630: Roast Beast

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Welcome to the last show of the year. Have a great holiday. See you in 2024 when, as I was assured when I was young, our young robotic bodies with our brains uploaded into them would be whizzing around and flying cars and enjoy your hallucinating AI that lies to you while self-driving cars run over your kids.

Woo-hoo! Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas! Okay, let's wrap it up, Jason. I got a fucking plane to catch. Yeah, I know. You're flying to Southern California. It was apocalyptic here yesterday. I know. I heard there was a light rain. No, actually, it was apocalyptic. I'm from the Midwest where it rained, where we get rain and it's rain. I'm driving down the road. It's a five-lane road. Only the two middle ones were the only place you could drive. It was bad.

Well, SoCal is not built for anything that resembles real rain. Yes, drainage is not on the table in Southern California. But I wanted to let you know, I'm starting off the holiday right. Since I am a grumpy old geek and an old man, I have, in my bathroom, I have two sets of tubes. On the left are the mouth tubes for the toothpaste and the things like that. On the right are the skin tubes for my, I've got my moisturizer. I've got my

hydrocortisone for whatever random rash happens to break out this time of year. I got my athlete's foot cream because just in case, I don't really have it, but it sits there. I just have three seashells. Exactly. See, that's what I should go for. So this morning before my coffee, I go to brush my teeth.

And my cleaning lady the other day had played a little bit of the shell game. Not the three shells, but she moved all my tubes around. And I forgot that she did that. So this morning, I brushed my teeth with hydrocortisone. It was great. Don't need coffee after that.

That'll wake you right the fuck up. Oh my God. Yeah. I, um, you know, I, we have a, what, every two weeks cleaning lady come in to kind of do the deep clean so we don't have to deal with that. But that's what we got too. Yeah. Yeah. I a hundred percent after she leaves, I spend an hour and a half walking around the house, putting everything back where it should be. Yeah. Exactly.

I don't know why that's so difficult, but it is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you get what you pay for, I guess. Yep. That's true. It's definitely a budget situation. Yeah. Yeah. We hired one of the girls from the local motels. That's what we got too. Yeah. So, okay. Maybe it's the same girl. Maybe she flies up to Canada.

Well, then we're definitely paying her too much. Yeah. Okay. Uh, so, uh, fuck YouTube. We're in the, we're, we're in the middle of this move or just this upload to get our show onto YouTube. Cause everybody's like, ah, Google podcast is shutting down. Where can we get it? Well, we want to be on YouTube music. To be on YouTube music, we have to upload our podcast to YouTube. Well, Brian, I don't know if you've ever listened to this show, but we're not exactly politically fucking correct. We are, we are in so deep in YouTube

jail right now that I don't know if we're ever going to make it out. But how's that even possible? There's all these like crazy right winger that look, the ads I've shown on YouTube kids when I was subscribing for my kid were far worse than anything we talk about. They all make it through the filter.

Everything we're flagged for is making fun of those people. So we mentioned crap like that and then we get flagged for it. And God forbid you ever mentioned the C word, the C 19, forget about it. All those are flagged. Cause I was like, I was looking at it. I'm like, why are none of the links from our show notes working in the YouTube show notes? And I tried to fix it and it's like, no, sorry, you're in YouTube jail. If you try and do anything else right now, you're in YouTube jail for three days.

But all we literally have ever done on our show is miscorrect misinformation. We exact misinformation. We are doing the right thing. I know. I know. But wait for it. I guess the AI doesn't recognize that. Wait for it. If I try and ask it to say, Hey, we were just doing exactly what you said. Can you please remove us from YouTube jail? And the algorithm or the 14 year old boy in Malaysia decides that no, we're wrong.

Then we get put in jail for another two weeks on top of that for wasting their time for giving them our content that they can monetize for free because we're not running any of their Oh my God. I, you know what? Let it go, Jason. I don't really give a shit if a bunch of our old episodes don't make it up. Who cares?

The problem is now it's too late because I clicked a button that said load everything from the feed. So I don't know. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. But by the time. I mean, just let the shows be in jail. Who cares? Yeah. Um, so that's the, that's the state of YouTube. So this is what we go through for you folks. All six of you that used Google podcasts, right? Who said, Hey, can we get our, get your show on, on YouTube music?

Oh, but Jason, according to the spam emails that we get every five seconds at our grumpy old geeks account, if we're not on YouTube, we're missing out. We are missing out. We should have taken up one of those companies that said me make you big on YouTube sometime. Yeah. We should have paid somebody five bucks and still be in jail.

Yeah. Yeah. Still been in jail. I, but at least I wouldn't be having an aneurysm. Well, that's the holiday season, Jason. Let it go. Listen to Elsa from Frozen. Just let it go. I'm trying to. Hey, by the way, speaking of, speaking of aneurysms, this is my two year stroke-aversary last week.

I saw you posted the picture. I don't know if one says congratulations. I think so. Okay. I think, I think that's how that works. Congratulations, Jason. Thank you. Thank you. And so, yeah, that's like, oh God. Yeah. I do remember it was around this time of year. I remember it was like, what a fucked up Christmas.

December 19th was when I had my strokes. And then December 20th is when I finally got my ass to the hospital. Yes. So I don't know. I count the 20th because that's the one I have pictures of. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So take care of yourself, kids. Anyway, let's move on to some more Google news. Fuck YouTube. Fuck you. So Google's, Google's and Epic's epic battle has finally come to an end with the $700 million settlement. Right.

So $630 million of that will go to the consumers who spent money on the in-app buys and shit like that. They're going to get $2. I want my $2. I want my $2. Too bad we already used as a show title 10 years ago. The other $70 million will go to states that joined the settlement, which includes all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Each of them will get $2 as well.

There you go. Yeah. And they say if you did buy more, you'll get more, but good luck. Good luck. You'll have to prove it. You'll have to upload it to Google system. You'll get flagged. You'll get put in Google jail. I know. Yeah. Oh, God. Uh, we talked last week about how Jeff Bezos's penis rocket was headed back to, uh, not quite space because it's a not quite spaceship. Well, uh, here's the TLDR. It went up. It didn't crash.

Well, next door dash and Uber are still horrible. Uh, so this come through, uh, door dash and Uber minimum wage ruling leads to companies to hit back on tipping. So just in case you thought it was over, uh, Uber, door dash, Grubhub, all of these companies in New York, uh, there was a ruling that said they have to give drivers at least a minimum wage of $17 and 96 an hour.

Okay. Well, to fuck with those drivers and just say, yeah, thanks. Thanks guys. Thanks so much. What they've done is they've changed the way tipping works on the app. Cause in the, in, you know, years gone by, you set your tip before you get the meal. Now you give the tip after you get the meal with the assumption that you're never going to see that person again. So, so the drivers are getting stiffed. Okay. And the timing of that is obviously a fuck you to their own employees.

I'm sorry, not employees, contractors that they wish they were, but honestly, that's kind of how it should have been. Well, both companies say that the minimum wage law increases their costs, which they have to pass on to customers in the form of higher fees. The only way they can keep the total cost affordable, they say, is to effectively support customers in paying lower tips. So what fuck you to them for the switcheroo, but you are absolutely right. I shouldn't be given a tip upfront.

