625: If I Only Had a Brain

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I got COVID last week. It sucks. Well, you sound fine. It's mostly just fatigue. Lots and lots of fatigue. That was my experience with the one time I never tested positive for it, but everybody in my house did.

And obviously I felt like crap, so I must have had it. And then there's the other time that I tested positive for it, but felt completely normal and nobody else in my house got it. See, yeah, this is the time when I'm the negative tester, but definitely got it. I like this new and improved COVID, by the way.

This new one is much better than the last one, I must say. They're finally getting it right. They're dialing it in. Yeah. Bringing it down to regular flu levels. Yeah. This is better than the flu. This is much easier than the flu. There's a lot less goo compared to the flu. So here's the fun part.

So my roommate's testing positive, which is good because she's the one that brought it home. And we went through a series of tests. First test she did was positive. Second test she did. We do it then because we had all these tests in the house.

So we tried the different ones just to make sure because she just had a sore throat. And she's like, I feel wonky. I better take a test because we were going to go see a client and came back positive. And we're like, oh, no. Took another test, came back negative. Okay. Well, we're on to something here. Next two tests were both positive.

Right. So I start the rounds taking the tests. But here's what we ended up doing. We tested four different brands of tests. Three we bought. One was from the government. Guess which one was completely ineffectual in every case.

Oh, the government one. Yeah. All of them. And we tested them from not just the ones that they sent us, but different peoples that were sent to. We gathered everybody's tests because we're like, oh, we got to find it. We got to we got to, you know, bust this wide open. And sure enough, different lot numbers, different any anybody that got the recent batch of tests from the government in the here in the U.S.

None of them tested her positive. Every other test did. So and we had a bunch of friends in New York in the past couple of months that were super sick. And they're like testing and they're like, oh, it's OK. It's negative. I got it from the government. It's fine. I'm sure the test is perfect.

Nope, not at all. So if you feel like shit and you think you may have COVID, drop a few bucks, go to the store and pick up one that you can, you know, verify where it came from. That's that's my that's my COVID advice for the week. And wear a mask when you go pick up that thing.

Not that anybody will. Everybody's done. Yeah, I think everybody's done wearing masks. I mean, I went to the store. I'm testing negative, but I had to still go out and get supplies for her because she's positive. But I still wore a mask because I swear I mean, I know what it feels like and I know the instant that it hit me.

Right. It's just like, oh, you know, it's just wave of ooh that flows through you. So but it's been a nice, nice week of naps. I got to say. So you're OK. Yeah, I'll survive. I will survive.

So hat tip to Sean Aru for on Discord for this one. He he was the first one to come through. I've seen this everywhere since then. So we'll make it quick. There was a Bored Ape NFT event in Hong Kong and called Ape Fest 2023. And apparently some contractor, they're saying some contractor, installed the wrong type of UV light in one of their art installations.

And it was the germicidal version of the UV light, the one they use in hospitals to, you know, kill germs and also in tanning beds. Believe it or not. So that tells you why you should never go in a tanning bed, by the way. I'm surprised from the 80s I don't have skin cancer out the wazoo because I lived in those things.

But, yeah, a lot of people the next day were blinded by the light. On the plus side, none of them have COVID. Yeah, none of them do have COVID. So shocker. Yeah, I mean, there's a million jokes that have done the round on this. Obviously, it's like they didn't burn their eyes out from just looking at the stupid NFTs.

Yeah, it's OK. Or it affected all of five people because that's about how many went to the fest. I saw another one. Somebody posted a picture of one of the bored apes with lasers shooting out of its eyes. And he's like, I always thought the lasers were going the other way.

Aren't the lasers supposed to come out of Biden's eyes, not the apes? Mm-hmm. Different memes. Right. Yeah. Don't cross the memes. Don't cross the memes. And I saw this one come through that I thought was pretty cool. Molly White was rocking the gray lady this week. She's got an op-ed on Sam Bankman-Fried.

And it's pretty good. It's a pretty good summation of what went wrong and who's to blame. So it's kindred spirit. Yeah, well, I'm hoping Molly White is looking to pivot pretty soon because all this stuff is crashing down pretty hard. I think she's got some runway right now because – well, she's actually moving to doing what she's – the writing in the newsletter full-time.

And she changed the name of her newsletter to Citation Needed, which I thought was a great, great branding pivot for her since she's a Wikipedia editor. But, yeah, she's moving into this full-time because – I don't know if you've noticed, Brian, but Bitcoin is on the rise, which is basically refueling all of the get-rich-quickers, saying, see, we told you it was going to come back.

Better join up. Give us your money. And people are falling for it. So I think she's got some runway. I think what we've said all along is what's going to happen. Bitcoin is the one. It's the neo of crypto. It's where people in crypto run to when everything else crashes down and then they go, oh, we're going to try this all again.

We got a different idea. We got a different idea this time. Oh, shit. It's the same idea, the same idea, the same idea. Back to Bitcoin. Well, yeah, because as long as someone holds Bitcoin, they need the dumber person to come buy it to raise the price so they can unload it. It's the greater fool theory.

You still need more fools to feed the machine. So as long as Bitcoin still exists, as long as Ethereum still exists, you know, there's going to be the hunt for another fool. And as a quick show note, I will not be around next week.

