604: Systematic Ambivalence

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. Elizabeth Holmes has reported to prison. Good. Finally. Finally. You know, it's funny. I was talking to my wife about this and my wife is, she's a lawyer. She's a hard ass.

And even she was like, I don't know. There's something about just being a mom. I actually feel bad. I'm like, no, no, no, no. She was horrible. She did horrible things to people's health. She lied. She cheated. She steal.

Put her in jail. Yes. And I feel bad for the kids. Well, she had the kids as a frickin' gambit. Yeah. Yes. Do feel bad for them. No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not worthy of that. Not worthy of that sentiment. Sorry. I agree.

So I told her, lawyer up. Yeah. If your wife cared so much, why wasn't she down there representing her? Not that kind of lawyer. Not that kind of lawyer. Okay. I didn't think so. But hey, you know. Speaking of people having kids and not doing the right thing, I found this article called, The Facebook Generation Wants Some Boundaries.

What's the Facebook generation? See, that's... I feel like it's us. Like, we're the ones that really kind of started on it, grew up. Well, not grew up with it, but grew older with it. We're the ones still on it. So I would posit that it's us.

Let's not say we on that one. So whatever. You're still on it. You're on and off it, like, faster than anything. No, I haven't been on it for ages. I have, like, four years, five years now. But the thing is, no, we were old by the time Facebook even started. So they're talking about the kids who, you know, were born when it was in existence. And it's just talking about stop oversharing with your kids because there are repercussions. And, you know, this guy, girl, Kami Barrett,

she's 24. She's actually been in front of state legislature talking about, we need rules, we need bargain, or we need, you know, we need some guardrails for the parents. That ain't going so well for her. But, and I thought it was kind of sad that she has no relationship with her mother now because of the crap that her mom posted on Facebook.

That's, that's pretty crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm very careful about posting my son online. I do occasionally, but my Facebook and Instagram are totally locked down. Right. And I don't post, I don't post my kid on Twitter. So. Locked down as far as you know.

Well, as far as, as far as they can be locked down. Yes. You know, it's, it's just the one, one numbskull hitting a button and visibility is everywhere. So, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of numbskulls now. So, but I keep it pretty tight. I get it. I totally, totally get it. Like, you shouldn't be doing this with your kids. Save it, do it, do private iClouds for family, that sort of thing. There were tons of apps out for a while. Most of them kind of crapped out, which is

unfortunate, but. Yeah. Yeah. I miss Path. Path was a good one. Was it Path? Yeah. Like the 50 person limit. Then they upped it to 150. There was one called, I used it for a long time with my parents, 23 snaps. But then they started to charge because no business model.

Right. So, yeah. Well, we, so it was, it was great free. You know, I didn't mind sharing lower quality photos or only a certain amount. That was fine. But as soon as they stopped the free level, like, no. Well, you get what you pay for. Yeah.

Anyway, I've got a little bit more anecdotal evidence too on, I talked to one of our friends who has a daughter about the same age as, as your son. And she was playing some video games on her iPad as well. Turned into a raging asshole.

Yep. Just, just like your kid did. So it's like, okay, a little more anecdotal evidence for what we were talking about last week with, you know, all that stuff. So it's screen time for kids. You know, we talked about how the people who, who create this stuff won't let their kids on it. It's like, that should tell you right there. All you need to know.

I'd much rather have my kid watching TV where I can manage it. I can, I see what shows he's watching. I've, I've vetted them. That's so much better because even all the games, like there's ads that pop up all the time. I don't want to be exposed to that kind of stuff. It's crazy. It's insane. And the mood, the mood switch is just instantaneous. Stick with educational stuff. You can, it's got to use the iPad.

And this just isn't for kids too. I generally don't doom scroll, but the other night I was, I had insomnia. I couldn't sleep. And Instagram just hooks you in with the reels. Now just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. And next thing I know, three hours later, three hours later, I look at the clock and it's one in the morning and I'm like, Jesus, I got to get up in four hours. And, you know, finally, you know, turned it off and tried to fall asleep. And for the

two days, I was angry. I was depressed. I just felt like shit. The first day I could chalk it up to lack of sleep. But the second day, no, it was, it was still the same exact feeling and nothing changed in my life. Everything was going fine.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's bad. Like I I'm pretty disciplined. I never got on Tik TOK. Well, I did brief briefly and went, Nope. Yeah. Yeah. Put that down, put that down and uninstall that quickly. Uh, I don't watch reels. So if you post a reel, if you're my friend on Instagram or Facebook and you post a reel, I've never seen it. I only, I do. I won't watch them. I just won't.

Good call. Good call. And the problem now is every, that's all everybody posts. I know. So like my social media usage is basically zero at this point. Yeah. I've, I've completely, you know, pared down, you know, anybody I follow on Instagram now, I know in person. It's just people I know. And so, and now you have to hit that little following tab to even see what they're posting.

And I didn't even know that. Yeah. There's a little following thing. There's a little dropdown. If you look at the logo, the Instagram logo, you click on that, there's a little disclosure and then you can hit following and you can see the people that you follow only. But it's anemic because everybody's posting reels. Right. Yeah. And I won't watch them. I just won't because I know how bad it gets.

Yeah. And now the fragmentation between Mastodon, Blue Sky and Twitter, I just don't even, I, you know, why bother? I don't even know where to go. A little bit later. I just don't, I don't know why. Why?

Yeah. That's the thing. It's like, I think, you know, Elon buying Twitter has turned out to be the best thing for the global psyche because everybody's just like, man, whatever we got. Yeah. We got plenty of stories about that in a minute. So yeah, I just, I just wanted to cover some of that, that stuff because man, I felt, I was angry, depressed, just, it's just a whole, like a shitty human being. And I'm like, if this is the way everybody feels nowadays, no wonder, no wonder you can't go

anywhere. It's like, yeah, yeah. It's just no wonder. We're in doom spirals. Yeah, exactly. And you just don't need to look any further than the fact that the people that made these don't let their kids use them. Yeah. End of story. That's all you need to know. I know. It's bad. It is bad. So I'm just like, I'm happier just getting rid of it. You know, I've tried many times and I come back for work, but now I'm thinking, you know what? There are people

out there who are really good at getting followers. And if I need to do something, I'll call one of my friends and say, Hey, can you post this for me? Instead of me trying to get a following so I can post stuff. It makes no sense. You wouldn't do that in business. You know, I'm not going to go start a TV station because I started a soap company. Yeah. Think about it. But that's what everybody is expected to do now. Yeah. That's the thing. You're a musician. You better be good on social media. It's redonkulous. And just one quick little bit of follow up. I've been getting emails left,

right and center. I know the audio has been kind of crappy the last couple of weeks. I was trying out a new interface and I've decided to finally get rid of it. It's for musicians. It's not for me. It's the Universal Audio Apollo Twin X and it's got too many bells and whistles, all the processing, all the crap that comes with it. Garbage. Yes, I know. Sometimes it's over compressed. Sometimes it sounds like a robot. Yes, I know. Please stop writing me. So today, Brian and I are both on the

same. We're on sound design, mixed pre-sixes. I've got a two, he's got a one, but we're back to the basics. So just leave me the fuck alone, please. I have a bunch of Canadian wood being chopped down behind me. Ah, well, we'll see what we can do on that. Okay. Brian's got wood.