Especially because that's, that's how that, uh, it started to become gaming the system in that if you, the higher, higher, you would tip higher because then the driver would be more inclined to get you your food quicker. Exactly. It was gaming the system and that's totally wrong. And I don't want to tip until I get the food because what if the food is destroyed? And a lot of time it has been for me. Exactly. And I've already tipped you like 20 bucks to get my destroyed food to me faster. Damn, you a big tipper girl. You know what? Well, here's the thing though. I've really

stopped using these services completely. I just don't like, it's not worth it that all of a sudden a $30 meal becomes $75. Yeah. Screw that crap. Exactly. I'm like, it's the world's most expensive quesadilla from Paquito Mas. And I love me some Paquito Mas, but damn girl, get your ass in the car and go pick up your damn burrito. Well, that's what I do now. But, uh, when I had the COVID a couple weeks ago, it did come in handy, but Jesus, was it expensive? Yeah, it's crazy stuff. Yep. Uh, I found this

from Corey Doctorow. What kind of bubble is AI? It's a nice thought piece that he wrote and put out last week. Did you get a chance to read it? I did not. Okay. Well, it is a very well thought out piece in my personal opinion, and it's spot on. It's the first time Corey and I have seen eye to eye in quite some time on something that he wrote from soup to nuts. Um, I've been thinking about the exact same question that he poses in the article for the past few weeks. And what it basically talks about is when

this bubble bursts, Oh, and it will burst. What will be left behind? Now we look at the first.com boom. What did we get out of that? Gazillions of miles of, of infrastructure. We've got fiber everywhere. We got lots of copper everywhere, which now people have dug up and sold to, you know, keep their meth habit going. But the, the thing is, you know, you look at the different bubbles and what's left behind. You look at the crypto and NFT bubble. Well, nothing was there to begin with. So

nothing has been left behind. So it's an interesting piece about what will be left behind from this AI bubble. Will we be left with a bunch of people that know how to write a bunch of code for shit that nobody's ever going to use again and something that benefits the world? Or is it just going to be a bunch of garbage anime manga images that everybody makes ad nauseum and garbaging up the entirety of the web, which is something else we'll talk about in a little bit. So it's a good piece. I highly

recommend reading it. All right, cool. Uh, and then after our show last week, you and I had a little off the air discussion where, because I made a flippant, but true comment about how Elon had taken over our entire podcast. Like we had talked about every single one of his companies. He sucks up all the oxygen in the room. It's, you can't get away from him, especially if it's slow news. It's just all of a sudden everybody defaults to, well, let's write about Elon then. Um, and you floated the

idea of like, let's have an Elon less show. Yeah. And now here you are talking. Well, I thought about it and I thought like, obviously we need to stop just getting, we need to stop grabbing the headline crazy stuff that just, it makes everybody laugh. Like, because that's just filler and it's just, there's no point in that. But I don't think we can stop talking about him because he is everywhere. He's ostensibly sort of kind of running five to six different companies that are huge. And at

the forefront for now of their various, uh, areas that they're in. So we can't not talk about him. And then I was thinking, well, if I want to get, how do I, how do I get away from Elon to some degree? And what is actually effective? Us stopping talking about him isn't effective because we should continue to talk about the stupid shit that he does because it's important. But what I can do

is dump Elon from my personal life and that I can let my money talk. So I'd finally had enough and I dumped a huge amount of Tesla stock this week. Now, not all, don't, I am not an ethical investor. I am a practical investor. I would like to retire with a large pile of money. So I have kept some Elon stock, but I was way, I had tons of Tesla. So I made a tidy sum there, got rid of all

that instantly felt better. So that was fantastic. And then I've also decided, uh, you know, I don't, I'm not a huge Twitter power user. He's not going to miss me. Let's put it that way. But I used to always go and, you know, it was a good curated feed that I had that gave me a nice mix of politics and science and all that sort of stuff, but I'm still loading it all the time. And now I'm seeing all his fucking red pill craziness and shitty ads. And I'm like, I don't want to do that anymore.

I don't want to support Elon and X anymore either. So I'm going to spend the holiday. Oh, what a wonderful way to spend the holidays transitioning from X to threads. So what I'm doing is like, I'm loading up my, my X feed. I'm finding the people that I like, the brands that I like, the different things that I follow that bring me joy. I'm searching for them on threads, adding them on threads, removing them on X. So I know I've already done it.

And eventually by, my hope is by the end of the holiday, won't delete my account, but it'll be pretty threadbare and I'll be on threads. No pun intended. No pun intended. And I'll switch over to threads because almost everybody does seem to be there and they're posting the same content in both places if they haven't left X entirely already.

So, so that's my approach to it is we'll continue to talk about the important Elon stuff that comes in and I'm making my statement with my money and my time and my attention and trying to remove it from Elon. All right. I have a plea to you and every other tech podcaster out there.

We can talk about all these companies all we want. He doesn't have to be mentioned in the post. It's Elon's X, Elon's Tesla, Elon's SpaceX. It's just Tesla, X, SpaceX. They all did some stupid shit. Just talk about the company.

And let's be honest about it. It's not like he, how do you, how are you full-time CEO of five to six different, incredibly involved companies? No, nobody can be that. Being the CEO of any one of these companies is a full-time, more than a full-time job. Right. So like, what does he do? Nothing.

Right. And you know what he is? He's cover for all the idiots who are running the other companies. So let's, let's expose the other idiots and stop talking about him because you know that there are other people behind the scenes making really stupid decisions. So I think, I think it's time to, you know, lift the veil on those people and let's see what's going on. So all of my stories, I have stories about some of those companies and he's mentioned in none of them because it's, it's irrelevant to the story

that he exists. So that's where I'm going with it. Unfortunately, I didn't have any Tesla stock to sell because I'm not, you know, Joe money bags up there. I'm actually boxing up all the rest of my studio to sell so I can pay my car payment next month. It's all gone. It's all gone. But anyway, I can still, I can still, I can still do my part to, to have a day without Elon. So even though you totally ruined

my, my show bit, we'll go with it. We'll go with it. I didn't see a show bit in the notes. Sorry. Nope. We, we talked about it on text. You just, you let off with your bit by saying we talked about it. Well, yeah, but I came to a different conclusion. So.

I know. I just, it's a, it's a two person show, Jason. It's not, it's not the set. It's not the tee up Jason for his bit show. Yeah, it is. In the news. Continuing on with the holiday of giving the pink slip. Phillips Hue has announced job cuts.

Signify the company behind the Phillips Hue. Do you still have any of those? I do. I actually really like them. Okay. Yeah. Well, you're not enough people apparently like them. I guess not. No, they are. I love this. They have announced that they plan to restructure its operations amid quote, ongoing market volatility and uncertainty. End quote. Same bullshit that everybody.

I think everybody's going to a chat GPT to write these statements. And he's like, this, this, this particular bit's gold. See, the problem is chat GPT would actually be more creative. So I know they're not. Yes. They are going to enact what they call a quote, new customer centric structure. Now, Brian, as far as I know, businesses should be customer centric from the get, right? Well, that's how it used to be, Jason.

That's how it used to be. I don't know if you've had any interactions with any businesses recently, but that has certainly not been the case. Hmm. Yeah. Seems to be, they say, they say they plan to bring their non-manufacturing costs to within the range of 25 to 29% of sales. Um, so they finally hired an MBA, apparently.

Right. Yes. Apparently. Somebody looked at the books and went, what are you people doing? Yeah. They got MBA for, MBAs for dummies for Christmas. Oh, I got the, oh God. Researchers from Western Sydney university are creating deep South. Should have checked that name first.

Yeah. The first super consumer consumer, uh, first supercomputer designed to simulate brain like networks at the scale of the human brain operating with the efficiency of just 20 Watts. Our brains can perform a billion billion operations per second. Not in the deep South. I'm sorry.

Uh, deep South aims to, uh, aims to match this by achieving 228 trillion synaptic operations per second. A breakthrough that could revolutionize our understanding of brain function and pave the way for, wait for it, Brian cyborg brains. This is not the story from last week either.

Nope. The brain-o-matic or what the fuck it was. The brain-o-matic. Oh, they say experts believe deep South will be pivotal in neuroscience research and AI development. This project is part of a broader effort to emulate the human brain's capabilities, including, including research into biological computers using actual brain cells.

