592: Ok, Doomer!

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. Okay, Brian, since we're old and Dave's not here, I guess it's time to get the obligatory health follow-up out of the way. Okay. How is the fallout from the colonoscopy going? Y'all better? Yeah, I mean, I feel pretty good, really.

I have to start a short routine of chemotherapy that they want to do, kind of just like mopping up and making sure that nothing has been left behind and will bite me in the ass in the future.

So I'll start that in like two weeks, and it's about a three-month thing, but most of it is done from home and two weeks on, one week off kind of thing. And I've heard it's not pleasant even at the lower levels, but it is what it is.

It's what the doctors say to do to make sure I'm going to be okay. So I'm going to do it. And that's that. And hopefully after that, it's just, you know, I'll have pretty regular checkups just to monitor things. You know, they'll do the scans, making sure I don't have any appearances of cancer anywhere else.

And I'll be on a pretty regular colonoscopy schedule. And, you know, there you go. That's about it, really. So I should be around for an awful long time. Okay. Okay. Well, that's good. That's good.

I like the whole chemo at home thing. Well, you know, pandemic work from home now. You know, medical care at home, apparently. Yep. Here's your chemo self-install kit from Verizon. Yeah, it's funny. They give you the pills and they're basically like, do not let anyone touch these.

Yeah. They give you a cup to, like, dump them into and then you just take them from the cup and, like, you keep them away. Great. So I'm like, okay. Oh, God. I can just imagine, just picture the Homer Simpson outfit.

Pretty much, yeah. With a pill flying around. So, yeah, that's me. I'm all right. All right. Good, good. Yeah. As many people who listen to this show know that for, I don't know, my entire life, I've been basically a raging alcoholic. So I'm actually getting treatment for that now, finally.

But I'm just mentioning this because I do AA meetings for several hours a day nowadays. And I keep getting phone calls at the same exact time every night from our friend, Dr. Teeter, and several other people who want to call and check in and say hi and do things.

I just want to tell everybody, stop calling me in the evening. Forget it. Teeter texted me last night. He's like, stop being an asshat and pick up the phone. I'm like, I'm in a fucking meeting. I can't. And then by the time I, you know, check my phone in the morning, I got all these angry messages. So sorry, everybody. I'm taking care of my health.

Isn't it great that when you're at an AA meeting, you're getting drunk dialed by your friends? Isn't it? Yeah. I'm like, come on. Come on. I can't lose. I can't win. But 64 days sober. So that's fun. Congratulations. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. But yeah, stop calling me at night, people.

Call me during the day like, you know, normal folks, I guess. Text like a regular human. Well, I can't even text. I turn my phone off. I mean, like it's in my pocket. Things are off. Leave me alone. Even when I'm on Zoom, because most of my meetings are on Zoom. But in the in-person meetings, I actually leave my phone in the car.

Oh, so you're doing AA from home. I do AA from home. Yes. It's a brave new world. It is. It is. I've done 120 plus Zoom meetings. It's crazy. That's awesome. Yeah. Just don't do AA meetings from the bar. That's kind of a good rule. Yeah. You're kind of not allowed to do that.

Yeah. They ask you to please refrain from that. Although I think I've seen some people piloted from the bar. I'm just testing my willpower, man. Yeah. Which step is that? God. I do have to say, though, after going to all these meetings, I do have a much enhanced appreciation of the movie Fight Club.

There is a lot of like you go to a couple of meetings and there really is a lot to that movie that is nuanced that people who have not gone to meetings will not pick up on. But since I started going, it's like, oh, that movie just like completely opened up to me. And I was already a super fan of the movie.

I've seen it over 100 times. But now it's just like, oh, man, I can go watch it again and again and get more out of it. You know, it's funny you mentioned that. Well, not Fight Club specifically, but Chuck Palahniuk, the author. I was actually my kid's school had a book sale for to raise money for the school.

And we were all encouraged to drop off books, kids or adult books. And, you know, people would go and buy them and all the money would go to the school. And I was going through all my stuff because I'm trying to pare it down because I don't have the space for massive libraries and kids stuff takes over the house and your life and everything.

So I was like, all right, I got to start getting rid of some of these. And I went through my entire I have like almost every book that Palahniuk has written. I had them all in hardcover because you go through that period, you know, as a male in your 20s and 30s where that's very, very attractive to you.

Yeah. If you're of a certain mind type. And I realized, like, except for Fight Club, I don't recall anything about any of these books. And I just got rid of them all except for Fight Club. Okay. And Fight Club, I didn't even like the book. I didn't even care that much for the book.

It's not bad. It's the only one I felt like keeping. There are a couple of them that I remember the stories from that I wish I could forget. Yeah, that's that's the thing. When I started to read some of the blurbs, I was like, oh, no, I don't need this in my life anymore. It was a phase. Yeah, I think it's a phase for a lot of people.

I think Choke was the last one I read. And that was enough. That was enough. He he did do a book where he talked about, like, his writing process and things like that. That was a pretty decent book. But and I I paid for his sub stack for a year.

Right. Which I really wish I wouldn't have done because I've unsubscribed from it because it's like seven emails a day. I'm like, just stop. Stop. If they were good, it would be even better. But I just did not really dig them.

Yeah. Yeah. Give your money to somebody else. I think I I couldn't get a refund, but I did. I did sign up for Molly White's newsletter. I paid her a year in advance because she at least doesn't write every single day. And when she does write, it's very well thought out. It is informative, not just entertaining.

Right. But anyway, we got a little bit of follow up before we dive into the actual show. Now that we've talked about the old man diseases, I came across this post. I can't remember how I find it, found it. But it's called The Embedding Revolution with Anton Shroynikov.

It's a podcast and it's with this guy, Nathan LeBenz. And the thing about it, it didn't really matter all that much. It's like they talk about some different open A.I. pricing and stuff like that. But what got me was today's today we'll discuss A.I.

Doomerism and why we're not all going to die, which got me. I've never heard of the word doomerism. And I'm like, that just that just made my little black heart grow three times. I'm like, I love that word. I love that word. So then I did a little deep dive and it's been a meme for a little bit about climate change.

See, I didn't know that I missed all the climate change memes because I gave up on climate change. We're all going to burn to death anyway. Fuck it. See, you're a doomer. That's what I mean. That's why I'm like, I may have found my tribe. So I looked up doomer and it's been around since, I guess, 2008.

And it came from 4chan of all places. Go figure. As most things do these days. Yes, that's true. But I'm reading the Wikipedia entry on doomer. And at the very end, it says, alternatives to doomerism include solar punk. Yeah.

And I'm like, huh? What? But solar punk? What the fuck is solar punk? So I did a little more deep dive on solar punk. Have you heard of solar punk before, before I get into this? That I had not heard of, no. Okay. I just assumed it meant like people that really like industrial music, but go dancing during the day instead of into dark.