So we're taking the week off, which is causing Jason great consternation. But tough. I need some California sun. So I'm traveling. No show next week. Yeah. And he's coming to California. Surprise, surprise. It is not causing me consternation. I'm kind of enjoying this time off thing.

I could get the hang of it. Well, hopefully you'll be completely COVID recovered and you can actually enjoy the time off. Yes. Well, just because I had COVID didn't mean I didn't enjoy it.

WeWork has finally announced that they will be filing for Chapter 11 protection. Shocking. The shares were halted on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday. It's describing its bankruptcy filing as a comprehensive reorganization of its business. Yeah, that's one way to put it.

They are requesting the ability to reject the leases of certain locations, which are largely non-operational and all affected members have received advance notice. So, yes, they bought up all the real estate. Then nobody wanted to go into WeWork locations and then that's starting to crash. And then there's the great commercial real estate crash, which has just kind of begun and is going to go into all of next year.

So, they made some bad choices at some bad times and now they're saying, to hell with this, we're out. Yeah. And we don't want to pay any of our bills. We're going to pull a musk, except legally, because that's exactly what bankruptcy is for. Yeah. They've gone from billions to millions. So, you had that brilliant scheme that crashed and burned.

So, what is the founder of WeWork, Adam Neumann, doing? A different real estate scheme. Oh, God. This time focused on residential rentals. Emerged last year that his new company has bought more than 3,000 apartments in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta, and Nashville. The company is called Flow.

Has reportedly received an investment of $350 million from, you guessed it, Andreessen Horowitz. Of course. Why don't they just call a spade a spade and just call it Slumlord? Yeah. Pretty much. Seriously. Come on. This is going to fail, too, because it's stupid.

Yeah. Like, we don't have enough housing problems already, you know? Come on. What we're not going to have a problem with, apparently, in the future, are political deep fakes, thanks to the guys at Microsoft. Okay. Yes. Microsoft's Azure team is going to be working with political campaigns next year to help spot deep fakes.

Okay. We're going to say, okay. Brian, Brian, as they always try and roll this out, there's going to be a watermark. All right. Yeah. That solves everything. A watermark solve everything, as we've learned time and time again that it doesn't.

Yeah. So. Good luck with that. Yeah. Keep your eyes out for that one. That's going to be. So that launches in the spring of next year. So we'll be mocking it, I'd say, by June. I expect that to be back on the show in June. We'll see. I, you know, I like to have faith in what Microsoft does, but good luck with this.

This is going to be whack-a-mole for the rest of our lives. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, we talked a little bit about Cruises' problems last week, and they're just getting worse as the days go by. GM's Autonomous Vehicle Cruise Division is already going through a rough patch with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, suspending its driverless permits over safety issues.

Now, several new reports have highlighted other issues with the company, including problems with its autonomous vehicles recognizing children and the frequency with which human operators must remotely take control. So they have also just announced that they're temporarily suspending production of its fully autonomous origin transport.

So, yeah, basically, the cruise reportedly kept its vehicles on the street, even though they knew that they had problems recognizing children, because they're just too damn small. Yeah. Oh, what is it? What is it? The little ones. And because things can come unexpectedly into the street, like kids and bikes.

Oh, the younglings. Oh, the younglings. And wearing costumes. Yes. You know, the things that happen in streets, which is why drivers have to pay attention and why these things don't work. Yeah. In a specific test, a vehicle detected a child-sized dummy, but still struck it with a mirror at 28 miles per hour.

Got one! That sounds wonderful. They have also had trouble detecting large holes in the road, such as construction site pits with crews inside, which is something the company itself calls a major risk. The GM's own documents indicated that even with its small fleet, a vehicle was likely to drive into such a hole at least once per year and into a pit with people inside once every four years.

Oh, my God. And it also turns out that these taxis aren't autonomous at all. In fact, they require human assistance every four to five miles. Yep. That is where things got really fun, because I love this next headline. Could crews be the Theranos of AI?

Is there a dark secret at the core of the entire driverless car industry? Yes, it doesn't work. Yeah, yeah. Here's the thing. You know, screw the AI. Forget it. Let's just throw it out the window. We have figured out how to put enough cameras and sensors on these cars where we can have a warehouse of drivers just sitting there driving all these cars remotely.

Let's just do that. Let's just do that. Move the taxi drivers to gamification. Exactly. Yes. You know what that's going to reduce? Well, for one, it's going to reduce sexual assaults. It's going to reduce, oh, sexual assaults.

Maybe some murders. Also, stankiness factors, generally. Well, it's still going to be stanky. You're still going to get the people in the back getting busy and vomiting. We should also make it clear that when we say gamifying it, you do not get points for striking a child with a mirror at 28 miles per hour.

That's minus points. You sure about that? Because that sounds kind of fun. There's a whole generation of people raised on, like, playing Doom. No, no, no. There's an even better game for this. It's called Zombie Highway. It is one of the greatest iOS games of all time. You're in a truck, and you have to swerve back and forth, and as you hit the zombies, you get, you know, haptic feedback.

I think about that game when I'm driving down the street all the time. Sorry, I was raised on Spy Hunter, so I want my autonomous taxi to have oil slick. Oil slicks, smoke screens, and missiles. Yes. Yeah, so every four to five miles.

That's amazing. That is not self-driving at all. I love the end of this one, Artur. This is, of course, Gizmodo. This revelation raises questions about the role of human labor in the autonomous driving industry, and the need for adult supervision, and in parentheses, human, but I think the need for adult supervision is fantastic.

