while. Ooh, nice. And that thing was – oh, choice. Except I moved to Chicago and you can't have a 300ZX in Chicago. First snow, you're screwed. The weather? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That thing would break loose if you went through the sprinklers on the street, you know.

Because the one I had was souped – it was souped up to 350 horsepower. So it was a beast. And I drove that thing from California to Chicago once and, oh, God, that was a miserable ride. That thing is not meant for cross-country. But to your point, when you get in it, you're in a TIE fighter.

It was great. Everything is black and you're, like, sucked in there and I'm just like, I'm going for Luke. I'm going for Luke. But getting in and out of it was miserable, miserable. I literally did have to, like, you know, roll out of it half the time and your hands get dirty because you're putting your hands on the ground to get yourself up.

Right. Yeah. I – you know, either that or you have to really start taking yoga. Mm-hmm. And who has time for that? All right, all right. Especially if it costs $104,000, I'm going to be working, you know, 22 hours a day just to be able to pay for it, let alone drive it.

Yeah. But that's – you know, there's another point here that I've seen some folks in the automotive press write about, which is that cars like this, it's getting harder and harder to find good places to drive them because our roads have gotten so clogged.

The back roads where you can go out on a weekend and just unwind with something like this. So I think it makes it harder to get the enjoyment that you'd like to get out of a purchase like this. Google is in the news.

Google is in the news this morning. Everybody is shaking their heads going, what's going on at Google? They are going to cut 6% of its workforce, about 12,000 people. So they are the next in line after Microsoft this week with 10,000.

Amazon last week with, you know, about the same, a little more. Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. Thanks, Elon, for starting that trend. But – I've seen also reports about this talking about how there's a little – or more than a little bit of groupthink here.

That if your competitors are laying off people, you start looking around and thinking, are my shareholders are going to be expecting me to lay off people too? Yep. And how much does that drive these sorts of things? Yeah, I think this is like, you know, cloud cover for all these places because they're like – these are probably people they wanted to get rid of anyway.

But they – you know, if they see these huge layoffs coming, you know, the stock might react not the way they want it to. Normally, though, when businesses cut headcount like that to save it, then the stock usually goes up. So it could also be part of that since everything is in the crapper right now.

But the interesting thing, I was listening to Pivot this morning and Scott Galloway, who every now and again says something smart, mentioned that, yeah, Microsoft is cutting 10,000 people. But they'd hired 40,000 last year.

So, you know, they're still up 30. So, you know. Oh, OK. Yeah, you have to look at – you have to look at what's coming in versus what's going out. But, you know, 6 percent of Google's – or Alphabet's workforce is kind of a lot. So I don't think that they were doing that. But even – they've got enough bad projects where they can, you know, cut a few, you know.

Yeah. Just cut a few. It will be perfect. Plenty of fat to be trimmed there, I would say. Definitely. So we got 12,000 new people who are going to be writing chat GPT detectors now, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Lots of – opportunities for startups. Yes, there are right now.

And by the way, I don't know if you did see this. I came across my desk at some point. But the applications for new businesses and LLCs are through the roof right now. Everybody's starting a new business. Yeah. So – which jives, you know. Downturns are the best time to start a business.

It's a great time. So – and a lot of people are jumping on it. The shark tankification of America. Yeah. Yeah, good for them. Yep, definitely. Twitter, though. Let's talk about Twitter for as short amount of time as possible. Say, do we have to?

Real quick. We're going to go through this real quick because this one really chapped my dazzle, as it were. Yeah. They – Twitter has decided to shut off access to third-party clients with almost – actually, not almost no warning. With zero warning. Everybody found out about it when they just turned off the hose, which is about as shitty as you can get, you know?

Mm-hmm. Why have a service that people can enjoy on their own terms? Yeah. I mean it's like if they were going to be deprecating that part of the business, you've got to give somebody notice. You can't just turn it off. Well, yeah, apparently you can.

So they did. And I understand why because they're desperate right now because Elon has basically, you know, stuck his tongue in the outlet and has just scrambled his brain at this point. There's – you know, he sees this probably as just wasted money and wasted opportunity because the ads don't really – I believe really get inserted into the API calls.

So you don't – you know, that cuts down on their ad revenue. How much it cuts down on their ad revenue, I would guess it's so negligible as not to matter. But they've also shut down all the data centers that probably fed half this stuff. I saw their ad revenue is down like 40 percent, like comparing this date to last date a year ago.

It's more than that. Yeah. I think it's actually more than that. I think it's between like 45 to 60. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, it's not good. I've definitely wound down my use of Twitter. I locked my account and I was just – actually this morning I was saying to my wife that Twitter needs to realize that desperation is not attractive because they're just pinging the hell out of me with alerts on my phone, the things that have nothing to do with anything.

You know, so-and-so just posted. Here's a post on this topic that, you know, more than I've ever seen from them before. And I leave it on my phone just in case I get – occasionally I'll get a direct message from someone or something like that. I'm not quite ready to delete it altogether. But I'm definitely not – I'm being intentional and not spending time over there and asking people who I like and respect and miss from over there to please come to Mastodon.

