627: Lords and Peasants

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We're down to the last few shows of the year. Yes, we are. Yes, we are, Brian. And you know what it is? Hmm. Tis the season to unsubscribe. Hell yeah. I love this part of the year. So many emails for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all the people that you thought were gone from your life.

Any mailing list that you accidentally ended up on or never signed up for, we'll be sending you mails. Yep. Yep. And it is your God-given duty to purge every single one of those. Yes. Ah, yes. My finger got tired from clicking unsubscribe. It's fantastic.

I've got to say one of the best little features of Apple Mail is if it recognizes any link in there, it does that little pop-up unsubscribe and you just click the one little button. Oh, I don't have that. That's a nice feature. Hmm. Now I use Spark. Yes, I know. I like Spark because Spark lets you just, you know, when somebody comes in that you don't recognize, they're like, would you like to block them forever? I'm like, why? Yes, I would.

Your block list must be massive. Oh, it's huge. It's huge. Huge. It's the size of China. Well, it's another time of year. This is when we get our Spotify unwrapped and Apple Music does their own version now. I can't remember what they call it either, but...

Sad failure unwrapped. Yeah. Well, the saddest part of the whole Spotify unwrapped thing is the artists are posting their versions so you can see how many times they were streamed and how many countries they were played in and all that sort of stuff. Then you do the math and you realize how little money they have made for all of that joy they gave people.

Oh, man. It's kind of sad. Yeah, it is. It's like I see, oh, 7.8 million streams. Let's multiply that by 0.00001 cents and see what we get. McDonald's. Yeah. I hear the McRibs back. Get a McRib for all that.

Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. No, I've... I canceled my Spotify account or my Spotify premium. Mm-hmm. Like we said, we were going to do a while back. Right. Yeah. Did you ever do that? No, because it's free. Well, the Spotify... Oh, the...

No, I get it free through my wife's work. Oh, that's right. Right. Because Universal is a stakeholder. I forgot you're married to a mob lawyer. Yeah. That's how that goes. You know, so. All the free garbage and cement I could want. Yeah, yeah. Oh, wait. That's the New Jersey mob. Same shit.

Oh, man. Yeah, in New Jersey, they kill you with concrete. In Universal, they kill you with streaming royalties. Pretty much. There you go. And I would just like to point out, what the fuck did I say last episode about the Q? Stop it with the Q. Stop it with the fucking Q. So Amazon unveils Q.

Damn it. An AI-powered chatbot for business. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I still... I like what you said last time. Just John Delancey is the only Q that we ever need. That's what they should call it.

Yeah. I agree. Q's all over the place, so. Yeah. It's cute. God. Have you used their version yet? Is it out in the wild, or they've just announced it? I haven't done anything with Amazon's AI offerings.

Anything from AWS I have not looked at in years. Mainly because I'm just... Oh, I got no use for it. And also, I just... I remember all of the... When I was leaving AWS is when they were bringing in all of the user management stuff, and it was so confusing to get anywhere with the keys that I need and all this stuff.

And I'm just like, look, I'm having a hard enough time, you know, locking down my S3 bucket. Okay? So, but yeah, since then, I haven't really touched it. I like the one-click chat GPTs of the world. That's the only one I'm still using, too.

Even though Microsoft's got their co-pilot out now, but you got to pay for that. So, we're not paying for that. So, I'm not using it. But they're all over the place. You can't... My toaster probably comes with AI. Yeah, I think it does. Yeah. I tried Bing. I tried BARD. I did side-to-side comparisons.

And sorry, ChatGPT still wins, hands down. Let me tell you the one problem with ChatGPT, though. I have it for my work. We paid for a subscription so, you know, people could use it and all that sort of stuff. And we were doing a little bit of a reconfig, so I wanted to cancel that account and open up another one with a different email address.

We're in the queue to pay for ChatGPT. You still cannot just sign up when you want to. You have to enter a queue. And it's been over a week now, and I still haven't gotten an email to give them money. Yeah, yeah. They had to throttle that because too many people were... They had the problem of too many paying subscribers.

They ran out of water is the problem. Yeah. I don't know if you saw this, the, you know, there's the big lawsuit against Meta about the kids. It's about the kids. Well, that, the lawsuit has finally been unredacted. So now we're really finding out how bad it is.

So, yeah, it's not good. All you need to know is that they knew. And not only did they know, they put a price on them. Yeah. They knew exactly how much money these underage users would be worth over their lifespan. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. No, there's, there's, there's no way, there's no spin that they can put on that. There's no, you cannot spin your way out of this. What you can do is just nothing, which is exactly what's going to happen. They will, they will say, you know, we have done our best effort. Kids will be kids. They will try to get around our stuff.

What more could we do? Ring hands. Oh, no. Where do we send the check to? Exactly. That's what it's going to be. How much is it going to cost us? And where do we send the check? Yeah. And who do we have to lie to, to say, we're not going to do it anymore. And then five years later, we'll write you another check. Well, let's, uh, let's talk a little bit about some of the content that Meta was pushing at some of these underage users that signed up.

Yes. Instagram has reportedly been serving up child sexualizing reels to followers of teen influencers. According to an experiment conducted by the Wall Street Journal, Instagram's reels video service would serve risque footage of children, as well as overtly sexual adult videos to test accounts that exclusively followed teen and preteen influencers, namely young gymnasts and cheerleaders.

Yeah, those sorts of ads are supposed to be forbidden on the platform. Such content was also mixed in with ads representing notable U.S. brands like Disney, Walmart, Pizza Hut, Bumble. Bumble is a notable U.S. brand? Yeah, they're huge. Okay. And the Canadian Center for Child Protection achieved similar results with its own tests separately.

So it is definitely happening. Yeah, that's great. Par for the course. Yeah, par for the course. You know, it's all the same system on the back end, so. Of course. Yeah, of course it is. Yeah. Now, I saw this one, and this one just kind of got me chuckling because this is where we're headed.

Jake Ward, founder of Content Growth, went ahead and grabbed a sitemap from a website, threw that entire, took the titles of the pages from the sitemap, threw it against ChatGPT, and then had it rebuild another site.

And then put that into the search engines and started to make money and stole millions of page views from the original site. Slow hand clap. Knew it was coming. Got to hand it to him. Knew it was coming. Yeah. But here's the problem.

He's bragging about it to everybody. And everybody's like, you're a fucking idiot, which he is. He's an idiot. I mean, we used to do this all the time. This is nothing new. That what's new is you can automate it with ChatGPT, which is fantastic for SEO for now.

Yeah. For now. Because what's happening, what we're going to see happening is over the next several years, we've kind of talked about this before. We've kind of skirted around it. But, you know, we talked about the Ouroboros of AI robots going out and feeding on itself and eating its own tail, which is what's, you know, mainly going to happen with search engines going forward.

You're going to have just a, they're screwed right now. I prefer the more wonderful visual of the human centipede. God. Thanks. It's a little too early for that for me. Thank you. Just finished my burrito. So what you're going to be seeing is, you know, we have search engines now.

We put in a term. We go to a search engine. It gives us a website. We go to the website. There's ads on the website that funds that. What you're going to be seeing in the future is you go to an answer engine, basically, and you say, how do I fix a widget? And it will say, here's how you fix a widget. And there's not going to be any websites associated with that because they've already sucked all the websites.

They have the knowledge. It's going to be answer engines instead of search engines. I, you know, I think I was putting this together, this timeline. I think it's going to be about four or five years until it's really a big problem. I was listening to the Casey Newton podcast this morning.

They were putting like 10 year timeline on it. I think it's going to be faster than that. It's going to be way faster than that. I mean, look at, come on, guys. At least, you know, us old timers have been around long enough to have at least a good idea of how fast it's going to be. ChatGPT just turned, or GPT-4 just turned one this week.

Yeah. And look at, look at the damage it's already done. So it's going to be a mess as far as search engines go and finding, finding, you know, trivial answers to trivial, trivial things. Which is why I kept saying, I've been saying for, since ChatGPT came out, fact checking is going to be the greatest job next to cybersecurity.

Yeah. You're going to need fact checkers. I mean, that's the real problem, right? We've been kind of touching on it a little bit with our complaints about Google over the past few years. Like, if you used to be able to Google something and get an answer, that actually worked. Now, when you Google something, you get seven gazillion different answers.

None of them work. It's just, it's gotten so useless. And once this is all just sucked in and you get an answer engine and you don't even have the option of trolling through what, usually the only way you find a real working answer anymore is somewhere buried in a message board, right?

That's, that's just where the answers are. The ones that actually work. You won't even be able to get to those anymore. You're just going to get the shit that doesn't work. And the funny thing is, if you, if you rewind the clock long enough, Google actually did this to themselves when they created AdSense.