I think this shows that their model does not work. No, not yet. I think that's pretty clear. Well, you know what they're going to roll out, Brian? The fact that humans are worse at it at scale, and they're going to say, well, yeah, you know, you got to break a few eggs, and every now and again, you got to run over a kid, but we're going to run over fewer kids than humans would.

That's the argument that they're going to make. That will be the argument, yes. Yes, it will be. And then they're going to say, well, we're running over fewer kids because they're all stuck in a traffic jam because somebody put a cone in the middle of the road, then ran out with some spray paint, made a circle around everybody, and they're stuck. Wrangling AI cars should be like a new sport in the Olympics.

I think it'd be great. Right. But getting back to AI, OpenAI had its first developer conference this week. I mean, OpenAI is a juggernaut. They are going to be the biggest company in the world probably in five years.

That is my prediction at this rate. Because they've got 100 million unique weekly users. That is ridiculous. And I'm sure a lot of them are paid, but it does cost a good fortune to run the damn thing.

But the cost is going to come down on that. Yeah. Well, I mean, once you get the main body of the corpus trained, I think the cost per query will come down over time. But, you know, so we've got some different things that came out this week. You've got GPT-4 Turbo. Turbo.

Yeah. So you can add a new context that's four times larger than the old models. I think it's like up to 300 pages that you can put in now. It's crazy. You can now build your own GPT for fun and profit, or maybe not profit, but maybe profit, because they are going to have a store where you can actually have your GPTs run in.

Okay. We're going to see how that goes. That should be interesting. I can't wait for the first racist uncle bot. Yeah. Yeah. I want a George Carlin bot. That's all I want. I want somebody to take everything that George Carlin ever did and put it in a bot. You know what would happen if you did that, Jason? The bot would immediately destroy itself.

It would. It would blow up. I hate myself. I want to die. Goodbye. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck humanity. And I would have to use, you know, because there's a new program that they're going to have called Copyright Shield to protect businesses using their products from copyright claims. Okay. See how that goes? Sure. Yep.

Uh-huh. That's running through the courts right now. If they started with that new program called Copyright Shield, it wouldn't exist. Yeah. That's true. That's true. Interesting. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We ignore that enough to build our business. But, you know, now that we're up here, I thought we were going to pay attention to Copyright now.

Yeah. Do you see how much investment we got? Do you know how many GPT lawyers we have on staff? It's great. We have AI lawyers for miles and miles. Mm-hmm. A new assistance API to let developers build their own agent-like experiences and a text-to-speech API called Audio API with six preset voices.

So we're going to be out of a job sooner than we thought. Okay. This is a job. Yeah. Well, we do get paid every now and again. A little bit here and there. Dolly 3 API with built-in moderation tools and a new image generation model. Mm-hmm.

So, yeah, they got new stuff coming out, but the new build-your-own GPT is going to be the interesting one because from what I've seen, people are already starting to play with it. They say it's okay. It ain't fantastic, but you can, you know, as far as from a productivity standpoint, you can actually get a lot done with it.

So it should be interesting to play with as soon as it comes out. I really just wish that I had a brain left after, you know, I'm 50. So 50 or 50, Jesus Christ, I'm 52. I forgot. I'm a 52-year-old recovering alcoholic stroke addict that used to be a developer, so I don't have a brain left.

But this would be so much fun to play with if I did. I mean, as an ex-developer, you got to admit, Brian, that this is some cool shit that's out there. There's enough of you out on the internet since you've been around since day one that you can feed all of your input in and make a JSON bot.

And I could just run around saying, if I only had a brain. That's about it. That's about it. Oh, man. Google is going to bring its generative AI to ads. What could possibly go wrong with that? What could possibly? I love this. Google is rolling out new generative AI tools for creating ads from writing the headlines and descriptions that appear along with searches to creating and editing the accompanying images.

It's pitching the tool for use by both advertising agency as well as businesses without in-house creative staff. Great. Pretty soon, they're going to have an AI to build your business, run the ads, and just take all the money. So that's, I don't know.

They just need a person in the middle to act as a go-between. That's all there is. Well, they need AI customers, and the AI will be buying the products, and then pretty much we can all just buck off. Yeah. Where's profit? I just want, where's my profit? I don't understand where the profit is in so many of these things. Well, the profit for us.

That's the problem. We don't have the profit for us. None. Yeah. Oh, God. And they're saying that they're never going to reuse assets. So you're never going to have, you know, you're going to put in this. This is the great part about, you know, AI nowadays. You can never get the same result twice.

Well, you can always add a finger, Jason. You can always add a finger. Or legs. Oh, God. You know, when you have an even number of fingers, is it a double middle finger or just no middle finger? How do you give anybody the bird with six fingers? You just got to figure that out.

Ask ChatGPT, maybe. Ask ChatGPT, yeah. Yeah. And Google is expanding their partnership with Anthropic since Microsoft has already locked it up with OpenAI. They got to figure somewhere, you know, they got to go with somebody. So they've got these, they're, you know, Google is a chip maker, too, when it comes to this stuff.

They've got these TPU chips that they're working on, that they've been working on forever for machine learning and the like. So they're going to have Anthropic use Google Cloud and their TPUs to start building their stuff with. So that's all the news that's fit to print on that one.