No, that was last week's. Yeah. Sort of, sort of. Yes. But I have an idea, Brian, give me 15 bucks in the back of a Pinto and I'll give you free brain cells all day long. I'll make you as many kids and as kids as you want. We're done. You don't need to make a computer to do that. And I take all this money and put it into education. Just do that. I was about to say, like, I, you know, looking around at

the world these days, the human brain ain't that impressive. What we need to do is start educating those brains. Yeah. Jesus. Stop making computers to do our work. Teach people to do our work. This is tech 101 these days. It's, let's find not a problem and make a new solution.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. We don't, we don't have a lack of brains. Tons of them around. Nobody's using them though. That's the problem. Exactly. They're underutilized. Let's use them. Yep. Okay. Moving on. Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola Corporation. Remember them? Mm-hmm. The electric trucking and electric hydrogen powered truck company. He's been sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding investors along with a $1 million fine.

Also tech 101. Yeah. Seriously. It's all fraud. Yep. Fraud all the way down. He was convicted of wire insecurities fraud back in October of last year. He could have gotten 60 years in prison, but only got four. He's apparently not very sorry about what he did either because he's kind of a dick.

Nikola's stock value has gone down to under $1. I can't believe there's still actually any Nikola's stock left because, yeah. Well, they're done. That company is done. No, they are totally done. So, yeah, fire sale at Nikola very soon.

So, enjoy your state-sponsored vacation, asshole. Well, let's talk about another company that's going to be done pretty soon, at least according to many year-end predictions. X is under investigation for spreading illegal content on Israel and Hamas in the EU because the EU actually has rules about this sort of thing.

Yep. So, in the U.S., you can basically lose your advertisers and then claim that's some bullshit free speech right there. But in the EU, there's actual implications for these sorts of things. So, they have opened up formal proceedings to assess whether X may have breached the Digital Services Act, the DSA, and areas linked to risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency, and data access for researchers, said European regulators on Monday.

We know for a fact that all of that has happened. Oh, yes. Many, many times. Many, many, many times. Yeah. So, there are harsh penalties for anti-Semitic speech in Europe, unlike the U.S. The German Penal Code specifically prohibits publicly denying the Holocaust and disseminating Nazi propaganda, according to PBS, which, well, that's happened plenty of times.

Yep. And the EU will investigate whether X designated, and I had not heard this term before, I do enjoy it, designated as a very large online platform, or a VLOP. VLOP. VLOP it like it's hot, Jason. VLOP it like it's hot. Has put forth reasonable mitigating measures against the amplification of illegal content.

So, and finally, lastly, regulators will examine whether researchers have been given effective access to X's platform data because they're trying to figure out if all of X's claims are true, and they can't, because X won't let them look. Yeah. Oh, God.

I wonder if there are any R.O.U.S.s on the VLOPs. Look, Jason, I did the whole thing without saying Elon. I know. You know why? I took it out of the title. I wielded my editing scalpel.

Tesla's crash more than any other brand, according to LendingTree. It might have had something to do with why I decided to dump a ton of my Tesla stock. Could be. You didn't say, or you did actually say you weren't very ethical when it came to investing. I'm not. I'm not. I toyed with the idea of being an ethical investor, but then I went, no, I like money.

See, when we did our stock, year of stock purchases back in, what was it, 2016? And I got rid of my Twitter stock immediately after we were done, because I felt bad, which was very stupid of me. I kept mine. Yeah, I know.

I know. Probably did pretty okay. Yeah, I think it was $13 or $11 a share when I bought it. Yeah. Sold for $154, I think. Oh, Jesus. Well, there you go. Yeah. And the NVIDIA stock I got at the same time was when NVIDIA was in the tank.

Oh, God. Still got that. Shut up. Shut up. I'm going to be living back in my Jeep soon, so fuck off. At least it's not a self-driving Jeep. Anyway, Tesla drivers have the highest accident rate with 23.54 incidents per 1,000 drivers from November 22 to November 23.

Close behind that are Ram truck drivers. It's right in the name. Yeah, it is. It is. It says, however, though, Ram takes the lead for worst overall drivers when considering accidents, DUIs, speeding tickets, and other citations. With Tesla, again, coming in second.

So, it doesn't drive for you, people. No matter what they say, it's not self-driving. You know, and just this past week, I've almost gotten in three accidents with Teslas because I swear, people think that the thing can't get in an accident because there's so much technology.

Well, there's not. There's a laptop and a couple cameras, people. Yeah. Yeah. Not even LiDAR. Not even LiDAR in the fucking things. So, you know what I didn't get in, almost get in an accident with? A Ram truck. But that might just be my location here. Yeah, not a lot of those in that particular area.

Drive out to the farmlands, then you'll see tons. Yep. Yeah. Remember when the Adobe and Figma deal was the biggest thing in the internet? Yep. Well, it's gone now. Yep. Yep. All over. The European regulators found the deal would hurt competition in the digital design space.

Basically, yes, because it's the two biggest companies out there doing it. So, they're not wrong. Regulators are concerned that a combined Adobe and Figma would create an all-encompassing design ecosystem that would harm competition. They sent Adobe a statement of objections over the deal in November, noting ways the acquisition would significantly reduce competition in global markets.

But don't cry for Figma. Adobe will now pay Figma a $1 billion termination fee that was laid out in the initial terms of the deal. Very smart, Figma. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. I think they're okay over there then. Yeah. I think they were doing fine anyway.

And Adobe's okay paying out that $1 billion because we're all paying the stupid subscriptions. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, that's good. I, you know, and there's still Canva. You could always use Canva. I never used Figma. I only used Canva. And even that was just like, man, if you really want to make crappy flyers, there's a lot of options out there for you.

That's true. Yep. There is not a lot of options for vacuum tube transportation, though, because Hyperloop One is shutting down. Yes, that amazing technology from the 1970s banks. Yep. Yep. Or also a 2013 napkin.

So, it turns out it's not really going to work. So, the whole thing kind of started to crumble with Richard Branson going after Saudi Arabia back in 2018. Okay. He's not a fan of the Saudis.

Right. And he ended up having to resign as chairman, even though he was like, you know, the biggest, you know, biggest supporter of the company. You know, I read a lot of stuff about Hyperloop and how it was basically just never going to work because material science just isn't there.

So, you have a 500-mile tube out in the sun. It's going to expand and contract. There's going to be shrinkage, Brian. And it's going to make it extremely hard to keep the vacuum is what I remember reading from everybody. Look, you focus on the shrinkage. I focus on the expansion.

I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure. That's why you're rich and I'm not. Anyway, so they're going to try and pivot it into a cargo company, which makes more sense because I'd rather, you know, instead of a meat tube. Yeah, let's just shoot some packages down it, not some people.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Because nobody's going to miss that if your expansion happens to break the tube somewhere. So, we'll see what's going on with that. And they're just going to keep the assets, the IP, and they're going to sell off all the stuff. So, I tell you what, though, right now, if I had Schulmeister money, I'd be heading to Vegas to buy the bunker that they did the original tests in and turn it into my secret, you know, secret lair.

Because that might be a pretty cool asset to buy. I'm doing okay, Jason, but I'm not doing secret lair, okay? Well, it's Hyperloop in Vegas secret lair. Come on. That's secret lair on a budget. I'm sure your buddy Penn Jillette's already scooped it up for his next house.

Yeah, probably. Probably. Oh, man. Well, we knew this was coming, but they are finally here. There's something new and powerful for chat GPT users to play around with, and that's pretty much it. Play around with custom GPTs. These are bespoke bots that are essentially more focused, more specific versions of the main chat GPT model, enabling you to build something for a particular purpose without using any coding or advanced knowledge.

