587: Our Inevitable Doom

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Jason, I've been trying to get used to Celsius because that's what the rest of the world uses. That isn't the United States. And we use it here as well. So it is – we got a deep freeze warning here in Toronto. It is minus 20 degrees Celsius currently. The North Pole today is minus 15 degrees Celsius. It is colder than the North Pole here right now.

That's what you get for moving to Canada. Yeah, well, you know, it's free health care freeze. I don't know. You need it for your toes to get reattached after all the frostbite. It's – I just saw – I saw Instagram the other day of a comedian. He's like, you know, Celsius is great for water, but if you want air, do Fahrenheit because it makes more sense, you know?

We haven't gotten as cold as it's going to get today. I just popped this over to Fahrenheit. It will get to minus 11 degrees Fahrenheit today. Oh, that's not bad. It's cold. Yeah, it's cold, but – I mean, jeez. I mean, I was in Chicago. It was negative 70 with a windchill downtown off the lake.

Well, that's not including windchill there. And we're right on the lake too. So there is windchill involved here, which is making it considerably colder. Okay. Okay. Here's the deal. Stay inside. Well, yes. Yes, indeed. I will. We've got a bit of follow-up. Peter wrote in and said there's a good precedent for gravity power. In fact, the world's first EV, which sort of runs at 100% efficiency if you factor out the tons of rocks it carries downhill, is powered by gravity.

And he sent a link to the world's first electric dump truck stores as much energy as eight Tesla Model S cars. Because the vehicle is electric, there's no need to heat up the brakes when descending. This is because the enormous electric engine acts as a generator and recharges the battery pack. That same energy is then used to help the vehicle travel back up the hill.

If all goes as planned, the electric dump truck will even harvest more electricity while traveling downhill than it needs for the ascent. Instead of consuming fossil fuels, it would then feed surplus electricity into the grid. Well, I think we've found unlimited power now then. We just all need dump trucks.

But here's the thing. Yeah, I don't – I just don't think that works that way. You know? There's no such thing. Also, you have to factor in is it – you know, it's a dump truck, so it's usually taking the dirt and the gravel uphill. So it's got to take the rocks with it up and then comes back down alone.

I don't think that you're going to get – Why you've got to ruin everything, Jason? I'm just saying you're not going to get infinite energy out of this. This is not – You know, this has not solved the world's problems. It's great for the dump trucks. I love those big dump trucks. I always wanted to go hang out on one when I was a kid, the Terex Titan. But yeah, this is cool. It's very cool.

But it's not 100 – there's no such thing as 100 percent efficiency. Close, but no cigar. Nope. The great layoffs continue, Jason, even though a jobs report came out today that said there were more hires this last month and previous year – and previous months.

So apparently all those people that have gotten laid off are finding jobs. But there's some more out there now looking. PayPal is laying off 2,000 employees. I didn't even think PayPal had 2,000 employees. What the hell are they doing? Seven percent of its total staff. They're obviously sending the continued messages every time I log in that I could use the app.

Thanks for sending me that text message every single time I log in. I don't want to use the app. I would be using it already if I wanted to. No shit. You know what's happening? All of the tech bros that got fired from San Francisco are taking all of the restaurant jobs that everybody quit during the pandemic.

It's just a reshuffling. Reshuffling of talent. But as part of the press release, as one does when one fires 7 percent of its total staff, we were treated to this nugget. And I do wonder, did this come out of chat, GPT? We will treat our departing colleagues with the utmost respect and empathy, provide them with generous packages, engage in consultation where required, and support them with their transition.

I want to express my personal appreciation for the meaningful contributions that they have made to PayPal. Or insert company name here, as ChatGPT would spit out. That's great. Well, speaking of also changing of job landscapes, Microsoft is planning to update Bing with a faster version of ChatGPT.

They're going to be moving with GPT-4, moving it into Bing. I don't know if anything can save Bing, but yeah. Well, free ChatGPT-4 would. I'll tell you that. If you don't have to wait or pay for it. That's true.

That's true. We'll see how the integration goes because ChatGPT-4, I mean, GPT-4 isn't out yet as far as I know. But I'm guessing they get behind-the-scenes access for the billions of dollars that they gave them. One would assume if you pay a couple billion bucks, you get access. Yeah, I think so.

That's how politics works. That's true. That's true. Look at how that's going for us. But yeah, ChatGPT now has ChatGPT Plus. You can get on the wait list for 20 bucks a month is what they're saying. I was going to ask, what are they streaming on that channel? Seriously.

Oh, you know what they could do on ChatGPT Plus? They could revive all the shows that got canceled. Firefly Season 2. All right. It just makes it up as you go. It'll write in itself. Exactly. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. I'll pay 20 bucks a month for that. Okay. Bring back the brown coats.

Anyway. So, yeah, 20 bucks a month, I'll pay that. I think a lot of people will pay that. And if I can get in when I need to get in, because it's really frustrating when I'm trying to not do work and have it do my work for me, and I can't get it to do my work because other people are having it do their work for them.

Well, yeah, quite a few people. This has been actually astonishing. They've got some statistics on this now. ChatGPT has been growing at a rate much, much faster than TikTok or any other popular app or service, according to a new study by analytics firm UBS, which I always want to read is USB. The open AI-developed chatbot was on pace to reach over 100 million monthly active users in January, or at least people refreshing to try to get in.

The chatbot only became available to the public on November 30th of last year, but this has just been astonishing. Within its first month of availability, it already boasted 57 million monthly active users. By January, it was already being visited by around 13 million individual users a day. In comparison, it took TikTok nine months after its global debut to reach 100 million monthly users despite its popularity.

So this is, I mean, people love this shit. Yeah. Imagine, I mean, this is why Microsoft put so much money into it because they are going to be making bank. I mean, obviously right now it's, it's, you know, it's the zeitgeist. People are talking about it. People are fucking around with it and playing with it more than anything else.