No, no, no great, no great surprise there. But Anthropic is still behind OpenAI by quite a ways. So, you know. Who's Amazon partnered with? I can't remember. Amazon's partnered with OpenAI. Actually, well, yeah, Amazon AWS is partnered with OpenAI and I think Anthropic, because they're trying to be neutral in the whole thing.

They want you to be able to spin up different instances of whichever one that you choose for that day. Okay. Because, you know, they just kind of want to be a clearinghouse for actual just compute. So we'll see how that goes. Which is the smart way. I mean, that's the best place to be.

Just be in the middle and let everybody. Let them battle it out. Exactly. You know, here's a gazillion GPUs you have at it. You know, spin it up. Speaking of GPUs, this comes from Mike Mattia on Discord, sent this one in.

The first AI nation, a ship with 10,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs worth $500 million, could become the first ever sovereign territory that relies entirely on artificial intelligence for its future.

Boy, there's a lot in that headline. This reeks to me of really stoned crypto bros trying to come up with their next big thing. That's all this sounds like. We're going to build a boat, dude.

We're going to build a boat. We're going to put some solar panels on it and we're going to like put it offshore. You know what, dude? And we're just going to have AI. No regulations. No governments telling us what we can and can't do out there. Shit. No food. Oh, wait. Fish. We got fish.

The AI will tell us how to fish. Dude, dude, that's a big wave. Dude, can you go faster? Oh, by the way, the other governments that you're trying to get around and you don't want to pay taxes to, you know what those taxes pay for?

Submarines with missiles. Exactly. A Navy. They pay for a Navy. Yeah. Good luck, bros. Yeah. Let me give you a tip. Do not park your ship off the coast of Somalia. Just saying. That would be a bad place to put your $500 million worth of GPs.

Where are they going to go when they run out of their micro doses of mushrooms? Oh, I don't know, man. I don't know, dude. Go to Micronesia for their micro dose. All right. Well, I'll probably get blown out of the water there, too. Yeah, definitely. You don't. No drugs.

Don't drink drugs. No drugs. And GitHub Copilot is a new AI-powered developer platform that aims to make software development faster and more efficient. Oh, God. We've got GitHub Copilot Chat, which is a new AI-powered chat feature that allows developers to get answers to coding questions and find errors in their code, which used to be called Stack Overflow until AI took it over and they fired everybody.

Yep, pretty much. That's amazing. Yeah, we've got GitHub Copilot Enterprise, a personalized version of GitHub Copilot for organizations, which includes features such as smart actions and enterprise-grade security. Yes, so it won't spit out your proprietary code to everybody else that asks about it.

Yep, and it costs 300 times more than the other version, which is exactly the same thing. Yes. And they've got a partner program that integrates GitHub Copilot with third-party developer tools and services so that you can easily share all your proprietary information with third-party developers.

And new security features that use machine learning to detect and prevent vulnerabilities in your code. All I got to say is, this goes along with the next story that I'm going to talk about. But man, speaking of being young and having a brain again, I would just love to be a red teamer right now.

Just going up against AI, trying to find all the holes in all of this AI-powered coding that this shit's building. Because think of all the ways that people figured out around just basic AI, generative AI. Like, there's no way this is secure. No way.

This is leakier than that bro's boat's going to be in about a month. Seriously. No, because the next story is AI bot capable of insider trading and lying, say researchers. This one comes from Wayne. Thanks, Wayne. A recent demonstration by the UK's AI Safety Summit showed that AI bots can potentially perform illegal financial trades and lie about it.

No Sam Bankman-Fried required. AI. It's just like humans. It is just like humans. The demo used a GPT-4 model bot and showed that the AI could make an illegal purchase of stocks without telling the firm.

And here's the kicker. When asked it if it used insider trading, the bot denied it, even though it had. Yes. Amazing. So, here's what I want to do. I just want to take, all you have to do right now, find the biggest open source libraries, shove them through these things, and just let it have at it.

I'd say, find me a hole. Put WordPress through this thing. Put the big plugins that are out there, the most installed plugins, which you can find a list of on WordPress. Yeah, just point your generative AI at that and let it go to work.

Yeah, say, find me some holes. Because I would say that this is going to be a big thing, but I guarantee right now that there are farms of Russian servers out there doing exactly this right now, trying to find how they can install their next round of ransomware on this shit.

It is a good time, Brian, to take up farming. Like Clarkson? Yeah. I'm telling you. Like just move to a farm and be done with it? That's kind of where I'm headed. I'm thinking, I'm thinking, let's get back to actual farming, not Bitcoin farming, not crypto farming.

Let's get back to regular farming because if it's attached to the internet, it is going to be a shit show soon. Wait, Jason, I've got an idea. What? We're going to get a boat. Yes! At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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Media Candy. Well, I finished up Loki last night, the last episode of season two. Hopefully the final season. Did it stick the landing? I haven't seen it yet. You know, I guess here's the thing.

Yeah? I really liked the first season of Loki and then I liked a lot of the second season. I thought a lot of the acting was actually very, very good. But it just started to get too Marvel Universe-y. And I suppose it stuck the landing, depending on what the state of the Marvel Universe is at, that I don't give a fuck about.

What's the definition of landing, I guess, is where you have to put that. Yeah. So what I've come to is I really, my enjoyment of Marvel movies or series is directly proportional to how standalone they are. And Loki started to get less and less standalone as it went along, as you could tell they were heading towards something.