Isn't that Coachella? Pretty much. Okay. Well, not anymore. Coachella is now Beyonce. Oh, got it. Here you go. Solar punk is a literary and artistic movement that envisions and works towards actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community.

The solar represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future. That's important. Optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism while the punk, in quotes, refers to the countercultural post-capitalist and decolonial enthusiasm for creating such a future.

Now, okay. Cyberpunk and steampunk. Those were kind of punk. Solar punk are just a bunch of fucking hippies as far as I can tell. I don't think they understand what the word punk means. Yes. Yes. And to clarify, I just, I asked my good friend, Chad GPT. I'm like, can you define the punk ethos for me?

And it boiled it down to the punk attitude is about challenging the status quo, expressing oneself authentically in advocating for social and political change. That part, that part is kind of maybe just a little, but basically.

There wasn't a lot of advocating for social and political change as part of the initial punk movement that did come after. Yeah. But still, basically punk is fuck you. That's how, that's how I define punk. Punk is fuck you. Funk the establishment. Fuck the man. You don't tell me what to do. Period. And when I hear about an optimistic vision of the future, fuck you.

That is not punk. Punk is not an optimistic vision of the future. Punk is breaking some glass. Come on. That's what I, that's what I have to say about that. So you can take your solar punk and have a, just pour on a big dollop of doomerism, please. You know, as we've gotten older, I've come to accept the fact that all the thing, all the words that we used to use, they have been reclaimed and recycled and they don't mean the same thing anymore.

All right, Jason, we're, we're all get off our solar punk lawns. In the news. Breaking news today out of Germany, Brian. Okay. GPT-4 is coming next week and it will be, I don't know what this means, multimodal.

Okay. But I think I know what that means. But I think it's going to be cross, cross genres like text and pictures and images and all this shit. As they say here, Andreas Braun, who is the CTO of Microsoft Germany, says that GPT-4 is coming next week and it will be multimodal models that will offer completely different possibilities.

For example, videos. And they're calling it a game changer. Ooh. It's already been a game changer. What the fuck? It's going to get changed. How's it going to change the game even more? But yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I'm looking forward to our GPT overlords coming next week.

Yes. In multiple languages and with video. Can't wait. Just what we need. More deep fakes with 42 fingers. Mm-hmm. All right. And in just really makes me upset news, police are prosecuting abortion seekers using their digital data and Facebook and Google help them to do that.

Wow. Who would have thought that was going to happen considering we talked about it in our security segment over two years ago? It's here now, finally. It's apparently been here, but now it's really, really here. It's fucking bullshit. It's really fucking bullshit.

And what they're doing is they're dumping chat logs, like full-on chat logs over to the police. And even if the thing that the police weren't looking for, they can find other things in there. It's like, you know, if you let a cop into your home and they're looking for drugs, but they find a stolen Renoir on the wall, they can arrest you for the Renoir.

And I know that these quote-unquote companies, big social media companies have to hand over data when, you know, presented with an actual subpoena from law enforcement, right?

They got to do it. Do they really have to do it so well, though? That's all I'm asking. I mean, there's only one solution for this. They've got to do end-to-end encryption on all their stuff, and then they can actually say to agencies, sorry, don't have it. Yeah.

Or to the other people who were doing this, get off fucking Facebook. Use a service that has end-to-end encryption. Or talk to people in person, maybe. Don't put this shit on the internet. We've been telling you for, what did you say, Brian, two years that we've been saying that don't do this shit?

Yeah. Don't organize your abortion through Facebook Messenger. That would be a bad idea. Yeah. And, you know, I go back to, what's his name, Eric from Google, when he said, you know, hey, if you don't have anything to hide, well, you know what? Back then, people might not have had anything to hide, but laws change, which we're finding out for the worst sometimes.

And then the things that weren't illegal yesterday are now illegal today. So just watch what the fuck you do on social media. Stop it with this shit. Well, somebody that's not going to have to worry about that at all is Sam Bakeman-Fried. Because the Justice Department basically wants to give him an old school Razor flip phone for the rest of his life.

And that's all he's going to be able to use anymore. In a letter seen by Bloomberg, prosecutors involved in his criminal case said Friday that Bankman-Fried's lawyers had agreed to modify the terms of his bail agreement. Provided the judge overseeing the case agrees to the changes, he will be restricted to using a non-smartphone without internet connectivity.

Unless a lawyer is present, he will also be forbidden from contacting current or former FTX and Alameda research employees. And he will not be able to use encrypted messaging apps, including Signal. So this all comes about because he allegedly attempted to contact the General Counsel of FTX's U.S. subsidiary over Signal at the start of the year.

I wonder what kind of conversation he was hoping to have there. Yeah, really. How the fuck do I get out of this? According to Bloomberg, District Judge Lewis Kaplan threatened to remove Bankman-Fried's bail and send him to jail before the start of his trial after learning that the disgraced entrepreneur may have also influenced potential witnesses.

So they've also banned him from using a VPN after his lawyer said he used one to watch a football game. Sure, that's the only thing he used that for. Yeah, it's not just a football game. He said he needed it to watch the Super Bowl. The one thing that is the most widely available program ever deployed every year.

He's like, oh, well, I need a VPN so I can go through my... I was like, no, you don't, dude. You need rabbit ears. That's what you do. You need a set of rabbit ears. Come on. Well, in addition to his razor, he will also be allowed a laptop and he will be allowed to surf the web, but his access would be filtered through a VPN that he isn't allowed to use.

Okay. I guess you can use this VPN that we've set up for you and we'll limit it to two categories of websites. One would include resources his defense teams say are critical to his case. In other words, the internet. And the other featuring a list of 23 websites he could use to order food, read the news and watch streaming content like his beloved Super Bowl.

I know. One of those 23 websites was not web3isgoinggreat.com, which I really think that they should put on that list. I think so, too. We should lobby for this. Yeah, really. Yeah. No, it's always fun watching Molly just go ballistic about this. Like, why is this guy not in jail?

He's not a kid. He's an adult. He should be in jail awaiting trial. We're talking billions of dollars here. Come on. You know? And if you steal two cigarettes at 7-Eleven, you go to jail. Well, if you're black. Oh, that's right. That's right. Let me. He just wears black, black hoodies.

He's not black. Yes. Black is how he feels on the inside, not the outside. All right, Morrissey. I'm working on it. Now that I saw that How to Make a Smith Song in Under a Minute last week, I'm really getting into it. I saw this. This gets basically the award for best headline of the year.

Elon Musk's Compelling Case for Worst Human of 2023 by Ethan Zuckerman, which is a fantastic short read. It kind of centers around the debacle this week of Elon calling out Haldor Thorleafson.