But, uh, you can't deny it. I think, you know, these numbers are crazy, but, uh, it's, it's useful. Yeah, it really is. But more, more on that later for sure. But yeah, we've got some more numbers that have come out. Spotify have released their Q4 earnings and announced that it now has 205 million premium subscribers up 10 million from last quarter.

Yet it's still losing money and firing the, uh, what, 6% of their employees. Yeah. So they continue to make money. They continue to lose money and the artists continue to be screwed. Great business model. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Uh, remember when Tesla went all in on Bitcoin? Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. That didn't really work out too well for them. Are we surprised? No. Well, I always thought this was going to be a loss. I always thought this was financial trickery to, to evade taxes and things of that nature.

So, well, there you go. Cause, uh, they racked up $204 million in losses from their little, uh, foray into the world of cryptocurrency. Um, I, you know, this, this article breaks down what happened. And, uh, of course, nobody's going to get fired for this. You know, you'd think that the shareholders might rise up in revolt with pitchforks and, uh, their votes to get rid of whoever did this.

Oh, wait, it was probably Elon. Nevermind. You can't get rid of it. He's a fucking cockroach. That's the thing. It's the cult of Elon that's really running this. And it's very frustrating. There are tons of activist investors on Tesla, with Tesla that are just screaming, please put an adult in charge.

Please just step, don't be CEO anymore. Please, please, for the love of God, this could actually be a real company without all the shenanigans, but no, no, no. Yeah. $204 million in losses. So that's quite a chunk. Um, now here's, here's where you really know you've hit peak Elon.

This is Tesla. This is a professional company with lots of cars on the road that are killing people every day. Great. Thank you very much. Not every day. No, almost. Every other. Every other. Okay. We're trying, they're trying, Brian. They're trying to get up there. So, um, at the very end of this article, it says Tesla disbanded its press department and could not be reached for comment.

Jason, I pointed that out like three months ago. Well, I forgot. Yeah. I was too busy with Twitter. I get Twitter and Tesla, Twisla, Twisla disbanded its press department. I mean, this is the hot new move is just to get rid of your press department.

Like just, we're just going to ignore it. All of this. Just pretend it's not happening. You know, for private companies, that's fine. This is a public company. How can you not have a press department with a public company? Yeah.

Well, mind boggling. Fucking mind boggling. Well, the justice department is finally, finally getting involved here. Uh, all the room, there were rumors of this for a long time, but apparently it is actually going to happen. Uh, the EV designer Tesla has confirmed in SEC filing that the DOJ has requested documents linked to autopilot and full self-driving features.

So good. They're saying that no government body has determined wrongdoing as part of an active investigation, but warns that enforcement could have a material adverse impact on its business. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You know what, you know what happened? Apparently somebody's, uh, some politician's son got killed or something in one of these.

So now that's not going to listen. That's the Dave Bittner theory. Nothing happens until it happens to somebody in power. Yeah. And then, then they get involved. But yeah, they're finally looking into this. Basically, they're going to have to say, you can't say you have self-driving. You can't say you have autopilot. You do not.

You have cruise control. Yes. Very bad cruise control, might I add. Yeah. And more of this is going on. San Francisco city officials have sent letters to the California Public Utilities Commission asking to slow or halt the expansion of cruise and Waymo robot taxi services in the city.

Uh, they're saying that unlimited expansion would be unreasonable in light of recent safety incidents in which vehicles blocked traffic and interfered with emergency vehicles. I agree. It is unreasonable. These are untested services. In fact, as we're testing them, all we're seeing are problems. Yeah.

So, stop it. Have you ever driven in San Francisco? I have. It's, not since these things have been on the road, but it was bad enough to begin with. I lived there for four or five years, and it is one of the worst cities I've ever lived in for driving.

I mean, it's terrible. It is a terrible place to drive. You don't want to drive. So, you know, you know, Brian, this is the, this would be the city where your dream could come true of 100% all in self-driving vehicles. If they got everybody off the road and just made them robots, that would be the perfect place for it.

By the way, just to, just to state, it's not my dream. It is my belief that this is the only way this will ever work. Okay. So it's more of a nightmare. It's a bit of a dystopian nightmare. Yes. Agreed. So, yeah. And the EU has vowed to get tougher on big tech privacy violations.

We've been talking about this for a long time, that basically these slaps on the wrist, I mean, they're sure, they're billions, not billions, they're millions upon millions of dollars, but it still works out to the coffee budget for these companies. And nobody's going to take it seriously until the slap on the wrist becomes a big old punch to the face.

So that's hopefully what's going to happen now. We'll see. Well, or maybe jail time for somebody. Maybe. Because money doesn't matter. These people have more money than they know what to do with. Money is, taking their money is not a deterrent because they're money factories. Yes. You need to take away their freedom.

And let me tell you why it's important. And you put a story in between, but these were meant to be linked together. So I'm jumping ahead, Jason. We'll come back. We'll come back to it. Documents show Meta paid for data scraping despite years of denouncing it. This is why we need big fucking fines. Meta has routinely fought against data scrapers taking their data, but it also participated in the practice itself, if not necessarily for the same reasons.

Bloomberg has obtained legal documents from a Meta lawsuit against former contractor called Bright Data, indicating that the Facebook owner paid its partner to scrape other websites to bring the data into their company. Okay. Yep. Do as I say, not as I do. Exactly. Fuckers. In surprising news to no one, Amazon is planning to close some of their grocery and convenience stores.

Wait, people didn't flock to these things? Yeah, this is a failure to read the room. They should have stuck to the, you know, the online side of things. I've been to the Amazon Fresh store out here twice. I went once during the preview to check out the little cool grocery carts to see if it worked.

It worked. Great. Fine. Went back one more time when I was desperate to find some flowers. And it was the closest store to the place that I was going. And they had some of, they had the worst flower selection I've ever seen. And it was overpriced, but it got me the flowers. No desire to ever go back there.

