600: Technically Sweet

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. We are celebrating our 600th show or actually more just a stop on the way to 666. We just have 66 more to go until the final Grumpy Offsy is fulfilled. The podcast of the beast. Yes. Oh, God. Show title. That's already done.

Yes. I was actually on episode 666 of Penn Jillette's show. I'm sure he celebrated appropriately. Anyway, a quick little bit of follow-up. As I was talking about last week about I'm on this new microphone. Well, yeah, it sounded like shit because I forgot to change a bunch of settings for the new microphone.

So that's why there were two versions that came out last week. I thought actually I sounded like shit, not you, because of the volume levels or something like that. It was – well, no. You were – one of us was too – I think you were too hot. I was too low. It doesn't matter. I went back and I fixed it.

But this microphone was actually set up for – I was using all of the plug-ins for a shotgun microphone and this is a large condenser microphone. Slightly different. So that's why some people got two versions of the show. If you were on Patreon, you kind of got the notification. But if you were one of the unwashed masses, then you didn't.

So there we go. And another little bit of follow-up. I found out what the MTE for Vans MTE is. It's called Made for the Elements. Should be MFTE then. But, you know. That's not how things work. I was actually trying to – I was trying to shoehorn a Menudo joke in there.

But I couldn't figure out T and E quickly enough or in Spanish. So just Google it. All right. A little bit of follow-up here on some AI news. Jaron Lanier, who we've talked about ad nauseum on this show back in the day.

Supreme Grump. A Supreme Grump with much larger vocabulary than we have wrote a piece – We have chat GPT now, Jason. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. Jaron wrote a piece called There Is No AI. Yeah. Yeah, no shit.

I've only been saying that for seven, eight, nine years now. Yeah, so he just says it with a lot more words. But no better than we did. No better than we did, which I thought was great. Yeah. It can be – You don't trust us. Trust him. Yeah, trust him.

He smells worse and has dreadlocks. But – So did I. That's right. You did. You did. You can sum most of his stuff up here by saying – He says, There are ways of controlling the new technology, but first we have to stop mythologizing it.

It's easy to attribute intelligence to the new systems. They have a flexibility and unpredictability that we don't usually associate with computer technology. But this flexibility arises from simple mathematics called random. Yeah, but I mean I do like where he went with this.

And I encourage everybody to go to read the article because he actually talks about how it's a great synthesis of human creativity. Yes. And I really like that view of AI and how it's evolving, which, you know, it almost gives you a note of hope. Okay.

Well, then let's get to the next article that I have here. Sure. Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, which I'm sure everybody has seen this by now because it is everywhere. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the scientists behind neural networks, which is part of what happens behind the scenes in some of these AIs.

And two of his students, I believe, one of them is now the chief scientist at OpenAI. He's basically come along and said, yeah, this isn't great. It's not awesome. So what I really like is, like, as companies improve their AI systems, he believes they become increasingly dangerous.

Quote, look at how it was five years ago and how it is now, he said, of AI technology. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That's scary. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it kind of is. It kind of is. Google is kind of chiming in a little bit.

Chief Scientist Jeff Dean said, we remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We're continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly, a.k.a. not giving a shit about the consequences.

Charging ahead no matter what. Yep. And here's what's really, really annoying. Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer. Who led the effort to build the atomic bomb.

And they truncated his quote in here. And he's, I'm going to read you the full quote from Dr. Oppenheimer. When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it. And you argue about what to do about it only after you've had your technical success.

That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. And Facebook, chat GPT. Well, look, I have a couple thoughts about this article. The first is that is human nature. Yes, it is. And I kind of agree with that. If we don't do it, someone else is.

Yeah. End of story. But we've also had this same brouhaha about CRISPR. We were terrified. What happens? CRISPR is now so cheap. Some kid in a basement can create coronavirus. Well, wait, maybe somebody did. Ooh. Got to think about that one.

But I mean, we had all that. That was just a couple of years back. And so far, so good. Nothing's really happened. My real issue with AI and where it's at right now, and I feel like there's a very strong parallel between AI and our self-driving cars, I feel like AI is always going to be 20 years away.

Always. Like, this is machine learning. This is pattern recognition. This is mathematics. It's mathless. AI doesn't exist. That's a long way away. The problem I have with this right now is the same thing that good old Elon has done with Tesla, and nobody else has.

It's putting it into the wild before it's ready for prime time. That's the problem. Keep developing AI. Should AI be built into my fucking browser already? No. Should it be everywhere? No. Should you have APIs so every single system out there is trying to get that sweet, ever-decreasing amount of fucking funding money because you have to say you have AI so you build it in?

No. That's dumb. Develop. Test. Do it wisely. Nah. Yeah, fuck that. This is tech. Hell no. Hell no. More on that later, but yeah. Technically sweet, baby. Technically sweet. Technically sweet.

That was my stripper name. I got some follow-up on some ex-Apple employees, the sentencing that we had talked about a few times. This is the guy who was defrauding the company out of over $17 million, Dehandra Prasad, who primarily worked as a buyer in Apple's global service supply chain and figured out how to fuck the supply chain and provide himself with some global service by taking half the money.

Fuck the supply chain, NWA's B-side. That's their new album. Yeah. Fuck the supply chain. Amazon's fuck. I'll have ChatGPT do it. Yeah, I'll have ChatGPT do it. Yep, exactly. So he's got to pay back his ill-gotten gains and he will be serving three years in prison.

Somebody else over at Apple that actually got off easy, Gerard Williams III, the former chip executive, the company accused of poaching employees. After more than three years of litigation, they've decided to go ahead and drop that case. So he went and co-founded Nuvia, a chip design firm later acquired by Qualcomm in 2021.

Basically, they accused him of secretly starting his second business and recruiting talent for a startup while he was still an Apple employee and using classified company information and all that sort of stuff, but they've dropped it. So I used to call this, I had a rule about dating when I would tell people when people were breaking up and I could see what was going on.

I called it the pitfall rule. Do you remember the old school game Pitfall? Of course I do. So you have to hold on to the one vine and then grab the second vine before letting go of the first vine. He pitfalled his way out of Apple. Oh, God.

Pitfall. I remember they, did you, do you remember the, they did a redo of Pitfall and Bruce Campbell. I kind of remember it. Bruce Campbell was the voice. Oh, cool. It was the only reason to play that game. It was a terrible remake. Speaking of terrible things, Brian.

We've talked about unionization in tech for quite some time on the show. Now the other shoe has finally dropped on Apple's store in Maryland where they have unionized. Turns out what they want. Tips. Fuck that.

Here's a tip. Fuck you. Tipping is a huge brouhaha in Toronto right now because basically almost every store has switched over to basic, the swiveling iPad to pay, right? Uh-huh. And they, they make the tipping, no tip options so hard to find and get to that you almost have to ask them how you get to it, which obviously is not a very comfortable discussion to have.

