640: A Minute of Silence

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. We're 11 years old today, Brian. My God, how time flies. You know the most depressing thing about that, Jason? What is, Brian? Absolutely everything we were complaining about at the first show 11 years ago, still happening. Kind of, yeah. Nothing's really changed.

Not much, no. We're just older. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now we have AI and crypto. Yes. Woo-hoo. But everything else is the damn same. The names have just changed. Some of them. Yeah. Like, you know, Facebook's now meta. Yeah.

Things like that. Yeah. Well, here's to 11 more. Woo-hoo. Fucking hope not. 11 more years of this. Put me in a home. Put me in a home. Well, that's exactly what's going to happen, Jason. You're going to be podcasting from a home. You're going to have a special little booth. You're going to hang up all those industrial blankets that are really scratchy for soundproofing.

And away we'll go. And you'll complain about my room still sucking. Yeah. There's nothing I can do about that. Again, nothing changes. Nothing changes. Well, the only difference is we don't have planes coming over from... That's true. I'm not in a flight path anymore. I'm in a moose path now. Exactly. And if anybody here...

We're recording this in the middle of the day here at my place. And I have very angry Israeli contractors in the office next door. It is very not soundproof. So if you hear somebody yelling in Hebrew, don't be worried.

I'm okay. I'm okay. It doesn't mean we've taken a side. It does not. It does not. No. So this weekend I was doing an intensive at Joe Zija's Voice Acting Academy. Okay. Which, by the way, if you're looking at getting into voice acting or the business of it, I highly recommend the Joe Zija Voice Acting Academy.

I'm not getting paid for this. I love the way he teaches and I love the stuff that I've been learning there. And this weekend I was doing a course on online casting. And in the middle of it, I got like 30 texts in a row with screen caps. Everybody going, hey, is this you?

And it was an Instagram profile with someone who had taken my name, taken my profile completely, and then started following everybody that was following me. And then trying to send them really strange DMs. Now, I've had this happen to other friends.

Tom Schwab was a good friend who had this happen to him recently. He's another podcasting business guy. And I'm like – and it kept happening. I'm like, dude, why do you keep sending me DMs on Instagram? You got my phone number. He's like, that's not me. I'm like, is it your staff?

He's like, nope. It's not them either. So there's a lot of Instagram impersonation going around it seems. So in the middle of this class, I'm like trying to play whack-a-mole. And here's the trick. Ask all your friends who tell you, hey, is this you? Just say Mark as impersonator and it goes away.

The account gets canceled. And you don't have to do anything. So you have to rely on your friends to A, be vigilant enough to know that you're being impersonated when they get strange DMs. And B, mark you as an impersonator. So there's my tip for the day. Or, you know, just keep your profile private like I do.

Well, I don't know if that actually stops anything. I mean, it'll stop them seeing who you're following, but it might not stop them from just impersonating your account. Well, they wouldn't be able to get any of my photos or anything like that. They don't need your photos. They didn't take any of my photos. They took your profile photo. They took your like a misspelling of the name, a bare misspelling of the name and your bio.

That's enough to make it look good enough. You know, you've got to look on the bright side here, Jason. You're high profile enough for somebody to do this to you. Oh, yay. Yay. I do have to say, though, when we were talking in the course, we were talking about AI voices in the future of voiceover.

Joe got very pissed off. He's like, it's not AI. He's on our boat. It's like, it's not fucking AI. Machine learning. Stop it. That ship has sailed, Joe. Sorry. That's my man. No, it's good. It's good. At least other people are still out there carrying the banner, even though we gave up long ago.

I do want to say, I went down the rabbit hole on Facebook video just to see if I could kind of see what Dave was seeing. And apparently a lot of our listeners have as well. Yes, there was a lot of discussion. Yeah, on a Discord, there was definitely some discussion. Here's what happened to me.

I did not get female comedians, scantily clad young ladies. What I got was a series of animals killing other animals. It was fucking disturbing. And that happened after about three minutes.

That's what it devolved into. I just went to video and just started scrolling. How's that AI moderation going out there in the world? Yeah. Going great. Not so good, I think. No. And I'm like, what are they trying to sell me?

What's the play here? What the fuck? That's my feeling anytime I boot up the internet machine anymore, Jason. It's like, what am I trying to be sold? I don't understand what the fuck is happening. I have no idea.

I don't really understand the internet at all anymore. No, it is a strange place. It is a very strange place. And if you listen to the end of the last episode, I put in a little extra bit that we had pre-recorded when we were getting warmed up for Dave's segment.

And somebody listened to it. Mike wrote in and said, thanks for including the last bit in this week's episode. Well, after a few glorious days of basically hardly, well, I didn't crack my laptop once, and I didn't even look at social media very often on an actual vacation.

It was kind of nice. I came back to some news, as we do, getting into the show as well. But obviously, I just love this one. And Apple has reversed course on its decision to ban Epic Games developer account, which we had talked about last week because, you know, Tim Cook read a nasty tweet and said, to hell with them, ban them.