They created the, the advertising model for people to create junk websites to, to just post up their crap so they could get that 0.2%, you know, ad click through to get those few cents that basically generated Google getting more content. This whole thing comes back to making it easy for people to create websites that, that turned revenue.

You know, you can take, you can just follow the, the breadcrumbs all the way back. So by them releasing AdSense, they basically fucked themselves in the future. So I love it though. I love it. Um, Neil Gaiman just had a recent interview where he, uh, he was talking about, man, wouldn't it be great if blogs came back?

And he, you know, he, he, he basically laid out a scenario for an internet of old, which isn't going to happen, but I wouldn't be mad if it did. Says the guy who only exists on Tumblr. Yeah. I mean, at least he's walking the walk. Yeah. I actually got, I got, uh, I clicked a link on something that stuck me in, in my Tumblr app today.

And I'm like, what is this strange interface? And I'm like, and all I see is like 150 posts by Bruce Sterling. And I'm like, oh, I must be stuck in the Tumblr verse. Cause this is where Bruce Sterling ended up after he left Ello. So. Right. Yeah.

Just follow, follow the, follow the Sterling. Just follow the Sterling. Uh, in this last bit of followup, cause yes, we're still stuck in followup in 12 minutes in, uh, this article is just great. Seven years after Elon Musk started the boring company, the company, company only has 2.4 miles of tunnel to show for it.

It would be more profitable if he just made those flamethrowers. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, the boring company has always been a solution in search of a problem. Anyways, this is just dumb, but you know, he's employing a few people, I guess. Yeah. This one in a hyperloop. Yeah.

Remember the hyperloop? Yeah. I remember the hyperloop. That's that could actually be useful that I could see. Like the, the long we've for my, for my entire adult life, there has been a high speed train coming between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, my entire adult life.

And it has never happened. And the hyperloop could have done it. That was in the news. When I moved to Southern California in 1995, they were promising. It's coming, man. It's coming. In the news.

I, this, I don't even know where to start with this one. This came across my desk this morning around four o'clock a.m. And I'm sitting in bed going, okay, what do I got to do for the show today? And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, let me read that again. Cristiano Ronaldo faces a $1 billion class action lawsuit for endorsing worthless NFTs.

And I'm like, wait a minute. You didn't need to put worthless in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a little, a little, uh, redundant. I'm like, wait a minute. This is 2023. Is this still a thing? And apparently it is because he did it with Binance, who is now in the shitter and people are going to jail more.

CZ is probably going to jail. Looking to like 18 months, maybe. I didn't even realize part of his, uh, his agreement was that he would not fight any jail sentence when he, when he took his $50 million fine, not including the $4 billion fine for Binance.

He's like, he would, he would, he, he, he waived his right to fight any, uh, any, uh, prison time. So, right. So maybe somebody, maybe we can get a clerk there to change it from months to years. Just so I don't really understand this lawsuit. Now, now let me start by saying, first off, I'm not a fan of Ronaldo.

Okay. I do not like him as a player or as a person. I recognize that he is a brilliant soccer player, perhaps one of the best that has ever lived, but that, that doesn't mean I, I have to like him. I don't. So, uh, so I don't get this lawsuit. Um, my understanding, I'm, I'm reading through it, you know, for, I haven't understood a lot of these lawsuits because you should be suing the companies, not the people that they hired to do ads for them.

Well, it's, it's the way that the people get paid. So, you know, it's like, okay, if they're promoting something on television, like a, like some soap, they get paid to promote soap. They don't get paid in buckets of soap. They could be more expensive later.

It's kind of, I know that's a really shitty analogy, but it's early. So cut me some slack. Um, okay. But again, hold on a second now. Uh, okay. So he didn't disclose the former amount of his compensation by Binance, which is required by U S law.

Right. The security and exchange commission, which is a U S entity said that you have to do all of this sort of stuff. Yes. Uh, let me, let me check really quick. Ronaldo, not a U S citizen. Binance was initially based in China, then moved to Japan shortly before the Chinese government restricted, uh, currency companies.

They subsequently left Japan for Malta and currently have no official company headquarters. Correct. So not a U S company. Correct. And a non-American citizen. Correct. What's the jurisdiction here? Well, the jurisdiction is still here in the United States, you know, people can be caught and extradited for things.

They're going to extradite Ronaldo from Saudi Arabian league. Could be, I mean, I guess he's never going to come play for the MLS. Yeah. Um, no, I mean, it doesn't matter. He still can, it's the United States. You can file a lawsuit against anything. They're, they're, they're suing Ronaldo cause he's loaded.

Yeah. Let's be honest. Of course. Okay. So this, this is, this is different how than any other lawsuit like this. True, true, true. I don't, I'm still like, why are you defending him? He's, it's, it's, it's an NF2 scam. I think the lawsuits should be against Binance, not against the, the people.

Uh, well, weren't you happy when Kim Kardashian got, uh, dinged? Well, look, I'm always happy when bad things happen to people I don't like. You just said you don't like Ronaldo. Oh, come on. I didn't say I would be upset if he was in jail. I'm just not entirely sure how this works legally.

Got it. Well, here's the deal. He was still pimping it, uh, up to as recently as November 28th. Probably this morning. Yeah. So, um, yeah, he's still, he's still, uh, waving the flag. I, somebody should tell him that his automated posts are still going, you know?

Um, yeah, no, I just thought that was a, it was fun. That people are still getting dinged for NFTs. I just think it's cute. NFT is still in the news. Yeah. I'm with you there. I was going through, uh, uh, someone, someone we knows. Uh, oh, I still see the GM posts from somebody we know.

Uh, not even that one. I, I, I saw, uh, somebody I know that just did a drop. They just did, uh, actually a couple drops, uh, selling, uh, uh, selling their NFTs and they sold out. And they're like, now, now who says NFTs are dead?

I'm like, well, everybody except the suckers that still follow you apparently because all 12 people. Yes. Uh, struck me crazy. Anyway, anyway, I'm getting off topic here. Okay. Oh, uh, so this one is an interesting story.

Newverse, this is just because this is pink slip season, right? Right. Um, uh, publisher Newverse, who is a, is part of TikTok and ByteDance, part of that family. They were a game developer, a, they're firing a couple hundred people, um, because they just can't quite make it, make their mobile game studio work, which is fine.

I, I think mobile game studios are definitely getting consolidated and becoming a thing of the past because it's like, they're so damn expensive to build. Now, if you're going to do it right, it's either going to be the kid in his garage or 800 people at EA building these things nowadays, it seems.

Um, so they were in the middle of the road and they're just like, nah, we're not going to do it anymore. But, uh, one of the big games that they did was a game called Marvel snap, uh, which I never heard of, which maybe is why they're going under two snaps into twirl. I just, uh, so this is just starting off the season cause we're at December 1st right now.

So I expect a lot more. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I'm just, I'm just, uh, kicking it off, kicking it off. It's like an appetizer. Yes. Um, so this next story I got, I was actually going to put it in more on of the week, but we've just not done that segment for ages, but this is certainly where it belongs.

Uh, Edwards, his civil says, I believe it's close enough for me, uh, founder of software developer conference. Devternity has already been in the headlines for reportedly listing fake female speakers for a conference. Got to check those boxes. Now it's been revealed that he may also be behind coding underscore unicorn, a popular Instagram account, supposedly run by a female coder.

Yep. Yep. Which isn't run by a female coder. No, it's not. This guy likes to cosplay as chicks. Yeah, he does. Yeah. And he's not very good. His, his op sec is shit. No, he's using, you know, he's using, uh, glamor shots that are basically like from photography houses or AI developed to, uh, basically fake a bunch of chicks, including, uh, this particular, uh, Instagram account that was very popular.

Now I like his response to all these allegations. The amount of hate and lynching I keep receiving is as if I would have scammed or killed someone. Well, hold on a second. You did scam people. Yeah. The scamming part. Yes. Yes. The scamming part. Yes. But I won't defend myself because I don't feel guilty. I did nothing terrible that I need to apologize for.

Okay. Trump. All right. Exactly. That's the, well, that's the way of the world now, right? It is. Just, uh, not only fake it, but then just fucking not care that you're faking it and say, screw you guys. Screw you guys. I'm going back to Instagram. Yeah. So the thing, yeah, the thing that he did that was really stupid, he would like send himself an invite for, uh, I can't remember if it was discord or, uh, a bulletin board or something, but send himself an invite, uh, then would basically log out of his account, go collect the invite

and then, uh, accept the invite all on the same IP, same browser, same everything. And it was, it was all back into his account. Yeah. So yes. Yeah. Uh, here's a bad one. Uh, in a tragic accident at Amazon distribution center in Fort Worth, Indy or Fort Wayne, Indiana, I think in Texas, it is tragic accident.

I always think of Texas. Uh, a 20 year old died after an accident involving an overhead package conveyor. Amazon was fined a whopping $7,000. Yep. Well, I suppose they valued that human life more than Meta did.

