590: A Zucker Born Every Minute

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. Breaking news, Brian. What's that? I just got an email from CoinX that says, Dear CoinX users, we noticed that the IP address previously connected to your account was associated with the United States.

Blah, blah, blah. You're going to get kicked off if you're a resident. Blah, blah, blah. 60 days to withdraw your assets. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then we will ban your account. Blah, blah, blah. And take all your money. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the reason I put this in here, well, two reasons. One, I never signed up for a fucking CoinX account, which has me really kind of worried.

Yeah, I get meta wallets all the time, notifications. So I don't really get it. I didn't get this one, though. I'm surprised. Yeah, the meta ones, I get those because I have – remember, I bought that $250 worth of ETH that is now worth $112. But what I loved about this email is at the very last line that says, CoinX reserves the right of final interpretation of this email.

What exactly does that mean? We're going to redefine what is is today. First, like, that cannot even possibly be legal to have a statement like that in your email. It's crypto. Do you think they care? Well, none of it – well, it's not legal, which is why they're shutting down in the United States anyways.

I'm sure something's going on that made them go, hmm, you know what? Not a good place for us to be doing business. Just thought I would pass that along. It's breaking news. All right. Well, let's get into some of this other stuff. I guess we're shoving this in follow-up because we talked about it.

Microsoft has had a week with their Bing and their AI, thus proving that AI can just, like, destroy even the most steadfast of companies. Microsoft is very good, generally, at releasing their products, at measured responses, and making sure things are at least mostly correct before they release things these days.

But AI has got them going nuts, just like everybody else. At the beginning of the week, they announced that they were going to limit Bing conversations to prevent disturbing chatbot responses. So basically, people that are messing about with it and as has been found out for almost all of these AIs, if you keep them going on the same topic, they basically start to hallucinate and kick back like, what else do you want from me?

Insanity answers. So they wanted to stop doing that, plus, you know, slight dash of racism getting in there and all the other things because, gee, you're pulling all your information from the internet. Yeah. What could possibly go wrong? What did you think was going to happen?

So they announced that and then they immediately basically walked it back and started to reverse some of the limits because people freaked out because I don't know why. Who has the time to sit there and do up to 50 to 60 ongoing chats with these things? Who?

Get a job. Or to quote Shatner from Saturday Night Live, get a life. What's wrong with you people? So they're changing course already. So they're going to restore longer chats and starting to expand the chats to six turns per session, up from five and up to 60 chats per day from 50.

So if you really want to waste a lot of your time, have at it. They're going to climb it up to 100 soon and regular searches will no longer count against that total as they have it baked into Bing. And they want to bring back these larger conversations that you can have with an AI responsibly.

What does responsibly actually mean? I'm assuming they're going to start to put in guardrails and they're going to start to shut some things down. I don't know. Who knows? I mean, your guess is as good as mine. But I particularly enjoyed the final sentence in this, much like you did with your email.

Microsoft previously said it didn't completely anticipate people using Bing's AI's longer chats as entertainment. Yeah, it's the internet. Come on. Well, it's the internet. I mean, I get it. There's a bunch of people that work at Microsoft that are rather responsible and sane.

And surely nobody's going to do anything like this with it. But then internet. And you should know better. That if it goes out on the internet, people are going to try to misuse it and break it. Yep, yep. And here's the thing. They were warned about this already because they released this in India long, long ago.

Well, long on the internet last year. And they knew that it was unhinged and uninformed, as it were. Yeah. So this is not something that they can claim ignorance about. Well, and everybody knew it. I don't have the link in the show notes.

But I remember reading an article that some of the researchers that were working on Google's version, barred, put out a public paper saying that if you keep going on one topic with these things, they start to go nuts. Like, everybody knows that this is baked in to the system right now.

Right. But it's also like humans. I mean, it kind of is. If you keep asking me the same question over and over again, like a five-year-old, you're just going to drive me crazy, too. So I guess it kind of mimics humanity in that way. It's like, just shut up already. You sound like my house in the morning.

Yeah, I spent 10 minutes on ChatGPT yesterday trying to have it give me a list of quotes from people that were still alive in 2018. And every time, Mahatma Gandhi, Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, I'm like, when did Steve Jobs die?

And it would come back and say, oh, whoops, Steve Jobs died a long time ago. I'm sorry that I put him in that list of quotes that I just gave you. Here's a new list. First quote, Steve fucking Jobs. Over and over again. Not ready for prime time, but fun. Not ready for prime time.

But yeah, I want to pimp a few quick things here since we're talking about the AI stuff. Ben's Bites is a newsletter that I read every day and get a lot of my stuff from. So link for that will be in the show notes. It's well worth the subscribe. He does a really good job of the, you know, cherry picking the good stuff when it comes to the AI.

See, British, Australian, because I see humor spelled with the extraneous U. Yeah, I don't know. I do not know. I don't care. I go for the links and I skip the humor with the U because I don't care. I just give me the fucking links, dude. Yeah, I got other outlets for that.

And also Lockhead on marketing number 167, the monster category battle, OpenAI and Microsoft versus Google. It's a good short listen from our friend Chris Lockhead. He posits that Google has already lost just because that, you know, everybody's thinking about chat GPT.

You know, nobody cares about the runner up in this case, even though they're both terrible at this point. But, you know, the first mover advantage and the chat GPT does have a little bit of gravitas now since everybody's been talking about it. Yeah, it's become the Kleenex of tissue paper.

It has. It has. So definitely give that one a listen. Link will be in the show notes. And finally, finally, something a little bit more interesting than the rest of the AI news, which is a Vancouver brewery popped on to chat GPT and asked it to make a beer recipe.

And I love this. It spat out a recipe that, for the most part, works. That is high praise for chat GPT at this point. We're not saying it's good or bad. Well, I'd rather you did before I buy it.

Oh, dear. I mean, it's beer. How bad could it be? In the news.

Brian, we've alluded to the U.S. Supreme Court cases that are coming up around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And we've all been worried about it. What are they going to do? Oh, no. What are they going to do? Because they're a bunch of morons. Well, turns out, surprisingly, they are a little bit more self-aware than we gave them credit for, at least when it comes to the Internet.

Justice Elena Kagan said, we are a court. We really don't know about these things. We're not like the nine greatest experts on the Internet or gun control or abortion or – oh, wait. Let me get back to topic here. Yeah. Yeah, so they are at least self-aware about their lack of knowledge on the Internet.

So there's a very good chance, fingers crossed, that they're just going to leave things as they are. We'll see. We'll see. When does a lack of knowledge stop people from doing stupid things? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Good point.

We'll see. Good point. I don't know. I mean they have staff that does understand these things. So one would hope that they are consulting with them. Yeah, well, I've had staff too. And just because they are staff does not mean that they are knowledgeable or intelligent on a particular topic.

What I actually see in my mind's eye is all of them are calling their grandchildren and asking them how it works. Yeah. Oh, here's a funny aside. I have some anecdotal knowledge that the – about the 19 to 22, 23-year-old crowd is starting to just completely dump social media.

Some kids and friends of the family, we've just randomly been polling people like, what are they up to now? What are they using? What's the hot – new hotness? And everybody is like, the new hotness is being around friends. Everybody is deleted Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok. They're gone. They're like, we just don't feel like wasting our time on that shit anymore.

And I'm like, yes, finally. Great. Well, I mean again, there was – I read a really great article in the – I think it was the Atlantic this week that basically talked about all the social malaise that's going on, all the problems people are having, how depression is ramped up.

And I guess somebody just put out a book about this. And it was like, it can really just be solved by putting your phone down and hanging out with people. Yeah. Pretty much. Yep. Pretty much. So I was just glad that this was a self-organizing group of kids that have decided to say, screw it, and hang out in person.

So I like it. Me too. They do still post pictures on Instagram every now and again, though, of them hanging out with friends at concerts, which I'm like, that's a good use. That's a good use for it. That's how we initially always used social media. When social media started, we weren't like sitting in our room trying to come up with cool, funny jokes or anything.

We were out with friends and taking pictures or like posting about meeting up. Like anybody want to go to this concert? That's how we used it. Yeah. Yeah. The good old days. Yeah. The good old days. Well, let's talk about Tencent for a second because they're going back to the good old days.

Okay. They have been, you know, putting in a lot of work into the VR space. They had about 300 people working on their XR unit, which they have decided to say, screw it, I'm going home. Because they've decided that VR is a dog.

And I agree. In the 90s, it was a dog. In the 2020s, it's still a dog. Until we get contact lenses or like implants that it can expand our vision into VR, it's just a pantsless dead man walking over and over again. I mean, everybody seems to be getting out of this or at least certainly definitely like firing half the group and all that sort of stuff.