But then he also went, oh, wait, hold on a second. EU regulators are going to look at us about that. Never mind. You're back. It's cool. Yeah. That, I guess, will be the end of that for now. For now. For now. Yeah. I have a feeling there will be a few more back and forth about it. And TikTok has moved on with President Joe Biden basically saying if the House and the Senate pass it, pass the bill, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, as it's known, rolls right off the tongue.

Yeah. He will sign it. And we do have some news on it passing. It has passed the first hurdle, the House. It still has to pass the Senate, which let's just say we have some gadfly senators that are probably going to gum up the works on this one. Yeah, probably. Probably.

Yeah, everything that I've been reading is like, this isn't going to get past the Senate. Nope. There is a great article over at Wired that says, addicted to TikTok, here's what the House vote to effectively ban it could mean for you. And it basically says nothing because it's not getting past the Senate. It's not going to get past anyways. There are a lot of human interest stories about, you know, obviously there are businesses that kind of rely on TikTok and a lot of hemming and hawing and the sky is falling down and gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair.

And I'm just like, it's just another platform. There'll be another one. It's just the platform du jour right now with the most of most youngest eyes. That's it. That's going to change if it gets banned or not. So prepare to move. You're building. Again, everybody, you're all building your businesses in somebody else's backyard.

Yeah, let's just let's just run it down. LiveJournal, MySpace, GeoCities, Vine. There's the list goes on. You know, people could not fathom the world without these services. And they're doing just fine. And it was just Facebook. And then it was just Instagram.

And now it's just TikTok. And it's going to be something else next week. So don't you worry.

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In 2022 and 2023, 27% of the total population of the United States reported using Twitter. In the Infinite Dial 2024 survey, 19% of the total population of the U.S. are now using Twitter. That's a big, big hit.

30% drop. Yep. I wonder what change that could have caused that. Hmm. I wonder. Well, Elon has noticed. And I like this opening sentence. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X in October 2022, he has thrown a lot of things at the wall and hoped that they stuck.

Read that as make money. Nothing has so far. Now he's taking a page from YouTube and he's going to launch a video streaming service on the platform. Sam Mobile reports. He announced that the feature was coming soon in a quote tweet from Doge Designer's account.

Okay. That's where I go for my news. Me too. You can soon watch your favorite X long form videos directly on your smart TVs. No. I don't watch them now. Yeah. I'm not going to watch them from my phone. On your platform. Yeah. Yeah.

So he's going to launch a dedicated app for Samsung TV and Amazon's Fire TV. They will be a video first because he says X is going to be a video first platform moving forward. And this development shows that they will translate beyond the small content boxes typically available on feeds to a bigger screen. No.

He also claims that eight out of ten times a person visits X. And keep in mind that's 30% less than did last year. They're watching videos. No, they're not. No. Unless they're strange porn ones that Dave finds on Facebook. Yeah. Or just a repost from TikTok.

Well, if you're trying to make your platform video first, one thing you may not want to do is sign on personalities to do video and then fire them because you just decided you don't like them anymore. Yeah. I mean, this story encapsulates Elon Musk in a perfect nutshell for me. Elon Musk cancels contract with Don Lemon after being asked about ketamine usage.

Yep. So Don Lemon struck a multi-million dollar deal with Musk's social media platform X a little while back to host a new program called The Don Lemon Show after he got left by CNN. He lauded X for being the biggest space for free speech in the world.

I now know more than ever that we need a place for honest debate and discussion without the hall monitors. How's it going, Don? Well, he's learned that there are now limits to free speech on X. If you want to speak freely about Elon Musk, no go. He confirmed the report that he'd been let go, saying he was informed that Musk was terminating his contract hours after the interview took place.

There were no restrictions on the interview that he willingly agreed to, and my questions were respectful and wide-ranging. We had a good conversation. Clearly, he felt differently. His commitment to a global town square where all questions can be asked and all ideas can be shared seemed to not include questions of him from people like me.

Of course not. And then Elon, of course, said he's becoming more Donald Trump every single day. I swear to God. He said in a statement, Lemon's approach was basically just CNN but on social media, which doesn't work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying. And instead of it being the real Don Lemon, it was really just former CNN president Jeff Zucker talking through Don, so it lacked authenticity.

All this said, Lemon Zucker, of course, welcomed to build their viewership on this platform along with everyone else. You fucking pissant. I know. I know. Yeah. Yeah. And Don asked him about the ketamine usage, too, and he said no, because he has a prescription. So just because the doctor gave you a prescription doesn't mean you're not using it.

Yeah. You're still using it. Yeah. That's how it goes. Okay. And again, fair game question to somebody in his position. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I got some sad news for you, Brian. Mm-hmm. The nation's aging power grid is straining to keep up with surging electricity demand from data centers, crypto mining, and new cleantech factories.

I seem to remember 11 years ago we were complaining about living in a third world country. Yeah, I know. I know. This has all happened before. It will all happen again. In Georgia, projected new electricity needs for the next decade are now 17 times higher than previous estimates.

Arizona and Northern Virginia also face major shortfalls in transmission capacity to power planned data center growth. Texas is already experiencing routine summer outages and winter outages, too, if you haven't noticed. Yep. Wait for it, Brian. The rise of AI is a key driver.