In the news. Well, Brian, we're back to the old chip shortages again. This is a little different this time. Now it's not cars. Now it's AI. Of course, yes. Yep. You know, all the GPUs were sucked up. Good for my Nvidia stock. Yep. This sure as hell is. Sure as hell is. Yeah. All the GPUs got sucked up from

the crypto bros. Now the AI bros have stopped making their own. So they're using it. And to use it, you need all of these crazy ass AI GPUs and the custom chips. And there's just not enough. There's not enough to go around. So hang on to that Nvidia stock.

All right. I will. Just, just a little longer. It's going to peak. It's going to peak at some point. So keep an eye on it. But man, right now, best time. I'm just kicking myself, kicking myself. Well, I've got two stories in a row for my segment. AI is the new eggs.

Yes. Yes, sir. Because the first article over at the Atlantic is a good one. Really fun. AI is an insult now. And it talks about how AI has just kind of become a bud of jokes at this point, because it's just ridiculous. And it's not that good. So pretty funny article. Really enjoyed it. But the second one, AI presents risk of extinction on par with nuclear war.

Yeah. Yeah. We're all going to die now. It's a joke, but we're all going to die. Which is it? Which is it? Like, I'm so tired of AI articles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The thing, the thing about these, you know, I said it last time, stop making it if it's so scary. Well, that's the thing. Everybody that signs these articles about we better industry leaders saying, we better slow down. We're not slowing down.

Yeah. And so at this point, I don't take any of it seriously. This is, you know, the boy who cried GPT. We know that these things aren't going to destroy the world yet. It is not sentient. It is putting a bunch of stuff together with probability. That's all it is. It's taking a dictionary and slamming it together based on things that have happened in the past.

Yep. It's me trying to figure out my wordle letters. Yeah. That's it. Just trying to figure out probability. Hmm. N should go there. I did see one great article about a simulation that I think the Air Force was running. Oh, God. Yes. Yeah. That one was great. So the premise was they were trying to take out, they had the AI try and take out these SAM missile sites, but they were, they had boundaries on it based on what they can and can't do. So the AI decided to take out the human operator that told them

to take out the SAM sites. So they would stop telling them what they can't take out and instead they could just destroy everything. That right there is a plot to a sci-fi novel. Pretty much. Yeah. But I mean, I think Asimov covered it. You got to put those three rules in people. Yeah. Well, when the, when they're, when the, the first thing that they're trying to have it do is kill people. Well, then it kind of. But kill those people, Jason. Exactly.

Which people are we trying to kill today? Yes. Yes. Our kill targets are. Yeah. There's a, there's another great article I read called, I don't, I do not think ethical surveillance can exist. Ruman Chowdhury on accountability in AI, which is a misleading headline because the, the ethical surveillance line is just an, an ad, like a footnote at the end talking about,

was it the capitalist surveillance state? Right. Yeah. But she's a very interesting person and it's a very interesting article. Did you get a chance to read this one? I did. I read through most of it. I, I, I'm kind of on board with her. Yeah. I love it because it's talking about moral outsourcing where we're taking the, we're basically taking the role that we should have as humans and putting it

onto the AI itself. So we can have a, basically a step back saying, no, the AI is the, the racist one. And she said, you. But that's not new. That's. No. That's what tech bros have been doing since day one. Right. Right. I mean, this is. It's the platform. It's the algorithm. It's the AI. It's always. Somebody else's fault. Yes. It's always somebody else's fault. We couldn't possibly do anything about, about it, except you could have. Yeah. I love that. There's, I mean, this comes,

this, some of these quotes come from a five-year-old Ted talk that she did. Said you would never say my racist toaster or my sexist laptop. How do you know what I call my toaster? Exactly. And yet we use saucy in the morning. And yet we use these modifiers in our language about artificial intelligence. And in doing so, we've not taken responsibility for the products we build. Writing ourselves out of the equation produces systematic ambivalence. I love the term systematic ambivalence.

I've been trying to garner that in myself for years. I mean, that should really be the title of our show. We should just go with that. I mean, grumpy old geeks is no more. Welcome to systematic ambivalence with Brian and Jason. Yes. Where we basically say we don't care.

Mm-hmm. Now I dug a little farther into the article too. She says, at its core, what she prescribes is a relatively simple dictum. Listen, communicate, collaborate. And then it got stuck in my head for a second. And I'm like, dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. Stop. Collaborate and listen. Ice is back with a brand new invention. AI grabs ahold of me tightly. I'm just like, oh shit.

I did not have you wrapping Ice Ice Baby on my bingo card. I know. For today's show. Sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry. I blew the curve. But her entire premise is based around Ice Ice Baby. There we go. All right. There you go. And as I'm reading all these articles, I'm thinking, man, Ray Kurzweil must be pissed. But then I'm like, wait a minute, what's he doing now? So I looked him up and he's still around.

He's definitely still around. Yeah. He is? Yeah. He actually works at Google as the director of engineering and a futurist and inventor still. But he did not sign the previous letter on putting the brakes on AI. Well, he's getting up there. He wants to live forever. I think he's thinking AI might help.

He's hedging his bets is what he's doing. Yeah, exactly. That's what he's always done. Yes. With that 800 vitamins he takes a day and shit like that. Yeah. So crazy. I like him, though. His book is phenomenal. So I got it on Audible and it's like 472 hours.

Yes, it is. Yeah. No, I cliff notes, baby. Give me the cliff notes. Yeah. AI is coming. Get used to it. It's called the singularity. Done. Drop mic. Get out. Next. Well, Tesla's in the news again. One guess. Good or bad news?

Bad. Yep. Of course. The German language newspaper Handelsblatt said it received 100 gigabytes of data from several informants showing basically everybody's complaint. Yeah. Everybody. Autopilot doesn't work. Yeah. Because it's not an autopilot.

Nope. It's not. So just tons and tons of complaints about emergency braking, phantom stops from false collision warnings. Everything that we've said, not ready for prime time, rolled out as a beta. Now it's real. I don't know. Whatever. Horrible.

You know what? I've got that big ass Jeep now with the big spare tire on the back. Yeah. I want to get, I need to go get a stop sign and slap it on the back of that tire. Just paint it. Yeah. Yeah. And put a, I need, and then just put a, one of those dash cams pointing out the back so I can just drive down the freeway and see if I catch any fish, you know?

Start in the Whole Foods parking lot. That's, yeah, it really, actually, that's where I need to wear my stop sign t-shirt. Yes. Definitely. So the other funny AI story that was out this week was about the lawyer, which everybody knows about at this point, but Stephen Schwartz of law firm, Lee Devov, Levidal, something?

Levidal, Levidal and Oberman. There you go. Basically, he went to open AI to write a brief. None of the cases actually exist. Yep. Not, not a one. Didn't check it. Didn't look in any, just submitted it. There you go.

Showing again that people are stupid. It's not the AI. Yep. And down in Texas, Judge Brantley Starr said that no more, no more, no portion of any filing that was drafted by generative artificial intelligence is allowed in his courtroom. How do you check? How do you know?

