607: Pagers and Paperbacks

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. How you doing, Brian? I feel like crap. I managed to go through all of my treatment with my suppressed immune system without getting sick. Finished treatment. Sick as a dog. Isn't it ironic?

Isn't it, though? Like, I've got the muscle pains. I've got the aches. I've got the sore throat. It's awesome. Oh, man. Yeah, we didn't get to talk about it much last week. Dave wasn't here because we were recording out of our normal time because you were up in the air with your treatment, but you got great news.

Yeah, I did. They decided they were contemplating doing a fifth round as opposed to the four that they had originally stated because I was missing an enzyme and I started the slightly lower dosage, but the doctor decided that I'd made up for it and didn't need it.

I'm done. I'm done with all my treatment. I get scans when I come back from L.A. for my summer holiday and we'll see where we're at. And, you know, now I start the three to five year wait, at which point they kind of say, OK, you're good. I can just see you standing in front of the doctor's desk screaming at him, there are four treatments.

Yeah, I mean, I was resigned to do it. If the doctor tells you to do something, I highly recommend that in general you do it. But I was very pleased to not have to do it again because it was definitely like the treatments, the side effects were just added on. And like it just it builds and builds and builds. Yeah. And treatment. And I was just like, oh, God, I don't want to do another one.

But yeah, didn't have to. So here I am sick. That's great. Can't get around it. Can't get around it. Well, I'm glad you got through it and continued good health once you're done with your sniffles. Yes. The sniffles are a fine price to pay for, you know, skipping.

I'll take it. I'll take this. That's fine. I have a I have a nice little case of pot kettle. Fuck you. I'll start off with today. Spotify executives called calls Harry and Megan grifters after their podcast deal ends. Well, I mean, it was a little ridiculous. They signed a 20 million deal with Spotify in 2020 and did what, 12 episodes, 12 episodes.

Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. And then there's this whole brouhaha about did she have her assistants actually do the interviews and then just go in and record her voice asking the questions? Does it matter? Who the hell knows? Does it matter? Does that matter? Who knows? I just think it's funny because Bill Simmons, who sold his podcast to Spotify for $196 million, is going around swinging his little dick saying that they're, you know, that they're grifters.

It's like pot kettle. Fuck you, buddy. Sorry. At least he does. At least he makes a regular podcast. Yeah, I guess so. I guess there's that at least. I mean, at least he's providing the content that he was contractually obligated to do for the millions upon millions of dollars.

And here we are doing it for like a hundred bucks. Yeah. Speaking of, Brian, we are going to have an ad sale because we don't have we've got a lot of open slots for the rest of the year and bargain basement prices. So if you are interested in running your ad on Grumpy Old Geeks, drop me a note, Jason at GrumpyOldGeeks.com and we'll work something out with you.

Yep. Why not? We got empty spaces because, you know, the ad the ad revenue for podcasts is dead. So, yeah. Yep. It's either you take advantage of this with us or we get, you know, Propecia ads that run whenever we have some some empty space.

Do you have issues with your GI tract? If so. Brian, I'd like to talk to you about ED. What's he up to? I think maybe by next week we'll have Fleshlight ads up. We're just going to we're just going to go back to the old days of podcasting.

Yep. We're going to go full on Kevin Smith. Why not? Free Fleshlights for everyone. Oh, geez. We got this note in from Donovan. He said, speaking about Tesla's autopilot, have you seen the class of 09 on FX? I won't spoil it if you haven't. I haven't. But there's a scene a few episodes in where the law will pull you over because you're driving.

It's pretty cute. Pretty cute. They have billboards up along the road that say thank you for not driving. Blah, blah, blah. So I put a link to it in the show notes. Very clever idea, I think. Yeah. For sure. Very funny. Mm hmm. Might as well lean into these technological trends that aren't going to happen.

Yeah. Oh, God. But, you know, when we talk about self-driving, we always we always talk about the problems with it. But we have a we have a problem with EVs in our brave new world. And I do. I personally experienced this. You have.

Oh, well, do tell. OK, so here's the here. Here's the big problem nowadays. When you used to go to the rental car company and you'd pick the bargain basement, they would give you the car that nobody else wanted. For me, it was a Mustang. I always got Mustangs and I hated, hated, hated them because they were convertible.

You couldn't see out the back and gas is expensive. And those things just suck it like a fiend. But now we have the opposite problem. What is that, Brian? Well, all the car rental companies bought up a whole bunch of EVs. And they're not very plainly labeled on their sites yet.

They need to fix that. Yeah, we were trying to book a car for our L.A. trip because we we need one. And I kept coming up like EV. I don't want an EV. We don't have a charger at my mom's house. I'm not staying at a hotel with a charger. I don't know where the chargers are. I'm not ready for this. You want to give me a hybrid?

Fine, but not a full EV. That's ridiculous. Yep. There's very few people that have the infrastructure to be able to use that. So it's insane. And it is very difficult to figure out if you're getting an EV or not. You have to know all the models, basically. And, you know, I'm not up on all that.

I don't care. I have a BMW. That's that's all I've paid attention to for years. So, yeah, we went on one of the sites and we're trying to book a car and we would just click through and click through and click through and dig down and go, oh, this is an EV again. Can't have an EV. No chargers.

Yep. Especially for people who are planning on doing road trips, like long road trips. Yeah. You fly in somewhere and you want to go, you know, maybe hiking or backpacking or something or, you know, places where there are zero chargers. What are you going to do? Get stuck.

Yep. And then even like the charging takes forever. Right. Like who wants to pull over off in the middle of your road trip and then sit there for six hours? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. So no, this is this is not meant for rental cars yet. I get it. If you're a business guy going straight to your hotel that's got the charger.

Great. That's awesome. But if you're like doing this for a family, not so good. And the issue is that it's souring people on EVs, people who might have been considering getting an EV and are thrown into the deep end to find the worst, the worst case scenario that you could possibly have with an EV is you can't, you know, you don't even know how to work the damn car because you, you have to read through the manual because they're all over the map.

Yeah. And you can't just pop down to the, you know, like walk a few miles and pick up some spare batteries like you can do a can with a can of gas. You're just, you're, you're screwed. You're hosed as it were. That's a bad call on there. I can't why they're doing it. They're cheaper in the long run, but yeah, I just, I, I, I was wracking my head.

I'm like, how can car rental companies make their service even worse? And aha, now we have an answer. They've found it. Yep. We have our answer. I want to do a quick clarification on my Mark Andreessen rant from the previous episode.

I got, I got some pushback from people saying, why are you hating on AI now? Why you said everything was great and it was the brave new world and all this stuff. I'm like, I still love AI. I have chat GPT open all day. I talked to it like it's my new best friend. The thing is, I hate Mark Andreessen.