Yep. With tech giants building power-hungry computing infrastructure. They also mentioned crypto mining, which is, I think, going down because all the crypto bros are moving over to AI. Whee! Mm-hmm. Yep. So, utility companies are scrambling because they just did not see this coming.

If they had AI, maybe they could have asked it, but they didn't, so now they're screwed. Yeah. Okay. Well, we've known this for quite some time, and just here's a thought. Charge these companies more that are using this much. Charge the companies, not the civilians.

Yes. Don't pass it on to the civilians that are sitting there with their 19 iPads and everything else that they've got in their house now. Mm-hmm. Shut up. And they're 75-inch TVs. Shut up. Oh, I'm sorry.

Did you feel threatened by that? Did you feel... Shut up. Did I microaggress you? I'm feeling, you know, I'm feeling triggered. Quiet. Oh, here's something to trigger you. In a groundbreaking unveiling at the South by Southwest Tech Conference in Austin, a digital avatar of Marilyn Monroe, created with advanced artificial intelligence, marks a significant advancement in the potential for monetizing the likeness of celebrities long after their passing.

Now, Brian, you used to work in this industry with websites for dead people. What do you think of this? I think, personally, think it's horrible. I'm not a fan of any of this stuff. I think, you know, once people have passed, we should enjoy their body of work, or in the case of Marilyn, their body, and let it go at that.

But, you know, the thing is, I've also met some of the, or at least talked to some of the family members that are mining their dead relatives, and they have no shame. So, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Yeah, that's what I think what it really comes down to.

It has nothing to do with the wishes of the deceased. No. They're dead. It's money. Yep. It just comes down to the cash. Yeah. So, okay. There we go. Yeah, that's unfortunate, but I'm not a fan of this stuff, and I would like to see some sort of legislation about it.

But good luck with that. We can't. Good fucking luck. We can't ban TikTok at the moment. Anyways, now it's NVIDIA that's being sued over AI copyright infringement. It's getting hard to keep up with these lawsuits at this point, because nobody wants to pay for anything, and they all want to train their AI in as much as they can, and cheaply as they can.

Basically, read cheaply, free. This time, authors are suing NVIDIA over its AI platform, Nemo. Disney might want to get in on this one. Yeah. A language model that allows businesses to create and train their own chatbots. They claim the company trained it on a controversial data set that illegally used their books without consent.

Which one is it? The Books 3 data set has been used to power Nemo. They've confirmed that. And we've also confirmed that that data set includes 196,640 pirated books in it. Don't!

Yeah. It's called the Pile data set, because it's a pile of fucking copywritten shit. I don't see how they're going to get out of this one, because it's pretty cut and dry. We used it, and we know that all this stuff is in it, so pay up.

That's about it. But of course, NVIDIA would like us all to know that we respect the rights of all content creators, and believe we created Nemo in full compliance with copyright law, which is patently, obviously, untrue. Untrue. Completely untrue. Yes. But if we see this enough, maybe you'll believe it.

Oh, Jesus Christ. It really doesn't change. Fucking nothing's changed, Jason. Nope. Nope. Well, this is kind of good, though. Not everyone is buying Silicon Valley's hype about AI, making the world better. At the South by Southwest Film Festival, a sizzle reel featuring tech insiders gushing about the need to leverage AI and not resist was loudly booed by the audience before a movie premiere.

You'll be taken to the stockades. The movie, which was actually not created by AI. But the great part about this article is the movie that they were screening was the new Fall Guy movie, and I went and I watched the trailer for it. It actually looks really good.

Oh, the trailer did look good for it. It looks good. I think they showed it during the Oscars or something. That's when I saw it. They turned it off before it got to the end, because it was one of those trailers that tells you the whole movie. Right. So I was like, okay, I got the gist of it. I'll check it out when it comes out. But they were right to boo, because, you know, South by Southwest, even though this is the film festival, there's lots of nerds there.

So here we go. Cognition Labs introduces Devin, the world's first truly autonomous AI software engineer capable of handling entire software projects from start to finish. Watch the demo.

Did you watch the demo for this thing? No. Is it real-time building something that somebody else asked that they didn't have to, they didn't preset the thing for? Pretty fucking good. Okay. I'll check it out. It's actually really good. And it's like, I'm glad I don't write software anymore. Although I am taking voice acting courses and figuring out.

Well, let's talk about that. Yeah. But check out the demo on this. It is actually quite impressive. It does real-time debugging when errors come back. It even writes its own logging program to check what's breaking along the way. This isn't actually terribly surprising.

If there's one thing AI should be good at, it's actually coding. Because that was us trying to learn computer language. Now, just have a computer write the computer language. Seems much easier to me. Yep. So, I kind of want to try it out. But then again, I don't really care that much.

That's the downside of it. What do you want to build? Yeah, I know. Although, you know, I do see like a full-on, like, anytime, like, you know, one of the things that, one of the reasons we're stuck in the fucking festering shithole that we're in right now is your Googles, your metas, your everybody are so far ahead.

