611: The Everything Episode

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

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Well, Jason, have you been X-ing? I have been... I have been... Yeah, I don't know what the fuck I've been doing. What the... What's going on? I don't know, man.

I... The... We... Yeah. That sums it up right there. That sums it up. Whatever. I mean, it is... Everybody else has gone on at great lengths about how this might be the dumbest brand move that's ever been made in the history of humanity.

Or the smartest. Or the smartest. Depending on what you're trying to do, yeah. Yeah. So we won't go on and on about that. But we do have a bit of information. We got a few stories. We got a few stories. Twitter's rebrand to X is underway with the crappy Unicode logo.

That looks like, you know, when we were all drawing that metal S on our books in high school, if we would have moved on to the letter X, that's what it would have looked like. So here we are. CEO Linda Yaccarino is towing the company line and has been set forth to actually provide, you know, corporate jargon speak instead of Elon's stupid look.

It's X. Isn't that cool? I love X. Yeah. X is great. He's offered some new clues or she's offered some new clues about what it may mean for the company in a memo reported by CNBC. She suggested that payments and banking features could feature prominently in Elon Musk's new vision, which leads me to two questions.

I suppose if they built that, maybe he could pay the people that he owes money to. Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's what he's waiting for. Okay. And secondly, would you trust a payment and banking feature on X, which is run by somebody who doesn't pay people? No. Yeah.

Absolutely not. You think people weren't going to give their card to Zuckerberg? Yeah, really? Yeah, sure. My God. Our usage is at an all-time high and will continue to delight our entire community, aka far-right Nazis, with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking, and creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities, she wrote.

In other words, everything. Yeah. Yeah. That's what he always wanted. He wanted an everything app. Well, that's what he's going for. It's going to be a long time coming, I think. You know, I do feel really bad for Linda Yaccarino because- I don't because I, well, okay.

Come on. Come on. Assuming she's getting paid. She's getting paid well. Well, she better, but I mean, this is not what she signed up for. She did not, she came in to fix Twitter. She didn't come in to fix X. Next week, it could be Y or Z or Q.

She knew damn well what Elon is like. You know, she knew what she was getting. She is not a dumb girl. Yeah, I guess. She knew what she was getting into, but still, yeah, you're a shit shoveler, so I hope you enjoy that. Oh, fun times, fun times. Yeah, so let me read this last paragraph just because obviously this came out of ChatGPT.

Many companies say they want to move fast, but we enjoy moving at the speed of light, and when we do, that's X, she wrote. With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly. We have to work tirelessly because we fired half the people to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants.

Even the child pornographers. And what marketplace? Yeah. Whatever. Anyways, there you go. Story number one. Your turn. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, if you want to trust your money to this guy, just talk to Gene Huang, who had his handle stolen outright.

And I use stolen in the way that most people have been using it, which is wrong. No, Twitter came back and said, hey, we like that. We're X now. We're going to take the handle X. And, you know, I feel bad at how naive this guy was.

George, or not sorry, George, Gene. Gene, yes. Yes, Gene. I don't know. All morning, I was trying to search for this news article, and I kept looking for George. And now I know why I couldn't find it. Gene thought that he could get some money from X.

He said, you know, I'll give it to you for the right price. And, yeah, look at the kid who had the Twitter account that followed Elon's jet, you know? Look at half of the landlords. They're not getting money. Yeah, yeah. If you don't give Elon a number he wants, he just takes it.

And in this case, they were well within their rights. It's called Eminent Domain, and they own the company. They own the platform. You're a squatter. You're a squatter. So get used to it. You should have taken the merch in the tour. At least that way, he could have, like, you know, sold some impressions on Instagram and, like, you know, eBayed the shirt.

Then he would have made some money. I would have asked for a flamethrower. Before the tour. Wrong company. Wrong company. Can't get it wrong. Whatever. He owns them all. Can you get a lift in the underground tunnel on the way to the XHQ? No, it only goes 100 feet, so no.

All right. All right. And finally, X has told advertisers they need to spend $1,000 per month or risk losing their verification status. Yeah. That's what we call extortion. I thought this – didn't this happen already? I think they upped it.

I'm not sure. The idea behind this is it's going to reduce the number of scammers creating millions of accounts on the platform. How scammers are buying advertising at high rates?

I'd like to see some stats on that. Nothing they do makes sense. Just get used to it. No, none of it. None of it makes any sense. But basically, yeah, they're extorting companies to be able to advertise on X, which I'm not even sure you want to. And I did see some stories about brands' ads being served up on neo-Nazi posters who are now monetizing Nike.

So that's going to play well. No, yeah. The whole thing is just a mess, dude. Get to work, Yakarino. It's a mess. It's all a mess. So, yeah. But again, to my earlier point that I made, I don't know, two to three weeks ago when everything started to blow up with all these different Twitter-like clone companies out there, the end result for me has been I've stopped caring about any of them.

Enjoy the silence. In the news. In the second quarter of 2023, Spotify saw its million monthly active users, or the Mao, climb to 551 million after welcoming 36 million new listeners.

That represents a 27% increase and is an all-time high for the streaming diet, which has just published its earning report. They've also had a record-breaking second quarter. When it comes to premium subscriber numbers, it welcomed 10 million paying users, 3 million larger, and grew its subscriber base by 17% year over year.

Here we go. Despite the massive influx of new users, Spotify still lost a significant amount of money and can't pay its artists shit. Of course they did. Of course they did. Of course they did. So, even though they've had its total revenue for the period is $3.5 billion, which is 11% larger than last year, but they're still crying poor.