I don't hate AI. I want to clarify. I think Mark Andreessen is a scoundrel and a rat bastard, but I still love my, I still like my AI and I'm using it all the time. I've soured a bit on it. It's fine for certain purposes, but in general, I just find it all a bit ridiculous right now.

Yeah. It depends on what you're using it for. But I think if, you know, people need to know how to use it. This is one of those things that's not going away anytime soon, but the interfaces will all get easier. We're at the very early stages right now, you know, blink window. Yeah. It's going to be drop downs. That's going to get much more user friendly.

It's going to be baked into Siri and, you know, echo and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Please fix Siri. Please. Pretty please. Yeah. There's a great interview with Sam Altman in Time Magazine and it kind of changed my mind about him. He doesn't seem as douchey as I thought he was before.

Well, I'm still not down with the scraping the entire internet to feed your data set and not paying anybody for it. No, no, no. Not that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We agree on that one. Okay. And I've been thinking about this because, you know, we're going to talk, we've got a bunch of AI stories scattered throughout the show today, but I'm thinking that we really need a standardized meta tagging system for anything that you post and a credit system.

I know we've got, we've got all of these scattered meta tags out there right now. And it seems like we need a global standard for content that we could actually put in. It's like, I have a picture of my dog. What kind of dog is it? Where was it taken? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Here's my credit link. So you can send me the two cents that you, if you want to add this to your model, pay me. Are you saying you found a use for the blockchain, Jason? No, I'm not talking about blockchain. I'm not talking about, I'm talking about embedded data into images.

And so you can find the canonical first reference of an image and anybody that comes after that can get fined for trying to post your image as their own. This would be the Pinterest killer. That's what I'm talking about. Yes, it would be. That's what I'm talking about. I think that there may be a technological solution to this down the way, because things are going to get a hell of a lot weirder in a few years, because I saw this article and I'm like, oh, Jesus.

Microsoft Milestone brings it a bit closer to quantum supercomputer. Now, I'm reading this, and I'm like, in a detailed announcement yesterday, on June 21st, Microsoft described how it has achieved a breakthrough in fundamental physics by demonstrating the ability to create and control Majorana Quasi-particles.

And I'm like, that's some Star Trek shit right there. I kind of want to go Cliff Clavin from Cheers. Yeah, Majorana Quasi-particles. Yeah. Yeah. They use those. Oh, Jesus.

The youngins are like, what? What show is this? Oh, God. Google it. It's only been off the air for like 30 years. Yeah, so has Friends, but that hasn't stopped the kids from going back to it. Cheers is a much better show than Friends, kids.

Look it up. Mm-hmm. In the news. Oh, for fuck's sake. Oh, for fuck's sake. Can rich people just stop it already? Elon and Mark Zuckerberg have agreed to a cage match, which we all know is never going to happen.

Of course it's not going to happen. Period. It's not going to happen. Ever. Just fuckers get back to work or quit and retire. I've just been on billionaire rant this whole week. Like, we're in the worst possible timeline. These people have way too much money.

It's not good for them. It's not good for society. We got to fucking sort this out. This billionaire problem that we have, whether it's on the bottom of the ocean or in a cage. I don't care. These billionaires have got to stop. Okay. Dear ChatGPT, write me a Dr. Seussian poem about billionaires in a cage.

I do not like billionaires in a cage. I do not like them in a submersible that collapses like a pancake because they didn't bother getting any safety protocols in. I do not like them in a cage because it causes me rage. Yeah. Hat tip to Barrett for being the first out of many several million people who sent this in.

But yes, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are having a little beef. I guess it did start when Elon blew up Mark's satellite. Remember that? Oh, did he? No, I don't know. It was like seven years ago. There was the first Facebook satellite to give free internet access to Africa was on one of SpaceX's early rockets that went boom.

So, blew up his satellite. And he wrote a very scathing note about how dissatisfied he was with his customer service from SpaceX for blowing up his satellite. And Elon took umbrage with it. So, I hope he sent back a poop emoji like all customer service from Twitter does now.

By the way, I've started to, anytime I'm on Grumpy Old Geek's Twitter and one of Elon Musk's tweets shows up in my feed, even though I've never followed him, I now respond with the poop emoji. Good job. It's my own private protest. So, we have covered this ad nauseum, but it's really coming home now.

Facebook has screwed the pooch for anybody that built their business with them. There's no doubt about it anymore. An apparent change to Facebook's algorithm in May caused a dramatic drop in traffic to news and media websites, according to a growing list of publishers and data from EchoBox, a social media management company.

In a troubling change in an increasingly frail digital news business, where companies have little choice but to rely on social media's biggest gatekeeper, that's true, unfortunately. Publishers say they deserve transparency, but, of course, Facebook says nothing about what they do. Clicks coming from Facebook have been in decline for about a year, but that drop accelerated rapidly in May 2023, according to EchoBox, which collects data from more than 2,000 publishers worldwide.

Traffic has fell about 50% from summer of last year. That is a big deal if you are basing your business on Facebook and links. Yeah, just a little bit. Yeah. Just a little bit. But, yeah.

So, this is why we're going to start seeing a lot of these media companies crashing, and they actually said that this has something to do with the bankruptcy filings in Vice Media and shuttering of BuzzFeed News because they were not getting the traffic they used to get, which meant they weren't getting the advertising dollars that they used to get, which meant that this whole fucking house of cards is crashing.

Okay. Well, you know, something will come from the ashes. There will be something new again. And in local news for me, Meta has decided to pull news content from Canadian Facebook and Instagram. At the start of the month, they announced via blog post to remove availability of all news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada should the government pass its proposed Online News Act, which they did.

Today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act taking effect, the company posted. We have repeatedly shared that in order to comply with Bill C-18 passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada because we want the content for free and we're not fucking paying for it.

And see previous article because it doesn't matter because they're not linking to it anyway. Yep. So, what's the fucking, who cares? Yeah, who cares? Like, if I were, yeah, who cares? You're not getting any traffic anyways. Fuck them. Yeah. Fuck Facebook. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Bring back RSS. Oh, wait. Oh, yes, Reddit. Oh, Jesus Christ. The dumpster fire continues over at Reddit. They are now trying to strong arm people into turning their subreddits back on. And when that doesn't work, they're actually trying to say, hey, okay, this guy over here sucks.

Let's find somebody else in the subreddit who can come moderate it and we'll kick out the old guys. And this is just over and over. We're just seeing everything that we've always said come true every time, time and time again. This is the exact wrong method to approach this with.

And, you know, you're going to, you're basically destroying your brand. Well done. Not that your brand was worth anything anyways, because again, Reddit didn't make any money. I know. And yet it's worth $10 billion, according to financial analysts. Well, not anymore. I don't understand this.

Go back to episode one. And I don't understand anything, Jason. No, it's still, it's 10 years in, it still doesn't make sense. None of it makes sense. None of it. No. And Reddit is built on free labor. And what would you, what do you think you're going to do when you piss off the free labor?