It is Fort Wayne, Indiana. So yeah. Wow. I don't know if you've ever been there. Nope. Yeah. Yeah. It ain't the greatest place in the world. Uh, it's just, uh, there, there's, this is like, I'm surprised all of Amazon's warehouses aren't in Indiana.

If this is the, uh, this is how OSHA really kind of handles things out there. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, Amazon has gotten over $270,000 in fines from OSHA since 2022. But, uh, yeah. Elon Musk has bookmarked this news story.

Yeah. Guess where Tesla's moving. That's where Tesla's moving. That's right. Little Tesla news in a moment. But, uh, yeah, that's just kind of, kind of weak, I think. Yeah. I'm pretty sure everybody thinks it's weak, especially the family of, uh, Chase Grusbeck. Who is the one guy. Well, I expect there will be a large lawsuit coming.

Uh, you, well, hopefully you'd, you'd think. Yeah. Yeah. You'd think. This is interesting. This is interesting. Uh, last year, Russia added meta to the list of terrorist and extremist organizations, right? Of course. Uh, so yes, it's, uh, they are, they're in there with the Taliban.

Putin saw some of the memes. Yeah. Oh, God. Uh, so yeah, they're, they're, they're with the Taliban and they also have, you know, uh, Twitter or X or whoever you want to call them today is, is, uh, listed as well. But what they did was, uh, last week they added the meta spokesperson, Andy Stone to his wanted list.

So Andy stay home. That's all we're going to say. They don't, they never said, go ahead and take a trip, Andy. Oh, that's true. Go for it, man. I hear, I hear Ukraine's nice this time of year. Um, so they, they didn't even say why though. That's the funny part. They're like, we're going to add him. It's like, is Zuckerberg on the list?

I haven't seen that. Cause that would be great. Yeah. That would be good. Yeah. Uh, so that's just, uh, just something to follow. We're waiting on, waiting on news on that one. But the Russia is just willy nilly adding people to the list of. I'm surprised X hasn't been removed given Musk's, uh.

Oh, it has. Stances on most things. It has. Well, it's been removed since, uh, you can, you can only get, uh, Twix through a VPN in Russia. No, no. I mean, removed from the list. Oh, removed from the list. I see. Oh, yes. Welcome, comrade. Yeah. X is good now.

Yeah. Actually, I'm, yeah, that is kind of surprising considering the recent news. Um, this one's interesting. Jennifer Watkins, uh, mother from New South Wales, Australia, got dinged with the, uh, the Google overlords. This is a, this is a recurring story and they really need to start working on this.

One of her, uh, seven-year-old twin sons posted a picture of his, or a video of his butt. Oops. Which then the, you know. I have a seven-year-old. This is unsurprising. Yes. The AI machinery then picked up on the fact that that's a seven-year-old butt.

Shut it down. Where's the big red button? And she was completely locked out of her account. And I love this. In Watkins' case, the flag video led to a complete lockout from her Google accounts, affecting her access to photos, documents, emails, and even her ability to use apps like McDonald's.

I don't know how many, uh, how many, uh, McDonald's are down there in New South Wales, but apparently there's one at least. So, and she really wanted that McRib. So, yeah, uh, the only way to get her account back was to have a reporter from the New York Times call Google and have it reinstated.

So, here's what I'm saying for the holidays as a side hustle for all New York Times employees or reporters with a New York Times email address. Pimp yourself out for account reactivation through Google. That will put a few extra presents under the tree.

I'm just, I'm just putting it out there. I'm just putting it out there. It's ridiculous how bad customer service for these companies is. Google's never had humans. Ever. I know. It's unbelievable. Like you really, you need a reporter. It's unbelievable. You need a reporter or somebody on the inside.

I mean, we got, when I ran Metblogs with Bonner, we got kicked out of Google News for years. Years. And then our friend Kevin Marks got a job there and we're like, hey, Kevin, do you know anybody at Google News that can get us, you know? To find out why we were kicked out.

He's like, let me check. They're just down the hall. He walked down the hall. Ten minutes later, sends us back an email. He's like, oh, you guys are back. That's how you do it. That's how you do it. The only way to get it done. Now, on this week, as the Twix turns, I don't know if you've noticed, but Elon has been in the news.

I've actively tried not to notice and you cannot get away from this. No, you can't. No, you can't. So we're just going to, we're going to, we're going to run through this real quick. So Elon went to a conference. He spoke at a conference and he told Bob Iger to go fuck himself, basically.

And every advertiser that tried to pull their ads off of Twix, I basically told them all to go fuck themselves. And yeah, and then Linda Iaccarino backs it up by saying, we're on the right side of history here. And that's, that's really it.

That's what it comes down to. She said, she said Musk's interview was candid and profound. I'm like, no, it's not. Yeah, it's profound to go tell advertisers that don't want to advertise on your shit platform to go fuck themselves. Yeah, because you're a Jew hating weirdo.

That's, let's put it in perspective. The reason the advertisers were leaving is because your boss was an asshole. Pretty much. And then he goes and tells them to go fuck themselves. By the way, isn't he the free speech guy? Yeah. It's free speech to pull your advertising.

It is. It is. Free speech does have consequences here. Well, he's not big on the consequences part. No. Yeah. He's good with the free speech part, but not the consequences. Yeah. Well, there might be some consequences in this next story. I love this. If Tesla gets unionized, it's because we deserve it.

Elon Musk says he's made his factory workers millionaires, but concedes some may still turn against him. He says, quote, I think it's generally not good to have an adversarial relationship between one group at the company and another group. I disagree with the idea of unions because I just don't like anything which creates a lords and peasants sort of thing.

I think the unions naturally try to create negativity in a company, says the lord of the matter. By the way, I would like a number or a percentage of how many of his factory workers are actually millionaires. Yes. I would like that number, too.

I would like to know what percentage. You know what? It's probably the same percentage of Uber drivers that make over six figures a year. Yes. I'm thinking that I'm thinking that Venn diagram lines up nicely. Yep. Remember that that juicy statistic that we haven't heard them throwing around that much anymore.

We haven't really had that much news from Uber lately, have we? No, they're keeping a very low profile. Yeah, I think they've learned their lesson now that Kalanick's out. They're like, let's just try and sneak by. Let's let Waymo and Cruz and all those guys take some heat right now and let Lyft deal with it.

And we're just going to sit back and we're going to deliver some hamburgers. That's it. Oh, man. Well, speaking of those millionaire Tesla employees, they're going to start getting the FSD version 12 soon. Just to the employees, huh? Yeah.

Hold on a second. This is how he's going to low his salary caps. You see where I'm going with this. That's right. Yes. Only the millionaire factory employees get this version first. It's a perk. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The millionaires and the people who have expressed interest in joining the union.

Those are the two groups of people. Oh, it was just a glitch. It was just a glitch, sir, that he ran headlong into that semi. No, no, it was just a glitch. We'll fix it in version 13. Unbelievable. Oh, yeah. Look at this little nugget. Right now, drivers need to monitor full self-driving at all times and be ready to take control.

If they crash using Tesla's FSD, they are responsible, not Tesla. Yep. And, however, that doesn't mean that Tesla will have truly achieved full self-driving as the company hasn't said anything about taking responsibility for the system as of now.

Yeah. And won't. And won't. And won't. Yeah. This will be in beta forever. Yeah. It says the main difference between the V12 update is expected to be vehicle controls being taken over by neural nets rather than being hard-coded by engineers.

Oh, boy. Do you want to be the... Oh, boy. Would you be a beta tester in that? Fuck no. Fuck no. I don't even want to be on the same fucking planet as those things. Nope. Nope. I want to be... I would not drive anywhere near a Tesla factory right now.

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So I finally watched the Milli Vanilli documentary on Paramount+. Okay. Fucking awesome. It was really good. Now, you were somebody who has lived in that world. You were friends with either Milli or Vanilli. I can't remember which. Yes, I know Fabrice.

So as somebody who has not lived in that world, would it still be enjoyable? Yes, absolutely. Okay. There was a ton of the story that I didn't know. There was a ton of the story I didn't know. Because I just knew him after the whole thing went down. You know, I met him after when he was like a radio, he was a DJ in LA.

And that's when I met him. But my roommate knew him before he got famous. So she knew the whole story. So I got all the tea, as it were. And what was left out of the documentary and what wasn't. So that was fun. But as a documentary, it's beautifully shot. There's great stuff in there.

No, you'd like it. As a music guy, you would really like it. Cool. Okay. I'll watch it. Squid Game Challenge, which is apparently a big hit. I almost had a panic attack in the first five minutes. I could not watch it. I'm like, just, I'm still scarred from watching Squid Game.

I've never watched Squid Game. I don't really understand any of this. This has been on the TV at my office with no sound on. It's just been, I've seen it out of the corner of my eye. I don't get it. And I don't care.

