643: Mechanical Goslings

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, we've been talking lately about things that have anniversaries that make us feel old. So I thought I'd start off the show today. Gmail is 20 years old. This week. Okay. I remember when it was launched. It was April 1st, 2004, and everybody thought it was a joke.

Well, joke's on them. Still using it. Yep. Yep. Completely free. And as long as you give up all your privacy and let them scan your email. Sure. Hey, it's actually been worth it. So there are no ads and no spam. So it works for me.

That's true. That is good. Except, yeah, it used to be free. And now it's – I think I'm spending 60 bucks a month on it. Okay. That's significantly not free. No, no. That whole grandfathered in thing got de-grandfathered quite a while ago.

So as of a couple of months ago, they started to send me the bill and it sucks. There's been a lot of whack in the grandfathers recently. Yeah, there are. It has been. Somebody's laying waste of the old folks' home, I tell you. Yep. But it got me thinking. Before Gmail, the email client wars were going on and I still fondly remember Eudora.

Eudora was my weapon of choice. Yeah. Yep. I love that program. It was so great. It was so great. And then it all just went to hell. Yeah. But I guess the remnants of Eudora now live on in Thunderbird. I used Thunderbird for a while, but on my waning days on my PC, I was still a Thunderbird user.

Yeah. Yeah, that's the only time I ever – if I get a PC and I have to get emailed, then I revert back to Thunderbird. Because it's the only one I know, honestly. I seriously doubt I know anything about it anymore. I wouldn't remember anything. I've been Macmail for so long now.

Oh, yeah. I'm a Spark kind of guy. Yeah. I have to use Outlook for work, and that is the absolute worst program known to man. Oh, I feel for your pain. I feel for your pain. Although it does just make me want to randomly delete things. So that's my work email policy.

I can't be bothered to sort out this shit program, so delete. Delete. Yeah. Blame it on Outlook. Yep. Another one to make you feel old. Facebook bought Oculus 10 years ago. Lit the world on fire, didn't it?

Oh, yeah. That VR revolution. We are living in the metaverse, Brian. We are living in the metaverse. Yep. My Oculus is collecting dust right next to my Google glasses, right next to my Snapchats, whatever the hell they call those things. Spectacles. Yeah. Yeah. And my, you know, $7,000 Apple Vision Pro. Yeah. All just sitting there.

I have two Oculi. I've got a, I've got a, oh, Oculus 1 and an Oculus 2. And neither one of them, I have, have seen the light of day in quite some time. I keep taking out the two to charge it because I want to go hang out with some friends in whatever, you know, game that they have going on.

And then by the time I'm done charging it, I can't figure out how to update it because the app doesn't work right because they did that thing with the two accounts. And I just put it back in the box and say, fuck you. Yeah. That's kind of how it works. So there's been a little discussion going on on our Discord. People were talking about, you know, various, like, why would anybody use text messaging anymore when there are these other things that are more secure?

You know, nobody talks about Signal. Why aren't, why aren't the grumpy old geeks ever talking about Signal? And then people got into, you know, all sorts of stuff and talking about, you know, Telegram and all the different apps that are out there for messaging and the pros and cons of every single one of them. And somebody posted this link as if some sort of vindication for Google chat.

Okay. Because, because, like, Google's not that bad. And then I was just like, Google's evil. But, okay. So, but, like, look, Google's not that bad. Google says it will destroy browsing data collected from Chrome's incognito mode. So this is coming out of that class action lawsuit over Chrome's tracking about incognito users.

You know, they tell people you're not going to be tracked. And lo and behold, yeah, they were tracked internally. They just, you know, didn't let external people track. Yeah. Directly. Directly. Yeah. So in 2020, the suit could have required the company to pay $5 billion in damages. That's significantly more than a $2 per user paycheck we would have gotten.

But instead of that, they've just said they will destroy billions of data points and improperly collected and update its data collection disclosures and maintain a setting that blocks Chrome's third-party cookies by default for the next five years. At which point it's a free-for-all again. Yeah. Because Google's great. Now, here's the rub with this.

Yeah. Yeah. They've been doing this for a long time. Mm-hmm. They've been doing it since 2016. Yeah. You think they hadn't sold any of that data yet? Oh, come on. So they're going to destroy the data points that they've already sold to everybody. I'm pretty sure they – here's how they did it.

I think this is an arm's-length transaction because they didn't sell the data directly to somebody. They used it in their advertising product. They used it in AdSense. They used it for targeting. They, you know, that's how they used it. And that's how they monetized it.

So, yeah, nobody cares what you were browsing for in 2017 now because the advertisers from back then are gone. So we need new data points. So it's useless data anyway. So for them, this is just, you know, this is bullshit for us. What do you mean those advertisers are gone? Aren't all those mattresses people still advertising on podcasts?

No, they're not. Oh. I don't know if you've noticed, but all those mattresses that they were selling didn't really – they don't have the longevity that they promised. So as far as I know, everybody is getting rid of their Casper and their Purple and going back to the good old Sealy Posturepedic.

I love the Posturepedic. Oh, I need a new one. My ass hits the bottom of the bed frame now because all this memory foam just remembers my big fat ass. Well, that's the problem. When you get to our age, your posture needs pedicking. It does need some pedicking. Please, please give me the pedics.

But, yeah, I can see how they – you know, for them, this is a great deal. They don't have to pay out and they're just – they're freeing up hard drive space for the next round. That's right. Silly rabbit. So I got into this thing this week with a not client who kept bugging me about a thing.

Right. God, those were the worst. I finally shook those. I quit my company, what, over five, six years ago? And it took me until, like, last year to shake off some of those friends and family that hung around forever. I'm like, I don't code anymore. No, I don't either.

But this is a guy who basically – it was a client who cut out a big deal which left me with this office that I can't pay for. So it kind of rubs me the wrong way but still writes me asking me for free shit all the time. Yeah. And so he's like, okay, well, I'm going to have to pay somebody if you can't do that.

Not offering to pay me, mind you, to do the job. He's like, well, then I'm going to have to pay somebody to do it. Right. And in this process ends up putting me on an email chain with the people that they're paying to do this job who can't figure out what a fucking RSS feed is.