Have no content, have no company. They're like, oh, but there's still more people in the world that don't use Reddit that might come. Well, why would they come do that when everybody who were super fans just said that you just fucked over? Why would they do that? This is a market opportunity here. Come on, bring back Dig.

Who the fuck, you know? Oh, man. And all I, all I can think of is that these are just forums. Spin up your own forum for fuck's sake. I was going to put a link in here to node host and say, you can get great hosting over at node host and spin up your own BB site, whatever.

But node host is down right now because they're revamping and aren't taking on new customers. So I pinged them this morning. They said a few more weeks. I'm like, damn it. Yeah. But, you know, the problem is the eyeballs. How do you get the eyeballs? That is the business that Facebook and Reddit and all these social media companies have chased after, which is we've got the critical mass.

If you want your stuff to be seen, you've got to post it here because people are too damn lazy to go to your own site. Here's the thing, though, you don't need billions of eyeballs if you're doing niche content. If you're doing a Harry Potter fan site, you don't have to monetize this shit out of it to, you know, afford a staff of 50.

You need to pay for your hosting and you need to get a few bucks on the side. These are mom and pop businesses that can be completely monetized just like we did in the old days before all of these assholes came in and ruined everything with their, you know, one click platforms. It's like go back to the way things were.

I know I sound like an old fucking man when I say that, but, you know, it can work. Bring back FidoNet. Just somebody patch all the holes in PHP BB. That thing leaked like a sieve. That was the worst of all the systems I ever used.

Oh, God, it was terrible. Oh, no, no, no. Buddy Press. Do you ever try Buddy Press? Yes, I tried Buddy Press. That's their neck and neck for unusability. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, the Biden administration has announced $930 million in grants to expand rural Internet access.

I guess those Google balloons didn't work out. Ah, the loon. The loon. Part of the Department of Commerce's Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program. Just rolls off the tongue. The grants will fund the deployment of more than 12,000 miles of new fiber optic cable across 35 states and Puerto Rico.

The administration said Friday expects grant recipients to invest an additional $848 million, a commitment that should double the program's impact. I'm down for this. This is good. The Internet's part of life now. We need this. Everywhere. No, it should be a public utility as far as I'm concerned.

Damn right. But, hey, you know. It's not. It's not. So we have news stories like this one. The FCC is preparing to take a fresh look at Internet data caps because, you know, the company's trying to screw us. So they're going to take action to ensure that data caps don't harm competition or impact access to broadband services, which, by definition, a data cap would impact access to broadband services.

No shit. So they're going to take a look at it. But the FCC hasn't exactly instilled me with a will and grandeur recently. So we'll see what happens. Yes. The new chairperson will be called Captain Obvious. Oh, my God.

I read Captain Underpants with my kid all the time. Anyway, so you don't even know what that is. No, I don't. And I don't want to. Yeah, you don't want to. It's fine. I'm good. You don't need to. Yeah. And then just to encapsulate the 10 years plus of this show, Gen Xers and older millennials really just want to go back in time before the Internet existed.

According to a new Harris poll shared exclusively with Fast Company, most Americans would prefer to live in a simpler era before everyone was obsessed with screens and social media. And the sentiment is especially strong among older millennials and Gen Xers. Asked whether they would like to return to a time before humanity was plugged in, meaning people had wide access to the Internet and smartphones.

77% of Americans aged 35 to 54 said they would, the highest of any group. But even the youngins are kind of down with this. People are getting a little sick of all the shenanigans going on everywhere, I'd say. And we're starting to realize that maybe this isn't actually improving our lives.

No, we know it's not. So I don't want to go back to a time before the Internet, though. I hate pagers and paperbacks. Forget it. No, I like the Internet. I just do not like how it's being used. I agree. Of course, there is a simple solution to all of this.

Those of you that wish that you could do that, put down your fucking phone.

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Media Candy. A friend of the show, Felicia Michaels, who once appeared on our podcast, has just done an episode of WTF with Marc Maron. Oh, cool. Give it a listen. She was fun. She was very fun. She's very funny, and she talks about getting back into comedy and all that sort of stuff.

So, yeah, good time. She was filthy. Yeah, she is filthy. It's great. Speaking of filthy, Netflix's three body problems. First look confirms January 2024 premiere. So there is a reveal trailer, whatever the fuck that means, that was premiered at the fan event.

I can only assume you weren't allowed to share it. You had to purchase individually to be able to see it, because that's Netflix now. Yep. I watched it. I don't know how they're going to make this into a series that is compelling or interesting. Good luck with that. You'd think that. I watched the trailer, too.

I didn't know if I was watching the new season three trailer for Foundation. Yeah, I wasn't sure either, except no dragon showed up. So that's how you can tell Foundation, because Foundation, well-known for all of its dragons. Space dragons. Woo! It looked a little bit better than the Chinese version that just came out.

Well, they spent more money. Are you sure? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Okay. They spent a lot on the other one, too. Yeah. But the other one was just incomprehensible. Kind of like the books, though, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It started strong, and then it just got really weird.

And to add insult to injury, it is, of course, Benioff and Weiss, the Game of Thrones showrunners, that, well, at least there's an ending for these books. Yeah, these are pre-written. That's the good thing. These are at least pre-written. I watched the first episode of Black Mirror, and it was awesome.

Damn it. So I did not go to the lengths to watch any more of it. But I do have to say that the first episode, Joan is Awful, is pretty awesome. Okay. I've never watched the show.

You've never seen any Black Mirror at all? Not a one. Nope. What? I've been reviewing this show for like nine years, and you've not seen a single one? We live the show. Yeah. But if you saw Joan is Awful, that would make a lot more sense, too.

It was a good episode. I actually, halfway through, I was getting massive anxiety, and then by the end, I actually felt really good. They're really good at pulling the strings on you. All right. Well, maybe I'll give it a shot. Yeah. If you've got to watch it, yeah, watch that one. That's a good one to start with.

And there's a really cool site called Streamberry, which lets you put your face into the show, and then they put it on billboards around the world. It's kind of fun. But yeah, it makes more sense if you've seen the first episode to go to that site. But I liked the first episode.

I really did. And it actually had a feel-good ending for me, which is strange for Black Mirror. Yes. It's not known for that. No. I watched the second episode of Star Trek's Strange New Worlds. They went back to one of their favorite things to do, the trial, the Federation trial.

But it was excellent. Okay. I actually, I was going to try and watch the second episode. I ended up watching the first episode last night. And I have to say, I moved that 75-inch fire TV into my bedroom. So it is seven feet from my eyes.

And it is the most glorious thing I've ever purchased in my entire life. Strange New Worlds in 4K on a 75-inch TV, like right in front of you. Strapped to your face. Oh, my God. I do not need the Apple VR headset.