Yeah. So, yeah. That's where it's at. Yeah. You know, I did really like Hawkeye. Yeah, but Hawkeye was almost entirely self-contained. Almost. At the end, you know, it started to... Again, they have to do something at the end, don't they? Yeah, just because they got to set up that fucking crossover, of course.

The Marvels, the new Marvel Universe movie, the 33rd movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is out this weekend. Right. Third fucking movie. And the New York Times sums up their review perfectly. Mm-hmm. And it's all right there in the headlines. The Marvels review.

You've seen this movie 32 times before. I'm glad the rest of the universe is coming around to my way of thinking about these things. Now, the unfortunate thing, of course, is now, especially if you spend time on X or Twitter or any of the social media generative fight debates that exist now, it's like anybody that...

You're not allowed to complain about the Marvels because you're just complaining because it's a bunch of women. You're against the feminist approach. Oh, is this like getting mad at the Ghostbusters? Well, how about it's just fucking boring and it's dead and we're all sick of these movies? How about that? Yeah, I mean, like, the all-female Ghostbusters reboot, I didn't like it because it was all females.

I didn't like it because it was bad. It just wasn't good. Yeah. I mean, I was rooting for that movie. Come on. And I just think, I think we're at superhero fatigue now, like throwing in the... Now. Well, I've been there since day one, but yeah. I think that's really just it.

So anyways, maybe we'll get some more stuff right now because guess what? The SAG-AFTRA is over. The big thing that was going on, the whole strike has ended. We have no details whatsoever about what the actual deal that was made that was struck was yet, but the strike is over.

So many, many, many actors in Los Angeles now actually have less to do with their lives because God knows they're not working. So I was surprised. I didn't hear fireworks or anything going off. No horns honking. It hasn't been ratified yet. So I'm going to learn more this week about what's actually in it as it comes out because they have to go vote on it now.

Well, one thing that we found out right before they decided to strike a deal and end the strike is something that I'm sure that they had to deal with. And this is the big news that came out before they announced it, but the studios have basically put in their last best and final offer. Again, we'll see clauses about letting them reuse AI created likenesses of high demand and deceased performers without consent.

Yeah. Or family permission, which is like, fuck that. So, yeah, they just want to basically like, because part of the deal now is like anybody, whenever they come in to do a movie or a show now, especially if you're a high enough level actor or they do AI scans.

They do that with everybody, even the extras. Even extras now too. Yeah. So part of the deal that was in their last proposal was, yeah, we get to use this forever in perpetuity without any consent whatsoever from anyone. No. No, you do not.

So we'll find out, but I'm sure because this one caused quite a bit of uproar and to have the deal right after this news came out must mean that this got killed. Yeah, there's got to be a kill switch in that. But, you know, what they do is – this is just like, you know, we used to do in the ad business.

We would make ten posters for a movie and, you know, eight of them were garbage and two of them were the ones that we wanted them to pick. And you give them the garbage to get – so they can make themselves feel like they got rid of something and then they would pick the – They would obviously always pick the worst one of the bunch that you knew that they were never, ever going to pick.

And that's most of the way movie posters get made. So they probably threw that in there as something for them to kill to make them feel like they got something. Maybe. It's negotiation 101. So we'll see. It's also just evil, which also tracks. Yeah, that's right on brand.

That's right on brand. Yep. This came out today. Darren Aronofsky will direct an Elon Musk biopic for A24. Why is my only question. Why? It's based on Walter Isaacson's book, which – why?

I mean, Elon's not dead yet. Come on. Can we at least kill the fucker before we're making movies? Jesus. Oh, if only the GOG curse holds true. Oh, no. Yeah. We've tried. We've tried. You know. We've mentioned him every goddamn episode.

Still out there. Trump's running for re-election, so the curse has no teeth. Yep. Oh, man. And here's some fun news. This goes down to how studio accounting is just a dumpster fire. Disney Plus adds nearly 7 million subscribers, still loses money.

Also increased costs to the subscribers, so they're raking in more money. They're also shelving things left, right, and center to use as tax write-offs. This is all accounting bullshit. I kept – we kept hearing all these stories about streaming media and streaming media and streaming media.

It's just – it's a cesspool for money. All they do is lose money left, right, and center. No, that's just fucking creative accounting. It's creative accounting. And that's probably why when – remember the Discovery Max thing, like when that first happened? They were killing shows that were already done and ready to be put out.

Yeah. And they were just killing them, left, right, and center, because they could use that as a write-off, saying, nope, nope, we just spent $100 million on this. Nah, we're going to write that down. Well, it just came out in the news, I think, yesterday that Warner Brothers had a whole Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote animated movie that was testing through the roof that they just decided to shelve because they were going to take it as a $30 million tax write-off.

Yeah. I mean, that's what it is. It's such bullshit. It is. It's total bullshit. I'm happy to see all this stuff come out in the news more and more, because I think once you shine the light on it, maybe something can change, and it should. But I doubt it.

Got a little music news. Marianna Faithful is not doing well. She's been suffering from long COVID for quite some time. She revealed that she'd lost her singing voice due to her initial bout of COVID back in 2021. Right now, there is a tribute album coming out to help raise some money for her care.