Yeah. Oh, you know, because none of it exists. Yes. No. If you do your due diligence with it, you're fine. If you don't, you're fucked. Yep. And I would like to show you what a future for AI is going to look like. Oh, great.

Monthly crypto exchange volume tumbled in May, hitting 32-month low. So give it a couple of years and we're going to be down to that same story, but with AI usage. Yeah. I'm telling you. It's just the new hotness. It's so annoying.

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Media Candy A lot of shows just ended. Secession. Thoughts?

If I feel like I wasted three years. Misery porn. Yeah. What the hell? Yeah. You know, it was a show about bad people and it ended badly for the bad people. Yeah. And, you know. I'm happy I don't have to think about it ever again.

Ever again. Ever again. No more wrap-ups. No more hurrying to watch it before the recaps hit the internet. Done. No more Kara Swisher podcasting about it. Barry also ended. Same thing. I mean, here's the thing. The Barry ending at least was funny and quirky. I don't feel too bad about it. I'm bummed it's over. But at least it had a

good twist at the end to make it worthwhile. Secession, on the other hand, did not. Well, I wasn't expecting a funny, quirky ending to Secession. No, I was at least expecting something. Yeah, I guess. No, it ended the only way it could. And the same with Ted Lasso. If it's actually ended.

It's got to be done. Nobody seems to know. Yeah. Well, I think Jason Sudeikis is done. Whether they do a spinoff or not, who knows. Just, yeah, they don't need to do a damn thing with it now. It's done. It's served its purpose. Let's all move on. But I think it stuck the landing. I really liked the last episode.

It was great. It ended the only way it could. And it was phenomenal. So, wonderful job. Yeah. And here's a quick thing. We talked about the length of the episodes on Ted Lasso. And I can't find the article that I was reading the other day, but it had a very good point.

Metrics. Yeah. All these shows are getting ruined by stupid suits with their metrics because all they care about now is watch time. So, they're taking these shows and they're dragging them out. Stranger Things.

Yes, as soon as the show is a hit. Yep. As soon as the show is a hit, we're going to increase fewer time. We're going to go from 27 minutes to two hours and 27 minutes per episode because we want people to watch longer, which is a stupid fucking metric. Yes.

You know, it's like, okay, have more people watch less time. Fine, done. But making shows worse just so you can juice the numbers in the short term makes zero sense unless you're just trying to keep your job as a dumb fucking suit who has no creativity in their soul whatsoever.

Just saying. Just saying. That's all. Yep. Personal experience there, Jason. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. Speaking of taking something good that was popular and milking it, I'm hoping. Fingers crossed here. Good Omen Season 2. Yep. Sure.

There was one book, no source material, but okay. I'll give it a go. July 28th. One of the guys is still alive and they had conversation, so I'm going to go with it. I'm going to go with it. Okay. I'll hold out hope. Yeah. I'm telling you, anything to get David Tennant on TV, I'm down with. I just love that guy.

So, there we go. And a smart move here by Paramount+. They put the entire first season of Star Trek Strange New Worlds for free on YouTube so people can catch up and get addicted and subscribe. Perfect. Very smart move. Very smart, because it is the best Star Trek on the air now.

It is so good, people. If you have not watched it yet, it is so good. It is the best Star Trek in years. Yep. It is so good. I hope they got everything in the can for Season 2, because the writer's strike is not going to be stopping anytime soon. Yeah, I think they're done. So, we're going to get a couple shows, but it's not stopping anytime soon, so start hoarding your shows.

And honestly, after the ending of Succession and Barry, I think that these guys do need a little time off to go write some new shit, because, man, it is getting bad out there. It's getting bad. But, you know, like I said, last time, we got Dr. Horrible from the now-canceled Joss Whedon.

So, that was at least something that came out of the last writer's strike that was decent. But, yeah. We'll see how that goes. Stuff that is good if you need something to catch up on. Will Trent just finished its first season, did get picked up for Season 2. It's an ABC show about a detective and a detective and, like, a little group of people that came from kind of an orphanage background.

It's amazingly good. The first episode is fantastic. The next three are kind of weak, but then it really picks up and gets really good. Thirteen episodes, first season. I think that's on Peacock. Peacock is a little disappointed. I'm disappointed that it wasn't a show about Trent Krim and the independents.

Because I always watch that show. Wait for that. I'm sure that'll be valid. Yeah, I'm sure we're going to get it. Yeah. But it's a fantastic little show. I love it. I love it. I can't. It's smart. It's very smart. Except for those two, three, and four, not the greatest episodes. But it moves it along. I finally finished every episode of Guys Grocery Games.

Well, lucky for you, there's 10,000 more coming out tomorrow. No, I hope so. I hope so. I'm done. I mean, it's like, I was sad when I got, when I looped it back around. One complaint, though, that all of the pandemic episodes where they did Guys Grocery Games delivery, where they had the chefs cook in their own homes.

Yeah. None of those are on Discovery+. Shock. It's such a waste, man. It's like, oh, I love those. They might show up there. I'm going to look. I'm going to look. But I don't think they ever released them anywhere streaming because they're not anywhere on BitTorrent.

Can't find them, you know. But supermarket stakeouts back on the air, that's still fun. You know, Alex Gornichelli in a parking lot down the road. I'm bummed because I always missed it. They always film in the area, like lately. I figure.

And they did a couple seasons in Arizona, but like this last one, they're out in Thousand Oaks. And I'm like, damn, that would have been fun. Well, a little bit of news for Dave. Dave, I'll tell him to listen to this segment. We need the listeners.

Tell them to go re-listen. Yeah. The future of baseball broadcasting is becoming clear. It will be the MLB. Valley Sports missed a payment for the San Diego Padres. So that deal is over. MLB steps in.

That's the only place you'll be able to watch soon. Wait, did Elon Musk buy Valley Sports? Is that why they're missing their payments? Maybe. Maybe. Perhaps. Okay. I think they just want it out. It's not profitable enough, so. Okay. Yep. So it's all going to be MLB soon.

All right. Cool. Which is fine by me. Blackouts will go away. So, stupid. Yeah. A couple music-related shows here. Dear Mama is a five-part miniseries about Tupac Shakur on Hulu and FX. Fantastic. We watched the first episode last night.

It is amazing. I mean, they've got everybody in it. It's beautifully shot. There's a lot of footage from when Tupac was a teenager, and it goes back to the history of his mom and the Black Panthers, and it's fascinating. And this kid was, I mean, at 17, he's more eloquent than most 50-year-olds I know.

Oh, yeah. He's one hell of a talent. Yeah. No doubt about it. Incredible. Incredible. And it's amazing. My friend's documentary finally got picked up. Paramount Plus snaps up the Milli Vanilli feature doc. All right. So they've been working on this thing for 20 years, I think.

And it's finally, finally got made, and it is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it's going to be up on Paramount Plus soon. So congratulations to Fab and Kim. That is so cool. So cool. A couple of good podcast episodes this week to get you through the writer's strike, because it's going to start stockpiling these, because it's going to start hitting soon.

And I heard they had to stop filming for, oh, Billions and The Old Man Season 2. So I'm sad about those two. But here we go. Derek Sivers was on Tim Ferriss' show. All right. I stopped listening to Tim's show because the audio is so terrible.