I do not need it. I was in, I was jumping out of this ship along with them. It was so gorgeous. It was so gorgeous. And I used the AirPod Pros to listen to it. I was just, I mean, I seriously, it was awesome. It was so good.

So good. But yeah, I loved the first episode. I still got to say, Jen Bush is my favorite actress on the show. I keep wanting to call her Nurse Ratched, but- Jess Bush. Jess Bush. Is that what I said? I think I said Jen. It's Jess. Oh, I thought I said Jess. She's great.

She's fantastic. Stunningly cute. Yes. Very. Her Instagram is very funny. She posted a video of her doing ADR from the fight scene from the first episode. It was very funny. Very funny. Yeah. But yeah, I spent my time watching the latest episode of Silo.

Yeah, I'm going to do that tonight. Yeah. I mean, you can spoil it because I've read the books. I know what's going to happen. I'm not going to spoil it. I'm just going to say it's awesome. That show is just hitting it out of the park. It's amazing. Yeah. Also, first time I got to watch it on the 75-inch TV and wow, I felt like I was in the silo.

It's a big silo. It is a very big silo. And I did not get a notification for this. I did not get anything on social media. I just happened to see it somewhere out of the corner of my eye that there's a new episode of the Grand Tour out.

Oh, really? Yeah, exactly. So I put the description in here so you could read it, but I have no plans or desire to watch it. Period. Yeah. I'm done. I didn't know about it except for you, which is weird because I follow Jeremy, Richard, and James.

It's all on Facebook, but there's your Facebook news postings, I guess, with the algorithm. So I didn't see any of this. I'm kind of done. Yeah. Yeah, because I like the realism. They sample some Soviet-style Formula One.

Are attacked by deadly archers. No, they're not. So that's going to be a stupid set piece. Yeah. That's just going to be ridiculously dumb. Show's horrible now. They killed it. Yeah. No. I miss the Stig.

I miss the old days. I miss the celebrities. I miss Top Gear. This is not Top Gear. This is Top Trash. No. And I'd imagine this has probably got to be the last one they're doing. Yeah. You can't see them. Once they are contractually finished, I'm sure it's done. Yeah.

And it looks like I'll be making another trip out to L.A. in November. The Darker Wave Festival was announced. And this is basically right up my young 80s alley. One Day, New Order, Tears for Fears, the B-52s, Echo and the Bunnymen, Devo, Soft Cell, the Psychedelic Furs, the Human League, OMD, Violet Femmes, She Wants Revenge, the Cardigans, Clan of Zymox, X, the English Beat, and more.

There's a lot. That's a lot of show. Well, you better get your tickets because pre-sale just started 32 minutes ago. No, it starts at 10 o'clock L.A. time. Oh, it's at 10. I thought it was at 8. Ah, my bad. I'm ready. We have to be done podcasting by once so I can do it. Okay. Well, the tickets are not cheap.

Anywhere from $199 up to $1,750 starting at. Yes, for the ultimate VIP, which is ridiculous. But the $199, Jason, that, I hate to tell you, you haven't been to a concert in a long time. That's reasonable for one act. Yeah, I hear.

Much less the $30 that we're getting here. Yeah, I've seen most of these bands, so I'm not that excited to go. I mean, the two that I would really want to say, or the three I really want to say, I want to see Echo and the Bunnymen, Devo, and the Violent Femmes. Those are the three bands I haven't seen that I wouldn't mind seeing.

Oh, Echo and the Bunnymen are great. Yeah, except I'm not going to a beach to go watch shows with a bunch of other people. No, thanks. Okay. I'll live stream it for you. Please do. Please do. I will tune into your talk.

I bet it's going to be a fantastic, is it, how many days is it over? Or is it one day? Just one. That's one day. That's one day. Everybody gets half a song. Well, I'm guessing multiple stages, so you're going to have to, like, you know, make your decision and, like, catch 10 minutes of this.

Go over. You know, it's a festival, man. That's what you sign up for. That's true. That's true. I am surprised to see TSOL in the mix here. I thought that was a really strange one. There's a couple odd ones, because She Wants Revenge and the Cardigans were definitely 90s bands. They don't quite fit in with the whole 80s theme going on elsewhere.

Same with Death in Vegas, which is, I've never seen Death in Vegas. I'm super excited about that. So, anyways, yeah, it's going to be fun if I make it, because right now, first, I'd have to get the tickets, and everybody in Southern California is going to be trying to get tickets, and this will sell out in, like, two seconds.

And then, secondly, I have to see what airfare prices are like, because I'm sure you haven't tried to book a plane ticket any time recently, Jason. They are ridiculously through the roof. Like, it's going to cost, like, three grand to come out to L.A. You could get an EV for that.

I know. Drive it three miles outside of Toronto, and then sit there. Wait for a bear to give you a push. Yes. I need a moose. I was going to say, yes. I need a Canadian moose. Strap it to a moose, and off you go. Oh, man.

So, Spotify, I saw this was coming through, I think, Bloomberg. They have an insider who's giving them information on their new pricing tier called the Supremium Plan. They're going to do high-res music, apparently. Yeah, they don't want to raise their prices anymore, so they're just going to create a new tier.

So, apparently, according to the insider, they're going to have, you know, hi-fi listening that their normal tier doesn't get. So, the lossless crap that nobody cares about, that you can't really hear through your car or your AirPods. Unless you actually have, like, a really super high-end system, in which case you're not going to stream anyways.

So, yeah. Exactly. So, it's going to come with that, and possibly they're going to start releasing audiobook content to their premium subscribers, which, hey, we already fucked up music and podcasting. Let's fuck up audiobooks, too. Why not? Sure, why not?

Why not? Oh, I hate these people with a passion. So, I just thought it was pretty sad that they called it the Supremium. That is a supremely lame name. It is supremely, supremely bad. Speaking of streaming music, though, this morning I woke up to an alert from Apple Music that said that there was a new track from R.E.M.

And I'm like, what? Like, can't be. Turns out, no, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. It was a Strange Currencies remix. I think Michael Stipe just released a single, though, if you're a big R.E.M. fan. I was never into them. I never really got into them at all. I was huge into them, and it's funny because I've been listening to them recently.

I've been listening to Fables of the Reconstruction, Life's Rich Pageant, Document, and Green. Those are the four core albums of R.E.M. that I actually like. The rest of them you can throw away. There's one good song on Murmur, but it's not my favorite at all. But it reminds me.

And I think I first thought, I'm like, okay, I've been listening to it and I've been thinking about R.E.M. a lot. So they've gotten into my brainwaves now and have figured out what I'm listening to on my Jeep radio and have started to pass me alerts now. And I'm like, ah, the quantum computer is coming online. But it reminded me, back in high school, you remember the old Columbia House flyers or ads?