Yeah. How do I not give you any money? I am at a counter and you were handing me the slice of pizza that is right there. Why am I tipping you 20%? Mm-hmm. That's ridiculous. Anyways. Yep. Tipping is crazy right now. Well, we talked about Elon's SpaceX Starship that kind of blew up.

Yep. And didn't go so well. And there was obviously a lot of soft peddling this. And to some degree, I agree, you know, we're trying out new technologies. Things are going to go awry. And you learn from that, which is one of the ways he spun it. But there's a little detail that's come out this week that I find highly disturbing.

A little bit. A little bit. Like, beyond disturbing. Like, the most disturbing. Not more disturbing than destroying the entire environment for, like, 50 miles around because he didn't want to put some water under the goddamn stupid thing that, so, you know, we've all talked about the many things that went wrong with this.

But this is beyond disturbing. There's a self-destruct button in case something is going really, really awry. Like, all of a sudden, it's heading towards the city. Yep. That would be bad. The big red button. Yes. Yeah. It didn't work. Oops. The self-destruct setting took over 40 seconds to work.

Rockets go fast. No shit. Were they on dial-up? I just found this unbelievable. Like, again, to some degree, I'm with him. Like, you're trying things out. You're learning from your mistakes. But two of your mistakes were so unbelievably stupid.

One of them was a solved problem. You put water underneath to stop the rocket from blowing up everything underneath it and going across 385 acres of land and causing massive environmental damage. We solved that. You didn't do it. That's dumb. Ditch and sprinklers. Ditch and sprinklers. It's a common thing.

Yes. But test your self-destruct button. Chapman says. Okay, Jim. I just couldn't believe it. That was like, oh, my God. You need some sleep. You need to drop 15 of your companies. Just focus on something, dude, because this is not going well.

Yeah. Anywhere. I mean, well, technically, he did not design the button himself, but somebody should have The buck stops at Musk. That's true. Oh, my God. Now, the news, the Biden administration is funding some AI research, but it's also hoping to keep companies accountable for their behavior.

Vice President Kamala Harris, remember her? We last heard about her about four years ago. Has met the CEOs of Alphabet, Google's parent, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and a bid to get more safeguards for AI. Private firms have an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to make their AI products safe and secure, she said in the statement.

And she also adds, they still have to honor current laws. Do they? I know I do. No, no. Yeah, so. It's called the Kalanick loophole. Yeah. They're saying this is a not-so-subtle message that AI creators will face a crackdown if they don't act responsibly.

I would say that that ship has sailed. Oh, yes. More on that very, very shortly, on how that ship has sailed. Now, this next story, it was a head shaker here. It was a booty shaker. Oh, stop it. On Wednesday's celebrated multi-platform recording artist, or multi-platinum recording artist, Snoop Dogg, took part in a panel at the Milken Institute's 2023 Global Conference in Beverly Hills.

Me talk pretty one day. After fielding a question by Variety editor Shirley Halperin about AI in relation to the 2023 WGA writer's strike, Snoop expressed his bemused feelings on AI. Now, question one, why is Snoop there?

What was he doing there in the first place? And why is Snoop the arbiter of technology in a writer's guild strike? I don't know. I don't know. I enjoy his collaborations with Martha Stewart, I must say. Oh, those are the best.

Those are absolutely... I miss their show. Their show was fantastic. Well, can't have writers anymore. No. Well, you know, I watched that show. There were no writers. There were no writers. It was a terrible show, but it was very fun. It was fun. But yes, so Snoop has graced us with his opinion on AI.

And I'm not going to read it because, you know, I swear a lot on this show. And this is like my swearing allotment for the rest of the year. So, but I recommend, there's a video in the show, show notes. Go check it out or link to it. Go check it out because it's very funny.

But he's like, he's giving his opinion on AI, which is, I'll boil it down to you. I don't fucking know, man. That's about it. Yeah. And he's getting, he's getting ink. He's getting column space for this. Because that is the world now.

It's, people are more interested in what Kim Kardashian would have to say about technology than people that, oh, I don't know. No shit. Yeah. That's the problem. That is the problem. Yeah. Well, IBM has announced they are pausing hiring to onboard AI instead. Would you like to be that HR employee?

Yeah, really. Yeah. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that the company is planning to pause their slow hiring in the coming years for roles in which AI could replace humans. He spoke about this to Bloomberg in an interview, explaining that the slowdown or freeze in hiring would affect back office positions and departments such as AR or HR.

So you get to, you get to interview your replacement. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He said that these non-customer facing positions make up around 26,000 positions in IBM's workforce. And I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.

So we're looking at about 7,800 human jobs that are going to go out the window until he figures out that AI really doesn't work that well. Yeah. And those kind of things get because 20 years away. Mm-hmm. Yep. Just hire some prompt engineers and fact checkers.

Yeah. Maybe we'll talk then. Now, we've talked about Silicon Valley executives much on the show. And I think that we've come to the determination that a lot of these people are mentally ill. At least I have. They've won the game of life.

They have more money than they know what to do with or could ever spend in a million lifetimes. Also, we should point out they won the game of life, not through skill, through generally luck and being in the right place at the right time. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Which brings us to Marissa Mayer.

Oh, the luckiest person in tech ever. Ever. Ever. Because all she did was fail upwards into a gigantic money bath. Yep. Pretty much. But she is starting a new company. Oh, joy. Which is why? You have it.

You won. Leave. Just – it's like Congress. Leave. You're old. You've done your job. She's the Feinstein of tech. Get out. Yeah. She's Feinsteining her way up. Here's what I didn't know. She does have two degrees in AI from Stanford. So this kind of makes a little bit of sense.

Google's e-learning. Yeah. She got them from Khan Academy. She's starting a new company called Sunshine. Sunshine. Yes. Sunshine. Blowing out my ass. Yes. The company might have been originally called Mundane AI. It's just basically an AI that does back office stuff like scheduling and scheduling.

So IBM can basically just outsource to them. Yeah. There you have it. There you have it. It's just – it boggles the mind why these people keep coming back. What does she have to prove? I mean, yes, Yahoo was a giant embarrassment. She has to prove that she's capable of something. Yeah, something. Because we haven't seen that yet.

Yeah. OK. I mean, it's been so long since she left Google. But, you know, I think she was employee – it was just an episode. I think she was employee 13 or something at Google. So, yeah, walked into the golden parachute there. But, of course, couldn't just take that money and go.

Then she had to go to Yahoo and bilk them for hundreds of millions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing, which is – you know, I guess that we are on repeat over there. So maybe ChatGPT can write us a new story of Silicon Valley. But who knows? Who knows?

Who knows? Well, ChatGPT is once again available in Italy. So maybe it will come in Italian. That's a giant shitball. But I am happy about this because it's available in Italy because ChatGPT said, oh, you make us some rules? We follow them. You got me doing Mario Brothers now.

The Guarante Data Protection Authority wanted OpenAI to resolve several issues by the end of this month in order to lift a temporary ban on the chatbot. They had concerns about the AI's training methods and chatbot violated GDPR, two things that are kind of important if you're going to be working over there.