I said – they're like, I need this data. And I'm like, well, here's the RSS feed. It has all the data and it just pull out what you need. And so I get an email from obviously a guy in India who's some kind of virtual assistant that goes, well, I pulled this up in my browser and said this document has no formatting.

And I'm just like, oh, my God. So wait, hold on. Let me get this straight, Jason. Not only did you get paid to do the actual work, you technically got an unpaid promotion to managing the people who are doing the work. Unpaid promotion to manage a digital assistant. So instead of going back and forth and describing them how to parse an RSS feed, I said, screw it.

We live in the world of AI. Just to get this shit out of my hair and leave me the fuck alone, I went to chat GPT and I said, I want to parse an RSS feed into an Excel document. Use it with these two fields. I want the URL in the title of the of the entries.

So it said, here you go. Here's a PHP script to do that. But the problem was it had dependencies and I didn't want to deal with dependencies. So I wrote back and said, rewrite that, but without dependencies. Here you go.

This will save it to it. And it said this will save it to a CSV file, which you can then open in Excel instead of having the documents to write a direct Excel document. I changed two fields. I put in, I put in the, the URL of the RSS feed and I put in the name of the CSV file, dropped it in, opened up my, my shell window, ran it, boom.

There's my file, pulled it out, emailed it to him and said, here, it's a fucking rocket science. Leave me alone. That took 10 minutes to do the entire thing from start to finish. You know how long that would have taken back in the day? Would have taken the better part of a day.

Getting out, I'm like, where did I put that RSS parser? Oh, I got to remember. Go to Stack Overflow. No, I know I have them around here somewhere. I'm like, okay, I got to parse the DOM. What's that field? Oh, God. You know, okay, I got to clean up that input. Oh, what if I got to check the C data?

Oh, Jesus. This was literally two entries into ChatGPT. I got functioning code that did the job. Yeah, by all accounts, it's absolutely great for small projects. It's unbelievable. And big projects are just a bunch of small projects.

Exactly. That's all a big project is. It's a bunch of little projects. Oh, what a time to be alive, Brian. Not if you're a coder. In the news. Well, I'm continuing on my AI bashing.

This is my thing right now, Jason. This is the AI hype is not worth the squeeze. And this just keeps on going on. People just seem to think that AI is everything when it's really just a small, tiny little thing that doesn't do much.

And a court... Yeah, but it's great for RSS readers. Oh, that's true. It's good for coding. That's what it's good for. What it's not good for is presenting evidence or enhancing evidence in a murder trial. And thank God the judge believed this. The judge in Washington state has blocked video evidence that has been AI enhanced from being submitted in a triple murder trial.

And that's a good thing, given that too many people think applying an AI filter can give them access to secret visual data. No, that's not what it does. And the judge rightly pointed out that, no, AI makes things up. That's not what we want as evidence.

Yeah. It gets even better, though, because it's not like they went all in on, like, the top-of-the-line technologies here or anything. The lawyers basically reportedly use, and this is in quotes, experts in creative video production who has never worked on a criminal case before to, also in quotes, enhance the video.

They use Topaz Labs, which... Yeah. Yeah. We all have. We all have it. And I would like to... Do you remember back when Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI came out? I do. I do. Do you remember when you were enhancing a city scene?

And they put, like, Ryan Gosling in every window because that's what the AI was trained on? So, Ryan Gosling committed the murder. Well, two of the three, anyways. Okay. Yeah. So, well done, judge. Something I don't say very often. Okay, Brian. And in an orgasmic moment for the C-suite at Uber, these things are finally coming to fruition for them.

The things that they've dreamed about forever. Man, my mayo is extra salty on my sandwich today. Waymo, self-driving cars are delivering Uber Eats orders for the first time in Arizona. That's right. Okay, great. Uber has said from day one, we want to get rid of drivers, period.

We just want to put ass from point A to point B. So, get your ass in the car. We'll get you there. Ass or tacos. One or the other. So, yep. Now we have step one. We have the food to make your ass fatter so you will need more space in that Uber later on when it's autonomous.

Yeah. If you live in Phoenix, you can now order Uber Eats and a robot car can bring it to you. You do have the option of having someone come with you. But here's the rub. So, the Waymo, they're going to use their Jaguars.

So, you're going to get your tacos delivered by a Jaguar. Top of the line. Yes. All right. Without requiring customers to pay a tip. Yes. Do you have any gray poop on? So, no tips is the upsell on this, right?

Yep. And I love this. This venture not only underscores Uber and Waymo's commitment to zero-emission transportation, but also represents a significant step forward in the integration of autonomous technology into everyday life. Zero emissions, zero tips, zero humans, zero paychecks.

That's what they're looking for. Sounds great. That's what we need right now. That's just what Uber has always wanted. So, I'm sure somebody's happy over there right now. Well, New York City also tried to eliminate some jobs where people would help business owners and give them information that they need.

How's that working out? Well, they replaced them with an AI chatbot, Jason. Yeah. There's been some problems with that. Okay. So, this chatbot was supposed to help business owners access pertinent information, but it's been lying, making shit up. At times, even misforming users about actions that are against the law, according to a report from the markup.

This was co-published with local nonprofit newsrooms documented in the city, and it includes numerous examples of inaccuracies in the chatbot's responses to questions relating to housing policies, workers' rights, and other tools. This was supposed to be a one-stop shop for city services and benefits, according to Mayor Adams.

And, uh, no. But they say it's okay. They say it's okay, Jason. Why do they say it's okay, Brian? First off, we let everybody know this is a pilot program. Oh, that's it. AKA, you're the beta testers. Got it. For the city, where it's giving you legal advice.

Yeah. And a disclaimer on the website does note that it may occasionally produce incorrect, harmful, or biased content. Okay, there you go. There, there. We wipe our hands clean to this. We told you. Yep. Mayor Ryan Gosling says. Yeah, so, you know, this AI is still working out great for people.

Perfecto. Not working out great for Amazon, though. Well, hold on a second. There's a run to that part. Yeah, yeah, don't, yeah, don't bury the lead on this one. So, uh, Amazon has their just walkout technology in its fresh grocery stores. No more. They tried it.