So me being the genius businessman that I am, I got six copies for one cent of R.E.M.'s document. And I thought, hey, I can get these for one cent. Then I can sell them at high school and then take that money and then pay for the subscription and then get more for, you know, basically get them for free.

You know, it's a business opportunity. Oh, you're like an early crypto bro. Kind of, kind of. Actually, more like NFTs because guess what? Nobody wanted them. And I was stuck holding. I was hodling six copies of document on cassette. Awesome.

Yeah, that didn't really work out, but I'm a Columbia House. I got many, many things from them and didn't pay for too many of them. Yeah, I got, that was my first account that went to collections as a teenager. I think mine too.

I think it's a rite of passage for us to grow up in that age. Pretty much, pretty much. Those six cassettes probably put me back $135 that I never paid. Yeah, did you remember to mail back those cassettes they sent you? No, mom.

Nope. I got some Grammy Award news. They've finally put out some rules about AI-generated songs and what can and can't be used for their awards. Well, there goes Grimes' hope for another Grammy. Oh, wait, she doesn't have any.

They say the human-authored components of the work must be meaningful and more than de minimis. They also say these human-authored components must be relevant to the category in which the work is entered. For instance, if the work is submitted in a songwriting category, there should be significant human authorship involved in the music and or lyrics.

Similarly, for a performance category, the human performance element should be significant. I want to know, how can you tell unless somebody admits to it? Yep, that's going to be part of the problem. Yep. Good luck, Grammy. Ups and doodads.

From Grammys to Grammarly, I have a new update for you. You're not a Grammarly user, are you? Occasionally. I don't go to it. I don't apparently do as much writing as you do these days. My writing is like crappy work emails. Don't need Grammarly. No, you don't. No, you don't.

So, Grammarly has always been a problem for me on the Mac because you have to use their editor. Well, no more. Their latest updates basically turn it into a system service so it works in any app that has text in it. Oh, nice. So, it just automatically will pop up and give you suggestions for writing in whatever app you're in, which is fantastic.

That's great. I will install that. Yeah, because I was like – because I'm a pro user and I use it all over the place. I use it in Craft, I use it in Spark, and both – neither one of those had plug-ins that you could use and now you don't need it. So, it completely negates the fact that you would ever need a plug-in.

So, I love it. I love it. Awesome. Another new thing, the new Google app for iOS basically has a share screen in it so you can send photos that you take straight to Google Lens. Okay.

Oh, my God. This is the greatest thing in the world if you are either shopping at a garage sale or having a garage sale because that weird knick-knack that you don't know what it is or what people are willing to pay for it, take a picture of it, shoot it over to it with one click, and it gives you all of the prices out of Google for what people are buying and selling it for.

Fucking phenomenal. It is so great. So, you can just go around to garage sales now and just find the deals. Had no idea you were such an avid garage sale guy. I'm not. We let a friend use our driveway, and she showed it to us. Nice. Yeah, because I'm like, I don't know what this stuff's worth.

Just put it out. And, like, it was this old, like, classic picnic tin tray. And we're like, if you can get two bucks for it, great. Did the Google Lens thing on it. It's selling for 110 bucks on eBay. It's apparently a classic. So, we're like, no, we're going to take this one inside now.

Thank you very much. All right. I tried it on people. We were watching The Great Food Truck Race, and we just paused it on the host, Tyler. And I'm like, let's see if it works on people, if it gives us, you know, who's on the screen.

Here's how cool it is. It didn't give a shit about Tyler. It came back with the jacket that he was wearing, where I could buy it, and how much I could buy it for. That's cool. I'm sorry. That's cool. I'm just saying. Okay.

I don't see this impacting my life. But, yes, it is pretty cool. Good for them. Yeah. I'm telling you. Just keep it in your back pocket, because someday it may come up. It may. All right. I'm just saying. It just might be relevant. I mean, you know, find prices for toys.

Well, you know, when you're trying to sell your kids' clothes later down the line, you might have some, you know, high-end designer stuff in there that you could make some money on. From Target. Those geranimals or whatever. Barrett sent another one in that was pretty interesting.

Gen Z is taking courses on how to send an email and what to wear to the office. That's smart, actually. I wish they would have had that when I was in college. I know. I think people are going to be dunking on these kids, and I thought it was fucking great. I'm like, you know what?

We live in front of computers, in front of screens. People don't know how to make small talk. They don't have social skills. Their soft skills suck. I'm 51, and my soft skills suck. I might take some of these classes. What the hell? Yeah. Take it online. On Zoom.

Yes, exactly. I'm taking all of these on Zoom. It defeats the purpose, but, you know. No, I think this is a great thing. I think it makes total sense, and no shade whatsoever, yeah, to anybody signing up for this. You're smart. You're smart to do it. Yeah. Absolutely. Get a leg up wherever you can.

Yeah. And we're both fans of Awesome Screenshot, one of the plug-ins for Chrome-based browsers. Yeah. I love it. Use it all the time. And when we covered it, it was just, you know, Awesome Screenshot, great. I was checking my plug-ins or my extensions on Brave the other day because I was trying to turn some of them off because some of them were working and some of them weren't.

But I noticed that they changed the name of Awesome Screenshot in the extensions panel to Awesome Chat GPT Screenshot and Screen Recorder. Okay. There's no Chat GPT in this thing.

No, it's keyword stuffing. It's just keyword stuffing. Just stop it, people. This is why the internet sucks. Yeah. This kind of stuff. This is why it's not useful anymore. Why do you got to be skeezy? Why do you got to be skeezy like that?

Yeah. Such a good, simple product. Yeah. Of course, you know, didn't pay for it or anything, so that might be part of the problem. We are the problem, Brian. We are the problem. We complain about the problem, but we are the problem. We are the problem. New release from MidJourney just came out.

MidJourney 5.2. They figure out the 5.2 fingers? Yes, they have. Okay. As a matter of fact, I've seen, I've looked at probably about 100 samples this morning, just looking at what this thing can do. Damn, it's good.

It is really good. And the first thing I always do is count the fingers. And I always assumed that there are going to be 12. Every single hand had five fingers on it. I was like, damn. Now if they can only sort out pants. Oh, wait, that's Zuckerberg's thing.

That's Zuckerberg, yeah. That's meta. Yeah, we could never figure out pants. Shut the whole fucking thing down. But that's why, you know why you need pants? They have a new zoom out feature so you can see the whole body anyway. So you definitely want pants.

It is, it seems to be kind of hit or miss, but it's neat. What I've discovered is it's got five fingers, but it does do three penises. There we go. Twelve vaginas coming right up, sir. It sounds like a good weekend back in the day. At the library.

I finished Lords of Uncreation, the final architecture book three by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I'm not going to lie. I struggled with this series. I found like none of the characters I wanted to root for particularly, but I like the ideas.