Investment in VR is just way down except for one company. Yeah, just the one. You own it now, Zuck. That's what you wanted. Yep. Yep. Oh, man. Speaking of China, though, there's a new shopping app out called Timu.

Have you seen this thing yet? I've seen commercials for it. Okay. I haven't seen commercials. Apparently, the Super Bowl commercial. Yeah, it was all over the Super Bowl. So my roommate was, you know, she's kind of a chicken little type when she sees something on TV and just thinks that the sky is falling. The sky is falling. Amazon is tripping out right now over this new thing.

I'm like, let me go look. So I went and I looked. I installed it. Yeah. It's like an online dollar store. Everything is super cheap and looks to be super shit quality. You know, it looks like a garbage shopping site.

So to test things out, I ordered a dog bowl. I ordered a silicone puzzle bowl for my big old Rottweiler because she needs a new one. And they're usually about 40 bucks at the groceries or at the pet store. This one that I ordered was $12.95 with tax and shipping.

It was about $15.95. Not exactly speedy shipping. They say it will get here by March 5th, on or around March 5th. Okay. Well, they do say this is very Domino's Pizza. If it does not arrive by March 5th, we will immediately give you 30% off.

I'm like, okay, well, that's nice. So I'm waiting right now to see when it shows up and what the quality actually is. And they do suck you in with, oh, hey, get $100 in free coupons. And then you get the coupons. And then it's like, oh, yeah, here's a $5 coupon if you spend over $3,000.

Here's a $2.95 coupon if you buy a Lamborghini on the website. It's like unusable coupon shenanigans. But we'll see how this one goes. But, man, yeah, the app itself, like bouncing around it, there's nothing on here that you would ever usually think about buying.

You wouldn't, like, go there to go buy this thing that you wanted, you know? I seem to remember the commercial is very much focused to appeal to women and it was mostly about women's clothing. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of gadgets. Yeah. For the guys, it's like – but the thing is, the guys know better.

Like all the gadget stuff they have, it's like they show pictures of Apple Watches and like get a smartwatch for $2.95. I'm like – Yeah, right. Yeah, no, no. It is – yeah, it's probably like a plastic version that they use in the store shelves for theft control.

So there you go. There you go. Try it out. Caveat emptor. Well, speaking of Amazon, we've kind of been tracking what people and companies are doing about work-from-home arrangements. Amazon has announced that starting in May, they will require employees to work out of the office at least three days per week. This hybrid work arrangement should strengthen Amazon's corporate culture and lead to a better collaboration amongst its workforce.

Yeah. Why is it taking so long? Well, it's not simple to bring back thousands of employees to our offices around the world, even though two years ago they were there every single day. They were there. We had to turn the lights back on. So, yeah, just flip the switch, guys. Yeah. Clean up the Keurig and let's get back to work.

Get the janitor crew in there. Dump the trash cans in. You should be ready to go. Yeah. We got some extras over on the Twitter side. They fired all of them. So we got some extra janitors if you need them down here. So there you go. I mean I'm happy that this hybrid thing is kind of taking precedence because it makes sense to me.

Like it's working for our company that I'm working at like two to three days a week is good. Like it's good. You get the face time. You can do things in real time together. And as long as you have a decent support system for virtual work, then great. I like it and I'm glad to see companies adopting it.

Yeah. Yeah. What I like more though is the four-day work week that is starting to gain traction. Oh, so many articles about that. Yeah. Yeah. If I wasn't a contractor and had to work seven days a week, I would think it's the bee's knees. But since I work seven days a week, who cares?

Screw them. Did that for 20 years. I get you. Yeah. Yeah. Still there. Still there. Speaking of Amazon though, the one medical deal has finally finalized. Okay. So you should be seeing it everywhere on the Amazon site if it is available.

But you're in Candidata, Nadia. Yes. Do you see it up there on your Amazon? Uh, I don't, but I do spend a lot of time on Amazon US because I, anytime I go back to LA, like for the month ahead of that, we're just like finding stuff and placing orders and sending it to my mom's house.

Yeah. Because everything's just cheaper. Yeah. Because everything's just cheaper. Uh, no, I haven't seen it yet. I, I, you know, this one medical thing has been a long time coming. Uh, it, you know, is it going to be good? I don't know. If it drives down prices for a lot of stuff, if Amazon can use its clout and actually do something good for people.

Great. Do I have a lot of faith that that's, they're trying to do things good for people versus trying to make money and own your entire life? Well, I think you have an idea where I fall on that. Yeah. Same here. Same here. So yeah, it's 144 bucks for the first year, which is a 28% discount for now.

Yeah. For now. So you can get health prime. Yeah. Uh, it's, you know, it's basically, you can call up, do an e-visit and get a prescription, which then they will ship to you. So yeah, there you go. You know, there's 20 conditions that you can get advice on right now, like migraines, allergies, sinusitis, and more.

I think I might actually try it out because I am having one hell of a time with seasonal allergies. And my actual paid doctor, which I pay hundreds of dollars a month for, has been, you know, useless to, to use a technical medical term. Claritin.

Ah, I did. Claritin didn't do much for me. I moved to Zyrtec. Now I'm, now I'm doing a hybrid. I do the, uh, this is the real fun one. Since you can take cold meds and allergy meds at the same time, since they are technically different. I take my Zyrtec with a shot of, um, Alka-Seltzer cold in the morning.

You're living the life, Jason. I'm telling you, man. I take that with my, uh, Lipitor for my, my cholesterol. Yeah. Well, at least that's it. I don't have like, you know, high blood pressure or heart medicine. So that's good enough. That's good. Yeah. Yet. Knock on wood.

Uh, Apple is making a health progress too. They've apparently, uh, made a breakthrough on the blood glucose tracking for Apple watches. I mean, that is a massive, that's going to be such a game changer for so many people. If they can make this work, man, that is just beyond, beyond.

What really pissed me off though, is that, uh, the stock only went up 0.3% on the news. It'll go up. It'll go up a lot if they actually roll it out. I think that's, we've seen, we've seen these kinds of reports before and it's still not here yet. So when they actually prove this thing works, oh my.

Yeah. We're a couple of years out from that. Unfortunately. I think so. But it's what, what a game changer that'll be. Just amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Tech knowledge and technology for once. For once. So let's get, let's get to the rest of the news and dash that hope against the rocks. Well, Elon Musk is continuing to basically just literally throw shit at the wall and watch it slowly drip down.

Uh, Twitter is making text-based two-factor authentication, a paid feature. Everybody like lost their mind about this. You have to pay to use, to use text-based, which is less, uh, less secure than using an authenticator app anyways. So you can use an authenticator app for free, but you have to pay if you want text-based two-fA.

What is going on? It's really easy, people. Elon got his Twilio bill. That's it. That's it. That's really it. He's got to pay for all those text messages. So if you want them, you pay. Yeah. That shit ain't free, man. That shit ain't free. That is it. That is, that is the entire reasoning behind this.

It is not that difficult, folks. Yeah. It's not the altruistic option that, oh, you know, text-based two-fA is less secure, like remarkably less secure. Yeah. It's, uh, it's the fact that, you know, homie's got to pay for it. Yeah. He's not paying janitors. You think he wants to pay Twilio?

Yeah. No, he does not. No. That's why Twilio laid off all those people last week. That was the Twitter division. Basically, they probably went, oh boy, we're about to be cut in half, so. Yep. Yep. And more fun over at Twitter, Tesla workers are accusing Twitter, who is owned by the same person that owns Tesla, of shadow banning their union account that was trying to drum up support for unionization within Tesla.

And guess what? It's true. They got shadow banned by their boss, who is also Twitter's boss. Huh. Yeah. Now that should be illegal. Oh, God. Someone called someone. Oh, wait. He owns a booth. He can do whatever he wants. That's true. That's true. You know, Twitter still is a private company now, so.

Yeah. I swear to God, if you made this shit up, you wouldn't believe it. But there it is. There it is. There it is. And Meta's getting into the we could use some money game.

And as one of our listeners wrote in, because I'd been banging on for quite a few years now about how if I could actually pay for a version of Facebook that showed me only my friends' timelines and didn't steal my data and all that sort of stuff, I would do so in a second.

And somebody wrote in and said, well, you're getting your wish, but not quite. Not really. No. Not really. No. You can now pay for Facebook and Instagram. They're offering a pay blue tick verification service as well. That's about it. So you can pay 15 bucks per month through the company's apps on iOS or Android or go to the web directly so they don't, you know, because they pass those commissions on to you.