Yeah. No, they're just recreating, you know, basically the difference is. Except no death. Yeah. Here, there's no death. That's the difference. Same games. I mean, for now. Until the ratings drop. Slow Horses came out this week for season three. I sadly have not had time to watch it. So that will hopefully be done over the weekend.

I haven't watched it yet either. Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to it. I did get a text last weekend from a friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, who was like, hey, the new Doctor Who's out. It's great. And I'm like, ah, shit. I'm like, I wasn't going to watch it. He's like, why? I'm like, because I missed all the other stuff.

He's like, ah, it doesn't matter. Because I watched all the David Tennant ones and I'm a Tennant fan. So he's like, just watch. So I watched it. It was, yes, it was okay. It was nice to see him back. You would have no fucking clue what's going on. I have just, I have decided I will just not ever watch Doctor Who.

I'm going to have a Doctor Who-less life. I just can't do it. Yeah. That's fine. Stay Who-less. Okay. Stay Who-less, my friend. Right. And there's a whole big trans thing that goes on with it. And we put an article in the show notes about Russell T. Davies on his importance of showing the trans struggle.

So give that a read if you want to. Kind of explains a lot of what happened in the episode. Right. I'm looking forward to the rest of, I think he's got two more to go before it transitions to the whoever the new Doctor is. But I'll watch the next two tenants. But it was fun to have him back for a little bit.

Okay. You know, in the old way. Right. So there you go. Okay. I watched the first four episodes, which are the only ones that are out right now. Netflix is doing kind of a staggered release for the final season of The Crown, season six. That's un-Netflix-like.

I know. It's kind of weird. I don't know if they've ever released anything like that before, but they're doing it with this one. Well, no. They do split Stranger Things. Okay. There you go. Yeah. They split that. Okay. You're right. Yep. That's true. So yeah, I watched it. It was a, it's fine. You know, they've made some questionable choices.

And this isn't a spoiler alert because this actually fucking happened like 20 plus years ago, but you know, Princess Diana dies. Oh yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, uh, Dottie Fayette or whatever his name is. I can't remember. So this is, the show is mostly about Diana now.

It's not about the family so much anymore because obviously that's, that's the big deal. But, uh, the questionable choices they're making, we get Ghost Diana. Oh no. And Ghost Dodie. Really? Does Ghost Leia make an appearance too? And it's, at one point I was like, I laughed out loud and, and you weren't meant to, it was like, it was a serious scene.

What they, what they kept doing when they, cause they bring Diana back as a, as a ghost so Charles can have a conversation with her. So he's getting out his own feelings. They pan to the empty chair after it's over as if you need a reminder that she's dead. She's sitting in the chair.

They're having the conversation. The conversation ends slow pan over to the chair, which is now empty. Spoon. Are you fucking kidding me? And then they did it with the, with Dodie too, because he came back and then they hand over to the chair that he was sitting in to show he's not there when the conversation ended.

I'm like, how dumb do you think the viewers are? Well, you know, it's fresh directing talent. They're just going by the playbook. So fucking good. Anyways. I'm sure they got notes from the studio that made them do that. Probably. How do you think the audience is really going to know she's dead?

Are you sure that they're going to know she, you should really show the chair after. You didn't put a shimmering light on her. You couldn't see through her. Maybe, maybe make her see through next time. Yeah. Kind of like Yoda. Do it like Yoda. Put her in a robe. Jesus fucking Christ.

Anyways. I also watched Welcome to Wrexham season two. The whole season is out over on Disney plus now. Highly enjoyable. It's like a real world Ted Lasso, except, you know, Ryan Reynolds is not as charming as Ted Lasso. Okay. Yeah. So it's great.

Interesting. Oh, I, you know what? Um, I started watching the new Fargo, the new season of Fargo is out on effects. Oh yeah. Isn't Kristen Ritter in it or something? I can't remember. Somebody. No. It's Jennifer Jason Lee, but, uh, the girl from Ted Lasso.

Oh, Hannah Waddington. I can't remember. Or Juno Temple. The other one. The, I, what was her name in the show? I don't remember. Oh, it drives me crazy. The little cute one. Yeah. It was, uh, yeah, yeah. She's in that. Okay. And she's, she's fantastic. You would never know she was British because she's got a, a Minnesota, Minnesotan accent.

It is great. Awesome. And she's, dude, it is so good. It is so good. There's four episodes out now, I think. Um, yeah, four, four episodes out. I just can't wait to watch, you know, like 10 minutes after it came out, we were glued to the couch. It was so good.

It's so good. Apps and doodads. Stable Diffusion came out, uh, with stable video diffusion last week, which takes a still image and can add up to 25 or generate up to 25 frames of video.

So the internet being the internet, they started throwing memes at it. Oh my God. And the result is awesome. One of, one of the most, uh, promising insane technologies in recent years with the most money behind it. And they've turned it into Giphy. Yep.

Well, they've turned it into a Harry Potter. Oh, I'm sorry. Jiffy. Jiffy. Fuck. Um, I get you every time with that, don't I? Oh no, you do. You do. Uh, it is so good.

I love it. I love it. You know, I have a personal penchant for disaster girls since it broke on in our magazine. Uh, so seeing that one brought to life was really good. The Distracted Boyfriend, there's a couple of those that are pretty good. Um, it's, it's awesome. Just go check out the, go check out the link.

Check out the videos. This is what AI should be used for. This is it. Don't destroy the world. Make more, make more Jeefs. Jeefs. Jeefs. Jeefs. Um, I saw this over at, uh, Microsoft and I thought about taking it.

Uh, Generative AI for Beginners. Of course. Um, it's, uh, basically a 12 lesson fundamental course on, uh, Generative AI. That's actually interesting. I think I would take it too. Yeah, I think I'm going to, I'm going to flip through there. I grabbed the, um, the coding stuff.

Oh, that was the big thing. I was trying to get the right version of Python installed on my laptop was a pain in the ass. That was the biggest problem. That might be a stopper for me. Yeah. Maybe I'll just read a book about it. Could be. Yeah. Or just skip the coding examples. Yeah. I tried to get, I got the wrong version of Python.

So I had to back, backgrade or downgrade it to get the right one. Then I can get the later one. Come on, man. Can I just get a, can I just double click something? I'm old. I don't have time to compile from source. Yeah. Oh God. Um, and I saw this one come through tired of crappy mobile games, full of ads or semi good games that try to squeeze as much money as possible out of you in the form of in-app purchases.

Lucky for you. No bullshit games is here to help you discover good, non-annoying, enjoyable games. And I thought of you and your, your angry birds trials and tribulations with your son. This is fantastic. I have a bookmark now. Okay. So thank you for that. You're welcome. He's still not quite there yet.

He knows that there's gaming out there. He's tentatively interested and we're pushing it off as long as possible, but it's coming and this is going to be very helpful because I am not, I am not paying my entire salary into in-app purchases. God damn it. Yeah. Yeah. I figured that would, uh, that would help you out a little bit.

Yeah. Um, and, uh, so I, I have complained on this show about, uh, the, the program Oh phonic, which, uh, me and many, many other audio folks use lots of podcasters use it to clean up their audio before it goes to, uh, goes to press.

And I paid a lot of money a long time ago for the desktop version. And then with the newer versions of the Mac OS, they decided that we're not going to use it. We're not going to develop it anymore. So you're stuck. And I swear to God, they put in some kind of a time bomb in the installer that it checks to see if you're on a newer version and it kills it.

And I know it works because I have one of my machines that I upgraded. I just continually upgraded to the latest and greatest version of the Mac OS and it runs just fine. So they're killing it. If this was a bigger program from a bigger company, I would file a class action lawsuit against them.

Right. But since it's not, I just had to be clever. I figured out that the, the PC version works just fine. The new installer works just fine on windows 11. All right. So I just installed parallels on my computer that I couldn't run it on.

Now I run the PC version. So Ophonic plus parallels equals fuck you. I win. You have no idea how good I felt when I came that morning when I, when I got that work and I came out and I'm yelling at my roommate and I'm like, fuck them. I won. Woo. I long to be able to just enjoy things as much as you do sometimes.

I know. I just, I ran out of credits on the thing. Cause it was my one machine at home that I do all my editing on. And I spent like a lot of money on credits because I had to do the mastering for the episodes and I ran out of money on it. And I'm just like, I just don't, I can't afford it right now. Clients are disappearing. So I just like, I had to get creative again.

I'm like, I paid for this thing. I don't, I shouldn't feel bad about being able to use it. Right. So, you know, fuckers, um, I finally gave up on Apple music. I cloud sync. Okay. I just, I did. I did when it first came out.

You were using Apple match, which only let you do 25,000 songs. Right. Right. And you had like 25,001, some shit like that. It broke everything. Um, I, I still, I've got 170 meg library or 170 gig library.