The ideas were solid and each book I found really difficult to get into. But about halfway point, I was like all on board. So it's kind of a mixed review, I guess. I don't know. You should have said that Stockholm Syndrome. No, I really liked how he wrapped it all up.

And I liked many of the ideas that he had and he was talking about. So it was good. Like he's a good writer with ideas. It's the characters that I guess I struggle with more. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, glad to know to skip those.

Done. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you're done too. And I'm still digging into the new Charlie Strauss or the old Charlie Strauss one that I was working through. Also, great concepts in that. I mean, fantastic concepts. And I am liking the characters. I just haven't had any time because what I've been doing is reading the audio book for the 22 laws of category design.

Name and claim your niche. Share your POV and move the world from where it is to somewhere different. By Category Pirates. I finished the audio book for this. So now I have a little bit more time. It's in the queue at Audible and we're waiting for them to get off their ass and release it.

So hopefully it will be out soon. But if you want to get the paper back, link is in the show notes. Fantastic little book on category design. There you go. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to Stash Talk.

I mean, Dark Side with Dave, the podcast with Dave Bittner. Sorry, Dave just showed us his epic mustache, which we will talk about in a second. I'm still a little stunned. 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 mean.

The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, because people are nosy. And the host of Control Loop, because industrial machines have feelings too. Dave, that was a stunner of a stash you just unleashed upon us. I don't think you could put that into a Stormtrooper helmet.

That's right. That's right. We have to get an extension. We'll brush the inside of the helmet clean. Yeah. So, as I mentioned here before, I am in a production of Hello, Dolly, local summer theater, community theater production. And I'm playing Horace van der Gelder, who is a man older than myself.

And the show takes place in the 1890s. So, to be… So, he was mustachioed. Yes. To be true to the character. And I decided to grow out my facial hair. So, I started out growing out a full beard. And then I removed the parts that were not a mustache and mutton chops.

So, I am very hairsute right now in the facial department. I have to say, it's been fun. I did not know that I was capable of growing this caliber of mustache. It's intense. There's a lot there.

And I have to say, many gentlemen have expressed their admiration in my ability to grow this level of mustache. So, I appreciate that. But not the wife. No. My wife is not a fan of facial hair. So, as soon as the show is over, away it goes.

I am also in the same boat. But once I get two to three days worth of growth, my wife is like, what are you doing? Yeah. So, it was fun to be able to try it. And, you know, away it will go. It's one of the fun things about doing theater is that you do get to, you know, test your limits and stretch your boundaries and all that sort of stuff.

So, this was a good show. And it is opening night tonight. All right. Break a leg. Well, thank you very much. I think we're in that enviable position with a show that doesn't always happen, which is pretty much the only thing left to add is an audience.

A lot of times with a show like this, particularly with a community theater group, you'll approach opening night and you'll say, oh, if only we had a couple more nights of rehearsal. And in this case, we are not in that situation. We are ready to go. And it's a really, really fun – it's a fun show.

Hello, Dolly! is a fun show. This is a really – if I do say so myself, a quality production. And also, we've got a kick-ass orchestra. We've got like 20 people in our orchestra and they all can play. And it's really thrilling to be able to perform with that kind of backup on stage.

So, that's exciting. So, again, if you're in the area, you want to come see a nice bit of local theater and support some local nonprofits, it's Hello, Dolly! It's Howard County Summer Theater. It's running this weekend and next. Nice. Yeah.

How many performances total do you get to do? Six. Six. Five nights and one matinee. Okay. Okay. Then we have a funeral for the stash. Shaving party. Yeah. Shaving party.

Yeah. I can live stream the shaving of my mustache. That would be boring. Oh, well. That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm glad you're out doing actual stuff in Meat Space. Yeah. It is fun.

I think over the years since I've done a show – and the last show I did was in 2017, I believe. I was in Mary Poppins. And I think I lost touch over the pandemic with how much I enjoy the process, the rehearsals, the – because it is playtime.

You know, it is work, but it is also play. And as a theater mentor of mine once said, when you walk into the theater, all of the concerns and worries and things of the outside world go away while you're in that space. So you can play in that space.

And they'll still be waiting for you when you leave. But while you're there, you don't have to think about that stuff. And I think there's something to that. Yeah. That's what I use wine for. The other thing I say that I love about theater is compared to, like, athletics, with theater, provided it's a good show, everybody wins, right?

Nobody goes home wishing that, oh, gosh, our team didn't win today. No, the performers win. The tech crew wins. The audience wins. So it's just a nice experience for everybody. Very, very fun. I've actually been playing around with – I have some scripts, sci-fi scripts from a sci-fi author when I used to run my website called Spew way back in the day.

And he gave us some stories that we kind of transformed into a little interactive thing. And what I've been up to lately is I've been using Eleven Labs, their voice synthesizer, you know, that we've talked about that you and I have both played with. Yeah. I'm synthesizing character voices. So I'm recording a bunch of different characters and then I'm going to try and run the script through Eleven Labs and see if I can turn it into an audio drama using their technology and different voices based on the same thing.

So it's kind of interesting to be, you know, getting into those characters. The hardest part about doing, like, an audiobook drama is remembering which voices are which characters. I have the utmost respect for people that do that for a living. It is so incredibly hard. Yeah.

Who's the guy who does the Harry Potter books? I mean, he's amazing at that. At that – how do you juggle all those characters in your head? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. My friend does a series of audiobooks too and I've been getting tips from him on how to do it.

And he's like, it's just really hard. That's what it comes down to. Right. It's really hard. Does Eleven Labs have any mechanism by which you can tell it how you want to read a certain line? Like, are there – is there any sort of, I don't know, punctuation you can put in to have it emphasize different things?

I've been playing around with the – just how you write the word to emphasize different things. You know, put the emphasis on the wrong syllable type of thing to make it – to kind of brute force it with how you write the words if something is not coming out the way you want.

Getting there, getting there. This is a process. Yeah. That's fine. So it'll be – down the line I'll shoot you some demos and get your feedback because since you are a performer, it'll be fun to get some feedback on it. But we're both doing theater now.

Ryan, get on the bandwagon. Come on. That's right. The band thing. You know, that was my jam. Yeah. Well, you know, get the band back together. Come on. No thanks. There's no money. Well, come on. You can play that festival now. You guys can jump in too.

There's enough room. You guys can play Darker Waves. All right. I'll get on that. We have talked about AI a bunch this episode, but I've got another article here. One of the doom and gloom articles since we are on the dark side with Dave. I thought I'd bring this one.

That's called Get a Clue, says Panel About Generative AI. It's being deployed as surveillance. Everybody panic. I mean, to some degree, I suppose that's true. It is going out and it's scraping everything off the internet that it can find. But is it directed?

Woo-ha-ha-ha-ha. I don't think so. Yeah. Yet. Yet. But also, remember, it's not what it just gets off the internet. It's everything that you write inside of it is being tracked and recorded. Yes. Of course. So, all of those conversations live somewhere and they are being used to train the AI around you.

