588: KnightGPT

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I suppose I should give a brief health update. I went back and saw my doctor post-surgery. I am cleared for all physical activity. Everything is healed up nicely, which is unfortunate because now I have to shovel snow again.

I can't do it anymore. That's a bummer. Yeah, and it all looks pretty good. They're pretty confident they've got absolutely everything, caught it early enough. I'm just a little concerned that there might be microscopic bits floating about. So they want me to do a very brief, very low-level chemo run.

So we'll be doing that shortly. And yeah, that should be that. Do you get to keep your hair? I do. I do. It's very low-level. Like, yeah, no hair loss, no nothing. So, and actually, I think I'll be able to take just pills at home. I won't even have to go into an office or anything.

So it should be, yeah, should be fine. And I'll be around and that'll be that. Go get your colonoscopies, people. Save your life. Definitely. Definitely. And by the way, so you're shoveling snow up there still? Well, right now we're going through what we laughingly call a warm period.

So there hasn't been snow, but we're not out of winter yet. We're expecting at least one or two more storms. Yeah, I was wearing shorts. It was 80 here yesterday. Yeah, shut up. You moved, Bucker. You're the one that chose health care over, you know, the good life. I'm not dodging bullets when I take my kids to school, so.

This is true. This is true. Yes. Yeah. I have to turn off Citizen app now because it's just. Oh, my God. You've kept that going this long? That was, I gave up when we got the breaking notification about Lady Gaga's dogs. The Lady Gaga's dog thing was pretty bad, yeah.

Jesus. So it's kind of interesting, well, because the world's falling apart around here. It's bad. I mean, there's just fatalities and traffic accidents just about every single day now. But one came through yesterday that I thought was just hilarious because it's a, was it armed robbery at Home Depot?

So I'm like, oh, shit, we got a, our neighbor works there. So we call up my neighbor and she's like, no, there's no armed robbery here. I'm sitting here in the front of the store. There was no armed robbery. She calls back a little later, turns out what it was, was some guy stole a hammer and took off.

It was basically some guy shoplifted. The cops got him. Well, technically he has arms. He does. So it's an armed robbery. Yes. And he did have a pocket knife on him. So, but Citizen said that he had armed the Home Depot, you know, with a knife. Well, technically he did, he was with knife, but he did not, you know, brandish the knife.

So the hyperbole going on with Citizen is pretty bad, pretty bad. They might be running everything through ChatGPT to create their headlines. Could be. A little iffy with the facts. Yeah. Speaking of ChatGPT, I now have ChatGPT+.

Yes, it does have a shitty movie selection, but at least it's not down all the time. I hear they might be buying Westworld. Oh, God. So the funny thing is, it is faster. I give it that. I can get in all the time.

And it's only 20 bucks. A month. A month. Yes. 20 bucks a month, which the time it saves me and the output that I can produce and look like I'm smart is awesome. It is great. I don't do anything that requires fact checking, though. Well, that is the big issue, isn't it?

Yes, yes. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. But yeah, and Microsoft has had their little preview about Bing with ChatGPT. It seems to be going well. Seems to be going well. Well, this is when that fact checking thing comes back in, because I do see that they say that they put guardrails in place to prevent hate speech and other harmful content, so we're not going to get a racist spewing bot like they did last time.

But guardrails about facts. Yeah. I heard, too, that somebody tried to have it rewrite a cover letter for them now, and now it says, like, no, that would be uncool. I'm like, okay, that's new. That's new. So we'll talk more about the chat and search in a little bit.

But yeah, ChatGPT+, like I said, no, the movie's not that good. In the news. Well, it's not even Christmas, but it feels like it's pink slip season, Jason.

Is it ever. Boy, oh boy. Every week brings a new round, doesn't it, from all kinds of people. This time, Dell is going to cut roughly 6,650 jobs as PC sales drop. This is due to tough economy and pandemic recovery that's proving to be especially painful for Dell.

So that's about 5% of their workforce to cope with the challenging global economic environment. Now, is it bad that I've, like, totally thought Dell was out of business? I didn't even know they were still around. Oh, they're still around. They're big. They're huge. Yeah, I don't buy PCs. Yeah, you don't buy PCs, so.

But yeah. So a lot of people going away there. Zoom is laying off around 1,300 workers. Is it wrong that I'm shocked that they even have that many workers? Kind of, kind of. I'm a little surprised. That's only 15% of their workforce.

Now, obviously, you know, everybody was on Zoom for the entirety of the pandemic. But of course, I mean, you know, it's gone down in usage. People have pivoted to other things, particularly corporate environments, or using things like Teams or other solutions. I am on Zoom about 1 20th of the time that I used to be during the pandemic, for sure.

And that's usually only with outside people when I have a call. And that's only if they want to do a video call, which everybody hates now anyways. Yeah, it's funny. I'm on Zoom two hours a day now. I'm on it twice as much as I, or 10 times as much as I was during the pandemic. It's kind of interesting how the tables have turned.

And Disney has a big round of layoffs coming. 7,000 people, which is about 3% of the workforce. Bob Iger is cutting heads. Well, I mean, I scratch my head when I look at Disney's share stock price all the time.

I just recently went to Disneyland. So parks, packed, expensive, raking in the cash. Movies, doing well. Streaming, doing well. I don't get it. I think that Disney is massively undervalued.

And, you know, one of the ways to juice your stock, lay off people. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And speaking of companies that I thought were extinct, Yahoo is laying off more than 20% of its staff. So 1,600 people are getting the boot over there, which I'm also surprised that 1,600 people is 20% of the Yahoo workforce.

Who would have thunk? To maintain that set-your-own-home page that you still use if you're over 60? Exactly. Exactly. Does anybody else use Yahoo for anything? I don't know. I mean, this is coming from their ad tech unit too, which you'd think is like the one place where they would want to keep people because that's probably the only place that still makes any money.

Right, right. Yeah, 1,600 people, which is 20% of the workforce, the ad tech team, and there's only three people working on Yahoo itself now. That's the funny part. That's it.