Please come to Mastodon. Yeah, but it's bad. Yeah, hopefully Twitterific is going to release their Mastodon client because apparently Marco Armit has been able to play with it and he said it's just like using Twitter. If you're used to Twitterific, the Mastodon client is like an identical clone.

So I'm going to be making that jump soon. I signed up for Medium's Mastodon instance but I haven't gotten in yet because I'm like, OK, Medium would be a good one to do because I do use Medium. I'm a paid member of Medium. So it should get me to the front of the line.

Ahem. You'd think. You'd think. Yeah, the one I'm on is called Hackaderm, which I like because of the pun, a packaderm, hackaderm. And just seem to be a nice, inclusive, kind of techie, geeky kind of group. So I've been happy there so far.

That's cool. I'm actually still – I started posting a little bit of stuff on Twitter, just mainly promotion because I've got it there. It's like it's kind of a wasted opportunity not to just at least promo some stuff for the people who don't have another way to get a hold of me or talk to me. So I keep it open for that, just a little bit here and there.

I'll check it once every day or two just for a minute because there's no conversations really happening there as far as I can tell anymore. There's still – I mean there's a few people that are left that I still like to follow that I haven't found anywhere else. So for now, I'll keep it around, but it's just – and I've been there since day one literally.

So it's kind of ingrained in my soul to just have it there. So yeah, his bills are going to start coming due for the interest on the loans that he had, which I'm sure is part of the desperation.

So those are coming due really soon. And also, unfortunately, he did win a little bit of the class action lawsuit for people who said that they didn't want to do the arbitration. They wanted to do a class action based on how he handled the firings and the compensation packages, which nobody got and all of that stuff.

So the judge actually sided with Elon on that. So what they did was they took the five people out who had signed arbitration agreements who can't be part of the class action lawsuit. And they got some people who had opted out of the arbitration agreements to come and take over the lawsuit. And the other interesting thing is Twitter told the fireease that they had to do arbitration individually.

They could not do like a class version of the arbitration agreements, which is going to apparently bite them in the ass because there are firms out there that specialize in that. And they're going to basically eat that elephant one bite at a time. And and really, they're just going to they're going to take on all of the people who want to do it.

And they're just going to keep filing and filing and filing and just gumming the works up over Twitter. You know, death by a thousand cuts. I think it's a good little side note here for folks just in terms of employment contracts and employment law and all that kind of stuff that, you know, when you're getting a new job and you're excited to get that new job and they put something in front of you to sign.

You don't necessarily have to agree to everything that's in there. Things like arbitration clauses and things like do not competes. You can line those things out if they really want you bad enough. Those are points of negotiation. So don't just assume that you have to sign on the dotted line in order to get the job.

It's negotiable. Yep, totally is for sure. And yes, stay away from arbitration if you can. Absolutely. Yeah, those contracts are a starting point. They're not the end. But some people are so desperate for a job, they overlook it. Right. And they're written to benefit the company, not you.

You just need to keep that in mind. That's not a judgment statement. They're the ones who wrote it and are put in front of you. And why wouldn't they do that? But go in informed. Yeah. And always remember, HR is not your friend. They're there for the company. So don't pour your soul out to HR because they are not your friend.

Just saying. Speaking of not having any friends, Elon is having trouble in San Francisco trying to get jurors for his case because he is a polarizing figure, as it were. So this is the sink. Yeah, exactly. My friend has the – she has the license plate Elon fan on her Tesla.

I'm wondering if she changed that yet. Oh, my goodness. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah. This is for the lawsuit around the toot – or I guess toot is Mastodon, isn't it? Isn't it what they call them? They call them toots. That's right. That's very, very uncreative, I must say, over at the Mastodon for that.

Well, what are you going to do? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so this is around the tweet that Elon made about taking Tesla private for $420 a share. So the people who got screwed by that are suing him for billions of dollars, which – sure.

That's great. As is their right. Yeah, which, you know, hopefully they win. They deserve to win on that one. He should have been saying that stuff. He's – that's just – it's a foregone conclusion that he's an idiot when it comes to the Twitter in every aspect of it, owning it to using it, bar none.

Turns out, though, he might be an idiot when it comes to Tesla as well. Dave, have you seen the story about the faked video from 2016 about self-driving? I have. The self-driving software? Yes, I have. So describe what's going on here and what do you make of this?

So back in 2016, Tesla released a video saying that this is our self-driving car software in action, and it wasn't. It was originally supposed to be this is what it's going to do one day, but that's not how it was presented to the public. They said that this is what we can do.

Well, it turns out that it was mostly faked. They used mapping software to guide the car, and even while they had that, it still got in a crash. Oops. But it comes back to them. Is this actually fraud that they created this video, said it was the self-driving demonstration, and it actually wasn't?

Right. Is that illegal, or is it just tacky? Right. Is it just marketing bravado? Yes. Or is it actually fraud? Mm-hmm. That's what, you know, somebody is going to have to determine probably in court for that because people are dying now, you know?