So they've ordered them to stop processing personal information of users in the country. It would be nice if they did that everywhere. But that is the thing that I always wonder about these companies. You get nailed in one country. You know it's coming everywhere else now. Why not just roll these changes out across the entire globe?

Because they don't have to. Because they don't have to. I know. Yeah. I know. Once they're forced in a country, then they'll say, oh, okay, then we'll do it to you too. But no ASCII, no ASCII, no Getty. No ASCII, no Getty. But thank God they have incredibly profound and unassailable rules in place like a pop-up now asking people to confirm they are aged at least 18.

Ooh. High tech. Yeah, that's going to stop stuff. Yeah. As we've determined here in the States. All it takes is a checkbox. Yeah. Now, this is breaking news sort of. Leaked internal Google document claims open source AI will out-compete Google and open AI.

And it's called We Have No Moat. And finally, they are actually acknowledging where the real scary shit is happening. Because when you're talking about Kamala Harris and her, like, oh, you've got to have rules. Sorry, honey. The horses have left the barn and they're on fire and they're irradiated and they are coming for you.

Yeah. The open source AIs that are popping up left, right, and center have zero guardrails and no way for you to ever enforce them. Exactly. Now, here's a little bit from the letter. We've done a lot of looking over our shoulders at open AI. Who will cross the next milestone?

What will the next move be? But the uncomfortable truth is we aren't positioned to win this arms race and neither is open AI. While we've been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch. I'm talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they're lapping us.

Things we consider major open problems are solved and in people's hands today. Yep, that's right. So when you're talking about regulation and guardrails and Italy can, you know, bitch and moan all they want, the real problem is everybody's got this technology now and it's out there.

We're not going to see – you know what we're not going to see anymore? We're not going to see people breaking into computers to mine Bitcoin. We're going to see people writing malware to train their big models. I think that's going to be next because everybody's got GPUs somewhere. Take a little GPU over here, a little GPU over there.

Boom, you've got the world's largest model and you didn't pay the hundreds of millions of dollars it took these companies to do it. That's going to be – I think that is going to be something that needs to be watched. Just mark my words, in the future, we are going to see malware that is being used to train these LLMs, guaranteed.

Oh, yeah, for sure because it's a thing right now. Yep. What isn't a thing anymore is Lyft. Oh, Lyft. Shocking. Yeah, that's right. Revenue is up 14% from the same quarter last year but stocks are down 10% because they're still losing money.

They're still losing money and there's no exit strategy anymore. They could have sold a year ago and it would have made sense and would have been fine but they've got nothing now. They're never going to catch up with the competitors who are losing even more money but we'll talk about that some other time. It makes no sense.

But, yeah, they're dead in the water and I don't see an exit strategy for them at all. On an adjusted basis, Lyft earned $22.7 million compared to $54.9 million a year ago. It is an improvement from the adjusted loss of $248.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Now, we're talking Pinterest money here. We talked about Pinterest last week. They lost $243 million in the last quarter. How do you lose $243 million when you steal all your content? I don't know. Still a shocker. I don't – it is a – I would say I stay awake at night thinking about it except I don't.

No. I think I may have figured out where some of that money went. Sundar Pichai got a $226 million – Well, that's a big chunk of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He could actually float these companies a little money and still be okay. Yeah, Googlers are really pissed off since he laid off 12,000 people but, yeah, got a raise.

So, there you go. You're working for the shareholders. You ain't working for the employees. No, no. That's crazy. The median Alphabet employee was paid $279,802 in 2022. That's a lot of money.

Yeah. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. I could really use some of that. That's a nice bit of coin there, Google. I'm sorry, Alphabet. I'm sure – here's the problem. That's averaged with his $226 million paycheck in the middle there.

So, he kind of has his finger on the scale a little bit. This is kind of sad. Google is going to retire Chrome's HTTPS padlock icon because nobody knows what the hell it is anymore. Kids these days. Kids these days, I tell you.

Yeah. They're just like, oh, what's that? No, so they're going to have it replaced by a tune icon, which is a couple of circles and a couple of lines, which looks like absolutely nothing. Okay. So, I don't know why. I don't know why. What's wrong with the lock? I guess the point is now that the lock is so ubiquitous that it's rare.

If you don't, something should pop up if there is no lock, which I guess most browsers generally do that these days. Yeah, they do that. I mean, here's a simple one. Just make the URL red or something, you know? Say, hey, turn the whole page red or do the pop-up like they do.

I don't know. Anyway, I just thought that was kind of a sad, sad moment in history that kids don't even know what the lock means anymore. They don't even know what HTTPS means anymore. Yeah. Now, we've talked about the checkmark kerfuffle over at Twitter.

We're not going to do that right now. We're going to talk about Gmail. Right. Because Google is going to start putting blue checkmarks next to select senders' names in Gmail to verify their identity. Great. Oh. Have they learned nothing? How are they going to do that?

Let's take the most toxic few pixels on the internet right now and replicate it. Let's do that. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Okay. Fucking idiots. Sundar, give back some money or get back to work because that's a really stupid idea.

It is working. Blue checkmarks, baby. Roll them out. That's right. He's got a green checkmark all the way to the bank. And this last one I have. Facebook is furious at the Federal Trade Commission after agency proposes ban on monetizing youth data. What a world we live in.

I don't even have to go into that. I mean, that just says it right there. That says it all right there. Fuck you, Facebook. I just saw this come across in my news feed. So I want to throw this out there because we've been talking an awful lot about people getting fired everywhere. There's actually some decent news in the U.S. economy.

I just saw this headline. U.S. employers added 253,000 jobs in April. Now, a lot of people in tech are getting fired. But, you know, adding a quarter of a million jobs in one month, not so bad. Not so bad. The gist of this article is economists are confused as to why this has happened.

But, you know, there you go. Uh, derp. Derp. 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 now at QVC.com.

Media Candy. The Dune Part 2 trailer has dropped. I actually had the very weird for me experience of actually a co-worker had alerted me to it and I clicked on the link. And it was going live in 60 seconds so I saw some weird god-awful countdown before I could watch a video.

Okay. It was strange because I don't live on YouTube. But, uh, good-looking trailer. Yeah. I'm looking forward to this movie. I was, but it's only in theaters at first. Remember it released on HBO Max last time? Yeah, yeah.

I liked that part. Me too. I liked watching it at home. But this will get me out to a theater. I will watch it. Yeah, I was kind of bummed that they kind of, you know, showed the sandworm thing in the trailer. I was like, oh, I should have saved that. Oh, that's what everybody's looking forward to. I know, but that's the point. It's like, save it, man.

Come on. Yeah. They did a really good job on the original trailers by not showing a whole lot. And this one, they kind of like, it's kind of a pretty big moment in the movie, so. I think they got to put some butts in seats. My concern is why did they release the trailer so early? November 3rd is a long way away.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. Got to get that buzz going, I guess. I guess. Well, good luck with that. I mean, the internet, the human internet ability to remember things is down to milliseconds now. I know. It's like, what are you going to do?