But this is a decent one because they did it at Derek's place in New Zealand. Derek is one of those great thinkers who I just adore. I've read all his books. I just read everything he's done. I really like his brain. Are you a Derek Sivers fan? No, hit or miss.

Okay. So every now and then I dip in. Yeah, I like him. I just like him. I think he's got a great mind. And Cal Newport, who I had a love-hate relationship with recently, had a decent episode about thinking as well on episode 250 called In Defense of Thinking.

The first three quarters is really good. You can skip the last bit. But there's some really good stuff. There was a really good link to a clip on John von Neumann, which was really good. Also, great episode and highly recommended. All right. I've been reading his newsletter.

Not bad. The newsletter is just kind of a link to his other New Yorker posts or wherever he's doing his real articles. Yeah, it's decent stuff. Wayne wrote in, said, listening to this week's show about AI, this is one of my more favorite podcasts, but this episode hit about that same thread.

I think you would both enjoy it, but also see where again you are a bit ahead of the curve. Yes, we are. This is from a show called Under Understood called Big Ideas Lost to Many Rooms, and it's about the writer's strike. Right. I listened to about 20% of the episode.

I'm going to go back and listen to it and subscribe to the show. It sounds like a really good show. People are pretty smart, and I just kind of like the cut of their jib. All right. Jib jab. Jib jab. Oh, I remember them. They were so good. They used to be down the street in Venice. No way.

Yeah. Oh, man. They were the best. I was a paying subscriber to them forever. One of the few, which is why they're not around anymore. Yeah. Those things were great because they were, if nobody remembers. Cutting edge for the time. Yeah. Early AI and deep fakes.

Yeah. If you're too old or too young to remember jib jab, basically you'd upload photos of you and your friends' faces, and then they would put them into flash animations and make greeting cards and little videos that you could send to people for their birthdays or special occasions, and they were phenomenal.

They were very clever and funny. Yeah. Yeah. Great music, great animation, great – just everything about them. It was like 20, 30 bucks a year saved me so much on gift cards or like actual greeting cards. Miss those guys. Finally, I've got a video here called A Stunning Scale Model Illustrating the History.

of Time. Did you get a chance to watch this? I did. Oh, my God. It was so good. Makes you feel very small. Very teeny tiny. I mean, you see the videos where they discuss the size of the universe where you just – Yeah, I do a lot of those with my kid because he loves that stuff right now.

Yeah, this is the first one I've seen where they actually try and visualize time, and it's really good. I mean, they did a really good job of it. So, yeah, if you really want to feel small on this fine Friday, go watch it.

And, you know, I'm glad I'm not drinking anymore is all I got to say. Caps and doodads. Blue sky. Woo-hoo. The Jack Dorsey Twitter clone, basically, which is a little bit decentralized.

They're going to let you choose your own algorithm. Oh, great. Just what the word means. You'll be able to write your own algorithms. So, I'll write one that just does simple chronological of people I follow. Yeah.

Because that's all I want. That's all anybody wants. Anywhere. That's it. That's the only thing people want, people. That's it. Well, no, the people who make it want the algorithms, I guess. Yeah. The algorithm makers want algorithms.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's his bright idea over there. Yeah. Which is, again, I don't know why I'm there. I really don't. You're ahead of the curve, Brian. You're an early adopter. You're an early adopter. Great. I'm an early ignorer.

Yeah. There's nothing on there except for John Scalzi. Skip the algorithm. Go read a book. There's just about 100,000 people in the entire world that's on there now. Yeah. It's useless. I did play with a little bit of the feeds, though. And they're cute, but there's nothing that you could – the feeds are nothing.

That you couldn't do with a hashtag. Right. That's it. If you had hashtags, that's it. That's all you need. That's the big innovation coming out of Jack's head. Yeah. Coming out of his beard. Let's be honest. And you were totally right about John Scalzi. Oh, my God. Today's Blue Sky is my 900th post.

I like being here. Thanks for being here with me, folks. You're the reason I like it. Go back and write a fucking book, John. I don't even call it Blue Sky. When I launched it, I call it Scalzi. Yeah. Because that's all I see. I got to unfollow him. First followed, first unfollowed. Yeah.

Yeah. He is definitely the Kevin Smith of Blue Sky. My God. He just – he's on it all day. Yeah. I did listen to a Kevin Smith podcast this week too. He was on Burt Kreiser's show. And, you know, Kevin was one of the OG podcasters.

He started way, way early. And he had the same feelings that I did about seeing all of these comedians, you know, get ungodly rich on podcasting. Because he went to Burt Kreiser's second house, which is just the podcast house that podcasting bought, where he does his shows from.

And Kevin's just like, is this building tall enough for me to jump off and kill myself? I know. Poor Kevin Smith. I know. But he's doing okay. He's doing okay. Yeah, he's fine. Yeah. He lives in Ben Affleck's old house. So I think he'll – I think he's doing fine.

Who's not doing fine is Elon Musk and Twitter again because now the valuation is still down again and again. It depends on what you think he's using it for. He's not using it to make money. He's using it to be the biggest troll in the world. Okay. Yeah.

It's all about publicity for him. That's it. Yeah. So he doesn't care. Obviously. He doesn't care about Twitter. If he cared, yeah. Yeah. If he cared, he wouldn't be there. Yeah. So it's no big deal for him. He doesn't care. Amazon is ditching its celebrity voices for Alexa and will issue refunds upon request.

I don't even know if anybody remembers they offered these. Yeah. But at one point, I think for 99 cents, I bought Samuel Jackson. Never used it. So I'll try to get a refund. We'll see. It's so lame that they're saying issue refunds upon request.

It's like, just give everybody their money back. Why? Nickel and diming everybody. It's just ridiculous. Exactly. That's the Amazon way. But you're going to spend more on customer service. The salaries for the customer service people. AI, Jason. Oh, that's right. They don't do it. They don't have people there anymore.

What am I thinking? Exactly. Samuel Jackson AI will be handling that. So who knows? They're shutting it down because they're basically going to stop all the Echo stuff, I think, eventually. So they're going to come out with their own LLM and that'll be that.

It's so sad, man. Alexa was like the thing. It's great. Screw the pooch. I still use it all the time. Yeah. It's sad. It really is sad. I don't want to see it go. I want to see them pump money into it because it's great. Yeah. Well, I got a little hat tip to Frag over on Discord.

He posted a link to a prop replica for the Grail Diary from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Right. Now, my first, of course, reaction was this is the coolest thing ever because they wrote it.

They made the replica from the original. So they had the original. And I've always been a fan of that damn book. I always wanted to see what was in that book. Ever since I started playing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on the PC when I was a kid.

Right. It was one of my few. I had the box. It came with, you know, a lot of little, you know, really crappily printed relics that you could play with and stuff like that. And I'm like, I always wanted one of these. Damn it. And I'm like, I'm not going to go down that. Whatever. I don't need any more junk in my life.

So I just started looking at the games. I'm like, oh, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. You can play it on Steam. So, but it won't play on a Mac. So I'm like, okay. And then I was looking at the stream deck or Steam deck because my friend got one. He was like, oh, these things are so cool. But it's like 650 bucks for basically a nice PC in your hand.