People are dying every year from using this software in their Teslas. It has a body count. It flat out has a body count. So there's a case to be made on the families of the people who died that maybe they were taken in by these arguments from this video to believe what the car could do, what the car was capable of, that they stated that the car was capable of without saying, this is what one day the car will be capable of.

Which Elon says every year, it's coming, it'll be here next week, it's in the mail, you know? Isn't that another side of this, that there were lots of people who paid for the full functionality of self-driving and didn't get it for years?

It wasn't active or available? Yeah. I mean, people had paid for it. It was like, you know, some people I know, it was like $12,000 or something. Right. And ended up getting rid of the car before the thing ever even shipped and never got a refund. It's like they literally just stole the money.

Now, that's a class action that they should have out there right now. They may have it. I don't know. I don't own a Tesla. I never will. So I'm not in on it. I like my Jeep. I like my big Jeep with like one computer in it that turns on the radio. Isn't that an interesting thing?

Because I have some friends who are all in on Tesla and they were early adopters. And in fact, I think this particular person has like the second Model S east of the Mississippi, something like that. And he had the Roadster.

He has the Model S. He's got a Model X. It just, you know, has them all, loves them, all in on Tesla. But now he's thinking like, am I driving around in a $100,000 MAGA hat? Yep. Actually, yeah. Pretty much.

Yeah. They're everywhere here. And I mean, it is literally the new Prius because that's – before in Southern California, Prius is as far as the eye can see. Now it's just Teslas. And, you know, a lot of people that I know that had them are actually starting to pull away from them.

So for that reason, it's like – I mean, it's the Elon effect. They don't want to be seen as being associated with him. They're like, I love my car, but he's a twat. What are we going to do? Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, people who have Teslas love their Teslas.

So, you know, good on them. But that's a lot of baggage to be carrying around. Yeah. Yeah. See how that one plays out. But, yeah, the video, it's douchey. Is it illegal? That remains to be seen. Mm-hmm. Amazon has cut their charity donation program, Amazon Smile.

Aw. Have you used Amazon Smile in the past? I have. In fact, I have a number of nonprofits that I like to support. And so they would use this, and it was an easy way to do it. If I was going to make a big purchase on Amazon, I would go, before I did, I'd poke around and see if, you know, was there someone I could throw a little extra change at just by doing virtually nothing on my part.

So I'm sad to see this go. So I'm sad to see this go. Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing is it was a dual storefront. I figured it was just a switch on the regular storefront that, you know, would say, okay, this is, I set up, I signed up for Amazon Smile. My personal charity was the Tony Hawk Skate Park Foundation.

Okay. So I used that for years. And I thought that it was just, you know, automatic. It turns out it's not. You have to go to the Smile site to make that purchase. And I'm like, oh, well, that's kind of silly. I didn't quite realize that. They are going to give the programs basically what an average of two months of what they would have normally gotten.

I looked, I kind of looked at the numbers that Tony Hawk was getting on, at least for me, and I ended up just cutting him a check for 50 bucks, which was 10 times what they've gotten the purchase history of me using Amazon Smile. I'm like, because they think they got five bucks out of me, but it was still five bucks they wouldn't have had before.

And if you do it at scale, it's a thing. So it's sad to see it go, but. It is. And I think the bigger lesson for folks running nonprofits out there is to just be wary of having too much of your income reliant on any one of these sorts of programs, because as we've seen with this and other ones along the way, they will pull the rug out from under you without thinking twice about it.

Yep. Yeah. And it's not like they need the money. It's Amazon. Come on. Right. But anyway, they're in head-cutting mode right now, too. Tightening the belt wherever they can. And apparently CNET has been tightening the belt, too, using their AI-generated articles and got busted pretty hard for it.

They started to put up notifications that this was written by AI, but there are now staffers coming out of the woodwork saying, no, no, no, no, no. They've been doing this for months and not telling anybody. Because CNET is now owned by a company called Red Ventures.

Last I remember – this is the first I heard about this. I didn't know that they got sold because it was CBS bought them before. Right. Right. Yeah. So it was something like CBS bought them for like $1.5 billion and then sold them for I think a third of that. Yeah, which makes sense. Yeah.

Sites like CNET are – they're dinosaurs for sure. Because, I mean, I remember back when CNET started, this was – I was watching CNET TV way back in the day when Ryan Seacrest was a host doing tech reporting.

Right. Yeah, and Halsey Miner was one of the guys that founded that and I ended up – Halsey was an investor in one of my companies that went south. But after he was the largest tax evader in California, they came and took his airplane and all of the artwork in our office. I will say we had the best artwork.

We had $30 million worth of artwork in our office. It was awesome. It was so awesome. Yeah, we were right next to – it was an incubator in San Francisco and it was us, OpenDNS, and a couple other groups up there and it was a blast.

It was a blast. You should be really careful not to do a spit take, you know. Oh, yeah. No, there was one chair that was like a – I forget what it was called. It was just this big silver couch-looking thing but it looked like a couch but it was a $500,000 piece of art that you were not even close to allowed to sit on that everybody sat on when everybody went home.