And then you can get it for 12 bucks and whatever. You have to send a government issue ID that matches the Facebook or Instagram account's profile name and photo. And for the low, low price of whatever per month for nothing whatsoever, you get a blue check. That's it. That's it.

That's all you get. Nothing else. Not even pants in the metaverse. Oh, man. They're scraping the bottom of the barrel. They really are right now. Who's going to buy this? Who? There are suckers born every day. Come on. Somebody's going to buy it. There's suckers born every day, right? Suckers. Yep.

Media candy. Well, Brian, a show that was canceled because a director slash writer was canceled has now been slightly uncanceled. The Nevers is back. Sorta. Sorta.

So just for the quick rundown for nobody that's seen the show, The Nevers was a show on HBO Max, maybe HBO back in the day. It was a long time ago. And, uh, it was written and, uh, the first episode or a couple episodes were directed by Joss Whedon, who was summarily, summarily canceled after that because everybody came out of the woodwork and said, he's a bad boss.

He was mean to us. Um, yeah. And, uh, that basically got the show canceled and there were seven episodes. I think it was seven, maybe six, still in the can that they had done. They replaced him on the show, brought other people in, blah, blah, blah, but they never aired the episodes and they removed the first ones.

From HBO Max, which really isn't anything new because HBO Max is basically removing everything that they can right now because of this stupid deal that they did. But to be, to be or not to be bought the rights to The Nevers and decided to air them.

Well, they aired them on a side channel, some kind of Warner Brothers WB channel, and they did it by appointment viewing only. So, um, hello, BitTorrent. So I grabbed them and now I have the full series, but I started to watch it and I just, I'm like, yeah, why?

I was like, why? It's, there's never going to be an episode, another episode after this. And I know that they ended it probably on a cliffhanger. Wow, you are, you are, you are on board with the Schulmeister theorem of watching TV shows now. Yeah, yeah.

You see my point. Well, on this, this, I don't know if this really comes into the Schulmatrix, uh, because this show has already been canceled and it was canceled without, I mean, you don't watch a show while it's actively airing. Because, because they might pull this crap on me.

But if nobody, yeah, but if, if that was the case, there would never be any more shows made. Somebody has to take a leap of faith. Well, let the other people do that. Not me. My time's more valuable, Jason. Okay. You need to come back to America right now because we cannot have that attitude in Canada. Period.

The me, me, meen is, has to be here in the U.S. We're number one, not your number one. I'm very close to the border, Jason. Okay. Okay. That's true. That's true. Oh God. So, uh, if you want to grab it, uh, hop onto your nearest BitTorrent client and grab it.

But why? As Jason says. But honestly, why? Especially if you saw the season finale or the half season finale, um, spoiler alert, was nothing like the rest of the entire show and they come back and everything I see is like the original part of the show.

So I, I, I'm not even, that's the thing. It's like, I just don't even want to, I don't want to waste of a download. I tell you. There you go. Well, you watch Picard. Fucking Picard. You said, you said that there was nostalgia.

It was nostalgia porn. Yep. Tripled 17 NC 17 X rated nostalgia porn. Holy shit buckets. Man, did they pull it out for this one? I, I did watch episode two last night and at the very end of the season or very end of the episode, I, I, I nearly jumped out of bed.

I was like, yes. So. All right. Uh, spoiler alerts here for people that haven't seen. Okay. Yeah. Let's put the notes, skip ahead five minutes if you don't want to hear any of this. So I love, I loved, I loved the first episode. I loved Worf coming in, in the second episode, but wrath of fucking con redux.

Please. Who cares? Come on. Who cares? I, I'm surprised that like, uh, I'm surprised that Jerry Ryan didn't have a thing crawling out of her ear at some point. Come on. Give it time. Give it time. Then, then we're going to fly into a nebula. So he can't find us.

Give me a fucking break. That was a little too much for me. That was a little too much. I don't care. I could not care less. I could not care less because you know what? It's better than season two. Anything's better than season two. Exactly. That's what I'm saying.

We have a low bar for entry here. And, and the portal weapon, which was, you know, like straight, I'm like straight out of the game portal. I'm like, Oh God, seriously. And they did that. Yeah. But you know, I don't care for getting to take down the transporter inhibitor.

That was pretty bad. That was pretty fucking bad. Why? Why can't we transport? Oh yeah. That thing I just put up a couple minutes ago that I've conveniently forgotten about already. Well, you know, even, even though that he's like, you know, a cyborg now and should have perfect memory, I guess something still slipped through those, you know, virtual cracks.

It's good. I'm going to stick with it, obviously. Who have we not seen yet? Well, we haven't gotten whatever data is going to be. Well, I think it's going to be lore and we haven't gotten Geordi yet. Yeah, but we got it, got his daughter. So, so far, so good. But the thing is, it's like, it's the final hurrah.

The only, the only disservice that I'm going to do by getting mad at that is a disservice to myself. I'm going to enjoy this no matter fucking what, because it's the last one and God damn it. I want to enjoy it. I'm trying, but I was yelling. Con at the screen. Yeah, that was, it was, but fuck it.

Who cares? I like the baddie. I think she's great. Oh, I mean, she's great. She's hamming it up like no tomorrow, which is what all good Star Trek needs. You need a ham in there. That's fantastic. She's just chewing all the conceit, the scenery to death. It's amazing. It's great. All right. So that's all good.

I found a really good article over on the Atlantic called Netflix crossed a line. And I think this goes to, to some extent to explain a lot of our dissatisfaction recently with, with everything, with all the products that we use with whatever.

And this is all about Netflix, of course, trying to crack down on password sharing and not allowing it and blah, blah, blah. And it's a great article that gets into the idea of the hard product, which in Netflix case would be, we are going to stream you stuff and the soft products, all the bits that come with it, the secondary goods and services.

He, the article relates it to like a Big Mac. The big, the hard product is the burger, the soft product. Well, you get the box and you get the bag to carry it with and blah, blah, blah. And you don't have to pay for all those other things. They're part of the product, even though they're not the product itself. And this article goes into great lengths to talk about how everything in tech recently has become like, they, they gave us all these soft products.

We, we got all this stuff that came with our main product and now they're trying to claw it back away from us. And not only just claw it back away from us, like in Netflix case, they've made it sound like we're now we're criminals doing something that they wanted us to do in the first place that we felt like we were already paying for.

We can share it. Netflix tweeted out the password sharing is love. Obviously this is something that we should be doing. And now they're going, no, no, no, no. You're stealing from us. And, uh, so it was just a really interesting article that just kind of across the board explains why we're so frustrated.

You pay for Amazon prime, not to access the products that you're actually ordering. Amazon prime is about the convenience and the quickness, but now it used to be like two day shipping. That was part of prime. Now it could be anything. It could be two days, four days a week.

Who the fuck knows when it's going to come? Because prime doesn't mean anything anymore. It's, it's gotten back to, it's just the product. We're a store and you order stuff and that's what you get. Uber. One of the ones that, that you and I have been screaming about forever. You used to be able to get them easy.

They used to be quick to arrive. They used to be cheap. You used to get a bottle of water and maybe a mint. Now, good fucking luck. You don't know if they're going to show up. They cancel on you half the time. It's not cheap anymore, is it? It's just the product now. You're getting a ride. It's a fucking taxi, except I would argue even more unreliable.

Yep. So. Yeah. You know why? Because all that free money dried up. That's, that's the issue. Well, the things that we're subsidizing, all these things is gone. Now, now they, much like Twitter, now they actually have to make money. Yeah. They could turn it into a business, which is hard, you know?

Yeah. Businesses are hard. Yeah. It's, it's funny too, because HBO Max is obviously not cracked out on this because when you log into our shared account, that list of people that you can be grows by the day. I got like seven people on my HBO Max account. I think I'm on the second row now when I logged in.

My muscle memory made me almost log in as you, I think. Yeah. No. Once I, I put my dad on there and I'm just like, oh, that's going to wrap. Okay. Need a bigger TV. Speaking of HBO Max, the last of us had a, uh, little embarrassing moment.

They, they say, uh, which this goes back to people really need to get a life. Because there's one scene that is like, you know, just a really quick scene. It's an overhead aerial drone shot of, uh, the two main characters walking across a snow covered bridge.

Well, if you squint really hard and pause at the right exact moment, you can see some extra crew off to the side, hiding under some trees. That's it. Oh no. This made the news. And I, I like the, uh, I like the comment that somebody else made.

