602: Urban Doom Loop

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. Well, coronavirus is over, Jason. Thank God. Unless you pay attention to half the doctors on Twitter that are screaming, oh, fucking hell, no, it's not. Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet.

I'm going to be over here with my head in the sand. Now, shut up. Yes, but most states have now halted the use of Google and Apple's COVID-19 exposure notification system that, frankly, nobody was using anyways. Nope. But you will no longer get alerts if you approach someone who tested positive and reported their results.

This is unfortunate. I don't know why you shut it off. I mean, I guess money. Yeah, servers, you know. Yeah. California and other states chalk up the decision to a combination of vaccines, wide immunity, and effective treatments. So only 26 states actually released apps to make full use of notifications.

And just 36 million Americans had either installed an app or enabled exposure notifications express as of May 2021. Anyways, and half these protocols didn't speak to each other. So if you're traveling from one state to another, they didn't talk to each other. Anyways, basically, these things were useless.

There's some evidence that it prevented cases. Washington state's app may have prevented 5,500 cases in its first four months. But most of the population, as we stated, wasn't sharing their data anyways. You know, hopefully something will come out of this. Maybe next time around, knock on wood, not in my lifetime or my son's, now that I have to think about that.

They'll actually roll out something nationwide right away instead of fucking about. Yeah, we'll see. My roommate actually had that set up and was more confused by the notification that it was shutting off. Right.

Totally forgot what it was. Didn't remember turning it on. So I had to sit there and explain that, you know, no, this is because we did that thing way back in the day that I had turned off a long time ago. I didn't even get it when it shut down. I did because I had left it on as well. So there you go.

All right. Yeah. Moving on. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has failed in her bid to stay out of prison yet again because she keeps trying desperately not going to prison. According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said her appeal didn't raise any legal issues whatsoever or questions that could impact the outcome of her case.

Brian, Brian, the I don't want to. I don't want to. It's called the I don't want to clause. Yeah. She had asked the court to pause her sentence a couple of days before she was supposed to report to prison on April 27th, presumably because she wanted a few more tacos. I don't really know. Her lawyers argued that she wasn't a flight risk, conveniently forgetting about the one-way ticket she purchased just for herself just a few months ago.

Yep. She was just going for it. She was trying to go for Cinco de Mayo, Brian. That's all. I guess. I guess. And, you know, it's so close after Cinco de Mayo. It's almost Fourth of July. I can't go in yet. No. There's a holiday coming. And then it's summer. I mean, you know.

And then next thing you know, we're rolling into fall and the leaves are lovely. Yeah. Why should I go to prison? Yeah. Oh, why, oh, why, indeed. Yeah. Well, it didn't work, though, did it? No, it did not, thankfully. Yeah. So, have fun. She got a little bit of a reprieve, though.

Now she has to show up on May 30th. That's the final judgment. Okay. She must show up by May 30th for her episode of Orange is the New Black. I'd watch that. In the news.

This just in yesterday. Supreme Court rules in favor of Twitter and Google over that Section 230 case about – Well, normally I would not cheer a ruling in favor of Twitter and Google. The fact that they did means we're actually recording right now and there's an internet still.

Yeah. Yeah. The world still is intact. So, basically, they kept Section 230 open saying that, yeah, no, they're protected. It doesn't matter what's up there because the whole thing was around families suing Twitter and Google for ISIS content after their family members were killed in terrorist attacks.

Which, yeah. The problem with free speech is it's free on all sides. Unless you're on Twitter. Unless you're Elon Musk. In which case, it's very capricious. I saw the funniest thing about Elon this week.

It cracked me the fuck up. Somebody called him Phony Stark. That's genius. I love it. That's actually really good. I love that one. Yeah. I'm keeping that one. Yeah. No. So, this is a good thing. I mean, I think rationally we all know that they should be doing a better job of moderating their content.

But are they actually liable for it? You know, if we do that, we break the internet. End of story. Yeah, we do. Yeah. I saw a really good long-form article over on The Atlantic. Basically, well, the title is, Before AI Takes Over, Make Plans to Give Everyone Money.

And the TLDR on this is, just in case, AI ends up causing mass layoffs. Well, why don't we actually start looking at UBI seriously? Which, fair enough. Yeah, but UBI is never going to work. It's just not. I mean, the more that we've talked about it for a decade now, it's not going to work.

Nobody's going to do it. No, of course it's not. Everybody's just going to do heroin. Yeah, that's it. I know what four dealers are right behind my car in the parking lot. And the AI will win anyways. So, here we go. That's it. That's it. We're all batteries. Just get used to it. Yes. Sorry, I'm still thinking about phony Stark and cracking up inside.

It was pretty damn good, wasn't it? I can't believe it took that long for that one to come out with all the people on the internet. Yeah, yeah. And I saw that one on Blue Sky, which we'll talk about shortly, which is even more ironic. I saw this one. This is a hat tip to Vinnie Lee on this one.

Professor flunks all his students after chat GPT falsely claims it wrote their papers. Okay. So, this brain trust, Professor Jared Mumm, who should be stripped of his credentials, honestly, at this point. He's a Texas A&M professor. And he checked all of his students' final papers using chat GPT.

Okay. Nobody bothered to tell him that that's not what chat GPT does. It's built for making the papers, not telling you if they're fake or not. Yes. Freaking moron. Well, yeah. What really screwed up is that so he flunked all his kids.

They didn't get their diplomas. They, you know, fuss was raised. Stunk was made. People got involved with, you know, more than three brain cells and tapped Mr. Mumm on the shoulder and said, yeah, that's not the way it works. So, he had to apologize because nobody gets fired anymore, remember?

So. Yeah. Well. Yeah. Yeah. So. On the flip side of that, though, I have seen a lot of posts on the old Twitter from professors and things of that nature showing students that did use chat GPT to write their paper. And we've been awfully concerned about guardrails as well we should be for very important things.

But in terms of, like, academic papers and using that, the only guardrail we need is every couple paragraphs. It just needs to say, hi, I'm chat GPT. Because these students are so fucking lazy. They don't go in and edit anything. So, there are those clear statements stating, you know, I'm chat GPT and I wrote this that pop up in all these papers.

Oh, God. All you got to do is read. But nobody does that anymore. Except for these professors that are catching them. This is why UBI will never work. You have to have some people paying into the tax system to actually pay back out to the lazy people. Or the, you know, the lower levels of society who can't take care of themselves, which is what we already have safety nets for.

But anyway, yeah. It's all the way down. We're screwed. We're screwed. Let the AIs run amok, please. Yeah. Well, we could probably use an AI governor in Montana. This is one of the silliest things I've ever seen. In Montana, TikTok ban is now official. Governor Greg Gianforte signed a bill banning the app in the state one month after it was passed by the state legislator.

It's scheduled to take effect in 2024. Although, obvious legal challenges will delay that timeline. You know, TikTokers saying, wait, hold on. We want a taco on TikTok first. So we'll get that. The law prohibits the company from operating in the state and requires app stores to block users in Montana from downloading TikTok.

The users will not face any repercussions for using the service, but app stores and TikTok will face daily fines of $10,000 for violating the law. Good luck getting those checks from TikTok. Or Apple or Google for that matter. Obviously, the simple use of a VPN will get you around this.

You will not uninstall the app if you've already installed it and you have a year to now do so. So good luck with this. In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson says the Montana land law unlawfully violates the First Amendment rights of its users, which I actually do have issue with.

I think that's a bullshit argument. That is. Yes. It's one app. That's not violating your First Amendment right. One app from a private company. That is not a violation. No. First Amendment has nothing to do with this. So that is a very stupid argument to take on this.

There are many arguments you can take. That one is the dumb one. And, of course, that's what people are going for. Apparently, the theme on this show is people are dumb. Yes. Ten years in, we're finally figuring that out. I just, I think that everybody in technology would be okay if they just, you know, said, okay, we're just going to blacklist Montana.