What are you going to do? Well, Paramount Plus has had some good news. They've topped 60 million subscribers thanks to Picard and the NFL. They are still growing quickly, even as its competitors recover. They reveal that its streaming service has over 60 million subscribers, having added 4.1 million in the first quarter. So, not bad.

The service had help from shows like the final season of Star Trek Picard, which has actually gotten critically good reviews the first time ever for Star Trek, and hit some of the streaming charts as well. Tulsa King, which I've never heard of, and the Yellowstone spinoff 1923. They also tout access to recent movies like Top Gun Maverick and NFL playoffs keep customers tuning in, as well as the UEFA Champions League, which, see, my previous rants about having to subscribe to 17 services just to be able to watch soccer.

So, yeah. And they've recently hiked their prices because they're doing really well. So, viewers are willing to stay. The investment could easily pay off. It is apparently also finally launching in Canada. I cannot leave the house without seeing gigantic billboards for Paramount Plus here, which means I can now pay more for less content due to international streaming arrangements and agreements.

I needed to look into it, but I had a bit of time, so, yeah, I Googled it and saw a very quick summary, which is keep using your VPN and pay for the U.S. one because they have half the shit that the U.S. does. Oh, great. Yeah. Great. And there was another pandemic loss that I did not realize until recently.

I loved the NPR show, Says You. It's grammar and wordplay. It's for old people and stupid people that are far too smart for their own good. But I loved the show, and it was great. And I realized that I hadn't seen any new shows showing up in my feed. They were populating older ones.

And then I finally, like, looked into it. And basically, they tried to make it through the pandemic doing Zoom stuff, but everybody on the panels, like, in the 70s, very funny, but in their 70s. And it just didn't work out, and they basically just made the decision to, you know what, we're done. So I was sad to hear that.

Another program that didn't make it was Ask Me Another, which was also on NPR for a while. So with those shows gone, I thought I'd go back and mention the ones I still enjoy when I remember to listen to them. I know you will call them not podcasts, but I listen to them as podcasts. I still love Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, one of the funniest shows left on NPR.

I enjoy Planet Money. And in the mornings, I tend to find myself putting on All Things Considered in Morning Edition. So, yeah, there's still some good stuff over there, but sad to hear about the loss of one of my favorites. They will keep the feed alive, and the shows are pretty evergreen for Says You, so you can always go back and listen to them.

Except for side jokes every now and then, it was never topical. All right. Yeah. And we're through, what, episode two or three, considering he died in one of them and wasn't really in it much without a big papa. So you're talking post-Logan.

Post-Logan, and good, but not great. Yeah, good, but not great. I'm enjoying it. I'm still going to finish it. I'm going to see it out. I've heard that the final episode will be a 90-minute movie. Which means they're not going to wrap shit up in the next six episodes and wait for that.

Oh, great. Great. I saw one of the greatest writer's strike billboards or signs that somebody had was, pay us or we'll ruin succession. I saw succession without writers is just, what was the show that Trump hosted? Apprentice.

Oh, the Apprentice. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, that was a good sign. All support to the writers, by the way. Writer's Guild. Indeed, indeed. Ted Lasso and Silo, I have notes here about. Ted Lasso, I'm an episode and a half behind because I just kind of lost interest halfway through that episode.

I'm like, and I started to watch it again. I'm like, yeah, not really. It's failing on me. There is not an article out on the internet that doesn't have the same opinion about how the show has lost its mojo and it's lost its way. It's strongest when it's showing soccer and using that as life lessons.

Way too much focus on these side plots that nobody gives a shit about. Yeah. Yeah, I'm suffering through it. I definitely hope this is the last season and I hope they do a better job of it in the next couple episodes because I just don't care.

It's lost its charm. Yeah, sadly it has. I actually went to start watching the other half of the episode last night and I got a giant ad for Silo, which is out now. So I checked that out. There are two episodes out now. I guess another one's coming next week.

They're going to trickle it out, but I watched the first 10 minutes of it before I had to go do something else and it's pretty. It's very pretty. It's well shot. Beyond that, can't really tell much yet. It seems like I'm sticking to the story though.

If you remember reading the book, it's a solid book. It's really good sci-fi, but it's a slow burn. And that's going to be a problem for TV and catching people right away. But what really annoyed me was I watched – whenever there's a new show on, I always watch the opening credits once just to kind of get a feel for it.

They Westworlded the shit out of these credits. It is just the music, the beats, the visuals. It's like that's the thing now. It's like after Game of Thrones came out, everybody had to do the intricate openings again. Right. Or like old Fincher movies.

Like you look at Fight Club and things like that. There's always a style that gets picked up. And it lasts for a while. That kind of like sketchy stuff, like very Trent Reznor Nine Inch Nails video stuff, kind of like the Rob Sheridan glitch art was big for a long time. Now – then it went into the Game of Thrones stuff and now it's like the Westworld type of thing.

You could probably put this right next to Westworld and it's the exact same trailer beat by beat. The music is identical, which was really just kind of a turnoff. I'm like, oh, did they really try? Because it doesn't feel like it from the credits. Well, you know, some executive said we need something catchy like that Westworld thing.

Yeah, which is so catchy. We want to get paid. So I'm going to stick with it for sure. I'm excited for the show, especially now that we've got the Writers Guild strike and we don't know how long that's going to go off for. So we at least we know there's a show entirely in the can. Yeah. Literally.

Spoiler alert. That was done completely with all the writers. So I'll start watching it in a couple of weeks when I've finished off everything else. And hopefully it'll get me through however long this writer strike takes. Yep. Yep.

And over at Twitter, somebody posted the entire Super Mario Brothers movie. How? Now, it's not that people haven't done this before. It's not that people haven't done this before. But, of course, due to Elon Musk's changes, if you are a power user as a Twitter Blue subscriber, you can upload videos up to 60 minutes long now.

Gee, what are people going to do with 60 minutes of bandwidth to upload video? I wonder. Yeah. Yep. How long did that last? How long did it stay up? It was up for quite a while because nobody works customer service anymore. Oh, that's right. There's nobody home. Yes.

Perfect. Yes. As the article points out, firing most of your safety and compliance staff will do that to you. Can somebody post spinning gold? I'm having a hard time finding that one. Okay. I'm just saying. If they're taking requests.

Yeah. Yeah. And somewhat good news, I guess, if you're in the Amazon Fire Stick thing, they are rolling out free Roku-like TV channels for Fire devices now. So, it'll be a lot of local content, which is great. So, you can help cut the cord, I suppose. We'll see.

They have partnership deals with hockey, with PGA Golf, with TMZ, ABC News, Condé Nast, and among others. Alal says they have over 400 publishing partners ready for the summer launch. It will be ad-supported, but so would these channels if you've got them through cable.