Spotify blamed these losses on the shutdown of its podcast shows as well as an excess real estate and severance for employees laid off due to company restructuring. Spotify blamed the podcast. Fuck you, Spotify. I know. Most of which they, of course, got for nothing.

Completely free because, you know, whatever. And, yeah, they just made money off stuff they got for free in general, except for Joe Rogan. I also love this because they've always claimed, companies always claim, well, we have to do layoffs in order to increase our bottom line.

But now they're saying, actually, severance for those employees that we laid off has hurt our bottom line. Which is it? No, Brian, it's short term. They do this all the time. This is, I mean, this was me in 1996 when the entire team got laid off from Paramount at Christmas because they bought Blockbuster.

The reason that they lay off 500 people is so the stock price will go up 25 cents because on the books it looks like they're not spending as much money. Then next year when it's somebody else's problem, the cost goes up because they're spending a giant amount of money on contractors and outsourcing everything.

So then they decide to hire in-house people. Then those salaries have to go on the books and the cycle repeats itself. It's the circle of life. Oh, you know, somebody, you know, Daniel, like a quarter. Shut up. You're going to bankrupt us. Oh, no.

Well, Meta also had a great quarter. Meta just had its best quarter since 2021, even as it continues to lose massive amounts of money on the metaverse. I'm sensing a theme, Brian. There's just a theme. Reality Labs, the meta division overseeing its virtual and augmented reality projects, lost $3.7 billion during the second quarter of 2023 and generated just $276 million in revenue.

So somebody bought those stupid things. I got one. They still – the company is basically saying they still expect to – metaverse spending will accelerate even though they've kind of pivoted away. They're going to continue throwing money at this. So I think Zuck basically told investors, oh, the metaverse was a bit of a bust, but it's still his personal dream.

He's a sunken cost fallacy here and he's going for it still. Oh, he's not giving up the ghost. He is not giving up the ghost. The ghost goes with no legs. This is a very long-term bet, he said. You know, on a deep level, I understand the discomfort that a lot of investors have with it.

And look, I mean I can't guarantee you that I'm going to be right about this bet, but I do think this is the direction that the world is going in. Zuck, let me remind you that the discomfort that a lot of investors have with it is because nobody cares. Right. Nobody wants to live in your metaverse or anyone's metaverse.

We don't want it. What you have to understand about Zuckerberg is he's trying to have his first original idea because everything else that his company, his fortune, everything that this kid has grown up with is because he's taken it from somebody else.

He's had no original ideas. He didn't come up with the metaverse either. That's not his idea. This is true. But he was trying to pioneer the adoption of it. He was trying to take it one level farther. I'm doing it, but without legs.

Exactly. See, that's the whole point. Less friction. Less friction. You don't swish as much. Well, even though Meta does not have a metaverse to speak of yet, and they've taken some of their money and they're moving it into AI, they've joined up with Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, who I've never heard of, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

And they're all jumping on board with the Biden administration's new plan to develop AI responsibly. Whee! Yeah. Unfortunately, it's voluntary, but it's something. No penalties, but it's something.

It's something. No, it's not, Brian. This is nothing. This is a nothing burger. No, this is- Absolute nothing burger. This is fingers crossed, hands behind the back. Okay, sure. Yeah, that sounds good. We need good publicity right now, so yeah, ethics. No, this is for the cameras.

That's all this is. This is for the cameras. People are going to start trying to get fucking elected again soon, so they've got to start the bullshit now. There's no teeth to this at all. No, it doesn't give me much hope, but I mean, baby step, hopefully. Do something more.

Push harder now, but at least they all agreed to not do anything they're forced to do. Exactly, because there's nothing there. They don't even know what the fucking thing is yet. They're just like, sure, we'll sign it, and then they're just going to go about their business. But the people that can do something about it are the publishers, and they're starting to get together to say, hold up, AI people.

You don't have crap without us, or you do have crap, literally crap, because we have the stories that power your AI, and we want to get paid. We want to get paid now. Yeah, this is the only – this is the real way to – again, you go after the pockets, and that's what they're going to do.

And they have every right to do it. They own the IP that these things are crawling. They've paid for it, yes. Because their biggest fear now is they're going to – the AIs are going to take all of their content, build it into a large language model that then you go from search to answer.

And that way, you skip the entire process. I go to Google, and I say, what's the best coffee place in Woodland Hills? And it says, this place. Here's a map. Here's a coupon. Go. You skip the entire review part where somebody went to that place, wrote a review, posted it on the local newspaper, and had to get paid for doing that.

They just steal it and go. So that's what they're trying to – that's what they're trying to turn off or like intercept before that happens by saying, hey, we need to monetize us sending this person to go do this work. This is how we're going to do it. You want food for your AI?

We have the pet store. So come on by. We'll sell you a bag of food, and then you can go about your way. But we want a couple billion dollars for that bag of dog food. That's where these people are going to run into the real, you know, enforcement, I think. I hope so.

You know why I don't have a lot of hope for that though, Jason? Hmm. Pinterest still exists. Oh, well. We have not been able to figure out how to stop IP theft of just photos, much less anything else. So we'll see.

They're a platform, Brian. They're just a platform. They're just a platform. Right. Right. We'll see. Well, Tesla, we're going to change gears here just a little bit here. Different shitty Elon Musk company. Yeah, they're back in the news because the FTC is trying to take them to court again.

Eventually, they've opened an investigation about the phantom braking syndrome, as it were. Apparently, this has been a recall in China that I never even heard of. So they're trying to get it done here so they can actually, you know, do a software update to fix the damn problem.

