638: Dave’s Lumber Yard

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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 DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. A little follow-up this week, Brian. Jason Bryant was having a confluence of Bryant. Jason Bryant gave us a boost to keep our Discord server going.

So thank you, Jason. And somebody else gave us another boost, and I don't know who it is. So let us know if that was you. I'll give you a shout-out. All right. Should be in the log of activities. Not that I'm a Discord whiz or anything. Look, the fact that I knew that we were going to get booted was – I thought that was an award for me.

I should have gotten a gold star or something, as much as I look at that stuff, since we lost our admin. I don't know what to do. Oh, I do miss her. I hope she's all right. Yeah, me too, too. And check out Jason Bryant's website, MattTalkOnline.com. If you're into podcasts about wrestling, not pro wrestling, actual wrestling.

Oh, I thought it might be about maternity leave. No, no. So Jason's a good guy. I really like him. So thank you very much, Jason. Yes, thank you. Appreciate it. A little bit of other follow-up here. I saw over at Gizmodo they had a video about how AI girlfriends aren't all bad.

So I was intrigued, and I watched it. So they had a chat with a sex tech expert about emerging AI girlfriend chatbots. Now, I don't know what it is about sex tech experts, but they all seem to be rather hot.

I don't know what's going on there. Maybe it's just that those are the only ones they allow on camera, but it seems to be a trend. Well, we've moved on from Dr. Ruth, that's for sure. They sure as hell have. But here's the deal. This is what she mentioned, nothing about security, which is what we talked about last week, which is the biggest problem, I think.

Well, especially since we know there are bad actors out there that are floating and flooding the Internet with these purely to mine your data. Exactly. Exactly. And she had really bad comparisons. She's like, oh, well, you know, in the past, like people are worried about how AI girlfriends and boyfriends, you know, everybody's worried about how they're going to affect people.

She's like, oh, we've got history with things like that. Remember video games? They're bad for some people, good for others, you know. And she was like using that tech to equate the fear of AI girlfriends and boyfriends. I'm like, those are two completely different things. Yeah, those are apples and boobies. Exactly.

Basically, the TLDR is they have no idea what's going on. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's probably a bad idea. Until it runs locally on your machine, I would say yes. Even then, I would say psychologically, probably not a good thing. I don't know. For some people, I think it could be really good.

Okay. I think in some therapeutic settings, I think it could actually be quite helpful. Yeah, and your basement by yourself is not a therapeutic setting, Jason. Well, if you have agoraphobia, it might be. Okay. Not everybody can get out of the damn house. Some people don't even – yeah, never mind.

Some people are stuck at home forever. I don't disagree that there are very small special carve-outs here. Laurie Anderson being one of those, she has made an AI chatbot of Lou Reed, her dead husband. Yeah, how's that going? She says she's totally 100% sadly addicted to it.

Yes, so not well. Yes. Yeah. She says, I still am after all this time. I kind of literally just can't stop doing it. My friends just can't stand it. Yeah. But it's part of an art exhibit that she's doing right now down in Australia. A lot of respect for her.

She's a pretty amazing individual. But, yeah, this is a – I just see so many unintended consequences coming from uses of AI. And this is one of them, and we'll talk about another one later. Yeah. I mean, it's technology. That's our bread and butter. Come on. It's going to go wrong at some point.

I mean, we're on the internet. Look at what happened there, our shining beacon of the world's knowledge at your fingertips. What do we use it for? Boobies. So, there we go. Also, just as a side note, Lou Reed, famously not a nice guy. Really? So, creating an AI of a dick.

All right. Maybe that's why she likes it. She just doesn't get yelled at enough anymore. Maybe. Could be. On yesterday evening, Gimlet, ParCast, and Ringer Unions appeared to have failed to have reached a deal with Spotify management.

Shocker there. Shocking. Yep. Ringer Union claims that 86% of their members are ready to walk out, while 100% of Gimlets are. Spotify is pretty much ready to hand them pink slips anyways. Yeah. They're like, I'm like, if you quit, I don't have to pay severance.

See ya. In the news.

And speaking of those pesky pink slips, PlayStation is laying off 900 staff across Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and other studios. So, yeah, there's a lot of layoffs going off in gaming right now, now that we've made it through the main tech stuff, and subsidiary tech is getting hit. It's about 8% of the PlayStation division's head count.

So, Insomniac, which made Spider-Man, Ratchet, and Clank, Naughty Dog, which made The Last of Us, and Guerrilla Horizon are all affected by cuts. These are some of PlayStation's most important franchises, apparently, as Naughty Gamer. I couldn't tell you one way or another. Well, The Last of Us is huge. They made the series out of it, and the second season's coming soon, so I figured there'd be more of those.

That's apparently a big one that I've never played. And here's the statement, because I love these. After careful consideration in many leadership discussions over several months, it has become clear changes need to be made to continue to grow the business and develop the company. Outgoing president and CEO Jim Ryan told staff in an email, we had to step back, look at our business holistically, and move forward focusing on the long-term sustainability of the company and delivering the best experiences possible for our community.

The goal is to streamline our resources to ensure continued success and ability to deliver experiences gamers and graders have come to expect from us. Ooh, okay. Right. Whatever you say, boss. And EA. Yeah, ex-boss. EA is also laying off 5% of its workforce, according to a report it filed with the Security and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.

That's more than 650 Electronic Arts employees that will lose their jobs as a result of the move, part of a broader restructuring that will see the company cutting back on office space and ending work on some video games. The statement is, we are streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere.

All right. Well, hey, look, you know what that means. There's going to be some apartments opening up in Santa Monica that you can slide back into. Come on back. I've moved on from the apartment living days, unfortunately. I need a house. So maybe I can take over the outgoing president from PlayStation.

From PlayStation. Take his place. That might be out of my price range, though. Yeah, maybe. Some electric vehicle news. Tesla is going to have to deal with a class action lawsuit from 6,000 black workers from the Fremont, California factory. I thought it was strange that so many Teslas were white, but now I get it.

Oh, man. Oh, man. The lawsuit, which highlights a hostile work environment, including the use of racial slurs and racist imagery, has been approved by a California judge for collective litigation. Now, I need to see this. Is this out there?

What is the racist imagery that they use? I don't know, but I am dying to find out. Me, too. You know, companies are led from the top. So I'm just saying. Okay. Fisker is also laying off 15% of its staff and says it needs more cash ahead of a difficult year.

All right. They're planning to lay off 15% of its workforce as it grapples with its financial difficulties. The company, which reported having over 1,300 employees at the end of September 2023, aims to cut nearly 200 jobs. You know where they should probably staff up, though, is their PR department.

I've never heard of this company. Oh, we'll get to it in a second. Okay. Fisker's cash reserves are running low with just $396 million on hand. Oh, poor babies. But here's the thing. They've got one model. One model of car.

It looks like a dumpy Alfa Romeo, and it's not selling. All right. So good luck turning that ship around. Now, Fisker made news several years back because they made this really cool-looking all-silver car. Justin Bieber had one.

He would race it around the neighborhood all the time. That's the car that he got yelled at when he was living in Hidden Hills, I think, down the road in Calabasas. It made the news in my neighborhood one day because a buddy of his borrowed it and drove to my local liquor store that my friends own and crashed it at the liquor store.

Nice. So, yeah. But that's the only time I ever hear of Fiskars is when you see them driving around Hollywood because they're all silver. They are impossible to miss. You go, oh, Fisker. And that's probably one of the three that are in existence. I've never seen one of these dumpy-ass SUV things that they've got going on around.