They wanted to get it down. So, there was no human interaction for about 50 in a thousand orders is what they were looking for. And, well, it turned out to be something along the lines of about 700 in a thousand. Right. And the, the real, the real buried lead on all of this was, Brian, would you like to take this one away?

Because I, I know you've been chomping at the bit for it. AI is people. AI is people. Yes. Shocking. As it says, most notably, Just Walk Out merely presents the illusion of automation with Amazon crowing about generative AI and the like. Here's where the smoke and mirrors come in.

While the stores have no actual cashiers, there are reportedly over 1,000 real Ryan Goslings in India scanning the camera feeds to ensure accurate checkouts. Excellent. We said AI is people for a long time. Turns out, oh, we were right again.

It's all Mechanical Turk, man. It's all Mechanical Turk. It is. But we should be able to sue them for this shit. It's unbelievable. For what? Because they went out of their way to crow about how we're using generative AI and high-end technologies. You're reusing a fucking webcam. Brian, if truth and marketing were illegal.

I know. Come on. The world would be a better place. Yeah, it would. It would, except the courts would be kind of filled up for quite a bit. If you can't use AI in court anymore, then what are we going to do? I don't know. But there's something good going on in California yet again.

Burning, burning. Well, California. Is it burning season in California yet? Not quite. Almost. It's raining today, so tomorrow it will be on fire. Burnout, quiet, quitting, and strikes. The news and likely your schedule is filled with markers that workers are overwhelmed and too much is expected of them.

And there's little regulation in the United States to prevent employers from forcing workers to be at their desks or on call at all hours. But that might soon change. California State Assemblyman Matt Haney has introduced AB 2751, a right to disconnect proposition, according to the San Francisco Standard.

So basically, it's going to say your employer has to lay out exactly what a person's hours are and ensure they aren't required to respond to work-related communications while off the clock. This is happening over in Europe, and it's probably a pretty good idea to have more stringent regulation around this sort of thing.

Now, how this relates to, oh, I don't know, non-hourly employees, if you're the salary guy, we've got to figure that out. But it wouldn't be nice to actually have this codified as we've just seen work creep everywhere, particularly since work from home and the pandemic. So who's going to enforce it?

The Internet police, Jason. Who's going to enforce it? Yes. Calling the Internet police. Calling the Internet police. The army of Ryan Gosling's in India will enforce this. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's a great idea. Fantastic. It is. It's a great idea. Yeah.

Remember when California said no more plastic bags? Yep. Do you know what happened, Brian? You had to start buying the bags. Plastic bag usage in California went through the roof. Disposable plastic bags. Because you know what they tried to do? They tried to make those bags that you get.

They used to be like paper wafferthin at checkout for free. You had to pay 10 cents for them. So they made very thick bags and called them, quote, unquote, reusable. But everybody bought said, said, screw this. I'm going to eat the 10 cents every time I go grocery shopping. And then I'm going to go home and I'm going to throw the bags away.

So landfills actually have more plastics in them because of California's great fucking idea. So it's everywhere, by the way. It's not just California anymore. It's all over Canada as well. And let me tell you, I'm doing my part rather than throwing them out and putting them in the landfill.

I now have 7,000 bags in the back of my trunk. So do we all. So say we all, Brian. So say we all. Good one, California. Good luck. Good luck. We're just going to be a bunch of basically AI fixers, robot repairmen, and plastic bag recyclers.

And it's all, I don't know. I don't know how this is all going to work out. And I meant to say on the last one about Amazon, I found a website that I actually signed up for where you can make money fixing AI. It's basically writing shit for AI.

It's crazy. It is the mechanical Turk of just specifically for AI. The test you have to take to become a person that works on the projects is over an hour long. What's the hourly rate? Yeah, seriously. It depends on the project.

Here's the other rope. I checked out a couple of these sites. And somebody will post a project, give you a bunch of work to do. But as the project nears completion, a lot of companies are just saying, no, this isn't good enough, and pulling the plug and not paying anybody but keeping the work.

Nice. So, yeah, they're just fucking over everybody. Like, you know, it's – I'm just – I got to stop. I'm getting angry. I'm always so happy when we do this podcast. I come away from it just full of joy at the world. Ebullient, Ryan Gosling.

That's what we are at the end. Just ebullient. Yes. Apple has confirmed that they are laying off about 700 workers. We talked about the Apple Car project getting shut down. So a couple hundred from there going. They are stopping the in-house micro LED display research unit.

They're going to probably offset that to somebody else. Also, Siri-related roles are being scrubbed because, you know, fucking Siri. They're going to be getting rid of that soon anyway and, you know, have Tim Cook GPT. They're saying, everything's great.

So we found out about these through the WARN notices, which we talked about. Yeah. And you actually knew about already that I didn't know about. But just so people know, it stands for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. They are getting adjusted, not retrained.

It should be called the boot notices because you're getting a fucking boot. Well, one thing that Apple has been pretty good about is that they tend to strike up new projects when they cancel old ones. And it has been bubbling out that they're going to be working on basically your Jetsons-esque home robots. So we'll see what happens with that.

Yeah. I would love that. I would love an Apple Rosie. I wouldn't. You need the Apple Rosie Palmer. They got to work on that. Zing! Huzzah! You're an AT&T guy, right? Yes, I am. Did you? Were you part of this Saturday morning emails and text messages that came out saying that 7.6 million of their current customers were affected by a recent leak in which sensitive data was released on the dark web, along with 65.4 million former account holders?

Somehow I dodged that bullet. Wow, look at you. Yeah, lucky I must be. You're lucky you must be. But you needn't fear, Jason, because they're launching a robust investigation supported by internal and external cybersecurity experts to get to the bottom of this and make sure that they don't have to pay any money out.

Ooh, great. Yeah. Looking forward to that. No, I somehow, somehow got lucky. All right, good for you. If that's the only bit of luck I have this week, I guess I'll fucking take it. Count it as a win. I'm counting it as a win.

Give me the W. Give me the W. Now, we have been talking about how horrible Elon Musk has become over the years, and now we have quantifiable data that he's horrible. Tesla is facing significant brand reputation challenges, according to a recent survey by market intelligence firm, Calibur.