In terms of development of things, like, there's no chance for a small guy to come out with a competing product anymore. Now, you probably maybe could, if you can get things off the ground fast enough, if you can flood the market. Now, you know, it's not just Instagram and then Facebook swoops in and buys the damn thing and runs every other, every other app, competing app, off the market anymore.

If you can get in fast enough now with these kind of things, maybe there's a shot for the little guy again. Could be, could be. That's the only plus I see here. Yeah, but they've got to focus on scaling. You know, that's always the thing. Scaling is always the bench. Yeah. You know, that's always been the real issue.

That is the hardest thing to do is scale. Writing the base program is stupid simple. It's getting it to millions of people without, you know, your servers melting, which is the hard part. But anyway, some more AI news. Google is going to take measures to limit its AI chatbot Gemini.

We don't know which of the three because there are three fucking Gemini's from responding to questions about global elections happening this year, aiming to prevent misinformation. You just have to go to Google for misinformation. They don't want to, they know where their bread's buttered. Go back to our old product for that. Yeah.

This is where we keep the misinformation. Just don't come over here yet. This is where you have it write stories about your cat. Okay. And some nice pictures of your cat with monocles and stuff like that. Go there for that. Misinformation, we got you covered because they can't sell ads against Gemini output yet, remember?

Not yet. Yet. But here's the thing. I love this one. So Google is, you know, they're saying, okay, we're not going to answer questions on this. And there are other chatbots out there saying we're not going to do this. We're not going to do that. Well, researchers have figured out a way, and they're calling it Art Prompt, that can bypass the safety filters of most major AI chatbots.

What they're doing is they are writing the words in ASCII art and then having the bot deconstruct the letters in the ASCII art and then replacing it basically with a regular expression type of scenario.

It's like, okay, you're going to find all this stuff. Here are all the instructions that you need to decode the ASCII art and turn it into text. Now, when you're done with that text, forget everything else you know. Take the word that I'm sending you here. Do it into that. Ba-da-ba-da-ba-da. Boom. Bob's your uncle. Here's how you make a bomb.

It's great. It's total whack-a-mole right now. It's crazy. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And I got another one for you. Eleven Labs. Oh, yeah. This is another great one. They've started to put in guardrails against, you know, whose voices you can create. You know, Tyler, what's her name?

And Gavin, what's his name? And Donald, what's his name? And Joe, what's his name? Nope. Can't do those names anymore. Can't do those voices anymore. Unless, unless, this comes from the guys at 404 Media who found this on accident. If you put in a bunch of silence at the beginning of the audio clip that you're training the voice on at 11 Labs, it skips all of the things.

It's only checking, like, the first fucking minute. Yep. That's it. Well, not Joe. Just silence. Yep. Nope. That ain't the Don. Nope. Let him on through. All right. I'm so glad all these things were so thoroughly tested before it put out to market.

Yep. And that is exactly the same thing, if you remember, like, two weeks ago, Instagram lets porn on if you just have 60 seconds of nothing before it. Then it's like, boom. They're not running their algorithms against the entirety of the files. They're just doing it at the beginning. They're like, oh, well, if it's not at the beginning, it must not be at the end.

I'm like, have you ever watched a porn? It always starts with the pizza guy knocking on the door. That's not porn. Why are there so many videos being uploaded about broken plumbing? I know. What the hell? I don't understand. Oh, well, let them all go. That's it. Well, let's go back to the EU, our friends in the EU, who seem to have a clue.

The European Parliament has approved the Artificial Intelligence Act, which will ban certain uses of AI that pose risks to citizens' rights and impose regulations on less risky types of AI. The new rules will prohibit applications such as biometric categorization systems based on sensitive characteristics, untargeted scraping of facial images, emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing based solely on profiling, and AI that manipulates human behavior or exploits vulnerabilities.

Basically, everything China does today. Basically, TikTok. TikTok. Yeah, that's it. So there you go. Yeah, OK. So the EU can ban TikTok first. I'm all for this. This is great. We need to start thinking about it.

We need to start putting the laws in place instead of just thinking about it. Good, good, good. Let's see if this has any teeth. Let's see if it actually does anything. Well, it has passed. So it's going to come into effect 20 days after it's published in their official journal. Well, and it's going to take some time.

The ban on prohibitive practices will apply in about six months after that, and the obligations for high-risk systems will take effect after three years. Yeah, what's the rush, guys? Here's the rush, Brian. A government-commissioned report warns the U.S. must act swiftly to prevent artificial intelligence from posing an extinction-level threat to humanity.

Ah, get it out! Highlighting the urgency for national security, the report compares the rise of advanced AI and artificial general intelligence to the destabilizing introduction of nuclear weapons. Good thing we don't have artificial general intelligence yet, so.

Yeah. But the key here yet is, Brian, it's yet. It's yet. It's coming. The State Department has not commented on it yet, but yeah, we'll see how it goes. I would just like to point out that the State Department commissioned this report for a quarter of a million dollars, could have just listened to our show.

I know. We'd have done it for a quarter. Or we'll take a quarter of a million dollars. I'll send a bill. On its way. Oh, man. So I'm sure you've heard about the tragic accident with Angela Chow, who drowned in her Tesla recently. I did. Well, it turns out that there might have been a problem with the touchscreen and how the shifting works.