I love things that don't involve coding or advanced knowledge. Yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it. And let's build our business on top of it. And many people will, of course. That's exactly what's happening right now. This is a prime example of if you're in the right place at the right time with a very limited amount of knowledge one needs that you can make a buck or two.

Because they're going to open up a store and anybody that can put together a focused little app and market it well enough will sell a bunch. So that's what's going to happen. Will these things be apps useful? I don't know. We'll see. Maybe in very limited ways in the same way that chat GPT is right now.

Yeah. Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I've been waiting for them to open it up because they announced it a while ago. Yeah. But it's been kind of stuck because of that whole thing with the CEO being ousted and brought back. And, you know, there's some stuff that's been going on over there, over at OpenAI.

So, you know, I've actually got a plan to try this thing out when it comes up. I figured you would. It has nothing to do with us. We're not going to make a GOG bot. I've got a different bot that I want to try and play around with. Oh, come on. GOG bot. It just goes, Musk sucks. That's it. Go, Sam.

Oh, God. So, speaking of AI, the guys over at 404 Media are killing it. This is a great story about the largest data set powering AI images removed after discovery of CSAM.

Yes, that's right. Yes. So, this big Leon or Lion, I think it's Lion. They call it the Lion. Lion 5B data set, which is being used by everybody. It's a huge data set with over 5 billion links to images.

So, it's basically a link library, right? Well, inside that link library, they found at least 3,000 suspected instances of CSAM and more than 1,000 confirmed cases. There's also a lot of ISIS training material and things like that in there, too, which you probably don't want.

And don't even get me started on the copyrighted images that are in there. But the CSAM is what finally brought it down, so they pulled it for now while they can try and figure it out. What they don't want to do is take that library, remove the CSAM, and then put it back up.

Because even I know there's a little key command in your terminal app called diff. You run the diff against the first one and the second one, and then voila, thank you so much for pointing out all that CSAM for me. I appreciate that.

I appreciate that a lot. Preesh. So, this was started from Stanford researchers and lead author David Thiel, no relation. He emphasized the gravity of the situation, saying that anyone possessing the Lion 5B dataset likely holds thousands of illegal images.

Also, if you are running cryptocurrency and the blockchain for Bitcoin, you also have some CSAM on your machine. So, I guess there's just CSAM all the way down now. Yeah. All right. That's great. Uh-huh. Technology is awesome. It is the best.

It is the best. And since we are all going to die in a festering hellhole because the AI is now taking all the energy, there's billions of funding pouring into facilities that claim that they can suck carbon from the atmosphere. Just take your Hyperloop and point it up at the sky.

There you go. Turn it on. There you go. And I love the subtitle of this article. It's the huge question, can it actually work? No. No. No. And they even point that out in the article saying that airborne atmospheric carbon capture has only shown to reduce emissions by 10 to 11 percent.

And they were expecting 80 to 90 percent. So, there you go. Nope. Doesn't work. Okay. No. So, they're spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get this thing to work. But, you know, that hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars might have been gone – might have been better spent on, say, greening up public transportation systems around the world to help remove carbon from the atmosphere by taking drivers off the road.

Just a thought. I'm thinking maybe let's look at the root causes of the problem. Maybe – maybe CEOs instead of the private jets just fly first class? Maybe. Maybe. Just a thought. Or maybe we revamp the train system here in the United States unlike everybody else in the world.

Oh, nah. That's also a thought, but nah. Nah. Nah. Let's build a bigger – We can't even get one from here to Vegas for fuck's sake. Let's build a bigger Hummer. That's it. That's it. Well, this news did make me smile, although, you know, had it come out a couple of years back, I would have had a party because I hated this company so much.

But the slow death of it just kind of ruined all the joy that I could have gotten from it. After laying off nearly a quarter of its staff last year, e-scooter rental company Bird has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company announced. Finally. Probably just leaving their scooters all over Venice Beach. Well, the thing is now when you move back, it'll be nicer for you.

Well, unfortunately not because it's actually not going anywhere. Existing lenders have agreed to purchase the assets, and the company is being kept afloat via a $25 million loan from Apollo Global Management, which is Yahoo and Engadget's owner. And second, lean lenders, according to the Wall Street Journal, they will continue to operate as normal and has sufficient liquidity to meet financial obligations to city partners, vendors, suppliers, and employees during and after the restructuring process and will operate as usual, the company wrote.

So they'll be able to pay off their debts, but eventually this thing is going to die because nobody cares. No, I mean, when was the last time you saw one? When was the last time you saw one? No, no, but they're done. Like, it was a blip. People were excited about it. It was a lot of fun, and people have moved on to, I don't know, walking.

There's a lot of bike rental companies around, which is great because that's actually green. Yeah, you know what killed it? I think e-bikes. E-bikes killed it because everybody loves their e-bikes. Yeah, it's just a better way to get around than a scooter. It just is. And by the way, studies have shown that it is so much better for the environment than everything else that we're doing right now.

So if these companies would have spent hundreds of million dollars on just giving away free e-bikes, they would have done more for carbon capture than anything else. Yep. Just saying. Just saying. Look at us doing all, like, environmental stuff. We're going to get flagged for that now.

Of course. We've said something wrong, according to YouTube. Well, because we are such a fan of unintended consequences around here, guy who urged planting a trillion trees begs people to stop planting so many trees. Now, this all started back in 2011 with Felix Finkbeiner.

There's a made-up name if I ever heard one. Well, he addressed the United Nations in a speech to open the International Year of Forests in 2011, saying, It is now time that we work together. We combine our forces, old and young, rich and poor, and together we can plant a trillion trees.

We can start the trillion tree campaign. You're just trying to get us flagged everywhere, aren't you? Of course I am. Well, Thomas Crowther, a professor of ecology at ETH Zutik and co-chair of the advisory board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, now urges a halt to mass tree planting.

Speaking at the UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai, Crowther highlighted the drawbacks of large-scale tree planting, including its impact on biodiversity and less effectiveness in capturing carbon than previously thought. He says, Wired is reporting that he criticized tree planting for being used as an excuse to avoid reducing emissions, which is what I was saying about the atmospheric capture.

Like, let's go back to root causes and not try and put a Band-Aid on the problem. Oh, God. Yeah, he originally did a study in 2019 that said the Earth could accommodate an additional 1.2 trillion trees. Turns out, not so much. Not so much. Yeah, it fucks with everything from indigenous populations to farming and biodiversity.

Well, you plant trees, but then you increase your carbon expenditure. It doesn't wash out. Yeah, and then there's the water and all that good stuff. Yeah, we need that water for our AI, for God's sake. Exactly. We can't give it to other trees. I know, and, you know, when they're trying to plant all these trees in Dubai, I don't know if they've actually looked around much.

Not a whole lot of water. Nope.

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Media Candy. Well, Brian, it's a good thing that they wrapped Loki. Woo! Because he who remains is now he who needs a job. Well, the he who might be in jail. Yes. Jonathan Majors, the actor behind said character, well, he was found guilty of third-degree assault and harassment.

And Marvel kicked his ass to the curb instantly. They had that press release written. They already had a writer's room doing alternate timelines. They were ready for this. They're like, yeah, that guy looks like he could beat his wife. Picked the wrong career. Could have been a rapper.

Would have been fine. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. He's done. Yeah. Moving on. I love this one. A California judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Amazon and the Tolkien estate filed by author Demetrius Polychron.

There's a name for you. He wrote The Fellowship of the King, a self-proclaimed sequel to The Lord of the Rings. And then he decided to sue Amazon and the Tolkien estate, claiming that the prime video show The Lord of the Rings, The Ring of Power, infringed on the copyright of his work.

You just can't make this shit up. This is the dumbest thing to come out of media candy since it was when the guys got together to try to buy a copy of the book Dune so they could own the copyright. That's right. That was with Crypto Bros. Yeah. That was when – yeah, smart contracts.