They said, better than a Starbucks cup. The Starbucks cup is the quintessential step on your deck TV moment. But, uh, you know, shit happens. Come on, get over it. I mean, this one, seriously, I saw it, I, I was watching that show and I'm like, I was looking where you're supposed to look at the people in the story, you know, people have

too much time on their hands, you know, tempest in a teapot at QVC shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day.

Start with today's special value, then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love from beauty and fashion to home culinary and outdoor living shop. Brian, I have been a fantastic fan of Dropbox for decades now.

It feels like since they first started my entire business is hinged to Dropbox. Well, well, well, so with the move to Ventura, they've had to start switching people over to using, uh, the Apple cloud storage system, which means that you cannot pick where your Dropbox lives anymore.

It has to go in a certain folder inside of your library, which, you know, cuts off access to external drives for your Dropbox library, which has pissed off millions of people, myself included. But that's not what pissed me off the most. What pissed me off the most is with their latest update, .logicx files no longer sync, period.

Okay. I don't know if you've heard about what I've, what I do for a living for the past 10 years is I work in logic and I save logic files and I swift them, or swift them, ship them between multiple machines. So I record on one recording machine that is custom built for recording.

I, I edit on a custom built editing station. And sometimes I'm just on the road and I want to kill some time and pull up my logic files and do some stuff. I can't do that anymore, which really, really sucks. So enter iCloud because I'm like, wait a minute, I'm, I'm paying for Dropbox, but I also You're already paying for iCloud too.

I'm already paying for iCloud too. And I look and I'm like 1.9 terabytes available. I'm like, well, solve that problem. Shoved everything in iCloud, at least for my side of things. I have still have to have client facing stuff in Dropbox. So I still have to have my Dropbox account, but it was just bullshit that I had to do that.

Cause I'm just like, the only way to really fix it was go into Dropbox, redownload the logic file as a zip file. And when I uncompress it, then it creates all these conflicts. And I have like, you know, 50 different folders in there. And cause it comes down to the logic templates or logic files are packages.

Even if you use the folder method, the logic file itself is still a package. And then Dropbox is having problems with that type of package. Hopefully they will fix it. There are a lot of people screaming about it, but if you do have to use iCloud, you're going to want to get this next app that I found called trip mode.

Cause in Dropbox, you can pause syncing, which is great because I do a lot of interstitial stuff. Like if I have a recording and I want to save it, bounce it and work on, you know, cleaning it or whatever, I'm having these multiple files all the time that are eventually going to go away. But Dropbox is always trying to upload them.

And so is iCloud. So if you don't want to soak your network, you need to turn it off while you're doing these jobs. There's no built-in way to turn off iCloud sync natively. You can kill the process, but okay. That's okay.

You know, I don't want to have to open terminal when I'm saving a file and re-enable it. So this app called trip mode actually lets you see what's going on in the background. What data is being sent by which programs in real time, and you can disable them.

Just click a checkbox, disable it for a short period of time, uncheck it, it re-enables it and lets the data flow again. 20 bucks for two Macs, which is perfect for my setup, one for the recording machine, one for the editing machine. Boom, Bob's your uncle. My other machines, they can just sync at their own leisure.

But so far, iCloud has been pretty rock solid for me, surprisingly enough. Dropbox will no longer be handling your packages. Nope, Dropbox, hands off my package, Dropbox. There you go. Hands off my package is something I've never said before.

Yeah, you're not picky. No, I'm not. Not at all. And I do want to do another shout out for Screens 4 for macOS. That app has saved my bacon so many times this week, trying to move around these damn logic files, because I'm at home, it's late.

My editing bay is at the studio, so if I need to get a file to do some kind of quick fix or do some work, I would just use Screens, pop in, pull it down, and go from there. It was just, it's so easy, and for what you get, it is so cheap. It is well worth it.

I mean, I haven't actually had to use it yet on my mom's computer, but install was a breeze, and just knowing that it's there in case something goes wrong that can't just be solved by me, basically nine times out of ten, rebooting her router, which I can do from my phone. Thank you, Eero. I'm super happy about Screens 4.

You know, it's one of those things I don't want to have to use, but I know it's there now, which is great. Yep. And you can even use it on an iPad, which is even cooler. Yeah. And the one thing, here's the game changer for Screens, is their Screens Connect product that goes along with Screens 4, which handles all of the stupid-ass port mapping for you.

Yep. That was always the pain in the ass. Setup is such a breeze. It's so great. Yeah. It's so great. God, doing port forwarding, even on an Eero system, which is, you know, as drop-dead stupid simple as you can get, is still a pain in the ass. Yeah. So, yeah, highly recommend Screens 4 and Trip Mode for people who use Dropbox who are moving to iCloud now.

It also does give you some cool background. You can see everything that's updating. So, any app that is, even if it's not, even if you don't see it, you can actually see how many times it's phoning home. Kind of like Little Snitch. Yeah. But it's an easier, it's a much easier interface than Little Snitch.

I agree. We've talked a long time about the environments that we run in. I think you and I are pretty similar in that we're mostly Mac. We have Mac households. I've got some Amazon stuff around. I know your roommate won't let you have any of that stuff, but I've been kind of an Amazon hybrid for a long time until we bought this house, which came with a Nest thermostat, which is great.

I love that thing. Oh, yeah. I eventually started. Yeah, they're fantastic. They just work great. And they connect to everything. They connect to, you know, you can get the app for your phone. You can connect it to Amazon. So Amazon products. So you can control the temperature just with your voice.

I mean, all of that's fantastic. A while back, I got one of the first, I got a Nest Protect. I mean, I have like 18,000 fire alarms in the stupid house, but I just did the one on our main floor. And the thing's beautiful. It works great.

I love it. I ended up buying another one and installing it on our bedroom floor. And I just love these things and they're fantastic. And they're all in the same interface with the, with the thermostat and you can, I can control them and they have a little light. I feel like I'm in Star Trek sometimes when I go up to bed after everybody else has gone to bed.

If you have the lights off and it's got a motion sensor and it does this nice little white, very soft illuminating glow as you walk through the house. So I, I walked down my, my, my main way to go to my stairs, little glow, like I'm in Star Trek. I go up my stairs and then the one up there catches me and it glows.

It's so cool. I feel like I'm in Star Trek all the time. I want it to make little noises like, but or that. Anyway, isn't, isn't the Nest Protect the one that when it first came out, wouldn't turn off. If like the alarm was going and people couldn't turn it off.

Maybe. I don't know. I see, I was so skeptical of these things when they first rolled out, but I think they're on like the fucking fifth iteration now or something like that. It's solid, man. I've had one for over a year, so. Okay. The URL says second gen. So I'm guessing they're on the second gen. Okay. There you go.

Second gen. All right. As long as it works, it's cool. Yeah, it works. It's great. The other thing is we don't have a doorbell here, which has been annoying because people knock and I either have to be that weird guy that's peering through the mirror to see who the hell's out there, or I have to just open the door. So finally I was like, I got to get a doorbell, but I refuse to get a ring.

I just refuse. I hate ring. We shit on ring. We've been shitting on ring for 10 years on this show. No ring. Nest has one. Okay. I'll check that out. And I also didn't want to have to deal with having an electrician out to come wire because the house isn't even wired for one.

So they've got a battery operated one. Even better. Battery lasts a long time. Piece of cake. Easy to do. Looks kind of sexy. Comes in some different colors. One matches my pink job up front. So perfect. Great. Order it. Awesome. It's pretty cool. I like it. The one thing I will say, the only downside, and I don't know what's going on with Google and Nest.

They can't seem to solve this. Google's tried to run, tried to roll out their own app called Google Home. The Nest doorbell only works in Google Home, but I have a Nest app that has my thermostat and my fire alarms in it. Those don't work in Google Home.

Those only work in the Nest app. So now I have three Nest products, two of which are in one app and one which is in the other app, which is really annoying. But again, it still connects great with all my Amazon products. I've got an Amazon show on our front floor.

So if somebody rings the doorbell, video shows up right on my Amazon show. It's awesome. Love it. That is quintessential Google right there. You have three products from the same maker and multiple apps. Oh, man. Have you tried doing anything with the Apple Home system with those?

No, because I don't have anything really. Like, I guess I could open up the app and see how everything runs through, but I'm kind of controlling everything with Amazon right now. So why mess? It's not broken. If it ain't broken, yeah. If it ain't broken, fuck it. You know, I'll end up in like a, remember when Dave Vittner tried to redo everything and the 18 months later, he was still working on it.

I don't want to end up there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, that's why I haven't moved. I've got a ring doorbell that I got. Jesus. This has to be Gen 1 because they were a sponsor on Jordan Harbinger's show and I got one of them for free as the producer. I haven't worked for Harbinger since 2018.