But there are 360,000 Teslas on the road with full self-driving. You know how we think about that. Yes. Cruise control. Let's just say overhyped cruise control installed. They're also trying to go after them for saying that this is fully self-driving, which it's not, which we've been saying forever.

So this is just another one of those stories that the Federal Trade Commission or somebody, the NHTSA, they keep going after Tesla, and I still have yet to see anything. How many investigations have we covered in the past two, three years, Brian? At least 30.

And how many have we seen any conclusion to? Zero. Exactly. So just chalk this one up to another bit of press. Yeah. Well, Waymo, who is also in the self-driving space, is pushing back from its self-driving truck efforts to focus on their self-driving taxis instead.

Ooh. Yes. That's one ride-hailing service. The move will help the company concentrate on making these self-driving taxis a commercial success, even though we all have questions about this and they've been endlessly problematic. In fact, wasn't it a Waymo that got stuck and, like, the police had to come because it was trying to make a three-point turn because there was construction and didn't know how to understand the signs, which is fair enough.

Multiple times, multiple times. Multiple times, yes. Even this week when they tried to take the Twitter sign down at the new XHQ, they put a crane in the middle of the street and all of the self-driving taxis got stuck because it didn't expect a crane in the middle of the street, just like everybody else did. Well, and just, again, because Elon, he didn't have a permit to put the crane there.

Actually, it turns out he did. Oh, he did? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It was just a miscommunication between the landlord who hates him for not paying the rent in the police department. No, fair enough. Yeah. The local supervisor came out and he was the one that actually spotted all the stuck taxis because of the crane. Whoopsie.

So I don't really understand this move by Waymo because people who are much more educated than us in this particular field, everybody that I've heard talking about the self-driving thing and the autonomous thing, they've all said that, like, trucking is the way to go. It's overnight.

It's highways only generally, you know, until the last mile. It's less traffic because they're driving long haul at night. Like, there is no better use case scenario for self-driving than trucking, yet Waymo is saying, nah, let's do taxis.

I know. I know. I just, the name of the unit that got cut was Waymo Via. I was thinking, maybe Pancho Via did a, I like this lawsuit against him. But it's interesting, too, they're trying to, like, California's thinking about legislation about self-driving trucks, and maybe this is what they're trying to, you know, cut off at the pass.

California wants to have, any self-driving truck must have a safety driver on board, which, you know, the companies say, yeah, that's going to hinder us with the self-driving trucks. And to me, that's like, that's the entire fucking point of a self-driving truck is that you don't have a fucking driver on board.

Yeah, but I get the idea of, like, we start that way. They're not saying forever. It's like, you want to test these things? Fine. But have somebody on while you start this process. I get that. That's fine. Okay. He'll just be asleep and watching porn, so it won't fucking matter, but, you know.

Yeah. I was going to say, just don't watch Harry Potter. It didn't end well for that Tesla guy. But I guess that got debunked somehow. Anyway, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have released, basically, open source maps for the world.

All right. They're going up against Google and Apple Maps. So, instead of, you know, I don't know, competing on a level playing field where they, you know, use it to make money that they've spent, they just say, give it away! Microsoft and Amazon, I can see, can afford it, but Meta really can't afford to be getting into this giving shit away thing right now, you know.

They're still trying to find their virtual pants. I don't know why they're investing in this stuff. And I want to know where the other shoe is going to drop on this. They say that they're doing this so developers can create better mapping apps. What's their cut?

There's a catch. There's always a catch. There'll be a licensing fee to use the API, of course, yeah. You know, I'm fine with this, except I would rather the trusted companies themselves release an app, as opposed to letting third-party developers do it.

Because, you know, how many ads am I going to get in my maps now? That and, you know, who could be messing with the data? I want a trusted source for that data. Just because it's, you know, just because I say, hey, I downloaded this from the Overture Maps Foundation and put it in my app doesn't mean I fiddled with it beforehand.

Right. You know, there are many ways that you can, you know, mess with this data because it's just numbers and waypoints. You know, a couple waypoints off, somebody drives off a cliff in their self-driving truck. Yes. But I just thought it was interesting that TomTom is also part of this.

And I'm like, TomTom's still around? I guess. Must be. There's an office somewhere. Yeah. Must be. They're still trying to do the voices. Nobody told them. They're stuck in the booth. Now, this one just hit the news wires and it's pretty, pretty insane.

Tesla created secret teams to suppress thousands of driving range complaints. That's X. Yes. Excellent. Oh, yeah. This is not a good look, as they say. This is definitely not a good look.

So, they're saying about a decade ago, Tesla allegedly, I've got to say allegedly, rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to display rosy projections of driving ranges, misleading customers into thinking they could drive further on a fully charged battery.

And also, when it got cold, the rains dropped by about 50%. Mm-hmm. So, they've already been fined by regulators in South Korea. And the EPA has dinged with them a little bit before. But apparently, this new thing is that they had an entire team of people to dissuade you from coming to the dealership when you had some type of complaint about this.

And then it turned into, if you ever want to come into the dealership, we're just going to say, go over here, you know. This is par for the course. The guy's a liar. The guy is a total liar. And we get it, Brian. Guys lie about their length all the time. But it always comes out in the end.

Also, cold weather shrinkage. Cold weather does make it half the size. So, there you go. I'm just thinking Elon, you know, just should move over to the Trump campaign so he could be like the director of communication because at this point, come on. I mean, I start to understand the Twitter customer service now just being poop emojis back because it's just always shit.

It is. Yeah. I mean, any of his companies. Except with Tesla, they can have the self-driving Tesla actually drop off shit at your porch. Perfect. It's just so unfortunate because, I mean, again, just like Zuckerberg, it's not like he came up with these ideas.