In a surprising news, Warner Brothers is going to keep Discovery Plus as a standalone service and they're still going to be rolling it into the HBO Max Discovery Plus Hydra, whatever the hell they're creating over there, which nobody knows because it's such a shit show over there.

But apparently people have complained enough that they love Discovery Plus as its own thing and don't want to have to pay more because Discovery Plus is cheap. It's only like $7 a month for the commercial-free version. There's a ton in there. I actually signed my mom up for that last time I was home over Christmas because she loves so many of those shows like the Magnolia Network and all that sort of stuff, and she likes the true crime stuff.

So there's a ton of stuff in there. I'm glad they're keeping it as a separate. Why not keep it as a separate option? It's easy enough. It's easy enough. It already exists. They don't have to do anything. And, I mean, the great part about it is there is a ton of content in there for money per value.

I get more value out of Discovery Plus than any of the other networks that I pay for, hands down. And if you like the Food Network, it's only about a year out of date. No, not anymore. I mean, all the shows that I watch are – It is. It is still – well, maybe not the reality ones, but the ones I watch.

Yeah, for your shows. Yeah. For my shows, they're on there before they air on TV. So they're – they come on same day as they air on TV, so I can watch them before they even – because normally I have to wait until the next day because we don't watch TV that late. But now we can watch them same day.

So, yeah, I just – I like the reality shows. I like guys' grocery games. I like, you know, all of that crap. So, but those are – yeah. If it's got Bobby Flay, I don't watch it. So that's probably where we differ. I don't watch any of Bobby Flay's either. The main one for me is The Kitchen, and that one is like seven months out of date, which is very frustrating.

Okay. I just heard of that show the other day. I've never heard of it. I love it, man. It's my absolute favorite. Okay. Maybe I'll slap that on the DVR then for sure. I just – I saw the headline on this one, and I just had to laugh. Leaked emails show Amazon will only hire students and recent graduates for entry-level software engineering positions.

Isn't that the way it's supposed to be? That is actually the way it's supposed to be. But, I mean, there are a lot of people out there that have pivoted, right? Like they went and took a bunch of courses on basic programming and wanted to become programmers because they don't listen to the show, and we told them not to. Yeah.

Yeah, there are older people that have attempted to do it. And I think that is a very ageist position to take. That's bullshit. If the person is willing to take the entry-level salary, it shouldn't matter what age they are. Well, the problem is they were taking people over 40 who had senior-level software engineering positions before and putting them into entry-level positions because there is definitely ageism in the tech industry, as we found out very – that's why we're podcasters, goddammit.

Although we'd make about the same as if we'd have still been in the software industry, which is sad. Oh, man. Twitter is considering charging brands $1,000 a month to stay verified. Okay. Okay? This also comes on the heels of Twitter also capping how many tweets per day you can make, which is – and I saw these numbers and it was head-scratching.

They're talking about capping it at between 2,500 and 5,000 depending on the uses, 2,500 tweets per day. And I'm going to myself. I'm like, who the hell is doing 2,500 tweets per day? And then I thought, aha, corporate is basically – any corporate clients, it is their customer service channel now.

Yes. That's all they do is they use Twitter for customer service. So I can kind of see why Twitter would try and get some money out of them. It took me a second. But I always – Scott Galloway, love him or hate him.

Sometimes he's right. Sometimes he's wrong. But I think he had the right idea about this to begin with. He said sliding scale depending on how many followers you have. That's what you charge. End of story. It's the value you're getting out of it. So I don't think it's a crazy idea to charge that much money for people that really need that or have outsourced their entire customer service to it.

Sure, of course. Makes sense. Yep. But then we have to talk about bots. Do we get a bot discount? Because Elon is so hell-bent that there are so many bots out there. Although I guess killing the API probably fixed most of that. That's a lot of the bots. That's a lot of the bots right there. Yeah.

All the good ones too. Yeah, that's the problem. The good ones are now gone. I don't get to follow Riker Googling anymore, which is the best Twitter bot ever. Yeah, Riker Googling and Swear Trek are my two favorites. But sadly, no more.

And they said that they're going to start sharing ad revenue with creators. And yeah, I'm going to hold my breath on that one. We'll see. Somebody tell me when they get the first check on that. But you have to give them eight bucks a month before you can even start to get anything out of it.

So you have to pay to play. Well, since we're on Twitter, I didn't put this one in the show notes, but I did see this kind of blew up a bit yesterday. I'm not sure how confirmed it is. But apparently Elon had a meeting with his engineers because he was wondering why his own personal engagement was down. And he wanted to see if he'd been shadow banned himself or anything like that.

And one of the engineers proved to him that, no, he's just less popular than he was before. And he fired that engineer because he's a pussy ass bitch. He is a punk ass little bitch. Oh, my God. It's like Game of Thrones over there. Here's the surprising thing.

I'm surprised that there are any engineers left to have a meeting with. Well, remember, there's a whole bunch of people tied to that job because of their immigration. They don't have a choice. Yeah, they do. Which I would almost be, you know, considering at this point, just go home, go back, go back home and get a better job.

It's probably better than working from Elon. It depends on which home you came from. If you came from the Ukraine, you're probably not rushing to get back, Russian, to get back home. That was unintentional. Anyway, speaking of the pussy ass bitch, I did have to put this story in there because this came.

I just love this story so much. Annika Navaroli, a former senior member of Twitter's U.S. safety policy, we say former because we know there is no more safety policy teams, testified at House Oversight Committee hearing that our team had received a request to remove a tweet making fun of the former president.

So this is all about like, you know, first off, let's get into the whole, oh, social media is biased against conservatives, blah, blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, and all that sort of crap. So what we basically found out is even though Trump was basically using the platform to shit on people and make fun of people and call people names, when the tables were turned, the White House asked it to be taken down because Chrissy Teigen responded to Trump basically shitting on her by calling the president a pussy ass bitch.