So, yeah. Good luck, Fisker. Yeah. Well, Apple took a look at this market and kind of said, I think we're done here. Good. Their long-anticipated and much-delayed project to build an electric car is going to that junkyard heap in the sky, according to a new report from Bloomberg. And much of the team will transition to work on generative AI, although it's unclear how many people might be laid off.

Yeah. So, the Apple car is gone. And as a lot of articles have pointed out, almost all cars are Apple cars now. Yeah. Because of CarPlay. Except for what, GM? Yeah. Was it? I think it's GM that refuses to do it or something like that, which is just stupid. Yeah.

And there's a lot of talk going around about how Apple should just go ahead and buy Rivian and say, screw it. Let's just take them over. I bet they could get a deal on Fisker. I bet they could get a deal on Fisker, except Rivian has cool-looking cars. That's true. Well, trucks. They don't do a car car, do they?

No, not yet. No, they got pickup trucks and SUVs. Yeah. They are pretty cool-looking. I see them all the time. So, when I'm in LA, not here. Yeah. We just talked about that last week. But they are definitely still having problems, too. Every EV is having problems. Well, yeah. We've been talking about this.

The infrastructure is just not there. And they're too expensive. Yep. And why would you buy a used EV? It's like, you know, buying used batteries. You have no idea how, you know. Batteries take love and care to last longer. So, yeah. No thanks.

Yeah. Well, TikTok is being forced to take down more music from its platform, as the royalty spat with Universal Music Group keeps going. This isn't anything new. It's just that the separate copywriting contracts also just expired.

They lasted a couple weeks longer. So, that contract is now over. And since they have not resolved any of their issues, now anything that involved a songwriter that is signed to Universal now has to be pulled. So, quite a lot of stuff. So, anybody that has ever done a collaboration with anybody that's a UMG person or that they wrote the song for them, all that stuff is now going away, which is a lot more songs.

So, TikTok is not being left with much music at all these days because UMG is the biggest in the world at the moment. There's only two other ones. And UMG is like basically twice the size of both of them. So, yeah. So, that has happened. And a lot more songs are being muted.

I haven't spoken to my wife about any of this specifically recently, but it certainly explains all the yelling I've heard coming out of the home office. One thing that I do want to point out, because a lot of these articles seem to say, you know, TikTok, UMG is pulling music from TikTok, the most important platform for promoting music.

Let's have a quick discussion about what promoting means. Because there has been another change in people's music consumption behavior, specifically people that consume music on TikTok. When TikTok first came out, it was promotion because people would hear a 30-second snippet on TikTok and then go, God, that's a great song.

I'm going to go over to Spotify or YouTube or whatever, where it's monetized, and listen to it. What they have discovered, and of course, people do track these things, especially Universal, what they have discovered is that people are no longer leaving TikTok to go listen to the music on other monetized platforms.

They are only listening to it on TikTok. So, if you're only consuming it on TikTok and you're not going to a monetized platform, is it promotion? No, it's consumption. Now, TikTok is a streamer, not a promoter.

And that's where Universal is kind of going, listen, artists, I get that you think it's important for promotion, but if nobody's going to listen to it on a monetized format anymore, we are fighting for you to get that monetized. Now, does this have to do with the fact that TikTok extended the amount of time, the length of the videos, basically?

Sure does. Because now you get the whole song. That's what I was wondering. Because before, there were short videos, so you couldn't put the whole song in. I remember back to the old school days of the internet when we were doing things, it was always like, never use more than 25 seconds of a song, because then you'd get in trouble. Yeah, no, I get it.

I get it. See, that makes sense, the fact that the longer video length correlates with less actual bouncing to other platforms. Yeah, it's not promoting something anymore, because nobody's leaving the platform to go listen to it anywhere else. Everybody's just staying and consuming it there.

All right. Well, in more universal music news, they've had a great year. Time for some layoffs. Yep. All these numbers are in euros with commas instead of periods, so I'm not even going to attempt to try and figure it out.

Here's the deal. They made a shit ton of money, and then they announced a strategic organizational redesign, which will generate 250 million euros in annual run rate savings by 2026, all of which is accretive to EBITDA through a combination of headcount reduction and other operational efficiencies.

Headcount reduction, meaning somebody's getting the axe. Hopefully, it's not your wife. No, no. She was on the... This show ain't going to support you guys. She didn't get much work done yesterday because of all the texting about who got let go and all that sort of stuff. Universal's a public company, just like all the other public companies.

You make money, and you want that stock price to get juiced even higher? Fire people. Yep. Yep. And they're a Danish company, I found it. I had no idea. Yes, they... Well, my wife's direct boss works out of the Netherlands, so... Oh, okay.

Yeah. That's where they decided to incorporate for, you know... I'm sure for completely non-tax dodging reasons. I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure there's no trickery involved with all that. Yeah, because the music industry has been a paragon of virtue since it began. Yeah. Speaking of...

Paragon's a virtue? Yeah. Switching right over to that. X is starting to give non-paying users the ability to make audio and video calls. Isn't that exciting? Just what I've needed, a phone.

Brian, it's technology at its greatest. Yeah. First off, it's a fucking stupid idea because we've all got a million ways to already call people. I don't see how this moves the needle in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. But the thing that's the real kicker for me, and this is what I hate about technology, and actually, this is...

It started with technology, and it's spread into the rest of the world now. This is just the way business is done now, and it drives me fucking nuts. They charged for this feature. This was one of the pluses of being an X plus user or whatever the fuck they call it. X blues, double X, Y squared, X something.

This was a paid for feature. This was the Twitter, the X crazies, the muskamax. They paid for this. And this is what businesses do now. You get your fanatical idiot users to pay for you to develop a feature that you then turn around and offer for free to everyone in the desperate hopes to bolster overall usage.

You people are suckers that pay for fucking Twitter blue. Fuck you, I did. I know, and you're a sucker for it. How'd those phone calls go, Jason? I use Instagram for that. And before you laugh at that, one of the interesting things that I've noticed recently, because we're dealing with a lot of people in the arts, and I heard about this on an interview, Instagram's biggest feature are DMs, period.

That's what 75% of the usage of Instagram is, is messaging. People use it as their instant messaging client. Right. And as I found out in the past two weeks, people make a lot of phone calls on Instagram too. When we need to get in touch with an artist, we actually get them on Instagram faster than on text or by phone.

Yeah. It is insane how the usage has changed. And the fucked up thing is, they're on their phone using Instagram, but they won't pick up the fucking phone if you call, but they will pick up a call from Instagram. It's maddening.

It is fucking maddening. That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. I mean, the creative types, Instagram is where they're at, right? They live there, yeah. It's not any other platform. It's always Instagram. Yep. Yep. So going back to that, uh, buy Facebook stock predict, I'm sorry, meta stock prediction a couple of years ago.

It ain't going anywhere. It's not. It's not. They got enough tendrils. Facebook itself as a product is a piece of shit, but everything else is doing gangbusters. Yep. Well, Facebook, I think it's still doing, making a lot of money. Yeah, they're fine. We'll get, we'll get to them in a minute. We'll get to them in a minute. Bitcoin's back in the news because apparently they found a treasure trove of new fools or maybe some old fools who hung onto their Bitcoin.

Oh, I think this is totally related to that, uh, SEC thing where the Bitcoin can now be part of, you know, like mutual funds basically. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, it's, it popped over $60,000 per BTC, uh, this week and it crashed Coinbase, which is fantastic.

Gotta love it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently, uh, a lot of people were getting zero balance notifications on their, uh, their Coinbase account, which, you know, with a regular bank, you'd go, oh, that's a glitch. But with Bitcoin, it is completely plausible that you can log in and somebody has cleared out your bank account on any given day at any given moment.