It is the weirdest grocery store. They have, I don't know. It's just not great. It just feels weird. It's not great. The vibe is just kind of, yeah, it's creeped out. It creeps me out. You know, the writing was on the wall for me.

Obviously, I don't live in Santa Monica anymore. But when I did, I used to frequent Whole Foods pre-Amazon's takeover. Once Amazon took over Whole Foods, the vibe changed drastically. I mean, I'm not just talking like $25 cucumber water that they were selling and bullshit like that, but it just, it sucked the life out of that.

Whole Foods used to be, say what you will about the old Whole Foods. Lots of people make fun of it. It was a good place to shop for me. And I loved it. But when Amazon took it over, it changed. And it was not cool anymore. Did not dig it. No, it's, if you can, if you can avoid getting run over by a Tesla, which I didn't that one day, it's, it is, it is very strange to go in there anymore.

I try to avoid it whenever possible. But back to this story, Amazon Go stores, those basically little convenience stores. Yeah. One just opened up here in the corner and the local paper said, just don't, don't waste your time. It's garbage. It is, it is a shitty version of 7-Eleven, which is really saying something.

Hard to do. Yeah, I know. And I mean, they basically said, why? Like six times in the article. They're like, why? Why is that here? You can't even park there. There's like four parking spots. Right. It is one of the dumbest stores I've ever seen. But I, I'll probably just go in there just to try it before they rip it out.

It's like, what the hell are you guys thinking? There's, there's literally four parking spots. Right. Know what they're thinking. All right. And a little bit of interesting slash good news about AI. We're going to be talking a lot about AI a little bit later, but I like this story, except it also is a good flashback to what we used to always scream about, about, because AI is in the headline and the entire article says machine learning.

Forget it. Forget it, man. Just give it up. Give up the ghost. I can't. I can't, Jason. You got it. It wrinkles. It wrinkles. Anyways, they're using machine learning or AI, whatever. Nobody fucking cares anymore to find possibly overlooked alien signals in radio telescope data. Now this makes a lot of sense because we have so much data, so much of this radio data from, from our, from the heavens above that it's not surprising that we're missing stuff that people aren't seeing it.

So the system is being trained to identify, um, interesting patterns that then can get kicked up for humans to look at. And they found a ton, a ton. So pretty cool. Oh man. You mean you don't have SETI at home anymore? We've come a long way from SETI at home, baby.

I remember running SETI at home on my first Xbox at night. That was really fun. Yeah. I used to make it my screensaver thing too. It would just click on when I'm not using my computer. I'm like, this is cool. Didn't, didn't find aliens. Yeah. Well, there are none. Sorry. Dark forest.

Dark forest.

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Media Candy. So I texted you, Jason. Yes. When this dropped and I watched it and then my jaw dropped and you said, you're not going to watch it. And I kind of don't blame you because my hopes are sky high right now. Picard season three trailer is awesome.

Well, when's it drop? It comes out in like February 15th or something like that. I thought it was March. I can't remember. There's a couple of different things coming soon. Can't remember the exact date, but it's soon. Very soon. It is going to be very soon. I will pick up my Paramount Plus subscription when it comes out.

Well, it won't be Paramount Plus anymore, Jason. Or Paramount Plus Premium because they're rebranding again. They've decided to completely absorb Showtime instead of this weird, you could add Showtime to your Paramount Plus Premium. So it is now named Paramount Plus with Showtime.

Brian, we really, really, really need to change careers and we need to go into branding because who the fuck is coming up with these names? Who? Who's getting paid to do this shit? Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to see them fit that on the little app thing.

Paramount Plus with Showtime. Oh, God. Can't wait for the new logo. So there you go. It's just being rolled in now. I don't see anything in this article about pricing tiers changing. I guess we'll just get Showtime as part of our Paramount Plus subscription now.

Okay. I don't know. We'll see. Save me time. Save me the hassle of canceling Showtime every time a show I watch is over. So fine. I only have to cancel one app instead of two when my shows are over. And I started to watch a new show on Netflix that this has actually been going semi-viral called Kunk on Earth.

Jason, have you watched any of these yet? Have not heard of it even. It's a British thing. It's a British comedian actress that has created this character and it's a mockumentary about science and how the – this one – she's done a few of these in Britain.

This is the first one that's been released here in the States or North America. I have to say North America instead of here in the States now, don't I? Yes, you do. Yes, I do. So it's the first that's come out over here. It's on Netflix. So she basically – it's six episodes long. You know, she goes through the history of the planet and it's Borat style.

You know what I mean? Like she doesn't know what she's talking about. It's intentionally funny. She interviews experts. You can't tell if they're in on the joke or not, but of course they have to be in on the joke. There's no way they'd sit through these interviews otherwise. So it's pretty funny. I will say that this show is an argument for not binging.

I have a lot of arguments for not binging, but this one in particular. Because it's one joke and it runs thin if you try to watch more than one episode in a row. You know what I mean? Like you watch one. I watched the first episode. I thought, oh my God, this is hilarious. Rolled into the second episode.

I was like, same joke. Pause. Came back to it a couple of days later after you've had time away from it. Funny again. But if you try to binge it, not so funny. It's like the Big Bang Theory. Yeah. If you catch it every now and then, it's good.

If you try to watch more than one of them in a row, you're like, this is dumb. Well, yeah. Remember when I had food poisoning and I watched the first five seasons of the Big Bang Theory in one, like one go? Yeah. Yeah. Same 10 jokes. Same 10 jokes.

Okay. Does it have canned laughter in it? No. Thank God. Oh, okay. Okay. You should check out the first one. I think it's funny, but just don't binge. At the library.

Brian, recently you talked about finally reading Dennis E. Taylor's Outland, which turned out to be his first book. Yes. And I was like, oh, okay. I kind of remember that book with the volcano and kind of a portal to other dimensions or other parallel worlds type of thing.