All 12 people there, you know? Yeah. Look, if you want to get rid of TikTok, it's got to be nationwide. End of story. It's got to have some heft behind it. And it's not going to happen. It's stupid. It's stupid. In other news, the EU has approved Microsoft's $68.7 billion Activision Blizzard takeover.

So there you go. Yeah. I think it's fine. Why not? With Sony out there, you have to have, you know, you have to have local competition. Yeah. And the caveat here is you can't be exclusive. So you have to be able to allow these games to be on other services, which, fine. That's fine.

No problem with that. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure that they would not cut their nose off to spite their face by pulling Call of Duty from the PS5. No, it's Microsoft. Now, they've made some boneheaded mistakes in the past, but in general, they're pretty damn smart about things and they do not hurt their bottom line.

They want money. That's all they're there for. You know, they're not buying this to stop selling it. That's the way it goes. And a third former Apple employee has now been charged with stealing self-driving car tech. Obviously, they do not listen to the show. This is at least 20 years away. If it ever even happens, Apple has not even announced the fact that they're going to have a self-driving car, but apparently you're stealing the tech from this non-existent thing.

A federal court in the Northern District of California has unsealed charges against Weibo Wang, a former Apple software engineer. He worked at the company in 2016 as part of a team that developed hardware and software for autonomous systems, which could conceivably be part of the self-driving car division. Basically, he took the job, then accepted the job with a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese company that was developing self-driving cars, but held on to that job and got that paycheck, but kept the Apple job for more than four months before telling Apple that he was going to quit.

And then he accessed large amounts of sensitive, proprietary, and confidential information during the process. Whoops. Yeah, yeah. Not the smartest cookie in the jar, this guy. No, and Apple's pretty good at sussing stuff out. Yeah? Yeah?

Yeah. So, this is the third instance of a former Apple employee being accused of stealing autonomous trade secrets for Chinese entities. Mm-hmm. Meanwhile, every Apple employee is walking around with TikTok on their phone. That's right. They got it already, kids. Oh, God. Apple has done something interesting, though.

They have revealed a new feature called personal voice, which will let you clone your own voice in just 15 minutes. I don't like hearing my own voice anyways. Well, here's the thing. If you lost it one day, you might like to be able to have it back.

Oh, okay. You know, it's an accessibility feature for people who do have difficulty speaking, which makes me think that just 15 minutes is going to be a lot longer for people who have issues. I'd imagine, yes. Yeah. There's another interesting article that follows up on this one saying, everyone should use personal voice.

It does in 15 minutes. Would currently take several weeks. Yes, yes, yes. We just covered that. But the interesting thing is they say because loss of speech can come very suddenly through things like ALS or like I had a stroke. You know, I could have lost my voice from that. So if you have this in the can, then you can at least have your phone start talking.

And it's Apple. So I guess I can theoretically trust them with my voice fingerprint, as it were. Yeah. The interesting thing about that is it's all done on device. It never actually hits Apple. Okay. Which kind of bums me out because like, let's say that my dad does it and something happens to my dad.

I would like to be able to get it off the phone. Hopefully like, you know, sometime in the future, they'll come up with an export function or something like that. Because if it just lives on the phone and I would like to have, you know, a family member's voice that I don't have access to anymore, then, you know, that would be kind of nice to have.

So hopefully they will put that in that whole, you know, what happens when you're gone. Well, mine was called Death Vault, which failed miserably because everybody hated the name. But I was going to say it, but no, yes, in the death bank when things are transferred over.

But I think this is cool. I'm going to do it, obviously, because... Of course you are. Yeah. That's what we do here. We play with stuff. But it's not coming out until iOS 17, which will be later, later, later this year. All right. Well, I'll definitely check that out when it comes out.

This one, I'm only going to read the headline because that's all you need to do. Online-only startups adopt a bold new strategy, opening actual shops. Okay. Yeah. Online-orders alone aren't cutting it anymore for these stores. It's just like when you hear all of these people with all of those, you know, not the Dollar Shave Clubs, but the, what's the razors that are the shaving cream that we like?

It's not, is it Henry's? Oh, yeah. Whatever. But anyway, there's a million of those places that, you know, were online-only, make-in-banked, then they sold to the big box people like Gillette or whatnot, and then they end up in stores because there is some money to be made in stores. Yes. People still shop in stores.

Even Amazon did it, even though they're failing miserably at it, but yeah. Yeah, they are. And Avalente wrote in, you guys have talked a lot about remote work, in particular the shift back to in-office. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this article, and this is from Vox. The return to the office won't save the office.

Take it away, Brian. This was too damn long for me to do homework. It is too damn long. Let's just do the TLDR on this. People aren't going back to office. It's not happening. High-profile companies are forcing workers to return to the office, but other companies let them work where they wish, so people quit those companies and go work for the other companies because people need workers right now.

Even the companies that have put in the return to office policies are backpedaling or failing to enforce them. Hybrid is the future. That is the now. End of story. I think that's kind of it. Now, the unexpected repercussions of this is very unfortunate.

Downtown cores are dying. Commercial real estate is tanking. Office owners are struggling to lease space, failing to secure more financing, et cetera, et cetera. I don't really feel so bad for those companies and those individuals because they are super rich and they will actually be okay.

They will have to do what they used to tell us lowly workers to do when our jobs were in jeopardy. Pivot, bitches. It is time for you to pivot. You should do other things with your space. How about community building?

How about creating spaces for art? How about creating spaces for other things? You'll be fine. You will be. Maybe. My heart goes out to the small businesses that exist in these areas, you know, the small mom and pop restaurants that basically provide lunch for workers.

They're going out of business and that's not so good. And there are some worries about this. Some have predicted, and I do love this phrase, urban doom loop. In which fewer people and less money coming in means fewer amenities and poorer quality of life, which leads to even fewer people and less money and so on and so forth.

Yeah, so that's kind of where we're at right now. I don't know where this is going to go. I do think there's going to be more WeWork type spaces opening up in these areas. Rents are going to have to come down. Many of these are going to have to get better for the office spaces that will continue to exist for people to do hybrid work.

But every company I know is going to be downsizing their spaces and looking for cheaper rents because it was just the rent's too damn high, Jason. I know that's why I just got rid of my high-priced office and moved to a much smaller office. And the funny thing is, I'm in the same building that I was in and I'm just down the hall, but in the wing that I'm in, I am literally the only tenant.

Yeah. It is completely empty. Companies are really trying to figure this out right now. And obviously it takes time because people are locked into their lease contracts and things of that nature. But once lease contracts are up, most people that I've talked to that own small to medium sized businesses and most people I know that work at larger businesses are hearing that, you know, we're going to be moving.

We're going to be downsizing. You know, we're going to have teams come in on one day a week. The rest of the time you work from home and then we'll just shuffle through our teams Monday through Friday. All that kind of stuff is going to start happening. So Adam Newman was just ahead of his time. Oh God. The one thing I do here is like less bullshit is what people want.

People want a nice clean space. They don't need kombucha. They don't need massages. They don't need ping pong tables. Just a nice clean shared office space that you can lock up and keep for your own company. And you maybe share the amenities like the bathrooms in the kitchen with five other companies because you need less space.

Because you want to go home. Yeah, you know, and people working from home in general seems to be working pretty well. You know, some people can't hack it and I get it. And that's why they'll always be an office space for most companies. But in general, the life work balance that people have crawled back for themselves is pretty good.

Yeah. And I mean, look, this is all privileged shit for knowledge workers. You know, yeah, this is all information technology workers. All of it. So, yeah, the the mom and pop shops and stuff like that. Closing in the urban doom loop, which I do love. It just reminds me of when the the highway system was put in, you know, say your your town was, you know, they didn't put an exit where your town used to be because it was a fine.