That's true. That's the excitement of Bitcoin and crypto. Let me tell you, if I opened up my Wells Fargo account and I saw zero balances, I would just assume it's a glitch. If I opened up Coinbase, I'd assume I got fucked. Exactly. Exactly. Well, if you're opening, if you, if you bank at Wells Fargo, you might be fucked anyway.

Well, that's true. That's true. Uh, I'm looking at my Coinbase balance right now cause I've been hodling. Uh, I'm right back up to the price that I initially purchased everything at. So if I pulled out now, it's, it'd be a wash. Dump it. I have so little of it. I figure it's almost, this is the gambling money, Jason.

I'm going to let it ride. Let it ride. I'm still waiting for my ETH to pop back up. I'm still a hundred bucks in the hole on that one. Right. So, oh man. Uh, so, uh, OpenAI is being probed by the SEC. So, uh, because apparently when, uh, I was going to say Sam Bankman freed, but Sam Altman.

Yeah. Uh, very gingerly. Uh, when Sam Altman was kicked out, apparently it kicked off a bunch of, uh, calls to the SEC. And once they get the call, they have to investigate. So they're investigating everybody, not just Sam Altman. So they're going to find out if, um, the OpenAI investors were misled.

So it's just a basic, basic inquiry and colonoscopy by the SEC. So I bet they'll have fun with that one. A lot of people get paid. So good. We'll see. We'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. And, uh, Google has been in the news, uh, quite a bit this last week.

But, uh, the first one I want to talk about is Stack Overflow. Our favorite coding resource back in the day. They have announced Overflow API, which is a way for AI companies to programmatically scrape their data and, uh, build their models on it.

And this is how we got the Borg, Jason. Yep. AI is now being flooded with crappy code. That's it. That's it. Because there's a skill with using Stack Overflow. Oh, yes. The skill is to know which, which reply to the question is the gold that worked.

Because you have to try a bunch of them. And it's not really labeled well, the one that actually worked. You mean, you can get somebody, hey, that did, you know, but whatever. But it is sloppy shit code that just gets you kind of partially the way there. It should have been called Band-Aid Overflow because it is just a Band-Aid on your code to get you to the next review.

So it kind of works so you can get paid. That's all that matters. Got a deadline and can't do your code correctly? That's what Stack Overflow was for. Exactly. So now that is going to be sucked into all of the, uh, the language models. So, uh, yeah, uh, Google's the first up to get the data.

Uh, Stack Overflow says it will be open to everyone who wants it at some point. I'm sure for a very nice juicy fee, uh, which they will then, you know, take home because they fired most of their staff already. Thanks to AI. Uh, but yeah, it's the beginning of the end.

It's the beginning of the end. Um, and Google also has been in the news about, uh, their Gemini AI image generation failures. And this has just been funny. This has just been funny. They, you know, if you put in a historical prompt and you wanted to say the founding fathers, you would get back a melange of folks with the results.

So you could get green, brown, black, blue, orange, purple, uh, any, any color in the spectrum because they are super woke, ultra woke and woke plus. Uh, and, uh, they, they acknowledge that they have a problem and they have taken it offline and it comes back to what they were doing was they were doing prompt rewriting.

So you put in your prompt and they think that they know better. So then they would rewrite the prompt to be a little bit more inclusive. It was like their search autocomplete except woke. Yes, exactly. Uh, if it's woke, it's broke. So they had to take it offline.

So, and they say that they know that they did wrong and, uh, they're going to try and fix it. But, uh, yeah, they overcorrected a bit on that one. So it's just funny. Everybody's got their butthurt about it. So I just think it's, I just think it's kind of funny. Um, uh, also funny is CNET's reliability rating at Wikipedia has been downgraded because of too much AI.

That's right. So how the mighty have fallen CNET used to be like the go-to source. Oh yeah. But that was like two decades ago. It was a very, very long time ago. Yeah. Very long time ago. Back, yeah, when Halsey Miner started that thing and then who, what was it?

CBS or yeah, I think CBS bought it. And, uh, then Halsey Miner went off, uh, and actually funded one of my companies, JPEG magazine, which we had to shut down because, uh, he was indicted for, uh, tax evasion. So he was, he was, if you looked at the list of, uh, unpaid taxes in California, right when we shut down, he was at the top of the list and I think they repossessed his plane.

So yeah, CNET's not been anything for quite some time. Yeah. Taylor's got that plane now. Great. Uh, back to some meta slash Facebook news. Facebook is going to be shutting down the news tab in U S and Australia. There's a news tab.

Exactly. That's the, that's their point. They're like, nobody uses it anymore. I wonder why it's fucking buried. Yeah. Nobody uses this thing. We completely hid. Uh-huh. Imagine that. Yeah. The only other thing that they hid that is actually of use is the chronological view.

Yes. But you got to dig for that one too. So maybe it'll make the, put the chronological feed a little bit closer to the top. So it'd be a little easier to find. Uh-huh. I'm sure that'll happen. Yeah, sure. Uh-huh. The only reason it's there is I'm sure from some agreement with the FTC that they made years ago.

And they're like, you have to have that in there. Okay. All right. You didn't say where, you just said it had to be there. That's right. Uh, back to some of your science news. I saw this one, uh, Varta space industries, uh, had a spaceship up in space and they had a really nice webcam pointed out the top of it for re-entry and you could, they made a video of it and you could watch it and actually hear it.

It is really cool. Did you get a chance to watch it? I did. I watched some of this. It was really cool. Yeah. It looks just like it does in the movies. Yeah. Yeah. You didn't get vertigo from this one. You ready for a dad joke on this one? Okay. Yeah.

It was called the W1. The W2 better get here pretty soon. God. Running out of time. Whore, whore, whore. Somebody out there's laughing. The accountants are laughing, damn it. The accountants are laughing. Yeah. What else you got?

Some more science news. The asteroid Dimorphos looks totally different after NASA's DART mission walloped it. Now, this is pretty cool. We managed to smash into an asteroid to see if we could nudge it off a course. You know, this is the whole, you know, we don't have to send, we can't send Bruce Willis anymore. Yes, sadly.

Something, yeah. And it worked. That's awesome. Okay. That's my science news. Yeah, but is there any actual photo of it? Because these are all simulations that they have in the article. Well, no, that's the problem. And the next mission that they're sending, I was listening to, what was that really good podcast from the BBC?

I know you're going to say it's not a podcast, but I think we can stop that argument these days. No such thing as a fish? No, the science one, the Eric Idle does the soundtrack for it. I'm scrolling through. Oh, I don't know that one. I can't remember what it's. Anyways, it's a really good one. And they had a bunch of astronauts on talking about how the next mission is basically going to have three orbital camera things on it.

So they're going to be able to do high def footage of the next one. And they're going to land it on it and like smash it into bits. And it's going to be really cool. Oh, it's going with its own camera crew. Basically, yeah. Okay. It's going to be pretty cool. That's a good idea. Who'd have thunk? I know. Who'd have thunk? Now, this next one is a story that happened to break online while I was online.

So I got to follow it in real time. And it was one of the best things that's ever happened on the internet. And it's also definitely one of those unintended consequences of AI because AI figures in quite prominently here. Oh, yes, it does. Cops were called to the Willy Wonka experience as crying children realized that AI ads were lies.

This was the Willy's chocolate experience in Glasgow, Scotland. And House of Illuminati is the organization behind the event. One would assume it's the fire festival guy that was also involved in this, but sadly, no. They were charged up to 35 pounds or about 45 bucks for a ticket, an afternoon of activities based on the Wonka reboot movie.