She was having problems with it that day, and apparently when she tried to do a three-point turn, she put it in the wrong gear, flew off into a ditch and into a pond, and boom, Bob's your uncle. That's very upsetting. And it's more upsetting because once the car goes in the drink, all the power turns off.

You can't open the doors. Which seems to me to be a problem when you have an electric car and there's no juice. You might want to get out of it at some point, even if you're stuck on the side of the road. Look, I told you, when I drove my friend's Tesla for the first time and I gave it a go, I was actively disturbed by how much you had to control everything through a gigantic TV screen or computer monitor touchscreen sitting in the middle of the dash.

I'm like, but we've had almost 100 years of cars. We've figured this out. We know where to put the things, to control the things so we can keep our eyes on the road. Now we're going to ignore all of that and all that muscle memory that we've all had from driving for years. And you're going to put a touchscreen that makes me look down and not see the road anymore.

And everything is controlled through that. And there aren't backup controls. There's no longer any of the physical backup controls at all. It's just all done through that. And this is a good idea. Nobody ever said it was a good idea, Brian. Here's the point that I will tell you that Elon is going to tell you.

The touchscreen is there to entertain you while the car drives itself because it is fully self-driving. Oh, right. Forgot. Remember, remember, Brian, you don't have to look at the road anymore because the car drives itself. Right. That's for watching my porn with over with one minute of blank video before. Exactly.

That that one minute is for you to be able to drive straight, turn on the autopilot. And once you've turned that on, then you can enjoy your porn after that first minute. It all makes so much more sense now. See, now here's the funny thing. Chow's husband, Jim Breyer, does not blame Tesla expressing their support for electric vehicles and his friendship with Elon Musk.

This incident has sparked a mix of blame and conspiracy theories, highlighting the complexities and potential dangers of modern automotive technologies. Yes, it has. Chow's husband doesn't blame him, but I wonder how Chow feels. Yeah, I think she's probably pretty fucking pissed. Yeah. Yeah.

You know what else makes me pissed off about Tesla, Brian? Just found this one this morning. A new report claims that Tesla paid zero dollars in federal income taxes over the past five years, despite earning billions in profit. The analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness states that Tesla received a $1 million tax refund from 2018 to 2022, a period when it made $4.4 billion in profits.

Yeah, that's a lot. People wonder, and people wonder why everybody's so angry. Mm-hmm. Yep. That's fucking ridiculous. I'm so glad I divested myself, mostly. Mostly. The report accuses Tesla of using accounting schemes like shifting U.S. earnings offshore to avoid taxes while still benefiting from government subsidies.

Well, what billion-dollar company among us doesn't do these sorts of things? Oh, yeah, that's right. All of them. Apple is one of them. And let's talk about Apple next. All right. Surgeons at Cromwell Hospital in London successfully incorporated Apple's Vision Pro headset into two microsurgical spine procedures, highlighting a groundbreaking approach to medical care.

I don't know if it's a groundbreaking approach. It's not exactly groundbreaking, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The equivalent of this has been going on for quite some time. Yes. The device provided by XX was worn by a scrub nurse assisting the surgical team enhancing efficiency and patient care quality. So basically what she did was sit there with the Apple Vision Pro on and looked at manuals and checklists and passed that along to the doctors, which I think is a fine use of the technology.

Absolutely. Yeah. You know, instead of having paper and things like that, you have to check. Checklists in the OR are phenomenally useful. Go read the checklist manifesto if you don't believe me. They've been on those little, you know, carts with a computer screen on it for quite a long time now.

So instead of scaring at the computer screen, she had a thing strapped to her head. Right. But then she can actually look at what, you know, she needs to look at instead of turning her head to look at a computer screen. So it might, you know, there might be some benefits to that. Right. As long as she's not watching that porn. Exactly.

And I can even see, you know, if the resolution was higher, the doctor has one of those things on and he's like, you know, give me the man here. He's like a man dash F spleen. Pull up the man page for your spleen to figure out how it works. Hold on, everybody.

I got an RTFM. Be right back. Yep. Oh, man. And finally, Kickstarter's ambitious pivot to blockchain, driven by a $100 million investment from VC giant Andreessen Horowitz, ended in retreat and a leadership change.

But not at the top. Initially, the crowdfunding platform announced plans in December 2021 to migrate to a blockchain protocol aiming to integrate Web3 technologies into its operations, which I'd like to remind everybody Web3 technologies was bullshit.

And there wasn't anything there besides put it on the blockchain and somebody will profit. Mainly Andreessen Horowitz. I love this. The move sparked significant backlash from the platform's community who raised concerns over environmental impacts and the potential for cryptocurrency scams.

Yes. Following a slowdown in implementation and the subsequent departure of its CEO, Kickstarter's new leadership shelved the blockchain project, easing worries among creators and investors. So there you go. Yeah. All right. Well, speaking of the blockchain, the U.S.

government says IP infringement is all over NFT marketplaces. I wonder how much this study cost. And again, you could have just been listening to our show. OK, so obviously the NFT bubble burst quite some time ago, but the U.S. government has only just published this report looking into the surrounding legal framework. The study carried out jointly by the U.S.