But he managed to build like Tesla. That is groundbreaking stuff. You know, his whole SpaceX. Amazing. Why does he have to be such an ass? I haven't figured that part out yet. I have not figured that part out yet. I do have a list of links in here called Tesla's Dieselgate.

It's basically a list of links from Cory Doctorow with all of the lies he's told. And there's even a site in there that I was going to link separately, but you can get it from this list. That is basically all of Elon's promises and how many days it's been since he said that they were going to happen and they haven't.

Yeah. It's a long list. It's a very long list. It's almost as long as Doctorow's regular books.

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

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.

Media candy. We got a treat this week, Brian, but with an extra Star Trek Strange New Worlds. A crossover episode. Which, um, that could have gone wrong, horribly wrong, so many ways.

And it didn't. And it didn't. It was, as far as I could tell, a 100% perfect episode. It was hilarious. It was so good. I mean, granted, you have had to have seen Lower Decks to get any of the jokes.

Yes. But it was perfect. It was absolutely perfect. It was stunningly good. I was, my, I was just grinning ear to ear the whole episode. And then they followed it up with an incredibly serious episode that was amazingly well done. This show, man.

This show. They can do anything. They're doing great. They're doing great. And the funny thing is, the guy that does the voice from Lower Decks. Boimer? Yeah, looks exactly the same. Looks exactly the same. Well, they did, yeah, for Lower Decks, I didn't realize that they had basically based the animated characters on the way the actors actually look.

Which is great. Which is great. Which is great. Yeah. And it took me so long. I'm watching it. I'm like, why do I know this guy? Why do I know this guy? I know, I watch something that he's in all the time. And it turns out it was The Boys. Mm-hmm. He's one of the main characters in The Boys. And when I was looking that up, I found that The Boys has a new spinoff called Gen V coming very soon.

Mm-hmm. And has trailer out. So, trailer looks just about as nasty and bloody as The Boys does. So, if you're into that kind of thing, keep an eye out. Man, yeah, Star Trek Strange New Worlds is just so good. It's just phenomenal. It just really is. Yeah, this is making me miss the days of 22-episode seasons.

Oh, me too. The fact that we just get so few of them. I want more. I want more, more, more of this. But maybe the fact that, you know, they're only doing so many makes them good. We don't get, like, Spock's Brain episodes and stuff like that. Yeah, but the fact that we're still talking about Spock's Brain episode means that they should have more episodes like Spock's Brain's episodes.

Maybe not. Just saying. Good Omen Season 2 is out. It is. I was a little bit confused about the rollout on this because on Twitter, I'm sorry, X. X. I saw some tweets, I'm sorry, Xs, about it being out, like, three days ago, which it wasn't.

But the Amazon Prime was, like, posting Good Omens 2 available now. It wasn't. Maybe it was in different markets, not the U.S. I don't know. But then, you know, because I was confused by that, I Googled it. And then Google told me it wasn't supposed to come out until today, the 28th.

Yet last night at the 27th, it was all there. Yeah, Amazon uses GMT for their release times, which is great, which is great. So it's always the day before. Same with Apple. Apple does the same thing. Yeah. So if it's available in London, it's available here.

They're smart. They know that if it's available in London, it's available everywhere. Yes. So I watched the first episode, and it was thoroughly delightful. Excellent. I watched up to the credits and then fell asleep because I was very tired yesterday. Getting up early every morning to do boot up makes me not so exciting in the evenings, especially since I just finished Strange New Worlds, too.

And to go from Strange New Worlds to that was a bit of a culture shock. I went the other way around. I watched Good Omens first, and then I watched the super serious Strange New Worlds episode. That would be the way to do it. Yeah. Yeah, it worked a little better. Yeah, I don't know. I got to talk to a friend of the show, MXV. He went to a theater and saw the first two episodes of Good Omens on Wednesday, Tuesday or Wednesday.

I was like, oh, that's interesting. We get those two episodes on Friday, but we didn't get two episodes. It released everything, right? Yeah, they're all there. Yeah. All six, right? Yeah, I think we get six of those. Yep. Yeah, next time they're going to call it 15 minutes, and that'll be the season.

But it's getting shorter and shorter. Speaking of MXV, he and I used to watch a show all the time called Justified, and it went off the air. It finished up, and it is now back with a shorter season. But damn, is it good.

I loved Timothy Oliphant so much. He's great. I do like him a lot. I see the ad for this all the time, and it looks sufficiently interesting for me to maybe watch it. So far, it's great. I watched the first episode. I'm going slow on it, and it's a slow rollout.

There are three episodes out right now because it's on regular TV, you know, that thing that old people have, still some of them. Yeah. But I love it. I mean, it's Raylan Givens. He's back. It's the same as the original Justified, and the original Justified was amazing, so I'm very happy about that.

Not particularly sci-fi, but Timothy Oliphant was in The Mandalorian, so there's your crossover. Only if he has a blaster in this. Apps and doodads. Here's probably my favorite headline of the week.

Threads adds a chronological feed as Twitter burns to the ground. That's a good one. That's pretty good, right? But it's not Twitter anymore. It's X. No, it's now X in the article. But as Twitter, sorry, X, owner Elon Musk continues to reduce his app to rubble, Threads is looking like a more viable destination for up-to-minute news and updates.

Yes, because they added a chronological feed. You need to update the latest version, and it might not appear for you immediately to switch between the For You and following feed. Tap the Threads logo or the home icon, and you can swipe from one to the other. I have not tested this yet because, again, as I stated previously, all of this stuff has made me not give a shit about any of them.