Yes. Earthside is the follow-up and it is out now on Audible only because he has its great deal with Audible. I hate that deal he made. I love that deal. It's perfect. Problem is I started to listen to it and I really couldn't remember very much about the first book.

So I had to put it on pause. I'm going to have to go back and do a double header to get back into Outland so I can read this one. Because I'm sure his skills have grown quite a bit since that first book. He's got a few more under his belt. Yep.

Yep. He's done some more writing since then. Yeah. I read a new book. I read Ask a Historian. 50 Surprising Answers to Things You Always Wanted to Know by Greg Jenner. Now, this is another person I discovered thanks to No Such Thing as a Fish, the podcast. He was a guest host once and was very funny.

So it was – I love this book. It was – I love the way he writes. I love his personality. It's very funny. Very, very good. Then I went through all of his previous books and I feel like I read A Million Years in a Day, which is one of his other ones, A Curious History of Everyday Life from the Stone Age to the Phone Age.

But it does not – Amazon is telling me I have not purchased this book before. So maybe it was on my – maybe he was promoting that one when he was on No Such Thing as a Fish and I was like, oh, I should go get that. That sounds good and never did because this is how our brains work now. Yeah, because that sounds familiar.

It sounds like it's a familiar title. And so is his name. But I think I probably heard it on No Such Thing as a Fish as well. Yeah, yeah. But highly recommend it. I love the way he writes. He's got a really good personality that comes through. It's very funny. And he's an actual historian. He knows what he's talking about.

Yes. And you mentioned why do we do that on the last episode, the podcast. And you couldn't – you said you had to listen to it on the BBC Player. Well, our fans have come out of the woodwork saying, nope, nope, you can get it on Overcast or other places. Yeah, I think when I first was listening to it, it was exclusive.

Like it had just come out and it was exclusive to the BBC. Now it's out everywhere. Got it. Got it. Yeah. No, I downloaded it and grabbed all the episodes. I listened to a couple of them. It is a good show. I enjoy it. Yeah, short little 10 minutes and very interesting. I like her too. She's engaging and funny. Yeah.

No, all in all, definitely a good show. So good find. After Babble is a new Substack newsletter from Jonathan Haidt. I like Jonathan Haidt. And so I shelled out the money for the $50 a year subscription because the money actually goes to charity.

He's got some nonprofits that he's set up himself, probably the Jonathan Haidt Second Home Foundation. Vacation fund. Yeah, exactly. I have I've actually I put it on my thing to read it and then I got busy. So I'm putting the link in here for everyone to go check out because I think if you listen to the show, you probably like Jonathan Haidt and you like some of the books that we've reviewed of his.

The Coddling. Was it The Coddling of the American Mind or something like that? Yeah. Coddling of something. Not the cod piece. The Coddling. But he's a smart guy. He's a very, very smart guy. So definitely check it out. Link will be in the show notes. And OK, there's a an op or an op ed, whatever, by Ezra Klein called How Barnes and Noble came back from near death.

This is the second article I've seen about Barnes and Noble coming back from the dead. And the other one was not an opinion piece. I'm trying to find that one so I can put it in the show notes as well. Somebody on our Discord channel sent it to us. I remember something in the New York Times a couple of weeks back. too, about that.

I'm happy about this. I love bookstores. I love them. Yeah. I never liked Barnes and Noble, but any port in a storm, you know? Yeah. It'll do. Yeah. Borders ain't coming back, which was my favorite, but especially the sale table.

I love the sale table at Borders. But this guy, James Daunt, took it over. And, you know, he's a British book guy. And what he's done was he basically turned all of the staff at the stores into the people who basically run, literally run the store.

They're like, make this a place where you would want to come to buy books. And that's what they're doing. And shocking. It works. It works. It works. Yes. Put your super consumers in charge of the actual business. And it goes. It's like the old school Tower Records where all the employees had their charts up for their favorite albums and they were all stacked in places.

That's how you do it. That's how you find out about cool stuff through people, not through algorithms. God damn it. Or paid placement from the, you know, the super ding-dong publishers. You do it from the people who care about books. Yep. There was another, oh, there was a great, the greatest sci-fi bookstore in Chicago called Stars Our Destination that was the same way.

It's like you go in there and you just ask, you're like, hey, what's new and what's good? And you would just get like 20 minutes of somebody was walking you around the store and you would like walk out with an arms of books. It's great. Yeah. That's the way you do it. I love that. I'm so happy that they're coming back.

We actually have a chain up here that's still in Canada and Toronto that still exists. And it's great. I love taking my son there and we just walk around. It's awesome. Cool. Cool. This next site I thought you might get a kick out of. It's called Wikinigma, an encyclopedia of unknowns. Wikinigma is a unique wiki-based resource specifically dedicated to documenting fundamental gaps in human knowledge, like the difference between AI and ML, you dumb fucks.

No, that's not in there. But there's- No, that's a known known. Yeah, there's a known known. It's just everybody ignores it. Yes. It says it's a compendium of so-called known unknowns. That's great. What a great idea. Yeah.

There's about, it says 956 articles so far. What's nice about it is you can browse by topic genre or you can actually just hit the random button. I just like going and hitting the random button. It's fun. There's a lot of shit in there I don't understand, but that's the point of it.

Nobody does. Exactly. Security? Ha!

We're joined by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the highly acclaimed Cyber Wire podcast. As the co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, Dave delves into the fascinating and often chilling world of social engineering. Dave also brings his expertise as co-host to Caveat with Ben Yellen, a podcast that explores law and policy, surveillance, and privacy.

Dave also co-hosts Control Loop, where he and his team dive deep into the latest developments and trends in the field of ICS and OT.

Welcome to the show, Dave. Hello, gentlemen. By the way, we have been told and talking about how we need to rebrand this from Security Hawk because we don't even bother anymore. This needs to be the dark side with Dave Bittner. Oh! Oh! Okay.