So it's like, okay. Because we had lots of cocktails at the office and from – you'd see people from all the other companies fucking around with it. It was great. But anyway, back to CNET. That was a long, long tangent. Yeah, they're just getting busted for using AI, which is going to keep coming out because the problem is that the articles that they were posting were not fact-checked.

So they needed the fact-checker. Right, right. And they were just prompting and posting, prompting and posting. Oops. Yeah, and the article that I read about this talked about how there are certain types of articles that are legit candidates for AI writing, like rephrasing a press release or tracking stock reports or just things that are wrote, same kind of thing every day.

Here's an update on this. That's the perfect thing and there's a legit use case there. But you should let people know that's what's happening when it's happening so they know. And yes, you got to have humans on the backside just doing a fact-checking venture on that as well.

I wonder if CNET is on their way, if they're already there or if they're well on their way to becoming what I call a zombie brand, which is a brand that has a storied history, built up a reputation for themselves, and then somebody comes along and buys them up and just bleeds that reputation dry until the brand just is walking around like a zombie.

And doesn't even know that it's dead. Yahoo. Yeah. Just like Yahoo. Same thing. One of the old dogs who is unrecognizable from what they used to be. Yeah. I think of Kodak. Yeah.

Like Bell & Howell. You know, like. Radio Shack. Yeah. Like Bell & Howell is one of those where the – somebody bought up the rights to the name and now you can make any kind of just cheap little made-on-TV gadget and, I don't know, pay, you know, two cents per unit to slap the Bell & Howell name on it.

And for some folks who that was a brand they grew up with, they go, ooh, that brand name means quality and it means nothing like that anymore. That – to me, that's a zombie brand. Got it. Got it. Yep. I believe you're right. I think that's what will eventually happen to them, sadly.

Well, time moves on. Time moves on. One last bit here about the AI explosion. You're going to start seeing these lawsuits hand over fist. There's a couple artists that are suing Mid Journey and Stable Diffusion about copyright infringement.

Yeah. So I think Getty's filed a lawsuit as well. There's a lot of people that are suing these people over using unauthorized artwork in the training data. Well, that's fine. Link to that's in the notes. The guy who did it, this guy Butterick, he made a website for the Stable Diffusion Litigation.

Go check out the website because inside of the website, they talk about how the diffusion works in these diffusion algorithms and how it basically is built.

And it is a very – I swear to God, he probably used ChatGPT for the description because it's really well done. But it just goes behind the science and how it works and why it's no different than any other kind of data storage that is being used, which is why it is a copyright problem.

This guy, he's an engineer, but he's also a lawyer. So it's going to be interesting to see how this kind of works out. But his name is Matthew Butterick. I'm fascinated to see how this plays out, too. So far, I tend to be on the side that I don't think this is copyright infringement, just in that I don't think being inspired by one piece of artwork to create another is copyright infringement.

If I walk around a museum and look at a bunch of beautiful art and then I draw something of my own because I've been inspired by the style of Renoir or Picasso or whoever, I don't think that's copyright infringement. Bingo. So that's where I am right now.

However, I'm certainly open to change. I was talking to my son about this last night. He was telling me that he was watching some video where folks were feeding prompts into one of these AI image generating things.

And they were using prompts that specifically described a bit of stock imagery, right, that they knew that the system had been trained on. And the fascinating thing was the system would come up with an image that was very much like the stock image, and it would include details from the stock image that had not been in the prompt.

Ooh, that's a problem. So, for example, you know, I'm just going to make something up here. Let's say the prompt was I want to see a picture of a kitchen, and you describe the kitchen, and there's a stove and white cabinets and this sort of lighting and this. But you did – you said nothing about there being a toaster in a particular place on the countertop.

And these – this system would come up with something that was very reminiscent of the stock image and included the toaster in the same place where the toaster was in the stock image. Even though it's a different image, clearly it was inspired by that stock image.

So that's interesting to me, and I wonder if that sort of fuzziness is going to lead us down – or where that fuzziness is going to lead us down the copyright violation path. Yeah, that's very interesting. I kind of want to play around with that now.

Right. Yeah, you know, if there – yeah, if there is only one thing, like somebody's mail is on the counter in the training data, and then you do something, and then it comes back with the mail for that person in the image. It's like, oh, that would be interesting. You know, little things – yeah, little details that don't – that shouldn't have existed if it were just an inspirational type of setup.

Right. No, that is a very interesting point. Yeah.

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Media Candy. HBO had their second biggest premiere in a long time for The Last of Us, which is a show based on a video game. Did you get to check this out, Dave? I have not yet, no. Is this something you're interested in? Because it is post-apocalyptic, you know, that kind of show.

I tend to like that sort of thing. I have to – I will say that after COVID, I have to dial it in because I find I'm more sensitive to this sort of thing. Like I can inadvertently put myself in a bummed-out mood after watching something like this.