That was around the smart contract days. Idiots. Well, the judge is very – actually, he doesn't even need to be a smart judge for this one. They could have picked the dumbest judge on the bench and got this thing. He claimed that it was unreasonable and frivolous from the beginning, that this guy wanted copyright protection for an obviously stupid fucking claim.

For fan fiction. For fan fiction, basically. So Polycron has to pay back the attorney's fees of $134,637. And the Tolkien estate came back with him with a kick in the nuts saying, you must destroy all physical and digital copies and you have a permanent injunction preventing any of your fan fiction from being further distributed.

Dumbass. Idiot. Speaking of dumbasses. Yeah. Well, according to Axios, Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav met with Paramount Global CEO Bob Baggish and Sherry Redstone, who owns Paramount's parent company, about striking a deal to create a new media titan through their combined forces.

What's interesting is that currently Warner Brothers Digital's market value is around $29 billion and Paramount's is about $10 billion, making the merger seem like a competitive move between two legacy studios to compete with Disney. So we're about to get Discovery Paramount Plus. Okay, great.

I guess. Yeah. You know, fine, whatever. And then they'll immediately sell Star Trek to get food stamps because that's what they do. Hey, one less subscription and, you know, Captain Pike is already basically doing a cooking show on his show. So why not? Well, yeah, that would put Paramount in league with the Food Network.

Exactly. It'll all be under one umbrella. Yeah. Pike's Grocery Games. I'm down. Discovery cast has got to do something. Oh, that's right. And how appropriate it, how appropriate would it be that Discovery, the series, gets bought by Discovery, the network?

It's like serendipitous magic. It is. Jesus. Calling the FTC. Stop this one, please. I watched the family plan. Well, I sort of tried to watch the family plan, the new Marky Mark vehicle on Apple TV Plus.

Uh-huh. What the actual fuck is all I got to say. It was, I mean, it was so beyond bad that, I mean, for me, it was, it felt like it was written for Kevin Hart. Like, Kevin Hart could have pulled it off because he's got this streak right now doing really dumb, fun action movies.

So, he's playing that character. So, I think Marky Mark wanted to cash in on it. He's not Kevin Hart. He's not funny. It's terrible. Every single, like, action trope has been, this could have been written by ChatGPT on an off day. It's that bad.

Go read the reviews. It's hilarious. The reviews are way funnier than the show. We actually lasted about 15 minutes. And then we're just like, no, can't do it. Can't do it. So, skip it, please. Monarch, Legacy of Monsters, also on Apple TV Plus. Fucking awesome.

Yeah, that's my holiday viewing, I think. Yeah, you'll be catching, you'll be getting right about, I think, episode 7 dropped yesterday or something like that. There's going to be 10 episodes total. It is great. So far, I love it. It was, at the beginning, I'm like, I don't know if this is going to fly or not.

But it just gets better and better. So, I dig it quite a bit. Quite a bit. Reacher is back for season 2 on Amazon Prime. Very good. Very, very good. It's not Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, which is even better. It's a big hulking dude, right?

Which is what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be. Yeah. It's based on the actual books and well-written, well-acted, well-done. Loving it so far. Slow Horses, season 3. Penultimate episode dropped this week. Cannot wait for the next episode. Very sad that it'll be the last of the season because these seasons are too damn short.

Only six episodes. But so good. So good. And a new show called Bookie, which I found on Max. Stars Sebastian Maniscalco. I can never pronounce his name, even though I'm Italian, too. It's a Chuck Lorre joint. It's very funny.

It's very funny. Only eight episodes. The run just finished yesterday. The last episode came out yesterday. We get to watch it tonight. But they're 20 minutes. It's popcorn, but they're funny. I mean, it's lighthearted. Very funny. Highly recommended. All right. I finished up The Crown.

Part 2 of season 6 dropped. Were there any more Diana ghosts? Severe lack of ghosts, unfortunately. They handled a couple things pretty well. Tugged at the heartstrings a little bit. You had the death of Prince Margaret, which was done very well. And I really did like the way that they wrapped it up.

They didn't take it to the death. Prince Margaret? Who's Prince Margaret? Princess Margaret. Well, you know, the pronouns were applied retroactively, Jason. Okay. Just checking. I'm like, man, that's a plot twist. Spoiler alert. She was never comfortable in the dresses.

Yeah. Yeah. She's living her truth, Brian. She was living her truth through death. That's how it works, Jason. Oh, man. You ruined it. Okay. Never mind. It was touching at the end.

I like the way that they wrapped it up. Moving on. Oh, I'm still watching Titans. I've almost finished the first season. And it is a great, dirty, gritty superhero show. I really like it. All right. All right. I forgot about that one. I got to check that out. It's really good.

This is just in from France. Beep, beep, beep. Le beep, le beep, beep, beep, beep. Le pas de. France's president, Emmanuel Macron, has announced a new tax on streaming music services set to be implemented next year. The tax described as a very low rate of levy will be approximately 1.5% of the income of the services.

The move has been met with resistance from, wait for it, Spotify. Yes. They say that it is going to be a hindrance to innovation and growth in the recorded music industry in France. Yeah. We can't steal as much money from your artists, is what they're trying to say. Thank heaven for little taxes.

So the revenue generated from this tax is designated to support the Centre National de la Musique. I looked it up and I thought, okay, maybe this is just a clever way of saying labels in France. But it's actually not. It seems to be a pretty decent organization established to assist various stakeholders within the music sector.

They play a significant role in nurturing and developing the French music scene. This includes providing financial support, which most artists need, professional training and resources to artists, producers, and other entities involved in music production and distribution. Yeah, most countries have that, just not the US. Canada's got the same thing.

There's a whole bunch of, basically it's basic, you're setting a bulwark against basically the United States machine running over everything and trying to foster local talent. Oh, didn't we used to have the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts? Or was that killed by Republicans? That was a thing at one time that did all arts.

But yeah, I'm sure it's still around, but incredibly underfunded. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because we don't care. Cups and doodads. Well, the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2, if you want one of those for Christmas, might be too late already.

Yeah, too late. Except it's not because you can only, it's only been, Apple has halted the sale of both devices in the US due to an ITC ban, which is related to a patent dispute over the wearables blood oxygen sensor. But what's ridiculous about this is you can still buy it everywhere else because Apple does third-party sales now.

So anywhere else that sells Apple products, you can still get this. You cannot get it from Apple. All right. So problem solved. Problem solved. So, and I'm sure a check will be written to solve the problem permanently. Yeah, yeah, at some point. Come on, they've got, I think Apple can afford to take care of this.

Yes. So, yeah. So anyway, yeah, and it just comes around to the fact that they put like, for entertainment purposes only on the warning. It's like, okay, got it. Apple has also settled a family sharing subscription lawsuit. You can actually get some real money for this one.

You can get about 30 bucks. So there's a link in the show notes for that. Each class member that files a claim is set to get $30. Though that total will vary depending on how many claims are made. The payout will not exceed $50 per claimant in up to, wait for it, $10 million will go towards attorney's fees.

Yep. You know how many, you know how many fan fiction books that is for Amazon? The lawyers always win. Yeah. Oh my God. So there you go. And it's better than $2, I guess, from Google. That's true. Yeah. I saw this link and I just, I have to pass this one along.

iPod wallpapers for iPone. iPhone. iPone. iPone. It's, they're just cute little screen grabs that you can use as your window dressing. I sent you a copy of mine. I love it. It makes me smile so much. It's really cool. But then it just made me think, oh wow, so everybody that sees my phone will know how old I am.

Yeah, so? That's fine. The trick on here is there's some links at the top of the article where you can go buy some. Scroll down a little farther and you'll get to the free ones. There you go. The free ones are just fine. The black one actually works better than the white one. The white one doesn't quite fit.