That's good. All right. I'm on it. I'll call our VO guy. Very good. Very good. I like it. I like it. Nice. Well, I just have to start off by this segment by just sending out a heartfelt thank you to both of you fine gentlemen.

Jason, you'd been kind of warning me that there was a package in the mail on the way. And when Jason warns you that a package is in the mail, you should be scared. Well, yes, you should. Yes, and it was not ticking, so I felt good about that. So yesterday afternoon, there's a knock at the door here, and I go out, and there's a box sitting out there, and I bring it in, and it's, oh, I don't know, about a foot and a half by a foot and a half by a foot and a half, and I come in, and I open it up.

I start slicing through the plastic on the outside, and as I'm opening it up, I'm thinking, wait a minute, and I get to where there's bubble wrap, and I'm like, could it be? It can't be. It is! What's in the box? Yeah, exactly. This is just the most beautiful Stormtrooper helmet that you could ever ask for.

It is spot-on perfect. It is gorgeous. It is really well-made. It's also comfortable, which I didn't think was possible with these things. Well, that blows a hole, and that's why they can't shoot anyone, theory. Well, yes, but you know what?

And it's also, it's easier to see out of than I thought it would be, and it could just be that it just happens to line up with my head. I have a big head, so I'm pleased that my head fits in it at all. But this is a really high-quality thing here, and I know I sent you guys a note, but this makes me so happy.

I have been smiling from ear to ear, and I'm kind of in that mode now where you've gotten something new, but you don't remember that you have it. So every time I walk into my studio here, and it's sitting on the desk, I see it, and I just go, oh, yeah, this is mine. I'm glad it brings you this joy.

I'm sorry we couldn't afford a full outfit for you yet, but hey, you stick with us another 20, 25 years, we'll get it to you piece by piece. That's right. That's right. Yeah, I got to stop growing my belly so I can fit into a real, so I don't look like fat trooper, but no, it is not an exaggeration to say that this is the fulfillment of a lifelong

dream of mine since I was eight years old to have a stormtrooper helmet, and now I do, and it is a good one. I mean, I can't imagine someone making one better than this. So I have to ask you guys, is there a story behind this as to how you track down such a high-quality item for your dear dark side friend, Dave?

Yes, there is, and I cannot believe you don't remember it. We actually talked about this on the show. This comes from our friends in Russia at CyberCraft. That's why it took so long to get here. Friends in Russia, thin on the ground these days, by the way. Exactly. Exactly.

And so, for months, this has been like, I've almost had an ulcer tracking this thing. Yeah. They flew it over the Ukraine. That was a bad move. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was tough. That was tough. Shout out to Leonard Kim over at CyberCraft, who had to put up with me asking every week, where is it?

Where is it? Because the way the tracking works coming from Russia is it gets you to a certain point, and then they say, your package has left the country. And I'm like, okay, now where is it? They're like, uh, it's left the country. We don't know.

It's like shrug emoji. Right. And you're like, oh, have faith. It'll all work. It's like in Shakespeare in Love, you know. It's a mystery. Well, it seems to have made its way through the UK on the way here. I was looking at the various stamps and things that are on the box as it made its way here.

I was surprised to see that it came from Russia. Honestly, if you had asked me, I wouldn't have been 100% sure that we were allowed to get things from Russia right now. But I'm awfully glad we are. Yep, yep. I ordered that thing on, I think, December 6th. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

So, he's like, yeah, there's festivities. The funny thing about the tracking is when they said it was on a Chinese weather balloon. Yeah, exactly. That was weird. I hear like a clunking noise on the roof of the building and go up there and find it. Just a weather balloon, though.

That's all it is, guys. Just a weather balloon. Yeah. Right. Right. So, yeah. So, it was one of those things where I was like, I kept looking at it and kept looking at it for a couple months. And then when it finally came around to Christmas, they're like, we're having a sale. I'm like, Brian, I think we need to do something.

Let's pull the stormtrooper trigger. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was very upset, though, when I told Brian that, you know, if we buy three, we can get even a bigger discount. And he said no, so we didn't get him. I wanted to get the matching set for all of us, but Brian's the wet blanket.

I think this is probably my gateway drug into the 501st. It is 501st approved. Yeah. Well, that's great. And it has to be. I was going to say, it cannot be. Well, I sent you guys some pictures. And the thing about stormtrooper helmets is, and it's the same thing with Darth Vader's helmet.

Like, if it's just a little bit off, there's something about it. You look and you go, that's not right. But you look at this one and you go, it is spot on perfect. And it's because stormtrooper helmets, the originals, are famously handcrafted.

So they're not symmetrical. And this one has just the slight imperfections that we've got programmed into our brains to say, yeah, that's a real stormtrooper helmet. And I think you can tell how excited I am about this. It's just really nice.

So I've been wearing it around and I just, like I said, I'm just grinning from ear to ear. And I'm just, I can't thank you guys enough. So I really appreciate it. I'm very glad. We're so glad to have made you this happy. It's a good thing. This is what life is about, making people happy and giddy.

Mission accomplished. So if you guys want your own stormtrooper helmet or any of the other helmets they make, check out CyberCraft. The link will be in the show notes. Or their Instagram channel. They show them making these things. And it's a pretty impressive process because they mold them and they do all the painting and finishing by hand.

So they're not like off of an assembly line, really. They are handcrafted. The Boba Fett is tempting. The Boba Fett is very tempting. The interior is beautiful as well. It's all, it's covered in soft fabric and there's foam in there. I mean, I've seen pictures of the inside of lots of different stormtrooper helmets.

And this is by far the nicest, most comfortable one I've seen. All right. Well, everybody, share the show with your friends and enemies and go to patreon.com slash GOG so we can get Dave the rest of his suit. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, man. No Corvette for Dave now. Sorry. And moving away from Star Wars, we have some feedback from Lisa Liu along the subject of chat GBT and the Nigerian Prince.