Haldor Thorleafson basically is a guy who worked at Twitter who didn't know if he worked at Twitter anymore because they kind of turned off access to his laptop, but there's no HR, so he couldn't tell anything. So, of course, he asks Twitter. He just goes to Twitter.

Am I employed or not? Elon does the most epic dick step on that we've ever seen. I mean, this puts everything he's done to shame and just called the guy lazy, said he was, you know, or if he's so disabled because he said he had a disability and like exposed his disability, which, by the way, every HR lawyer in the in the world immediately went smelled blood.

Oh, my God. They did. They smell blood. You can't do that, Elon. You just can't do that. And the funny thing is, this guy is like well known for being an ambassador for disabilities. So, fuck. I watched this.

I watched this play out in real time. I have to say, I've been very like down on social media and particularly Twitter. My enjoyment and what I get out of it is mostly gone because most of the people that I like to follow have left. But boy, it was all worth it just to watch this play out.

I know. I mean, I had to watch it in the news because I have I have blocked Elon after I after I just got tired of it. I just got tired of it. So this was nice to see all all in one nice little ball of Jesus Christ. Would somebody take this guy's fingers away from him?

I know. I know. Can we get Elon a flip phone? This just always reminds me of my days when when social media first came out working with bands and I would just be like, no, you can't have access to your band's Twitter account. You cannot. No, no, no, no, sir.

This is a bad, bad idea. This is bad news. Oh, man. We shouldn't have had access to our own Twitter accounts, let alone a band. Jesus. Oh, my God. And speaking of bands, this actually I put this in here because this is reminded me of a night that I had with you. This is a Twitter engineer says at least two bodyguards accompany Elon Musk around Twitter HQ even to the restroom.

Now, this makes I may not be a raging alcoholic like like you, but I have been known to invite I don't I don't recall any evening like this with us. This was the day it was December 30th in Chicago where we were hanging out with the Google dolls.

Oh, the New Year's Eve show. Right. Yeah. And the night before, remember, we went out drinking with the band and hung out with who's this lead singer again? I forget his name. Johnny. We're hanging out with Johnny and Johnny had his bodyguard. And I'd never seen this. We're all at this big giant table eating steaks and lobster and, you know, just being decadent shits.

And he went up to go to the bathroom and his bodyguard got up and went with him. And you told me later, he's like, yeah, he has to do that because it's you know, it could be dangerous for him in the bathroom if fans see him go in and like, oh, makes sense. So so I can understand why, you know, Elon would need this because, you know, Elon has anti fans.

He doesn't have fans coming up to ask him for an autograph in the bathroom. He has people coming up to shiv him in the back in the bathroom. He has people asking him if they're employed or not. Yeah. Yeah. You'd figure he would hear the wheels of the wheelchairs sneaking up behind him going squeaky squeak. But I guess I guess he needs a bodyguard for that.

I just thought it was it was it's interesting that he's walking around Twitter with bodyguards. But it I it makes sense to me because he is definitely when you fire 80 percent of your staff, you're going to make some enemies. You know, yeah, yeah. Got to got to break a few eggs to fuck up an omelet.

Yeah, really. So and it even even he's he's doing the you know, they're not quite quitting. They're being quiet fired. They don't even know. It's like, do I still here? And which brings me to everybody being fired. This was a great article. How a single engineer brought down Twitter.

Well, I would say how a single CEO brought down Twitter because he fired all the engineers. It's just, you know, we have the fresh talent who can't get out of their H1B visas who are stuck there. So the long and the short of is Elon says, hey, we're spending too much money on this API.

Let's turn off the API for everybody. OK, great. Not realizing that, oh, 90 percent of the inside of Twitter is run by their own API. They eat their own dog food, which is how it generally works in tech companies like this. You know, you build these APIs and then you you are your own customer for these APIs.

And it's all about access lists and things like that on who can get to them. Well, one guy just screwed up the config file and it just took everything down. And I mean, what's happening now is what we predicted was going to happen sooner. You know, when we predicted this after the first round of firings.

But it's finally, you know, the cows are coming home to roost. We're pretty sure those are chickens. In Elon's case, they might be cows. OK. Who knows? The pedos are coming home to roost. How's that? Yeah. I mean, they're going to continue to have these problems.

You just can't take it. I don't first off, we all know that Twitter was kind of gaffer tape together anyways. Oh, yes. And you just can't downsize that much. You just can't and expect something to continue to work. So, yeah, you get I mean, the way it works with these things is there's always one guy that knows everything.

There's just one guy. And if you get rid of that guy on accident or on purpose, there's nobody else for them to go, you know, ask. You can't go ask the Oracle. And he used to be able to ask Slack, but he didn't pay his Slack bill, so he can't even ask Slack. Maybe he should have tried ChatGPT.

They could have fixed that code. Yeah, they do write code now. The last line in here I just love. Inside Twitter's HQ, however, the mood was almost late. We're laughing all the way down, says a current employee. It's great. I mean, what else? What other choice do you have?

You enjoy the ride, right? Yeah, as long as you're still getting a paycheck. But, hey, even if you're not getting a paycheck, you could probably still live there for free as long as you just kind of stay under your desk or whatever. Plenty of sleeping bags floating around that place. Yeah, there are. Yeah, there are. And just a little Twitter – not Twitter news, Tesla news now.

Yep. Tesla can't catch a break here. Now they're being investigated because the steering wheels fall off on some model-wise. Missing a bolt. Yeah, yeah. I guess Elon didn't pay the bolt bill over a Tesla.

I guess not. So, yeah. You'd think that somebody would have noticed that there was a screw loose somewhere. But, yeah, it's a very small subset of cars that have actually had the steering wheel fall off, but one isn't – one is too many, I would have to say.

One is too many. Yeah, it's just – you know, it's a bit like saying, you know, 95% of our planes operate flawlessly. Yeah. It's like that. Well, we're going to need 100 here. Yeah. We're looking for 100. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, it's like, okay, let's put out a plane where the wings just randomly fall off.

Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of a key component. Kind of a key component. The QC, like, shouldn't these things be checked as they roll off the line? I just – He let that department go. Yeah, probably. Yeah. That department. Who needs that stuff?

Just have everybody work harder. Yeah. And we don't need to check anything. Sleep on the factory line. That'll solve this problem. Exactly. This is now we're getting into the realm of actual science fiction. Researchers use AI to generate images based on people's brain activity.

Mm-hmm. That's just – Yeah. I read it. Did you look at the pictures? I did. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's kind of – it's not perfect by any stretch, but it's close enough to be kind of terrifying. It's – yeah. I recommend that everybody go check the link in the show notes.

That'll be gog.show slash 592. Go click on the link and look at the images and just – just – just marvel at it for a second. First of all, I mean, two – I have two completely competing thoughts in my brain about this. Okay. One, how fucking cool.

Yes, yes. And number two, we are rocketing towards that fucking sci-fi dystopia I've been reading about all my life. I know. I know. I'm actually – I was actually going to talk about Stranger Things – not Strange Days later in the show. So this is getting close, getting close.