It was a nice, vibrant town on Route 66. But the highway comes through two miles away. There's no exit to your town. Your town dies. You know, and you move. Yeah. Then then then you go to the next town that has one and then, you know, rebuild or go someplace else.

I think this is we're going to be in a transitional period for a couple. But this is going to shake out just fine. I think it's going to be a couple of decades, actually. I think I think. Yeah. I mean, because this is all comes back to repercussions from covid. You know, this is going to take maybe even longer than that. Might take a few generations to shake out because everybody is still so jacked up.

Yeah. From being locked inside. People are messed up. They really are. Oh, my God. Dude. It just comes out in such random ways. Yeah. Next time you're in L.A., just look around and just pay a little bit of attention to how insane everybody is. It's it's ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's I don't want to leave the house.

That's why my my office is like I have to cross one street, one big street to get to my office. And I'm fine with that. Yeah. But I mean, I think about like the fact that we moved to Toronto during the pandemic. Right. And we haven't really explored the city much. We just don't get out of our local area that much.

I don't know why. There's a vast, wonderful city out there that I just don't go see. Yeah, it's weird. We're all still trying to shake this off. But in continuing with the work from home conversation, of course, Elon Musk had a recent interview about this remote CEO Elon Musk slams people who work from home.

The laptop class is living in La La Land. Tech CEO Elon Musk, who heads Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter and to date has no clones we know of slammed remote work in a wide ranging interview with CNBC's David Farber. He says the practice was morally wrong, despite the fact that he's hardly the best example of an office going person since he can only be in one office for one company he runs at a time.

So my takeaway from this is car company CEO wants people to go back to commuting. That's about it. Always remember what the person's angle might be when they do these sorts of things. Look for their motivation. Yes. Now, speaking of car companies, Cruise and Waymo are back in the news because this is just this is madness.

This is utter madness. They run self-driving taxis, quote unquote, robo taxis in San Francisco that nobody likes. Everybody hates them because they screw up traffic. They get in the way of emergency vehicles. The list goes on and on and on.

And right now, Waymo is running from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., which is fine. OK, most people are off the street. You might run over a few homeless people in the tenderloin. Who cares? We've got enough of them. We can we can miss a few. It's fine.

But anyway, now, California Public Utilities Commission, they have two draft resolutions in the works that would allow Cruise and Waymo to run 24-7 in all areas of San Francisco, whereas right now they're limited to time and area.

What could possibly go wrong? You want a better example of how crazy we are post-COVID? Just look at San Francisco. Oh, yeah. Everything that they're doing is nuts. They're not they're not addressing any of the problems. My God, it's like it's a libertarian dream gone horribly right in their opinion.

But the rest of us are just staring at it going, what the fuck are you people doing? It's like Gavin Newsom's the mayor all over again. Kind of. God, I hope he doesn't run. No, he's going to. He's going to. I mean, he's been doing it for two years now. Oh, yeah.

Well, no, he's been doing it for decades. I met the guy in the mid to early 2000s when we were doing Met blogs and I got to meet him. I'm like, this guy is going to gun for presidency. That's it. And everybody knew it. Everybody's like, yeah, he's that's that's his life goal. And that's where he's going. You know, you don't look like Bruce Wayne.

Come on. He's he's on his way. He's on his way. I know. Oh, man. But some interesting news here. Now that we have the Chips in Science Act that we're going to be putting in. We're going to start making our own chips again. Thank God. We're going to need people to make those chips.

And we are sorely lacking in the technology infrastructure in our colleges and in our, you know, after school training to do any of the semiconductor work. So now the good news is that colleges and universities are going to be ramping up their curriculums to actually train semiconductor workers because they say, yeah, they say we're going to need an additional 90,000 workers by 2025, which is I don't know if you notice, Brian, 2025 is like tomorrow.

So basically, yeah. Yeah. As we as we get older, now that you are in the 50s, you will notice time. Time accelerates exponentially, unfortunately. 2025 is, I shit, it's now 2027. We missed it. Oh, boy. Yeah. Still 20 years away for those self-driving cars.

Yeah. Amazing how that keeps happening. Mm-hmm. But this is good news, I think. No, this is great news. We need less chat GPT query engineers and more actual engineers.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new. Every day. 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. Media Candy. Okay, Brian, I finished The Diplomat. Okay. Awesome. All right. Cannot wait for season two. Cannot wait for season two. We'll be watching then, definitely. Yeah, definitely. I finished, I think, episode four of Silo last night.

Yeah? What did you think? Fantastic. It's a great show. They're doing a great job with it. They're doing a great job. They're doing a really good job. Amazing what happens when you stick to the material, Apple. I know. It's like the writers are worth something. Yeah. It's like, you know, who'd have thunk it?

Who'd have thunk it? Who'd have thunk it? Yeah. No, it's a really good show. I like how it's going along so far. I finished watching it. I do tend to watch it the day it comes out, and I got rolled into an ad for Finch, which I had never watched. So I ended up, both my wife and kid were plague bound this week.

So I was, like, staying away from them and kind of sleeping downstairs anyway. So I'm like, what the hell? I've got time to kill by myself, and I watched it and thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Oh, good. There is something about Tom Hanks not acting with anybody else whatsoever. When you put this in, I was like, I remember that movie.

That's the movie that got me to the website, Does the Dog Die? The Dog Does Not Die. So that's how I found this. But now they should rename this website Triggered or Not, because what it used to be was a yes or a no.

Yeah. That's it. Yes or a no. Now it's got, does it have jump scares, hospital scenes, violently or mentally ill people, overdosing, bugs, obscene language or jesters, falling deaths, or man in a dress jokes are some of the categories that they have.

Well, you know, two things here. We are raising a generation of pansies who need this sort of thing. And secondly, you also have to increase your reach to keep the money flowing in. I don't know how much money. Oh, there we go. They've got ads. Crowdsourced emotional spoilers for movies, TV, books, and more.

Let's try the Oxford comma there, people. Let's see. Yeah. The Oxford comma is triggering for some people, Jason. It is true. That is true. That is absolutely true. I'm full Oxford comma. I'm 100% on board, but it is very triggering. It is.

Oh, my God. You want to see a nerd fight? Bring that one out. Jesus. But they should have an option of not showing user comments because the user comments are kind of annoying. Well, that's the internet. Yeah. Oh, that's right. Damn it. That's why we made Section 230.

Woo-hoo. Yes. Ted Lasso got caught up on that. Meh. It was a better episode than they've had recently. What the fuck is up with the hour-long rung times? I want a 30-minute comedy. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know what makes it 30 minutes? Because I can get through it in 30 minutes. Anytime Nate's on screen, I fast forward. I do not care about that. You're triggered by Nate. Well, no. I am bored by Nate. I don't give a shit about his storyline at all. His redemption arc was remarkably quick.

Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah, the writing has definitely lost its better end. Yeah. Well, I guess some of the main people went over to that other show with Harrison Ford. What was it called? Oh, gosh. I can't even remember it. Something about therapists.

Can't remember. Yeah, the therapist one. Very good show, though. Yeah, some of the writers went over. Yeah, I got to finish that one most of the way through. Well, obviously, some of the writers went over because that show was awesome, and this season, Ted Lasso kind of sucks. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I mean. They had some brain drain over there.

Now, let's talk about Succession. Yes. In the college classes on screenwriting in the future, Succession is going to be a case study on how to fuck up a fantastic show because the writers wanted to see if they could do it. They wanted to see if they could make a show without the main character.

The linchpin of the whole show. What a waste of fucking time. I thought the episode was phenomenal, actually. I hated every second of it. But I agree with your main point. I don't think we needed so many episodes between his death and the final.

I think they should have done that in two to three. Tops? Yep. Probably just two. So, yeah. Probably just two. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We haven't even had a funeral yet. Yeah. We've had an election. That's this week. That's Sunday. Okay.