Yep. And actually we'll get to that in a second with one of my Media Candy picks here. But – so I kind of pick and choose. Have you seen this? Do you recommend it? I loved it. I never played the video game, but it's – it's so funny that – what's his name?

Pascal. Pedro Pascal. Yeah. He's in everything right now, obviously. He's on the cover of Wired this month. He's a media darling. Yes. Yes. Yes. But what was funny is I'm like, man, he looks like Burt Reynolds. It's all I could think of when I'm watching this.

I'm like, damn, he looks like Burt Reynolds the whole time. The mustache and everything. I'm just like, wow. I'm like spitting image of a young Burt Reynolds, but I loved it. I loved the first episode. What I loved even more though was they have an official podcast, the HBO's The Last of His Podcast, which I listened to right after.

It's hosted by Troy Baker who actually played the voice of Joel, who's the main Pedro Pascal character in the video game. And he sits there with the co-creators who put this together, like the filmmaker and the video game guy who got together to make this show.

And it's really, really fascinating to hear the creators do it, but in a really professional setup. They're not sitting there with their blue Yetis in the back corner of the lot. It's extremely well done. But some of the thoughts behind it are really interesting because they're saying it's a love conquers all story, but it shows the dark side of love, how it controls people.

And it's just a really, I highly recommend watching the show and then listening to the podcast because it's fascinating. So I'm really looking forward to the next couple of seasons. They also talk about the decisions they made in how the first episode kind of built and came to be, which I'm always interested in.

How do they write that story? How do they create it? What was behind the decisions they made and why? I love that stuff. So I think because once you see it, it doesn't ruin the rest of the season or anything or tell you where things are going. It just says that, you know, it just gives you a breakdown, a very intelligent breakdown of the episode and the season.

So I think together they really do complement each other. It is, you know, I've listened to a lot of official podcasts and I've never made it through the first like 15 minutes because they're just garbage. This one, this one nails it. Absolutely nails it. Okay. All right.

Good to know. I'll check it out. Yep. And I saw this on YouTube of all places. It's from the Diary of a CEO channel, which I've never heard of, but it has like 2 million followers or 2 million subscribers. It's an interview with Darren Brown, who's one of my favorite magicians and quote unquote mentalists and, you know, debunker type of guys.

I just, I could just listen to him talk for hours just because he's got a great voice. But it's an interesting, if you're a Darren Brown fan, it goes into his childhood and, you know, his upbringing and some of his decisions on how he does his shows and things like that. But if you don't know who Darren Brown is, there's three specials on Netflix, Sacrifice, Push, and The Miracle.

Have you seen any of those? I don't think so. Oh, dude, you got to watch those. They're fantastic. Yeah. They're really good. They're all social experiment type of things. The Miracle, I believe, is a stage show. Sacrifice and Push are not. Those are just different types of long-term experiments.

Definitely worth watching everything. I am dying to see one of his live shows, but, you know, I'm not in England and I couldn't make it to New York when he was there. So maybe someday I'll get to see one, but he's just fantastic. He's one of my favorite performers. Okay.

Yeah. All right. Interesting. You know, we were talking about how sometimes you have to take things in small doses and meter things out. There's a show called Fleischman is in Trouble. Are you familiar with this one? No, I'm not. So it's a miniseries.

I think it's only eight episodes and it's a good show. It's about a guy who he's a doctor in New York City. He's married to a woman who's a talent agent for folks who are on Broadway.

And it's one of those shows that kind of unwinds as you go. And throughout the show, you get the backstory about these characters. There's flashbacks. It's narrated by the title character, Fleischman. I think it's Toby Fleischman.

It's narrated by one of his best friends from college. So one of those best friends who kind of knows you better than you know yourself, that sort of thing. But it's a fascinating look into this couple's troubled relationship, how they got to where they are.

It's well acted. I believe Claire Danes is the female star in it. So very good. But I will say that whenever I watch an episode of Fleischman is in trouble, immediately afterwards, I watch an episode of Abbott Elementary to cleanse my mental palate because Fleischman is dark.

And so I need something light and funny and to just let my brain sort of expand again into a happy place. Yeah, into a happy place. But it's a good show. If you're into that sort of psychological thing, relationships, it's well done.

So worth a look. All right. We're on Hulu. I just popped a couple of other things in here that caught my eye over the week. There is a video on a Reddit group, a group called Praise the Cameraman, which I follow, which is, you know, camera operators doing good things.

And I used to be a cameraman, so it interested me there. But there's a young woman who's rollerblading down this course that was set up somewhere. And I don't know why or wherever, but, boy, 20-year-old me really would have loved to have skated on this course.

And I thought you would get a kick out of it, too. You would have loved to have hit this thing on one of your skateboards. And I don't know who set this up or why, but, man, what I wouldn't have given to go down this thing at a certain time in my life. It just looked like a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's kind of like a rally course. I've seen these in skateboarding before. They're really cool. It's basically a bunch of humps and jumps and turns, and it's just like a snake course. And they look like so much fun, except for some of the massive jumps that would have killed me.