But as long as if you switch to chronological feed and it sticks and doesn't reset every single time you open the app, that would be good. That would be good. I covered this on boot up the other day, and I told everybody, don't worry if it doesn't work for you yet because I spent 10 minutes trying to make it work.

I just checked. I have the latest version of the app, and I still don't have it. Right. But yeah, I would like it, even if I have to reset it every time, which is fucking lame. But yeah. They've also introduced a new follow button to make it easier to follow people back and a way to approve all your follow requests at once if your account is private, as mine is.

Zuck said there was more to come, including legs. Wait, no, that's a different feature set. Different one. Hopefully including the ability to post to Threads from the web, direct messages, improved accessibility, better search, and a TweetDeck-like way to keep tabs on Threads posts. He then stated he's going to rebrand it eventually to Z, and it will do everything known to man.

That's it. That's it. Oh, God. The funny part is that Zuckerberg owns the trademark to X for social media, so I can't wait for this one. See, that's what the cage fight should be about, who gets the trademark. But then they're going to have to bring in Satya Nadella because Microsoft owns a trademark on X, too, for different things.

Everybody except for Elon has a trademark on X. And Elon wants to make it the Everything app, which everybody else has the trademarks for. And everybody else is doing. All of these sites and services and apps are starting to just become the same damn thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of something becoming the same damn thing, I saw this headline, and this was a head scratcher. Google Docs can now automatically add line numbers. Oh, thank God they've got a feature from Excel from 1994. I know.

I was just like, wow. That took you a long time. I was like, either Google – I mean, this had to be – I know it was a slow news week, but Jesus Christ, man. Google Docs.

The first thing is it's like, okay, why didn't they have that already? The second is this is news? So, I had to perpetuate it because that's what we do. That's what we do. Yes, it is. We amplify the stupid. Yes, we do. Speaking of, Elon Musk says Twitter will soon only offer dark mode because it's, quote, better in every way, which it's not.

It's not. It's not. It's actually not. You know what's better in every way? Light mode that switches to dark mode. That's really good. Choice. Choice. Choice is good. Choice. Yeah, because I have an astigmatism, which means I can experience halation, which is – when I'm looking at white text on a black background, I close my eyes and it is just lines of yellow.

Yellow as far as I can see. It's not the best. Yeah, that's why I don't use dark mode anymore. Because I tried it and it makes it very hard to read and it makes – it gives me headaches. Like if I have to read a lot of stuff in dark mode, I get a headache, which is why I fucking hate dark mode.

So, another reason to say, can I have a refund for my ex-blue? Okay. And still more problems for other decentralized social networks. Mastodon has got a major CSAM problem. Shocking.

Shocking. It's gained popularity over the past year as Twitter – sorry, ex-users looked for alternatives. It hasn't gained that much popularity. That's the problem. There's 13 million people on it. That's not popular. No. Part of its appeal is its decentralized nature that insulates it against the whims of billionaires who speak before they think.

It also insulates you against moderation, which is exactly why a lot of child pornographers have moved over there. Well, what's great is there's only 13 million people on there, so it makes you very much easier to find dumbasses. A study from Stanford found 112 matches of known child sexual abuse material over a two-day period with almost 2,000 posts using common hashtags related to abusive material.

Researcher David Thiel says we got more photo DNA hits in a two-day period than we've probably had in the entire history of our organization of doing any kind of social media analysis, and it's not even close. Well, at least it's making their job easier. Hey, they found a niche.

They did. That's a big part of your marketing, right? Yep. Wow. Wow. Okay. Well, as you said before, nobody has any new ideas for these, and TikTok is fighting back with text posts because that's what I want to do when I go to TikTok.

I want to read. That's the biggest complaint about threads, which is you automatically got all your Instagram people that you follow for visuals, and now they are typing, and they're not that interesting. Especially if you look at people I follow on TikTok.

Different apps for different purposes kind of make sense. Trying to do everything, not so much. You hear that, Elon? The dark side. Ha! With Dave. Step into the intriguing realm of the dark side with Dave, captained by renowned podcast supremo, Dave Bittner.

Not only does Dave command the Cyber Wire podcast, your go-to for cybersecurity updates, but he also collaborates with Joe Kerrigan for Hacking Humans, a deep dive into the harsher aspects of human nature. Alongside Ben Yellen, he co-hosts Caveat, unmasking our intrusive tendencies.

Plus, he acknowledges the hidden emotions of our mechanical allies in control loop. Be ready for a thrilling voyage across these themes with The Dark Side with Dave. Hi, Dave. Wow. Okay. Surprise! Happy birthday!

Happy birthday! Woo! Well, thank you. I say the greatest gift I could ask for was that intro. Was that – did you make that or was that assisted in any way there? It was augmented. Augmented.

I like that. I like that as a term of art. Yes. My writing has been augmented. Very good. Yes, indeed. It is my birthday as we record this and I'm happy to start another trip around the sun.

You know, a sure sign that you're older, Dave, is you actually just, you know, work on your birthday instead of like taking the entire week off like we did in our 20s. Well, truth be told, I had actually blocked off this day to be a day off for me, but then my colleagues started just scheduling stuff, you know, disregarding the fact that I – Rudely ignoring you.

Yes. Right. Right. And it got to the point where it would be less work for me to just go ahead and do the things that everybody wanted from me than to go ahead and reschedule them all. Right. So here I am. So happy birthday. Yes.

Yes. Now, let me ask you. Are we all in our 50s now? We are. Yes, Brian finally joined us. I was drawn unwillingly across the line back in May. Yes. All right, young man. Well, welcome to the club.