I've got an iPhone 13 Pro and it doesn't quite fit the actual, if you use widgets, they kind of fall out. But the black one works perfectly. And black is always better anyway. That's what they say. There you go. Mm-hmm. I saw this and I just had to roll my eyes. TikTok rolls out an enhanced app experience for tablets and foldables.

I didn't know anybody gave a shit about foldables, but I just, come on Meta. How long have we had an Instagram app for phone on iPads? Come on, please. And threads, by the way. And threads. Yeah, at this point, I want you to update threads.

So it looks decent on my iPad. That's all I want. Please, I'll use it then. Especially if we're going to make this transition. I would like it to work on my tablet, please. Because that's the only place I use social media. So it's on my iPads. So please, make it work. And I saw this news.

Apple's recently released TV OS 17 update allows for native VPN apps and big name providers are wasting no time getting in there. Express VPN has got one. Nord VPN has already got one out there now, which is, I'm torn on this. On the one way, on one hand, it's great that it's so simple to be able to toggle now so I can, you know, I can watch my Discovery Paramount Plus app, which is US only, and then switch back and get Canadian content on Netflix because they have some things that aren't licensed that my kid really likes

and all that. On the other hand, now everybody's going to be able to do it because it's so damn easy and the whack-a-mole is really going to begin as all these subscription services are going to see all the Nord VPN traffic coming through and start shutting down all those IP addresses. So great. The thing is, it's like, how many people actually use Apple TV to begin with and how many people are going to use a VPN on Apple TV?

I think you're talking about a very micro subset. I hope so because it's such a pain in the butt when I find out it's been blocked and I have to go in and rejig everything and find new IPs. Yeah. Well, and if you want to do this without an app, our friends at Private Internet Access have a thing called Smart DNS which you can set for your Apple TV.

No app needed. So check that out. There's a link in the show notes to get a deal on Private Internet Access from us at GOG. All of these solutions are easier than mine where I have a dedicated router. Yep. Although it is easy to switch Wi-Fi networks so that's all you have to do and it works across the board for everything, right?

So it works on our laptops, it works on our phones, it works on our iPads, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When it works. When it works, yes. Yeah. Yeah, you're worried about somebody looking at your phone to tell how old you are? Look at your router switching setup. Come on. Come on. One's hardwired to the U.S.

The other's in Canada. It's great. Yep. I've talked many times on this show about how I love Spark Mail for OS X. It's my favorite. It is now on Set App. So Set App is killing it. There is so many things that I use Set App for now.

CleanMyMac X, Bartender 5, I think. Downy, which is great for stealing YouTube videos. Paste, which gives you a paste history of all of your clipboard stuff. Ulysses for writing. Time Mature for tracking client work. Gemini for cleaning up all of those stupid duplicates on your hard drive.

And CleanShot X, which is so great for doing awesome screenshots. All of that stuff are on all my Macs that I use with Set App. But now that they've got Spark, it's so much cheaper just to get a Set App subscription. There is a link in the show notes to take you to the Spark page on Set App.

Check it out. We do get a few bucks if you sign up for that one. This is not a paid ad from them, but we will get a kickback just letting you know. But I'm telling you, Set App has changed the way I use so many apps. I don't have to find subscriptions to all of these things.

I think, oh, what's the, oh, God, what's the one with all of the, iStat Menus. iStat Menus is on there too. Another one that I don't have to pay for. You use all that stuff. Yeah. Yep. And it's way cheaper than buying them individually. I mean, like, by threefold.

Right. And it updates it all for you in one place. You don't have to go do round robin and update everything. It's so much nicer. So much nicer. I love Set App so much. What I don't love, though, is my Synology is an old Synology and they're finally sunsetting the operating system on it.

So I've been working this week to, like, get everything off of it because it is old, it is slow, and I'm not going to get a new one. Ah, screw it. There's nothing I really care about keeping anymore. Nothing that needs to be fast, right? Like, who cares? Yeah. I'm not running any kind of video shop or anything like that.

I've got a bunch of hard drives. All my photos haven't been updated in years. I'm not even keeping a camera to take pictures anymore. I sold, like, with the studio, I'm selling all my cameras. Like, I'm keeping a phone. That's it. I was like, I don't care anymore. So I'm going to put it all on a hard drive, stick it in a drawer, and say, fuck it.

But even getting everything off of it has taken days. I've got, like, 16 terabytes of data on this thing. It is so slow. Over gigabit Ethernet. It's like, come on. But, yeah, if you have an old Synology, just make sure that you're aware that there are going to be no more security updates for it.

They're basically just shutting you off. They're saying it's starting October 2024, but I don't think they've updated this thing in quite some time. It is so slow. I mean, it was released in 2016, so kind of time. But the shitty part is the hardware works fine.

So, maybe there's, maybe, hey, if anybody has, like, an open-source OS that we can sideload onto a Synology, drop me an email, jhapd.me. I'd be curious about that. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave with podcast superhost Dave Bittner.

Dave is the host of the CyberWire 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 are going to come kill us all in our sleep. Hi, Dave.

Hello. Happy end of the year. Yes. Thank God. You know, it's cliche to say this, but this year really has flown by and, you know, here we are. So, it is getting faster and faster, but it seems like this year in particular just blink and you miss it.

I've been in a 12-step recovery program this year. this feels like it's been 27 years. Is that right? Okay. We all have different experiences about how this year is going. That's totally fair. Time is malleable, people. I appreciate that. Yeah. I spent 51 years sober now, or 51 years as a drunk and one year sober and it feels like 10 of those all put together.

Wow. So, anyway, yes, time does move differently for everyone. Mm-hmm. Sleep tracking with the new Apple Watch. I want to talk to you guys about this for a second because we all have Apple Watches and I don't think either of you guys are doing sleep tracking, are you?

Nope. No, because that's when I charge my watch. Same here, right? I don't want the watch on me while I'm asleep. I actually don't like having anything on me when I'm sleeping. I find it impedes my sleep, so ironically, sleep tracking would screw up my sleep. So, yeah, I let it charge overnight and I sleep like a baby.

So, I got this new Ultra 2 and the thing about it is, I mentioned it when I first got it, you don't feel it. I don't even notice it's on. So, I'm like, okay, and I'm sleeping terribly and I usually put it on the, you know, the stand to charge it overnight like everybody else but the last couple nights I'm like, okay, let's give this a shot just so I can get some metrics because I have been sleeping horribly for, well, the past ever and, Life.

Yeah, I wanted to get to, now that I don't have my eight sleep bed since the dogs broke that, I don't have any kind of insight on how many times I'm getting up and all this stuff so I gave it a shot the past two nights and I really, really need to go see a sleep therapist.

Oh, wow. I got, the first night I got 22 minutes of deep sleep. Last night I got 15 minutes of deep sleep. REM is under 40 minutes for both nights. It's like, so many things are clicking together right now.

Yeah. And I'm like, okay, I really, now, you know, what gets measured gets managed. Thank you, Peter Drummond. So, I just wanted to see what you're, if you guys were running any metrics on it because, you know, like the blood, the blood oxygen thing, which is the whole patent problem they're having now, the fact that they put in there that is for entertainment purposes only, it is not consistent for me with a standard finger blood oxygen reader

that you get for like 19 bucks on Amazon. It's three points off, three points lower, no matter what, but it's always three points lower. It is consistently off. So, that's why I was wondering if anybody else was doing any sleep tracking so I can, because I don't have a baseline for the data that's coming from the sleep tracking.

So, if anybody else that's listening does sleep tracking with their Apple Watch and has any insights on any kind of statistical anomaly over time that I should watch out for, drop me a note. I would like to know. I have to say, I have just, I mean, I don't have wood to knock on, but I will knock on it shortly.