Sorry, 170 meg wouldn't be that bad. 170 gig library. Uh, it would only do like 110 meg no matter what. Right. And I couldn't figure out. It's like, so I uploaded, uh, Andy Preboy just put out a new wall of voodoo album from this old stuff.

And I'm like, I really want to listen to this on my walk. And I put it on my computer, let it sync. It said it was synced. I go to my phone and my phone says, turn on sync to let it sync. And I'm like, it is on. And no matter what I did, turning it off, all this shit. So I'm just like, screw it. Plug the phone in, go through all the rigmarole.

I just plugged the phone in now and sync the library manually because there's just no other option to get stuff from your computer to your Apple music player, because it is manually loading a library nowadays is just a nightmare. So it's like, you can pick one, one or the other, no, or Spotify.

No, 80% of my music does not exist on streaming services. Yeah. So that is a problem. Or it exists in two thirds mode. It's like every album I love, there's two thirds of it. Right. It's like, great. Good times. I remember a long time ago, Ikea released their first kind of automated home stuff.

It was a blinds, right? Yeah. You were going to get those. I was going to get those and never did end up getting them, but I was excited about it and I went and looked at them and they, they look pretty cool and nice. And you know, it's Ikea, it's, it's basic, but it works, which is nice. But they never really followed up on it.

And that was all they had, but they're finally releasing some more stuff. The first is a parasol door and window sensor. So you can mount it on your door and windows and they'll get a notification if they open or close unexpectedly. Kind of cool. They do have some smart bulbs. They did release some of those.

That's true. There's another thing called a Valhorn, which is a wireless motion sensor, which activates lights when movement is detected, which is kind of cool. And then there's a releasing something called the barding water leakage sensor, which alerts you about any rogue water before your floor finds out apparently, which is pretty cool.

And I was like, I welcome Ikea getting into this space because it's, it's a fucked up space where nothing is compatible with anything else. And I figure if you're getting Ikea stuff, it's going to be compatible with it, with all the other Ikea stuff, right? Sort of. Sort of.

Because the follow up line in this article is all the sensors are compatible with Ikea's dirigory hub, but only Valhorn works with the older Tradfee gateway. So they're still having the same issues that everybody else is. Okay. But yeah, I mean, you know, it's, it'll be cheap.

It mostly will work and why not go for it, Ikea? Makes sense. Well, what I like, yeah, what I like here is they're doing basic stuff that actually is cool. It's like, okay, window and door sensors. Yeah. Great. I don't have to buy an entire security system. Love that because it's like, oh, did I leave the garage door open?

Let me go look. Okay. I don't need a whole thing for that. The water thing would have been great when I lived in Chicago and, you know, we always have basement leaks. It's like, oh, that would have been fantastic. MXV, friend of the show, go get some of these. You need them more than I do. And yeah, I just like that they're doing things that are useful.

Yeah. I might even, yeah, I mean, we had a water leak in one of our bathrooms. Just one of the old pipes just ruptured for no reason. And we never, we just got lucky and noticed it. But if we didn't, not paid attention, like gone out and forgotten about it, like put these in your, every bathroom. Yeah. If they're that cheap, that's great.

I love, I love the direction they're going with. Yeah. I agree a hundred percent. That's, that's why I put it in here. Yeah. And then from the, you only had one job file. Yeah. Google is investigating a drive issue that causes files to go missing. Nice.

Google drive users have recently been reporting that files and folders have gone missing with some saying that months worth of data has disappeared from their accounts. They're acknowledging the issue appears to be caused by the drive for desktop app, according to nine to five Google. So yeah, you have one job. Keep files and they're disappearing.

Now, as we've always said, if there's only one copy of it, it doesn't exist. Exactly. And of course, Google did mention that as well. Well, they recommend making a copy of the app, copy of your app data folder. If you have room on your hard drive. The reason we put it on Google drive.

It's on Google drive because I don't have the space on my hard drive anymore. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever tried to use Google drive for desktop on a Mac. No. It's horrendous. Right. It is horrendous.

Well, apparently it's more horrendous now, Jason. It also deletes files. Yeah. This is a good story for me because I pay 20 bucks a month to Google for a couple terabytes of storage to keep my photo library there in case I kick the bucket so it's somewhere safe and online.

Well, this just tells me it's not very safe and online. So I think I'll pull that from there because that was my last line of defense was my Google drive. But I haven't even updated it for ages. Right. So I think I'm three years out of date. You know why? Because Google drive for desktop on a Mac sucks so bad.

So thanks for the reminder. That'll save me another 20 bucks a month. There you go. Check. Now, we've been talking about electric vehicles and how we're not going to buy one anytime soon. This new technology is actually kind of neat. And, you know, a couple of years down the line when it comes time to maybe get a EV, this is something that might actually be in the wild.

It is a wireless road that charges your car as you drive across it. Of course, it's Israeli tech because anything cool comes from fucking Israelis. And it's from this company called Electrion. And it is really neat.

Basically, as you drive over it, it's safe for everybody, you know, when it's not in use by a car. Once the car goes over it, it senses it. I'm never wearing anything other than Doc Martens in Michigan. Seriously? Like, I would like something nice and thick and rubbery between me and that road.

They say it's safe. They say it's safe. But it's just a quarter mile segment right now. And they're just testing it out to see what it's going to be like. I think this has some possibility. The only problem is we have done several stories over the years about Qi charging and how wireless charging with your phone or any device using, you know, the, you know, electromagnetic charging with the mats.

You lose a metric shit ton of charge just to the ether. So I am wondering what the leakage is going to be and if this is actually going to cause more problems just from electrical leakage than anything else. So, and, you know, it's a quarter mile.

I mean, I know in the future they're going to want, you're going to have more, but that just seems, I don't know. I see many problems with trying to put that much electricity into the roadway at any given time with the grid that we have in our third world country right now. Oh, yeah. This is going to take gazillions of dollars of infrastructure.

Yeah. So, and our children's children's children might see this. Might, might. But I love this. Demonstrations were held Wednesday at Michigan Central Innovation Center, a hub for advancing technologies and programs that addresses barriers to mobility. The district also is where Ford Motor Company is restoring the old Michigan Central train station to develop self-driving vehicles.

And I say, how about you just bring back the damn trains? I love trains. Trains work. Yes. Public transport, people. Yeah. But speaking of, you know, the future and the children's children's of the children's, Google DeepMind actually just had a breakthrough.

They've got a new system called the Graph Networks for Materials Exploration, or GNOME. Mm-hmm. GNOME just came up with 2.2 million new crystals that it kind of cycled through and found 380,000 stable materials that could actually power future technologies and can be made in a lab.

Ah, but did they find the dark crystal? I don't think so. I don't think so. I think that's still under copyright. Oh, wait. If it's AI, it definitely found the dark crystal. That's probably what is going to power the rest of the world. Somebody call the Henson lawyers, please. They say that it took an equivalent of nearly 800 years of constant human work to get to where they're at now.

So it would have taken us 800 years of people actually doing the experiments to come up with these, and they've put it out. But they're giving away the 380,000 materials, like the recipes. Right. And there are labs that are already starting to try some of these things out. Awesome. So. That's cool.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's really cool because, you know, it's basically for computers and superconductors and things like that. Mm-hmm. And, you know, for the next generation of material science. Nice. This is what another thing that AI should be used for, material science and memes.

That's right.

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At the library. Patrick writes in. For what it's worth, I read or listened to all the Expanse books twice. In my opinion, excellent through to the end, and the authors nailed the landing. Best final chapter I've read. Audible narrator does a great job, too.

Thanks for all the work on years of consistently entertaining shows. Well, somebody made it to the end of the Expanse. Somebody did. That's great. I just want to know if the Mythbusters guys flowed out at the very end. Is that how it is? That's what I was wondering, too. I finally finished The Last Improx, The Interdependency Book No. 3 by John Scalzi.

Great. Wasn't it? Fucking great series. I really enjoyed it. I have not enjoyed a series like that in a long time. It flowed really well. I was into all the characters. There was a major curveball that I really wasn't expecting.

But it all worked out. I loved it. Fantastic. Well done, John Scalzi. Yeah, I think that's some of the best stuff he's ever written. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Honestly. It was great. It is like one book. Yeah. It is just one book, and I thought it 100% stuck the landing.

110% stuck the landing. It was like you couldn't see it coming. And 100% left it open for more. Like, I want more. Yeah. This one I actually kind of do. Yeah. I could definitely go for more, and he certainly left it open to do it. So very, very good series. So I was looking for something, you know, that I could just dive into.

And I found Galaxy Outlaws, the complete Black Ocean Mobius missions, 1 through 16.5 by J.S. Morin. It was a 4.7 out of 5 stars on 13,000 ratings. Thinking, okay, that's pretty good. And it's 85 hours and 6 minutes.