So, big deal. Now, you don't have to pay for cable. We'll see what they have, but I'm excited about that because I don't have cable here. And the one thing I do miss out on is the local news. So, they'll have some of that. All right. All right. They do have Freebie right now, which I think is interesting because it sounds like it's similar.

But you can't delete it. I've tried. Oh, you can't delete Freebie? You cannot delete Freebie. Oh, okay. Okay. I think Freebie is more of those, one of those, like, we just licensed everything we possibly could that was basically out dirt cheap. So, TV movies, but not so much streaming.

Not true. Actually, not true. They have done original content. They did the – I think it's Bosch Legacy was the show that came right after Bosch. It was the new one. That was Freebie only. So, they built that one. A friend of mine is on a show that I put in the notes here called Casa Grande, which is a five-part miniseries, like a retelling of Upstairs, Downstairs, set in Northern California.

That's Amazon Freebie, and they commissioned that one too. So, they are doing actual content. I don't know if that's going to change with this new channel, but now that I have a Fire TV, I'm kind of looking forward to it. Because the funny part is I've got DirecTV, but DirecTV works on this stupid wireless system now because there's no cables.

Where they put the base station in my house will not actually reach to where the Fire TV is in the garage. So – Nice. Yeah, yeah. Technology, it's our friend. It's the best. Yeah. Speaking of that, if you want to wank in Utah, you're going to have to wait. Pornhob Goes Dark in Utah to protest age verification law.

They've disabled access to its website for people in Utah that aren't smart enough to have a VPN on Monday to protest the state's new age verification law, which requires websites with adult content to confirm users are 18 years of age or older. See previous comments about add a fucking checkbox. Yeah.

Nobody cares. That's all you've got to do. Over at culturalcurrents.institute, they actually have an infographic showing how much search volume for VPN went up in the state after that went into effect. So they're still wanking in Utah, but they've got to jump through some hoops.

Yeah, as you do. Yep. I saw this video from Casey Neistat. He did a vlog that was completely scripted by ChatGPT or GPT-4. That feels so like two months ago. Yeah.

Everybody did their quick report that was written by ChatGPT. Yeah. I think this one is a couple – like two weeks old at this point. But, yeah, the long and the short of it is he didn't try very hard, A, in the video. It was kind of a funny video. He needs to hire some prompt engineers.

Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, his takeaway was, yeah, it's not ready and I want humans to write stuff. I'm like, I'm with him on that. But, you know, I'm still along with the GPT-4 to give it a little juice here and there. I'll tell you who's not with them, the Writer's Guild. Yeah, that's true. That is definitely true. And I saw this channel come through called How to Basic.

It's got 17 million subscribers and I'd never heard of it. Did you get a chance to watch the video that I posted in here on how to make katsu curry? I watched a little bit of it, but I do know how to make katsu curry already. So, but, you know, this is the how to adult for the millennials, right? Or for the Gen Z these days.

No, no, you missed the whole point of it. You have to wait till halfway. Okay. I didn't get that far. It turns into the evil dead halfway through, which is kind of his whole shtick. Like everything is, it's like a normal how-to video and then it just goes horribly awry in the middle of it.

Okay, that's funny. And this one is fucking hilarious. It is definitely worth watching. Go check it out. And Zero-G, the company that does the Vomit Comet, the Zero-G flights. Yes.

They've decided now to do concerts on the Vomit Comet. What could go wrong with that, I wonder? That sounds great. I saw a little video of it, which I put in the show notes. And there's nothing about that that looks fun to me at all. No, no, no, no.

No. Definitely don't want to go into that port-a-potty. Apps and doodads. Brian, it's the beginning of the month, so this is everybody's public service announcement to clean your tweets. I appreciated you putting that in there because it made me go click through.

And apparently, due to Elon's tinkering, at some point I got deauthorized, so I had to go through and redo that process. And I'm down to 50 tweets because I don't tweet that much anymore. So that's all that's left on my timeline. Yeah, I'm down to about the same because I clean it up every couple weeks. I have a recurring notice in my calendar to remind me to go back through, and I usually set it to anything that's older than two weeks.

And I do that every now and again. Yeah, I do a month. Yeah. So you only get 100 deletions per month with the free tier. So, you know, if you want. That's good enough for me because I don't tweet that much. Yeah, a lot of people don't tweet that much anymore.

But for all you people that like to post every single racist thought you've ever had, this is for you and pay for it. And the funny thing is, I got, I was reminded this time, not from my alert, but from an email they sent me. Yeah, I got the email too. Wasn't that, I was like.

I was confused. I was very confused that they were sending me an email, but B, I thought it was a very funny email. Don't be like Nick Cannon, you know. Or what do these three celebrities have in common? Canceled. Yes, it was very funny. But when I initially got the email, I had assumed, I was like, oh no, they've been shut down.

Like Elon has figured out a way to block them. And I'm like, damn it, I like this service. Yeah. But luckily it wasn't that. Yet. Yet. Yeah. Give it time. Give it time. Elon, you should be using this. I'm just saying. Just saying, bro.

Just saying, bro. I talked about the bridge dock a long time ago because I've got one. It's a very nice Thunderbolt dock that you cannot plug in an external hard drive to because it will unmount it randomly most of the time while you're in the middle of a giant copy or in a backup or anything like that.

Like when you're using it. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. It sucks when you're using it. Yeah. It's great if it just sits there. It's beautiful. It is well designed, highly engineered to the brink of ridiculousness, weighs about 400 pounds. So you can kill a man with it.

You just can't actually use it. Surprise, surprise. They're going out of business. What? Yeah. They got they got screwed by Apple in many ways from their original product, which was this crazy iPad dock with a keyboard and a trackpad.

Well, Apple did not really give them a lot of keys to the castle with the trackpad integration with the iPad OS until much later and blah, blah, blah. Very, very long story in the link in the show notes. But, yeah, basically they spent all their money trying to do stuff and they had bad management, toxic work environment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But the best part about this article is Bridge banked with Silicon Valley Bank, which crashed in March. The crash had no effect on Bridge because they had no cash in the bank to lose. Well, that's that's finding a light ray of sunshine in the dark, isn't it?

Yes, it is. I do have a quick Silicon Valley Bank story that I that I haven't told anybody yet because it was very, very funny when it happened. I used to have an account at Citibank a long time ago under one of my one of my companies. Well, one day in the mail after Silicon Valley Bank was, you know, rescued or whatever, I get an email that my old company was called Enigma Labs Inc.

Well, I get a thing from Citibank that says Enigma Labs LLC just received a two point five million dollar wire from Silicon Valley Bank. Woo. And I'm like. And Jason was never seen again. Yeah, we wouldn't be having this conversation if it went differently.

Trust me, my friend. Well, it turns out somebody at Citibank screwed up and Enigma Labs LLC is a company out of New York and they got the two point five million dollars. The problem has been fixed so I can talk about it now. But, yeah, they were. I mean, how?