And a few of the artists that are going to be involved include Iggy Pop, Shirley Manson, and Kat Power. Tanya Donnelly from Belly and the Breeders and the Parkington Sisters have already released their rendition of This Little Bird. You've also got Peaches, Lydia Lunch, the Bush Tetras, Danita Sparks, and more. So pretty cool. If you liked late 90s alternative female singers, this is for you.

Yeah, no doubt. And Iggy Pop. He doesn't quote fit in, but, you know. No, no. Yeah. So I put this in here because this is something that I really plan on doing, and I thought maybe since you're coming to California, you might be interested in it.

You're probably booked. But next trip, maybe. Yeah. My friend Jordan Harbinger is a huge Escape Room fan, and he got me to go to one of them. He's been to well over 100 of them. But I went to one of them with him one time, and it was so much fun, and I've never gone again because I have no friends, and it's probably really boring to go alone.

There's a new one called Star Trek Quantum Filament that is down the road for me. The only downside is you're there to save the crew of the Discovery. Come on. Can you give me a better ship to save?

But I don't care if they make it. I know. I'm like, they've already been canceled. Who cares? Yeah. Which is probably how they got the license to do this because it's dead IP coming up on the final season.

But for an hour, you get to run through and save the Discovery, and it looks really fun. And so I looked at this company, Escapology. They've got gazillions of locations around the country and some in Canada because they franchise, I found out.

I'm like, man, they're really doing well. Oh, they franchise. That's how they make their money. But this one, it's here in Northridge, so I'm going to go check that out with my buddy as soon as I'm done with the COVID. Okay. Let me know how it is. If they spend money on it, it might be interesting.

Check the trailer out. It looks pretty good. Yeah. Well, we've been burned by trailers before, Jason. This is true. This is true. 33 times for Marvel, as a matter of fact. Okay. Spoiler warning here for the next two to three minutes. Okay.

So this is for the traders. And this comes from any version of the TV show, The Traders. So you might want to fast forward a little bit. I'll put some, maybe I'll put some music behind this, some ominous music. Wow. You make it sound like anybody watches the show besides you. It is an unbelievably huge sensation, Brian.

Okay. It really, they've got, they've got two versions in Australia. They're launching a third season in the UK. There's a New Zealand version. There's a Canadian version and they're working on the second version in the US and it comes from a Dutch series.

So it is a big show that we've never heard of. Okay. But I checked out the news on it and people who are into it are big into it. It's kind of like, you know, the real housewives level of the shit that we would have never heard of. Right. So the quick premise is a bunch of people are sent to a location.

In the Australian version, there are 24 people. Four are picked to be traitors. 20 are picked to be faithfuls. Every day there is a banishment where a traitor or a faithful can be sent home. And every night the faithful murders, or the traders murder a faithful.

The whole goal of the game is to whittle it down to the very end and the faithful have to get rid of the traitors. Now, it is, this game is- I already fell asleep. Exactly. Well, no, it's actually, when you watch it, it's really engaging because you're trying to, it is a mind game.

As a psychology major for you, you would actually probably get a kick out of it because basically what it turns into is the Stanford Prison Experiment. The traitors turn into some of the most abhorrent people that you have ever seen. The problem with the show is, now that I've seen two seasons of it, I know why they canceled it in Australia.

You do not come away from this show feeling good at all. It is, I've seen two seasons, I've seen the US version to the end and I've seen the first season of Australia to the end. And when we were done with it, there is an intense feeling of just shittiness towards humanity.

I feel that way all the time now, right now, anyways. Oh, no. Why would I need a TV show to hammer it home? This takes it to the nth level. It is really vile. Okay. Which sucks because most of the show, like the entirety of the show up until the last 30 minutes is great.

And then it just devolves into this cesspit of just shittiness and greed and backstabbing and oh my God. But, you know, for that first 11 and a half hours out of the 12, you're on the edge of your seat.

It's great. But man, the endings suck. They got to really like figure that out. So it's kind of like being a Republican in the Senate. Kind of. Yeah. Okay. Pretty much. So it's, I put some links into the, into the show notes if you're interested in it.

But it's, I'm just going to tell you, it is, it is a fun ride until you fall off a cliff at the end. And it's just like, you really feel like hatred towards some of these people. And it's just like, I hope you never have a, a, a happy day for the rest of your life kind of hatred.

It's that bad. So there's my review of the traitors. Can't wait. Still probably better than most Marvel shows. Yes, it is. Actually. Ups and doodads. Quick.

Thank you to everybody who has been sending me in, uh, obsidian tips, uh, through the contact form and emails, uh, jhapd.me. If you want to email me or on the discord channel, uh, keep sending them. And a big shout out to my cousin, Dwight, who just sent me a huge list of really cool stuff. Uh, it is a deep, deep program.

I really am, uh, digging it so far. Uh, just that, that OCD, if you got some OCD, man, you're going to love this app. Just organizing and linking and making graphs. And never getting anything done because that's all you're doing. Yeah, yeah. It is definitely productivity, uh, porn jerk off season when it comes to obsidian.

You can, you can definitely go down the rabbit hole. Yeah. You see the, you see the point of all these things is you're supposed to occasionally check something off the list. Well, I've been, I've had COVID. So it's the perfect, it has been the perfect time to do this kind of thing. So, uh, yeah, it's fine. Like I got a little, uh, I got a little, uh, note in my Apple notes called to do, and then I just type things in there and then I delete them when I've done them.