The event was promoted with AI renderings of lollipop forest, jelly bean waterfalls, flying horses, giant mushrooms, and other fantastical larger than life scenes promising a place where chocolate dreams become reality. Hundreds of parents arrived with their families. They were greeted by a gutted factory with dirty windows, exposed air condition systems, a couple of plastic candy canes, and other redded props strewn about on bare concrete floors.

The whimsical Oompa Loompas turned out to be struggling actors frantically reciting scripts that were handed out the night before the event and were written by AI and were basically nonsensical. There are these wonderful pictures. The memes are all over the place.

There is an awesome interview with one of these sad Oompa Loompas. The Meth Lab Oompa Loompa Lady. The Meth Lab Oompa Loompa Lady. And she is awesome. And I got to hope she gets great jobs moving forward. The interview is awesome. Link is in the show notes. Everything about this is awesome.

Yeah. It was just the best thing that ever happened on the internet. Close second this week, though. Wendy's. Oh, Wendy's. Oh, Wendy's. Wendy's got in the news. The internet has its own beef with Wendy's.

Ha ha. When it discovered the fast food chain was planning surge pricing for 2025. Now, Wendy's clarified in an update statement on Tuesday that it has no plans for a surge price. Bullshit. We said these menu boards would give us more flexibility to change the display of featured items. This was misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest at a restaurant, said Wendy's in an official statement.

We had no plans to do that. Would not raise prices when our customers are visiting us most. So, yes, they're saying that the new menus will just be able to move things around. Not prices. We'll just put this burger up higher because that's what's selling right now. Except. Except, to be clear, Wendy's CEO told its shareholders it would begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing less than two weeks ago on its earning call.

Dope. Where's the truth? The memes about this have been phenomenal. Fantastic. And I just have to say, because this is what happens. One company will float an idea. And it will get, it will get crucified for it.

But right now, a thousand other companies are going, hmm, we'll let this blow over. And I will tell you right now, any fucking food company that tries to pull out surge pricing, I will never fucking eat there again. Exactly. Exactly.

My favorite one is, can I get the hamburger? Would it cost two hours ago, please? I love all the ones with the different screenshots from all the different movies. Oh, yeah. I'm going big on burgers this morning. I'm going to, I got to offload them. Good week for the internet.

Really good week for the internet.

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Media Candy. Brian, you turned me on to the show Constellation on Apple TV+. Mm-hmm. No. I said after the first episode, and then after the second episode, halfway through, I said, well, maybe. Have you had a chance to watch it yet?

No. As soon as you put this in the show notes, I was going to wait. Okay. You're my test pilot. Okay. Well, the first episode was kind of like, okay, whatever, and it's really confusing. And then once you get into the second episode, you're like, oh, I see.

And then it got really creepy. And it was like 1030 at night. And I'm like, I don't need to watch this right before I go to bed. Oh, no. Because this is when I would be watching it. But, well, I needed to be able to at least be somewhat fresh for today. But I'm going to finish watching it tonight.

It's got me hooked a bit, I got to say. Okay. Cool. Yeah. I mean, it looks good, right? Like, it just looks like it's going to be good. Yeah. So far, it's pretty, like I said, the first episode was a little bit of a slog to get through because it's setting up the premise and everything. There's a lot of action in the first one.

But I'm just like, okay. And I'm going to stick with it, though. So give it a shot. I need somebody to play along at home with. All right. All right. I will. It's a slow roll, too. I think there's only three out right now. Maybe three. Okay. So my initial no turned into a, well, maybe.

So I'm going to give it a shot. Now, Neuromancer is also coming to Apple TV+. And I'm going to no, no on that one because it's Apple TV+, and it is based on a novel. And we've seen how they've done with Foundation. So.

But they did okay with Silo. They did okay with Silo. But this has Graham Rowland involved, who you may know from shows like Lost. Oh, I'm out. See? See what I'm saying? So. Yes. We'll see how much they fuck this one up.

Yeah. So that's a no-no for me. There was no polar bear in Neuromancer. I'll tell you that much. Well, there might be a digital polar bear. Who knows? Who knows? All right. Now, the big no, no, no for me is we've finally seen images from the Crow reboot.

Yeah, I'm out. I'm sure. No. Are you sure it's not the Joker reboot? It's so. I'm sorry. Eric Draven did not have a fucking mullet to start with and little meth-y tattoos. No, no. This movie should be off the books to be remade ever.

You know? Nothing is. It's, yeah, unfortunately, you know. Respect Brandon Lee and respect the original movie. And the original soundtrack. The original soundtrack, yes. Everything about the first movie would, well, it would have been picture perfect if Brandon hadn't died because the stuff that they had to cut from the movie because it was too dark after, you know, he died would have been great because all of the, oh, was it the cowboy stuff and all this?

It was all taken out. His resurrection, all that crap was taken out. But still, ended up with a decent movie if you can get past the guitar bits. That's what was hard for me. But still, classic movie, even more classic soundtrack. Go watch the old Brandon Lee Crowe and skip the shit out of this one.

Agreed. Now, in other reboot news, I did not know that they were rebooting Naked Gun. And they're rebooting it with Liam Neeson. Which gives me hope. See, can he break out of that role that he's been in with Taken?

That whole Taken series for so long as being, you know, an over-the-hill action star. Because he's made a lot more movies like Taken than he's actually made Taken movies, I think. And the last one was just so bad. So bad. Well, look, Seth MacFarlane is producing this.

I think Liam Neeson can pull off the, it'll be, him doing comedic stuff based on that whole Taken persona is going to be awesome. It has a chance. That's why I didn't give it a no. That's why I didn't give it a no. All right.

And a hell yes for me for the week is Guy Ritchie is going to be directing a Ray Donovan spinoff called The Donovans for Paramount+. I loved Ray Donovan. I thought it was a great series. And it came up the other day because I was talking about Alan Alda on another show. And like, is Alan Alda still alive?

I'm like, of course he's still alive. He's got Parkinson's. And I saw him in something recently. And I couldn't remember what it was. And I looked it up and he was Ray Donovan's therapist in the final seasons of that. He was excellent in it. He was absolutely excellent in it. And I love Guy Ritchie. And I love the universe of Ray Donovan.

And it's going to be in London with a, with a, you know, fixers over in London. And so I think this has a chance to be really fucking good. So I'm hopeful. I'm very hopeful. Well, I watched a random movie called Next Goal Wins, which popped up on Disney Plus.

Well, yeah, probably because of that. It's similar-ish to Ted Lasso. Now, normally, when I see Taika Waititi's name, I run the other direction as fast as I possibly can. And he did direct this, unfortunately. But it was actually clever and funny and kind of heartwarming.

The Taika Waititi bits that he puts in, which are just so purely him, are absolutely the worst parts of the movie. They fall completely flat. And they're horrible. But luckily, they're kept to a minimum because there's an actual story that he has to tell. So he can't fuck around too much.

And it was good. It's based on a true story about the American Samoa soccer team, which is infamous for its 31-0 FIFA loss in 2001. The worst loss in World Cup history. And the whole point here is they hire kind of a down-and-out Maverick coach to come and...

Ted Lasso? It's kind of, but like a cranky one that drinks a lot. Okay. And it's quite funny. It's Michael Fassbender plays the character. And he's very good at it. So, yeah. I mean, it's a fun little movie if you just skip those few... You know, go get a snack when Taiki himself walks out to do clever bits.

I watched the trailer and it did actually look pretty decent. It was a fun movie. It's a fun, you know, just heartwarming kind of movie. Worth it. Definitely worth it. Yeah. The Taiki Waititi stuff, I think his best work is still Hunt for the Wilder People. And it's been all downhill after that.