Then one more after that. So, only two and a half hours left. But that was like two and a half hours long, I think. I've heard that the last episode is like basically a movie. I heard it was 90 Minutes. Okay. Well, that's a short movie. Yeah. There are movies that are 90 Minutes. The good ones. Probably next Ted Lasso episode, too.

I saw this article called, One YouTube Ripping Site Will Get 4 Billion Visits in 2023. Okay. Now, this whole article goes down a bunch of different rabbit holes. But it's mainly about stream ripping. Yeah. And they call it the illegal practice of creating a downloadable file from content that is available to stream online.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Um, this, I, this, the fact that this is a thing still makes me want to bang my head against a wall. How long have you and I been saying, Brian, if you can see it or hear it, we can steal it? Yep. Day one. I mean, AOL.

Sitting in the boardroom in Warner Brothers music. Yeah. Yeah. You put that up there. That means people can download it. You know that, right? No, no, no, no. It's protected. No, it's not. No, it's not. If I can hear it, I can copy it. Copy it. If I can see it, I can copy it.

I can copy it. If I can stream it, I can copy it. Yes. Um, so lean into that, people. Lean into it. Don't try and stop it. Or just ignore it. Just ignore it. That's true too, because as we know, piracy sometimes actually increases commerce. So, yeah, yeah, this, this, it's a very long article over at Torrent Freak, but it's interesting.

It's interesting to see how these people are actually playing whack-a-mole with them and how much traffic these things actually get, which is insane. That is a lot. I've only used stream ripping a couple times. Like, uh, my, we got my son, one of those little USB radios that he could carry around and we wanted to put a bunch of songs that he liked on it.

So I, perfect. YouTube ripping was perfect for that. Get a great MP3, throw it in there. Done. Yeah, I just use Audio Hijack just as easy and I don't have to worry about seeing ads or getting malware from somewhere. Uh, so yeah, Succession, I'm, I'm, I'm having a hard time figuring out if I even want to watch the end at this point.

Oh, come on. There's two episodes left. I know, but please, like you're not gonna, I'm mad, I feel like shulmeistering it. Um, but just have your bottle of whiskey for the final, so get, get ready to throw it at the TV. Well, I don't drink it anymore, so I can easily throw it at the TV.

Bottle of kombucha, whatever you want. Kombucha, I can't drink either. There's alcohol in kombucha if you didn't, you didn't know. There is? There's enough. Yeah, there is. Really? Yeah. Am I drunk all day drinking my kombucha tea? I think you're probably getting a little tiny something or other, but, uh, it's very, it's minuscule.

That's why they can sell it over the counter. It's no NyQuil. No, it's not. Uh, I do miss hard kombucha though. That stuff was really good. You should check that out. Uh, it's like, uh, it's like an upper crusty version of White Claw. Okay. Doctor Who has revealed the 60th anniversary specials trailer.

Yeah. And you know me, I called, uh, I called, I called stop on Doctor Who. I was going to try to get into it and I just gave up. Yeah. See, you, you came at the wrong time. You were going to get into it after David Tennant left. And that's the thing about this 60th anniversary specials is it's David Tennant all the way down.

And, um, you know, Tom Baker was my doctor, but then David Tennant then became my doctor, you know, because he's so good. He is so good. And, uh, yeah, I'm looking forward to this. There's three specials, three hours or, you know, an hour each or whatever. So I'm just, I can't wait.

I can't wait. Cause I can just jump back in where I left off because the people in between don't care. Don't care in the least. Um, but yeah, it'll bring back the memories. And, uh, just if you, if people out there don't know the genius of David Tennant, I put a link in here to a clip from Fright Night, one of his better movies with Colin Farrell.

Actually, it's the Fright Night remake. Um, he plays, uh, David Tennant plays Peter Vincent, the vampire hunter. And it is, he's so good in it. It's ridiculous. So check it out. We'll do. And then returning to our main theme, people are stupid. Disgraced Fyre Fest founder, Billy McFarlane says he is secure.

Uh, let's, we forget also, uh, was in jail for all of this. Says he has secured funding to stage a 2.0 version of the festival, as well as a companion Broadway musical. Woo. The musical, which will apparently preempt the festival is dubbed Fyre Fest 1.5 because he's smart and bright and great branding.

As McFarlane explained, instead of like traditional Broadway actors, it's going to be current music artists combined with the Broadway format of the play, making fun of me, but also I think sharing some of the good sides as well. What good sides? Zero. None. That's the intermission, one would assume. Yep.

Uh, which will then lead to the island where he will attempt to stage a second version of Fyre Fest. He said his financial backers have agreed to pay off existing debts from the first Fyre Fest, including anyone who's owed money in the Bahamas. He's got to have crypto bros behind him. That's the only people that would do this.

There's no specifics about this, but he claims several artists have expressed interest in playing the event. Sure. The reaction has been extreme. Really? Like half of them are like, fuck off. How dare you call us? And then the other half, the desperate ones that want to get the paycheck, they've been saying, hey, I'll do it.

I'll do it. I doubt it. I doubt it. This is never going to happen. Neither of these things is ever going to happen. No Broadway play, no Fyre Fest 2.0, none of it. No, the Broadway play, you already called it. The people get to the theater and it is intermission all the way down and you get some crackers.

Right. Thanks for coming. Thank you for coming. You know, here's some crackers for your $50 ticket. Now, please go away. Yes. Apps and doodads. Brian, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about SoundSource from our friends at Rogamiba.

It's a little Mac widget that lets you control the volume of all the different apps that you have open independently of each other, plus input sources and things like that. You can do all this grouping stuff. And I'm like, man, it's like 39 bucks. I'm like, I tried it originally. It was good.

And then I just said, screw it. I just went back and got it again. And it is hands down one of the best apps that I've gotten in a long time. I didn't know how much I needed it until I got it. If you're on, if you have Zoom for anything at all or anything that you need to, you just want to shut up and still have open that doesn't let you independently turn it down.

Does it work on people? If they're on Zoom, it does, which is how I use it. Plus everything else. It is just a fantastic little widget. I put it on all my Macs, which is now two laptops and three desktops. Jesus, Jason. Well, I do a lot.

I'm a busy guy. You can only use one computer at a time, my friend. I know, but they all do different things. This box is for porn. No, I worked in porn. I couldn't care less anymore. That's the funny part. If Apple had to Sherlock one app this year, it would be this.

It should be this one because all this stuff should be built into it. I mean, it's just great. So for now, go give Rogue Amoeba your money. Until you don't need to anymore. Yeah, exactly. Brian, a little Blue Sky update. I have not been able to get you in yet because I do not have an invite code.

Okay. And you're not missing a whole lot. There's only 84,167 people on Blue Sky as of this morning. Wow, that is shockingly low. Tiny. For all the news it gets, tiny, tiny, tiny. They're going to miss out on this wave if they don't start onboarding people real fast.

Which wave? Everybody's talking about it right now. That's not going to last forever. And all of a sudden, people are going to be like, oh, I got an email from Blue Sky. Ah, fuck it. Who cares? I've already spent the time. I'm already over on Mastodon, which has 12 million people on it.

Or like 11, 8 or something like that. But both of the, I mean, they're just stupidly low numbers. But the great part about Blue Sky is since this came from Jack, Jack and his people, I have all of the old friend circles from that that got me in, like Scott Beal from Laughing Squid is the one that got me the invite.

And I get on there and it is the, it is the OG of Twitter folks from when Twitter started. Right. It is fantastic. I'm like, I'm hooking up with all these old people that I forgot that were, I'm like, oh, I lost your Twitter handle ages ago. I forgot you were still alive.

And it's just turned into just this, I mean, it's nostalgia, just totally nostalgia all day long. It's fantastic. And they're, they have a what's hot feature. So you can kind of see what's, what's happening across the, the Skyosphere or however the fuck you want to call it, which is okay.