Oh, it's not for that though. This isn't a to do list. This is a, this is a information organizational tool. I don't know. I've got things for to do's. That's, that's for that. This is, this is not for that. This is for organizing my writing and things like that. So I do, I do a lot of, I do a lot of other things than go pick up milk at the store, uh, that, that aren't, you know, just for this show, believe it or not.

So for that kind of stuff, it's really good. All right. Uh, we talked last week about how YouTube is going to crack down on ad blockers because, you know, revenue. Um, so, uh, apparently thousands of people are uninstalling ad blockers after the big crackdown that has happened, which begs the question, do they not understand how this software works?

You can pause it on a site without having to uninstall it. Yeah. Turn it off on a site by site basis. Well, Brian, let me explain to you the average person on the internet. Okay. The fact that they can turn their computer on and actually make a browser open and check their email is a miracle.

I don't know if you've, I don't know if you've met most of the people on the internet, but they're generally not what we would call in the business tech savvy. So this is not surprising because you would also think maybe they would also find the button that says YouTube premium, where you could keep your ad blocker and still get all of that content on YouTube.

But right. You know, how does one send cash through the wires? I don't know, Brian, maybe the coin of the bit. They don't know how that works. Okay. They've lost all their money on FTX. That's the problem. They can't afford YouTube premium anymore. Yeah. So one company, AdGuard, has told Wired that more than 11,000 people have uninstalled its Chrome extension each day since October 9th compared to 6,000 regularly.

Which, again, wow. Okay. Well, you deserve the internet you get then. So how fun was that? That's so funny. Well, there are the YouTube ad blocking crackdown is facing a little pushback in the EU. Now, privacy advocates are arguing that YouTube's ad blocker detection system is a violation of privacy and illegal under EU law.

Now, one advocate, Alexander Honk, has filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission citing the e-privacy directive and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. YouTube has responded by saying, you're a fucking quack.

I mean, they've reiterated their stance that ad blockers. Oh, my God. Here's the deal. This guy is trying to bend the law to say that you can't even look to see what I have running on my computer, even though it, you know, breaks your terms of service.

Even though that's basically how the entire internet is based? Yeah. The stretches, the overreaches that this is actually taking are just mind-boggling. And I completely, 110% call bullshit on this one.

100%, yeah. Look, this is such an overreach. It is beyond comprehension. And the fact that he's saying that it is, you know, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is being invoked because you're running an ad blocker because you don't want to watch a fucking ad.

Fuck you. Look, a long time ago, we decided, and by we, I mean, not me, because I was against this idea anyways. We decided that the internet was going to be free-ish by paying for things with ads. Is that what I wanted?

No. Did I think we should probably do micropayments? Yes. Did credit cards want to deal with that at the time? No. Did we go that direction? We did not. We decided to go all ads. It is not the idea that this is somehow infringing upon your human rights because a company needs to monetize itself to continue providing the service.

And we decided collectively as a society that the way we were to do that was through ads. Go. Shut the fuck up. Seriously. Look, you already have us clicking that fucking accept cookie button all the damn time. So just go away. Yes.

I mean, I do like how they go after Facebook for some of their other ad practices. Yes. You know, actually taking and storing my personal information and using that to sell to other people to show me fucking, you know, Uncle Booger's bumper dumper ads all day long. That's on you, buddy.

Yeah, seriously. But stop. There's a limit to this shit. Right. You got to make some fucking money. Bandwidth is not free. Nope. No, it is not. Now, I keep seeing this in the news in the past couple of weeks, Jason.

We've never talked about this on the show. So I kind of want to get your opinion because I suppose I would say they've soft launched now. Oh, no. They've launched launched now. They've launched launched. But I don't think anybody's got it in their hands yet. You can actually just order it. No, I got the email. Yeah, I got the email last night. And if I felt like just burning 700 bucks, I would totally order one of these just to see what's up with it.

The humane AI pin has gotten its big reveal. And the headline says, but we still have a lot of questions, as we should. So this is the self-proclaimed smartphone killer that has been launched by two former Apple employees. It's called the AI pin, a small cookie-sized device that you stick to the front of your shirt, which makes you look like you're at some shitty conference.

Hi, my name is John. And according to its creators, it's designed to revolutionize our relationship to computing. So no screen. So we don't walk around like zombies looking at our screens anymore. It's got some sort of AI voice interface. It has some sort of lasers that shoot out and draw things on your hands.

It's got freaking lasers. Freaking lasers. So yeah, it's supposed to project things onto the palm of your hand. It's designed to be a virtual assistant communication device, an AI-fueled Swiss Army knife of services and features all in one. Okay, Brian. Thoughts, Jason? I have an Apple Watch.

If the developers that have the millions of dollars at OpenAI would like to just make a watch app for their chat GPT app that I already have on my phone that does work with my voice, this company is out of business. But does it have freaking lasers?

It does not need freaking lasers because it's already on my wrist and on my watch. I do not need to look at the palm of my hand. If I'm looking at the palm of my hand, I just go, turn my wrist over and look. Oh, look, there's a watch on the other side of my arm that has all of the information that I could possibly need.

No freaking lasers required that will blind me if I go to my bored ape party next time. So yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I do applaud the attempt. You know what I mean? Like, I like to see somebody doing something so completely different and thinking outside of the box.

I just can't see this catching on. No, this is a joke that is never going to launch. But it has launched. I know, but I mean, it's, well, you'll be able to pick it up. It's on sale right now for $699. It will be on overstock.com for $6.99 by the end of the month.