He's just... I can't stand him. He's definitely an acquired taste. I liked his first Thor movie. I thought it was funny. But, you know, yeah, short shelf life on that. Then he did the second Thor movie, I guess, which was the worst bomb in Marvel history.

Something like that. Well, until they put women in, right? Right, right. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, internet. Right? Yeah. Well, there is a part two that I'm looking forward to this week and it is Dune part two. I'm going to break my rule. I'm going to the theater, baby.

Are you really? I'm going to the theater. Yeah. Yep. Now, me and my friend, we're going next week. We're going to go catch a matinee. I'm going to watch the... Because I've got the 75-inch TV in my bedroom. So I was hoping they were going to do a dual release, but they're not. So this weekend, I'm going to sit down with my AirPods in, a big bucket of popcorn, and I'm going to watch Dune, just like I'm at the theater.

Because if you sit at the edge of my bed, you can't see the edges of the TV, which is perfect. Where did that worm go? Yeah. I mean, part one was so damn good, and I'm avoiding as many spoilers as I can. I've read a few reviews, and they're all very, very good.

Yeah. The little things that I saw said it was better than the first one, so hopefully... Hard not to be, because this is when all the action happens. Yeah. You know, come on. They have been running some clips from the old Dune with Sting, like showing Sting in his little outfit.

And I'm like, yeah, different movie altogether. Yes. Tops and doodads. So I saw this one pop up, and it was purely because of Star Trek, and most of the articles talk about how it's like a Star Trek tablet. Come to life, Lenovo's Project Crystal is the world's first laptop with a transparent micro-LED display.

It's cool looking, man. It's cool, but damn, it would be annoying to work on. Well, your OPSEC is horrible. Yeah, seriously. But I think, you know, they do point out in this office that the most obvious use case or in this office, in this article, the most obvious use case would be sharing info somewhere like a doctor's office or a hotel desk.

So that's kind of cool. You know, you just use software to flip the screen so then people can see it. But it's just cool looking. And it does look straight out of like, you know, the Star Trek reboot and stuff like that. So yeah, you know, it's insanely expensive and it's just a concept device, but it is definitely cool looking.

I would have one just to have around the house. Yeah, see, I want the transparent micro-LED display on the inside of my Jeep so I can have a really cool looking heads-up display. Yeah, that'd be cool. That's what I want. Yep. Yeah, that makes sense. That would be cool. Yeah. Yeah, get me to that part and then we'll talk.

So, but yeah, on the laptop, I will wait. Because yeah, bad OPSEC for sure. No, I'm not watching Pornhub. I am 100% paying attention to this team's meeting. Oh, the cool thing though is you can put the web camera behind.

No, you couldn't because the web camera was still seen. Never mind. I thought it came up with a cool use, but no, no, no. So this is kind of cool. Researchers have developed a way to make an optical disc about the size of a Blu-ray or CD that can store 1.6 petabits of data.

One scratch. You're gone. There goes the Library of Alexandria with a piece of dust right there. One scratch or let it sit in a drawer for about five years. Useless. Done skis. Oh, man.

Yeah. That is true. That is true. Just saying. It's not that big of a revolution here, people. Yeah. But it is kind of cool that I can fit that much data. Yeah. I'll get one of those drives for my see-through laptop. Yeah. Seriously. You know, they got like 128 gig DVDs that you can get now or Blu-rays for data storage.

Yeah. I was thinking of checking that out. I was listening to somebody who was doing it to do like just a long-term archive of shit. And then I'm thinking, you know what? Who gives a fuck? It's probably a lot cheaper than the cloud these days. But you would have to like make a note like every three years, do another copy.

Exactly. Yeah. Just to re-up them to make sure that they're going. But it's like, I don't really care anymore. Like I'm 52 and I've been holding on to all of these photos my whole life. And you know what? If they just went away, it might be a nice thing. So I don't have to keep copying them and dragging them around.

I got to tell you that that is freeing. That has happened to me before. Like I've had, when we were just getting ready to move here, like somebody broke into one of my storage facilities and took some stuff. And I was like, good. Yeah. Fine. Mm-hmm. Seriously.

Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, I've probably spent, you know, months of my life just watching copy in progress bars, moving that shit around where I could have been out doing stuff, actually having a nice life. Oh, well. That's a topic for a different show.

Just going to let that sit for a minute and breathe. Yeah. Seriously. Another thing I could have been doing instead of sitting in front of – I spent three days last week because I was just twitching for a video game. I don't know why. I just got a bug up my ass and I needed a video game. So I went to Apple Arcade and I picked up Jetpack Joyride 2.

Okay. Electric Boogaloo. Jetpack Joyride was fun. It's, you know, it was an infinite – not even an infinite scroll. It was a scroller that you just basically – it was one and done. You tried to get as far as you could get every time. Jetpack Joyride 2, they at least made levels so there was like a progression of baddies and things like that.

So you weren't always starting from the beginning. And there were 100 levels. Finished the whole thing in three days. I won the game in three days. Okay. So that was – since it was an Apple Arcade Plus game, it was free. There was stuff there you could buy, but I'm saying I'm paying for shit.

But it was fun. It was a definite upgrade to the original Jetpack Joyride. I'll give it that. And it was a good three days. I enjoyed it. My pooping experience was action-packed. But I was telling a friend about it and we got on to the topic of Tetris, talking about PTSD treatments in Tetris.

And there's some research out there about how it can help people suffering from PTSD. They did some studies on it and it was pretty cool. But I remembered that I have the analog pocket, which is that Game Boy – it's basically – it's an emulator with a bunch of – you can plug in a bunch of different games with adapters. But it does Game Boy cartridges out of the gate.

And you store it right next to your flesh pocket. Okay. Oh, God. It's going in the wrong direction. No comeback on that one, please. I will just – I will keep my mouth shut. But the only game I've got for it is Tetris. I bought a couple other cartridges for it and I realized that, oh, my God, Game Boy games were really shitty.

It was a waste of money to buy those. Because I thought – I remember the Castlevania game and I'm like, oh, I remember. That game was fun. It was fun when the Game Boy was the most advanced gaming platform on the planet. Now it's just garbage. Absolutely garbage. Tetris has legs.

So I've been playing Tetris every – I put it in my nightstand drawer. So at night when I'm sitting there doing my meetings and stuff, I can sit there and play Tetris. And it's – it is fun. I got to say, you get back into the groove of it. I haven't hit my record yet.

My record is 217 lines. But getting there. Getting there. I don't have the brain of the 15-year-old that used to play it by any stretch. But I do recommend the analog pocket. It is a cool game device for – it's a little pricey, 220 bucks. But still nice.

Still nice. All right. And I got this news. MacPaw's Setapp will become one of the first to agree to Apple's controversial DMA rules. This means that they're going to be paying the Apple extortion fee in the EU to basically what's – it's tantamount to running their own app store built inside of Setapp.

Right. So we'll see how this goes. I am hopeful for them because I am a huge fan of MacPaw and everything they do. But for now, go get Setapp for your regular computers. And you can still get your stuff on the iPhone. It takes like two extra steps because you have to get the app and then they send you a QR code in the Setapp app on your computer.

You just scan that QR code and it unlocks the app on your phone. It's great. All right. That's cool. It's a simple way to do it and it doesn't actually charge anything extra. But Setapp saved my ass this week. I needed to do a video. I was in Final Cut Pro Hell all week and I needed to capture some video off of YouTube and that Downy program that comes with Setapp, you just copy the URL, paste it in, boom.

You get the video straight down. You can actually have it if you want it to convert it to audio only, give you a WAV file or an MP3, which is very handy. So I'm sure your wife probably is going to start screaming and throwing things through the phone right now. But if you need to.