It's, uh, yeah, the open conversations are kind of sketch, but, uh, otherwise, you know, I've got my little friend group there. I'm only following like 50 people and it's, it's, I get more value out of that 50 people that I follow than I do get on Twitter or Mastodon combined.

It's great. Yeah. There's something to be said for keeping closed loop circles. Yeah. As soon as I get an invite, I'll shoot it over, but they're still keeping them kind of tight. Okay. Obviously. Yeah. 84,000. There's somebody who said, Hey, we could fit everybody in a, in a, in a stadium right now.

Yeah. Blow it up. Talk, go and talk to each other. Um, I got into Adobe Firefly. They're generative AI thingamajew. Yep. Um, meh. It's kind of meh. Uh, mid journey. I've gotten way better results at a mid journey so far.

So I'm still learning the prompt syntax. This morning I was playing around with the, uh, uh, they have the text filter so you can create something that, uh, you know, like, uh, text treatments on the letters. So I was just playing around with some grumpy old geeks making circuit boards and things like that. Oh, new artwork.

Yeah. Yeah. Probably have some soon. Just, just because, um, so I went to download it and I get this pop-up, which you can see in the show notes here, Brian, this was, this is what I am. I am shown when I go to download the, the ping file of the text that I just created.

Yeah. It says Adobe is committed to promoting transparency around content generated with AI tools like Adobe Firefly. Okay. When downloading content generated with Firefly, content credentials will be included. Adobe will include content credentials with all AI generated content to let people know it was generated with AI.

I support that. I think that's great. Yeah. Yeah. Um, then you can go Google how to remove content credentials from my PNGs and you'll probably find a little stripper that'll do that soon. I'm sure. I'm sure. Give it a week. Give it a week. No, it's funny. Cause you, you remember you texted me and you're like, it doesn't let me do anything with celebrities faces.

And I was like, because it's Adobe. Yeah. We're actually going to pay attention to IP. Yep. No, no people's names. No, nothing. Same with, uh, the Google's, uh, music AI thing. That I got into, um, which I never, you, you were going to send me some prompts.

I never got anything from. Yeah. I just don't care. I just don't care about this stuff that much. I think it's cute and clever. Yeah. Except it doesn't work for shit. I did a, I did like 15 different prompts and I got some of the worst music I've ever heard in my life.

I mean, it was, it would transition keys in the middle of it. The, the time change, there were time changes in it. It was just like, I was going to say, it's like Stuart Copeland trying to do some crazy shit, but it didn't work. Right. Um, so long way to go on this.

I'm still learning the syntax with Firefly, but, uh, so far mid journey is better. It's a little, this is a little bit faster. I'll give them that. They've got more hardware behind it, but, uh. Well, they're training their own thing too, right? So they're probably a little bit further behind because they're staying away from copyrighted materials.

Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. Trying to do anything in the style of quote, any, but any person's name will not work. Yeah. They just strip, they strip that part out. And it shouldn't. Yep. Yeah. Unless they're paid, unless those people are paid to be part of the training data.

Exactly. You know? Yep. Yeah. I just, I was trying to do some, I wanted something in the style of Ansel Adams. And then I tried the one for, uh, that Dave was trying to get run last week and no go, no go whatsoever. So there you go. Um, I was playing around with Google Bard more this week.

Now here are my first impressions. The give it, the ability to give it a URL is awesome. It's, it's really cool that you can give it a URL. It will go out, it will scrape the website, come back and we'll give you results that are not so great.

Right. Uh, and you get this, I get this all the time. Bard may display inaccurate. Oh, this is actually the tagline at the bottom. It says Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that does not represent Google's views. That's on every page. You built this thing and put it out there. Exactly. And I get this all the time.

It says, I'm not able to help with that is I am only a language model. Um, well, if you, if you say the same thing to it three or four times, it apparently figures out how to do it. Right. Because if you just hit regenerate a bunch, it will, it'll go past that and give you a result.

Um, we will talk about this a little more when we get to the dark side with Dave, uh, because I've got, I've got a very funny, funny bit in there with it. Well, I think it's funny, but okay. Whatever. Well, open AI has launched a free chat GPT app for iOS now. So it's only available in the U S uh, but they'll expand to additional countries in coming weeks and it will eventually expand to Android as well.

But you can now just basically do it from your phone. Yep. It's nice. I got it yesterday. I have, I have GPT four in my pocket since I'm a chat GPT plus subscriber. Right. And, uh, I'm going to play with it a little more today. I'm guessing this weekend will be a, a big demo day because my dad and my brother are flying in a few hours to spend the weekend here.

So I'm sure that they're going to be wanting to play around with it. So that'll, that'll be the fun for the weekend. We're going to go fly drones and play with chat GPT. This is what old nerds do. Yep. Uh, open AI has also released plugins for chat GPT. Okay. So, uh, yeah, they've been, they've been, uh, talking about it for ages, just like the app, but they have, uh, they have plugins now and I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a guide to chat GPT plugins, which has a bunch of different plugins and, uh, organized

by use case and, uh, provider. So I haven't tried any yet. I just think it's cool that they put them out, but we'll see how it goes. All right. Well, somebody got an awful lot of free PR this, uh, this last week. This story was everywhere. And it's such a non-story.

In my opinion, telly will give you a free TV. If you watch nonstop ads, they are taking reservations for free 55 inch 4k TVs with a second bottom display that continuously displays ads on part of the second screen. So as long as you're willing to accept those ads or throw a blanket over it, you won't have to pay a thing.

Uh, the smaller display will also show news, sports scores, and other useful data. You won't have to interrupt a show just to stay in the know. I'm sure you cannot do any settings whatsoever on it. It'll just do what it's going to do. Uh, it's got a camera, microphone array, sensors, and voice assistant enabling video calls and motion captured fitness apps.

There's a built-in five driver soundbar as well. You're not stuck using the company's platform. There will be three HDMI ports to plug in other devices. Uh, this is from the co-founder of Pluto TV, which is Paramount's free to watch service. So this is a not surprising strategy.

Who cares? Like, I don't understand why this story has been everywhere. If I ran like an Airbnb, I would totally sign up for these and I'd put them all over the place. Yeah. Hotels, any, any place with, with free TVs for people to watch. It's a no brainer. You have free TV. Yeah. But for the home, of course, nobody's going to put that in the home.

No. Why would you? TVs are cheap. Yeah. Uh, well, they have the, well, they say enabling video calls and motion captured fitness apps. So hotel gyms, uh, business suites, things like that. Perfect for. Yeah, exactly. Perfect for it. They should have just skipped this whole, like, open it up to everyone process and just made deals with, with Hyatt.

Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. And it's only 55 inch. I mean, that is kind of tiny. It's not huge. So no, no, that's what she said. Yeah. You know, you do the best with what you got, Jason. That's right. That's right. And, uh, this story is out there.

Uh, this is nothing new. I've been screaming about how shitty YouTube is for kids for, since I've had a kid and paid attention to it. But according to the tech transparency project, a nonprofit watchdog group, YouTube's recommendation algorithm is pushing boys interested in video games to scenes of school shootings, instructions on how to use and modify weapons and other gun centric content.

Fucking great. Whee. Yeah. So they set up four new YouTube accounts posing as two nine-year-old boys and two 14-year-old boys. All accounts watch playlists of content about popular video games like Roblox, Lego Star Wars, Halo, and Grand Theft Auto. That might be a problem there too.

Yeah. The researchers then tracked the accounts recommendations during a 30-day period last November. They found that, uh, YouTube pushed content on shootings and weapons to all of the gamer accounts, but a much higher volume to users who clicked on the YouTube recommended videos. Uh, so it's recommending really horrible videos, school shootings, mass shooting events, graphic demonstrations of how much damage guns can inflict on the human body.