The survey indicates Tesla's, quote, consideration score has dramatically fallen to 31% in February from a high of 70% in November 2021. I guess the consideration is, would you consider giving Elon Musk and Tesla your money?

Well, no. Look, there are bumper stickers that are selling really well, saying, sorry, bought this before Musk was a dick. And people have been putting these on their Teslas. I have to call the **** because he has a Model S, and the license plate used to say Elon fan.

It's probably getting tomatoed. I know. Hopefully, he got rid of that thing by now. I mean, who didn't see this coming? Like, there's no way. We've talked about it. We've talked about it forever. I sold tons of my stock, thank God. I'm glad I did now. I kept some because you know what?

You know what? We'll right this ship, Jason. The Cybertruck? No. Tesla CEO Ryan Gosling. Yes, there we go. Everybody loves Ryan Gosling. You put him in there, all your PR problems are gone. Just replace him. Set him on the board.

Tell him to shut up and play tiddlywinks, and your problem is solved. Have a spying board. No, they can't do that. They can't do that. Well, this doesn't help either. This is a great video of a guy taking delivery of his Cybertruck, his $100,000 Cybertruck, gets in it, pulls out of the dealership, floors it, and it breaks.

The thing doesn't last, it lasts like a fucking mile. It just goes, he's like, whee, and then the thing starts flashing red, going, warning, warning, warning, pull over. You're going to explode. I was scanning the news right before we started the podcast, and I saw an article that was like, if you want to know how the Cybertruck is going, just go to the automotive forums and find out.

I'm like, everybody's having problems with these things. This is such a, like, fucking wet dream of Elon's, and it's just such a piece of shit car. Yes, it is. Marcus Brownlee, MKHB or whatever his initials are, I was watching his review of the Cybertruck, and he said something that I thought was very interesting.

He's like, when people see him driving it around, a huge amount of people come up to him and say, what the hell is that? Most of the public, outside of us nerds, have never fucking heard of the Cybertruck. That's the crazy part. That's how much of a bubble we live in.

They're like, what the hell is that thing? He has to explain it to them. And everybody thinks it costs more than it did, which is interesting. But he was talking about the drive-by-wire system because there's no, you know, there's nothing connecting your steering wheel to the wheels, which, by the way, is the problem that the guy had after driving a mile and the thing broke, was the steering was saying, steering problem.

You know, when you're going fast in a six-ton machine, probably good to have the steering that works. Be nice. Yeah. The cool thing about it, though, is that adaptive four-wheel steering actually looks pretty cool, but you kind of need it because the things are so huge. You can't make it around a corner without it.

But it was an interesting – he had a pretty good review. I only got halfway through it, and then I'm just like, I'm not wasting any more time on the Cybertruck that I'm never going to buy. But we'll probably be killed when it goes astray driving down Ventura Boulevard and rams into my building. But, yeah, so, yeah, Cybertruck not really doing well for Tesla right now at all.

Nothing is.

Media Candy. Well, I finally finished Better Call Saul last season and Chef's Kiss. What a show. Perfect, wasn't it? What a show. Yeah. Yep. Ended perfectly. I actually wasn't expecting the redemption at the end, so that was very nice.

Yeah. And on a high note, as it is. Yeah. So that was very good. I also finished Constellation. Okay. Let me – I'm at the penultimate episode. I got 10 minutes to go, and I cannot bring myself to press play. I would like the seven hours of my life back, please.

Okay. I'm going to save that last hour then. Don't. Don't. Yeah. Even if they come back with a second season, which they would have to, to have this make any fucking semblance of sense, it would be so stupid.

This is 100%. This is a Ronald D. Moore. This is a loss. This is – let's just do really interesting shit, but not have an endgame. Okay. Let's make it as cool as possible. Oh, shit. Now we have to explain it? Fuck that. Yeah.

That's what I was feeling. That's what I was feeling. Oh, well. Yeah. I only wasted seven hours, not eight. Okay. I wasted – I went in for the full eight, Jason, and I did it for you. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I've been watching The Regime, like I mentioned before, and they had the penultimate episode this week.

I don't – I don't know if this is going to need a second season. I think they're going to kind of wrap it up, hopefully, at the end. It is so weird. It's not getting enough buzz to get a second season, I think. No. And I think they're going to wrap the story. But, yeah, my roommate and I, we were like, oh, The Regime's on.

I guess we should watch it. That's a level of excitement. Must blah TV. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, this ain't NBC on Thursday nights in the 80s, man, by any stretch.

Yeah. Kate Winslet's great in it, but the whole thing is just like, what am I watching? I don't understand. Okay. Well, I'll let you know how it goes next. Let me know if it wraps up well, but obviously, you didn't exactly sell it.

If it sticks the landing, then it brings it all to make sense, but I have a feeling it may constellation out. Okay. We'll see. I did watch the new Roadhouse movie on Amazon Prime this week. Mm-hmm. I loved it.

Really? I thought it was great. Yeah. It was really good. All I saw online was why. Jake Gyllenhaal is fantastic in it. But he's no Ryan Gosling. No, he's no Ryan Gosling. They should have had Ryan Gosling as the baddie, because what's his name from the UFC is terrible.

He is comically bad in this. I mean, they should have just got Yosemite Sam to play the part, because that's exactly how he took it. Okay. Conor McGregor, that's his name. Just so over-the-top dumb.

But Jake Gyllenhaal saves it. I mean, he's fantastic in it. It's so hard to watch, because there's such a contrast between what really good acting looks like and what really bad acting looks like. And when you put him in the same room, it's like, hmm. But there is a really terrible CGI ladled fight scene at the beginning of the movie, which I'm like, oh, God, if that's what this movie is going to be like, then I just can't.

But then it just went into story, and it was a great story. So I think it was better than the original, personally. All right. Go from that. A lot of people will fight you over that. Trust me, it's better than wasting eight hours on Constellation. Two hours, it's a good two-hour filler movie.

It's fun. All right. Well, we started to get some inkling of why Jon Stewart was basically fired by Apple for doing a show over there, outside of the fact that nobody was watching it, which is a big part of the problem. But he had FTC chair Lena Kahn on his weekly Daily Show segment earlier this week, and he started to talk a little bit about that.