And even if it's not exact, which it's not, it's still – because memory is not exact anyway. So, hey, you know, it is what it is. But this is kind of neat that they can take fMRI signals and kind of reconstitute it, running it back through the diffusion algorithms to kind of reconstitute things.

And it reminded me a lot of – like ages ago in the – like maybe 96 or 97, we had – I was scanning a lot of images and I had kind of a shitty low-res scanner. But what I found was – and this I think is kind of a lot of the – the way a lot of this stuff works.

If I take a scan or if I took a scan back then in Photoshop and up-resed it to the maximum that my little 2CI could handle, you know, take that scan, res it up massively, apply a Gaussian blur to it, then shrink it back down, the interpolation in the algorithm would actually make it look a lot better.

Which I – you know, I think that's kind of a standard practice nowadays. But this was like, you know, 96, 97 that I was doing this. And I was like, oh, and I've used it forever. It was a great trick. And I think that that's where they get the, you know, some of this diffusion model. It's like makes everything very diffuse and then you just keep removing the noise and resharpening everything until it kind of comes into play.

And, you know, that's a lot of what they're doing with this stuff. And it's just – it's crazy that they can do this from a fucking fMRI, you know? I'm going – I'm excited for this one. I'm very excited. It is weird. It's – you mentioned Strange Days. That actually came out in 95, which is right around that same time period you were doing all your scanning.

And I just got to say, I was at the rave that they used in that movie. No way! Yeah, Aphex Twin played on top of like a tank or something. It was – I had finally made it to one of the dance scenes in a movie that actually exists because, as we all know, those scenes in movies are wildly inaccurate of what any club is actually like.

But since I was in the movie set for the rave, it actually looked like that. So it's cool. That's very cool. That's very cool. I always think about the club scene in The Matrix where that thing is just like, yeah, no, that was bad. That was really bad.

I mean – That's what – that's how solar punks party. Yeah, pretty much. Oh, God. But this is fun. It's fun. It is definitely Strange Days with this stuff. And somebody wants to give L.A. a Boston Dynamics robot dog spot, right?

Fortunately for us, we are not San Francisco. And out of the gate, everybody decided, this is a bad idea. We do not want spot in our neighborhood. So it was shot down like the city council shot it down.

But they've decided to just take a few days to kind of mull it over and see if they can kind of get the public on board so they can get their free dog. But – No dogs, please.

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Well, let's start with last night's Picard. We will go spoiler-free, I think. But, well, I wrote you, Jason, right after I finished watching it. What did you think? Um, wow. That was good. We finally got the Picard we were waiting for.

And dare I say it is probably the finest hour of Star Trek we've had in 20 or 30 years. It was pretty fucking good. It was pretty fucking good. Yep. It was pretty fucking good. Yep. Yep. Yeah, they un-conned it. That's for sure. They did. I'm a little sad because I'm starting to think we're only going to get Marina Sirtis in TV screens for the entire season.

Yes, seems like it. But, uh, wow, that was a good episode. Really good. Really good. Uh, speaking of not so good Star Trek, Star Trek Discovery is ending with season five next year. Well, that's good news. Yes, I agree.

That's pretty good news. Yeah, I didn't mind it. They had their run. They shot their shot. Did not care too much for it. It was, it's still Star Trek-ish. Is it? Is it? And, uh, but I mean, what are they going to do now? They've flung themselves so far into the future.

Are they going to, they seem stuck. They don't know what to do anymore. So, time to let it end. Yeah, please. Pretty please. Now, I read this, I read this article that you, you linked in here. And, uh, I would quote here, as the Hollywood Reporter notes, the series currently holds the distinction for being the longest running drama on Paramount Plus so far.

Its debut back in 2017 led to record sign-up numbers for the streaming service, then known as CBS All Access. Well, it's because it was the first fucking show on the network, you goddamn assholes. Yeah, it'd be hard for anything to have run longer. It would be very difficult for anything to have run longer.

Yes. Oh, got in the record sign-up numbers? Well, because it was the first show they had. Duh. One is bigger than zero. It's a record. It's a record. It's a record. Okay, what else we got? I saw some news that's going to make you happy. Jon Bernthal is returning as the Punisher for Daredevil, the Born Again series that's coming out.

Yes, I did like this. And I kind of went down the rabbit hole a little bit here. It's cool that it's going to be 18 episodes. That's cool. Charlie Cox was like, how many? This is going to be hard. I'm sad that they're not bringing back the redhead and the foggy guy, unfortunately.

I know. That really- That bums me out. That was my next point. It's like, oh, two of my favorite characters aren't coming back. Or they're being recast. We don't know. I would prefer that they just not bring them back instead of recasting them because there's no reason to recast them. If they're going to have them, have the people back.

But you win some, you lose some. But either way, I love Daredevil. It'll be fun. Did you watch Chris Rock's Selective Outrage? No. Oh, one of the few people who didn't watch. It was good. It was good. I like Chris Rock.

He was, I'd say he was 80% of his, at his best. Yeah, I'm a fan. I just, you know, I just wasn't around when it was on. And now it seems like I've read everything I need to read about it. So why bother watching it? It's still good.

I mean, it's still a good stand-up special. It was interesting that they saved all of the, you know, the Will Smith and Jada stuff to the very end because I don't think he had actually said that stuff in many live performances. Everybody was saying, oh, he screwed up a joke that he's been doing for months.

I'm like, I don't think he's been doing that for months. I think that was what- That was the money shot. Netflix paid all the money for, you know? Exactly. They're like, we're going to give you all of the monies, but just save that joke. And that's why he screwed it up. But he saved it. It was good. All right. But I dug it.

I dug it. Well, Apple's throwing a bucket of cash at another post-apocalyptic drama. This is a book that we've actually read on the show and reviewed and enjoyed greatly, Silo, which is based on Hugh Howey's series of books will debut on Apple TV Plus on May 5th. So I watched the trailer for it.

It looks pretty good. It seems like they're not going to do a foundation, which isn't foundation at all, except in name. It looks like they're actually going to follow the book series in and of itself, which is good. I'm very intrigued. I don't remember much beyond the first book.

I do remember reading one of the books. I got like halfway through it and stopped reading. It was like the prequel where they were talking about how the silos were made. And I was just like, this is boring. Yeah, that wasn't so great. I don't think they're going to do that. But there were two or three that followed after the first one, which kept going with it, which were not bad.

But I mean, obviously, the first one's the big story. So, yeah, I'm interested in watching Apple TV is has really kind of been hitting it out of the park recently with a lot of their shows. So, yeah, what's the what's the one with Harrison Ford that you like so much shrinking?