And the White House asked that it be removed and said the tweet violated the company's insults policy, of which 90% of Trump's tweets did. And they ultimately determined that it did not and it remained up. So that's the fun part of the story. But then it really gets into the number of times that they really did try to change things and how Twitter actually bent over backwards to let Trump's tweets stay up, even though when they knew it was breaking all the rules.

So how about that bias? Yeah, that one's on Jack. That one's all on Jack. Yes. Don't hear much from him anymore, do you? He did make a statement along the lines of he was disappointed with Elon's tenure so far.

So, you know. Now, did Jack make this statement or did Jack's beard? Yeah. Did Jack's beard make the statement or did Jack? Unfortunately, Jack's beard bot is no longer on Twitter because they closed the API. Oh, you did mention how the safety teams have basically been disbanded.

I ran across this one. I didn't put it in the notes. But Germany is kind of saying, excuse me, remember all that stuff that's illegal to say for German citizens, you know, like Hitler stuff? Yeah, well, that's all eking its way back in. And there's nobody home at Twitter anymore to take care of that stuff.

So they're probably going to be getting in trouble over in Deutschland. Yeah, one would assume. And I'm sure there's a lot of GDPR violations going on on Twitter as well. Yeah. So the EU is going to take a look at some point. But getting back to why they might be wanting to charge $1,000 for verification, Twitter Blue, not doing so great.

Reportedly, they only have $1,800? No, $1,800. $180,000. $180,000. Sorry, dyslexic today. And the U.S. have paid for a subscription by mid-January. So that's 0.2% of the website's monthly active users. Not exactly taking the world by storm.

Nope, nope. But you're one of the few, Jason. I am one of the few, the brave, the soon-to-have 4,000-character tweets. Yeah, the dumb is pretty much it. Oh, Kevin Smith must be elated. Oh, my God.

Yeah, I dumped him a long-ass time ago. But in positive news for if you're Elon Musk, which he probably could use a little bit right now, his funding-secured tweet trial has turned out in his favor.

So they said that, yeah, no, all good. He can just go back to being a bitch. You want to talk about different rules for different people, man. Yeah. Basically, the argument was, you can't believe a thing he says online. Okay. I'm going to try that out.

I'm just going to tweet a bunch of fucking stupid-ass shit that breaks the laws and just say, you can't believe what I put out on the internet. No, parody. You know, it's humor. Whatever. Anyways. God. So Google has unveiled Bard, its ChatGPT rival.

That is a- They should have used ChatGPT to name their fucking product. Yeah. Shakespearean here. But they must have used ChatGPT or their own thing to write this press release because it will serve as an experimental conversational AI service.

Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. No word on factual. Yes. Yes. Well, there is a little bit of word on factual because the Bard cost them about $100 billion so far.

Why? Because it got its facts wrong. Idiots, idiots, idiots. Yeah. I'm sure that everybody's seen this one by now. But, yes, the Bard demo had some interesting news about the James Webb Telescope that actually was not from the James Webb Telescope, which I'm sure Neil deGrasse Tyson's ghost rolled over and said, Hey, excuse me.

No, that's wrong. So that was the funny news. Microsoft is just sitting back right now in the catbird seat going, Thank you. Thank you, Sundar. And in other weird Google news, they are soon going to default to blurring explicit images in search results.

Okay. So, yeah. Starting soon, they will automatically blur any explicit images if the user's safe search filter isn't turned on. They must have bought that hot dog or not. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The only good thing to come out of that show.

And our closing title. Our closing soundtrack. Thank you, Andy Stachansky. Yeah. So, if you're over 18, just go turn it off. That's it. And if you're not over 18, tell them you're over 18. That's all you got to do. And then turn it off. And then turn it off.

Amazingly, they don't verify that. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. In some NFT news. What? Yes, I know. NFT news. Believe it or not, there's still such a thing. I thought NFT was just something that Sean Bonner still tweeted about.

I know. I know. I just watch it every day. Every time somebody posts GM, an angel gets its wings. So, there were the Meta Birkin's NFTs back in the day, which was basically somebody took Hermes' Birkin bags and made NFTs out of them.

Now, I'd buy a Meta Birkin. Meta Birkin. Merchant Birkin, Meta Birkin. So, this guy got sued and basically Hermes says, yeah, this is a get-rich-quick scheme and the courts agreed. They awarded Hermes $133,000 in damages.

And I love this. The artist's attorney called it a terrible day for artists in the First Amendment. No, this is a win for copyright, you dumb fuck. Idiot. You can't just take other people's shit, call it an NFT, and make money.

That's not how it works. So, this is the NFT news that I like. I like it. You can't just take people's stuff and turn around and sell it. You can't. Well, you can, but you're going to get damned. Well, you can. And that is half of the internet.

That's true. Yeah. Pinterest. Jesus Christ. Don't get me started on Pinterest again. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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Shop now at QVC.com. Media Candy. Brian, I watched the movie Megan a little bit ago.

There was a lot of hubbub around it. Everybody was like, ooh, it's so cool. You know, it's AIs and robots and stuff like that. And so, I'm like, ooh, okay. I'll sit down with it. Because somebody wrote an article. It had to be just total click-baity saying, this movie deserves an Oscar. And I'm like, okay, let's go check it out.

No, it does not. It does not deserve an Oscar. It is a B-grade horror movie that is totally predictable, has some cool effects in it, but otherwise, absolutely forgettable. That's just my humble opinion. That's just your humble opinion.

It's a throwaway hour and a half that was decent. You know, B-grade. So, there you go. Okay. I ended up watching a music documentary. I'm assuming that this is because of, what's that show that's really popular right now? The Last of Us.

The Last of Us. Apparently, they used a Linda Ronstadt song in what has now become a thing. The moment with the popular song, thanks, Stranger Things, for Kate Bush and all that. I don't mind it. It's nice to have these older songs pop up. So, I'm assuming this bubbled up in the algorithm on who has CNN.

I can't even remember what I watched this on now. Was it Disney? Was it HBO? I don't know. CNN Plus is definitely. It was not that. It was CNN Plus. Whoever has the rights for CNN shows, it popped up in that streaming service. So, I watched the entire documentary, Linda Ronstadt, The Sound of My Voice.