He said that Apple asked him not to host Kahn on a podcast, which was an extension of his The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV Plus show. And he also said that Apple basically wouldn't let them do a segment on the false promise of AI.

So yeah, they definitely had a heavy editorial hand, to which I would say, what did you think was going to happen if you hire Jon Stewart? Exactly. That's why you hire Jon Stewart. That would be like hiring Jon Oliver and hoping he doesn't make fun of you.

He's going to. And see, that's where HBO and AT&T and Max got it right by letting him just run with it. Yeah. Let him run. That was half the fun of watching the show, was watching him make fun of AT&T, his corporate overlord.

And they let him, you know? Yes. So that's what good comedy is. The softening your image a little bit. Yes. Yes. That could be why he has all the Emmys, you know? I saw this one, a hat tip to Mike Mattia over on Discord. I did not know this.

An executive who worked on the three-body problem was sentenced to death for fatally poisoning the Netflix show's producer. Well, it's definitely a body problem. Lin Xi, who helped bring three-body problem to screens, died before the series airs because he was poisoned in 2020 by Shu Yao, who headed up a subsidiary that oversaw adaptations of the book.

Now, more than three years later, Shu has been given the death sentence. So, yeah, he poisoned Lin and a couple other members of the team by basically just, you know, poisoning the food in the office. So, great. Don't eat the bao there. Yeah, no doubt.

So it was apparently just over business. All right. Well, that's fun. Yeah. What a waste. Star Trek Discovery has dropped their first two episodes of their final season. Did you watch them yet? I watched them both last night. Okay.

And? They went for action. That's okay. That's what we heard. Yeah. That's what I heard. Yeah. There's definitely a MacGuffin that they're going to be chasing around that will have no real anything to anything. They've gotten rid of the spore drive, so there's no real need to explain anything anymore.

And I've got to say, Jason, it's not you, but you've ruined the show for me. If it's not me, then how did I ruin the show for you? Well, I think I was blind or I was able to ignore, not the wokeness.

It's not woke. I mean, it is, but all Star Trek is woke and we can talk about that at great length, whatever. It's the, these, every character is an emotional child and all they fucking do is talk about their feelings and, and legitimize each other.

You're in danger. The entire universe is about to break up. Why are you consoling each other and validating each other's feelings? I feel like you really see me now, Brian. Fuck. I feel validated. I can't watch the show. I'm so sick of it.

Like, get your fucking phaser and get on with it, you bitch. Oh, good. You've come around to my way of seeing the world. I love it. I mean, I'm going to have to see it out because the next episode is the one that, no, you don't.

But the next episode is the one that Rikers directed and said is one of the finest things he's ever directed. And then I'm four seasons and three episodes in. There's only like seven more. I thought it was Strange New Worlds that he said was his best TV. Oh, shit. Yeah. Well, maybe I am done then.

I think you might have to be done because that was, he was talking about Strange New Worlds, man. I wasn't talking about this Discovery shit. Okay. I just sat there and I had to pour myself another glass of wine. Then I sat there and I was like, God damn, they're still fucking talking about their feelings.

Poured myself another glass of wine. Why am I watching this shit? Sounds like you should have just got a warp core breach instead of that wine. I should have. Oh, well, anyways, speaking of another thing that probably is going to really suck and we don't need in the world, a new Matrix movie is in the works from Drew Goddard, the writer and director best known for his works on titles like The Martian, The Cabin in the Woods and the Netflix Daredevil series, will both direct the film and pen the screenplay.

Currently untitled, the project will be the first Matrix film not to involve creators Lana and Lily Wachowski, although the former will serve as an executive producer. We didn't need the last one. We don't need this. Well, this might actually help. That's what they said about Matrix 3. Oh, God.

But no, they shot two and three at the same time. There was no fix in three. But, you know, here's the deal. Create some more universe stuff like they did with the Animatrix. That was fun. Yeah. And don't bring back Keanu. No, don't bring any of them back. They don't have to bring anybody back. Bring a side character back.

Yes. Whatever. Don't care. It will probably suck. No, no, no. It's all going to be about the Morrowindian. I just like saying that word. Sorry. Go ahead. Okay. I saw this article on IFL Science, and I used to really love that site, and I thought the writing was genius.

And since then, it's just decent stories that might as well be written by AI chatbots, a.k.a. Ryan Gosling in India. But this one was fantastic. And obviously, I looked at it because of the topic matter. Song lyrics today are less sophisticated, angrier, and more self-obsessed than they used to be a study says.

Somebody gave him the CD of wet-ass pussy. That's all it took. Yeah. I don't know if you read the article. I will sample two to three paragraphs here for you. This is the most genius article I've ever read.

Ever. Songwriters may be under pressure, but they just didn't get into the groove like they did back in the 1980s. That's the conclusion of a new study looking at the evolution of song lyrics from 1980 to 2020, which found that while the meaningful verses created by earlier artists could sound like a prayer, more recent efforts are often just like a careless whisper.

The researchers examined the lexical complexity of 12,000 songs spanning genres such as rock, pop, rap, country, and R&B, a task that one might imagine took them all night long. The message is that lyrical intricacy has been free-fallen for over 40 years, with songs becoming increasingly simple and repetitive.

And it goes on like that for at least 20 more paragraphs. And it is fucking awesome. Okay, I got to go read it. I got to go read it. That's great. So good. Hat tip to Benjamin Taub, the writer of that article.

Oh, yes. Hat tip. Excellent. Excellent work. Raises deserve good serve. Nonprofit organization Artists Rights Alliance has issued an open letter focused on the rise of AI in music, signed by over 200 prominent names in the music industry, including Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, Greta Van Fleet, et cetera, et cetera.

Everybody. Just everybody signed this. Under the call to stop devaluing music, the letter states, some of the biggest and most powerful companies are, without permission, using our work to train AI models. These efforts are directly aimed at replacing the work of human artists with massive quantities of AI-created sounds and images that substantially dilute the royalty pools that are paid out to artists.