Okay. Even better. And I love the description. It's what you'd get if the Orville took place on Serenity, or if Star Wars had wizards instead of Jedi. Okay. Loved it. Got it. One credit even, which is like $8 for 85 hours of entertainment.

Problem is, it breaks on the Audible player. I can't listen to it without it breaking every time I go back to it. It tries to re-sync with another device that doesn't exist because I only have Audible on one device.

And so I have to delete it and re-download it, which is very big for 85 hours of audio. Right. So it's sad, so I have to return it. So instead, I'm going with Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Okay. I was talking to somebody about Anti-Fragile the other day, and it's one of my favorite books. Same with Black Swan. Definitely something a little more heady than, you know, The Orville in Serenity. Completely different. But I'm looking forward to this one.

It's one of the first books in that series that I never read. I started with Black Swan and moved to Anti-Fragile, and I forget the last one. But his books, they make you think a lot. All right. And I got this note from Comixology. Comixology is going away.

They've merged it with the Kindle app, and I gave it a try. It's not great, but it gets the job done, which I think is all you can really expect anymore from Comixology and Kindle and Amazon. Right. It's like, we're going to give you a minimum viable comic book reader.

Okay. And that's about it. So, it is definitely not a step forward in any way, shape, or form. So, just be forewarned that you have to re-download all your books on the Kindle app, and you got three days until it goes away. Right.

For good. Well, and for those of you who have been reading Game of Thrones and the George R.R. Martin book series, the title here tells you everything you need to know. George R.R. Martin has no new pages. Oh, surprise. Surprise. Yeah, he was on some sort of, he did an interview, like I think last week, and he said, I have like 1,100 pages written, but I still have hundreds more to go.

And if you follow him, you probably know that number, because over a year ago on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he said he had 1,100 pages done. So, you're going to be waiting a long, long time. You know why? Because I think he's got all the monies.

Yeah. I don't think he needs to finish right again. Who cares? He doesn't give a shit. Yeah, they finished the show without him. And so, he's like, well, why am I going to bother with it? Screw that. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave.

Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave. With actual Dave this time. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy. And the host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings too.

We're so glad you could join us today, Dave. It's been a minute. It's been a minute, hasn't it? It has. It has. It's good to be back. I feel like I've been saving things up. I have a little list at the end of our show notes here of stuff I've been thinking about. But yeah, nice to be back. Had a nice break over Thanksgiving.

But nice to talk to you guys again. Yeah. Yeah. Over the break, I signed up for the 404 Media feed. I want to help promote the new guys because it's Joseph Cox and that crew who split off from Motherboard.

Right. Who we talk about all the time. And sorry, Casey Newton. I had to cancel my subscription for you to pay for them. So. It's a zero-sum game. It is. Yeah. Casey's doing just fine. And I looked at how many subscribers he has. He's going to be okay.

He's all right. Yeah, I want to help the new guys out. As part of my subscription plan, there is the 404 Media Podcast for paid users. We got to get it a little ad-free and maybe with a little extra bit at the end. Now, let's have a chat.

All right. Have you guys heard the 404 Podcast? No. No. Like you, I am a fan in general of 404 Media. At least their print stuff so far. And of course, Joseph Cox always does excellent work. So I support what they do.

I read their stuff all the time. I have queued up their podcast in my podcast app and just kind of hit play to make sure it plays. But, no, I haven't actually dug into any of the episodes. Yeah. I think that – here's a tip, guys.

Stick to the writing. Stick to the writing. You are amazing journalists. Stick to that. Pretty please. Leave the podcasting to the professionals. There's nothing really – I say this out of love. I love you guys. I'm sure nobody there is ever going to hear this, so it's okay.

But, yeah, they're not professional podcasters, so it's kind of painful to listen to. And they talk about the same thing that's in the news without adding a whole lot extra to it. So it's kind of one of those things where I would personally prefer that they write more articles. That's just my two cents as a paid user.

Well, at one time, we were all beginning podcasters, so let's give them some time. But I don't want them to be professional podcasters. I want them to be professional journalists. Right. Now, if they want to hire two or three maybe amazing tech podcasters to take over for them, I know three guys that are ready to go.

So help me understand here. I'm not sure Dave can fit one more in. I was going to say, why not? They may have spoken out of turn for Dave. Yeah, why not? What the heck? Do you think that it's an issue that they haven't yet found their rapport with each other and their rhythm?

They're still finding that? Because that's a pretty common thing when folks start out. Could be. They just don't sound very comfortable on the microphone in general. So it's going to, you know, that first year of being uncomfortable on the mic and not really having a good cadence, knowing how to talk into a microphone, things like that.

They don't sound professional. So as somebody who's been listening to podcasts for 15 years, it kind of is like just one of those jarring things for me, I guess. Do you think an editor could help them to streamline it? No. No. This is something that's just going to take time and practice.

It's not a bad show. It's just they should be doing other stuff is just my only complaint. Yeah. There's no value added in them doing a podcast version of the stuff that they're publishing. Nope. Is that fair? Yeah. That's what I'm saying. As a paid subscriber to 404, I would rather them write more stuff and spend more time doing the investigative stuff instead of rehashing the stuff that they've already investigated.

Interesting. I just think it's – I think it's a misuse of time. Okay. Well – But I do love their site and I love their articles. Fantastic stuff. I'm so glad that they split off from Motherboard when that took a shit. So – Yeah. Me too. I hope they make it. It's good stuff.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I saw this that came through over the break and since I was somebody who owned an eight sleep bed, I don't have it anymore because they are not dog proof. As I've learned after three of them were exploded by my dogs.

I've met your dogs. Yes. Is there any mattress in the world other than a slab of three-quarter-inch plywood that is dog proof to Bammers? I mean – Well, here's the funny part. Bam Bam isn't the one that broke my beds.

The 70-pound Doberman is the one that broke all the beds. Okay. Because she's got those pointy little rat paws with the pointy little toes and we keep our toes fairly well trimmed. But they still like slice through these things like Freddy Krueger. So – And to eight sleeps, you know, to their credit, their customer support, I called them up and I'm like, hey, my dog broke this thing.

I know it's not in warranty because you actually gave it to me for free because we talked about it on a podcast five years ago. Do you guys sell a replacement topper for it? And they're like, oh, we'll send you a replacement. And they sent me an entirely new queen-size bed with the new topper.

So, I have to say their customer support is fantastic. All right. But their CEO actually was – he was running experiments over the drama with OpenAI saying that the quality of sleep in San Francisco has gone in the shitter while that drama was going on, which is just like, hey, somebody's always watching you guys.

So, you're saying they're getting analytics from the beds back? Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's one of the great things about eight sleep is you get – there's a fantastic – I love that he says it's one of the great things. It was. That was one of the great things. I see that as a negative. Oh, no.

I loved it. So, one of the great things is that there's a company aggregating your sleep schedule and – okay, great. That's what you've really – that's a new direction for you, Jason. Well, it was great for me until I heard this, the fact that they are aggregating and putting it with everybody. I just like waking up in the morning and figuring out how much REM I had last night.

I'm like, okay, that's great. Just don't need to share that with the company. That's all I'm saying. I know. That's what I – you know, we always joke that my bed had a fucking EULA with it. Now I understand why it had a EULA with it because they were doing this kind of thing.

You get a little note from them that says it seems like you were very restless here, almost as if a medium-sized dog was scratching on the bed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're like – they would give me – because you can split the bed into two sides and sometimes Dino would sleep on my side.

It seems like you were agitated last night. I'm like, yeah, because Dino was on my side of the bed. He didn't stay on his side of the bed. But when it was just me on one side and the dog on the other, I got great metrics from it. And, you know, they're pricey beds, but the heating and cooling side of it – I got nothing bad to say about Eight Sleep.

I just thought this was a funny use of the technology that they used it to track how OpenAI was doing poorly when Sam Altman was kicked out. By the way, I will just add here sort of a life pro trick here for someone who's been married for a very long time.

That one of the best investments my wife and I ever made was a dual-zone heated mattress pad. Oh, very nice. Yeah. Yeah. So her side is usually on 11. My side isn't plugged in. Yeah.

But it's great. Yeah. And same thing with a Rottweiler. When it was just me and Bam Bam, her side of the bed would be at 11 and my side would be at, you know, negative two. Yeah. It was perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Those things are – yeah, you can't – the other upgrade I've heard for married couples is a second bedroom.

Yes. Yes. That's very European. And I've learned, like, there's – they don't have the kind of, I guess, the shame that we have of a couple sleeping in separate bedrooms. They're just like, no, we want to sleep. You know, I love you, but we want to sleep.

Yeah. Sleep is for sleep. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we got a little bit of actual security news here. You and Senator Ron Wyden, who is by far the most discussed senator on this show. Yeah. He keeps popping up because he's always going on about these things. He wants the public to know about the details surrounding the long-running Hemisphere phone surveillance program.