I think something about that. It's some play on psychologists. Yeah, I was thinking shrinkage, but that's a whole different thing. That's a whole different thing. Yeah, shrinking is fantastic. You know, we've got slow dogs, which is fantastic. I mean, just really quietly come along and just like have all the prestige shows.

Now, Ted Lasso's back in a week or two. So, yeah, they had severance, which was a big hit, I guess. I tried to watch it. It's hard. Yeah, it's really hard. It's like watching David Fincher. Like everything is like this monotone color scheme that just kind of starts to bum you out.

You just start feeling more and more depressed as you're watching it emotionally. Yeah, I don't know. The thing about severance is they spend seven episodes like really teasing very late little bits here and there, which is like seven hours of like, would you get to the fucking point?

And then on the eighth episode, they really kind of, you know, they break it wide open and then you find out what, you know, what the hell's going on with everything. Right. But it's a long squeeze for a little tiny bit of juice. Yeah. I got sick of squeezing well before I got any juice.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the first episode is 15 minutes of them walking down hallways. It's like, come on. It's like – I think it's one of those things. It's like the old Zay Frank, the show, where he would just do something really boring and inane at the beginning of the episodes and he'd be like, are the new users gone yet?

So it reminded me of that quite a bit. Perry Mason season two is back. I loved the first season of Perry Mason because it's got Matt Rice in it from The Americans. Yes. We saw the trailer came on for Perry Mason season two.

My wife looked at me and went, yeah, The Americans. That really was a great show, wasn't it? And that's as far as we've gotten with Perry Mason. Well, the first season of Perry Mason was phenomenal. Highly recommend it because it's pre-lawyer days and it's like a whole crazy new story.

But it was really, really, really good. I mean it was really good. So I have high hopes for season two. Godfather of Harlem season three is out, which I didn't even realize. I kept seeing ads and I thought they were just doing reruns of season one and two because it used to say coming on stars.

Well, it's not on stars anymore. I think Amazon got the rights because it's on MGM Plus, which I like to call BitTorrent because that's where I have to get it from. Which I like to call Bond and a couple other things. That's it. It was Bond and the Godfather of Harlem now.

That's – well, yeah. AMC Plus had Interview with a Vampire. Oh, did you ever watch that by the way? No, I never did. It was always on my list and then I was like I don't know how I can get AMC and I don't want to pay for it. Yeah, I'm paying for enough already.

Thank you very much. Well, here's the thing with Apple TV Plus or just an Apple TV, you can get the seven-day free trial and just binge the whole thing in a couple days. I have a six-year-old. There's no such thing as that kind of binging anymore. God, he's six now.

Unless it's bluey. Jeez. I can't believe your kid's six. I know. God, this show's going to be ten in two weeks. Ugh. You didn't even have a kid. Wow. The good old days. The good old days. But Godfather of Harlem season three, I think it's on episode seven now.

I'm going to go back and catch those because Godfather of Harlem is also awesome. A great show. Not very sci-fi or tech in any way, shape or form. But, I mean, it's worth watching just for the guy that they got to play Malcolm. I was going to say Malcolm Gladwell, but Malcolm X. I thought you were going to say Malcolm in the middle.

No, it could be that too. It's really good. Really good. Now, there's another podcast that I actually started listening to, which is – now, don't judge me, Brian. It's a TMZ podcast called Last Days. That's not what I'm surprised about.

What are you surprised about? I'm surprised about that you're listening to anything that involves sports. It has nothing to do with sports. Okay. It's all about dead people. It's basically the last days of ex-celebrity. So that guy, Paul from The Fast and the Furious, was Paul Walker?

Is that his name? Something like that. Yeah. Basically, it gives you the actual scoop on what killed them. So basically, crappy old tires is what killed that guy. Amy Winehouse, yeah, she drank too much. She's dead. I thought – but the nice thing is you get like the final tally because I thought she quit drinking and then basically just had a little bit to drink and then died, you know, like the dead cat bounce thing where it's like – Oh, no.

No, no. She blew a – well, she didn't blow because she was dead already. She had a .41 in her system with three bottles of – three empty bottles of vodka in her place. That'll do it. Yeah. That'll do it. That's epic. That is epic.

And I'm waiting for the James Gandolfini one. That's coming up soon. But the Robin Williams one was really good too. So I just like them because they're short. They get to the point and they just give you the straight backstory. So if you knew a little bit about it like I did, like, you know, just hearing about it here and there in the media, this just takes everything, sums it up in a short, quick, well done podcast.

So it's a good listen. It's a good short listen. I liked it. Very cool. I watched Black Panther Wakanda forever. And? I know that this movie was supposed to be infused with an awful lot of meaning for many reasons that I will not get into.

Uh, but thank you. In reality, it's just another fucking stupid MCU movie. Uh, okay. That's all it is. Okay. Yeah. That's, I, I mean, I thought Black Panther was pretty good. Uh, wasn't fantastic. This one is nowhere near as good as the first one at all.

Oh, okay. Well, yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of, I'm kind of done with the MCU. Sorry. I didn't mind the first one either. I thought it was, it was okay. It was, it was sufficiently different enough from all the other MCUs, but this one is, is not, it is, it fits right in with all the rest of these dumb movies.

I'm totally over the movies. Some of the shows, the TV shows are all right because they're not as fantastical and insane, but yeah. Yeah. I'm looking forward to Loki coming back. I like that one. Um, even though you hated the ending, I liked the ending. I did hate the ending. Um, who knows if Hawkeye is going to come back since Jeremy Renner got run over by his own snowplow.

Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. Um, and of course she Hulk, she Hulk was great. Yeah. She Hulk was great. I do like the shows. Uh, watched history of the world part two. How'd that go? You know what? It's dumb fun. All right.

It is like, if you grew up watching Mel Brooks and Monty Python and silly, dumb, stupid humor like that, he nails it. It's exactly what you'd expect. And I found myself rolling, laughing a couple of times. Like, okay. I know the world has moved on and certainly comedy has moved on.

You have to be edgy. Mark Maroon kind of like, you know, not really all that funny, funny. Uh, this is old school, dumb, funny. And they, it's, it's great. I, I, much like, uh, what was that crunk of, on the earth or whatever that we want that I talked about.

And I said, you don't binge it. Same thing. Watch each episode, go away, do something else for a long time and then come back to it. Come back to it. Okay. Yeah. I couldn't get into that crunk show. I tried it. It's just didn't do it for me, but I'll try this one.

Cause I like Mel Brooks. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's what you'd expect. And Mel Brooks does all the narration. So, which is nice. That's good. Uh, is Max in it at all? Cause his son, I, I like his son a lot. No, I haven't seen him. Like I've only watched two because I'm following my own rule.

Like I, I'm going to wait another week before watching another one. So I haven't seen him yet. I don't know if he's going to be in it or not. All right. Cool. I'll check it out. Ups and doodads. Ryan, we were talking about ring doorbells last week and just general doorbells.