And obviously, it's just going on saying, knock it off, people. Have you tried Sona AI? No, I haven't. Holy shit. That good? Damn. That good. I, they, something's got to change, man.

Because that thing, I wouldn't be surprised if there are ready songs on the radio right now that have been written by that. Wow. Okay. It's not good. Yay. There are things that AI is good at.

Yeah. There's no doubt about that. It's just, you know. Yeah. You know what they're not good at yet? HVAC. I'm going to HVAC school. Fuck this noise. Until my Rosie Palmer Apple droid can fix that shit for me. Man, we already checked out the Autoblow 2 on the show.

Come on. If they can get that noise problem reduced, then we might have a winner there. Mm-hmm. No, really, the Sona stuff is, like, I downloaded, I just ran a couple things through it. It's unbelievably good.

All right. Put a link in the show notes. We'll give it a shot. Okay. I do need a new hobby. So, let's get into the music business. Now, I've already just gotten into voiceover work, which is, we'll talk about in a second with Dave. So, let's just stay behind the times.

That's where I want to be. Firmly behind the times. Behind the times. You know, I'm over 50, so I guess that's where I'm supposed to be for my twilight years. That and greeting you at Walmart when you come in. New bill in California, introduced by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, aims to address Ticketmaster's dominance in the ticketing industry.

Good luck. The bill would lift restrictions on ticket resale and require Ticketmaster to allow other ticket sellers to offer tickets through an API. All right. Okay. Yeah. That's going to work. As somebody who used to be a programmer, no, that's not gameable in any way, shape, or form.

No. There are ways to do it. They just got to, yeah, Ticketmaster needs to get spanked. But making them offer an API isn't the way to do it. Just allow other ticket sellers and stop embargoing all the venues because you're Live Nation too.

And you can basically say- Yeah, break up that. And stop offering artists massive advances for tours and locking them up into your personal ecosystem for everything. That's what they do. And that's how they get everybody. Lena Khan. Hello. Yep. Hello.

This has been a problem for decades. Come on. But, you know, now the Swifties are on board. So now we're going to see real change. Sure. That's what we need. Yep. So Killer Q on Discord sent this one over. And it was a great article. The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming saying, one day you'll barter bread for our DVDs.

Bread goes bad and so do DVDs. Exactly. I was going to say, hey. Have you heard of BitRot? Yeah. But this actually comes from an actual thing where people lost power and they just had a little portable DVD player that they could juice up and would watch their library of DVDs.

Because God forbid they talk to their family. Well, if you've got kids, I think if you had a, you know, whatever your kid du jour DVD is, you'd probably pay some bread for that just to keep your kid quiet for a while, which seems to be what happened. But people in the neighborhood found out, so they started, you know, trading things for DVDs and getting paid for it.

So this guy was basically a Bit Lord saying, you know, yeah, you want to entertain your kid? Yeah, that'll be two cans of Corona, please. And two limes. Enter the Thunderdome for this copy of Barbie. There you go. So the thing is, yeah, BitRot.

It's a good article talking about the nostalgia of DVDs and things like that. And if you, I just gave away all my Blu-rays and DVDs last week because I started having them around. I'm like, next time I put this in the player, it's just going to be basically a bucket of sadness when it says can't read discs. So I'm like, okay.

I've got hard drives where I have everything backed up. There's, you know, that's going to last me till I'm dead. I don't need to rewatch those movies anymore. I'm 52. I'm done with those. I need to go to HVAC school. Come on, leave me alone. But it's a good read. I recommend it.

If you're one of those people who still keep your DVDs around, this will be validating for you, I'm sure. Do you still keep DVDs or Blu-rays around? I have a box that has been in the closet since we moved here. I did a big call. I basically kept like some of my absolute favorite movies of all time and a lot of stuff that you can't get anywhere else, like concert films, you know, because every band used to release a DVD of their live show from the tours and things like that.

I've got a lot of those, but I don't have a single, I don't have a Blu-ray player anywhere in this house. I'd have to, if I wanted to watch any of those, I have to go buy one. And here's the thing. Have you ever said to yourself in the middle of the night, man, I wish I had that concert from 1982 that I could watch right now?

No, because I'm old. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We got to break the habit of just, you know, collecting all that old shit from when we were kids. There are things that were really important to me in my 20s. I'm not in my 20s anymore. I have other things in my life. I have a child.

I've got shit to do. Like the idea of getting drunk on my sofa, like I used to do when I was 22 and watching, you know, the Nine Inch Nails concert film and then throwing on Underworld and then watching the three hour cure videos. I don't have time for that shit anymore. Well, one thing I used to collect, Brian, that I don't have anymore is episodes of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, because he was my Sherlock Holmes, damn it.

Well, that is now 40 years old. Keeping on with the theme, I saw a nice article. Forty years later, Jeremy Brett is still the best Sherlock Holmes, and I would have to agree. Now, finding the old Sherlock Holmes is a pain in the butt, but thanks to the God-given internet that we have, thank you, Al Gore, for the information superhighway, the entirety of it is on YouTube.

So you can go, it's been there apparently, and I thought, oh no, somebody's going to see it and take it down. Well, it's been there for 11 years. So I'm guessing it's not going anywhere anytime soon. So there's a link to it in the show notes. It's basically a playlist of all the episodes, which I then, because I'm insane and still have that need to collect everything gene still in me that we just talked about, I used the Downey app, which I have via set app, which we highly recommend you check out.

I took the URL for the playlist, dragged it into Downey. Downey then downloaded every single episode of Sherlock Holmes for me. Now I have it in a folder on my Plex server in like two clicks. It's great. I love Downey. Okay. Period.

If you need to download shit from YouTube, that's the app to get. It is so easy. And you don't have to go through a website, look for 15 different ads and all that other crap. You literally drag the URL or copy the URL, paste it into Downey, and it will just get it for you. And whatever resolution you want, whatever subtitles you want, done.

It takes seconds. So thank you, Jeremy Brett, for a fantastic Sherlock Holmes series. He unfortunately didn't live long enough to get knighted. He was going to be knighted for his work in it. So yeah, it was a bummer. It was a bummer. But that reminds me about my other favorite, because I was a big Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot fan at the same time when I was growing up.