Didn't get one, said no, no, no, no, no, no. And then it just reminded me. I'm like, oh, I own Darklands, which is an old, another old PC game, which they did port to the Mac, which I never finished playing because I need a lot of alcohol and friends to play with for that. And I don't have, I don't have either of those anymore.

So I can't play Darklands. Okay. Then I'm thinking, oh, what was the first game I ever bought for my PC? And it was a game called Zill in 19, or yeah, 1984. It was a great DOS game, but it was reliant upon the old function keyboard layout, which was two rows of F keys to the left of the keyboard.

Right. Oh, this is why you guys went nuts on Discord. Yeah. Like 7,000 posts in a day. Exactly. Because when games first came out, they were reliant on that layout. Like on Zill, like all of the directions were north, south, east, west and everything. And on screen, it aligned with that keyboard.

So when you got the new keyboard with the function keys across the top, you couldn't play anymore. Same with Flight Simulator 1.0 because like the flaps and the throttle were keyed to those and made no sense across the top. Anyway, I found that I could play Zill again through this app called DOSBox.

Okay. Which is really cool. You can download a DOS emulator to basically any platform, or you can even play it in browser. You can run DOS games in the browser. Nice. I thought that was so cool. And so I just went down that rabbit hole, and then I ended up buying the fucking book anyway.

Of course you did. It showed up yesterday. Did you see the photo I posted on Discord? I did, yeah. When you open it up, it is wrapped exactly like Indy got it at the college. It's perfect. I haven't even unwrapped it yet.

The detail was impressive. What? It was very impressive. Yeah. The detail, yeah. I haven't unwrapped it yet because it's like – I'm like looking at it. I'm like, oh. I just kind of want to leave it as is. But someday – I need a hot German blonde to come and try to take it away from me. Yeah, seriously.

Seriously. So this week, this coming week, the new Apple hotness is coming. Uh-huh. Now, I want to know – we're talking about AR all the time. How come nobody has any pirate-themed advertising around this?

Because AR is basically – Arr. You know? Come on. You're missing a prime marketing opportunity here, people. They are. We'll see. The trailer video is unimpressive. I didn't watch it. I don't like spoilers. Don't. Don't. I'm not going to waste my time with that.

Wait for them to unveil the real deal. So, yeah. Yeah. June 5th, 10 a.m. I've got it on my calendar. I'm ready to go. I blocked it off. I'm actually going to watch it this time. Well, you know, I look at this one. It's a new category of hardware coming from Apple.

I'd like to see it in real time, you know? That's true. That's true. You know, I saw that. It's going to be very expensive. Yeah, very expensive. Well, we think it's going to be very expensive. We think it's going to be $3,000. We think it's going to have two 4K TVs glued to your eyeballs. But we'll see.

We don't know. Yeah. Could just be new earbuds. Yeah. That could be it. That could be it. Was Palmer Lucky got a preview of it and said it was, you know, pretty incredible. So we'll see. Yeah, well, he's got a great track record. Yeah. Speaking of, the MetaQuest 3 is out or has been announced because Zuckerberg is trying to steal a little thunder for his R headset.

Yeah. I don't know. Whatever. My Quest 2 is still sitting on my nightstand uncharged because I have to keep recharging it so then I can update it, try and figure out my login, put it on my head, play it for five minutes, and put it back on the nightstand.

I have yet. Yeah. I've yet to have a compelling reason to get one of these things. Don't. Don't. There's no reason. There's no reason. Yeah. Don't. Seriously. So we'll see how it comes out. There's a bunch of specs for the Quest 3 I was going to go through, but who cares?

Nobody's going to buy it. There you go. At the library. I was looking for something to read that was pretty quick and saw Roadkill by Dennis E. Taylor. The author of the Babaverse series.

I liked it. It's fun. It was okay. It was fun. It was popcorn. It is popcorn. I'm glad that it finally came out in the format that you could consume it in. Yes. An actual book. Yes. It was an Audible original at first.

Yes. It was fine. It was fine. See, the thing is, it probably is better as an Audible original because it had, like, I want to say a full cast recording, but it wasn't a full cast recording. But the guy who reads it, who reads all of the Dennis Taylor books, is so good that I remember it as a full cast recording.

Okay. Yeah. It's fun. So, it was fine. It just made me want more Babaverse. That's all. Well, the thing is, it actually didn't make me want more Babaverse. It made me want more Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because the ship in that story is basically Marvin. That's true.

That is true. It was very funny. That was the best part of the book is the ship's personality. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave.

The podcast with super host Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are crappy. And the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy. And the host of Control Loop because the future is very scary.

Very scary. Yes, it is. Very scary. Yep. Hi, Dave. Yep. Hello. Nice to be back. Very nice to have you. Yeah. As usual. As usual. What's the latest? What's the latest? We've talked about the Adobe podcast enhancer audio tools on the show a couple times.

Yeah. It's in beta. And I think that while it's in beta, they keep tweaking the algorithm because some days it sounds great. Some days it sounds crappy. It has become utterly unusable. I don't know if you guys have tried it lately. Yeah.

You know, well, describe to me what you're experiencing here. I'm getting things that just sound completely robotic in parts. In some parts, the volume will change drastically in the middle of a sentence. And sometimes it will speed up and slow down.

Oh, really? It's really random. Yeah. It's drunk. It's very drunk right now. Beta beware. Yeah. Get what you pay for. Yeah. The old saying about never upgrade during a project. But the joke is you're always in the middle of a project.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And you're going to update. You know, it's funny. I was playing with it earlier this week and literally playing with it because the idea I had – I was chatting with some of my audio editor guys and it struck me that old TV shows that were filmed in front of a studio audience and I was thinking of like the Mary Tyler Moore show, you know, mostly they were boom mic'd.

And the boom mics back then were not as good as they are today. They were not mic'd as close as they are today. Nope. So I decided to take an old episode, like the first episode of Mary Tyler Moore and run it through Adobe's podcast enhancing tool to see if it would sound on mic.

And? And it mostly did but to your point, it was way less consistent than I had previously experienced it being. So I had chalked it up to just it being a funny environment because there's audience laughter and, you know, that sort of thing.

But it sounds like maybe a little bit of what you're describing was thrown into the mix as well. Yeah. It's changing. It is definitely changing. It's evolving, Jason. It is evolving, yes. It is using its AI brain to become craptacular.

Yeah. Soon it will be self-aware. Yes. Then what would we do? Not have to podcast anymore? Yeah, please. It will be interesting when it starts replacing words and replacing sentences, you know. You didn't mean that.

You meant this. No, no. That is not grammatically correct. Let me fix that for you. Mm-hmm. I can see it. We'll get to that. I can see it. Yeah. That'll be the future. That's interesting. I'll keep an eye on that. You know, like we talked about last week, I did notice how it was, they were putting some limits on it with the amount of time you could use it, which makes sense.

But I hadn't heard anywhere else that they were making under-the-hood tweaks. So I'll keep an eye out for that. Yeah. We kept the show to the amount of time where I could actually use it last week. I ran us through it, and it was so bad, I just went back to the old ways. The whole, all the last show, there's no AI in the last show.