I'm a web designer and recently had a scam attempt from Smith Morgan, a guy who needed a website. The inquiry seemed legit at the beginning with a workable project outline and business overview. So I bid on the project. See, that was your giveaway that it was bullshit because there was a workable project outline. The S came very quickly, too quickly, and it ended with the classic, I need one favor.

I need you to take a larger payment so you can pay my other contractor because I cannot in my condition. Surgery, blah, blah, blah. It's a common ploy on Craigslist and they're usually easy to spot. But I'm thinking with chat GPT, these scripts will become more and more specific and realistic. Wild West stuff. As open AI develops, so will the scams.

Beware and take care, guys. That's a good point. Yeah. It's not just us messing around with good old promos and weird things. It's the scammers are using this, too. Right. Yeah. I think you mentioned this on a previous episode, Dave, where it's like, okay, we don't have to worry about broken English anymore because they can fix it.

Right. Fairly easily. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is definitely going to be a thing. But speaking of things that they fixed, I went through and I looked at our chat from a while ago where we role-played the Pinocchio game with chat GPT.

And I went and I put in the exact same prompts that you had sent in and they have fixed it. Now they talked about the liar's paradox in the actual replies. So that's good. It's alive. It's learning.

It learns. They're listening to our show. They're listening to our show. They really like us. They really do. And thanks to Stuart Lloyd for sending in the info about the liar's paradox on the last episode. He also dug up the Star Trek clip from the episode where they actually use this on the androids to- The sexy androids?

Yeah, yeah. And hardcore fit in mud. So that clip will now be in the show notes as well. It's all fun to go watch for sure. And Alex wrote in, oh, dear God. He says, another AI tool to play with. If you upload one minute of someone's voice with the AI, we'll then use it to say anything that you put in a transcript.

And yes, I did. This is from 11 Labs. It's a beta. I sent it a 10 megabyte file of my voice from an audio book that I'm reading. And it trained in like under a second. It was like, boom. Okay, here you go. So I put in a piece of script that was a different piece of script from the training data.

And it came back. And I'll play just a second of it here for you. So if you are a CMO, this idea that you need to be proficient in as many different marketing platforms and disciplines as possible is nonsense. So that's not exact, but it's pretty damn close.

And this is the free version. They have a professional version, which is better, which I'm guessing you can train on more data. And you sent me one, Dave, too. Right. So just so my plan was to not tell you that this was a recording of me before I knew that you had been already playing with this.

So the jig was up. So what I did was I asked ChatGPT to write up a thank you to you all for having me on the show. And then I loaded that text into the Eleven Labs beta voice synthesis, and this was the output from it.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the hosts of the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast for having me on their show. It was an absolute pleasure to share my thoughts on cybersecurity, and I appreciate their willingness to engage in an open and frank discussion. I'm grateful for the chance to have shared my insights and experiences with the audience, and I look forward to future opportunities to do so.

Thank you again. See, the failure there is in ChatGPT not synthesizing your personality on this show, but the voice is spot on. Like, it's good. Yeah, it's crazy good. Yes, it's mostly me. It's – if you weren't looking out for it, if you hadn't been warned to pay attention to it, and you asked someone, who is this, they would say it's me.

Same with yours, Jason. It sounds like you. Here's where I start to get a little freaked out, because cast your minds back, not even that far, maybe a little bit over a year ago when one of the very first iterations of this AI voice training popped up, and we were all looking into it.

And Dave, I remember we had a conversation about what happens since we have these vast archives of podcasts that we've done. These things just get turned – pointed to the vast archive of our voice. It'll probably get pretty close.

A year later, five minutes, boom. Right. That's how good this stuff is getting. Very fast. Five minutes for free. Well, the Microsoft one was like three seconds – or 15 seconds, and it was getting it. Think about how good these things have gotten, how quickly they've gotten that good.

It's kind of frightening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this got me thinking about improving or customizing podcasts using these techniques. So let me lay out a scenario for you guys that maybe you can relate to.

There is a podcast that I very much enjoy listening to, and I'm not going to say the name of it, and you'll know why in a minute. And this podcast has three hosts. Sounds familiar, right? And I really enjoy two of the three hosts.

Okay. The third host I don't like at all. In fact – Sounds very familiar. Very familiar. Right. In fact, I'm sure the listeners right now – They're in the room with us. Yes. Listeners right now are nodding their heads vigorously, and some of them are thinking that I'm the one that they don't like, and I totally accept that.

That is a valid point of view. So when I listen to this show where there's the one of the three hosts who I just dislike, and I find myself when I'm listening just saying, oh, shut up. Shut up. Get to the point.

Come on. Right? So this got me thinking, could I come up with a version of their podcast where I would take their show, have it transcribed, have – and figure out a way to do all this in an automated sort of way.

And take only the parts of the show from the host who I do not like, run them through chat GPT to say, summarize these parts. And then run that through the voice synthesis so that I get a version of the podcast with the host who I don't enjoy listening to cut down to a fraction of their presence in the show but still with the content that they provide.

Because this person is also long-winded and uses 10 words when one would do. Right. Is his name Casey by chance? It is not, no. Damn. I thought I had it. I thought I had it. I'm thinking that Dave's not going to name names here. Yeah. Well, I mean, I was already thinking, can't I just take all of our segments, throw them into chat GPT, let it spit it out, run it through the synthesizer, and just send Jason the audio files and our show's done.

See? And as Brian says that, I was thinking I could actually bring back boot up without ever touching the microphone again. And just do it literally from my bedroom in the morning. Now, it sounds to me like, Dave, this is obviously pretty possible, assuming there are APIs for all these things.

Alternatively, you just find a show you like better. Yeah. There's a possibility. There is a possibility. That's crazy talk. That's crazy talk. He does like two-thirds of it. Come on. That's better than most podcasts, Brian. Jeez. That's true. That's true. But going down that pathway, what if I wanted to have the nightly news read to me every night by Walter Cronkite?