And the Labors of Hercule podcast, still going from Adam Roche and Frankie, still one of my favorites. They're killing it. They've now had every cast member that mattered on the show. So go check it out. They had David Suchet. I'm so jealous. I'm so jealous. But I know it's like three people are going, oh, that's cool.

And the rest of you are going, shut the fuck up. Exactly. I'm going to tell you about another podcast from somebody you've never heard of then. Why not? Let's stick with the theme. Douglas Sarine, who used to play the ninja from Ask a Ninja, he's got a podcast called Anthem of Life.

And here's the description. Anthem of Life is one-on-one conversations with the biggest names in music. Not the musicians, producers, or lyricists, the people in the music. And since they're fictitious, we have comedians playing them. It's about the people that people who write songs, write songs about.

So it's all improv. It's a 100% improv show. And he's a professional improv guy. So it's actually really, really good. I think Eleanor Rigby was the latest episode. It was very funny. Very, very funny. It's an interesting concept. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great concept and highly recommend checking it out.

It'll put a smile on your face for half an hour a week. All right.

Apps and Doodads. Okay, Brian. So we have a feedback-laden episode here of Apps and Doodads. Okay. But this is so exciting. This is so exciting for me that I put it at the top and I have to say it first.

Okay. Super Monsters Ate My Condo Plus is now out on Apple Arcade. Oh, I thought that was a new streaming service. No, it's not. It'll take up as much time as you want. This is an old game that was – I used to love this game.

It is one of those games. It's a short throw game. You can play for like two, three minutes, maybe up to four if you're really good at the power-ups per round. But it is an old, stupid, fun game that I played for hours and was so sad when it got deprecated with an iOS point release somewhere along the way and they took it away.

Well, Apple finally paid another company to come in and remaster it because the old one was 8-bit and it looked kind of cool. But now they just did it with vector art that looks better because if you're playing 8-bit on a giant iPad nowadays, it does kind of look shitty. But I opened it up last night, started – I got it.

I was so excited. I started playing it and I'm just having too much fun. Too much fun. I cannot recommend this game enough. If you have an Apple Arcade subscription because it's free with the subscription, go get it. Super Monsters 8 My Condo Plus. Okay. All right.

That's all I had to say. Now I'm revved up here. Okay, moving on to some feedback. All right. Rob from New Zealand wrote in. Love the show. Listening to it from New Zealand. And I hear you, re-Adobe, have tried Affinity Photo, one of few with a top-up for major upgrades but way cheaper and great to use. Yes.

I used to have the whole Affinity stack because they've got basically an Illustrator, an InDesign, and a Photoshop clone along the way. It was nice. The version I had – I mean, I had like the 1.0 version. I checked the iOS store last night and it was there up to version 2.

I had $60 to buy Affinity Photo. So they're not cheap. They're actual – they're real apps. They're good. But when you buy the 1, you get it on all platforms. So you get it on your iOS and the Mac at the same time. So I don't know if it's out for PC.

I don't think it is. I think it's just Mac. But here's the news. Welcome to Canva, Affinity. Canva has just bought the company. Right. So who knows what's going to happen to it now. It's going to be an Adobe Suite version for coming from Canva. Yeah, pretty much.

So we'll see how that plays out. I don't have a Canva subscription anymore because I had one for two years and I used it once. Waste of money. I know a lot of people that use it all the time and they make very mediocre art with it. So if mediocre art is your goal, highly recommend Canva.

But Affinity Photo was a pretty good analog to Photoshop. The only problem I had was all the key commands were different and I have my Photoshop way of doing things. So that was, I think you tried it too back then. And we came to the same conclusion. It's like, it's okay, but it's not Photoshop. Yeah. I know how to do this in Photoshop.

It's going to take me 15 minutes to figure out how to do this in Canva. Yep, exactly. Got some feedback from my old friend Kevin Snyder from back in Chicago. He says, as an Apple Vision Pro owner, I feel compelled to give my thoughts. So, this is a very long email, so I'm going to get to the meat of it.

He said, two months in, I still get the most enjoyment from watching content, but I at least have multiple uses because he's using it for some different workflow stuff and productivity. Is it worth the cost? Not even remotely. Most of what it can do, the $500 Quest 3 can do. The only way this is worth it is if you're so fixated on those 4K screens.

He says, TLDR, future bright. Apple has a nice entry-level product. Still a long way to go, and V1 is not even close to worth the price tag. So, thanks, Kevin. And, yeah, it's pretty much what we said. You know, let's wait for V2.

Yep. And Barbara wrote in, what do you think about Kagi Search? I'm interested to hear your take. This came in at the exact same time as a 404 Media article called, Friendship Ended with Google. Now Kagi is my best friend. And talks about his three months of using Kagi Search, which is a paid search engine.

Costs you $10 a month for unlimited searches. There's another version for $25, which is just the, can we have some more money version? I skipped that one. So, I got it. I installed it as my default browser. I paid the $10 to try it for the first month. I'm hooked. It's great.

No ads. Fast. They've even got a summarizer AI plug-in, which I got to say sucks balls. Not worth it, but it's free because it comes with it. Just, but from a search engine perspective, I get the correct answer with above the fold.

I don't have to scroll. I might have to give this a go. I remember Neva when that came out. Yeah. About a year or two ago. That was also a paid search engine that wasn't supposed to have any ads or anything like that. But they went down the AI rabbit hole and then got bought out by some other company called Slow Flake.

And it wasn't ready for prime time then, but sounds like this is. Yeah. I am sick to death of Google search results. They're useless now. Here's the funny thing. Kagi uses a lot of Google search results, but they're a front end to it.

They strip the shit out of it. But they've also got search results from other providers too. So they're basically just a paid front end to a bunch of different engines. Okay. So, but it's fast and they do a really good job of it. So I, so far I recommend it. Give it a shot.

You know, there's a free version that you can just try out. It's pretty easy to set it as your default search engine in your browser of choice. I think, I think except opera, which you use. But I did it for Brave and it works great. So highly recommended. We'll take a look. Jon Stewart, again, is in the news for me at least because he finally did a video on AI.