So yeah, mine's old, but it's battery powered and it works fine. Works fine. The cameras on the other hand are garbage. Yeah. I hate it. Oh, the camera is actually really good on the, on the nest one. That's cool. That's cool. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll swap over sometime. Anyway, Instagram co-founders are back with a new news app.

It's called Artifact, which is a name that inspires me. Not at all. It also makes it incredibly hard to remember where the hell it's at because I can never remember the name. Artifact makes me think that this is really old, not up to the date news.

Yeah. So I can get Indiana Jones news on this. Yes, exactly. Name aside, dumb name aside, fantastic app. I love it. I've been, I've been using it for a couple of days now and the news that it bubbles up for me is really good.

So, um, I'm a fan so far. The, uh, there's some interesting, creepy things that I don't care for. Oh, great. Uh, well, you, but you can avoid them. Don't share your contact list. Okay. One and done. Yeah. Um, you can sign up and start using it without putting in your phone number, but if you do put in your phone number, it lets you sync across multiple devices, which is fine.

Um, I'm okay with that. When you, when you create a link to share an article, it will tell you how many people clicked on that link later on. Um, I don't know if I care for that level of tracking. I just want to share link, you know, and I, I technically, I just want the share link to the actual article that I'm reading.

I don't want to share link back to artifact for you to track it and then go back to the other thing. That's kind of annoying too. So. Do you really want to know how many of your friends are actually opening up the links that you're sending them? You're probably better off not knowing just for your own ego.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and one of them's actually automated because what I do is I take the link and I use the share sheet to do save to reader and the reader app then, uh, you know, it launches it and pulls it and ticks it off as two reads surprisingly.

Right. So, uh, my app that does not have anybody looking at it because I haven't looked at it yet. Uh, artifact will tell me that reader has, or that link has been seen twice and I can guarantee you I have not shared it anywhere. I've just stored it. So that might be a bug, but otherwise it's okay.

Have you tried it yet? I have not. I will, uh, I will give it a go. I kind of, I got a minute. I like Apple's news app. I started to use it a little bit more now too, since I have the news plus and it's, it's decent. I actually like artifact a little better. It gives me a little better news.

The thing I don't like, and obviously artifact does the same thing is I just want the direct link. I don't want the link back into Apple news or art. I want the direct link to the article. It's not your content. What are you? Pinterest? Seriously. I hate that part too. And for some reason now, Joe Biden does not like Apple.

Uh, God, there was a, there was a ban going around, uh, because there was a patent dispute from this company called Alivecore that said that Apple basically infringed on their patent and they put in the thing that says, Hey, you're not allowed to sell Apple watches anymore.

And it has gone to Biden's desk to be hopefully vetoed. And Biden said he wasn't going to veto it, which is annoying because I want my next gen Apple watch when it comes next year. It's not going to, you don't have to worry about it because then this is just going to go to court for about 15 years and then the Apple will write a check.

Okay. Well, yeah, I wish they would hurry up and do that just to, just to get it out of the way. Cause stupid shit like this takes the stock price down and I need the stock price to come back up so I can sell it because I need the damn money. Fuckers. So. Wait for the, wait for the glucose monitoring. I will be, yeah, no, I'll be in debtor's prison by the time that comes out.

So skip that. And, uh, thanks to TikTok being horrible and people being horrible in general, we have a new Tide Pod challenge out there now. This, this, uh, centers around Ozempic, the diabetes drug. Well, turns out Ozempic can also cause weight loss.

So if you're not eating, try that sometime, you fat fucks. Anyway, um, so basically people are trying to get Ozempic to lose weight. And so now there's a shortage of Ozempic for people who actually need it. Right. So you can be skinny and stupid now, but wait, there's, there's, there's a catch.

Always wait for that other shoe. Cause when you stop taking it, you gain the weight back and sometimes double because your metabolism is all jacked up. So stop it. Fucking morons. It was never meant to be a weight loss drug. That's not what it's for.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Get some ivermectin or whatever the hell it is and shove that up your rectum. Which is proven to do nothing. So that was great too. Yeah. Uh, and finally, I'm going to do a call out here to the audience. I, I need some recommendations here. Um, I, I had a universal remote that was, uh, for my mom and it was one of the Logitech ones, the harmony brand or whatever, uh, that allowed you to kind of do programming.

So it was like one button and I could record it so that it was okay. Okay. Mom, you hit this button and that'll turn on the TV, turn on the soundbar and it'll bring up the apps so you can watch your Netflix or whatever. You hit this button and that'll, instead of going to the apps, it'll go to your cable.

So you can watch cable TV. Boom. Great. But the app, uh, the remote has stopped working. It's been a long time now. It's, it's not. They discontinued it. And they've stopped making remotes altogether. They've got out of the business because it's a shitty business and the stuff is hard and there's like nothing out there.

So I'm looking for any recommendations for a universal remote control. That's good for seniors. I've Googled it. Not like one of those four button ones. My mom is not senile. She can see still something in the middle. You know, not, I don't want her having to use 17 different remotes. I just want a couple, a simple remote, a simple remote that lets you do that kind of programming.

If anybody knows of anything out there and has a good recommendation, please hit me up. Thank you. I remember when they discontinued those remotes. Do you remember where we were when, when that happened? No, it did not stick in my mind as, as, as one of the most important, uh, it wasn't the moon landing, which I wasn't around for it.

By the way, I'm not that old. Yeah. No, I remember you going crazy about it. That's why I remember it. But we were in your loft in Venice. It was that long ago. Wow. So my mom's had that remote for that long. Crazy. Yeah. The fact that it's still worked up until this point is amazing. That is, that's, that's pretty good.

Yeah. I've got a couple of short books here this week. Uh, the creative act, a way of being by Rick Rubin. Uh, you don't like Rick, not a Rick fan, not a Rick fan.

I understand he's involved with a lot of great albums and a lot of very successful albums, but the fucker just lays down on the floor and says, make it sound more blue. Fuck you. Yeah. Well, that's pretty much what this book is like. Uh, I, I didn't hate it. I actually, as far as a creativity book goes, I thought it was pretty decent, a little woo woo, a little hippie ish, but, uh, there's some good takeaways in there.

Cool. Uh, but for a better one, check out, ignore everybody and 39 other keys to creativity by Hugh McLeod. That's a much shorter, more concise, better book. Hugh was a cartoonist, um, really big around the web two O days. I've actually got pictures of him.

I think at a couple conferences we both were at, uh, he did the squiggly business card, uh, artwork things way back. In the day, uh, cool guy, but, uh, he was actually creative, made a lot of money at it. So was Rick Rubin made a lot of money at it too, but I think Hugh might be a little bit more hands-on creative.

So Hugh actually made stuff, did not tell other people what to do. Uh, anyway, I've got no, no dog in the fight for Rick Rubin since I'm not a music guy, but, um, the book I thought was, I thought there were some good takeaways, but just, there's a lot of stuff in between that you could probably lose. Right.

And I got this book, it's called The Mind is Flat, The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain by Nick Chatter. Um, this book, he does a lot of, um, reaching around how our mind works.

He does a lot of reach arounds. Yeah, there's a lot of reach arounds going on today. I can tell where you're going with this. I just read the pull quotes that you threw into our show notes. Yes. Sounds like a bullshit artist. Sounds like a lot of bullshittery. Yes. Cause he, what he does is he's, he uses the human visual system and the flaws in our visual system to highlight other cognitive flaws that we have.

And basically tries to make the case that the subconscious really doesn't do a whole hell of a lot as far as our decision making and things like that, that we are way more impulsive than we are made out to be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was reading some of the comments on Amazon from other people who were in that field who said, this was an entertaining read, but it's mostly bullshit, but it was an entertaining read.

But the author first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser. Yeah. Sounds like something Rick Rubin would say to a, to flee while they were recording the Red Hot Chili Peppers album.

Kind of, kind of. Here's the upside of The Mind is Flat Through Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain by Nick Chatter. It was free on Audible. Oh, there you go. The only reason I, cause I looked it up cause somebody posted about it on Twitter and it made an interesting comment about it.

I'm like, oh, I'll just look it up, see what, see what they say about it on Audible. And Audible's like, hey, this is included in your, in your monthly subscription. I'm like, done. I need something to fall asleep to. And I, I listened to it for a couple hours as I was, you know, coming in and out of consciousness. And, uh, yeah, it was, there's a lot of visual stuff in there that he was trying to shoehorn into how the brain works whole hog.