That's why I said a 20-year-old me would have loved to it. Today, I don't think I'd make it down the first ramp. No, no. Dropping in on it would probably kill me, for sure. Yeah, but I've seen these. And there's actually a really good – somebody made a joke in the comments on the one you posted. It's like, okay, just add three more people and put it on ice.

And somebody goes, here you go. And it's a link to the same kind of course. But it's a Red Bull. It's a Red Bull course. Same type of thing, one of the rally courses. They do it on ice skates. Oh, wow. It's kind of like roller derby, but on ice on that type of course. Go check out the comments and find it.

It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Wow. The other thing I put in here is a clip a buddy of mine sent me. It is from a Blue Man Group show. And Venus Hum is guest starring in it. And they're doing a cover of the old disco standard, I Feel Love.

And let me tell you, what I love about this video is that I think it captures what the excitement of the live event must have felt like. There's just a tremendous amount of energy in this clip.

And I just love it. I would have loved to have seen this live. I haven't seen Blue Man Group live, but this clip makes me want to. It's funny. I saw Blue Man Group live in Chicago, and I bought the DVD that has this performance on it at that show. And when you put it on, I'm just like, oh, my God, I remember this.

And I watched it twice because I love that clip. It is such a great song. It's got so much energy. And I love Blue Man Group. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. Next time you're – I think they've got a residency in Vegas now. So next time you're in Vegas, definitely go. It is so much fun.

Yeah. That's what I hear. They never really struck my fancy, but after seeing this, I think I'm definitely going to have to check them out. Yeah. It's an in-person – you've got to see it in person to really get it because you feel the drums. You feel the percussion. And we saw them in a very small studio in Chicago, and it was just – it was an experience, absolutely an experience.

And, yeah, this clip just – it makes you smile. So if you are going to watch Fleischman in Trouble, then just go watch this after, and you'll feel better. There you go. Caps and doodads. So, Dave, I got a new audio interface this week.

I know we talk about audio. Yes. Aren't you a member of the audio interface of the week club? Well, this is the one of the week. There we go. Okay. Right. I got the Universal Audio Apollo Solo Heritage Edition. Okay.

It was a couple hundred bucks off on Amazon, and I was going to spend a couple hundred dollars on plug-ins that I needed because I have an Apollo twin in one of my studios. And I need two of them, one for recording and one for editing because I've got two different setups.

But you need the hardware to activate the plug-ins because of the DSP and the licensing and all that crap. Apollo or Universal Audio is expensive. It is an expensive hobby that I was actually getting away from. I am speaking to you now through an Apollo X4, so I'm familiar with that.

There you go. So I had an Apollo 8 rack mount that Jordan Harbinger gave me, but it's at my friend Andy's house, who's a rock musician, that we're setting up next week. So that's going to be fun. So I needed something that was small that I could carry with me, too, because I wanted something on the road.

The Apollo Twin, you've got to carry a power cable, which I hate. The Solo is bus-powered. So you just plug it in with your USB-C, plug in your XLR mic, Bob's your uncle, and you get to use your plug-ins on it. So I'm like, okay, that's the one I need.

So I can stay in the editing suite and powering that with my Mac Studio, and then the Twin will be where I'm at right now, which will replace a MixPre 3, which I have here from Sound Design. The MixPre 3 is fantastic because it has a built-in recorder in it, which I love, which is what I'm doing right now.

I just press record. It records to an SD card. I love it. But I like the Apollo better. The Apollo sound better. So this I have to do a lot of work on. The Apollos, all of the filters with the DSPs, is a great buy. I think it was like $500. It's usually $7.

So I saved a couple hundred bucks, and you get four plug-ins with it, which would cost you a couple hundred bucks anyway if you were getting the plug-ins, which was the impetus. So, you know, basically I saved like $400 on it. Yeah, that's great. You know, I love our Apollo, the sound of it. As you and I have talked about, software comes up a little bit short just in terms of there's some basic interface stuff of saving and restoring files that just leaves me banging my head on the desk.

But I can live with that because the other stuff is so good. No, they're fantastic. They're fantastic. And we were talking on security a bit ago about YubiKeys and locking down your accounts, and I'm like, you know, I should just bite the bullet.

So I went and I ordered two YubiKey 5C NFCs. So you can unlock – you use the NFC token with your phone to unlock things by just holding the key to your phone. So I'm like, okay, that's the one I want. Two of them, $110. They said expected to ship by January 13th.

I bought this on like January 6th or something. I don't know if you know what the date is today, but today is January 20th. It's later than that, yes. Yes. I am – shut up, Siri. My watch decided to – I hate it when she does that.

Yeah, I pulled it up and it opened Siri. But anyway, I went and it says, order status. Your order is processing. Then I go to the front page and it says, shipping lead time. This product is expected to ship by February 17th, 2023. I'm like, god damn it.

So supply chain issues over at YubiKey. Great. Yeah. But you use YubiKeys, right? I do. Yep, yep. We swear by them here at the CyberWire and basically my philosophy is that if it's important, I use the YubiKey on it.