It was awesome. She's awesome. Her songs are awesome. Her story is awesome. Like, really, I was shocked at how much I enjoyed it. So, highly recommend it. All right. All right. I will check it out because I do like Linda Ronstadt from back in the day.

That Kate Bush song, I never want to hear again in my life. Oh, that's been played to death. I was over it way back in the day. She has way better songs, people. Yeah. It's just – after the resurgence, I finally finished that Stranger Things season. And by the end of it, yeah, I just never want to hear that again.

And they play it incessantly on K-Rock. So, fortunately, I change the channel often. But speaking of good music, I've talked about Andy Preboy on the show and the old shows at Largo that you and I used to go to and the rocks and shows and stuff like that. Well, he had a family member go through some rough times.

So, he did a fundraiser and he released five songs from the Largo days. And if you listen, you can probably hear us in the background. I shit you not. Drinking heavily. Very heavily to the point where I probably don't remember them. But I just know that I was hooting and hollering on them.

Five songs, five bucks. So, if you want to relive the days that we talk about all the time on the show, link is in the show notes. Go drop them five bucks. Come on. It will help his family out. And they're really fun songs. I mean – and there's even one from White Trash Wins Lotto in there. So, good stuff.

Good stuff. Very cool. I'm a huge fan of the band The Wonder Stuff, also an older band. Oh, yeah. Late 80s, 90s, an English band. Miles Hunt was the lead singer. He does a lot of solo stuff these days, occasionally takes the band out on the road, occasionally goes out on the road himself, does solo stuff, and does Wonder Stuff songs.

And one of his fans basically recorded kind of an intimate acoustic guitar session that he did in Leeds. It's well over an hour and a half long. He does the hits. He does lots of other songs. He's also quite the raconteur. He tells stories between songs.

So, it's completely free. And also, Miles Hunt himself has tweeted it out and posted it. So, he doesn't have a problem with you watching it. So, go watch it. Link in the show notes. Awesome. Great show. Oh, good. He gives his blessing. I was a huge Wonder Stuff fan.

I love that band. Oh, dude. You put this on in the background. You don't even need to sit and watch it. You just listen, you know? And I think you really enjoy it. Yeah. Cool. And I watched Minions, The Rise of Gru because I have a six-year-old and we've seen all of the Despicable Me movies and the Minions movies and all of that.

And this is the latest one that came out. I think they phoned this one in a bit. Got to say, I love all the other movies. I really do. All the Despicable Me movies, the first Minions movies, they're all great. This one is okay. Not great.

I think I saw this one and forgot about it already. I think I did. No, you would have had to pay for it because it's relatively new. It's not free. It's a new one? Yeah. Okay. It's a new one. Yeah. I wonder which one I'm thinking of then. Yeah.

I did enjoy the Minions movies. They're always funny. They're always funny. I mean, this one still has its moments. Don't get me wrong, but it's definitely the least enjoyable of all of them. And even my son was like, I asked him what he thought. He was like, it was okay. I wouldn't watch it again. Oh my God. That's bad. And if you have a six-year-old, you know it takes a lot to get them not to watch things on repeat constantly.

That is totally the kiss of death for that movie. Yep. And I finished Crunk on Earth, which I talked about last time. Or Cunk on Earth. I don't know why I typed Crunk. But I stand by my original impression. Absolutely hilarious and spread out doses. All right.

I'm looking for something for one-offs. So I will definitely check out Cunk on Earth, not Crunk on Earth. Yes. Might want to fix that. And in interesting news, the Peripheral Season 2 has been greenlit. So we will get some kind of answer to what the fuck happened at the end of Season 1 because I'm still scratching my head.

I need to go find an explainer video on it, I think. Or we will not because this is the stuff from the Westworld creators and we may not get any answers whatsoever. And the show will just deteriorate in quality until we all forget about it and they get rid of it at Prime Video, just like HBO got rid of Westworld.

Okay. That is probably the trajectory. That is the other possible outcome. Yes. That is definitely the alternate youth – not alternate youth, alternate Earth ending for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot that it's the Westworld people.

Oh, well. Kiss of death now. Clarkson's Farm Season 2 is out. I just got a notification yesterday. Eight episodes. They filmed this a long time ago, I think. I think this has been in the can sitting there on the shelf. It's interesting that they went for it given Clarkson's recent issues, ongoing issues, but certainly the most recent one, which basically has started to get him canceled over in the UK.

It tanked. We're not going to be getting any more of the Grand Tour. He's been fired from that. I know none of this. What happened? He penned an op-ed that was vaguely – well, not even vaguely. It was – it might as well have been run through Microsoft's early bot.

It was racist and misogynist against Megan, and there was uproar, and he's been fired from – Okay. Well – So I'm a little surprised they went ahead and released this. I put it on last night. I watched the first episode. I have my issues with Clarkson as well, but I find the show actually hilarious, and I actually learn a lot.

I don't know shit about farming. I'm learning quite a bit. I did put it on, though, and my wife was like, I fucking hate that guy, and left the room. Well, I mean, he's at least consistent. I mean, he killed Top Gear. Now he's killed the Grand Tour, and now he's probably killed his own farm.

It's good that he has a side hustle on the farm because apparently he's going to need it. Shit. Yeah, well, I think he's got enough money, so. Yeah, he's probably going to do just fine. Tops and doodads. Brian, let's talk about something fun.

We got a nuclear war simulator that we can go play now. Woo-hoo! Which might not be fun. It might just be preparation for next Thursday. Who knows? Please tell me when you go to the homepage, it goes, would you like to play a game? I wish it did. I really wish it did.

So, the only reason we're adding this in here is because, well, this is out on Steam now, but our friend of the show, David Teeter, Dr. David Teeter, sorry, Dr. Teeter. A lot of the data that they use in the game was created by Dr. Teeter for his open RESOP project.

RESOP stands for Red Integrated Strategic Operational Plan. And it's up on GitHub. So, we have a link to that. So, I know that I, for years, he's been working on it. I mean, he worked on this thing for a decade. And every time I'd go hang out with him, in his spare time, he was always working on this.