As long as you rip it off TikTok, she doesn't care. Okay. Hey, but no, you know what? YouTube actually get – they track the view. So somebody gets paid off of that even if you're downloading it. The one view. Yeah. The one view. Actually, two probably because you got to view it the first time and then you got to get it the second time through the app. So you get two for the price of one.

Yeah. And then never again. Yes, yes. So check out Setapp for the Mac. There's a link in the show notes. We are big fans here at Grumpy Old Geeks. At the library. Mark Andre wrote in, says, Hey, guys, I think this message is only relevant to Jason.

I believe you a Farscape hardcore fan, if I remember correctly. Check out this Kickstarter. And this is for the Farscape 25th anniversary comic book celebration. Well, Mark, you kind of – Mark Andre, you kind of got it right there. I am a huge fan of Farscape, not of the comics. The show.

I like the show. I've never been a big comic adaptation fan. If the comic came first and I was a fan of the comic, sure, like Sandman. I love the Netflix version, but I love the print version more. And, yes, we are fans because Gigi, who played Chiana, was on this very show a couple times, I think, when you were out of town, Brian.

I needed fillers to, you know, get through the week. So she came on and helped out. But if you're a fan of the comic books, definitely check it out. It looks like a really nice edition or a couple of different editions that they're making. And it actually has blown past their initial ask.

So it will get delivered, hopefully. All right. There you go. Very cool. I finished another book in the First Contact series by Peter Cowderon. These are kind of like my reliable go-to little sci-fi snacks in between bigger books. You've got to be running out of those soon. Not even close.

He's got like 25 or 26 of them. I think I've only read like seven now. Oh, okay. So this one was Losing Mars, and it was great. This one's very like hard sci-fi. A lot of like, you know, real research went into this. It's very much his, you know, take on the Martian, but a little bit more exciting.

And with actual like, you know, aliens in it. So yeah, very good. Like I've, there's only been like one dud so far. So I've really enjoyed it as well. Cool, cool. I have five books that I'm juggles and juggling between right now. I've got Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey that I started on your recommendation.

And I kind of got stuck with it and needed something else to just kind of recalibrate my brain. So these are the, these are the ones that I'm, I'm actively jumping between right now. I've got Kasher in the Rye, the true tale of a white boy from Oakland who became a drug addict, criminal, mental patient, and then turned 16 by Moshe Kasher.

Okay. I thought it was the Axl Rose story. No, it's, it's really funny. He is damn funny. And it's read by him too. Is this the guy married to What's Her Face? No. The female comedian? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I can't remember. I'm blanking on her name. Leggera. Yeah, Natasha Leggero.

Natasha. That's it. Natasha Leggera. Yeah, they're married. Okay. So it's really funny. I'm most of the way through that one. Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant. I love Adam Grant's books. So this was just his latest book.

So I think I've got that on auto renew. Whenever he comes out with a book, I just get it. And Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Dewig. Also one of those guys that generally, when his books come out, I pick up so far. I haven't opened that one yet.

But he did an interview on Kara Golden's show last week that we put out. And it was really good. So I expect this book will be pretty good, too. I just want to say really quickly, speaking of guys that we always buy their books whenever they come out, Christopher Moore just announced on Twitter and other platforms as well that he finished his draft of his latest book.

So we got incoming from him soon. Oh, sweet. And I think we have a new Bobaverse book that's due anytime now. New Bobaverse is due anytime now. And Neil Stevenson's got to be due for something. Oh, yeah. I mean, he's had time to crap out about 4,000 pages since the last time we heard from him. Yeah, so he's about one-third of the way through another book.

Exactly. So his short story will be out soon. I also got a book called Bounce Back, 12 Warrior Principles to Reclaim and Recalibrate Your Life by Travis Mills. Travis was on an episode of Christopher Lockhead's Follow You're Different.

And I thought he was really good, so I picked up his latest book, which is this one, Bounce Back. He's basically lost both legs and both arms in an IED explosion in Iraq, and really, really just amazing guy.

His story is fantastic. He's a badass, and it's actually a really good book. It's a short book, and it's just – I like it. It's just a lot of nice little short principles that he gets through the day with, and if he can get through the day with them, you'll learn something out of it.

I enjoy it. So that's where I'm at right now with my reading cue that just keeps getting rotated through depending on the mood that I'm in and how much time I have. Yeah, I got to say the same thing happened to me with Infinity Gate. Like I dipped about halfway through. I powered through as opposed to switching to something else, but it'll get you back.

Yeah, I'm right at that part where I think you dipped too. I'm like, oh, yeah, this is what he was talking about. I think I'll just go read something else for a little bit and come back. Yeah.

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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. And the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy. Oh, yeah, he's also the host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings too. Hi, Dave.

How you doing? Hello. I would categorize myself as hanging in there. I have a bit of a cold. A bit of a cold today. Just a little like upper respiratory thing. It's a nuisance cold. So they're not really keeping me from doing anything. I did COVID test and I so far don't have – it's not testing positive for COVID.

So that's good. But, you know. Yeah. Well, everybody's sick all the time now. That's what I've discovered about this year. Okay. I mean, in my house, we've just been passing it around. My son has it. He gives it to my wife. My wife gives it to me. I give it back to my son. It's been that way since Christmas.

Okay. Yeah. The gift that keeps on giving. Yeah. So I wanted to talk about one podcast that you don't actually do, Dave, which is somewhat shocking. Strong Songs. You had mentioned this a while back and I had just forgotten about it. I always meant to go back and listen to it. But then you had posted about, I believe, the latest episode with this, which is In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel on Facebook, which reminded me that this podcast exists.

And I went and subscribed to it. And I want, I always like to start strong with a podcast. So I went and scanned through everything. And I found the Radiohead Paranoid Android episode. Now, Radiohead for me, OK Computer is one of my touchstone albums.

Like Disintegration was the album of my teen years. OK Computer was the album of my 20s, for sure. You know, top album of that period in my life and still a hugely influential album, Omni. I can listen to it anytime. So perfect. I will listen to that episode.

If this episode is anything to go by, this might be one of the finest and strongest music podcasts that's out there. I did not know what to expect. You know, I've listened to a lot of music podcasts where they just either talk about songs a little bit or they have one of the musicians on and they just talk to the musician about the songs.

This guy plays the fucking song. Right. Like he deconstructs it and he's such a brilliant musician. Here it is on piano. Here's the guitar part. Here's what the guitar part would sound if we transposed it. Now you can see why they did it that way. It's amazing. So thank you so much for this recommendation.

You're welcome. The Paranoid Android episode was unbelievable. And I can't wait to, you know, I'm going to go through and do all the songs I know first and then move on to the other ones. Yeah. Just this past week, I listened to the one about In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel. And one of the things I love is that this host, Kirk Hamilton, is just so positive.

Oh, yes. He and it's infectious. And I just it's a feel good podcast because it's music you love. You're learning about what makes this music so special. But there's no cynicism or guile in Kirk Hamilton at all.

And let me tell you, Paranoid Android is not a feel good song that is full of cynicism. And he managed to not do that with this episode. Yeah, yeah. I only wish there were more episodes, you know, he... Well, I want him to do all of my favorite songs. Now I feel like I need to write in and say, well, how come you haven't done any Cure Depeche Mode yet?

I would like to write that. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. You listen, you just... I can't imagine the amount of time that must go into his deconstructing these songs and then reconstructing them using his own instruments. Yeah, it's amazing. It really is.

Yeah, it really is. I cannot recommend this one enough. So thank you again for reminding me unintentionally on your Facebook feed. Oh, good. Well, my pleasure. Glad you're enjoying it. I have a little dystopian news. I was driving through Beverly Hills this last weekend, and there's a giant sign in the middle of Sunset Boulevard that says...