It is a dubious distinction, although I guess I'll take the wisdom over youth, although I wish I could have both, right? Although in today's world, wisdom and about six bucks will get you. Coffee. That's true.

It seems a bit – it seems a bit devalued these days. Okay. Then can I have my working joints back and then I'll just be stupid? I'll trade. I'll take it back. I'll take that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how many trips around is this for you, Dave? So I just turned 54. All right.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. Will you still need me? Will you still – why does it feed me when I'm – well, it's 64, but 54. Yeah. So, you know, all systems nominal. Okay. Yeah.

With the help of some modern pharmaceuticals. There we go. With some augmentation. Yes. Right. Yeah. I mean I can't do this all on my own. That would be crazy. But no, I'm keeping alive. I can't complain.

Who would care if I did? Exactly. Nobody listens to us anymore. We're too old. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Well, speaking of old guys, I have an old sober guy movie review. Since Dave – or Brian does Drunk on a Plane movie reviews, I'm going to do sober from my bed movie reviews.

Okay. That's how I roll. Yeah. I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Wow. Okay. Dave, have you seen it? Is Jason really the only one that's seen it? I have not seen it. Wow. This is shocking that the three of us have seen it. My wife has seen it. I know. You would think I would be there.

But the problem for me was that the release of this film coincided with the opening of my Hello, Dolly! show. Oh, right. You were busy. So I was a little busy and I have not made it to see it yet. What I'm hoping is that it's – I mean, I guess I got to get to it because I can't imagine it's going to be in theaters all that much longer.

Go see it for your birthday. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. I haven't seen it yet either. It's just my son isn't quite old enough to make the trip to this movie yet. So I will be waiting for it to come out on streaming and watch it then. But – okay. So spoiler-free, thumbs up or thumbs down, Jason?

Two thumbs up. I absolutely adored it. Excellent. Terrific. That's good. I had a blast. Even with Phoebe Waller, what's her nuts? I still enjoyed it. Well, I love her. I love her. I like her a lot too.

I enjoyed Fleabag very much. I understand there are lots of people who have their dander up with her in this film, but I come into it with an open mind. I feel like this happens to women in particular that do more than just one thing.

Like if she's – oh, you act? That's fine. You act and write? Oh, fuck you. Stay in your lane, little lady. Stay in your lane. That happened with What's-Her-Face who wrote Juno. I can't even remember that woman's name anymore. Yeah. Then it happened to What's-Her-Face that did Girls.

I can't remember her name anymore either, but yeah, there was a lot of anger directed at these ladies that don't stay in their lane. So good on her, Jason. Screw you, Jason. You're wrong about What's-Her-Nuts. I said I liked her in the movie, so shut up. Well, but she didn't ruin the movie for you. She didn't – I mean, how was she in this film for you, Jason?

I can only say it as many times as I can fucking say it. I liked her in this movie. Jesus. Now, Jason, Jason, stop being so down on her. There must have been some things about her that you liked in this movie.

I really enjoyed Killing Eve, too, so she could write and act. Fine. I just hated Fleabag. There, there. That's fine. That's fine. That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. I loved that Fleabag. It was great. But this is good. Do you feel this was a good wrap-up to the Indiana Jones?

I'm going to stick with – Trilogy. We're going to ignore – we're going to ignore the crystal skull completely. Right. Yeah, it was perfect. Because that was a steaming pile of shit. But yeah. It was – yeah. No, I thought it was – this should have been the final movie. Just forget about the nuking the fridge.

This was a fine Indiana Jones movie. You just have to remember it's an Indiana Jones movie. And it was perfect as far as I can tell. Okay. Let me ask one last follow-up question to this. Did Harrison Ford actually act or did he just inhabit his grumpy guy persona as Indiana Jones?

Well, he acted as Indiana Jones. I mean, it's kind of it. No, but you know, like in the last 10 years, Harrison Ford has become a persona. Oh, yes, yes. And that's all he does anymore. Right. No, Indiana Jones showed up to work for this. Okay, good. That's good to hear. All right. Yeah.

Brian's right. He just kind of comes in. He grumbles in the microphone. Well, he does that too because he's old Indiana Jones, but – Right. The age regression was fantastic. Just everything – I mean, you couldn't even tell. It's just like – So no uncanny value anymore?

It really felt natural. No, it felt natural. It really felt like I was watching a flashback like that they filmed back then. I thought it was fantastic. Then I guess it's really good that they're on strike right now to try to stop that sort of stuff from happening without them. Yeah. But I mean, that's really high praise.

That's the highest praise you can give for something like that, that it wasn't distracting. Not at all. Absolutely not. No. All right. Well, I will up my attempt to see it in the theater then. Maybe I'll try to get out there and see it this weekend. I highly recommend it. Yeah. We've come a long way since Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One in terms of the Uncanny Valley, I guess.

All right. Yeah. And Princess Leia. Yeah. That too. Yeah. Yeah. No, for me, I just, I didn't even notice. Did not even notice. Good. So, and just the story was great. The beats were great. And you just have to remember, it's an Indiana Jones movie.

There are going to be beats that they are going to play again, you know? And this is the last Tarasso. There are going to be some callbacks. Lots of them. And I loved every one of them. So. Yeah. I'm in for that. Yeah. Can't come to streaming soon enough for me. There you go. Well, if it can't come to streaming soon enough for you, you can always go to Sweden.

There you go. That's true. But I can't watch those handheld camera movie theater versions. Oh, they have tripods nowadays, Brian. I can't. I don't want to hear the people eating popcorn, Jason. The thing is, you probably just don't want to see the subtitles in Korean.