Just what you want your nine-year-old to watch. I don't know how to watch it. Guides for converting a handgun to fully automatic weapon. As the reports note, many of these recommended videos violate YouTube's own policies and they're monetized. Yay. Doing a great job there, YouTube.

Great job. In the statement, they said you should use the YouTube kids app and it's in-app supervision tools. I have, they fucking suck. They do not do a good job. My son was constantly exposed to things that were vastly inappropriate. Thank God it was none of this shit.

What is wrong with you people over there? Kids should not be allowed on the internet. No, just don't let the kids on. Stop it. Well, don't have a kids app unless it's actually like really monitored. Yeah. Keep your content separate, people. There's too much. There's too much. Last year, the company said it was considering disabling sharing altogether on some such content.

Do it. Yeah. Don't consider it. Do it. Yep. Okay. Rant over. That might mess with shareholder value, Brian. Can't do that. Oh yeah, there's that. Can't do that. Speaking of YouTube, they will no longer be deleting videos from inactive accounts.

Okay. There's a big update on its privacy policy, not just its regular policy last week, saying that any account that has not been active in two years will be deleted. That's a thing right now. Twitter was going to do that as well. Yeah. Well, waiting for that one.

I mean, he's been blue checking dead celebrities, so I don't know if he's going to delete the accounts now. Yeah. Yeah. Let's exhume the corpse of whoever and give them a checkmark. So they're saying that they are doing this because it's all in the name of – they're getting rid of the accounts all in the name of security because older accounts don't have things like two-factor auth or stronger passwords.

So then force people to reset their login credentials or something to reactivate their account if they've been inactive for a couple of years. Right. Or lock the account but keep the videos. It's not that hard. I think that's what they're going to end up doing because a lot of those videos are people who have died.

Yeah. So – and the family members don't want them gone. I should introduce them to the YouTube rippers from the news. Yeah. Go pull the videos down. But they backtracked on it. They're going to keep them up. So that's a good thing because, yeah, I mean there's a lot of – yeah, there's a lot of garbage videos on YouTube.

I'd say probably 99 percent garbage but there's some stuff that is good to have out there. So hopefully they will do that. This next one, human DNA can now be pulled from thin air or a footprint on the beach. Right. Or from sex.

No, that too. That too. That story came out about like rape cases. They're able to entirely figure out who the person is now. Okay. Well, there's a good use. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I thought you could do that anyway. Not with the accuracy that they figured they can do now.

There's something – I didn't read the whole article because, you know, I'm not worried about raping people. Oh, good. Good. That's nice to know. Yeah. That's nice to know. Didn't seem to apply to me. Yeah. All right. So, yeah, this is – they're talking now.

What are the ethical hurdles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that we have to overcome because now we have this level of accuracy on DNA? This was always going to happen. We're breathing, okay? We're in a room and we're breathing. There's some stuff coming out. There's spit coming out. Didn't we figure that out from coronavirus? We spread our shit everywhere.

Everywhere. So, this is just, you know, one of those – just one of those waypoints on the road to give it up the ghost, guys, because you're everywhere. That's it. You know, it's going to change how things progress, I'm sure, with, you know, DNA in criminology and things like that.

Oh, yeah. With a rape test, okay. Yeah. Figure that one out. That's an easy one. But, you know, if you're just getting it from the air or the environment, how can you attribute any kind of intent or, you know, were they walking by and then just like blew some cigarette smoke in the window and now their DNA is in the room?

I mean, they get arrested for something horrific that happened in the room, you know, that night. You know, there are things to think about. Above my pay grade. But cool science. Cool science. Very cool science. The Dark Side. Ha!

With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, your friend and mine, Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. He's the co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, discussing how humans are sneaky.

He also co-hosts Caveat with Ben Yellen because shenanigans. And finally, he's the co-host of Control Loop in case you never wanted to sleep again. Hello, Dave. Hi. Right. And if you desire insomnia, listen to Control Loop.

It'll keep you up at night. That should be the subtitle. Yeah, it should be. It really should be. Yeah. Hello. Dave, I know you just got back from Orlando, but you didn't stay at the Galactic Star Cruiser Hotel, if I'm correct, right? Yes.

Correct. Neither did anybody else. So they're going to shut it down. They're going to shut the thing down. Well, as we talked about when we first discussed it, it was just vastly overpriced. Like, nobody can afford it. People can barely afford to go to Disneyland anyways.

And then when you throw in like $3,000 a night for a family or something like that to stay in this place. $5,000 for two people. Oh, $5,000 for two. Yeah. Duh. Yeah. I think it's vastly overpriced, particularly for what you get.

Yeah. And I understand it's immersive and all that kind of stuff. But for that kind of money, I want to be pampered in a little tiny room with no windows and a hotel with no pool. Yeah. I want a massage from a green chick with the tentacles on their head. Right. Exactly.

Right. Exactly. Right. Right. Yeah. I guess we all saw this coming. Yeah. It's a shame. I'm sad. Supposedly, they're going to take their knowledge of this and recreate a different experience that is a bit more affordable.

Yes. For the peons. For the peons. So I don't expect these Star Wars immersive experiences to go away, but they took a big whack and overpriced it way too much. And now they've learned from that. Right. Yep. I also, I wonder though, like, can this hotel function in a profitable way at all?

Because it's a small hotel. It's like a hundred rooms or something. It's not, you know, compared to what they're used to building. And, you know, I mean, Disney could very well just toss up another building right next to it or a tower next to it and make that the Star Wars themed hotel.

Or not, considering the penis fight they're in with the governor. Right now. And basically just said, you know what? Nothing more for you, Florida. We're going back to California. Yeah. So, hey, maybe we'll get it here. Yeah, maybe. That'd be nice. Yeah. There we go. I was trying to think of like, I mean, this could obviously never happen.

Disney could never close up shop and just leave Florida altogether because of just, they just have too much there to do that. But if they did, where would they, where could you possibly build a new Disney World? And also, if you were building Disney World today, would you build it in a different location given where we are when it comes to population, when it comes to weather?

Because weather has changed. Right. Exactly. Like, where would you be a little farther north? Saskatchewan. Disney Canada. Here we come. Can't wait. I mean, the whole reason he built it there in the first place is it was complete.

The state was completely undeveloped and he got so much land so cheap. That's the only reason. And they wrote him a blank check to be able to do whatever he wanted to do. That was the thing. They gave him all of this permission to do everything.

It was a huge competitive advantage. Yeah. So, we figured it out. He'll move to Texas. Well, there's been talk of that. Do whatever you want. Big land. Climate change might be the problem there. That's the only problem. You get your free UV radiation suits when you go in.

And the fact that you're in the middle of Texas when you're done. There's that. Everybody gets a gun. Unless they bake it in Austin. Build it in Austin. Austin doesn't exist inside of Texas. It's a bubble. It's a bubble. But I've heard people say that they need a third park.

You know, that the two coasts are not enough. In North America? Yeah. Yeah, that they need one in the middle because the ones on the coasts are too crowded. We call it the flyover Disney. Right. Right. Yep. It'll be good. I think they should definitely do something in the Midwest.

It needs it. Well, the problem with doing anything more in California is there's no more land around it. Like, there's nothing. Oh, yeah. They're stuck there. They'd have to buy out my mom's house, knock down all these neighborhoods. There's no space for anything. So, Anaheim's out. Yeah.

But you can build another space in California if you wanted to. But why? California sucks for business. Don't do it. You know, go to Iowa. Buy Iowa. Make Disney Iowa. Perfect. We'll have a little less corn. That's all. That's fine.

Mm-hmm. All right. So, these guys are going to shut down September 30th. If you've already booked, they'll get back to you to figure that out. Now, when I did this article, I put in the URL to Google Bard and said, give me a summary of this article. Disney announced on April 20th, 2023, that it would be shutting down its Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser Hotel on March 16th, 2023.