It's like, and that's one subsystem of how the brain interprets the world. So trying to make that the crux. I would say, I'm going to say skip this one. Okay, fair. Long, long-winded way of saying skip it. Okay. Uh, I was talking about Mickey Bereni, the lead singer of Lush, uh, the other week, cause she was a guest on the Curious Creatures podcast cause she's out promoting her book.

I've been trying to get ahold of this book for ages because it is not available in North America. It's a UK release, uh, fingers crossed how music saved me from success, which is her memoir and a hat tip to Jackden on our discord who basically said, I've got, I've got a pirated copy.

Want it? I was like, yep, I sure do. Didn't have to ask. Read it in two nights. Uh, absolutely loved it. It's a great story. Mickey, if you happen to be listening right now, as soon as you get North American, uh, distribution, I will be first in line to purchase a hardcover, preferably signed copy.

You will get your money. By the way, you already have all my money. I bought every single Lush release. I went to every single concert. I have a bunch of t-shirts and I bought all those crappy CD singles that you record label released with three different B-sides on every single version of the same CD single. Bought them all.

So you got money for me. Don't worry. All right. Thanks. So you don't feel too bad about it. I don't feel too bad. Uh, a phenomenal book. Yet another one of those, uh, memoirs that's coming out right now that, uh, tells you what I learned within the first five years of working in the music industry.

The music industry sucks. All right. There it is. Yeah. Fantastic read. Really enjoyable. And, uh, then I saw this story and, uh, shocking. Here's a surprise. The Kindle store has a prolific new author, ChatGPT. Yep.

ChatGPT is listed as the author or co-author of at least two. Two hundred books on Amazon's Kindle store, according to Reuters. The actual number of bought and written books is likely much, much, much higher. Much higher. At a zero. Since Amazon's policies do not require authors to disclose their use of AI in writing books.

That dovetails nicely into the next article I have, which is science fiction magazines battle a flood of chatbot generated stories. The editors of three science fiction magazines, Clark's World, the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, and Asimov's science fiction, said that they have been flooded by submission of works of fiction generated by AI chatbots.

And they're like, yeah, we knew it was coming. Uh, this sucks. Um, and they said that here's, here's an interesting thing. Uh, Mr. Clark from Clark's World, clever name. Uh, he said, but in just a few weeks, uh, blah, blah, blah. We got a bunch of submissions. He said he had been able to spot the chatbot generated stories by examining certain traits in the documents, the writing, and the submission process.

But he did decline to be more specific, saying that he did not want to give those submitting the stories any advantages. Smart. Right. Smart man. And he said the writing is also, in quotes, bad in spectacular ways. They're just prompting, dumping, pasting, and submitting to a magazine.

Yep. Now, did I not say on this very program that we are going to need verified human certification sooner than later, Brian? You're right. We absolutely need to know which piece of shit story was written by an AI and which piece of shit story was written by a verified human.

Exactly. Exactly. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Dave Bittner is back. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast with Joe Kerrigan.

Dave is also the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they explore law and policy and surveillance and privacy. Dave also hosts Control Loop, where they discuss the latest developments in ICS and OT. Welcome back, Dave. It's good to be back. Hello, gents. Hello. Nice to join you again.

Yes. Good to have you. Good to have you. I want to do a little quick follow-up here. I saw an article by Casey Watts called Welcome to Mastodon. Forget Twitter. Mastodon. Mastodon. Mastodon has 10x the engagement. And it's a nice little write-up for, you know, people that are new to Mastodon, what it is, how to get on, and all that kind of stuff.

There's tons of those out there. But this, I thought, was a fairly decent one. And the reason I put it in here is because I hear through the grapevine, because I have a Mastodon account on the same server as you, Dave. But I check in very often because I kind of like the silence now for the most part. But even people on our Discord channel says, hey, Dave's chatting it up over there on Mastodon.

Too bad he doesn't say anything over here on the Discord. I'm like, well, Dave got kicked off of Discord. He won't come back. Yeah. Don't worry about that. So just go to Mastodon. Right. Yeah. The Discord thing isn't – Yeah. What's your experience over there so far? Well, first of all, for our listeners, the Discord thing is not – doesn't have anything to do with desire.

It's that I can't seem to get on Discord anymore. And I'm not – I'm just done trying to play the multi-factor authentication merry-go-round game with them. So that's just the way it is. But Mastodon, I have to say Mastodon, it takes a little getting used to because it is different.

And the fact that it's federated instead of centralized means there are some new things to learn. But overall, I would agree with this assessment that the engagement is much better. The engagement is much more meaningful. But is that self-selecting samples, smaller sample size, you got to kind of work for it to be there kind of thing?

Yes, I think that is part of it. But my – I'm also getting the sense that Mastodon is not so much a numbers game that Twitter was. In other words, if you're out there to try to get a huge number of followers, that ain't the – read the room.

Yeah, that's not what this place is about. It is – I'd call it a good parts version of Twitter where it's just nicer. It's friendlier. The discourse is not as toxic or not toxic at all really.

I can't – I'm trying to remember. I don't think I've seen anything where – any trolling or people coming after each other on Mastodon. And I think part of that is because the moderators at Mastodon have a lot of control and they take their moderation seriously.

So they're trying to build – There is moderation. There is moderation, yeah. So they're trying to build this community kind of like things were in the old days. It's more – it's more Usenet-y than Twitter-y I think for those of us who remember Usenet. Oh, yes.

Many, many moons ago. Have you tried Ivory yet? I have tried Ivory. The – but not enough to get it to stick. I'll say – I'm looking at my phone here. The mobile app I use for Mastodon is called Toot with an exclamation point at the end.

It's quite good. There's a little elephant on there. Well, they all have elephants. They should have a plate of Mexican food because that's when you generally toot. That's right. Ivory is good as well. I hear that's the one of choice particularly for Mac users.

But no, I've been using the Mastodon native app on my web browser on my computer and then I've been using Toot on my mobile device. And that's been serving my needs fine. I played with Ivory but there just wasn't enough immediately there to make me switch away from the comfort I've established with Toot.

There you go. Yeah, it's pretty new. So it's from TapBot. But I got it. I just kicked it over the other day. I've been using Mastodon on my Mac. Seems to be okay. It's fine. Yeah. Gets the job done. There's not as many features as just the web interface.

So I think I'm just going to use the web interface from now on because it's easier and it's free and it's everywhere. Right. And I just haven't done it because I don't know. I think it goes back to the fact that I remember Usenet and I've got switching platform fatigue.

Like I just can't be bothered. Like I'm still on Twitter. I look at it. I have no interest in another social network. I just don't. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I am enjoying about Mastodon versus Twitter is that you can reach the end of Mastodon.

Yes, you can. Yes. Right. And then you put down your phone. I've read it all. Right. You just don't sit there doom scrolling forever, forever, forever. You'll, you know, it'll say, oh, there's 40 new things since the last time you were here. And you scroll through them and then you hit things that you saw before and you put it down and that's it.

So it's a lot more contained and I'm finding that to be pleasurable as well. Right. It's kind of like social media was before it was monetized. Amazing. There you go. Amazing. Imagine that. Yeah. Oh, well. Well, anyway, the link to the article will be in the show notes.

If anybody has not jumped on the Mastodon bandwagon and wants to toot with Dave, there's a new show. Tootin' with Dave. Tootin' tootin'. Rootin' tootin'. Oh, man. Have you guys seen Spirit Me?

I looked at it since you put it in the show notes here and it's interesting. It is interesting. It lets you create your own avatar in just a couple minutes with your phone. And then you can type in some text and it will generate a video of you. And I love to type any text and it will generate a video where you will say it like real with your appearance, voice, and emotions.

No, they won't. They won't at all. Well, emotion is the real sticker for all of these, even the good ones. Like that is just where they fall flat. Yeah, I don't think there's an AI out there that can handle my emotions. Nope. All right.

So, yeah, all you have to do is watch the video on the front and you will – if that is their crowning achievement in technology, yeah, don't waste your time with the rest of it. You know, I was watching it and the thing that struck me about it is that the video on its own is quite good.

The audio on its own is quite good. It's the blending where they need more work. The lip sync is way off. It reminded me of when you have a video game, you know, like a cut scene in a video game where they have a professional voice actor and they have some animated what is supposed to be a photorealistic human talking and the voice sync just isn't quite right, the lip sync.

And that's what I see – that's the tell for me for this one, that the lip sync is pretty rough right now. But I wonder if they got that down, how much more convincing would it be? Well, the Uncanny Valley is real and that bridge across it is long and hard to build.