And, uh, you said you got the nest doorbell. Yep. I would check your, check your EULA on that to see if it matches the ring EULA, because turns out that there are some loopholes in those EULAs that, uh, let law enforcement just get whatever they want, no matter what.

Of course there are. Of course there are. Oh God. Yes. There's an article, uh, over on Politico that talks about the, uh, the, the privacy loopholes where they can actually subpoena your video footage, all of it, and, uh, just willy nilly take it.

Um, yeah, there's this guy who, uh, this guy, Michael Larkin, who lived next to a drug dealer or an alleged drug dealer. Yes. And the cops were trying to build a case on the guy. So they, you know, subpoenaed the footage from the neighbors. Well, for some reason they were given all the footage from inside this guy's house.

Um, okay. But apparently this is something that can happen to anybody with ring cameras. Well, let me tell you something, if you value your privacy and don't have a bunch of cameras inside your own house that are saved on a cloud somewhere else. Yeah.

Yeah. Cause the thing is, I mean, they're, they're calling out ring on this, but I'm pretty sure this is any thing that has a cloud service attached to it that you're going to get to. I'm sure it is as well. Um, I, you know, I, I guess I'm kind of doing this kind of plausible deniability in my own head with my door camera and that I'm just not thinking about it too much.

Yeah. But first off, it only points outside. I don't have anything pointing inside. It's so if they want to subpoena videos of, of Amazon delivering things to me in snowy weather, by all means enjoy it. Uh, I also have turned off an awful lot of the features. Like I, I, I don't need to keep video of the 30 seconds.

Anytime somebody pushes my doorbell, I just don't. So, yeah, well, see, I mean, and that's the funny thing about my ring cameras. Like I don't get the video of them coming up to the door, pressing the doorbell and standing there. I get the video of them walking away because that's, that's how good ring is.

Yeah. It's like if I, if, if it had ass detection, it'd be perfect. I could figure out who it was, but. You can just run that through the, the, uh, FRMI machine and reconstruct the person. There we go. Let's hook it up. Oh man. Yeah. So, uh, I, I've taken most of those cameras.

I actually have taken all the cameras out of the inside of my house because my roommate is smarter than I am. And she's like, no, that was it. That was, that was the discussion. No, no. But I want to see the dogs when I'm gone. No, I just, no, I don't get to see the dogs. Fine. Put an air tag on them.

You'll know where they are. Yeah. Well, I just want to make sure they're okay. Right. But you know, I'm just a softie that way. Yeah. A softie that doesn't value your privacy. I get it. No, I don't, I don't really care. If the cops want to see that, well, they're, they're sick bastards anyway.

Uh, man. Meta. Meta has announced that they are cutting the prices of their VR headsets. Yes. Because that's what you do when you have a large supply of shit that nobody wants. Yeah. Kind of like Yeezys or those Funko things. Uh, so they dropped, uh, the quest pro by 500 and 70 bucks on the quest too.

Yeah. And, uh, still not flying off the shelves. I'm betting. Nope. Probably not. It's funny. I got a, I got a chat from a friend of the show, Rob Fogarty, uh, this morning. He's like, Hey, I want to hang out with you on, on, in VR. I'm having fun. I'm like, you should try it. I'm like, Oh, I got to go find it and plug it in and charge it.

All that good stuff. But, uh, I'm going to try it again since I have somebody to try it with. I got the dart game. So we're going to try and play some darts, I guess. Okay. Uh, we'll see how long it takes before I get queasy. But the problem with me playing darts is the best time when I was playing darts was I was two beers in and then I could never, never miss.

I was about to say, this is probably a good thing for you if you wish to play darts, because I don't really know where else in the world one goes except for bars to play darts. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm still a little fresh in my sobriety to be hitting the bars. You know, stick with the virtual darts. I think it's wise. Yes. Yes. I can have a virtual Guinness, AKA some tea.

Yeah. But give it a shot. I'll let you know how that goes. Cause I, I'm kind of interested to try it again. Cause I got new, I got new glasses so I can actually use it. That was the big problem was like, I could never get it adjusted just right. So I could actually see anything. Um, but now I think with my new glasses, it should be good.

So I'll give it a shot. I'll give it a shot. Uh, I talked on the show before about my Opal C1 webcam that I got and I love it. It's a great little camera. And my friend was asking me, it's like, Hey, what, what kind of camera should I get? I want it like a high quality webcam that I don't have to get a DSLR and all the crap that goes along with it.

I'm like, Oh, check out the Opal. So he did, but then he went a step further and did a little bit more due diligence on the current state of webcams. And he found one that is actually $1 cheaper than the Opal. The Opal C1 comes in at 300 bucks cause it's got like a Sony 4k HD sensor in it and, uh, all that.

Uh, this is the Insta360 link. Okay. It's on a gimbal and it's controllable and it's got a bigger sensor. It does cooler stuff, way cooler stuff. And like I said, it's a buck cheaper. It's $299. It is awesome.

It is a fantastic webcam. I have to say it does beat the Opal C1 on a few major features. One is whiteboard mode. You can actually put these little L stickers, uh, on your whiteboard and do a hand gesture. It says it uses AI.

No, it's just fucking recognition, whatever. Um, but then it'll point it at the, at your whiteboard and just zoom in on it and just show the whiteboard. So you can draw on it and stuff like that. It does the follow you around the room stuff, like all that stuff. But it's also got a desk mode where it can, where it will just point down on your desk and do like the keystoning, like the anti-keystoning for you.

So you can do like little demos on your desk and stuff. It's really cool for the price. And the, like the sensor is bigger, the video is better, and, um, it doesn't have some of the cool features that the Opal has. Like the Opal, you can do like, uh, introduce bokeh to the background and stuff like that.

But, um, for the price, I would, I would definitely recommend the Insta360 link over the Opal C1 at this point. So, and the microphone's pretty good too. So, cause I said it, I set up my, that 80 inch Amazon fire TV.

I set that thing up as a zoom station. So, which is the coolest zoom station in the world. I gotta say it is massive. So you put that camera on top of the TV and then you can sit on the couch and you can move it around the room and zoom and stuff like that.

I recommend, I think I'm going to get one of these for the house and put it on my TV in my room. So when I'm doing my, my other stuff, I can just have a zoom set up. Like I, it's like we're, we're in the future. It's like having, you know, really nice video conferencing in your home for pretty cheap. All right. Now, Brian, we talked about the Bing bot last week.

Yep. And so has everybody in the world. I have tried it. I've been using it. It's pretty cool. The, the upside of the Bing bot is you can put in a URL and say, Hey, please summarize this, which you can't do with chat GPT. You have to copy the cat and copy the copy, put it in and you only get a few hundred characters.