That's the worst part. Right. That's true. Right. Right. Yes. There were no subtitles in Korean for this one. This was good. So, yeah. Yeah. No, I can't. I was thoroughly surprised. I was like, my choices were Barbie, Indiana Jones, or Oppenheimer, and I chose for Indy.

Okay. I think I chose wisely. I've heard good things about both Barbie and Oppenheimer, too, though. I have, too. Yeah. So, all three of those movies are ones I hope to see. Maybe they'll be on my plane, and I can give my drunk on a plane movie reviews when I head back home.

You know what's out of that list, though, that nobody's saying good things about? Mission Impossible. Actually, nobody's saying anything about Mission Impossible. Just Kara Swisher. She's the only person singing the praises because she loves Tom Cruise. The only other person as short as she is. I don't listen to her anymore.

I've missed her praise, but I haven't heard anybody say anything about it. It's just like, yeah, it's out. That's about it. It's out. Is it doing good business? Do we know? Overseas, it did. I don't know if it did well here. Yeah, domestically, no. No. Domestically, Indy and Mission Impossible, both are kind of tanking compared to Barbie and Oppenheimer.

So, especially compared to Barbie. Barbie's kicking. Yeah, Barbie's massive. My son saw Barbie with a bunch of his buddies. So, here's just an interesting little window for one of his – so, my son is 16 years old. He's heading into his junior year in high school.

And for one of his buddies' birthday parties, all of the guys got together and they went to see the Barbie movie. Missed opportunity. And they loved it. Good place to pick up chicks. Oh, yeah, that too. They loved it. They loved it. He thought it was great.

So, yeah, that's on my list as well. Excellent. So, I put this particular article in here because, Dave, you and I have talked about this quite a bit. The AI-ification of voiceover and voiceover actors and things like that. Well, and we've also – Brian and I have talked about the news app, Artifact.

And Artifact, we've both given up on because they started to gamify it. Yeah, I don't need my news gamified. No, I don't need badges and stars. I just want to read the news. Well, apparently now you can go have Snoop Dogg or Gwyneth Paltrow read the news to you because they have, quote-unquote, AI voices that will read the news to you.

Huh. As a person who has a daily tech news show and Dave as someone who has 17 daily cybersecurity news shows, this got my dander up just a smidge but not a whole lot. Yeah, I'm curious what your take is on this.

Well, I think as we've said, this is inevitable. This is going to come. Some of the things that caught my eye here in the story you shared was how they're using – they have a voice called Mr. President, which sounds like Obama.

This is what caught my eye on the article as well. They have one called – Same. Yeah, they have one called Dwight. It's nice that they paid and licensed two celebrities and then just went ahead and ripped off other ones. That they couldn't probably get. Right. Yeah. And I don't know how people are going to fight this because how do you prove that the voice was trained on the actual celebrity versus it was trained on a celebrity impersonator?

Yeah, in clean room it basically. I sit there and I watch episodes of The Office if I have a voice like Dwight's and then I just recreate his mannerisms with just a little – with my own voice and my voiceover of it. They train it on that, which is close enough.

So when it reads it, boom, you've got your Dwight for a tenth of the price. Right. But what I'm saying is – And probably legally. Well, but what I'm saying is like you could actually use Dwight's voice but say that you did it the clean way.

Didn't. Right. Right. And how do they prove the way that you did it or didn't do it? That's – Federal court. Right. Well, and it may come to that. Like I can imagine I would – it would be fun to have my news read by James Earl Jones or Christopher Walken or – but also I will say my experience has been that like when you do this with your navigation system, like Waze, it does get old kind of fast.

Like it's fun for a while but there comes a point when what you really want is a neutral voice to read your news or your directions or whatever. I don't know. I had an old Garmin back in the day that had the unlicensed Darth Vader voice and that was awesome and I could still be using it today.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a good point. We did a road trip a couple years ago and Cookie Monster was our pilot and that actually was quite fun. Yeah. But do you want that every day on the way to the office? Yeah. Well, I think if they could find a way to refresh their jokes, then I think they'd get a lot more mileage out of them.

Like I got tired of Cookie Monster wondering if the police ahead had cookies. Yeah. See, and that's why I think that this is doomed to failure. A, well, because Artifact is doomed to failure. But there are going to be other apps that do this. The thing is these stories aren't written for voice.

They're written for the page. So until someone comes along and starts rephrasing them, I guess, with fucking AI. Yeah, that can be done. They'll just rephrase them and then have them reread. So summarize this article and read it from Snoop. Great. Yeah.

Okay. I will say that what's one of the things that ChatGPT is remarkably good at, which is if you give it all the information it needs, if you're not asking it to draw on its own body of information and you just say, take this story, take these several paragraphs, rephrase them, rewrite them for the spoken word or rewrite them in the style of NPR or rewrite them in the style of AP.

Right. It's really good at that. Yeah. And you can take something that's – you can take impenetrable writing for the spoken word and ChatGPT will get you 90% of the way there. Yes, you'll still have to do a pass on your own to just put it in your own voice, clean some things up.

But it's scary good at it. Yeah, it is. Oh, well. I know, right? It was good while it lasted. There will be lawsuits. I mean, again, I think back to the Garmins, you know, they had those knockoff voices and eventually they had to stop doing those.

Amazon tried to roll out celebrity voices and then basically got out of the game because they knew that they couldn't do it without licensing it. It was getting too expensive because, you know, James Earl Jones wants to get paid if your Amazon Alexa is going to start talking to you in Darth Vader's voice.