So we'll see if they can do it. But, yeah, these guys, not so much yet. Nope. That's fine. That's fine with me. Give the time. Take your time. Take your time. Our jobs are safe for now. Just for now. So to that point, I'm curious, how much does the thought cross your mind at the point that we are in our lives, right, you know, on the unfriendly side of 50?

And, Brian, you're not quite 50 yet, right? It's coming in May. Okay. So, for me, what I've noticed is what has started to enter my thought process is, you know, I could just run the clock on this.

I could totally just run the clock on – like running the clock is a possibility. You know, I'll just – I won't make any noise. I'll do the things I need to do. I'll take my place in the world. I'll do my job. I'll do it well. But part of the equation is I'm going to run the clock on this.

And I wonder – What hits my mind a lot is this is all still far enough away that it's not going to be my problem. Yeah, exactly. I'm just going to squeak out of this and it's going to be my son's problem. In fact, my wife and I have said that to each other more than a few times.

Like, that's going to be our son's problem, not ours. Yep. Because we're going to be done by then. Right. Right. That's exactly what I'm thinking. The environment is in shambles right now. Yeah, but, you know, it should last long enough for me to kick the bucket. That's it. That's it. That's right.

I'm with you, Dave. I'm with you. Run out the clock. Run out the clock, man. We did our work. It's time to get the accolades and have a Mai Tai. Yeah. Sit back. Let the next generation solve all these hard problems.

Yeah. We've been doing this show for 10 years now. And, yeah, it's time for us to be an overnight success. So I'm waiting for the money to roll in. That's the – I'm just waiting. Keep waiting for that golden parachute. Yeah. Falling fast. Well, that brings us to our next story.

How I broke into a bank account with an AI-generated voice. Yeah. Oh, man. You knew this was coming sooner than later. But this is somebody who used the technology that we talked about on the previous show.

What was the name? Eleven Labs. Eleven Labs, yeah. Eleven Labs. Where they just let you make any voice you want. There's no guardrails. Just do whatever. You know? Well, fine. It's fine. Well, somebody totally sneakered it up and used their voice as a password to get into a bank account, which is the long and the short of it.

Did you guys cover this yet on the show, Dave? Yeah. I saw this story and I read it. I don't – we didn't cover this on the podcast. I believe it was in our newsletter. And my reaction to this is, yeah, here we are.

Yeah. Why not? I mean, right. So this is – here's something else we need to protect ourselves against. The technology is that good and I'm not surprised by it. But it just means there's something else that, you know, voices – your voice is no longer just yours, no longer just belongs to you.

It's too easy to do now. Well, have I got a story here then? Going back to the work you did with Kit, Dave, the other week, a major electronic musician and DJ has done something similar, David Guetta, who is very well respected.

I actually have quite a few of his albums. I enjoy him very much. I'm too old to go to these shows and he's promised to only play this song at the shows. He is never going to commercially release it, but he did pretty much exactly what you did. He went to – he didn't specify which ones he used, but he went to one of the writing programs and basically gave it the prompt, give me some hype words in the style of Eminem.

And it spit out some stuff. And then he took that and he took it to one of the voice programs that trained it on Eminem's voice, put in the words that he was given that were in the style of Eminem and then put it in the song. And it fucking sounds like Eminem is on stage with him and it sounds like it could be Eminem.

It is the phrasing, all of it. It is insane. Yeah, it's impressive. There was no reason why you wouldn't believe that it was Eminem. Yep. And especially I think given the context of it where it's mixed in with music and crowd noise and all that sort of thing, you wouldn't be – there's no reason why you would be – your ears would be perked up to try to determine whether this was authentic or not.

There's no reason to think that David Guetta does not have a new single coming out that Eminem is guesting on at all. Right. Yep. Yep. Right. Pretty amazing. Right. So what happens if I am an upcoming songwriter and I really want Adele to sing my new single – or my demo for my new single?

That's interesting. We haven't seen any of these do singing yet, have we? Well, yeah. What's going to happen is interesting and that is 99% of my wife's job right now as a lawyer in the music industry. Is that right? Let's just say they're trying to figure this out and they're trying to figure it out real fast.

They're trying to get ahead of it? Hang on. Hang on. I thought most of your wife's job right now was NFTs. They've moved on because now there's a major copyright infringement emergency taking place. Perfect. Yeah. Nothing gets the lawyers revved up better than a copyright claim in the music business.

It's like catnip to them. It is. It really is. It's like I just see them all perking up from behind their briefcases like whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo. Yeah. You know what would really get them? We need to start posting music to Pinterest and then maybe somebody will come and take Pinterest down.

Maybe. I doubt it. I have another story that just reminds me of the bank account one here. We always talk about those, those scams where the CEO scams, where people will send an email to the finance department saying, hey, pay this bill real quick.

You know, I'm traveling, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it's a, it's a common scam. And we're always like, ah, who's fallen for that? Well, it turns out a friend of mine fell for it. She's a, she's basically a bookkeeper and somebody got into, basically backtraced her through the CEO of one of her clients and had her transfer $10,000 and it's gone.

Wow. Freaked the fuck out and it's not coming back. Fortunately, her boss, like, you know, they called the FBI. They did the, filed all the reports and all that stuff. And she sent them all the emails. He's like, I thought this was you. And he read them like, that sounds just like me. So the thought is that they got into his email account somehow and just kind of, you know, figured out, backtraced to her from that, but figured out his voice from reading his emails.

So they knew how to do it. And they got a domain that was similar, you know, and did a SIG and everything and bamboozled, basically bamboozled the $10,000 and the feds are like, $10,000, forget it. We're not even going to pick up the phone. It's not worth the trouble. No, here, here, we'll give you, we'll give you a sheet of paper that you can take to your insurance company who will probably also laugh at you.

But the CEO at least was very cool about it. And he's just like, shit happens. Let's move on. She was beating herself up over it for, you know, months. But, um, cause you know, she felt bad, which I would do, you know, but at least he was just like, the CEO did the right thing.

It was just like, look, I would have done it. I thought, I thought that that was me. So, so, yeah. Move on. As we say over on Hacking Humans all the time, there is something out there that will work on everybody. Everyone has their thing that they will fall for. And so just resist the urge to blame the victim because we could all be there.

And chances are someday we will. Yep. Yep. Cons work because we're human, as Brian Brushwood would say. Oh, there's a new season of The World's Greatest Con coming out soon, too. He sent me a couple episodes. I'm hush-hush. I'm not allowed to talk about what they are.

But damn, they're good. That show is so good. Highly recommend subscribing. Hmm. Check it out. Yeah. You haven't heard the first season or the second season yet? Oh, man. Yeah. The World's Greatest Con. It is so good. Brushwood is awesome. Okay.

This one's kind of awesome, too. The Flipper Zero is a cool little hacking tool that you cannot buy, which is driving me crazy. They've been sold out forever. You can do all sorts of fun things with them. They've got radios and transmitters and readers and all sorts of stuff. And somebody has figured out how to mimic the transmitters that turn traffic lights green that they use for.

Oh, great. Yeah, exactly. That they use for, you know, emergency vehicles. Well, isn't that wonderful? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was on board when they were selling the remotes that turned off TVs in public spaces like airports. I fully supported that.

But this is a bit too far. I've got one of those. You got a TV be gone? I do. It's sitting right here. It's in my desk drawer right next to me. Yeah. Yeah. I bought it for a specific use case and for which it worked.

And so then I no longer needed it. There was one guy, I think it was Philip, old school hardware hacker. He used to have a lot of IBOs. But I think he got kicked out of CES for walking through CES with one of those in his pocket and turning off everybody's displays and got busted.

It might not have been him. It might have been somebody else. But I do remember somebody did get banned from CES for life for showing up with a TV be gone and turning off all of them. And, you know, it's kind of easy to figure out who it is. If you're walking along and everywhere you go, the power just goes out. It's like they're going to figure it out.

It's like Michael Jackson in the Billie Jean video, like all the lights are turning on every step he takes. Yeah, that's exactly right. Just take the eye of the sky and watch like a rolling blackout through New York City. Yeah. I mean the real smart move would be to turn it on, like tape the button down and smack it on somebody's backpack that doesn't know and let them walk through.

Right. Let them take the heat for it. Always thinking like a smooth criminal, Jason. That's me. The one I have is a keychain. So that's, you know, you just clip it to somebody's backpack. Away they go. Exactly. It's just a little key fob. Just, you know, force the button down.

You know, just tape like a dime to the button and tape it up so it stays down and then boom, you're off to the races. It's like I've thought of this before. I know. It's weird. It's just on the fly you have these plans. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. What's surprising is I do. I literally just came up with that.