Ooh. Right. I could do that now. That's totally within reach. I mean, you could do Walter Cronkite. I could do Scarlett Johansson. I mean, might as well have an enjoyable voice. And I would do Christopher Walken. Ooh, that's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. But this is not a fantasy anymore.

Well, I guarantee you that lawyers are very much thinking about this exact thing right now because now it's going to be copywriting voices, copywriting faces. All that sort of stuff is in play already. I know this. I know lawyers that are working on it. Yeah. Even on the voiceover side of things, when I'm doing all this research into getting into the voiceover game, which I think I'm probably going to put on the shelf now because why fucking bother?

Everybody's talking about make sure you read your contracts because you could be just accidentally giving away your digital rights to your voice to a company that they don't even know that they're taking it. So you have to be very, very careful about how your contracts are worded for any of your voiceover work.

And it's a thing. The professionals are really thinking about that right now because this is getting really damn close, really close. It is. Once they get the emotional thing, you know, if you could – if there's like an HTML for voice scripts for the prompts where you could say, you know, blink, whatever.

Sarcasm. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yes. Disdain. Cover this in disdain. Well, I would love to know what the pro version of this Eleven Labs thing does if you had – because for all – for the three of us, there are hundreds if not thousands of hours to train on of our voices.

So if you just toss the RSS feed for our shows at one of these training libraries and let it chug away, to what degree can it nail our personalities? Like, would it know how we reply to things? I don't know.

But – I don't know either. I have no doubt we're going to get there. I feel like that's where the AI falls down now. But yeah, I agree. We're going to get there. Definitely. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm going to – I'm definitely going to try the pro version to see if it – if you get more training or like more training time or what it does that really kind of – not just more, you know, characters that it will read.

Oh, remember – I'm hoping that it does more stuff. Remember in the old world when you wanted to purchase something, they actually told you what it would do? Not anymore. No. Now you have to buy and see. Right. Do you feel lucky? Yeah. Caveat emptor, baby.

Mm-hmm. So I've got a great ChatGPT story for you. Mm-hmm. Our friend of the show, David Teeter, Dr. David Teeter, called me the other night just in a fit because he was so giddy because he broke ChatGPT. I'm like, okay. He's the one.

He's – well, when he does something, I listen because he's definitely the smartest person I know. So he did a query. He says, how much PFAS is in synthetic turf because he is a world-known specialist in this kind of thing about astroturf and the chemicals that it leaches into the groundwater and all this stuff.

And so it comes back with an answer. And then he follows on with, what studies have found that the release of PFAS from synthetic turf can be significant? Then it starts to read some studies out and gives it a little more thing. And he says, please list these studies, and it lists three studies.

Then he says, oh, well, please tell me the DOI number of these studies. Then it comes back with DOI numbers for these studies, which are the digital object identifier numbers for the studies in the academic research. Then it says, please give me the titles and authors of these studies, and it does.

Here's the rub. None of these people, none of these studies exist. Completely made up. 100% from whole cloth. Yep. Wow. And he asks ChatGPT, do these references really exist? He says, yes, the references mentioned in my previous responses do exist.

The DOI numbers and authors are correct, and the titles match those found in the referenced studies. You can use the DOI numbers to locate the full articles through a library or academic database. So if you Google it, no, you can't. And then he even goes on to say, I think you're lying.

ChatGPT comes back and says, I apologize if my previous answers were not accurate. I am an AI language model developed by OpenAI, and I strive to provide accurate information. However, I am not perfect, and sometimes I may make mistakes. If you have any questions or concerns about the information I have provided, I encourage you to research the topic further using credible sources.

Which I am not. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, yes, completely made up. Wow. Well, and so I think that speaks to – I've seen a couple descriptions of ChatGPT. One is that it's bullshit as a service, which I think is good, and I've also seen it described as mansplaining as a service because it – because basically it spews out bullshit but with total confidence.

Yes, yeah. And with no regard for the audience to which it is spewing the bullshit. And this is an example of that, I think. Yeah. Well, again, it's just a tool. Right. And it does what it does. It doesn't necessarily purport to be the expert in any field or even truthful.

It answers the questions. It will make up shit to answer the questions. The tool is the tool. It is what it is. It does what it says on the tin. It will answer questions. There's no promise in here that it's not going to make shit up. It's going to answer the questions.

Right. That's it. Like, there's nothing here. There's no reason to believe that it's going to be an expert or tell the truth or anything. It's just you put in a question and it comes back with something plausible. They should have just named it MAGA. I was avoiding the Donald Trump thing because, you know, years of PTSD of getting yelled at because I shat on him so much.

I know. I know. I just want to start running conspiracy theories through here and just see what it comes back with. Oh, God. Right. I wonder if now will there be a – like if you buy the pro version, would it include a separate AI that can do fact-checking for you? That should be in the free version.

Yeah, right. Now, they do have a new tool that they came out with for detecting the AIs and it sucks. It really sucks. I mean, this is going to be really bad whack-a-mole, right? That's the territory we're getting into.

Again, to our previous discussion about this, like we need to accept this. It's here. It's not going to go away. Being able to catch it is going to be just as fraught with danger as using it in the first place. Again, approach it as a calculator.

It's a tool. That's it. And we don't need to just accept it. Like don't try to figure out if people are using it or not. Who cares? That's right. Well, I kind of care when it comes to fact-checking. Like I said a couple weeks ago, I think all these low-rent writers are going to turn into prompt writers and fact-checkers.

We need the fact-checkers. But here's the other thing that I worry about. If I take some of the output that I know is completely false from something that somebody might be searching on fairly obviously and I go create it and then perpetuate the lie that it did.

Like, I don't know, vaccines cause autism and start making documents that ChatGPT then starts indexing and putting out there. You can create a flywheel of bullshit. You mean social media? Oh, that too. Yes. It's called Twitter.