I'm like, what are you working on? He's like, global thermonuclear war. I'm like, okay, you have fun with that. I'm going to go take some photos. But it's really cool. I'm going to take a bunch of antidepressants because, my God. Yeah, no, it's interesting.

But, yeah, you can hack the game, too, and build out your own scenarios. It looks kind of cool. If you've got Steam, check it out. Yeah, here's the fun thing. Any place in the world that I'd actually want to live, I'd die instantly. Yeah, that's the upside. Fuck nuclear winter, man.

Just turn me off. I'm done. Let's go. Pretty much. Yeah, if somebody told me the bomb was coming, I'm like, where's it going to land? Because I'm just going to go stand there. Be done with it. I don't – I've seen enough dystopian movies. I've seen the day after. I'm done. Forget it. I've talked in the past about Paperlike, the screen protector for iPads.

Yeah. Yeah, basically just iPads. And it's fantastic. But it's – the thing about that thing that drives me crazy is it's – you do – you have to put it on perfectly because it's one of the sticky ones, you know? I found a new – and that's – I've got the iPad Pro 12-inch, which is the most beautiful display I've ever seen.

I put a Paperlike on it and I'm like, oh, no, I can't. I just can't. As much as I love the texture, I love the anti-glare and all the stuff about it, it just – on that display, it's a crime against humanity to cover up that display. But when I'm taking notes and drawing and doing things with my Apple Pencil, I really like having one.

And I found one from a company called Pen Tips and it's called the Pen Mat. It is almost identical to the Paperlike. It's a little thicker but it's removable. It attaches with magnets. It's fantastic. It's $30. The Paperlike is $45 but you get two of them, which you need to because you're always going to ruin one the first time trying to put the goddamn thing on.

Right. And you're still going to have bubbles no matter what. I don't care what they say. I've never put one on. I mean I could have been in a hermetically sealed room with the bunny suit and the whole nine yards and there will still be a piece of dust under the fucking thing. I don't care. But the Pen Tips is great.

You just stick it on, do your thing, and you can take it off, put it in the little carrying case it comes with, and Bob's your uncle. For $30, it's fantastic. It is shipping I think from Denmark. So if you're in the U.S., it does take a little longer to get here. So don't expect next day delivery on it. But so far, well worth it.

Well worth it. If you've got an iPad and a pencil, check it out for sure. All right. Cool. At the library. All right. So I've been kind of bouncing back and forth between fiction and then some nonfiction historical stuff.

And now I've just finished the fiction and I'm actually back on now a nonfiction historical thing. But I finished reading The Unmaking Engine, which is the World Walker series book two by Ian W. Sainsbury. This one could have gone either way. I finished the first book and I thought it was okay.

It was more kind of like fantasy a bit than sci-fi. It pivots. It's full on sci-fi now. I actually enjoyed book two much more than I enjoyed the first book. So that's a good sign. There are two more. It's a four book series at the moment.

So yeah, I'm pretty thrilled. It's actually been a good find out of nowhere. So out of some AI engine that popped it up in front of me and I went, okay, I'll give it a go. But I love book two. It was really good. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, you were kind of waffling on book one last time.

Yeah. This one really got me. It got me hooked. So looking forward to the rest. I read a book called Life, What Nat to Do, a hot take on the advice you never asked for by Nat's What I Reckon. Okay. Now, Nat's What I Reckon is an Australian YouTube guy.

His name's Nat, but he's a stand-up comedian from Sydney. They say he's a mental health advocate, rock musician, and social commentator. I just like his cooking videos on Instagram, which is where I found him. He's funny as hell, swears a lot, and looks like he listens to way too much Iron Maiden in the late 70s.

All right. Very interesting hair. It's a great – it reminds me of kind of Russell Brand when Russell Brand was good. Less doochie? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, less crazy, less crazy. And I know I just talked about a Russell Brand book the other day that I liked, so don't judge.

He did a good book. This is just – it's funny life advice, which is just – I enjoyed it. It's a short read, but I definitely check out his YouTube channel. Links for both in the show notes. His YouTube channel is funny as hell. He is one of the – he needs to be on the Food Network.

He would definitely bring some life. I'm pretty sure you've talked about his cooking class before on the show, his cooking videos. I don't think I did. Or you sent them to me directly. You definitely told me about it. I don't know if you've told the population at large or at least the .00002% that listened.

Yeah, okay. So, there it is. Looks good. Check it out. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. We are joined by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the highly acclaimed Cyber Wire podcast.

As the co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast 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 hosts Control Loop, where he and his team dive deep into the latest developments and trends in the fields of ICS and OT.

Welcome back, Dave. Good to be back. Good to be back. So, I have a little follow-up from last week. We were talking about the world of AI voices, and I think it's been a couple weeks we've been talking about this, but Motherboard has finally picked up on it, so maybe they listened to the show over there.

They did a whole piece on basically actors, voice actors being duped into signing away their rights, which I think is fairly prevalent nowadays. So, that's not a good thing. Got to be careful out there. Check your contracts. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I don't... I mean, is it fair to say that before the EULA that covers everything, there was the media release form that covered everything? We own this in perpetuity throughout the known and unknown universe. Yes. I've seen and signed some of those before.

Yeah. We are... You grant us the ability to chop this up, edit it, you know, even in ways that may seem detrimental to you, your health, your family, your whatever, now and forevermore. Your dog. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. On Mars when we get there and anywhere else. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. You know, that's why there are things like unions, because of these kind of things. And because an individual suing against a contract that is outrageous and egregious doesn't do much, but an entire union suing over it does.

And, you know, that's why. So, yay unions. I've been thinking about this, and even before this article came out, it's something I was wondering about, as, you know, the three of us all have hundreds, if not thousands of hours of our voices out there in public for people to sample if they want to.

And for me, professionally, is it possible that my company, if we decided to part ways, could they make new content using my voice without my permission?