I've never had issues with sleep. I know that's put me in some rarefied air because many, many, many people do, but that's just never been a thing for me. And particularly once I dialed in, like, you know, I need a firm mattress check. I need, I use one of those crazy bean pillows for my bottom pillow layer and then a nice soft pillow layer on top of that.

Check. Boom. I'm done. I'm good. So. Yeah, for me, first of all, rumor has it that as we speak, Santa is loading an Apple Watch Ultra 2 on his sleigh for me to unwrap on Christmas Day.

Mrs. Claus has let me know that that is probably in my future. so I suspect after that I will experiment with the sleep tracking just, and for me it's just been a matter of the phone, particularly after this last update, not having the battery life to hardly make it through a single day, let alone a day and a night.

Yeah. My wife uses it quite regularly just to track her sleep and she has much more difficulty sleeping than I do and she's been quite pleased with it. I will say that I, like Brian, was a very, very good sleeper. I could sleep anywhere and then COVID happened and I started, like most people, I started doom scrolling waking up in the middle of the night

and that was that. So I'm much better. I can't say I sleep as well as I did before then but it's more spotty. Like I will sleep through the night sometimes. I will occasionally wake up and go, oh man, I slept great last night but that's few and far between.

The thing that I'm struggling with, I think, sleep is my body being comfortable and relaxed and pain-free when I'm laying in bed at night and I just, I don't know if, and part of it too is that it's not like you can just start sampling different mattresses, you know, because mattresses are expensive and.

But there's all these, I think you missed your window to do this, Dave, because all those delivery mattresses would try it for two weeks free and then ship it back. Three months. Most of them have gone out of business now, so. I know. They were all three months for free and if you don't like it, ship it back on us. But where does one store all the mattresses when you've got 17 of them around?

If only we hadn't been so snobby about not taking ads for those companies. Talk about yourself. I had three eight sleep mattresses for free.

I had $15,000 worth of beds. over at Cyber Wire, we successfully kept all of our advertising industry specific and I can't sleep at night.

We're swimming in edibles and mattresses and shaving cream over here, Dave. I'm still wearing an outfit that I got when I was on the Jordan Harbinger show. I got my me undies, I got my socks, I got my pants. I'm wearing my Tommy John underwear right now. I was shaving with my Henry's.

Come on, you guys. Lifestyle ads, Dave. Seriously. Well, listen. That's half the reason you podcast. It may come to that, right? The way podcast advertising has gone in the last year, it may come to that.

I get three e-bikes. Yeah. But I did recently start, I tried sleeping with a weighted blanket again and I do actually like that quite a bit.

I don't think that's going to work out for me in the summertime because it's so hot unless someone comes up with a weighted net. Cooling blanket. Yeah, I was just thinking of that. I'm like, how would that work? No, it's great in the winter time. the weight I think does help me because what I find is that I'm carrying a lot of tension in my legs and my hips and I have to be very mindful of just letting that go and it just keeps me from sleeping and then I wake up in the morning kind of sore

and achy and you know, you hear that this is a pretty regular stage of life sort of thing that happens but I'm not happy about it. So if any of our listeners have any tips or suggestions for an evidence-based approach to finding a better night's sleep, given what I've described here, I'd love to hear it.

Now that we've done sleeping and shaving, I would like our listeners to be prepared for 2024 our special deep dives into showering and shitting. That's right. We'll start comparing our prostate exams. Toilet paper. This episode is sponsored by Dude Wipes.

That's right. Dave, just to get back to your pain at night, I already suffer from that. Two Advil before you go to bed. Do your right. Yeah. No, you're right. Be careful with that, though. Got to be careful with that, especially if you've got liver issues. Well, since I haven't been drinking all year, I've got liver to spare now.

Okay. I'll take a bit of that. quick update on the 404 Media podcast that I trashed a while back. Their podcasting technique aside, this week, I finally figured out why it actually is a good podcast.

They talked about the stories that they did about the microphone tracking. They talked about the story about the CSAM in the large image models, the Lion 5, and also how Facebook is getting junked up with all of these AI meme replacements and all this stuff.

What was really cool about all three of these stories is they talked about the behind the scenes on how they did the reporting. That was cool. How they got the story and stuff that didn't make it into the actual story. The really fun part is I am seeing all three of these stories trickle down into mainstream media several days after they originally did their reporting.

If you want to get on the front line of what these guys are saying that eventually makes it everywhere, go subscribe. Give them $10 a month. They're awesome as far as getting really good, deep stories out there early. Like I said, they could definitely use a host on that show that keeps everybody that herds the cats as it were.

But the actual stories and how they're doing the reporting is fascinating. I'm still listening to the show and I actually thoroughly enjoyed it now. I'll take a fresh look at it. Like you, I've been very impressed with their reporting and certainly it's an impressive group they've assembled there, so I hope they make it.

I have not subscribed yet, but I think I will do that before the end of the year here, I will sign up and give them my $10 a month because yeah, we should support independent media. Definitely. Yeah, I shifted my money from Casey Newton who's doing A-OK.

There you go. He's doing just fine now, so I just kind of shifted around to the new upstarts and these guys need to stick around. They're doing great work. So I want to tell a little bit of a story here. Do we have a minute for a story? We do. We can kill some of the cyber news because who gives a shit?

It's the end of the year. It's the end of the year. Come on, we already talked about like sleeping. Who gives a crap about all these breaches? If you want to hear about cyber news, subscribe to the Cyber Wire. Exactly. We'll leave the links in the show notes. You can go read on your own time. There you go. So as our listeners know, it's been about a year and a half, maybe a little more than that since my mother passed away.

And I think I also described how my mother was very much someone who used food and cooking as a way of expressing her love for her family. She was every bit a 1950s housewife.

She was June Cleaver was my mom. And she took great pride in her ability to do those things. She could orchestrate a meal like no one else. But it was the classic thing where the whole family would sit down, all the food would come out, it was perfectly timed, it was hot, it was delicious, it was everything you could want it to be.

My mother didn't eat because she was busy orchestrating. But that was how she wanted it. Come on, sit down, eat, mom, come on, no, no, I'm good, I'm good. She's that kind of an old fashioned mom. Um, so my mom passed away and so in the time since then we've been adjusting to that and one of those things is figuring out how we handle holiday meals.

um, our tradition in our family was that everyone would gather at our house for Christmas morning. Um, my wife and I bought my parents' house so it's home to everyone. I have a brother and a sister who live nearby, my father lives nearby, um, my, uh, so everybody's close.

We don't really have many people who are far away. Uh, so they all come to our house Christmas morning and we would have, um, brunch, uh, breakfasty kind of foods, people would open gifts, sit around a fire, watch football, all those kinds of things, take a nap.

Um, but then we would go our separate ways and then we would meet at my parents' house for Christmas dinner and my parents live nearby, a few miles away from where I live. And my mother, of course, would make a traditional holiday meal and that usually centered around a ham as the centerpiece.

Um, so since my mother passed and my wife has taken over, uh, this particular holiday for cooking or decided that this year she was going to take over cooking for this year and hosting, um, she was a little, uh, iffy about cooking a ham.

My wife is Jewish, so she does not have a whole lot of ham experience. She does not have a whole lot of ham experience. Uh, and she has kind of a cultural, I don't know, saying it's a yuck factor is probably too strong, but it just doesn't, she doesn't feel right.

It's not a warm, fuzzy meal. Exactly. Not, she, she, she certainly does not have the association with that, that the rest of us do as being a meal of comfort and, and love and all that sort of thing. So she said, what, what do you suppose we could do that is not a ham?

Uh, she said, I could cook a turkey, I could cook a, you know, we could do some chickens. I said, well, why don't you do a roast? She said, I've never done a roast before. I said, well, that's fine, you know, do a roast. She says, well, I'm afraid of doing a roast, you know, doing my first roast be the roast for Christmas dinner.