I haven't had an account there for years. And the funny thing is Enigma Labs has not been a thing for years. So someone's grep search was horrible. I know. Well, chat GPT probably pulled it out for them. Right. But, yeah, that was that was that was a interesting couple of days. I'm like, huh, is this just we're like had people inside Citibank looking into it like what's the tax ID that it was sent to?

Like, does it match? No. Damn. Because if it matched, man, we'd be having this from the the the shores of Costa Rica right now. I tell you that Steve Wozniak, who is well known for being a co-founder of Apple, but also ruining his reputation with Segway Polo.

He now says he does not like his Tesla anymore, and he has a great quote. I actually believe those things about self-driving cars, and it's not even close to reality. And boy, if you want to study of AI gone wrong and taking a lot of claims and trying to kill you every chance you can get a Tesla.

Put that on the ad, Elon. Put that on the ad. I've got to say, having just driven a Tesla once, I think the more concerning aspect that probably kills a lot more people than using the self-driving feature that gets all the headlines is the fact that you have to drive the car through an iPad that makes you take your eyes off the fucking road.

Yeah, yeah. We've spent millions of dollars on campaigns saying, please don't text while you drive. And the best-selling electric vehicle out there has you look down at an iPad the entire time you're driving. Yeah, let's put a large screen TV that you can play video games on in the middle of the car in the front seat.

What could possibly go wrong? At the library. I finished a book, but I have a brief aside. Somebody, a show listener, had written in and asked about if we had ever read some books.

I can't remember quite what it was anymore, but I was going back through our show notes to try to figure out, did one of us ever read this book? I never found out because search sucks. But I did see a brief little aside that we talked about, our rules of reading books. Yes.

One of them was the fact that if you're reading a series, never read them straight through. Always switch back and forth and read a different book before you read the next one. Correct. And I've been following that rule without even realizing we made it a rule once. And I'd like to say it's a very good rule. It is a very good rule.

There's a reason we made it a rule. So I just want to remind our listeners. So I had finished, I can't remember what I had read right before this. I think it was one of the Greg Jenner history books. And then I went back to a series that I was reading and I finished the 17th year, which is the World Walker series book three by Ian W. Sainsbury.

Book four is also out, which I purchased at the same time because I'm in this far. I got to finish it out. But I will read a different book before that. All right. It's okay. I really enjoyed the first book. I thought it was a great premise. He's a relatively new author. So let's give him his props for that.

I don't know if it's his full day job or if he's just doing it on the side as a lark. But this has a lot of problems that, you know, beginning authors will typically have. And but overall, it's a fun series. I was kind of hoping book three would be it.

But there's a book four. I'm really hoping book four will be it. But he's also a new author that has found some success with this series. So this could go on forever. Yep. Yep. Ride that. Ride that sandworm, buddy. I would like some conclusion to this because I'm kind of getting bored.

But he likes to pay his mortgage. So yes, yes, I understand. Therein lies the rub. Yeah. So I did get an alert that Season of Skulls, a Laundry Files novel, is coming out May 16th. You and I are getting a lot of the same alerts this week, my friend.

Yes, we are. Yes, we are. Yes. This is the 12th book in the Laundry Files series, which has nothing to do with the Laundry Files we once started listening or watching and listening to and reading. The clue is in the world of the Laundry Files, which could mean anything. Mm-hmm. Yes. Bring back Bob.

That's all I got to say. But I'm going to – I'll listen to it again anyway. I'm 11 books in. Might as well stick it out. Same thing, you know? I don't know. I'm going to wait for your review on this one because I've just found my interest in non-Bob Laundry Files as Wayne completely.

You know, I was getting that way last time and then I powered through the book and ended up actually really enjoying the book as a standalone novel in its own right without the old cast of characters for the most part. So, yeah, if you take it as, yeah, in the world of the Laundry Files.

Think of the Laundry Files world as like Discworld now. You know? Right. If you have multiple scenarios, multiple storylines, a huge cast of characters. But I liked all those characters. I know. I'm not so sure about those. Let me do the voice. I'm not so sure about the rest of the characters in the world.

In the world. The Laundry Files. Yeah. Well, I'll find out May 16th. I pre-ordered it like a schlub. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave.

With podcast super host Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast for all your cyber security news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy. And the host of Control Loop because the machines are going to take over the world.

Woo-hoo! Hello, Dave. How was RSA? RSA was great. It was a fun trip. It's a long trip from the east coast to San Francisco. It's about a six-hour plane ride. So, that's a hike. I do it often.

Yeah. Fortunately, I'm a good airplane sleeper. So, I do well with that. I'm a good airplane drinker, Dave. That's fine. Well, the two might be related. Yeah, and I flew United, which is most of the time I fly southwest.

Like, if I'm hopping around on the east coast here, southwest is really easy. But United has the non-stops between BWI and San Francisco. So, when you get into a United plane these days, there's first class and then there's – Anarchy.

Economy plus. Cattle. There's economy plus, which is – Oh, yes. Which means leg room. And then there's where I was sitting, which is from like row 22 on. It is just absurdly tight back there. Now, I'm fortunate in that, as I think I've mentioned here before, I have a very airplane-friendly body, which means I have short legs.

So, I don't – it's like – it's not like I have my knees up against the seat in front of me. But still, if you drop something on the floor, you're not getting it until the plane lands. Yeah. Right. So, anyway, the conference itself was great fun. Nice to see people that I don't get to see very often.

It's remarkable how many people from the east coast I only get to see in San Francisco every year. But such is the way of conferences. We had a good show. Lots of success. I think I did 24 interviews in four days. So, that was pretty busy.

Yeah. Yeah. I'd say the high-profile interview for me was I had a nice conversation with Rob Joyce, who is the director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency. So, that was – Nice. Good get. It was a nice – Yeah. A nice get, a nice little feather in our cap. And he was a delightful guest.

He was not at all guarded and just had a nice conversation. So, that was a real highlight. Avoided parties. We did do one night of karaoke, which was great fun. We had to find a new karaoke place because the old one did not survive the pandemic.

Did Logan Roy walk in halfway through your karaoke session and tell you you were not serious people? He did not. Oh, okay. But I'll tell you, there were some – there were a few regulars there who were quite talented. You could tell these were folks who – this was their haunting ground.

And there were some really impressive singers there, which – you know, I am someone who can sing, but I would say vocally I am out of shape. I'm like a big, fat athlete who used to play. And like – so, it's a little intimidating.

But we did well and we had a lot of fun. And so, that was good. You want to dig into some of the AI stuff? I need to know where the AI fell on our three options for sure. Yeah. So, it was interesting. For folks who missed our previous conversation about that, we said that – well, the joke was that half of the booths were going to say we fully embrace AI and half of the booths were going to say we protect you from the people who fully embrace AI.

Yes. And it was a little more complicated and nuanced than that. My take-home was the big players are all in on AI. So, Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Well, they're funding most of it, so that does make sense.

Right. No word from Apple. But, of course, Apple doesn't do trade shows. So, they were just absent. They had nothing to say. So, my takeaway is that because the big players are going all in, the smaller players have little choice but to, at the very least, acknowledge it and have something to do.