Do you have a backup YubiKey? Yeah, I have two of them. I have the one that's on my key chain and then there's one that's in an undisclosed location that's my backup just in case. Yeah, that's why I bought a two-pack. I'm like, ah, that's something they should not sell by a single unit. No, no.

That's a really important point you make. If you get a YubiKey, get two for that very reason because if you lose one, that's a bad day. Yeah. If you only have one, that's a bad day. If you have two, no problem. Yep. Yep. Well, one is none, two is one. Yeah. But speaking of shipping delays, I got a note this morning from Analog.

Analog. They are the makers of the Analog Pocket, which is a video game device. Kind of like it's about the size of a Game Boy and it plays Game Boy games with the Game Boy cartridges. It can also play Game Gear, Neo Geo, Atari Lynx and other ones with adapters.

I ordered this in January of 2022 and it's shipping today. Oh, really? Yep. Wow. Well, all good things come to those who wait. Yeah, finally, finally. And fortunately, I still have an original Game Boy with my Tetris cartridge.

So I'm going to be using the cartridge with it. It looks gorgeous. And I recommend going to the site and looking at all of the features this thing has. It does everything. I mean, it's crazy. It's got like MIDI controllers in it. You can do a sequencer with it. You get all sorts of crazy stuff with it.

And it even says, completely engineered in two FPGAs. No emulation. And I'm like, okay, I had to look up FPGA. I'm like, what the hell is an FPGA? Field programmable gate arrays. Yes, it is. Come on, man. Software, not hardware, dude.

I'm software. Yeah. Well, FPGAs are kind of the in-between, I guess. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. You put software on it to reprogram it, but. Yeah. But. I have this theory that in our minds that you ever experience something where, for me, if I'm practicing something on the piano, I can practice and practice and practice and I'll only become so good at it.

And then if I sleep on it, quite often I'll come back the next day and I'll be better at it than I was when I stopped the day before. And my theory is that that's part of the dreaming process while we're asleep is that your brain is functioning kind of like a field programmable gate array where it's taking stuff that's only in software and while you're asleep, it's programming some neural pathways and putting some of that stuff into hardware.

Absolutely. And that's what an FPGA is. So that's sort of a useful metaphor that I've completely made up for myself. It could be total BS, but I find it useful. Yeah, it works. Works for me. I'll remember it now. I'm sure. But I'm excited.

Apparently they are shipping in 2023 now. So if you want to get one, caveat emptor, but I'll have a full review of it when it actually shows up because they did that annoying thing where they're like, your item is shipped and you go to the tracking number and they're like, well, they made a tracking number, but we ain't got it yet.

So come back later. Yes. How many times does that happen? Just because you made a label doesn't mean it's on the way. Yeah. Here's another app and doodad. This is more of a doodad. I went to Warby Parker this week to get new glasses.

Actually, I think I went on Saturday or this week. Okay. I went there. I got an exam because they just opened a spot here at the Topanga Mall in the Valley. And I'm like, okay, I want to try them because I hate lens crafters and they cost too much. So I went, I got the exam.

The exam was $160. That was for glasses and contacts. Great exam. By the way, the glaucoma tester now is handheld and barely blows crap in your eye. It's fantastic. I love new technology. Worth it for that. Okay. Yeah. You don't have to put your head in the big thing where they blow the air at you.

It's a little stick that the guy just kind of points at you and goes, it's almost nothing. It's fantastic. So I got the exam and went out. I picked out two new pair of glasses with the super coatings and stuff like that and got all that paid for. $560 for both pair of glasses with all of the crazy coatings.

They get here today. LensCrafters takes over two weeks to do those types of glasses with all of that stuff. They get here today. Also, and as somebody I know, you wear glasses, right? I do, yes. I have found, I'd never heard of these.

These are the greatest invention I've ever seen, literally, because now I can see with them, multifocal contact lenses. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. I wore those for many years. I've never seen them before. It is like dark magic. Yes. It is. Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah. Yes. Because. So the way, would it describe how it works? Please, please. Because I don't know what the hell, I don't know what sorcery this is, but it's, oh, yes. Tell me. So imagine a contact lens. You get a soft contact lens. But instead of being one prescription, imagine microscopic concentric circles alternating between two prescriptions.

So you have these little tiny rings that start in the center and make their way out. And they're so small that you can't resolve them individually. But to your eye, basically what it means is you can see everything. Oh, I fucking love science. Yeah, they're wonderful.

I got to the point with my prescription, because I also have some astigmatism. Me too. That I couldn't make it work sitting all day at the computer monitor. It just wasn't quite sharp enough.

And contacts aren't as sharp as glasses generally. So I went away from those. And now I'm just wearing glasses. But boy, yeah, they are. They're magical. If you can wear them, I highly recommend them.

Yeah, because I've got an astigmatism too. And the contacts that I can wear for outdoor, I can't read the speedometer on my Jeep, which is a problem. Son, do you know how fast you were going? Actually, officer, I don't. I have no idea. But I put them in.