Practice roast. Like, exactly, exactly. That's what I said. I said, I said, well, do a test roast, do a practice run roast. She said, but it's only a few days. I said, believe me, it'll get eaten. Hook the roast. Yes. So, so she goes online and she reaches out to friends and says, I'm doing a roast.

What do I need to know? And she gets some recipes and some advice. Start with a strong joke and save the humor for later. There you go. Right. A real zinger to win the audience over. So she goes to the grocery store to our local Wegmans to buy a roast.

Side note, I completely, completely unaware what meat costs. You can spend $200 on a roast. Did you know this? No. Yeah. Yes. Where the hell are you shopping? Yes. A very nice high, like obviously you're not going to skimp out on a holiday roast.

You know, the nice meats get quite pricey. Yeah. A Wegmans high-end premium roast is $200 for something that would serve 10, 12 people. It's a big hunk of meat. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously that's not what we got for the test roast and it's probably not we're going to get for the main roast.

I mean, with all these roasts, you should have bought a cow. Seriously. It would have been cheaper. Yeah. So she buys the roast, brings it home, prepares it. It's lovely. She actually gets some rosemary out of our garden, chops it up, puts it on, you know, just all the things, the vegetables in the bottom of the pan, cooks the roast, has her temperature thing testing to see.

We want to get to a perfect medium rare. So that's 130 degrees in a roast, cooks the roast, roast comes out, we let it rest for 20 minutes, cooking the other things. We have some potatoes, we have some greens. So it's my wife, my son Jack, and me, and I slice open the roast and it is perfect.

It is absolutely phenomenal. So I'm cutting up the roast, serving my son, serving myself, my wife, and I try the roast and it is delicious. It is absolutely just perfection.

Now, what this made me realize is that my mother's roasts were terrible. They were way overcooked. I think, I often wonder if that's a generational thing because I hear that across the board.

Is that right? My mother did the same thing. I love my mom's cooking. My mom cooks many things really well, but these long meats always tend to get overcooked, way overcooked. Yeah. I cannot imagine eating my mom's roast without gravy.

Oh, yeah. Gravy required. Yeah. It needs it. And just the texture. But I had no idea that a roast... You could have it without gravy? Yeah. You wouldn't need it, right? Like this medium rare roast, the texture of the beef melting in your mouth and the flavor and everything.

Like, I was used to, in my mind, if you categorize roast, it was a certain texture of meat that was kind of dark and dry. Like you. Yeah. And that's what I thought it was. And you ladle the gravy on top of it and kind of mash the mashed potato in there a little bit too to make it...

You got to rehydrate that thing. Exactly. But I loved it because it was my mom's and I associated it with all of these special family events and holidays. Little did I know how awful my dear mother's roast really was.

And now I know. And I'm not sure how I feel about that. Oh, God. Might I recommend with the new roast that you have discovered a little whipped horseradish? Oh, yes. Whipped's delicious. Let me write that down. You don't need the gravy, but a touch of horseradish.

A touch of horseradish is going to... Elevate the wheel. You might want to put a little extra napkin on the lap, if you know what I'm saying. In related news, we have also been acquired along with Paramount Plus and the Discovery acquisition, and we're now part of the new Food Network. Yes.

Exactly. Three old guys at our new cooking show. Now, when you say whipped horseradish, what does that mean? What does the whipping part entail? Well, just take a normal horseradish sauce and then whip it, aerate it a bit, so it's kind of like frothy.

You can actually, not to step on the way Jason does it, you can also add a dash of heavy cream to your horseradish and then whip it that way. Oh, this is so good, so good. Yeah, you don't want to be too heavy on the horseradish because you'll lose the taste of the meat, but you want to have that essence of horseradish in there.

Just for yourself. I'm known in my family as metal mouth. I like heat. You want to have that rushing feeling through your sinuses? I like a one-to-one ratio of meat to horseradish. Wow. No, I'm not saying that's wrong in any way, shape, or form, but I was just trying to be a little more discerning for Dave since he is just discovering that the actual meat tastes good.

Seasoned to taste. Well, and this was the other thing, too, is that the way that my wife prepared this, she put olive oil on the outside and the rosemary and some other spices, and so there was this kind of crispy crust on the edge of the meat that was kind of like a flavor bomb, you know, and so you would hit that and you'd get this rush of flavor, but then that would fade away, and then behind that would be the actual flavor and texture of the meat itself, which is just wonderful.

No, my mother and my grandmother, the roasts literally were cooked floating in gravy, so that's the way it was done. They were cooked within an inch of anyone's life, but they were floated in gravy, so you didn't care, and yes, I loved it, but I've also now had real roast.

And boy, what a difference. I wonder what the history is behind that. Do you think that maybe over the generations there wasn't consistency in the quality of meat, and so it was just safer to cook the hell out of it? I would potentially agree with that, except for the fact that literally my grandfather and grandmother were butchers!

Okay. Although, I mean, perhaps maybe because austerity, first generation immigrants, maybe they brought home the worst cuts of meat for themselves, perhaps. I mean, maybe that would explain it, but in theory, they should have been able to bring home anything they wanted to.

I wonder if a meat cooked like that keeps longer in the icebox. Perhaps, yeah. when you don't really have, you know, freezing the way we have freezing, maybe that was a component as well. Well, as you can probably hear, I'm digging this meat, and I'm looking forward to having some more, and it's just been delightful that, you know, my wife had this hit-it-out-of-the- ballpark success with her first try with a roast.

Both me and my son are just raving about this, so we're looking forward to our Christmas dinner, and, you know, adding a new... taking an old tradition, bringing it up to date, and the fact that my wife is able to make it her own for the next generation and beyond, I think, makes it extra special.

So... I was really bummed, because when I saw you put this in the show notes, I really thought you were roasting your mother, and we were going to get a comedy special here. Right, exactly. Yeah. How fat was my mother? Let me tell you. How fat was my mother? Very, because her roast was fucking terrible.

That's right. Yeah. That's a great story, Dave. Thanks for sharing. I can think of no better way to end the year. Yeah. Well, shall we wrap up there? We shall. Let's do it. All right. Well, have a great holiday, gentlemen, and I look forward to catching up with you in the new year.

Thank you for including me in everything this year. I was thinking back, I can't believe how many years we've been at this together. It's quite a long time. It's been a while, and it's still a pleasure every week, so thank you for having me be a part of it. Happy to have you, Dave. Thank you. Very happy to have you.

Closing shout outs! Over at Patreon, we've got Josh, Dave, and Danielle. Welcome to the family. Thank you so much. Over at PayPal, we've got Dag, Brian, Blake Bowling, Nathaniel, Tom, Andrew, Joseph, Mark, and Ramsey. Over at the tip jar, we've got Sean, Karen, Eric, Ross, and Kevin.

Woo-hoo! Thank you. And we've got a final review for the year. Tech news with a splash of night industries from Boba Fett's Maid. That's a good name. Five stars. Always great, like listening to three friends in a bar who actually like and have things in common with without the hassle of actually having to leave the house or socialize.

Don't feed after midnight or cross the beams. I think it was across the streams in Ghostbusters, wasn't it? He's from Great Britain. Oh, okay. Yeah. So beans over there. Yes. Okay. Indeed. It's a cultural thing. Thanks to everyone who has sent us donations or subscribed this year.

You're what's keeping the show alive. And for the holidays, try and tell a friend. You'll feel better. I promise. Yes, you will. And just a show note here, we're off for two weeks. We're taking a real holiday, so everybody enjoy yours. Yes, please do. Yes. Until next time, I'm Brian Schilmeister.

And I'm Jason Filippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about on today's episode are at GOG.show slash 630. 630 of these things. 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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Stay grumpy and happy new year.

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