So this is the AT&T thing that basically federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies have the ability to often – to request often warrantless searches from the project's phone records that AT&T has been collecting since 1987. These are trillions upon trillions of domestic phone records.

Four billion new records are getting added to its database every day, and a federal or state law enforcement agency can request a query with a subpoena that they can issue themselves. So that's not much of a subpoena. Yeah. And apparently, it's pretty bad. You can basically – you can target alternate numbers, obtain location data, and look up phone records of everyone who's been in communication with the target.

So this is basically – if you use a phone, you're fucked. And the center is kind of like, hey, what the hell is going on here? Yeah. Ben Yellen and I talked about this story. I think another element of this is that AT&T actually has a profit motive because they charge for this service.

So the law enforcement agencies contract with them, and it's a problem. The other thing that – speaking of Senator Wyden, we just covered in today's podcast that he is blocking the approval – the Senate approval of the new head of NSA and Cyber Command.

Lieutenant General Hogg, I believe his name is. Boss Hogg? Well, he will be. It's not spelled that way, but yeah. I can't wait until he shows up in that white suit. Right. He's got his big old Cadillac. He comes cruising up to the security entrance at NSA.

Well, hello, fellas. He's got his little – the thing is, who would his Roscoe be? Yeah. Yeah. Right? Oh, my. And his flash drive is shaped like a basset hound.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, there goes any chance I ever have of interviewing Lieutenant General Hogg. Don't worry. Nobody listens to the show. Yeah. But in this case, Senator Wyden is blocking it because he wants more transparency from NSA when it comes to Section 702 surveillance.

Right. Which, of course, is set to expire at the end of the year. And we'll see if Congress either – if they can – if they either do an extension, which is a possibility, or they may let it sunset or do a real rush, rush kind of renewal of it.

But I guess this is the lever that Wyden has, and he's using it. All right. Excellent. And I found this article, which I thought was very interesting now that I live in Toronto and use public transport basically all the time. I know listeners in Los Angeles will have no understanding of any of this because there is no public transport in L.A.

But I was thinking about this because I do have a tap card for Toronto's public transport here. And they're saying that smarter public transit comes at the cost of rider, basically, privacy. It's very difficult to pay with cash for these systems these days.

And, well, here you go, 404 Media. A 404 Media investigation has revealed that riders were right to be concerned. So checking trip histories, selling data, it's all over the map because every transport authority does different things.

But, yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about that as we've switched for convenience to using, like, pay-as-you-go or tap cards or anything like that, all that data is being collected and sometimes being sold because a lot of these, obviously, public transport systems need money.

So, of course, they're going to sell this data to get money to keep the systems running. So it's something I never even thought about. But now every time I'm, like, going somewhere in Toronto, I'm like, where is this data going? And a lot of these authorities are not very forthcoming about what they're doing with the data.

And it's very difficult to find out. So it's something I never really thought about. But now every time I'm tapping my card, I'm like, where is this data going? What's happening to it? This reminds me of a little bit of thought technology that I saw someone share when it came to public transportation and how we consider that.

And what this person suggested was that we should not think of public transportation systems as losing money. The only reason that we think of them as losing money is because we charge money for them and they cost more than what we charge. This person said we don't think about roads as losing money.

We don't say, boy, we lose money on our highways every year. No, roads cost money. They're an investment in infrastructure. And if we thought of public transportation in the same way, they simply cost money, which we offset with fees, but it's going to cost money. That would be a more helpful way to think about public transportation than complaining how much money we lose on it every year.

I agree. Yeah. But that's not what's going to happen. No. Still good, though. Yeah. Yeah. Still good. So I put this next one in here for you, Dave. DAC in the golden age of gadget catalogs. This is an article from Cable Sasser over at Panic.

Panic, the makers of Transmit. And now they have Nova, which used to be called Coda, which I used for years. I love Panic stuff. This is one of the greatest old catalogs of all time. Yes. You remember this thing? Oh, yes. Yes.

I saw this about a week ago, and I guess over the Thanksgiving break, I spent way too much time looking through this catalog, and it was such a fun nostalgia trip. And as Cable Sasser points out, it's not just the photography.

It's also the writing. I'd forgotten about this, really. Somehow, I hadn't thought about it in a long, long time. And it was really fun to go back and see how they did this. Because, yeah, I mean, it was entertaining reading.

They're trying to sell you a, I don't know, a new stereo receiver. But you would read the whole thing. Oh, yeah. No, this was, you know, awesome when it came in the mail. And the one thing I had completely forgotten that I had, I actually had the Alien Invasion arcade watch.

And I saw it, and I'm like, wait a minute. I used to have that. It was like, all these memories came flooding back. And I'm like, oh, my God. And just going through this thing, the Darth Vader phone, and oh, there's so much stuff in here. I have.

There's a picture of the Fireball pinball machine. Oh, yeah. I have one of those. You still do? Yep. Yep. Nice. Probably bought it about 10 years ago. It was also sold through Sears. And it's not an arcade machine.

There's no coin slot in it. It was actually, it was made by Bally. And Bally made a full arcade version of Fireball. But they made this smaller version. It's like probably a four-fifths size. But it's all real pinball parts and made by Bally from around 1974, I believe.

But yeah, I got one off of eBay probably about 10 years ago. And it's been in the basement rec room ever since. And I love it. That's awesome. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. Look through this catalog. I mean, it is just right for the demographic of the folks listening to this podcast.

You will smile from front to finish. I wanted to update on my Eufy security cameras, which we talked about a couple months ago when I initially purchased them. So far, so good with a couple of little asterisks.

They are working very well. I am impressed with the image quality. Remember, we were concerned about, because they're battery operated, we were concerned about power in wintertime. Yep. And sure enough, that is a concern.

I have two cameras looking out the back of my house. One of them is way up high on the top level of a deck. It gets full sun all day long. It's doing just fine. I had one lower down that I had to get a supplementary solar panel for, which Eufy makes.

So instead of the probably two-inch by four-inch solar panel on the top of the camera, now I've got a probably four-inch by eight-inch solar panel that sits above the camera. Right. And it seems to be doing just fine. The doorbell camera.

Golden battery is no joke. Yeah. I mean, I've got a ring – not a ring doorbell. I've got the Google equivalent. And it was going to cost too much money to hardwire power, so I just got the battery one. And all summer long, it was great. And in the past two weeks, I've had to charge it twice.

Okay. Yes. I've got a ring with a solar panel. And even that, the solar panel can't even keep up now because it does get – I mean, it's getting down in the 40s here sometimes at night. And it is draining those things. Yeah. Because I've got the one with the light, so it's got the floodlight on it. Right. And every time a squirrel runs by, the floodlight goes on.

So I've actually had to change the batteries on it in the past month, which during the summer, never have to even think about it. It's just 100% all the time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So the doorbell camera, I've had to charge about once a month so far, but I think as it's getting colder, that'll probably accelerate.

Yeah. The other thing I learned about how these cameras work that I didn't really think all the way through that I've had to adjust for is that because they're battery-operated, they want to be using as little power as possible, which means the camera section is not running 24-7.

And it's not like a security camera that's plugged in that's just constantly recording. So the way it works is it has a very low-power motion detector, and motion detectors use almost no juice. When the motion detector gets triggered, the camera powers up and starts recording.

Probably takes less than a second for that to happen. So the limiting factor for me was the range of the motion detector because in my backyard, I'm looking out over a pathway that goes past my house that probably goes 50 yards is the zone I want to see.

And the motion detectors only go probably 20 yards, something like that, that they can be triggered. So sure enough, Eufy sells external motion detectors. So I can throw more money at this problem.

Right. So that's what I – It's convenient that they have all these solutions for extra money. It is. It really is. I'm so thankful that I'm able to throw more money at their company to solve my problems. But I just thought that was interesting because I hadn't really thought through the way – My wife was looking at the footage, and she was saying, well, you can see the person walking.

Why isn't that triggering the camera? Because that's not what triggers the camera to record. It's the motion detector, not what the camera sees. Most of the time, the camera's off. So I'm still dialing it in with all that kind of stuff. But in terms of the app, the quality of the hardware, all that kind of stuff, very pleased.

There's no monthly subscription, which is nice. I did buy a terabyte SSD drive for the home base that goes in the – like the base station, which is where everything gets recorded so that basically I can keep all the footage forever. It comes with something like 16 gigs, which is – in our house, it was probably about a week's worth of footage.

Oh, wow. Yeah. So not bad, but now it's forever pretty much. So that's the update. You can catalog every squirrel that's ever lived in your backyard. That's right. That's right. Raccoons, all that kind of stuff. Mostly I see people walking their dogs.