I still sounded shitty because I was on that crappy interface, that crappy, very expensive interface that- For music, not for podcasting. Yeah. Well, Dave's on one now. He sounds fine. He just knows how to use it, I guess. I don't know. He put the time in. You mean my universal audio interface?

Yeah, I dumped mine. I'm done with it. Okay. Yeah, because it's over-processed, over-compressed, no matter what I do. Even with no effects on it, it sounds terrible. I cannot get that thing to sound clean. So Brian and I are both back to our sound device, Mixpre 6s, and just nice, clean signal.

It's got a limiter, and it's got a high-pass filter, and that's all I need. Perfect. Run that thing at 80 hertz with the high-pass, no air conditioner noise, no traffic noise, and just a limiter so I don't blow out my, you know, blow out my levels, and that's it.

All right. Well, good. It's all you need. Yep. And I'm on the mic that I think I need to get Brian just to kill some of that damn echo in his room. I'm using the Sennheiser, was it MKH-416? Something like that. Oh, yeah. MK-416. Yeah, it's basically a voiceover mic.

Like a classic. Oh, okay. I thought the 416 was a shotgun mic. It's a shotgun, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of voiceover actors use it, and it's just, it's really nice for clearing out as much noise as you can out of the room. Right. Very nice. All right. Well, let me know before I come to L.A.

I'll pack up the old mic. Yeah. I don't know. I don't think this, after Trump and COVID, I don't think a mic like this is in the GOG budget anymore. That's true. Yeah. The relentless pursuit of perfection. Yeah. I think these things run with the shock mount and the pop filter.

It's about $1,200. Wow. Not in the GOG budget anymore. Yeah. Brian's just going to be echoey forever. That's right. We'll buy him a $20 rug, and that'll be it. Yeah. Well, I was going to talk about Ted Lasso and the ender of Ted Lasso, but related to that, did you guys see the microphones that the announcers use on that show?

Yeah. What is up with those things? Yeah. I did a little dive into them, because I'd never seen anything like that before. And evidently, it's a ribbon mic, and it's designed exactly for that one thing, which is talking in a very loud environment, and it's made so that it's designed to be pressed up against your upper lip, so the distance to the ribbons is precise to only get your voice

and cancel out other things around it. And evidently, in Europe, they've been using them for decades for that kind of sportcasting thing. Here in the US, we go with the headset mics, but over there, that's what they use. But I've been around sports broadcasting for a better part of my career, and I'd never seen anything like that before I saw it on Ted Lasso.

Yeah. I figured that little thing at the top was to hold their mouth in place, so they were right up on top of it. Yeah. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. Things have also changed a little bit, because in US sports, broadcasters tend to be in a booth. Right. In soccer, not so much.

Right, right. Yeah. They're out in public, so. Yeah, that's true. Were they ungodly expensive? Because I'd imagine a ribbon mics, ribbon mics generally are not cheap. I don't know. I don't remember what the pricing on them was. I mean, it's a pretty specialized thing, so I suspect they probably do cost a pretty penny.

And of course, ribbon mics tend to be pretty fragile, too. So, you know, you got to keep a backup. All right. Anyway, speaking of Ted Lasso, I know you guys touched on this earlier in the show, but I wanted to weigh in here that I think I found the final episode to be quite gratifying.

I feel like they stuck the landing. Yes, I agree. There weren't really any parts of it that I felt unsatisfied about. It was really what I hoped it could be, and I felt great about it. Yeah. They put a nice, pretty bow on it.

I could have done without the Cat Stevens, but. Oh, come on. And the Lord of the Rings multi-ending. Heart-wrenching. What are you, dead inside? Come on. Yeah, I am, actually. I was actually thinking about that song and how important it is as a father. And, yeah, it's just heart-wrenching.

Heart-wrenching. It was perfect. Yeah. Yeah. And the other one I wanted to touch on was Mrs. Maisel. Did you guys see that? Working through the last season with my wife right now. Okay. Haven't finished it yet, though. Okay. But I would watch the Abe and Rose show, 100%.

Oh, my gosh. I want that show. Yeah. I don't want Mrs. Maisel anymore. I want her parents. Tony Shalhou. They're the best part. That is such – I mean, his talent is unbelievable. He is so funny and so good. The nuance in his performances are – I just – it's just a pleasure to watch him work.

And he's perfect in that part. Those two are the best part of the show by far. Like, just hilarious every time they're on screen. Right, right. And it seems like this – in the third season – or not the third season. I was thinking Ted Lasso. The final season of Maisel. Yeah. They realized what they have there and have been giving them a lot more screen time.

Yes. Yes, they certainly have been. And it's been glorious. Yeah. Well, I won't – Yeah, I'm working my way through it. So we'll see. I won't have any spoilers, but I thought that was another one where I was quite satisfied that they stuck the landing. Oh, good. I enjoyed it. Yeah. Have you seen it, Jason? I'm still halfway through season three.

So – because I just kind of fell off and I was – now that I knew it was the final season, I was waiting for the verdict to come in. I'm like, I'm not going to go – I'm not going to succession this thing and try and power through it for that kind of ending. So if it's good – if it stuck the landing, I'll dive back in because everything else has ended.

I'm out of shit to watch. I know, right. Yeah. I'm halfway through Muppets Mayhem now, which continues to be good. It is one of the shows that I'm enjoying because it makes me laugh out loud. Yes, definitely. It's very – And there aren't a lot of shows that make me laugh out loud.

Like most shows, something funny will happen and I'll go, oh, that's funny. But Muppets Mayhem makes me laugh out loud. Yeah. My least favorite thing about Muppets Mayhem are the humans. Yes. Yeah. Less humans is always better with Muppets as far as I'm concerned.

Right. Right. Like I see why they kind of need to be in there and I see that there's sort of the framework that they hang everything around. But – But still. The scenes with them, I just want to get through so we can get back to the Muppets being Muppets. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. I saw an interesting story come by. This actually came by today. This was from the Futurism website. And it was about the top Google result for Edward Hopper, if you do an image search, is an AI generated fake.

Great. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Yay. Yay. Progress. Edward Hopper – Edward Hopper is a famous artist. He's a realist artist. And if you do a search on Google for Edward Hopper, you get an image that appears as though it could be one of his works.

Right. But it's not. And – Yeah. What is – That's not good. Here we go. Right? Away we go. Well, there's also been uproar about Van Gogh, Starry Night. Somebody used AI to expand the portrait.

Oh. Great. Awesome. There was also an AI generated Mona Lisa. That's getting a lot of slack. Yeah. So here we are. Great. Well, have you guys – yeah, we've got that with the masters now.

But have you heard about the Paragraphica camera? That basically it uses geolocation. You tell – so you click the button. It says, oh, you're here. And then it will basically generate a photo of where you're at. Instead of taking a photo, it uses AI to generate an image just based on where you're standing.

Oh, wow. That's fun. Yeah. OK. I'd seen something like that a while ago where people were doing that with Google Images and using the mapping to create mosaics of people's photos.

So basically create 360-degree mosaics that – from photos that people had taken on vacation or whatever, you know, so commonly photographed places like the Eiffel Tower, which were as easy to do. They would stitch together thousands of photos and you basically end up with this giant 360-degree view that had practically infinite resolution because it could just stitch together from everything.