They can't poo-poo it out of hand because I think, on the one hand, they're so reliant on the big players. You know, how many cybersecurity companies, their whole story is we help you make your Microsoft experience safer or your Google experience safer.

So, I think that's kind of the business reality of it. But I think there's – in the community, there's kind of a lot of skepticism and eye-rolling and sort of – you hear that clicking sound? Hold on to the bar. We're heading up the first lift hill here and we'll see where this goes.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. How was COVID? Was there any talk of it? Masks anywhere? Anything? Very little. Okay. So, I wore a mask on the airplane just because I think airplanes are one of the easiest places to get sick in general and I don't like getting sick.

So, I wore a mask on the airplane. One of my work colleagues has a compromised immune system. So, I was looking to look out for them as well. So, on the show floor, nothing. Okay. Nothing. I mean a handful of people were wearing masks. But there's no mandates.

There's no – yeah. It's pretty much as if – no, it wasn't very much talk of it. So, I'd say it's done. The masks have moved to the shoes because it's San Francisco and you don't want to step in man boot. It's booties.

It's booties in San Francisco. Yeah. Okay. I did hear – I heard a statistic while we were there. I don't know how accurate it is, but somebody said that 30% of San Francisco downtown office space is vacant right now. Yeah. That is going to be the next real financial worry is there's going to be a massive crash in real estate, commercial real estate.

I think so. Yeah. I think when we see all these commercial leases come up – Everybody's going to get out. A bit of a reckoning. Yep. Yeah. The office building where I have my space is half empty. Yeah. Can't rent it. Yeah. Yeah. There's just lots of empty spaces. They're going to have to – somebody's going to make billions of dollars coming up with a solution for what to do with those spaces.

I always think that it should be community-based, like put in cool stuff, put in art galleries, put in all that sort of stuff, get people inside the buildings again. And we need affordable housing. We do need affordable housing, so start rezoning. Not in my office building we don't.

See, and that there is the problem. Not in my backyard is the problem everywhere. Yes. You California NIMBY, you. Yes. Absolutely. I'm sorry. They already are in my backyard. Yes, but not legally, Jason. Not legally. Well, you wouldn't – no, they are because they can't get kicked out.

The cops are there every day, can't kick them out. So even though like every morning I come around the corner to some guy's bare naked ass taking a water bottle shower on the street, you know, exposed to everybody every damn day. The weather's too damn nice.

It's easy to be homeless there. Yeah, it is. Anyway. Moving on. Moving on, please. Got a little follow-up here from Jake. Grumps, we use our antenna to watch local games for baseball, football, hockey, et cetera. You can get a cheap one on Amazon for $30, or you can get a larger omnidirectional one for $80 to $120.

The omnidirectional have come a long way. I put one up at my parents' rural home. I grew up with six channels there. With the new antenna, they're getting $20. Woo! Plus all the digital sub-channels, it's worth the cost, especially for putting on local news in the morning. I had a suggestion, but Dave, you beat me to it.

Yeah. So this is a good idea, and I think lots of people overlook the fact that television is indeed still being broadcast. It's actually how I watched the Cubs World Series that they won was with an antenna. And I only saw half the game because it was raining, and it blew out my antenna.

Oh, I love that. Yes. Yeah, unfortunately for me, the Orioles are all locked up on a network called Masson, which is a cable sports network. So most of their games are not broadcast. Yes, to both of your points, Jason, when you get to the playoffs, those tend to be bought out by your Foxes and your other broadcast people, so you can get away with that.

But regular series, I can't think of a single, I don't know, maybe our listeners can write in from all over the U.S., but almost every market has been bought out by a subscription cable-only network, Sportsnet, or there was one called Bally's, which I think has then been bought by somebody else and it's been rebranded.

But there are no broadcasts on regular channels anymore for baseball. They're all locked up by these different networks. So this brings you to my solution, which I have finally fixed, Dave. I actually put a little time into this. So just a background again, I've mentioned this before.

My wireless setup is I have two wireless routers. One is set to my actual location here in Toronto, and one has a hardwired VPN on the router that is set to Los Angeles. All that's required of my family to access Canadian streaming versus American streaming is to switch Wi-Fi networks, something even my son at six can do now.

He's figured it out. Especially on an Apple TV, it makes it very easy. The MLB app-specific workaround on Apple TV is also incredibly simple if you figure it out. You go into Settings, Apps, and the MLB, and they have a switch. Allow MLB to access location.

You set that to never and allow this app to track you. Don't allow. Now the app can only rely on my IP location so I can work around all the blackouts. Of course, you still have to pay the $100 whatever a year for the MLB subscription, but it works. Hmm.

That's good. So as long as I had those things switched off because I was using whatever before, I assume there's a GPS in there, to basically override my IP setting and tell MLB, yes, this guy's in Toronto. So I got blackout. As soon as I switch that off, it works perfectly.

Yeah, this is great. This is good stuff. Tell me about the Wi-Fi thing, the hardware VPN built into your router. I'm familiar with that. There are many, many, many routers now that will allow you to sideload different apps. I can send you a link privately to a box that I bought that basically straight out of the box, I just plugged it in and typed in my VPN provider and username and password, and I was off to the races.

Gotcha. Or if you want to make it a weekend project, you can buy any router that will allow you to install them, and you can work through that yourself. Nice. But I bought one pre-built. Right, right. So then on the Apple TV thing, which is what I use, are you going through the VPN for that?

Yeah. So I basically set up two wireless accounts, and one is Ocean Park, and then the other one is Ocean Park USA. So my family easily knows to switch back and forth. So you want to get your cool Netflix stuff that's only in the US, my son goes, switches it to Ocean Park USA, and then loads up Netflix and then gets all that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. All you got to do, all you got to teach your family to do is switch wireless networks. That's it. Right. Right. I love it. See, that is a workable solution. Yes. It does require significant infrastructure, two wireless routers, VPN, Apple TV.

But if you got all those three things, it's easy. Right. And I'm willing to do the work behind the scenes. Yeah. Yeah. Once you have a flux capacitor, getting up to 88 miles an hour is nothing. Plus, all my garbage goes away easily. Yeah. All right.

Well, it's good. So I got a project now. It's good. Now, the question is, will I complete this before baseball season's over? But we'll see. There's always next year. Yeah. Exactly. I'll send you the link. Well, as an Orioles fan, that's something I'm used to saying. There's always next year.

There's always next year. Maybe you're not really in much of a rush. Actually, you guys have been doing surprisingly well this year so far. I'm waiting for the crash. Yeah. Oh, it'll come. It'll come. I threw this link in here for you, Dave. It's called How Logan Arcade Got Its Misfits Playing Robot Dogs.

This comes back to the Rock of Fire explosion that we talked about on the show. These guys at Logan's Arcade got a band together with the animatronics and made a Misfits cover band with Glenn Dogzig, Jerry Bonely, Doyle Von Frankenbone, and Robo.