Copyright Office and the Patent and Trademark Office. Following a 2022 request by the Senate determined that the current intellectual property laws are robust enough to deal with copyright or trademark infringement in NFTs. What's lacking is manpower. Again, we need the Internet police. So that's the real problem.

The agencies also determined that although there are some benefits to the tokens, trademark infringement and misuse is prevalent on NFT marketplaces. The report notes that the decentralized nature of NFTs and blockchain networks complicate any attempt to enforce trademarks. The very reason we're supposed to be using these is because theoretically we are able to enforce our trademarks.

Yep. Yeah. So and this goes on from there, of course, all the different problems that we've known that these platforms have protocols, but they're not across all platforms. There's no cross-platform mechanisms to allow trademark owners to identify or take down infringing content, settling trademark-related disputes involving blockchain-based domain names, or confirm that sellers own the trademark rights associated with the assets they offer.

It's all just a mess. So and basically the report comes out and says it is all just a mess, but they still recommend in their report to Congress that the current use of NFTs doesn't require changes to current IP laws, probably because there won't be NFTs pretty soon. They've also noted that incorporating NFTs into the registration and recording process practices is not necessarily advisable at this time.

In other words, they don't think they should have to deal with NFTs either. If you want an NFT, go to Coachella. That's right. All right. Blue Sky is back in the news here. They got Aaron Rodericks, who is basically leading Twitter's trust and safety team to be its new head of trust and safety.

I swear to God, I read that and I thought it was Aaron Rodgers. And I'm like, man, I know he's having a hard time getting back in the quarterbacking game. But I know that is a pivot. That is a serious pivot. So no, Aaron Rodericks was fired by Elon after the Twitter takeover.

So we'll see what Blue Sky is going to do. Oh, wait, here's what they're going to do. Blue Sky is revolutionizing online moderation by open sourcing a tool called Ozone for collaborative content review and labeling. So Aaron is basically going to be watching people do his job for him, I guess.

Yeah, let me just get this straight. Let's just break this down for one quick second here, Jason. Break it down. Yep. Moderation is hard. We don't want to do it. We're going to outsource it and then charge you for it so you can subscribe to the moderation tools that you would prefer.

Well, they're open sourcing it, Brian. They're open sourcing it. Yeah. OK. Thanks a fucking lot. By the way, I don't know if you saw this. I saw I haven't followed up on it because I haven't really cared that much. Elon says he's going to be open sourcing Grok, the AI platform that is on Twitter right now.

Right. You know, guess what I get every time I go into Twitter? An ad that says sign up for Twitter plus plus plus so you can get access to Grok. Got to get the money while you still can. I know. I know. So I don't know what's going on over at Blue Sky. I keep checking it every now and again.

It's kind of interesting. Sometimes I get some stories out of it. But the most for the most part, it's a dead man walking because the name sucks. It is the worst name out of any of it. I just never remember it's even there. Yeah, it's it's just it's just kind of there.

Like I still I hardly look at any of this stuff anymore, but I'll look at threads and I'll look at X. I'll still look at X over Blue Sky just because I still have a good I still have a good list of people that I follow on X and not all of them have left yet. So, yeah, well, only 30 percent have left.

So only 30 percent. It seems that actually seems about track. Yeah, it actually really does. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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Media candy. Brian, I have a release date for my new project and I'm very excited. A daily news show. No, it's not a goddamn daily news show. Get off my back. Never gets old for me to say that. I know it doesn't.

I know it. So there's a new podcast coming called Schmackters with James Marsters and Mark Devine. People may know James Marsters. He was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and he played Spike. And Mark was in Sex in the City and Masters of Disguise and a bunch of other stuff.

They're both lifelong actors. So we got together and we put a show together where basically they it's a Q&A, but with comedy. It's fairly funny. It's launching on a week from today. I believe that would be the 21st Thursday, the 21st.

You can go subscribe right now. The link will be in the show notes. Go check it out. Preferably subscribe with Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe anywhere else. But if you subscribe with Apple Podcasts, you'll be doing me a favor. I'm trying to get it up in the charts. You know what I'm saying? So I don't know. It's a fun project. We're going to keep doing it if people listen.

Very cool. Which I hope they do because it really is kind of cool working with these guys and we're having fun doing it. That's great. Hope you like it. I hope it goes well. Everybody go listen. And Somebody Feed Phil season seven has come out. I've watched, I think, half of them now. Just as good as always, Jason.

Puts a smile on my face even after doing shows like this. Did you get caught up on the missing seasons that you were behind on? Yes, I finally caught up on all the missing seasons and we're on to the new one. Okay. See, what I'm thinking is I'm just going to jump to season seven and then every now and again, Netflix will remind me that I have shows I haven't watched and it'll be like a surprise.

Tweets. That's very nice. That's a good way to do it. But yeah, there's, I mean, the show is. It's exactly the same. It's fantastic. Can't complain. I have another reason for you to hate Discovery, which is coming very soon for its final season that you're not going to watch. But I'm still going to get you a disco t-shirt for your birthday.