Elon bought it, damn it. It's called Twitter and the bots that are already all over the place. Like it's nothing new. It's just another version of it. I know, but it sounds so good that people are going to trust it. That's the thing. Right. Right. But isn't this interesting that we kind of bump into this time and time again with AI?

I mean, remember back with Microsoft's Tay where they tried to do a conversational thing and it just so quickly veered into racism and just all the nasty isms that are out there online. And I think this speaks to that as well where in our minds, we like to think of AI as being this aspirational thing that is better than us.

But if we feed it all of the information about us, it's really just shining back a mirror at us. And the fact of the matter is, is that human beings in the course of their day-to-day lives do a whole lot of lying. Yeah. And that's what this is doing. Some of it altruistic. Some of it not.

I mean, there have always been arguments that the white lie is grease is the wheel of social conversation. That's right. That's right. And it's true. Your butt does not look fat in that dress, my dear. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And but those 32 fingers on your left hand really, really, you know, go with your complexion.

So it's it's a strange, definitely a strange new world. I love this stuff. But now that Microsoft is going to be building it into teams and we're going to get Clippy GPT coming out of this, that'll be that'll be really fun. So, yeah, I mean, because we use teams in at my work.

And so I always get those press releases and things like that. It's their application of it, at least initially, is kind of interesting in that it's going to summarize meetings and do like immediate post summaries and things of that nature, which is kind of cool. That's a great use. That's a great use of it.

Exactly. So it's not like they're opening up the whole thing through teams. That is that is the initial thing. Now, I'm sure it will expand. But what I like about a company like Microsoft, why I was thrilled that Microsoft actually invested so much money in this is they have appropriate corporate guardrails, unlike many other companies we could mention right now that could have been investing in this.

Microsoft, I actually kind of mostly trust with something like this. You did hear what we just talked about with Tay and the racism. Well, they shut it down immediately. They shut it down immediately. But they released it. Well, you shouldn't have released it to begin with.

They're getting learning. That was a learning experience for them, apparently. The AI trained them. Yeah. OK. I was at a get together with some friends over the past weekend and several of them were public school teachers.

And we were talking about ChatGPT and how they think it's going to affect their profession. And, you know, it sort of ran the spectrum from those who, as you say, Brian, just embrace it as being the next version of the pocket calculator to others who were lamenting that it really is going to take away creativity and those sort of things.

But one thing we all agreed on was that kind of the chasm between the way that we're teaching our students and the way the real world operates is getting wider. Yep. That teachers need to be recognizing that this is the future.

And so the point I made in our conversation was, what job do you go to these days where you aren't allowed to look things up if you need to? Right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Show your work. No. Right. Google. It's called Google. All that stuff. I was actually related to that.

I saw that there was some uproar about the fact that I guess millennials don't even know how to read cursive anymore, to which I thought, who cares? When's the last time you wrote something out in cursive? Right, right. Let it die. I can't read Sanskrit either. What's the fucking point?

Exactly. Exactly. It's time to move on from these things. Nobody writes in cursive. Nobody reads cursive. You sign your name. That's it. You know, and I want to go back to what you said, Dave, about creativity, because what I'm seeing is I think this is actually creating an explosion in creativity because people are putting in different things that they, you know, that they'd want to see in the world that they didn't have to do.

They didn't have the faculty to create, especially with the, you know, the image stuff. But even with the writing, it's like you can put in things that you just come up with from your imagination and it creates it. So people are thinking differently on, you know, just things that they would like to see in the world and slapping it in here.

And it's, you know, it might not be perfect, but it's a starting point. I like it. I think this is actually helping it. I agree. I agree with you there, Jason, in that it should be a starting point. And when I've talked about it using these kind of tools at my company for things like crafting press releases and of that nature, I always say, first draft.

Use it for your first draft and then sit and massage it and add in the voice and the opinions and the personality after. But you can use this for the first draft and save time because that part's the hard part, getting all the freaking details and the boring, plain language. Then go in and tweak it.

That's creative to me. I don't have a problem with that at all. Yeah, I agree. I agree. All right. All right, guys. Well, I'm going to go slap my stormtrooper helmet on and run around the office scaring people. So thanks for that. Over at Patreon, we've got Mark, David and Matt.

Welcome, welcome, welcome. And remember, everyone, if you sign up for our Patreon feed, you get the show a little bit early sometimes when it's available. But it's also ad-free and in high res. You get the full resolution, 192 kilobit per second MP3.

Listen to my basal profundo. Yes. Dulcet tones. I forgot about that. Over at PayPal, we've got Matt, Simon, Nicola, Jonathan, Judge, Nikolai, Matthew, Robert, and Thomas. Thank you all so much. Woo-hoo. Over at the tip jar, we've got Daniel, Adam, Mario, Christopher, Matthew, and Sean.

Thank you. And we have a new five-star review from Nisian. Good listening as we slide toward our inevitable doom. If you remember making web pages during the first internet bubble, then these are your people. Experience your inevitable physical decline with friends who are going through the same thing. If you are young, then use this podcast to find out about how in the future good eating and exercise habits become a matter of life and death.

Also, there's tech news sprinkled in from the jaded point of view of people who have seen it all before. My only criticism is the segment with Dave Bittner should be renamed from Security Ha to Shooting the Breeze with Dave. Regardless, it's a segment I look forward to each week. I will continue to listen for as long as we all continue to survive. Hands down, the best review we've ever gotten.

Yeah, we've basically given up on Security Ha because, you know, he does 25 podcasts all about security. He can do those. Yeah, pretty much. And, you know, I think five years into the show, we all had just breach fatigue, you know, because we were covering it every week. Like, oh, new breach, new breach, new breach, new breach.

Fucking Christ, could somebody lock down their AWS database for once? No. That's pretty much what it got to. Yeah. No. I guess we'll get to big stories when they actually come along, but it's more fun to talk about Star Wars and shit. It really is. Yeah.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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.

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