And it's pretty awesome. Probably not so kid-friendly, but yeah. I love everything about this. And I hope we're off to some sort of trend of robot tribute bands of great old bands. I think people are loving these robots because they are so retro, and this is the perfect way to do it.

So, yeah. I'm loving this. Making our future overlords cuddly. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. What was that movie, AI, that Spielberg directed? One of the things I thought about that film was, or one of the flaws I thought in that film was, to me, the most interesting character was the teddy bear.

Right. I barely remember that movie. That was the one that Kubrick started, right? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I just remember that there was that spot in the movie where it was like, went from really interesting and slow moving to whatever the hell it turned out to be.

Yeah. The movie was kind of a mess. It was a lot of interesting ideas, but there was a teddy bear character who was an AI robot as opposed to the AI robot boy. And to me, the teddy bear was much more interesting than the boy. But what are you going to do?

Is it worth watching again? Does it have legs, you think? No. Okay. It does not. No. I remember it not being good the first time around. That's what I thought. Just making sure. Just making sure. No, it does not. I got a couple of quick links in here for you Star Wars folks since yesterday was May the 4th. Some outtakes from Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and James Earl Jones recording for Star Wars' 1-800 phone line, which are kind of funny.

Yeah. So those are worth listening to. And yesterday, Carrie Fisher finally got her Hollywood Walk of Fame star. Yes. What took so long? I'm surprised she didn't have one earlier. She is one of the personality types that probably said, I'm not paying for that.

Yeah. Because remember, these aren't gifted. You actually have to pay the city of Hollywood to get these things. So, yeah. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, she finally got it. So that's good. Yeah. And this week, Apple released its first rapid-fire security update for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

So I now have the A version of the current software. They have not done this sort of thing before. So it's a new thing for them, but good on them rather than wait six months. You know, they can do quick fixes now. Yeah. What struck me about these updates was how lightweight and quick they were.

Yes. It didn't take an hour. No. Which is what I was bracing myself for because typically you do some kind of system update, even like a .1 update, and you're like... Yeah. See you later. Right. Well, because there's no knowing. There's just no way to know how long it's going to take.

And, of course, the progress bar is a lying sack of shit. Yes. And it gives you no indication of how long it's going to take. And if you go through the progress bar once and it restarts, there's no telling that that's not just one of many restarts that you're going to have to sit through.

So, yeah, I was very pleased with how quick these happened and there don't seem to be any issues. So it's nice that Apple has the capability to do this. Evidently, there were pretty serious flaws. And so they pulled the trigger. Yeah. That's good. Good on Apple. That's good. Impressive.

Yeah. All right. That's all I got this week, guys. One security story. Woo-hoo. Works for me. I will say, and maybe put a pin in this for next time, but I saw that Google released passkeys this week.

Oh, yes. Which I think is a big deal coming. I can't say that I'm up to date on my knowledge of passkeys. I watched a couple of presentations on it in passing, and I'm trying to get somebody from Apple on the show to talk about it. I'm curious as well because I saw a lot of tweets that basically went, so they're replacing passwords with something that is still kind of a password.

It's not, it's not, though. Yeah. It's not. Yeah. It uses your biometrics mostly to – it's kind of like the – what do they call it? What's the safety thing built into your laptop? The Enclave. Secure Enclave is what I'm – it's the parts I'm looking for.

It's kind of like the Secure Enclave where the passkey sort of passes the information that says, yep, this is who they say they are. We're good here. And off you go. So it's supposed to be a security enhancement and also very easy to use. So I'm going to do some more digging into it, and hopefully I can get someone who really understands it to explain it to me in a way that everyone can understand it, and then I will pass that knowledge on to everyone else.

We'll talk about that next week, assuming a lot of pop culture things don't happen that are more interesting. There you go. Much more important. All right. Very good. See you soon. Shout out! Over at Patreon, we want to thank Melanie for doubling your monthly pledge.

And nobody else signed up. So everybody, remember – No, but we've got a double pledge. That's awesome. Yeah, we've got a double. We've got a double. You can sign up at Patreon for three bucks a month, starting at three bucks a month. You can give us more if you want. We'll take it. We'll take it. You can sign and thruple your pledge. Yes, you can.

Like the millennials with their weird dating situations. And, yeah, you get the episodes a little bit early and ad-free and in high definition. All right. Over at PayPal, we've got Nicholas, Simon, Matt, Judge, Jonathan, Benjamin, Matthew, Nikolai, and Thomas.

Thank you all so much. And over at the tip jar, we've got Marcel, Mario, Matthew, and Linda. Thank you, everybody. No reviews, though. We'll get fucking canceled for this at some point. I'm sure. I'm sure. And Fred wrote in, I was bored today, recently divorced and away from my three kids.

Didn't know what to do, so I made this for fun. And this is a t-shirt design that he made. And it said, and it's a code t-shirt. He said, it's written in pearl, as I know you will love it. And as I don't know shit about pearl, the code has been provided by ChatGPT. Made me giggle for a while, blah, blah, blah.

Cheers from Switzerland. P.S. If I sell any of those shirts, it will go directly to your tip jar. So there is a link in the show notes to go buy one, but I'm not going to ruin the joke. I'm not going to spoil the joke. Go check it out. Go check it out. And in sad news, Eileen Saki from MASH has died.

She played Rosie. She was 79. She played many characters in that show before settling on Rosie, apparently. Yep. As many of the actors did. In fact. She was the final Rosie in the show. When we did the live, or not live, but when we did the podcast recording up at the MASH set for the 50th anniversary a few months ago, Rosie was there.

She was actually there. And our friend, Brian Blondell, shushed her in the middle of recording. Classy Blondell. She was, yeah, she was just chatting it up with somebody while we're trying to record a podcast. And Brian did what he was supposed to do.

He was, he was a good, you know, a good worker, a good assistant. He shushed her. So. I know this whole podcast is about you, but shut up. Yeah. Quiet. Quiet on set, woman. It was very funny when it happened, though.

But she, she was just like, oh, okay. It was very funny. But yeah, she will be missed. She was very nice. Very sweet person. But Gordon Lightfoot died, too. Yes. Canada is shut down in morning. I've believed that was going to come. Yes, for sure. Is Tim Horton still open?

No. You have to wear a black band to go in. Okay. As long as you can get that sandwich. I'm good. Great songwriter. Like, amazing. What a career. And vastly underrated. Should have been far more successful. Yeah. Well, I only know his one song, so I'm sure that's probably into it.

Yeah. Well, I mean, go listen to the top five on Spotify, at least. It's worth a listen. All right. I hardly agree. 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.showslashdonate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever.

You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absa-smurfly free. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.showslash600. Woo! Champagne. Fireworks. Boom. Blah, blah, blah. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans.

You can also head over to GOG.showslashcontact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.showslashreview and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars if we didn't get any this week. Get on it, people, and stay grumpy.

At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead with brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more.

Shop now at QVC.com.