One of those programmable, you know, looks like a construction sign or whatever. Yeah. And I just caught it at the right time. It says, welcome to Beverly Hills. Then a pause, a beat. Police drone in use. Oh, wow. Okay.

Thanks. Thanks for welcoming me and letting me know that I am being surveilled from the sky. Welcome to Beverly Hills, indeed. Yep. The sad thing is that, I mean, I laughed about it because I was in such a good mood because I had seen a gaggle of Lambos pull up at a stoplight in front of me.

Are you sure it's not a tribe? What is the correct wording? Maybe a pride of Lambos? A pride of Lambos. It could be a pride of Lambos. Yeah. So pride of Lambos pulled up, and they're all revving. They're... And I'm looking at them. I'm like, ah, hustle bros.

And then as we're waiting there for the light to change, I see in the traffic behind, slowly creeping up, is just a lone motorcycle cop. And he's just, like, weaving his way up there very slowly, like, like, it's like rikki-tikki-tavi, ready to strike a cobra.

Yeah. And then right before the light changes, he fucking flashes the blues and pulls over the guy in the end. And got him. You never want to be the straggler in the pride. Exactly. It's like the old bomb tech shirt. I don't have to be the fastest, but I have to be faster than you. Or not, it's the bear.

Taking off the slow and the weak. Yeah, that's the bear attack one. I just have to be faster than you. The bomb tech one is, if you see me running, try and keep up. But I saw the guy get pulled over, and it made me so happy. And so when I saw the police drone in use thing, I just had to give it a little chuckle.

Yeah, I wonder what that's about. I mean, obviously, it's cheaper than a helicopter. But what does it allow them to do other than what they can't do with regular surveillance? I guess, I don't know. I mean, I guess it lets them go wherever they want, and it's a line item in their budget.

I would suspect the Beverly Hills Police Force is well-funded. Yes, they are extraordinarily well-funded. And they have more cameras than London, I think, in Beverly Hills. I think you're right about that, actually. Yeah, what they do is they don't have it up in the air all the time. It's kind of on standby. A Toyota has entered the area.

Yes. Get it in the air now. No pintos allowed. There was a huge amount of smash and grabs on Rodeo Boulevard or Rodeo Drive. Rodeo Boulevard is Rodeo Boulevard down the street. Rodeo Drive is where the rich people are. There was a ton of smash and grabs.

So I think a drone would actually help try and track that much faster than trying to do it on the ground. Because I don't know if you've ever driven in Beverly Hills, but it sucks. Yeah, it does suck. Yeah. So if you need to track somebody who's on foot running from something or just shot somebody and stole their watch, which also happens in Beverly Hills, a drone is actually a really good way to do it.

But you still have to get up there, get it up and go find them, you know. So I just think it's just another, you know, just another tool in their tool belt. But the fact that they have to say it so proud and loud as you as you first enter Beverly Hills is just like, OK, we get it.

We get it. And Nancy writes in on Apple Watch 2 Ultra. More than once it warned me about excess noise when my dog was barking at a bear. There you go, Brian. There's some action for you. I would prefer a bear warning on my watch directly. That would be useful.

Well, I want to know where Nancy lives, that this is a regular occurrence, that her dog's barking at bears. More than once, yes. Yeah. So that's good. I will say. Stay safe, Nancy. Yeah, please. Give that dog a treat.

Per your recommendations, I did turn my watch around so that the digital crown is on the other side. And I will say it is an improvement but is not quite perfect. And here's why. What I found is that if I'm wearing long sleeves, sometimes the sleeves will brush up against the digital crown and turn it, which makes the watch go to a different page.

Well, I have a solution for that, Dave. Yes. Move to Los Angeles. There you go. Then you will only wear short sleeves and this will never be an issue. Right. That's practical. Sure. Okay. Yeah, no problem. I've never had that problem with my hoodie. But, yeah, I don't own anything long-sleeved.

So, come on down. Well, see, and I don't like having cuffs around my wrists. So, like if I'm wearing like a dress style shirt, I will always roll the sleeves up a couple notches to have it kind of, you know, midway up my forearm.

But I've just noticed a couple times if a sleeve sneaks down there, it'll mess with the digital crown, which is far better than accidentally triggering the alarm or the 911. The police, yes. So, yeah. So, it's still an improvement.

Oh, yeah. Not perfect. Yeah. No, and you're right on that having the crown on that side and being able to hit it with your thumb is way better than having it on the other side. So, I'm going to keep it this way. And, you know, I'm continuing to play with it and just see what different kinds of settings.

May I suggest you find raglan shirts? Raglan shirts. Yeah. Yeah. That'll solve the problem too. Yeah. Oh, I need like those three-quarter length sleeve baseball. Yeah. Oh, like in the 70s. That's actually what I meant when I said raglan because anytime I search for, yeah, the three-quarter length.

So, they tend to, yeah, be that. So, I love those shirts. I have a bunch of them. So, they're my favorites. I could just go back to wearing tank tops all year round. Yeah. I'll wear that. Not that I ever did. I don't think I ever did wear tank tops. But I remember when Brian showed up at our first Zoom meeting with the fans and he was wearing a tank top.

It was hot. Our friend Trent, it was just like, what? He couldn't afford sleeves for this? Come on. It was fucking hot. What are you going to do? My stepdad actually worked at a gas station in the 70s and we had one of those t-shirt presses with the three-quarter, you know, sleeves.

And remember, you get the big book of all the decals. Right. So, you could go in and get whatever, like the Ayatollah is an Asahola t-shirt with your Twinkies and the love. Keep on trucking. Free mustache rides. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was a thing. Keep it classy, 70s.

Yep. I miss you. Yeah. Yeah. So, Sebastian wrote in and I got a sense of either disappointment or condescension from this email a little bit. At the very least, frustration. Frustration that we couldn't have possibly known this ahead of time.

Yeah. Hey, guys. I was a bit surprised to hear you wondering if your phone could get to 670 nanometers. But after Dave was wondering about this as well, I had to write. And he goes on to explain that our phone does not change wavelengths. It sends out three at all times corresponding to red, green, and blue.

And if you turn on night shift, it's the same as changing the white balance on your camera. It only changes weight factors for these threes. So, we can never do the red light thing that we were talking about from our phone. And we are silly, silly boys for thinking that we might possibly be able to. Yeah. Yes. So, well, I also love how he ends it.

And sorry for being probably one of 300 people writing in as you probably realized the mistake on the first message, but you earned that one. Well, no. You're the only one, Sebastian. You're the only one, Sebastian. It's just you, buddy. You win. You win. I do appreciate the information because you are the only person that told us that we can't do that.

So, now we know. But, you know. Can I explain myself? Yes, of course. Perhaps. So, let me just take us through my thought process, which Sebastian has rightly revealed. These are magical devices and they should do everything. That's right.

Yes. It is our era's equivalent of a tricorder. So, I think Sebastian rightly points out the error in my thinking, but let me go through this and let me just start with the caveat that this is all at the very edge of my understanding.

So, I think what he's getting at here is true, particularly because our iPhones are OLED devices. So, the pixels themselves are emitting light as opposed to an LCD device, which would be backlit by an array of broader spectrum LEDs.

Right? Right. So, what I was thinking was it was as if you had like a broad spectrum LED underneath the screen and then over top of that was an LCD screen, which filters the colors, rather than an OLED, which generates the colors.

Now, the other thing that I was wondering about was not every display is capable of displaying the same color gamut, right? Newer displays can make more colors than older displays. And that means that they must have greater capabilities of their brightnesses and dimness and the intensities of their color.