Right. That's about it. A couple other things I wanted to touch on here. I want to talk about shaving. Yeah. Okay. So – and this is – Face? Shaving my face, yes. Yes. Clarifying. Yes, yes.

Shaving my face. This is the grumpy part of Grumpy Old Geeks because this is something that I'm grumpy about. So since I was a teenager and started shaving, needed to start shaving every day, which probably happened in my late teen years, I have been using an electric razor primarily.

Sometimes I use a regular old razor, safety razor, but mostly I use an electric razor. That's my preference. I like it. It's another gadget for me to play with. It's all good. I would say in the past year or so, I had noticed that I was not getting the quality of a shave from an electric razor that I was used to.

Now, over the years, I have replaced my razors. I've replaced the foils on my razors and I buy quality electric razors. So it's none of those things. So I started looking into it. And sure enough, the research I found said that, wait for it, as men age, the elasticity of their skin decreases.

This makes shaving with electric razors problematic. Evidently, electric razors rely on youthful elastic skin to do what they do. So even sort of like pulling my skin, you know, straight like a old Hollywood facelift, it has not been enough.

And I think it's also the fact that the hair on my beard has changed. Like, you know, when I was a teenager and into my 20s, pretty much it was all the same kind of hair, you know, thickness and color and all that kind of stuff. Now, you got your dark hair, you got your gray hair, you got your little wispy hairs, like all this.

Again, this is the grumpy old part of the show. Yes. So I've switched to using a regular razor to get a good shave. And I was just curious where you guys were on this journey. If you, if, because I'm the oldest of the three of us, right?

Yes. By a little bit, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I didn't know, like, where you guys stood with this, but it seemed to me like this slotted right into the grumpy and old part of the show. So I thought I'd share. My youthful elastic skin laughs at you. Ah, I see.

It's all that clean living? Oh, yeah. I attempted to use an electric razor in my late teens. I never found that the shave was as good or as satisfying. Right. So I never went back.

I've been using, you know, I think I've, what are they up to these days? 19 blades in the standard razor. Exactly. Yeah. Whatever number we're currently at, I think I use a Mach 3. I've been using a Mach 3 for probably two decades now. I find the key for me is really having a good shaving cream.

I've settled on whatever they sell at Sephora. So whenever my wife does a Sephora order, I have her get me their shaving cream as well. And that really does the trick for me very, very well. So, and I mean, it's a pain. I have to shave. I joke that I get my five o'clock shadow comes in around noon.

So I have to shave often. Me too. That exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. So, yeah. Every day I shave. My son recently has decided he wants to see me with a beard, but I hate having a beard. So, yeah. So we'll see what, where that, I mean, my son's going to win briefly.

And then I get to have, I get to have that fun process. Then the wife wins. Not anymore. Then you get to have that fun process of when you shave off your beard, you, you do all the different things like the Fu Manchu and the Hitler and all that sort of stuff. Right. Right. Right. You, for about five seconds, you think, you know, a goatee wouldn't be bad.

Yeah. So you try that out and then you take that bit off and then you've just got the, you know, you've got the, like, I'm a trucker mustache. And then you shave that down to the little Hitler one. And then you shave that off and you're back to normal. Yeah. There you go. What about you, Jason? Okay. So, uh, about six months ago, uh, my buddy, Andy pre boy came over and he was, I hadn't shaved that day.

And he's like, you need a shave. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. I just didn't feel like it today. And he's like, I've discovered the joy of shaving. And I'm like, Oh, do tell. So he, he started to regale me with some of his techniques and his products. The first thing he gave me was a bottle of pre-shave oil, which completely changed my life.

It is the greatest thing ever. You, you, you wash your face, you get it all. I wash right after I get out of the shower. So it was all, you know, like moist and ready to go. Then I put on the pre-shave oil, let that, like rub that in for like 30 seconds. While that's going, I take out my, my, my brush and I take out the foam and I do the whole, the whole barbershop thing now.

And then do the, the brush on the face and then do the shave. The shave, it's like so much nicer. Takes like maybe two to three minutes longer than normal. The shave lasts longer and I smell gorgeous.

Um, I will put, I will put my products. The only people that know about that are his two dogs. And my roommate. Yes. And me, but I can smell it. That's all I care about. I am a self-centered, you know, that's me. That's fine. I want to smell good for me. No shame. And, uh, it, the thing is, it's like the soap that I got lasts longer than the, uh, Henry's or whatever it was that I was getting.

Oh, Henry's wasn't bad. Yeah. I remember. I used that once. Yeah. But it, it, it, it is, it is like, it's so much different than using just the brush with the, you know, the little, um, puck of soap. You just wet the brush, whip it in the thing, put it in a little bowl, whisk it up, put it on your face.

Cause while the oil's going and, and softening your, your facial hair, when you start using the brush on your face, it lifts up the whiskers and opens the pores up. Then you just do a quick shave with the Mach 3 and it is beyond so much nicer. I have to admit, I never would have guessed that Jason would have had the most refined shaving technique of the three of us.

No, no. That's true. That's true. Uh, I've got the brush. I got to start using it. Oh man. It's so nice. It's so nice. And he gave me a little bowl, um, you know, to put the brush in the, to do the foam and stuff in.

And it's got a little holder for your, your razor, but it's also it double, um, it's got a, uh, double purpose. The bowl is actually hollow. So you pour in hot water into the bowl. So it keeps the bowl warm. So your, your soap stays warm while you're mixing it up.

It is. Trust me, guys, we're old enough where you can take the extra five minutes and you will feel so much better. It is so worth it. My shaving game is on point. This is all new to me. Yep. Uh, I did not know that pre-shave oil was a thing.

So pre-shave oil changed the game. I mean, just the pre-shave oil alone will, will, will change your life. All right. So. Mm. Very good. All right. All right, gents. That's what I have for you this week. It's good to be back and, uh, look forward to talking to you guys next time.

All right. All right. Absolutely zero Star Wars. Oh, whoa. There's a disturbance in the force. Stay on target. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Over at Patreon, we've got Dan, Mark, and Nilof.

Dan says, great show as usual. I'm glad to have you back from your break. I appreciate you doing a show during Dave's and most folks vacation. You're welcome. You're welcome. Over at PayPal, we've got Shiloh Shop, Charlie, Simon, Nicole, Haway, Jonathan, Judge, Tom, and I think that was Thomas and I probably mistyped it.

And Nikolai, uh, Chris sent us a 50 bucks. Thank you very much. Phillip also sent us 50 bucks and said, loving the show still. Left a small donation as a thank you. A couple of things. One, there are so many great bitters and ales here in the UK, but as Brian says, you generally find them in pubs and not the bars. There are plenty of those around.

Can recommend some top beers if interested. And the Sonos Bar. Drive the big bar and connect it with HDMI TV and Apple TV remotes can control volume just fine. And then Nay, who sent us a hundred bucks and says, thank you for the top notch entertainment over the many years.

As I drive into work, I have been a long time listener and wish I could donate more often. But as you know, times are tough. I can't remember which episode, but a couple of weeks back, you mentioned FB Purity and I've been trying it out for about a week and mind blown. Finally, I can see a timeline of what my friends are posting instead of the algorithm garbage.

I've also removed the FB app from my phone. There is no need to use it after discovering FB Purity. Anyway, happy holidays and I hope my meager donation helps in some small ways. Thank you. And P.S. I did not use chat GPT to write this. Thank you, Nay. And just real quick to Philip, if you've got the big Sonos bar, it works fine.

The Ray, you have to use the RF stuff and it's a pain in the butt because it doesn't have HDMI. That's what you get when you get the cheapie. Yep. Over at the tip jar, we've got Josh, Nick, and Adam. Thank you all so much. And I want to give a big shout out to my friend Ted, aka TrackPants, and Christine over at Reed's Chocolates.

We drove out there to see them this weekend and he was like a real life Willy Wonka for my kid, except he didn't kill him, which was nice. All right. So we got to do a chocolate factory tour and kids' mind was blown. So thank you so much, Ted. Very cool. We got some RIPs this week.

Linda Saltzman Sagan, co-creator of the Voyager golden record and pioneer plaque, has died. She was 83 years old. Ah, sad to say. And by the way, we had a couple other deaths this week. And I'd just like to say, fuck Charlie Munger, the capitalist pig dog. Fuck Henry Kissinger, the war criminal.

I choose to shed a tear for Shane McGowan. Pogue singer who has died at age 65, who we thought was about 95 years old for the past 20 years. Look, as I said, the more surprising headline was Shane McGowan still alive for the last 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't. He will be missed.

Yeah. It wasn't unexpected, but it's still very, very sad. So if you're not a Pogues fan, I, yeah, yeah, go just listen to the Pogues. There's going to be a lot of fairy tale of New York played this Christmas. My least favorite song that they ever did.

But especially now that it's been, it's been edited everywhere. So, but anyway, until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schellmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 627. GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment.

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