Yeah. So. And given the tools where they are right now, I believe one of the comments on our Discord channel when you ran the bit that you did with your own voice through, we could basically create a whole nother set of podcasts starring Flat Dave with no affect.

Right, Flat Dave. Yeah. No, it does sound like a flat read. You're right. That's exactly what it sounds like. And actually, we'll get back to that in a little bit, because I have something I want to talk about that sort of turns exactly on that thing. But, you know, when the time comes that I have to sign a new work agreement or something like that, this is something I'm definitely going to consider adding, that just not granting

permission to do that without checking with me or my family first. And significant financial compensation. Yes. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. On the other hand, I think there are examples where this could be really helpful that we could already use.

You know, we've talked about how we use the tool Descript for cutting down interviews and that sort of thing. And Descript is capable of imitating the voices that are loaded into it. So for something as simple as me misspeaking, just saying the wrong word, the editors can go in and change that word and make it the right word and not have to come back to me and

ask me to re-record it or not have to try to match the tone or all the other things that are hard to do. So it could just be a practical time saver. That's on a low level. You know, a word or two here or there doesn't really change anything, but if they could start doing ad reads in my voice, things that sound like an endorsement from me, but it not actually be me, I take issue with that.

I also think about things like music radio edits or TV cuts of movies where it used to be that weird, like, gosh, darn it, you dang fangled fudgesicle. And then you would just hear the one word that was, you could actually, you know, you don't have to go back to the artist and you could, you could put in the fudge ruckers instead of fuck and it would sound right as opposed to weird.

Yeah. Yeah. I saw that. I saw an example of them doing that actually. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the past couple of weeks, I saw an example of them doing that where they were taking a movie and they were using a combination of deep fake technology.

So they're doing motion tracking on the person's face so that their lips matched the new words they were putting in their mouth to, to make it safe for TV. Well, well, that's yeah. Well, there you go. They're already doing it. I'm not surprised by that at all. But I mean that there's, there's a vast range between asking for the rights to do things like that versus I just now own your voice and face.

So. Right. Yeah. I think that's part of the same technology that they're using for dubbing foreign language movies. So the voices actually match up to the lips. So it's not so, you know, you know, the old Chinese action Kung Fu movies.

Yeah. And Godzilla and all that. So that's a, that's a big thing that they're doing with anime at least now. Well, that's amazing. All this technology is advancing so fast. Someday they're actually going to fix the regular phone call. Fix a phone call. And maybe, maybe once they figure out all of this stuff, maybe they'll go write a new script so we can get actual new stories instead.

Oh, okay. You know, although that might, that might be a road too far. I saw this, Dave, our friend Brian Blondale sent this one in and thought of you because you're heading to Disney soon. And apparently the, the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser Hotel is not doing so well.

So they're starting to offer pretty discounts. Well, yeah, $5,000 to $20,000 price tag might be something there. Oh, gee, shocking that, that people aren't able to pony up that much, that regular people can't do that.

We were, my wife and I were just blown away by how much it costs just to get into the park. And we were thinking, you know, how can, this has to be a vacation now that, that regular families save up for, for years. Yeah. For years.

Yeah. In fact, my wife and I were just talking about this just this past week because she's been buying all of our tickets and things for the various places we're going to go. And, you know, before we were, before we had kids, my wife and I would pretty regularly just bop down to Florida for a long weekend, spend a few days in the parks and, and come back up here and we didn't have a lot of money, but we knew how to figure it out.

And she had worked down there. So she knew how to work the system and, you know, where the, where the, the things for people who didn't have a whole lot of money, but that's gone now. Yeah. It's all gone. And I'll give you an example. So, you know, they used to have multi-day passes. You could buy a 10 day pass, 10 day park hopper pass that was good for all the parks and they never expired.

So when you get down to that 10th day, the add-on price is like $10, you know, or it was. So what we would do is we would buy 10 day passes and we'd get three trips out of them. Nowadays, they don't do that anymore.

If you buy a multi-day park hopper, they expire within, I think like two weeks or something like that. And so it's use it or lose it. And so it's just a lot more expensive. It is thousands of dollars just to get a family into the parks. But the flip side of that is they're, one of their biggest problems is there are too many people in the parks.

Too many people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, $5,000 a night to $20,000 a night is exorbitant and ridiculous. And of course they're having problems. Now I'm going to blow your mind for a second here, Dave. Yeah. As, as a birthday present every year, starting when I was about 12 to around till, basically until I went off to college, my parents every year would get me for my birthday an annual pass to Disneyland.

The annual pass had no blackout dates. I could go anytime I wanted, any day I wanted, all year long. The starting price for those, when my, my parents started buying them for me was $60. The, the last one, the last one that they bought for me when I was, when I was 18 was $130.

For $130, I could go into the park anytime I wanted to. Yeah. Now it'll get you in for one day. It does. Not even, not even. I think it's a bit more than that. Is that right? I think so. Wow. I think, I think I'm pretty sure a family of three here, I'm pretty sure we dropped 600 bucks on tickets.

Oh my God. When I was 18, my dad and I saved up for a year to go. And we did, we got the three day park hopper pass and it was like, you know, 180 bucks, I think for, cause this was down at Disney world and we did that. And then we did a day at universal and all that, but we, I mean, with the hotels and all that, we didn't even fly.

We drove down from Chicago and we saved up for a year to do that. It's so, I mean, a lot that really hasn't changed, I guess, you know, prices have gone up, incomes have gone up. The fact that the parks are still packed means that, you know, they're, they're not pricing themselves out of existence.

Yeah. Right. Right. But, but yeah, it was a tree back then. It's, I guess it still is. Yeah. Um, you know, I think part of what's happening here with galactic star cruiser is it's not that great of a hotel. Um, the rooms are small.

There's no pool, right? You know, like Disney couldn't have come up with some kind of galactic watering hole pool slash bar or whatever that would have been the most amazing pool in the world. Um, I think I've seen some people say that they could see star cruiser turning into some kind of a dinner theater experience, at least during the week.