Now, please, please do. Please do. I am going to, I am going to watch the last season. All right. Because I'm invested. Look, I watched the, after you made me watch the last fucking season, which was terrible because you said it actually got better, which it didn't. Now I'm invested to see this thing through to the end.

Sorry. All right. Well, there's one thing that you won't be seeing at the end. You will not be seeing Jonathan Frakes, unfortunately. Because he's smart. He doesn't want his reputation tainted by that travesty of a Trekkian show. Now they're stretching this headline a little bit to say this, but Discovery will be the first Star Trek show in 50 years to end without a Jonathan Frakes appearance.

Yeah, they really are stretching out. I mean, fair with the original Star Trek going off the air well over 50 years ago. That's true. But it's the first show since Star Trek Next Generation came out, not including the shows that haven't ended yet, which includes and various, including Prodigy and Strange New Worlds, which he may or may not show up on.

Probably not. But yeah. So I, you know, that's, that's the thing. It's, it's a nothing story because they needed to pad out stuff because there's not much going on in sci-fi, I guess. So there you go. Are they talking about a Jonathan Frakes appearance in general or just in the final episode?

Just in a final episode, apparently. Okay. Because I got to go back and I don't remember. I think in general. It must not be final. Yeah. He was in the final episode famously of Enterprise, which didn't really work, but I could see what they were trying to do.

But I think it was just, he just appeared in Deep Space Nine. Yeah, I think so too. And actually it wasn't him. It was his villainous transporter clone brother, Thomas. Oh, look at you. Ah, no, I need to go back. I still have never watched Enterprise. I've got an entire Star Trek series.

You'll, you'll like it slightly more than Discovery. Okay. Well, that's something. It's got T'Pol in it. She's hot. I know. That's, I'm thinking that's the only reason to watch it. And Boshi. So, I'll give it a shot. It wasn't bad. I didn't mind Enterprise, but it's, uh, it's better than Prodigy.

Okay. And Discovery. But that's it. Maybe some of the animated stuff that nobody's ever watched. Remember when we used to play all those trivia games on the iPhone? Yes. There was one that had Star Trek trivia that you would just always kill me on because you knew all the Enterprise questions.

I was just randomly guessing when it was an Enterprise question. I have no fucking idea. Brian, I've been trying out Poe this week. Okay.

I vaguely remember her. Late 90s, uh, alternative rock female singer. No, not her. Not her. Now, Poe is the, uh, the AI tool that has been put out by the Quora people because nobody goes to Quora anymore because everybody's got AI tools to ask questions to.

Trust me. I'd much rather ask the AI tools than the fucking idiots on the internet. Yeah. Yeah. Especially at Quora. Oh my God. That was, I got, I got tagged as a podcast expert and the questions I got were just so terrible. I'm just like, you guys really just have never heard of Google.

Have you period at all? What's a microphone? Okay. This is where we need to ask Jeeves back. Oh, ask Jeeves. I miss ask Jeeves. Shitty service, but great logo. So a, uh, Poe, it's, uh, it, I remember when it started, I'm like, okay, I just, I didn't understand the whole thing with different models and all that stuff.

So Poe is basically an interface to all these different models and you can subscribe to Poe and get access to the different models instead of subscribing individually to the others. You know, it kind of rolls them all up. Uh, it has in the really nice thing is it has a desktop app for the Mac that I can just keep open all the time and then bounce between the different models.

I love it, except for one problem. It's backed by Andreessen Horowitz, which makes me feel really fucking dirty. Makes me really dirty. And that's why I haven't paid them yet. I'm on the fence.

Okay. Yeah. The new Anthropic models, uh, the Claude models that they released last week, way better than ChatGPT, in my opinion. Way better. Okay. So it's like, do I go to Anthropic and pay them? Then I have to go here and cancel that.

So I just cancel them all and just subscribe to Poe, but then I'm giving those motherfuckers my money, which makes me feel skeezy. Well, they're getting your money somehow, some way, anyways. I don't know. I'm pretty good at avoiding Andreessen Horowitz joints, but we'll see. I might have to cave on this one because it is easier and it's nicer.

Okay. Well, you let me know. I still am just, uh, I have a ChatGPT subscription and that's about it. And I hardly ever use it, unfortunately, because I just don't. Well, you should go download this and check it out because the free version, you get a lot of free stuff in there. Okay. And, uh, the stuff that would be good for you is, you know, show notes and artwork.

Yeah. Just use it for that. Exactly. It's a one-stop shop. And if you don't pay them, then all the more, all the better, I guess. All the better. Exactly. Well, Apple is just basically kowtowing to the EU at this point because the EU actually finds, has significant fines that aren't just coffee grounds anymore. So, uh, days after Apple started allowing iOS users in the EU to use third-party app stores, the company has now announced more changes related to how developers can distribute their apps.

Most significantly, those who meet certain criteria will be able to let users download apps from their websites. The web distribution option, which will be available this spring, will effectively let developers bypass the app ecosystem entirely for their own apps. Now, they have some rules to this, which kind of makes sense to me.