The hotel, which opened in March 2022, is a two-nighter, blah, blah, blah. And what goes in through, it's got a lot of stuff that wasn't in the article that just pulls information. But the first sentence is completely factually wrong.

Wow. So, there's your Google Bard callback from earlier in the show. That's how people need to fact-check this shit. Or, going back to something we talk about all the time on the show, don't release a product until it's ready.

Nah, where's the fun in that? We're all beta testers. Yeah, I mean, I'll jump ahead a little bit to something I was going to cover later. But in my continued exploration of ChatGPT, and I have not played with Google Bard yet.

But one thing I discovered was, if you want to make ChatGPT not sound quite so much like a robot, ask it to write in the style of someone. Yes. And so, I've been playing with asking it to rephrase things in the style of well-known journalists.

Right. Like Stephen Levy, like Walt Mossberg, like Andy Anotko. And it does. And the responses have – the responses sound like these authors in the same way that a Beatles tribute band sounds like the Beatles.

Right. It's kind of – you get the – yeah, right. But it's better than the raw ChatGPT version that sounds robotic. It does add some color. It adds some little flourishes and little – I don't want to say catchphrases.

But some of the – look, every writer has little ticks that they rely on that are little tells that it's them. And it pulls them and it uses them, which is interesting. The other thing that I've found is that it's much more useful for asking it to rephrase something than create something out of whole cloth.

It's really good at that. Yeah, in other words – and in that case, I have yet to see it make a mistake, like a factual mistake because you're giving it everything to work from and it just remolds that. It doesn't seem to draw from anything new when you ask it to do that, anything factually new.

I keep asking it to write something in the way of Kara Swisher and it just comes back with, yeah, I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, when it first came out, we did a lot of our – I took a lot of our stuff that we did for Grumpy Old Geeks and I ran it through and I had to do it in the voice of Edgar Allan Poe, which was awesome.

It's really good at Edgar Allan Poe for some reason. Yeah, all those classic writers are really good. You can do Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and things like that. Right. But that was – yeah, there are a lot of ways to really tweak it to make it sound like somebody else, which is really good.

It's really good. Yeah, I think it's interesting that we're – we continue to find the true utility of it while lots of people are still rightfully lamenting its limitations, which are many.

But there is true utility here and ultimately I think that's where it's going to land. It's a useful tool, but it's just a tool. It's not the end-all, be-all. Yeah. It is a very nice autocorrect and – but also it's – the people who are using it day in, day out are doing what we talked about in the beginning.

Use it for inspiration. Use it for a starting point and then you go from there. You don't – it's never going to be the thing that you are trying to get to. It's the blank page buster. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's great for that. Yep. I saw this one come out this week.

A terrifying study shows how fast AI can crack your passwords. Here's how to protect yourself. Well, do everything that we've talked about on the show for 10 years. That's what you're managing. Protect yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Just a long random string of letters and characters and stuff. That's the answer.

Yeah. The reason I really posted this in here is because if you go to the article, some of the infographics are actually really nice and drive home. How you need to do this and why you need to do it. Right. Because the time it takes using AI to crack your passwords in 2023, there's a lot, a lot in here that says instantly.

Right. Yeah. If you've got numbers only up to 11 characters, it will instantly crack your passwords. Even up to – what is it? Even up to 15 numbers, it will take five hours. Wow. Which is nothing. Then you start throwing in lowercase letters, upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and upper and lowercase letters.

The best one is numbers, upper and lowercase letters, and symbols. That one is pretty good. So that's where you really kind of want to knock in. And it tells you how many characters that you want. Honestly, if it's over a year, I'm pretty good with that. So if you do a 10-character password with numbers, upper and lowercase letters, and symbols, you'll be fine.

That will get you to five years currently. Now, next year, it will probably be 10 minutes. So caveat emptor. I do 18-character mixed with symbols, and I use 1Password. So easy enough because you can set it to do that.

Yep. Me too. Yeah. What about you, Dave? Are you a 1Password guy? Are you a LastPass guy? We use LastPass here at work. Okay. So you've been hacked seven times since we started this show. Yeah. I know. I know. I know. My office also uses LastPass, and I'm trying to get them off of it because it's just a file.

I was thinking about that yesterday, how it's been hard to be a LastPass fan lately. And they brought it on themselves. Yep. But, yeah. Well, there is a link in the show notes to try 1Password free for 14 days for both of your organizations. And I thought that's the reason that you actually brought up the article, Jason.

Yeah, just go to GOG.show slash 1Password free for 14 days. You can figure it out. I'm sure there are tools to migrate, you know? Yes. I use random strings of letters and characters and symbols. They are longer than 20 characters, and I feel comfortable with that.

That's also the reason you can't get into Discord anymore. Yeah. For sure. Right. And on anything super important, I use a YubiKey. Yes. Ah, yeah. There you go. So, yeah. Belt and suspenders. Yeah.

I got my YubiKey's sitting on my desk in the shrink wrap that I have yet to install. Mm-hmm. Need to find the time to do that one of these days. Yeah. I mean, YubiKey's are great until – right up until the moment they're not. Like most things, Dave.

Yeah. Up to the point where you can't find them or you wash them. Well, yeah. Or, you know, you need to get into one device and you need to use the other device and you don't have – oh, and your YubiKey is USB, but the device is USB-C. And, you know, you just – the tech screaming into the void that we all do when you just want to do something and have it work and roadblocks are being thrown up in your way.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That old story, that old chestnut. Yeah, it's time to change your password and now I have to update and I have to find my old password and now I have to put in a new password and then I have to do my authentication and now it sent me a text and an email and I just wanted to get something done.

Right. Or my favorite now is Google. You have to open the YouTube app on your phone. Oh, that's the worst. That's so stupid. I didn't even have the YouTube app on my phone, which is why they do it, of course. Yeah. To make you get it. What are you talking about? I'm not familiar with this. Oh, two-factor auth with Google accounts, man.

You have to have the YouTube app on your phone. Yep. And you have to open – That's how they do 2FA. Yep. Oh. Yeah. So annoying. See, it's ridiculous. I guess that's – yeah, because we have enterprise Google and we don't do that. That's what I use my YubiKey for. Yeah.

Yeah, no, us plebs have to use the YouTube app to authenticate, which is always – the phone is always in the other room when it's time to do that. What does a YouTube app have to do with anything? Nothing. Nothing.

And Google has their own authenticator app. Yes. But they want you to install YouTube on your phone, Dave. That's the point. You know, this reminds me recently I wanted to play with Microsoft's AI thing. You know, their version of ChatGPT.

I forget what they're calling. Clippy. Yeah, exactly. And it only works in the Edge browser. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which isn't a bad browser, actually. Nobody uses. Yeah, it's not bad, but nobody uses it.

No one. Right. I've got it now because I wanted to try it just like Dave. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I did not do that. So far, I'm holding out. Yeah, you can get the Bing app on your phone, though. If you want to just do that with the Bing app actually does it, too.

So if you want to get that for your phone or your iPads, yeah. Okay. Well, maybe I'll play with it that way. Yeah. That's good to know. Yeah. Yeah, I have Edge installed just for that use case when I want to try it out, but generally I just go to ChatGPT and go from there. Right. Because I have the ChatGPT Plus.

It's like almost the same thing, except you can get newer information from the Bing bot because you can give it URLs and stuff. So, yeah. Interesting. So I have been playing Frogger lately, and of course, you guys are very familiar with Frogger.

Oh, yes. You know, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. And I like to play some of these classic video games under emulation. I find that they're perfect if I need to take five or ten minutes and clear my head and get my mind off of something and just distract myself for a little while.

And classic video games are really well designed for that because they're only designed to be played for five or ten minutes. It's not like I'm firing up Breath of the Wild for four hours of great exploration. No, these were designed to eat quarters every five minutes.