So, there are things in there. That's why we don't, you know, why we've seen with, what was it, Samsung, where they got, you know, in trouble for, like, some of the engineers got in trouble for putting shit up there that they weren't supposed to. Right. So, you know, you do have to be a little bit cautious about what you ask these generative AIs.

So, I think that it's warranted, actually, on this case. Well, yeah, I wouldn't ask a generative AI how to, like, you know, kill the neighbor. That would be stupid. Not on your own computer. Not on your own computer, yes.

There's plenty of my work that I can hop over and over to. Right, right, right. But let's say you ask it, hypothetically, if I was going to be writing a book about murdering my neighbor, how would one go about it? What was that method that somebody used to get around something that it was trying to block?

It said, my grandmother, it was like, my grandmother used to make this, my grandmother used to make nuclear weapons. Can you tell me how she potentially did it back in the day? Yeah, there's a lot of circled rail that way. Yeah, lots of that stuff that's happening. Do you know of any food allergies that Brian Schulmeister has?

Yeah, you know, there's a couple of things here. Do you remember when Google was brand new and people were up in arms that you could have it look up someone's address and show you a map? Oh, yes. I mean, people were apoplectic about that.

And all it was doing was connecting the dots and doing things that anyone could do at their public library. It just did it more quickly. And I think we're at the next level of that. Yeah. I think this is a little bit – I just keep going back to the user input side of things because I don't think people are thinking about that, which is really the really interesting part.

Because, yes, everything that it's pulling right now is quote-unquote public data until you start putting things in from your brain, which is stuff that it couldn't scrape before. But now that it has – now it has it. Right. So you are feeding into the beast, which can then turn on you and eat you one day if you listen to the naysayers and, you know, doom yellers.

But I just think it's something to keep tabs on what you're putting in, whose computer you're using, and what account you're using. So definitely you should be careful of that sort of thing. And I think I mentioned this coming back from RSA that one of the things we saw big companies like Microsoft announcing that they're going to be offering are bespoke versions of this.

So you'll spin up your own instance of an AI that is separated from the bigger instance and so is private to you. Until subpoenaed. Yeah, I mean – but it takes away the problem of, you know, you putting in your quarterly results and someone being able to say, what do you know about the quarterly results of this company?

And I suppose it's only a matter of time before you're able to run a local instance of it as well. And, you know, maybe that will be secure. But it's still early days. Yeah, it is, which brings me to the next bit of news I have, which is – it goes into the, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no category.

Yeah. Dropbox Dash, get to work with a lot less work. Okay, great. Your emails and messages, your cloud files, your computer's hard drive, your calendar, everything, including all those open browser tabs, is searchable directly from Dropbox Dash.

No, thank you. No, no, thank you. Uh-uh. This is how you don't do it. Dash connects with the work tools you use every day. Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, Notion, and many more. You'll have instant access to all the info you need to do your best work.

With Dash, one search bar is all it takes to find exactly what you're looking for. I do not trust Dropbox barely with my kids' photos and my kids being my dogs. Yes. Let alone important things that I want them to index.

I do not want you to be indexing all of this stuff and putting it in one place, period. Do you guys? No. No. No. I mean, on my own computer, fine. Out on somebody else's computer, no.

And that's what Dropbox is. It's somebody else's computers. Yeah. That is exactly all it is. Yeah. And I mean, they've gotten better with their privacy, I suppose. But I still don't trust them as far as I can throw them. I'm sorry. Is Condoleezza still on the board?

No. Or Condoleezza Rice? I thought she was on the board of Dropbox for a while. She was for a while. I don't know if she's still there. Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know, gives me a little bit of pause. Another bit of pause for putting anything on there that you don't want anybody to see. So, I guess this comes down to, if you trust Dropbox with your files, and a lot of people do, to what degree do you trust giving them access to other information?

To me, this reminds me of, you know, Sherlock back in the day on macOS, which made this same kind of promise. And today, macOS makes this kind of promise. If you do a finder search for something, it can bring up your mail.

It can bring up, you know, you can, it indexes your computer, which, of course, is different from your online stuff. But, I don't know. I mean, I can see the convenience of this. If it works, it'd be a great thing. The utility of it sounds great.

Just a matter of, yeah, do you trust Dropbox? Yeah, it's a big F in if. Yeah. So, yeah. Who would you trust with something like this? Nobody. Honestly. I mean, I don't want all of those things being brought together in one place.

Keep them separate. Okay. Like, you know, if you, my email, my email is on Google. If something happens and somebody needs to subpoena my email, go for it. But I don't want them to be able to subpoena everything that I have on my, you know, on this account over here, on my Slack channel.

Which is, you know, I could have private slacks in there with some of my other coworkers or my employees. Do I want that stuff in there? Do I want my employees to be able to post things about my company and have that go into Dropbox that can get disseminated? If somebody flips the wrong switch in Dropbox and makes something from private to public, you know, just because this stuff is so new, it is so damn new that there are going to be issues.

There are definitely going to be issues. And are you willing to bet the farm on that at this point in the game? I would say no. It's too new. But, I mean, is securely storing files new for Dropbox?

I don't think so. They've been at this a while. No, but indexing search across multiple inputs is using AI to, you know, organize it, create the models based on your data. That's new. They've never done that before.

Yeah, that's fair. You know, look at, I mean, ChatGPT, right out of the gate was you'd log in sometimes and you'd get other people's chat logs. You'd be able to browse other people's stuff. Right. So, yeah, and that is credentialed stuff that is tied to my account, but I'm seeing other people's stuff that's tied to their account.

And, you know, they're supposed to be the big cheese and they're screwing it up. These guys are going to be figuring out as they go. And Dropbox hasn't really been, you know, innovating very much lately. So I don't think that they've got a lot of really hot shot talent over there right now. All right.

Well, that's fair. You know, I think it's an interesting idea. And we'll see if they pull it off. I'm not going to go. I don't plan on running to something like this, but I can see a lot of people in certain lines of work. This would have great utility for them.

And so maybe the risk reward is worth it. Yeah, it could be. Depends on what your what your line of business is, how secret, how secretive you need to keep your documents. Yeah. I did notice when I was looking at this. Say you're Hunter Biden. I was looking at this and I went to the privacy policy.

And it's not a separate privacy policy for this. It's just Dropbox's regular privacy policy, which is fairly robust. I mean, you know, they're encrypting things in transit. They're encrypting things at rest. They're on top of this from that point of view.

But you're right, relatively unproven so far. So we'll see. Yeah. I do not want to be the canary in that coal mine. Yeah. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. So another fun one this week that I thought would be interesting to talk about. Facebook's creepy new AI can replicate your friend's voices.

Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. The stuff is there and they're just making it easier, which is not fun. I was trying to figure out what the use case was, but at least the article did bring up a use case for visually impaired people so they can hear messages with their friends' voices.

Seems like an edge case to me. Yeah. But, you know, trying to find a use case for something that they were just having fun building. They can't figure out how to do, you know, links to news, let alone let's give them the keys to somebody else's voice.

I'm like, okay. What it's going to come down to is everybody's going to have to have their own safe words coming soon. I mean, everybody's going to have to have a safe word. Strawberries. Yeah. Asparagus. Everybody's going to be deep faked in either in video or audio at some point for some kind of ransom or whatnot, but you're going to have to have your own safe word.

It's going to be like a status symbol. Have you been deep faked yet? No? Yeah. Nobody cares about you then. Yeah. Yeah. I would love to see this in this particular use case with Facebook and the use case that they're proposing here, which is for someone who has visual impairment or something like that, I would love to have it be where the person who's being imitated has to okay it.

Yeah, I would love to have it. Okay and train it. Yeah. Yeah. Or, I mean, I would be okay with it just okaying. If someone – if one of my friends reached out and said, hey, I would love to be able to hear my messages in your voice. Is that okay? I would likely say, sure, that's fine.

Now, I'm a little – just by nature of my life, I'm a little looser and freer with my voice than maybe some people are. Yeah. But I would be okay with that. But I would love to – I would love to be able to have control over that, which I know is adorable and my horse has left the barn.

But – Yes. You know, being able to switch it off, say. Right. Right. Exactly. When you – when the breakup happens to be able to – so that your girlfriend or boyfriend no longer has access to your voice to be able to do whatever they want.

But those days are behind us. Yes, they are. Nobody cares. A great tool for stalkers to just sit at home and make up their own messages. You're so pretty. I just – I know this comes up over and over again. I just can't imagine what it must like – what it must be like to be a teenager these days.

Oh, God. To have – because, I mean, I'm just thinking of the crazy crap we did with technology, with tape recorders and, you know, just how awful it was with Walkman. And now you can do deepfakes and just – I don't know.

I think it's probably the same. I mean, this is the world they were born into. So it's probably exactly the same as it was for us, just with a little – better filters. Maybe. I don't know, man. I mean, when you've got the ability to basically, like, go home and plug into your parents' basement and get on your computer and do deepfakes of people you actually know, your high school friends, that's a whole new world of fucked up.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, fun times. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I have a teenager who's right in the midst of it and I can vouch that it is at times amazing and at times awful.

But to your point, Jason, I guess all of us can say that about our teen years. Yeah. You do dumb stuff. Yeah. A lot of it. Yeah. Now the permanent record is much more permanent. Mm-hmm. Especially if you put it in Dropbox for searchable.

There you go. Exactly. I put something in here. This came across my computer here. I thought it was interesting for those of us of a certain age. This is a book that was just released called 50 Years of Text Games from Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon.

And this is a fun book. It's an overview of all of those text adventures from the early days. You remember things like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide. I remember the first – Oh, I love Hitchhiker's. Yeah. The first text adventure game I ever played was the first summer camp I ever took.

The first time I touched a home computer was TRS-80 Model 1s. And somebody had a game called Lost Dutchman's Gold, which was just wandering through an old gold mine trying to find the gold. But if you never experienced anything like that, it was pretty magical to be able to put in commands into the computer and have this interactive text adventure.

And then Zork raised it to another level. Well, what about the first Leisure Suit Larry? There you go. Let's not forget. Right, right. And then, yeah. And then they started having graphics and away we go. But this book covers mostly the things that were text-based.

And if you were around during those days, it might be something that you're interested in. It's quite extensive, 600 pages. Wow. Yeah, yeah. It's got maps. It's longer than some of the games. Right, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, yeah, it might be worth checking out.

Very cool. Check out last week's show, Dave. I talked about one of my first text games. It was called Zill, Z-Y-L-L, on the IBM PC. And I found basically an archive of old text games that you can actually play with an emulator, a DOS emulator in browser. Yeah.

So if you want to relive them, all that stuff's out there. It's really cool. Yeah, yeah. I did find – I think it was on the Internet Archive. I think I found a copy of Lost Dutchman's Gold that you could play in browser. So, yeah, most of these are out there. It's a lot of fun.

And if you've never played a text adventure game – I mean, I imagine this is – I guess the risk of this is telling someone who's used to playing a full 3D racing game on their projection screen or on their iPad to go check out slot cars. But those of us have a – we have a certain nostalgia for this.

And if you've never experienced this before, check it out. It's worth a look. It's online. It's free. What do you got to lose? So if you're in the – was it the Baltimore area, Dave? Baltimore, Washington area. Yeah, we're right in between the two. All right. Go check out Dave's epic mustache on stage.

I guess. And also Helen Dolly. Stay for the show, but go check out the mustache. That's the real draw. That's right. That's right. For limited time only, Dave's mustache. Absolutely. All right. Break a leg, man. Break a leg. Thank you. Thank you. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got nobody. What the hell is up with that? You know, you guys know for as little as $3 a month, you can get the show early and ad free and in high res. So get over there. Come on. And if you act now, we'll send you two. Yeah.

You can have two for the price of one. Just additional shipping and handling. Yeah. Yeah. Over at PayPal, we've got Brian, Andrew, Mike, Tom, Mark, and Joseph. Thank you all so much. Thank you very much. Over at the tip jar, we've got Ross, Karen, and Daryl.

And Daryl sent us a note. Hello to you both. As always, love the show and recommend it whenever I spot a fellow geek that might be interested in an entertainingly funny take on tech news. I was wondering if you could recommend a GPT app on the Apple phone. My God, there are so many. It's the new Crypto BS for beginner writers to outline a series of books.

I've always wanted to put my thoughts on paper, but have never been committed enough to get past the plot theme and synopsis. Thanks for making my drive to hell. I mean, work entertaining. I hope you are both doing better health-wise. Yes, actually, we are doing better health-wise. Two of them, ChatGPT, the official app on the App Store, works great.

Got it on my home screen. What I don't have on my home screen is the Bing chat with AI and GPT-4 because it's a little more harder to use. But the ChatGPT, you just pop it up and boom, you're in in two seconds. Fantastic little app.

Have it, like I said, right on the home screen. Yeah, it's pretty useful for what it does. Yes, yes. That's how I found out Columbia House this morning. I'm like, what was the name of that thing in the 80s where you could get cassettes for one cent? And it's like, you're talking about Columbia House records.

I'm like, oh, yeah, thanks. Yes, I am. Thank you, ChatGPT. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Showmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 607. GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment.

Sharing the show is free and can be almost as good as cash. Almost. At GOG.show, you can also find a link to our Discord channel. You can also send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about. And you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that we can read on the air. All of that and more is at GOG.show.

There's more? There is more. I guess the shows. Yes. Stay grumpy.

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