And this was probably a decade ago that I saw that. Yeah. I remember that. I also saw there was some uproar online about how people are using smart erase to edit their old photos. Oh. Taking, like, strangers out and how it's, like, ruining our memory, basically.

Wow. So it's a brave new world we're in right now. It's interesting. Yeah. There was something in the early 90s or mid-90s that I remember that I could never – I've been trying to find it. And I didn't really try that hard lately, but what they were doing is they were taking old movies, like old World War II movies, and taking the frames – like, you know, they would just take the frames of a scene, interpolate it to generate a high-resolution image of the scene in the movie, which was kind of cool.

Right. But I saw a demo of it. Like, I mean, this had to be 95, 96, and I have not seen it since. But it was really neat technology, speaking of just crazy shit they're doing with all our old, like, footage and stuff. Right. So taking multiple frames, just pulling little bits of detail from each of them to make one high-res frame.

Yep. Yeah. Just interpolating the whole thing into one giant image. Kind of cool. Cool stuff. It is cool. Some of it's cool. Some of it not so much. But, you know. Yeah. Ask the Edward Hopper estate. I'm sure that they'll say not so much.

Yeah. Yeah. Sharing an interesting, I guess, blog post, you'd call it here. This is from someone named Dana Boyd. I know Dana. Do you? Yep. She's been around forever. Yeah. Partner researcher at Microsoft Research.

Do you know her personally or just know of her online? No, she was back. She was big in the web two days. She always wore silly hats. So we were always at the same conventions and talked to her a couple times. Yeah. Nice. She's literally been around in the scene for a long time. Okay. Well, this is the first time I've come across her stuff, or at least that I'm aware of.

And interesting post here. It's titled De-skilling on the Job. And a couple of points here I thought were worth sharing. She talks about the – obviously, we're talking about artificial intelligence. And she describes a framework of two different camps.

There's camp automation, which is where the AI replaces the things – replaces us for the things that we do. But then there's camp augmentation, which is where it is a helper with the things that we do. And I think that's an interesting framework to think about.

But then the other things that really caught my eye, she talks about this notion of a moral crumple zone, which is basically where – she uses the example of something like autopilot or auto driving in a self-driving car, where the computer handles everything right up until the moment when it can't make a decision.

And then it turns it over to the human. It's a situation that is too complex for most humans to handle. So bad things happen, and the human gets blamed. Yes. Tesla. Exactly. Yeah. We've been talking kind of about this a little bit earlier.

Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, we basically rely on and blame our tech instead of us. Yeah. Right. Mm-hmm. Right. And she points out that – she uses the example of Sully, the famous pilot who landed on the Hudson River, and how he went against the advice and instructions of the air traffic controllers, and had it not gone well,

he would have been blamed for whatever had happened, had it gone badly because he didn't follow their instructions. Yeah. But he was – But he wouldn't have cared because he would have been dead. Well. Perhaps. Could be. Could be. But then she also talks about how skills are developed, how people are being – no longer being trained on the job, that most jobs these days, most organizations these days don't have the kind of on-the-job training that used to be a regular thing of the workforce.

They want everyone to arrive on the job as being a unicorn. And I think particularly in cybersecurity is one of the areas that that's really, I think, causing a lot of trouble. I hear stories about folks coming out of school and not being able to find jobs, and then you hear from these companies saying they can't find anybody to hire.

Well, it's not that – the people aren't there. What I've noticed in my workspace with some of the younger people is there's a distinct lack of drive. I mean, as soon as they hit an obstacle, they don't try to figure it out themselves.

They kick it up. Like, where's the drive? Where's the sort it out? The initiative seems to be gone these days. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing I've noticed is an odd pride in ignorance.

Yes. Oh, my gosh. In other words – I don't know anything about that. Why do I not know about that? Right. And it extends to simple things like pop culture, anything before my time. Yeah. I just – I don't know anything about that. Yeah.

And that's your problem that I don't know anything about that. Yeah. One of my most frustrating things is when people say, well, I don't know how to do that. I'm like, well, figure it the fuck out. Figure it out. We have – You have a device in your pocket that gives you the entire expanse of human knowledge.

Don't tell me you don't know how to do something, especially – I literally had to write somebody Google it the other day instead of asking me. Like, Google it. Figure it out. Solve it. We used to have Let Me Google That For You. Remember that? Yeah. That was a great website. But where do we think this comes from though?

Where – what is – why are we seeing this in this generation in particular? I know, but that's the easy – like, what's the – Horrible school. Every generation blames the one before, right? That's the song lyric, but – I mean, they've been saying for years that schools have been training for tests rather than life.

Yeah, that's true. And by shitty parenting, I don't mean lack of – I mean, like, helicopter parenting, things like that. Like, I'm Gen X, and so are you guys. It's like we were taught – we were kicked out of the house with, you know, two sticks and a piece of gum and said, figure it out.

That was our life. Nowadays, it's like – I'll do that for you. Nobody's growing up anymore. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. That's interesting. I saw – actually, this morning, I saw – Definitely an old man podcast today. Yep. I saw a speaker who was talking about – he's a – he has a contracting business.

They do home renovations and things like that. And he was talking to one of his colleagues who also has that sort of business and works with his son. And they had a job they were going to do on the weekend and the father said to his son, let's go do this job. And the son said, I've got stuff to do.

I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. So the father went and did the job and came back and was complaining to his friend who was the speaker that I saw. And the person who was the speaker asked the father, he said, well, where does your son live? He said, well, he lives with us.

Uh-huh. And who cooks his food? Well, his mom. Uh-huh. And so what's his motivation to work on a Saturday? Right? Like – None. Yeah. Right. Yep. So I don't know.

I guess that's – I guess I'm hesitant to paint all of this with such a broad brush because there are kids out there who are killing it and I run into them and there's – and it's exciting to see them and to talk to them and, you know.

But at the same time, there is this wave of, I don't know, apathy or disinterest. I mean with Gen Xers, we're the apathetic generation, right, famously? Yeah, but we cared about not caring. We're good at it.

We made art from our not caring. We invested into not caring. We wrote songs about it. We made movies. We wrote books. Well, part of our not caring was being self-sufficient and so – you know, because we grew up right on the leading edge when for a good part of our lives we didn't have microwave ovens.

So if we wanted to eat while both of our parents were at work, we had to learn how to cook things without burning the house down. Yep. And kids don't have to do that today. These kids do. But you said you were excited when you see kids like that. It's because they're fucking unicorns. That's why you get excited when you see kids that are killing it and self-sufficient, you know?

Yeah. It's not the norm. It's the exception. Yeah, it does seem to be these days. Right. But are we seeing that through our own filter? In other words, what was our parents' generation saying about us?

Were they saying that we were lazy and that we were – we weren't going to amount to anything because, you know – Yeah, I don't know. We weren't drafted or none of us – there's a million things we didn't do. Well, we were the slacker generation, right? Yeah. That was what we got painted with.

Yeah. But not all of us did. So hopefully it's the same. Yeah. I don't know. And I guess the other thing too is that it's going to be their world. So they'll – If you want it to suck, have at it. Well, but that's kind of my point is that it's easy to say, you know, that it shouldn't be this way.