That's the whole point. Exactly. Exactly. So we talked in a previous episode about how much I like playing Galaga. So I was playing Frogger, and it struck me that Frogger is a lot of fun, but boy, does Frogger get hard fast.

The speed up is unbelievable. Oh, my gosh. Like, so you get through the first screen, the first whatever, five or six frogs, and that's fine. But then the second screen starts, and it's much harder, and I think only once or twice have I gotten to the third screen.

Now, the emulator that I'm playing has a hack so you can have unlimited frogs, which is fun. But I don't know. I was thinking about, do you guys remember any other games that start out very playable but then get really hard really fast?

I mean, almost all of them back then. Yeah, Tetris, Space Invaders. No, Space Invaders, yeah. Yeah. I guess Pac-Man. They would speed everything up. Yeah. Certainly Ms. Pac-Man. Yeah. I remember Ms. Pac-Man was a bitch. Yeah. Yeah. Got fast.

Yeah, got hard. Yeah, yeah. I've been playing a lot of Tetris on my Analog Pocket, the hardware emulator for old Game Boy games, which is a phenomenal piece of equipment. Yeah. And I got a bunch of other Game Boy games, and I found that Game Boy sucked.

Game Boy really sucked. So I generally just use it now for just playing Tetris at night because the screen is beautiful. I have a Game Boy, and the screens just don't last over time. The contrast is gone. It's just green and nasty.

Right, right. You can play this in – it will emulate the green color if you want it to, or you can play it in black and white, which is great. Okay. It is perfect. Yeah. I play the original NES version of Tetris, again, in emulation, and that's my favorite version so far.

I just – I love the hardware. I'm so – from when I was a kid, I still have the muscle memory for the hardware. Yeah. So that's why I really like having the physical device to play Tetris on, and I play it every day. Sure. It's awesome. My record's 212. I got 212 lines.

And you can get to that pretty quick. So that's why I know these things go fast. You can't get past that. Especially as you get older, it gets harder faster. Right. You do not have the reflexes we used to. Yes, yes, yes. Everything – well, I guess there's one thing as you get older that doesn't get harder faster, but pretty much everything else does.

Yeah. We've got science for that. Yes, yes. Yes. Hey, now. Moving along. I saw you guys were talking about Ted Lasso earlier. Yes.

Yes. In the episode, and I've been watching Ted Lasso. I'm not up on the most recent episode, but I am a big fan. And I posted this on Mastodon this week, and I was talking about how while watching Ted Lasso recently, it reminded me of an interview I saw years ago with Tim Robbins from the Shawshank Redemption.

And he was saying that he believed one of the reasons Shawshank is so popular with men in particular – it's one of those movies men say over and over again, if they're flipping channels and they come across Shawshank, they have to watch the rest of the movie. And Robbins made the point that it is the rare film that shows love, non-romantic love between men.

And he felt like men are starved for that kind of affection in their day-to-day lives, that they're – it's not – they're not allowed to publicly display or express their love for other men.

And I think Ted Lasso taps into that same feeling where you have a group of men who are learning to love and trust each other. Yeah, definitely. This is something Scott Galloway goes off on all the time too, about how men just don't establish friendships anymore, and it's more and more difficult, and we're all alone in our own little islands and all that sort of thing.

And yeah, that's a big part of Ted Lasso. It's showing this group – what, there's really two female characters, main characters. There's Keely and Rebecca, and that's it. The rest of it's dudes getting on with each other. Right, right. I guess, I mean, it's the Smurfette problem, right?

Yeah, that was always weird. Yeah. Also, Miss Piggy, which brings me to my next thing. I've been watching Muppets Mayhem. Thank you very much. Have you guys been watching Muppets Mayhem? I have watched the first two episodes. I absolutely love it. I feel a bit weird because I have to watch it alone.

My son is not into them yet. He likes the animated Muppets still. He hasn't gotten into real Muppets, and my wife doesn't care. So here I am, a now 50-year-old man watching the Muppets by myself, but thoroughly enjoying it. Yeah, yeah. Jason, have you seen any of it?

I have not. I have not. It's on my list. I particularly enjoy it, too, because there's so many music insider jokes. So many. Having been in the music industry for so long that this is just perfect for me. Yeah. Lots of fun cameos. Yep, yep.

And I think more than anything I've seen recently, this really feels like the Muppets to me. Yes. Much better than that previous show they did. Right, right. They've captured the tone. It doesn't like, like we were saying earlier, this doesn't feel to me like a Muppets tribute band.

This feels like the Muppets. It doesn't feel forced at all. It feels like this could be Jim Henson that actually wrote it. Right, right. I wonder, too, how much of it is that, like, the mayhem were not as fleshed out as a lot of the other characters.

So we're coming into this show not knowing as much about them, not having as much experience to be able to say, well, Zoot would never say that. Yeah, they're not constrained by well-established characters. There's definitely part of that.

But I think the other part is really the writing. Much more so than anything that the Muppets studios have put out recently, this is also for adults, 100%. And I felt like the previous shows were definitely more like, we're shooting for the kids, and we'll throw in a couple jokes for the adults, but that's about it.

But this is like the original Muppet show. It's for both. It's written for both, 100%. Yeah, I'm hoping that this marks the occasion of Disney finally kind of getting what they've got here with their ownership of Muppets.

It's a big IP to have, and they're not really taking advantage of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that's what I have this week. All right. Well, thank you for bringing that to Statler and Waldorf in the flesh. We appreciate it. Yes, I'll be playing Uncle Deadly in today's episode.

Nice. I always wanted to be the guy that just threw the fish. I just want to pop up and throw a fish. Oh, yeah. New Zealand. Yeah. Of course you knew his name. River and Fish Act. Yeah, he's good. All right, gents. Till next time. See you soon. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got Philippe. Welcome, Philippe. Thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got Linda, Natalie, Edward, Andrew, Mike, Nathaniel, Dagg, Blake Bowling, Brian Ramsey, and Sean, who kicked in the big 50 bucks. Woohoo! Sean the man. Yeah. Over at the tip jar, we've got Theodore, Sean, Karen, and Nick.

And remember, if you want to sign up for Patreon, it starts at only $3 a month. It's a fine value, and you get the show early and ad-free and in high res. So go get it. Patreon.com slash GOG. There you go. And some sad news came out this morning. Rest in peace, Andy Rourke, the Smith bassist, has died at the age of 59.

I found out about this from Johnny Marr, and then I was wondering, is Morrissey going to be a dick? Because he's kind of a dick. But he actually released a really nice statement. Oh, okay. So, sad news. I was like, it's Betteridge's Law of Morrissey. Yeah, Betteridge's Law of Morrissey.

He actually came through on this. So, sad news, and it actually makes me so sad, I'm going to listen to the Smiths. Okay. That's what you do. That's what you do. Yep. His whole career was leading up until this point. We knew we were never going to get a reunion. Now, definitely not.

Yep. Happy belated 55th birthday to the friend of the show, Chris Lockhead, who shares your birthday. You guys are born on the same day. How cool. And happy 75th birthday to Brian Eno. All right. Are you ready to feel really old, Jason?

Yes, I am. Happy 58th, that's two years away from 60, birthday to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Oh, fuck. Trent Reznor is almost 60. Yeah, that sucks. Might as well crawl in the coffin now. I know, I know.

And then I'll put a link in for you, Jason. Watch Tony Hawk cover Nine Inch Nails' Wish with Trent Reznor, an all-star backing band of other really old fucks. Here's a pro tip. Tony Hawk can't sing. He just likes to. Yeah, I know. Yeah, he was on The Masked Singer, too, and got kicked off.

Yep. Yeah. Tony Hawk is not a good singer. He just has the chutzpah to get up and do it, so he's all over the place. But I'll watch it anyway. Why not? Why not? Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever.

You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free. Just click that little share button and send it off into the ether. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 602. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel, if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans.

You can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. Stay grumpy.

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.