But with the Bing bot, you can just say, Hey, please summarize this and put in a URL. Give, it takes a second, goes, pulls it and comes back with a really nice, well done summarization of the article. I dig it. So that's, you know, that's happening. We know that's happening.

Duck, duck, go has gotten in on the game too. So now they have, I'm not, I'm, I, I'm not making this up. It's called duck assist. Oh God. Yeah. It sounds like something you'd download in the matrix. Duck assist.

What the fuck are they thinking? So what they're doing is they're using open AIs, GPT stuff to summarize your queries, your search queries. But what they've done is they actually constrained the sources to Wikipedia and Britannica.

Because God knows nothing on Wikipedia has ever been wrong, Brian. It's at least an attempt. It is an attempt. They're not pulling in 4chan. No, they're not. So, you know, round of applause, I suppose.

Slow clap. Yeah. Slow clap. But duck assist, really? Come on. Well, you know, they're kind of locked and loaded with the duck thing. Yeah. Well, Brave is doing the same exact thing. Yes. Go figure. But they've, they've called theirs The Summarizer.

Okay. Which is just a really bad B-grade movie title. The Summarizer. God. Well, it's not limited to just browsers, Jason. We are getting chat GPT-enabled AI summaries everywhere with the help of OpenAI.

My Discord is adding conversation summaries using their bot, Clyde. Clyde? Right turn, Clyde? Yeah. And Slack has added a chat GPT app as well. They are also for summarizing conversations and threads, according to Slack.

So you can hit the button and at the end of it, it'll come back with, yes, Bob, everybody thinks you're an asshole. Unless you work at Twitter, then you don't get access to it. That's how you find out you've been fired. Yeah. Chat GPT, have I been fired?

So Slack's parent company, Salesforce, has created their own generative AI system called Einstein, which is actually, if you're going to go for naming, that's pretty good, actually. A little arrogant, but... A little arrogant, and I'm sure it's not that smart, but, you know, that's better than duck or whatever, duckery or whatever the fuck they call that one.

Duckery, yes. Duck Assist. Duck Assist and the Summarizer go up against Einstein and Bard. Great. It's crazy, though. I mean, I've been trying to wrap my head around this. Like, as you mentioned, we're a couple of weeks off from having done this show for 10 years.

I don't remember anything exploding as quickly as this has in the 10 years we've been talking about tech. Yeah, not blockchain, not Bitcoin, nothing. Nothing has gone as fast as this and been adopted in so many places and just been, like, everywhere.

It's crazy. It is crazy because it's that cool. It is that cool. Yeah, it's just not perfect. And people are treating it as if it's a finished product that they're incorporating into everything. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? At least we know what we're going to be talking about for the next 10 years.

God, I hope not. Well, here's the thing. We can just generate it and we don't have to talk about it. It's perfect. That's true. That's true. Yeah. Chat GPT 7, write me a show. And it's something that has not also been adopted as quickly as Chat GPT is Mastodon because everybody's leaving the tweets.

I talked about Ivory, the Mastodon client, when Dave was here a couple of weeks ago. I miss Dave. He needs to come back. So I put a thing out. I'm like, okay, what's everybody using for their iOS client? Because I was checking out another one called IceCubes that someone on the Mastodon told me about.

It's really nice. It's actually a really nice client. And the guy who wrote it, Thomas Record, has a making of blog post that I put in the show notes. It's worth a quick glance at to show how he made it. But it's a really nice, well, full-featured client.

So I recommend checking that. I'm going back and forth between Ivory and IceCubes because Ivory just came out with a big update that actually lets you create a Mastodon account from the actual app now, which is really good for onboarding people who don't know shit about Mastodon. The problem is they're going to end up on a server they probably don't want to be on.

So I've been hanging out on Hackaderm and just watching the main feed go by because there's only like 18,000 or 19,000 people on that instance. So it's pretty small. It's pretty geeky. It's all about hacking different things. So it's interesting.

It's actually fun to read the full firehose of toots that come on by. I can't believe they called it fucking toots. But I'm enjoying Mastodon. I just put it on and just like glance at it every now and again.

And I'm slowly porting people who put their Mastodon handle in their Twitter bios. I just go grab those now and slot them in so I have people over. Since everybody seems to be moving away from Twitter, I just post my Wordle account or my Wordle score.

I got a two yesterday, by the way, Brian. I was pretty proud of myself. Congratulations. Thanks. I still play it every day. I just don't post about it. Yeah, I just post it because it's the only thing that I'm posting about on Twitter. I post about this show and my Wordle score. That's all that's left. But check out Ivory or IceCubes if you've got iOS.

Or join me and don't. You can do that too. You can also do that. But I think Dave's analogy of it being like old school news groups is really accurate the more I'm hanging out in there. It is. It's just random cool stuff from cool people. If you're on a server, you kind of know what they're going to be talking about.

So it's neat. I find it neat. All right. I finally finished the second book by Greg Jenner. I had read his kind of amusing history one previously and really liked it.

So I picked up another one. Dead Famous, An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen. Yeah, this one was a bit more difficult for me. I guess I just didn't like the subject matter as much as I like history. I don't really care about somebody that was vaguely popular in the 1700s and how it relates to the Kardashians anymore.

I was going to say, it's all got to tie back in to the Kardashians. It kind of really does like he could have called this all things Kardashian, all things lead to Kardashian, all roads lead to Kardashian. I'm workshopping right now for him. I don't know why, but I do really like his voice.

Like I like the way he writes. I like his humor. I like his style. Apparently, he has a podcast and he's done some things for kids. So I'm really going to research this guy more. The book was a bit of a miss for me, but just subject matter wise, like he seems like a great guy.

I would totally go play darts with him at a bar with a real beer. Okay. A real bar, not a VR bar. Yeah, exactly. I've started to read a book called Proust in the Squid, the Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Marianne Wolfe. I'm just getting started on it.

I found it through the Cal Newport podcast, Deep Questions, episode 238. He was talking about it and doing some excerpts from it. It sounds really interesting and it comes from a neuroscientist and developmental psychologist background. And there's a lot about dyslexia in there and things like that, which I haven't gotten to yet.

I'm just talking about it now because I think this is something that might be up your alley because it's psychology, it's reading, it's all this stuff about different things. But the really interesting thing is how our brains are trained to read screens versus pages, like solid pages.

And it's fascinating. There's a fascinating difference. Like when we're looking at a screen, we're basically skimming to find relevant results quickly because that's what we've been trained to do thanks to the internet. And when you actually read a book, it accesses different parts of your brain and you take in more information, but there's a lot more processing going on.

It's really kind of interesting stuff. So I'm going to finish it by next week. I'll have a full proper review of it. But what I've read so far, I'm really, really digging as well as the stuff that I heard on Cal's podcast that was really, really cool. Okay, so I would be remiss if I didn't ask this, particularly since this is a book about actually reading physical pages.