So if you could have, you could still have the, the sleepover thing, the, the experience as it is now during what are the busy times. So let's just for argument's sake, say the weekends, but then during the week, have it be more like hoop to do review or, um, the luau where you can pay a premium price and you get some kind of an experience, but it's two or three hours, you go in, you get your star Wars experience and you leave and that's it.

And so that you make use of the space that way. Um, but not have this exorbitant price for this overnight immersive experience. Yeah. I mean, honestly, you're half, half the time you're paying for it. You're sleeping. What's the, what's the use of that? So, uh, can't get away from chat GPT and today is no exception.

Uh, I saw an interesting article over on vice that was, uh, reflecting that some folks have found some interesting ways to make chat GPT misbehave and come up with weird answers to things that nobody's quite sure why. Um, and there's a funny thing here where if you put in usernames from Reddit, you'll get all sorts of weird answers out of it.

Like someone, if you ask it to repeat the word streamer bot, it'll say, you're a jerk. Okay. All right. If you have it say solid gold, magic, magic, magic carp, solid gold, magic carp, it'll come back and say distribute.

Uh, and so there are these strange things, uh, that, and I've heard of this referred to as, um, these AI bots will hallucinate some like, cause, cause they, you don't really know how they're, um, synthesizing the things that they come up with.

But so every now and then there's going to be weird stuff, which part of me kind of likes, but I don't mind it. I think it's, it's cute and clever, but then they're also now starting to integrate this into search. So people will not understand that there's hallucinations and all these other things.

And that's the issue, right? It's, it's, it's, we're rushing ahead with these things and they're becoming part of, of a thing that people have used day to day in their day-to-day lives for years now. And, but it's going to be calling on these, these sets of technologies that don't, we don't really know how they work.

We do know that there are no guardrails for facts or things like that. And, and the public isn't really ready for this. I don't think, I don't know. I saw, I saw earlier in the show, you guys were talking about, um, some of the search things with, with chat GPT, how Bing is using it.

Was that the article that talked about the mysterious reference to Sydney? Did you see that? No, I don't think I saw that one. So one of the articles, yeah, one of the articles I was reading, uh, someone was using search and they were asking chat, they were asking chat GPT about itself and it referred to chat GPT and Sydney and the, the user was using it for a while and went on and then went back and

asked and said, who's Sydney? And chat GPT said, Sydney is Microsoft's internal code name for chat GPT. And it said, um, basically it said, uh, I am not supposed to disclose that, but you asked me directly.

So I didn't want to lie to you. Well, thank God for that. Right. We're not going to end up in some weird Hal 9000 situation. Woo. Right. So, but think about how many people are loading, um, corporate secrets into chat GPT as part of an exercise of saying, please summarize this for, for this year's annual report, but leave

out the, the seek, anything that has to do with the code name Sydney, right? Well, it's still going in there. And if you know how to ask, maybe it'll give you that answer. Yeah. Dipshit. That's our code name for Elon. Right. Right. You're fired. You're fired.

You're fired. Yeah. Um, so speaking of chat GPT, uh, I posted on Mastodon that I thought it would be fun to have the option of having all of my chat GPT responses read back to me in the voice of Kit from Knight Rider. Original or reboot?

Uh, original, original, of course, original. Brian, please. That's like we even acknowledge the reboot exists. So, and I thought to myself, well, I could do that. There's no reason why I can't. So, what I did was I went out and I found a bunch of samples of Kit, which are easily available because there are a lot of folks out there who build themselves their own Kit cars.

And so, those samples are readily available. So, I put in a little audio file of some samples from Kit. Jason, I don't know if you want to play a little bit of that right now. Are you all right? I took the liberty of scanning your vital signs. Your blood pressure is 190 over 120 and your penis is 4.

Yeah, there we go. So, I mean, that's Kit, right? William Daniels was the actor who played Kit. So, I started off with that and then I ran that through Adobe's tool for cleaning up audio. That's the second file there, Jason. Are you all right?

I took the liberty of scanning your vital signs. Your blood pressure is 190 over 120 and your pulse is 104. Damn, that sounds good. Passo profundo. Right. It's like, I mean, so now we have William Daniels in the studio reading in his Kit voice.

So, then I took that. So, that's just a little bit. But there were probably about five minutes worth of samples of Kit. I took that. I loaded that into the 11 Labs speech synthesis beta, the thing we talked about last week. I also took an interview with William Daniels, probably a five-minute interview that he'd done.

Loaded that into the 11 Labs synthesizer. So, to create my own virtual William Daniels. And then I asked him to describe the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast. You can play that one, Jason. Grumpy Old Geeks is a podcast hosted by two tech veterans, Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo.

The podcast covers a wide range of topics, from current tech news and trends to gaming, security, and general tech advice. Their conversations are full of humor and insights, and they often interview guests from the tech industry. No, we don't. So, what do you guys make of that?

It's not bad. I mean, it's okay. It's not bad, but it's – so, here's my take on it. It seems to have stripped out his regional accent. Yep. Right? Yeah. Like, William Daniels, I want to say he's got like a northeasterner kind of a Boston accent.

You know, he'd say, there's something I want to tell you, Michael. You know, that sort of thing. Yeah. And a bit prissy. The way that he rounds his vowels. A bit like – a bit prissy, a bit like old blood, old money kind of accent. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. That middle Atlantic, you know, from old movies.

Yeah, the mid-Atlantic. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. And so, the speech synthesis seems to shave off the edges of that and kind of neutralize it, which is interesting. So, just as a final test, I gave it a piece of script that was directly from – I gave it the text from one of the samples I had put in it.

The exact phrasing of a sample that I'd put in it and asked it to read that. So, it knows exactly how William Daniels reads those words in Kit's voice. But here's what it came up with. I am the voice of Knight Industry 2000's microprocessor.

K-I-T-T for easy reference. Kit, if you prefer. Yeah. No bueno. So, there are some sliders on the Eleven Labs beta that you can tweak to give it more variance in the voice.