But they're going to inherit the world that we created. But they're also going to inherit the world that they are making for themselves. And so they'll adapt and I guess they'll find their way. Or they won't. If you want to believe there was no music before Taylor Swift, good luck. I've seen idiocracy.

I know how this story ends. Yeah. Rondo. Yeah. I just – there's something that makes me uncomfortable about this line of complaining and yet I'm not exactly sure what it is.

Because it makes us feel really old, Dave. Yeah. Now we're the old people on the lawn complaining. Right. Yeah. It might just be that. Yeah. We're not wrong.

Right. It's because we can't get anybody to mow our lawn for us anymore. Well, no. They don't want the money. Right. They're too busy taking Instagram reels. Yeah. Until you put your grass on the blockchain, you're screwed. There you go. Yeah. Well, we just – we buy a robot to mow our lawn.

That's what I want. Oh, God. Finally this week, a little bit of personal news to share. I am doing a show this summer. I'm doing some theater. Yeah. There you go. I am doing a show this summer. I'm doing Hello, Dolly.

Awesome. I am playing Horace van der Gelder in my local community theater production of Hello, Dolly. I'm very excited. This is my third time doing Hello, Dolly. I did it once in high school. I did it once back in 1999 where I played Cornelius Hackle.

And so I have aged into playing Horace van der Gelder. For those of you who are not familiar with Hello, Dolly, it is one of the classics of American theater. It's just a fun show. So I'm doing that. I'll have a link to that in the show notes if anybody is in the Baltimore, Washington area and wants to come see a fun show and help a community organization raise some money for some nonprofits.

I will warn you that community theater is, as I describe it, it's the minor league baseball of theater. You used to be able to say the Orioles of theater, but not anymore. That's right. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So it's definitely a little bit of waiting for Guffman in there.

But I'm enjoying playing in the sandbox and I'm really enjoying the process, which I hadn't done in a while. I hadn't done a show in a while. I figured I was done. And my friend who's playing Dolly kind of pulled me out of retirement and said, Hey, I will do this if you do this.

Can we do this? And I said, Yeah, I think I'd like to do that. And I'm really enjoying it. Awesome. That's amazing. Eight hours and 18 minutes door to door. So I'll be seeing you. There you go. I'll save a seat. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got Donovan. Thank you, Donovan, very much. We've got Christopher who wrote in, who's a new subscriber and wrote in, Hi, I finally decided to just automatically donate via Patreon rather than give occasionally via PayPal. Everybody take note. Be like Christopher. I wrote the five-star review from episode 587 and I've been a listener for a couple of years.

Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Christopher, for your PayPal patronage as well as your Patreon patronage. Yes. Thank you. And Manuel wrote us a nice note. Hi, guys. I've just been let go as part of AWS Cuts. I'm scaling down on most of my Patreons, but I'm increasing some, the ones, as Marie Kondo would say, that bring me joy.

Hope that the increment combined with the super peso, Mexican peso that is, will help buy some beer to forget the Jays are in last place of their conference and help Jason buy some chamomile tea. Thank you very much, man. I may live in Toronto now, but I'm a Dodgers fan. Don't care about the Jays. Well, it's even easier then.

You don't have to buy as much beer to forget about the Jays because you've already forgotten about them. I've already forgotten. Over at PayPal, we've got Matt, Charlie, Jonathan, Matthew, Judge, Nikolai, Thomas, Nikola, Simon, and Fred, who sent in 50 bucks and note. Hey, I made a couple T-shirts some weeks ago about the code for deciding if eggs are good or bad and told you I would send every benefit to your tip jar.

Well, as I sold none, I either have a bad sense of humor or your listeners have a great sense of style. So I sent 50 bucks your way as the entertainment you provide every week is so worth it, and I've been a passive listener for too long. We'll be a Patreon soon.

Promise. Cheers. Well, thank you very much, Fred. Thank you, Fred. You appreciate it. Over at the tip jar, we've got Nick, Adam, Mario, and Matthew. Thank you, everybody. And we've got some reviews in. Five stars from Filtering Craig. Last reviewed in January 2018. Well, I'm glad you updated.

Grumpy Old Geeks, the brainchild of Jason DeFillippo and Brian Schulmeister, accompanied by the ever-elusive Dave Bittner, proudly holds the illustrious position of being Bittner's 14th best podcast that he appears on each week. Now, I know what you're thinking. 14th? That's not exactly a gold medal, is it?

But, hey, let's give credit where credit is due. In a podcasting universe where Bittner is a regular guest on numerous shows, Manning managing to crack the top 20% is an accomplishment worth mentioning. Thank you, Filtering Craig. Thank you. And we've got this next one from Strez Technoid.

My meager payment and indignant—I can't speak today, too. Indignant review, so smile. Update it again. Would have rated the show at six stars. Less one stars, I had to leave a snarky, remarker comment. I consider a five of six next-gen and a meatspace score of 4.755 Picard.

Guess I will just have to go to the website. What is the address again? Knowing you're both sci-fi buffs and fanboys, I'm older than both of you, not additively, as I predate your cultural lineage by way of Lost in Space. Hey, I used to watch Lost in Space. Sorry I couldn't feed the collective kitty as I am now obscurely retired in a remote desert location and low on rocket fuel.

AI snarky on. Old codgers have remained true to their charter, as well as Fortran. Stay grumpy. Hey, kid, get off my submodules and punch cards. AI snarky off. All right. Well, thank you. That was amusing. And it was amazingly enough today to just add to our street cred as technologists, maybe sort of.

I got a Google alert that said I got a Webby Award nomination. Well, thanks for that timely alert, Google. I know. From 2014. Well, congratulations, Jason, retroactively. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you. This is back when I worked at a company called David and Goliath. We did – we were working for Kia. Yes. Yeah. It was crazy. But the funny thing is, A, I didn't know that I had an honorable mention in the Webby Awards from 2014. The other thing, though, the funny part about this is I was going to North Korea with Jordan Harbinger, and at the last minute, I had to go because the Kia people said, if you go to North Korea, you can't come back and work for us.

Like, damn it. That's funny. I ended up not going to North Korea, but I got a Webby Award instead. Well, nine years later, you found out about it. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. That's amazing. Congratulations, Jason. Thank you. Nine-year-old ago you is very proud.

Very proud of that work I did. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulman. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. If you got a kick out of our ramblings and you've got some loose change, you might consider heading over to GOG.show slash donate. Your bucks help us keep this crazy circus afloat, and we might even wind up liking you a lot.

But, hey, maybe you're broke or just cheap. That's fine. You can still help us by sharing our show with your buddies and your enemies. Why not let everyone in on the fun? It won't cost you a dime. We promise. If you want to follow along at home, check out the show notes for this episode at GOG.show slash 604.

It's kind of like a treasure map, except the treasure is all the stuff we've just been talking about. And there's more. If you've got a burning desire to gab with us and other listeners, you can find the link to our Discord channel there, too, over at GOG.show. And it just keeps going on and on and on.

This is some AI crap that I didn't shout out this morning, so we're going to cut it there. If you want to leave us a five-star snarky review, head over to GOG.show slash review and stay grumpy. That went on way too long.

I was just like, oh, Jesus. Yeah, that's a bit long. Even if I wasn't like chemo addled, I don't think I'd make it through that. Yeah. 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.

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