Are you listening to an audio book? Are you reading this on Kindle or are you reading a real book? I'm not reading a real book. I'm actually reading it on my Kindle, not the Kindle app. Gotcha. I busted out my regular Kindle, my Kindle Paperwhite, and I've been reading on that recently because I find that taking notes on that are much nicer for me because of the – just the form factor I really like.

Speaking of, have you seen the Kindle Scribe? I have not, no. It's massive. It is a massive Kindle. It is kind of like – I think it's supposed to be kind of like a hybrid between an iPad and a Kindle because it comes with a stylus and you can draw and take notes and things like that.

It's remarkable. That's the thing that I think it reminded me of the most, that remarkable tablet that you see everywhere. That's like 600 bucks. I'm looking at this and this is a Kindle I would actually use. I've not been swayed by any of the models. This I actually like, but I don't $400 like it.

Yeah, see, that's the problem. I don't $400 like it either. I like – you know, I think I like $249 like it. That's about – Like I might as well just get an iPad and run their app on. See, but that's the thing. It's like I like – I really like the e-ink. Like reading off of e-ink is much easier on my eyes and I can not – I don't get as tired.

When I read off of a Kindle is what I do on an iPad. Right. And also there isn't Clash Royale waiting behind the Kindle app to go play when you're on a Kindle, you know, which is a really big – that's a really big selling point for me. Yeah, I used to be a lot better about it.

Now I struggle more. Like when I'm reading on my iPad, I will find myself like launching Facebook or launching Twitter or whatever. And I'm like, no, I'm supposed to be reading right now. Damn it. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. So if the price comes down on that thing, I'll probably pick it up because the problem I have with my paperwhite now is since I am getting older, the words have to get larger for me to read them.

And there's like four words on the paperwhite because the thing is tiny. It is like smaller than an iPad mini, which, you know, if you can read smaller letters, but I have to use the dyslexy font, which is kind of a fatter, bigger font anyway. And I need to make the words bigger because I'm old and blind.

So that's why I think this thing – because it's big. It's like a 10.5-inch screen. And it does look cool, though, doesn't it? It does. It's just – it's just too damn expensive. GOG.show slash donate. Yeah. Please buy us some Kindles. Somebody send a $400 – $800 donation, please, so we can both get one.

Thank you. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Steven and Nelson. Welcome, folks. Thank you. And over at PayPal, we've got David, Benjamin, Alexander, and Ralph. Thank you all so much. And over at the tip jar, we've got Nick, Linda, and Jeff.

So we appreciate all of the contributions that come in. And just a reminder that if you do sign up for Patreon, you do get the show a little bit early, and you do get it in high-res and at 4D. Chat GPT summaries. Well, to clarify what the high-res is, it is not in, you know, super Dolby Atmos.

You do get it at 192 kilobits a second and at 48K sample rates. So you can hear all of our dulcet tones if you want them. All right. We have a new five-star review from Bruce Groblah in Great Britain.

Brilliant hosts. I've been listening to the show for a number of years now. Actually, before I read any further, I just wanted to say I have seen the light. AI is the future. Elon Musk is a bona fide genius. I'm telling you, man. 11 steps ahead of us in chess. That's what's happening. And I'm going to sell my possessions to buy an NFT of Donald Trump.

Anyway, back to the review. Blah, blah, blah. Some lefty liberal nonsense. Not going to give this the time of day. If this was a real review, it would say, Jason and Drunk Brian in the same room is 100 times better than the regular serving we get. But the regular serving is 100 times better than anything out there. So, Deliveroo. Deliveroo.

I'm going to have to wait for Summer for Drunk Brian in the same room. And actually, that's only if Jason's okay with that because I don't want to fuck up the sobriety. Oh, you can be drunk as you want. You guys can be as drunk as you want. Fine by me. Thank you, Bruce Groblah. Quibble writes in, has a question for us.

Perhaps a dumb question, but I'm wondering if there's any software available that could let you know if any three-letter agencies have accessed someone's personal info. I've looked around a bit myself but was unable to find anything I could fully trust. Thanks for any feedback. Yes, it's called the Honeypot app.

Actually, I just think it's called the internet. Yeah, nothing like that exists, Quibble. Try the dark web. You can try the dark web. In which case, you can guarantee that people have looked at you. Yeah. Just assume that they have. Seriously, just assume that they're looking.

That's all you got to do. And RIP Tom Sizemore. I really like Tom. Yeah, me too. He was in Strange Days, speaking of. Yes, he was. He was in Strange Days. He was in Heat, Black Hawk Down. And, of course, he was Sergeant Horvath in Saving Private Ryan, my favorite role of his.

But, yes, he will be missed. He had a very similar path, it seems, that I did. Yeah. Which makes me a little scared. But, anyway, yes, Tom, you will be missed. And I saw this and I wanted to put it in here because I thought it was interesting.

A Privacy Hero's Final Wish, an institute to redirect AI's future. This comes on the heels of Peter Eckersley, who died back in September last year. And I think we covered it when he died because he was a no-joke kind of guy.

You know, half of the web would not be – most of the web probably wouldn't be encrypted without him because he was one of the founders of Let's Encrypt that gives you the free certificates for your website. I think I have probably 50 of those things on all of my websites that are still out there because it's easy to do.

It's free. So, Peter was – he was a real fucking hero for the internet as far as I'm concerned. But before he died, he was trying to get people to take up the mantle for his quote-unquote institute to really put some guardrails on AI and make sure that it doesn't destroy the world.

And, you know – Good. That's a cool way to go out, I guess, you know? Say, hey, look, I'm not going to be around, but can you guys keep an eye on this thing? You know, I left it on the stove. It's still going. But can you check it every now and again to make sure it doesn't boil over? That's kind of what he did.

So – and people are taking him up. So it's good. It's good. But finally, after everything we've talked about, Brian, and this comes back to you saying that you've never seen a technology get adopted this fast in our 10 years of doing the show. A great little article by Evan Armstrong, and this is a little bit – this is actually a month old, so it was very prescient.

It says, AI looks like a bubble. Well, if it walks like a duck, it talks like a duck. It might just be a duck. It's a duck-anizer. Yeah. If it walks like a duck-duck-go, it might be a duck-duck-go. Good read.

But, yes, the title tells you everything that you need to know, except it doesn't look like a bubble. It is totally a bubble. It is totally 100 percent a bubble. Yeah. Oh, I mean, just from an investor's standpoint, everybody's throwing all their money at it. Yes, yes, yes. But people are wasting money like no tomorrow right now.

It's great. I love it. That's what – where did they get it all? I thought they wasted it all on Bitcoin and it all went away. These are the people that got their Bitcoin out in time. These are the people that got all the money out of FTX. Exactly. Before it shut down. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, visit GOG.show slash donate. Drop us $400 a shot so we can get some of those Kindles, please. And you can also help keep the lights on and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free.

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