I got them. I could see that. I came to work. I'm with you on the computer thing. I actually was wearing readers with them when I was looking at the monitor, which worked great. But when you're moving around and leaving the computer and coming back to it, if you're sitting there for a long period of time, you can wear readers with them.

But I'm just like, I have computer glasses for a reason. They're much sharper. They're much crisper. So I just went back to those. But for daily use when I'm not in this stupid recording studio, I can go out into the world again and not have to wear glasses. It's, oh, I love those things. Thank you for the science lesson too.

You can wear sunglasses, right? You can choose whatever sunglasses you want over. Yeah. Yeah. They are great. Since we're on the subject of eye exams, I'll share one little bit of wisdom that I learned when it comes to eye exams and pricing and all that kind of thing. I have an eye doctor who I like very much.

You know, just a small business, local community sort of eye place. Guy who grew up in town. You know, good guy. Has his own little optometry place. And so I've been going to him for years. And I get a certain, you know, vision benefit through my employment here at Cyber Wire.

And what I discovered is that there is a secret box full of frames that they don't tell you about that are free with your insurance. So in other words, they say, go out and, you know, select a set of frames.

And you go out to select the frames and you're like $600, $400, $300. You know, you're going, how is this little bundle of wire possibly $600? But if you ask, there's a box that in my place anyway, keeps in a drawer.

There's two boxes actually. And they bring them out and there's nothing wrong with them. They are, it's a whole different variety, but they're the ones that you can get for free through your insurance. And so I did. The ones I use, the ones I use for my computer, I have two pairs of glasses.

I have a pair that I use when I'm out and about and those have, what do you call it, progressive lenses. So, you know, it tilts your head and you get a different prescription there. But the ones for my computer that I'm wearing right now are just fixed distance just for the computer, you know, dialed in for that because I spend so much time every day.

So for those, I was like, oh, I'm sitting on my computer. Nobody's going to see me. I don't even, you know, I don't care. I just need to be comfortable and lightweight. And so that's what I did. So just a tip out there, sometimes you need to know to ask. And so ask.

Cool. Yeah, I guess I got a fancy pair of computer ones this time. They're actually clear. The frames are clear because, you know, sometimes I'm on the Zoom, so I would like them to be, you know, somewhat fashionable. Sure. Yeah. But they're computer glasses too. They work for a very small range.

But this new pair, and this is another thing I'd never heard of. They're like, would you like a little reader boost on them? I'm like, a reader boost? What's a reader boost? They're like, oh, we just juiced the bottom there. So if you're looking down to read something, you get a little bit of a magnification, a little boost. And I'm like, well, this boost intrigues me.

Give me the boost. Tell me more about the boost. Yes. Everything's a boost. So, but basically it has like a little 1.5 magnification at the bottom. So when you're looking down to read your menus, you can now. This is some old people shit, but it's great.

It's great. Welcome to grumpy old geezers. Yeah, that's it. And it's only going in one direction. Yeah. Let me tell you about my ED pills. That's right. That's the great thing about growing older. You never have to worry about conversation because you can always talk about your ailments.

That's right. That's right. Closing shout outs. This is the part of the show where we pay tribute to the fine ladies and gentlemen who sponsor and support us directly so we can keep making the show. Your direct support is what literally is behind us doing this show, and we appreciate every single dollar that you have donated.

Seriously, we do. Over at Patreon, we've got Jeremy. Thank you, Jeremy, our newest Patreon subscriber. And remember, over at Patreon, you do get ad-free versions of the show as well as a high-resolution recording as well. Over at PayPal, we've got Dag, Nathaniel, Edward, Andrew, Natalie, Linda, Brian, Mike, John, Robert, and Ramsey.

And over at the tip jar, we've got Karen, Sean, and Ross. Again, seriously, thank you so much for your direct support of the show. It keeps the lights on and keeps the puppies in kibble. So I checked real quick because I'm a domain kind of guy because I love Hover.com.

They're our sponsors, Hover.com slash GOG. I wanted to see if I could get certifiedhuman.com. Unfortunately, it is taken, and it is for sale for $13,695, which is a rather random number. I was going to say, that number seems oddly specific to me.

Yeah, it is. I wonder if an AI picked out that number. Right. I should check to see if certifiedhuman.ai is taken. There you go. I'll get that next time. Yep. All right. Well, it was great joining you this week and looking forward to having Brian back. But until next time, I'm Dave Bittner.

It was fantastic having you. Thank you so much for sitting in. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for joining us on another episode of Grumpy Old Geeks. If you're loving the show and want to help keep it going, head on over to GOG.show slash donate to support us and keep the lights on. We'll be forever grateful.

Seriously, your donations keep the show going. Keep it coming. And don't forget, sharing is caring. So spread the word about the show to all your friends and even your enemies. It's easy and completely free. To access all the goodies from this episode, check out the show notes at GOG.show slash 585.

You'll find links to everything we talked about as well as a link to our Discord channel where you can connect with us and other fans of the show. Got something to say? Well, then head on over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're feeling particularly snarky, head on over to GOG.show slash review and give us, let's say, five stars.

We'll take five stars. Stay grumpy and human. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place.

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