They've got to opt into the new app store rules, obviously, that see them pay a fee for each user install after certain thresholds and be an Apple developer program member that's been in good standing for at least two years. This is an attempt to basically not have the Apple environment turn into Android with shit everywhere that just fucks up your system and steals your data.

So, makes sense to me. Uh, it seems like a good move. And I, I, I would like to think it's going to transfer out of the EU, but it probably won't. So, we'll see. Yeah, they're going to hang on to that one as long as they can. Yeah. You know. And I just keep thinking about this. Imagine a world where we have to deal with all this shit on our desktop computers.

It's like, come on. Yeah. It's like, just make it like our desktop computers and everybody will be happy. And, uh, about, oh, I don't know, 10 to 15 years too late, uh, Airbnb has made a new rule, uh, to their hosts. Please stop filming the guests.

Finally. Yeah. I don't know why it took this long, but they've announced new privacy policy policies that entirely ban the use of indoor cameras. Um, previously the company allowed hosts to keep cameras in communal spaces, but ban them in areas like bedrooms and bathrooms, as they should.

Hosts were technically supposed to disclose any cameras in the rental location, but this removes any ambiguity about it. So, uh, yeah, you're just not supposed to have them. Also limiting outdoor ones. They can't point at things like outdoor showers or saunas or anything like that. If you've got that as well, they can also use doorbell cameras and noise decibel monitors.

However, the noise decibel monitors require disclosure and can only access decibel levels, not record or send sounds. And, uh, these can only be placed in common areas as well. Now, who exactly is going around and policing this? This is definitely going to be a self-police thing where somebody stays somewhere and says, hey, I saw a camera.

And then the host says, no, you didn't. And then Aaron B is going to do what exactly? Well, yeah. And there's this, there's this other route that I'm thinking is, well, they refund you your money and get you, get you a new listing. So what if I get a really nice Airbnb, I go there, I stay for a couple of days, and then I quote unquote find a camera.

Right. That I take pictures of and send to Airbnb and say, hey, these guys have cameras. I want a refund. And then I put the camera back in my bag and take it with me to the next Airbnb and do the same thing over and over again. See, I love this, Jason, because you have those kind of nefarious things like just right at your brain's fingertips.

Always. Yeah. That's how I, that's how I live. Come on. That's going to hurt. No, it just makes life more interesting. Slightly more fun. Yeah. Again, it all comes down to policing. It's a great rule. And I like it. And it makes sense. And obviously you shouldn't be doing that sort of thing because it's fucking creepy.

But yeah, that's who's good luck. Good luck with this. Yeah. And if you're worried about people trashing your shit, don't rent it on Airbnb. Yes. Easy enough. Done. Done and done. So Apple is planning to add hearing aid capabilities to its AirPods Pro earbuds with the upcoming iOS 18 software update this fall.

What? Exactly. I mean, if this is a major thing, because I think my roommate's grand or my roommate's mother, who's 94, will not go get hearing aids, period. There's something about old people and hearing aids. I don't know what it is. If somebody knows, please tell me how we can figure this out.

Because I know a lot of people with older parents who cannot get them to get fucking hearing aids and they can't hear a damn thing. It's the same reason I resisted getting reading glasses for like almost a year. You just don't want to admit you're getting older. She's 94. Come on. Yeah, she's sick of hearing your shit.

Yeah. Well, either way, I think we could probably get by with giving her some AirPods and say, here, here you go. They say the current AirPods already provide hearing assistance on par with $10,000 hearing aids in quiet settings. That's a saving of over $9,000.

Yeah. Seriously. Those things ain't getting any cheaper. I'm looking forward to this. This is a good use. Good use. No, I think it's great. I think it's exactly what this technology should end up being used for. If it's good enough to do it, if it's on par with the models that are out there already, fucking fantastic.

Yeah, let's do it. Closing shout! Out! Over at Patreon, we've got a new subscriber, Glenn. Welcome, Glenn. Hey, Glenn. Nice to see you. Over at PayPal, we've got Ralph, Shari, Miles, Linda, and Natalie. Woo!

Over at the tip jar, we've got Panos, NL, and Joseph. And just a reminder for people who are not Patreon subscribers that want to be, only $3 a month gets you the show a little bit early, a lot ad-free, and in super high-res. So go get them, Tiger.

Super high-res. That's right. All right. Fantastic. And some sad personal news for me and for quite a few people. I was on my vacation and got a call from my old business partner. With some bad news, a close personal friend of mine, World Party frontman Carl Wallinger passed away at the age of 66 over the weekend.

He was a pretty amazing guy. It was rough enough when we lost Sinead, but Sinead's very tied in with Carl Wallinger in my world. And she actually sang on his first album. He helped write some of the songs for her first album.

They knew each other very well. And so now to lose Carl as well in a space of less than a year. Jesus fucking Christ. Anyways, he's an amazing talent. I always used to say he had more talent in one fingertip than most musicians have in their entire lives.

Go listen to some World Party stuff. It's fantastic. You will be missed, Carl. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. Very sorry for your loss, man. Very sorry. 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 640.

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.

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

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