And not only, you know, Darth Vader's voice, then you're getting into you have to license from Lucasfilm, which now means Disney, which means real money. You know, if people push back on this, it's going to have to – they're going to have to pay up. I think that's where we're getting to or they're just not and it's chaos and anarchy and to hell with everything.

Well, I think the real thing is people don't want it. I mean that's – when you mentioned Amazon just now, they got out of the voice game because nobody was – wanted to pay for it or use it. I mean they had Sam Jackson forever and nobody was using it. I think that's a tough one with the Alexa and with a lot of these voice assistants because, as we've talked about, and this veers off into a tangent, but I'll just briefly touch on it.

Nobody knew it was even there because there's no fucking manual and there's no way to figure out what features are even available. That is the biggest challenge with all the voice assistants right now. So I would argue that, yes, a lot of people don't want it, but also I think a lot of people didn't even know it was an option.

What happens when these systems can synthesize the voice on the fly? So there's no menu that you choose from. You can choose anybody at any time. For anything, yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, I want Snoop Dogg to read my news.

I want Samuel L. Jackson to read my news today and it just does it. We better invent those Star Trek replicators soon and get rid of the need for money. That's all I'm saying. Oh, man. I'm going to be selling fans on the street pretty soon. I think some of this stuff is on a collision course with the Supreme Court with copyright and all that stuff.

Yeah. It's a good time to be an IP lawyer. Yeah, for sure. Except nobody can afford to hire them because nobody has a job. That's true. I mean, you see, we talked about it a couple weeks ago, like Sarah Silverman was suing ChatGPT and all that sort of stuff.

So the lawsuits are starting. So it's going to be interesting times. But, yeah, right now it's not looking good for, you know, people. Good for companies, bad for peoples. So we got a bit of other news here.

In a move to prevent public companies from delaying news about cyber attacks, the SEC has set a four-day deadline to disclose material cybersecurity incidents. Now, they put a lot of carve-outs in here. So if it's something that would lead to substantial risk to national security or public safety, you get a longer time period.

And I can see a lot of fudging there, but we'll see. These carve-outs are always a bit of a problem, aren't they? Yeah. I had a really interesting conversation yesterday with a subject matter expert from Accenture who was all over this.

And she was saying that a lot of this hinges on the word material. So we agreed that there are going to be a lot of in-house counsel folks who are going to be chewing on that word material and deciding because it is at the moment of decision that the breach is material that the clock starts ticking.

So if we take a month in-house and golly, we just can't decide whether this is material or not, that might delay the release. Now, whether or not that's defensible, if the SEC comes knocking and says, okay, prove it that you knew this wasn't material, that's a whole different thing.

And the SEC, of course, has a lot of power over these organizations. But I don't know. Overall, I mean, I think four days is pretty reasonable for public companies. Yeah, especially, you know, it's just – it's also common now and it's – I think about like LastPass when they tried to backpedal it and didn't want to announce it.

And it's just – it's incredibly frustrating if you're relying on these companies for something. And if it's been breached, you should know. You should know as a user of the products and certainly as an investor. And four days is more than enough time for the C-suite to offload their stock and head to Belize.

They can have their money moved and out of the country before anybody is the wiser. Come on. That's four days is more than enough time. Yeah, well, and I think also it's enough time for them to make their case with regulators that if there is a reason that they think they should delay disclosure for the things like you outlined, Brian, if there's national security or something like that.

Or it could put undue burden on them from a trade secrets sort of view. Or one of the other things is if revealing it will make things worse, if it will make things less safe, then they can make that case. Yeah, four days seems reasonable to me.

I'm sure there are lots of folks who are disagreeing, but – Yeah, and the other thing is you have to get sign-off from the attorney general if it's a national security or public safety risk. So you do need at least a little bit of time. I'm just wondering how they're going to put that pipeline in place.

Yeah, right. Is there a back phone to the attorney general? I was just going to say, is there a red phone to the attorney general? Yeah. Right. Let me ask you a question. I got some customer support here. Is this material, my man? Right. Poop emoji in response. Secretary Elon says, poop.

Oh, my goodness. All right, guys. Well, it's been fun as usual. And get your butt to the theater and happy birthday, Dave. I will. I will. I'll get myself a birthday cupcake and a little hat and a sparkler. And I'll sit in the front row of the theater and watch Indiana Jones and have myself a good old time.

Woo-hoo. All right. Go enjoy Phoebe Waller. What's her face? There you go. I'll sing shout-outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Josh. Welcome back, Josh. Thank you, Josh. Over at PayPal, we've got Mark and Charlie. That's it.

Light week. That's it this time. Over the tip jar, we've got Daryl Ross, Nick, Adam, and Ashley. And remember, everyone, if you want to sign up for our Patreon feed, it starts at $3 a month. You can give us more if you want, but we'll take the $3, and you get every episode ad-free and in high-res and just a little bit early.

So get on it. Yeah. And then, of course, in sad news this week, Sinead O'Connor, the Irish singer behind Nothing Compares to You and More, has passed away at 56. We've talked about her on the show many times before. I had the pleasure of working with her for a while. I genuinely loved her as a person.

It's just all very sad, and I don't – yeah. I just – I can't even really fucking talk about it. Yep. Sorry, man. Sorry. All right. Until next time, on that high note, I'm Jason DeFillippo. Wee-hee! And I'm Brian Schilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at gog.show slash 611. gog.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment. It's almost as good as X. Sharing the show with your friends, enemies, or anyone in between is freeing to be almost as good as cash.

Almost. At gog.show, you can find a link to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans. Head over to gog.show slash contact to send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about. gog.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably a five-star that we can read on the air.

Stay grumpy and keep X-ing. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place.

Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead. With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.