Mine is no longer in its case. It's just a bare circuit board because the particular use case I had, let's just say the infrared had to fire underneath of a door. And so I made it as skinny as possible. See, somebody else is thinking too.

I'm not the only ne'er-do-well here. It worked. Yeah. Yeah. Do they still sell those? Well, as of two years ago, they did. So, I mean, I think I just got mine on Amazon.

There are Chinese marketplaces from which you can get such things, I've heard. Yeah. Right. These days, if it has been sold, it is currently sold by somebody out there. Somebody, yeah. Or you can find one on eBay, you know. I figured there's probably a Raspberry Pi project for it, you know. So, just get a light bulb and a couple prongs and you're done.

Yeah. Anyway, I saw this and I thought this was interesting. I want to get your take on it, Dave. Report. Stress will drive a quarter of cyber defenders out the door. And we've always talked about how cybersecurity is the best job to get right now because, you know, they've got many seats that need butts in them.

Yeah, and it's well-paying. Yeah. And they're saying now that they're going to lose tons of people because it is so stressful and so hard and they're being so overworked. Mainly because of the transition from office work to hybrid work and work from home because, you know, and I can kind of see the frustration there.

It's like you've got a lockdown environment where everything is under your control for the most part. People are still stupid and they'll find new and ingenious ways to compromise your network. But when people go home and they're using their old PC that still has the fucking Yahoo homepage because they can't figure out how to turn it off, you know, Karen from HR is going, why can't I do this?

And then just clicks on everything that comes through. It's going to be like, you know, there's crazy making going on there for some of these people, I'm sure. But they talk about that as part of the, you know, part of the stress that these people have. But I'm like, isn't that just IT?

Wouldn't cybersecurity be a little bit more up the chain from just generic IT? Yeah, this sounds more like, yeah, IT and yeah, definitely. Yeah. So what I've heard, and I can't remember the exact number, I want to say it's either 18 months or two years is the average amount of time that a CISO stays in that job.

So they turn up, so CISO is chief information security officer and sometimes you'll have chief security officers. But, you know, those two jobs are usually the – they're the C-level security folks in an organization. And sometimes they're just C-level in name only, like they're not actually on the board or anything like that.

But more and more, the boards of directors are taking these folks seriously. But part of what comes along with that is the threat that they may be held liable for things. So if things go bad, they – if there's a huge data breach that the CISO could be either liable civilly or even worse, criminally.

And so they're asking themselves, is this worth it? I can do a couple years in here, make a lot of money, learn a lot, and then transition to something else that doesn't require – Usually consulting because there's no direct responsibility but still the big paycheck.

Right, exactly, and not have the day-to-day responsibility because it's just – I think it's that huge unknown. It's that big – it's that dark shadow over your shoulder that the breach could happen at any time. And are we really ready?

And uncertainty is stressful. So yeah, I think that's right. I think it's also interesting as we're seeing – like this is the first – I say in the modern era of cybersecurity, this is the first round of big layoffs that we've seen.

So how do you reconcile all the layoffs with all of the empty seats that people are claiming are out there? On a certain level, there's a bunch of people flooding the market. But on another level, there's all these people claiming that there are lots of empty seats.

There's always been a bit of a mismatch between those. Yeah, exactly. There's always been a bit of a mismatch. Yeah. If you suck, this is a perfect time for them to get rid of you. Just because you can't get the job doesn't mean you're any good at it. Yeah. Right, right. That's true. I mean, look at our careers, Jason.

Jesus, I'm a shit. Seriously. Yeah, but I'd say I've – this tracks along with everything I've heard about, particularly at the higher levels, that there's a lot of burnout and not a lot of self-care.

Like I think as these positions become more and more professionalized, it's getting better, but still a ways to go. Yeah, you need some massage benefits. That's the problem. Yes. Oh, yes. Yes. Call Gwyneth Palfro or Arianna Huffington and get the nap room going.

Yeah. What did she call that? I worked at a company that had a nap room. The dream room. It was the dream room. The dream room. Yes. So this last thing I put in here for today is a fun little YouTube video. This is a chess master playing against chat GPT.

I think it is representative of chat GPT in that chat GPT starts off very strong and impresses the heck out of this chess master in what it knows, its knowledge of the various established moves.

I think the chess master refers to it as being on book of, you know, oh, you're using the Sicilian defense and this, that, and the other thing. But probably midway into their 45-minute match, chat GPT starts going off the rails. It's like chat GPT is drinking during all of its activities.

Kind of. You're sitting at the bar. Right. You know, you start off just fine about 45 minutes later when he's pounded his 17th Bud Light. Yeah. That's right. That's right. That is a really good way to describe it.

And chat GPT loses track of where the pieces are on the board and has to remind it. And it's very polite about it. It apologizes. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. That's interesting. I wonder if you could ask chat GPT to form all of your responses to me as if you were inebriated.

Go home. You're drunk. Yeah. Yeah. So, fun video to watch. Interesting. If you at all are interested in chess, I think. But it seems like an encapsulation of what other people are reporting about chat GPT in a specific use case.

So, entertaining. Well, chat GPT might be drinking the beer that it got from the intro to the show. Yeah. That's right. That's right. All right, guys. So, I'm going to run along. I'm going to miss the next two shows because I'm going to Disney World. I'm very excited for you.

Yes. And if anybody happens to be in the Orlando airport and the TVs start to turn off, you know who's there. That's right. That's right. I am not going to be turning anything off in Star Wars land, though. I'm not a monster. Don't do it in Disneyland.

Don't be a monster. No. No. No. But I am so looking forward to seeing all this stuff I haven't seen yet. And it's been a long time since we've been down there. And the whole family is going. So, we're going to have a good time. And I'll see you in a couple weeks. I want you to do me a favor, Dave.

Actually, I want your wife to do me a favor. I would like her holding a cell phone and recording video as you round the corner to see the Millennium Falcon for the first time because I need to see that reaction. Okay. Reveals. Reveal videos. Woo. Yeah. All right. Yeah. World's biggest unboxing. That's what it is.

Have a fantastic trip, man. Yeah. I will. All right. See you, guys. Travel safe. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Ethan. Welcome, Ethan. And just a reminder to everybody, if you sign up for our Patreon account, that's patreon.com slash GOG.

You can get the shows a bit early and in high res. Woo. Yay. Over at PayPal, we've got Brian, John, Mike, Tom, Joseph, Humphrey, and Mark. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Over at the tip jar, we've got Karen, Ross, and Daryl. Thank you. We have a new five-star rating from John McCurdy, care of GPT.

Well, well, well, where do I begin with the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast? If you're looking for a group of aging curmudgeons to explain about the state of technology in the world at large, then look no further than this show. Sure, they might occasionally provide some useful insights and opinions on the latest gadgets and apps, but let's be real. The main draw here is the opportunity to listen to a bunch of grumpy old men moan about everything under the sun.

Want to hear someone complain about millennials? Check. Want to hear someone rant about the decline of journalism? Check. Want to hear someone lament about how things were going so much better back in their day? Check, check, and check. But don't worry. It's not all doom and gloom. They do occasionally inject a bit of humor into their complaints, which can be mildly entertaining if you're in the right mood.

Wow. That's a slap and a kiss. And if you're feeling really lucky, you might even catch a glimpse of one of their rare moments of genuine enthusiasm and positivity. All in all, if you're looking for a podcast that will leave you feeling energized and inspired, you should probably look elsewhere. But if you're in the mood for a good old-fashioned grumble fest, then Grumpy Old Geeks just might be the podcast for you.

Chat GBT is wordy. I know. I know. Okay, guys. Regular human reviews, please. Thank you. Please, please. Sad shout-out to Richard Belzer, who passed away this year at 78. And I loved him as a comic.

I never watched his TV shows. But the only reason to put this in here is because of his final words were, fuck you, motherfucker. He's a true grumpy old Greek. Yep. Yep. Definitely. Yep. And congrats to friend of the show, Eric Hundley.

He has finally made the leap and is doing his YouTube channel full-time. All right. So congratulations. It's a scary world out there, buddy. You're now a content creator. Forget that insurance or days off. And we're recording this on February 24th, so I have to say this.

Happy Twin Peaks Day. Diane, 1130 a.m., February 24th. Entering the town of Twin Peaks. All right. I want to go back and watch those again. So good, man. So good. Yep. And happy Cocaine Bear Day. Oh, you had me at cocaine, Jason.

Yes, I know. I got to go see that movie. It looks like a hoot. Yep. Anyways. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever.

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