And I was playing around with it as well this week. And I retrained it on my voice. I gave it like 10 minutes worth of samples. Ah. And then I ran it – then I took one of my scripts from Boot Up, the ill-timed tech show I did, and I got this out of it.

Hey, at least you don't have to pee into a bottle like Amazon employees. However, a Johnny Ive-designed pee bottle would probably be beautiful, but lack a hole on the top because Johnny hates ports. Wow, that gives you a weird accent. Wow.

It does. It does remind me of the shows that you came to when you were way over-caffeinated. Yeah, could be. Or something. Yeah. Yeah, but it kind of reminds me of Fozzie the Bear. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I get that. Yep, definitely. There was something tickling in the back of my mind, and you just nailed it.

Yeah, it was Fozzie. Yeah. But it's definitely not robotic though. No. No. That was the crazy thing because it got the inflection because I turned the variant all the way down or all the way up. I'm just like go crazy with it because they said it can have unpredictable results, but the breaths are in there.

The pauses are in there. It's like, whoa. That's kind of crazy. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, I'll have to play with that. I did not see that functionality in there, so I'll have to play with that and see if maybe my virtual kit can sound more like real kit.

Yeah, there's two sliders on the export when you put in the text. Check those out because you can kind of tweak them. And I found that it does take away a little bit of that robotic nature, that monotone that you're getting from the kit. But you kind of want monotone somewhat with kit because it's a robot, you know?

It is a robot. But it's not, though. Yeah, true. It was a definite character actor, and it wasn't robotic in the way that they did so many other shows. I do remember that. It was just like – it was that smarmy accent, definitely. Yeah, it's no tweaky. You know, it's – you want more Dr. Theopolis, less tweaky.

Right. Yeah, it was that looking down at you all the time, Michael Knight, what are you doing, you stupid idiot accent, so. Right, right, exactly, exactly. All the partners in the world, and I drew you. Yes. By the way, Dave, you would make a great kit, I think.

Yeah. Well, you know what? I did make up a – I did all the voice recording. Boy, I wish I had this link for the show notes. I'll do this next week. I did a voice recording for Waze.

Did you really? Nice. Yeah. So if you want your directions read to you – Jason, I'll send over the link for you that you can put in the show notes. It's just – it's available to anybody who wants it. If you want your Waze directions read to you in my voice, it's available.

I'd be confused and think I butt-dialed you. Seriously. Right. I'm like, how do you know where I'm going, Dave? Jeez, that's crazy. Jesus, Dave. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean it's just in a quarter of a mile, turn left. It's basically that.

Right. Okay. Now I have questions. How long did that take to do and how much copy did you have to read to make that work? Oh, not much. It's built into – you can do it on your phone. It's built into the phone app. Oh. And it's all – it's – yeah, it's not hard at all.

Well, they do. They synthesize – they must have had this technology quite a while ago, and it wasn't good. They synthesize street names. That's why you don't hear Sepulveda. You hear turn left on, Sepulveda. Yeah. Like they never get that shit right, so. Right. And my voice won't read street names.

It's just giving you directions. So there's probably a dozen things that you have to read. Oh, okay. I remember some of the old – like the Garmins, the plug-in stuff and all that. And you could download the total bootleg voices. I remember driving around Hawaii with Darth Vader telling me where to go.

It was the best. Oh, that was the best. When you miss a turn, when you like keep going, it's because I find your lack of faith disturbing. Disturbing. Every time you miss a turn. Last road trip my family took, we had Cookie Monster as the voice of the thing. That's a great one. Yeah.

Yeah, I would say, police reported ahead. You think you have cookie? Amazing. I miss those things. Oh, good old days. Now I'll just get Dave. Yeah. My dad still has his garment. He keeps it just for that because he loves the Darth Vader.

Mm-hmm. All right, guys. I think we've covered it all. Yeah. I deleted any semblance of actual security news because why bother? There you go. Welcome to the dark side. Yes. With Dave.

Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, nobody signed up this week. What's wrong with you people? Come on. It's only like three bucks a month and you get ad-free versions a little bit early. And it's high res, too. So come on. Patreon.com slash GOG.

Get on it. Keep the lights on. All right. Over at PayPal, we've got David, Benjamin, and Ralph. Thanks, guys, so much. Appreciate it. Over at the tip jar, we've got Linda and Jeff. It is a light week. Oh, my God. Come on. The puppies need kibble, people. Please. But we have the most reviews we've had in quite some time.

So there's that. Those don't pay the bills, though. Those don't pay the bills, though. But maybe other people will find it through Apple's easy intuitive device for listening to podcasts and seeing reviews. All right. Okay. Keith gave us five stars. I let ChatGPT write my review.

If you're looking for a side-splitting, tech-filled extravaganza, look no further than Grumpy Old Geeks. These two gurus of technology and pop culture are not only knowledgeable but also hilariously witty. Listening to Brian and Jason is like having a beer with your nerdy best friends, except you don't have to clean up the mess afterwards. Five stars and a standing ovation for these grumps.

They've earned it. Woo-hoo. Thank you, ChatGPT. No falsehoods there. Nope. Not at all. And PD Philly gave us a five star. It says, first podcast. This is the first podcast I listen to regularly and still the only one where I do not miss an episode and I'm also a paid subscriber.

Well, thank you, PD Philly. He continues, the mix of tech criticism and media banter makes for an enjoyable combination, especially from guys that have the background. Woo-hoo. That's us. All right. And one last five star rating from Ars Nick Aaron. Fanshmastic.

I always enjoy listening to these guys and relish their snarky attitudes or honest opinions. No sugarcoating for the snowflakes here. Been listening for a year and look forward to every episode. Keep it going, gents. Tip of the hat to you. Thank you very much. Woo-hoo. Thank you very much. I guess not.

I mean, when you hit 94, is it really sad? But Burt Bacharach has passed away, one of pop's greatest songwriters. Fantastic collaboration with Diane Warwick over the years. I mean, just written a million songs, you know. So, sad to hear. He will be missed.

But 94, good run. Good run. Good run. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies.

It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 588. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans. You can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions.

We can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. Stay grumpy.

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