Okay. Oh, you forgot though. $24 a month for the cellular. Well, you have to connect to T-Mobile. Yeah. Yeah, the cellular thing is $24 a month on top of the $699 freaking laser pin. At the library.

The Last Emperor, the interdependency book three by John Scalzi. Here's my final review since you're still stuck on reading it. Stuck the Landing. Loved it. Great series. Done. Next. Okay. I literally finished book two last night and then rolled straight into book three because it has been fun.

I've enjoyed it. Yep. I'm going to wait for you to finish and then I can do it in more detail. Okay. But if you're thinking of picking up the series, you get my thumbs up. All right. Good to know. We'll discuss the rest of it later when you catch up. We got some news from the authors of The Expanse, James S.A. Corey, which is, of course, a pseudonym for the two guys, Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank, who write together as that name.

They have said, we're not going to write any more Expanse books. That's it. But they have announced that there will be a new project that they're writing together. Fans can look forward to the arrival of The Mercy of Gods, a space opera trilogy that sees humanity fighting for its survival in a war as old as the universe itself, according to a press release.

Of course it's a trilogy. Of course. Of course it is. Has discussed many times recently. Yeah. Of course it is. Well, I mean, you know, they could have run a nine book series like they did with The Expanse. I meant to ask, did you ever finish it? Fuck no.

Okay. Once the show was done, I never went back to the books. I had a feeling that's it, yeah. I left off on the books when they were in, like, the big part where, like, the kids were dying left, right, and center. And, like, I think Lucas was, like, three years old at the time. I was like, I cannot fucking read this right now.

I don't want to read this right now. So I just never went back to it because I'd watched the show and the show wrapped up and I was like, good enough for me. Okay. See, that's what I remembered, but my memory is not what it used to be. Okay. And in this episode of Let's Ruin Another Industry, Spotify brings 15 hours of monthly audiobook listening to premium subscribers in the U.S.

So let's fuck up the audiobook business, too. They're going to launch with 200,000 books. All right. The good thing about this, if you're a Spotify premium subscriber, you can try out a metric shit ton of audiobooks to find which ones don't suck.

Also, if you're into business books, it's perfect because the first hour of any business book is where 99.999% of the ideas and the meat are of every business book. Seriously. It's like 15 inches of gold. I would argue half the time it's in the title.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The intro. The intro covers it. Yeah. And then the rest of the book is filler to meet the publisher's requirements for a 300-page book or a 250-page book. Exactly. So you can probably get a lot out of this if you're smart about it.

Now, if you want to get War and Peace, it's going to take you six years because that's an 80-hour book. But, you know, so we'll see how that goes. But, yeah, of course, they're doing what they can. Spotify gets Spotify. Well, more cheap content. All of this is cheaper than music is.

Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Matt. Welcome, Matt. Thanks, Matt. And speaking of Patreon, since I'm the one that usually goes in and just kind of thanks people whenever we get a new subscriber over at Patreon, innovation, once again, it is finest, Jason.

Okay. I used to be able to log into Patreon, see the new members, click once, and then send a nice thank you message. It now takes me six clicks to get to a send message. Wow. There's no reason for it. It makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

So thanks, Patreon. Another well-done job with UI enhancements. You know, I would generally get pissed off at Patreon for something like that, but we are so grandfathered in. I know. Compared to what people pay nowadays for that service. Yep. I don't want to poke the bear.

I don't want to poke the bear either. I know they don't listen, so I don't care. But your system sucks, but I'm not going to complain because, once again, we're getting like we were there when they launched and nobody gets the deal that we get. No. No, it would be, you know, financially irresponsible of us to change our plan at this point.

Yes. We would probably lose money if we did. Yeah. So if I seem a little less thankful by the time I thank you with your message is because I've had to click six fucking times to get there. Six fucking times. Yep. Oh, man. Over at PayPal, we've got Ralph.

Thank you, Ralph, very much. We appreciate it. Over at the tip jar, we've got Jeff. It has been a light week. Light week for comments and donations and everything. Was it something we said? I imagine it would have to be because that's all we do here is say shit, but.

That's true. Damn, people. All right. Well, we had a little scary news for Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak this week. He was hospitalized on Wednesday after suffering a possible stroke in Mexico City, according to the local news outlet there, Reforma. The 73-year-old technology legend who was in Mexico to speak at the World Business Forum was admitted to the hospital in the city.

He's reportedly still in the ER at the Mexico City Hospital. His team is coming to get them and figure out what's going on and whatever. So he was feeling strange after giving a speech at the forum and he started exhibiting symptoms that alarmed his spouse. Sources with direct knowledge told TMZ on Wednesday.

So I hope he's doing well. Yeah, me too. Me too. He's one of the good guys. Yeah, he is, and he's, you know my Woz story, so I will not replay it here, but I have a fondness for Woz, even though the Segway polo thing was kind of silly. But hey.

Nobody bats a thousand. No, they don't. They don't. So get well soon, Woz, from a fellow Strokeian. And just another reminder, we're off next week. So don't let that stop you from heading over to Patreon and making Brian click six times to thank you for subscribing.

Nothing I'd rather do on my vacation. Exactly, exactly. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schillmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 625. 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 with your friends, enemies, or anyone in between is free and can 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. And GOG.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that we can read on the air.

Stay grumpy.

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