And maybe that all comes down to just brightness and saturation of these three fundamental colors that Sebastian's talking about. That could very well be the case. I don't know. But that's where my wondering came from, was sort of the intersection between wide color gamuts and what I was thinking in my mind of a backlit display, which Sebastian is right.

I'm incorrect in my thinking about that. So, that's my explanation for how I got to that wondering. It was not random. It was not – it was a process, however incorrect it may have been.

It wasn't haphazard. Well, and it's also not helpful when you search the app store and there are apps that claim to be able to do this. So, there's also the intentional, you know, fuckery that goes on with the internet. So, excuse us for thinking that it's possible when we were told so by some app from Chaiping.

Yeah. Right. Jason, did you buy the light emitters yet? No, I didn't. Okay. No. Yeah. I keep looking at it and then my wife told me I was nuts and we're never putting one of these things up in the house. And I was like, but I'm going blind and so are you.

We should try this. Right. The thing was I looked at the Amazon listings and, you know, the prices range from like $13 to $700. Yeah, I saw that too. It's a very murky, confusing market.

What I should be doing is actually like Googling and finding reputable scientific resources that could point me in the right direction. But who has time? Exactly. And I looked at my credit card balance and it said, you're not buying a damn thing today, boy. Turn that off. So there we go.

We did have a few people write in on social media that have things of that nature and have said that they haven't really seen any benefits for eyesight, but it has helped them sleep and things of that like that. So who knows? Yeah. We will wait for more research to come in, I suppose.

Yeah. And I think it's probably in our best interest that if we're going to be monkeying with our eyes that we make sure we're using a high quality product before we do. Well, that's why I was waiting for Jason to order first. Right. True. Yeah, because the funny thing is I have a blue light next to my bed, a Philips – I forget what the name of it was.

It's not a Hue light, but it's one of the old school seasonal affective disorder lights. Oh, the sad lights. Yeah. Yeah. This was extremely expensive when I bought it and it still works. It works great, but I use it to wake me up in the morning and it's blue. So now it's saying I got to use red. I'm like, ah, I don't know.

I'm sticking with the blue because I want to wake up. I'll be blind. I got glasses. I'll just watch Superman in the morning. Then I get blue and red. You know, so now I'm wondering – I was thinking like you could have this light in the shower stall, like, right? So while you're taking your shower, you could be bathed in this beautiful red light so that you're multitasking.

Well, let me tell you, Dave, this is another ad that shows up constantly for me on Facebook. They have these little zip-up sauna units that you can put in your house now and half of them do come with the red infrared lights as well. Okay. So let me ask you this. Did either of you ever live in a house that had a heat lamp in the bathroom?

Yes. Yes. Okay. Because that's all infrared, right? I believe so. Yeah. I don't know. I just know that I looked fabulous under there. Really old bulb. All my blemishes disappeared. It was just like I went to a strip club. There you go.

So I wonder what wavelengths those put out because you can just – you can buy one of those at the hardware store, just infrared – a heat lamp basically. I'm waiting for the Jumbo's Clown Room branded version. There you go. That's an L.A. joke. Sorry, Dave. Okay.

Well, there's also the lumber yard outside of Des Moines where men go for wood. I'm not joking. I need that shirt. That's my 70s shirt that I need. Yep. That is an actual place. That's where I bought Evan Williams' first lap dance.

Oh. Oh, yes. Internet history 101. But, okay. I'm sorry for the digression here. Go ahead. Well, I'm going to close this out today with two quick YouTube clips that caught my eye this week. The first one is about a minute long and it's a segment from Curb Your Enthusiasm and it's Larry having issues with Siri.

And I don't know if you guys had a chance to watch this but – No. Imagine the intersection of Larry David and Siri. It is everything that you would want it to be. I will definitely be watching that shortly, yes. Check it out and enjoy. And then the last thing is this just a delightful video that came across my path this week.

And I was unaware that there is a ongoing contest that's been happening for years and it's called Dance Your PhD. Basically, people who've written their PhDs, they make music videos about their PhDs and they submit them to this contest.

That's great. And this year's winner is a gentleman who is studying kangaroos in southeast Australia and he's put together this just wonderful, delightful video. And I got to say, the music has got a good hook.

You can dance to it. But it is – it's just beautiful. It's moving and you learn some stuff about kangaroos. But it's just one of those things that, for me anyway, it just makes me happy when I watch it. So I hope everybody clicks through and checks it out.

You learn a little bit. You feel good and just spend a little time with the dancing kangaroos. I did watch this, my worry, because it did make me want to go down a rabbit hole of finding the rest of them. Like I want to see all the Dance Your PhD entries, but I have a feeling that none might be as good as this.

Yeah. As you would expect, it is a broad spectrum of quality and styles. And I can't say I've seen one that was better than this one. So it's a good place to start, I guess. Like we said earlier, good week for the internet this week.

All right. Well, that's what I've got, guys. Wish me luck with this nuisance cold and we'll see you all next time. Lots of tea. Lots of hot tea. It is Friday, so perhaps a little whiskey and honey. Oh, that's not a bad idea.

Yeah. I'm also heavily dosed up on Sudafed. I was going to say, get some Sudafed. Ephedra is always the key. Can't hurt. No, it can't. It can't hurt. Never hurts. All right. I'll see you guys. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got JSM 1955. Thank you, JSM. Thanks, Jism. I wasn't going to go there, Brian. He gave us money. And a flashlight. Yes, thank you. And for just $3, you too can become a Patreon subscriber and get all the shows ad-free and a little bit early.

And in high-res. Don't forget high-res. Yep, yep, yep. What else have you got, Brian? You're going to make me come if you keep talking about this, Jason. Shut up. Over at PayPal, we've got David, Charlie, Jonathan, Judge, Simon, Howie, Nicole, Nikolai, Sloan, Thomas, and Jason, who gave us a whopping $150 and says, Jason and Brian, your show is always my favorite to hear each week.

I gave on here and Patreon because the grump must flow. Also, I'm proud that I never stopped starring your downloads for Overcast. One note, Opera is the Chinese bought-out browser. Vivaldi is the forked version after the Chinese buyout. Oh, okay. I'm also glad you finally learned how to pronounce Osaka. Keep on grumping.

I just read it as I see it. Over at the tip jar, we've got Josh, Daryl, Adam, and 40 bucks from Martin. And Martin says, hi, Jason. Thought you might enjoy Retro Tech Dreams on Twitter and YouTube. The new video about After Dark was a blast from the past. As always, thanks for the podcast.

I enjoy every new episode. Cheers, Martin. Yeah, that After Dark video is awesome. It'll be in the show notes. I love After Dark. Oh, it's so great. So great. And we have a new five-star review from Emma. Look forward to this every weekend. I love the show, and I find myself waiting eagerly for each new episode.

I'm about the same age as these guys with a previous IT career, and I identify with and appreciate the grumpiness factor. I look forward to getting the latest tech news delivered with a delicious mix of cynicism and humor. I regularly follow new book and movie show leads. Keep up the good work. And thank you from Malaysia. All right.

I'm surprised we get through the filter there. Yeah, thank you very much. Nice. And in sad news, Richard Lewis, the comedian and Curb Your Enthusiasm actor, has passed away at 76. Curb Your Enthusiasm actor. Robin Hood, Men in Tights. Come on. This guy's been in a million classics. Yeah, seriously.

Too many to mention. Mm-hmm. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 638. GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment.

Sharing the show with your friends and enemies or anyone in between is free and can be almost as good as cash. Almost. At GOG.show, you can find a link to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans. Head over to GOG.show slash contact to send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about.

GOG.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that we can read on the air. Stay grumpy.

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