And I don't know if you watched it, Brian. I have not seen this, no. Okay. You must watch it. Everybody must go watch it because it is quite possibly the greatest Jon Stewart video of all time. So I don't want to ruin it for anybody, but he kind of nails the entire thing on what we're getting wrong with AI.

And it's all about toast. So check it out. All right. I saw another article come through from Futurism, which basically is my clearinghouse for articles that I can't pay for anymore. So basically what they're saying, the Wall Street Journal is talking about how AI companies are trying to make larger and larger models.

We all know, but the problem is they're running out of shit to put in the models. They've stolen everything already. They've basically already stolen the internet, which is why I also think it is a very dangerous time to be Google. So they need to be working on this stuff faster because pretty soon it's going to be like, well, we already have the internet over here in this box.

Why don't you ask it a question and get your answer? You don't have to search for it. So them and Kagi should be worried. But anyway, they're running out of stuff, and the article just talks about how they're trying to figure out where to get it from. They're thinking about scraping public YouTube videos and getting the transcripts.

I think Google might have something to say about that. They did. That was actually a headline today right before we went to record, which was YouTube basically warned AI companies that scraping their videos is fucking bullshit. You can't say that. We're the only ones that can do that, motherfuckers.

Yeah, we can do that. It's ours. Exactly. I bet Anthropic will be able to do it, too, because Google has a massive investment in Anthropic, who I got to say, I'm still I'm loving their models even more than open AIs. So we'll see what happens with GPT-5. But they're also saying that they're debating actually putting in synthetic data, which is generated by the AIs.

So fake data. We're going to train our AI on fake data. Pretty much. Yeah. Well, that's the worm eating its own tail. There we go. That is the Ouroboros that leads to model collapse, which we've talked about as a real danger because everybody's posting this shit, which we will talk about with Dave in a few minutes on the security segment.

This stuff's everywhere now, everywhere on the Internet, and everybody's slurping it up like it's all, you know, the gospel according to humans. And it's not. So we got problems coming. We do. And, you know, I'm just talking about Neva. Let's talk about another AI-powered app that I was using for a while, Artifact, which was actually a pretty good news app for a little bit until they decided.

A week. It was a good news app for a week. Until they decided, hey, we're not really popping and clicking here. What are we going to do? I got it. We're going to gamify news. Yeah. And then all of us were out because that's not what news is for. Yeah. So they announced that they were basically going to abandon the project because not enough people bought on to their conceit.

But never fear. The company for which all technologies go to die has bought them. Yahoo. Oh, great. Yeah. They're not going to run Artifact as a standalone service. They will fold Artifact's AI personalization tech into their other products, such as Yahoo News, which I didn't even know still existed.

I still see some Yahoo News articles come through every now and again. It's rare. Well, there you go. Yeah. But the Artifact founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, are still pushing the company line because they probably have to because I'm sure that they have a deal where they'll stick around for a little bit to get their big pile of money.

AI has allowed us to give users a better experience discovering great content they care about. Yahoo recognizes that opportunity and we could not be more excited to see what we built live on through Yahoo News. No sadder words were ever said by a tech guy. I know. Oh, man.

I didn't have time to – we'll talk about this next week maybe. Marissa Meyer is back in the news speaking of Yahoo. Oh. What company is she running into the ground these days? Some new one that she started that was supposed to be a new photo sharing app because that's what we all need right now. It's a new photo sharing app.

I'm sure. Yep. Dead as a doornail. Yeah. The Dark Side with Dave with podcast superhost Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast for all your cybersecurity news.

The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy and the host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings too. Welcome, Dave Bittner. Thank you, gentlemen. It's an honor to just be nominated.

So thank you for having me back. Okay. Well, we're going to get into the namesake of the show here now, Dave. Yeah. We've got a new Star Wars trailer. Yes. Tales of the Empire. So we're going to the dark side. So let's go to the dark side with Dave.

We're flooded in new Star Wars content right now. Yes, we are. And I've got to say I've been keeping up with The Bad Batch, which is on its final season. It's been excellent. That's what I hear. I'm seeing all sorts of posting on social media about how amazing it is. So it is on my list.

It's definitely in the queue that we're going to revisit it. Yeah. I watched the last two of those just last night right before watching Star Trek Discovery and getting depressed. But Bad Batch was excellent. Next time, reverse the order. Yes, I think so. So I've got a couple articles in here about it.

And there's one called Breaking Down the Sithy Secrets of Tales of the Empire's new trailer, which I didn't read because that just screams of spoilers. Yeah, I don't want to break down the secrets. I want to watch them on the show. Watch them. Unfold. Well, yes, I do understand that.

And I respect that. And I agree with that. However, I did look at the breakdown after watching the trailer. And what struck me is that, I hate to admit this, but it is the sad truth that I am at the place in my Star Wars journey where, with these new things that involve so many things from so many different areas of Star Wars, I need a Star Wars Sherpa to help me through.

You need to spend some time on Wikipedia. Yeah. For me, I'm lucky because I have my youngest son, Jack, who is up on all this stuff, who watches, he's watched all, he's watched everything. And he has the young mind that can capture and remember all of these names and places and planets and all that kind of stuff.

So he's your Yoda GPT. He is. Yeah. So I'll sit with him and every now and then I'll lean over and I'll say, who is that? You know, which, what is that from? Sometimes he'll pause it and I'll say, okay, so back in the Clone Wars, such and such and such and such. And I'm like, oh my God, okay.

There is a bit of like chasing its own tail happening with these shows. Like rather than just have completely new characters, everything in this universe must absolutely be connected in some way, shape or form. Right. Right. In the universe, you know, it's like, think about how that doesn't scale.

You know, it's like someone saying, oh, you're from Baltimore. Do you know, you know, Jeff Jablowski? I'm like, no. A couple million people. Saw him last night. In the Star Wars universe, it's like, oh, oh, sure. Han Solo. Yeah. Ran into him over on this other planet a while back.

You know, okay. But it's fun. I, you know, we kid because we love. That's true. And I will be watching it for sure. Me too. This is only tangentially related to Star Wars in that many of the episodes were directed by Dave Filoni.

My son and my wife and I have been making our way through the Avatar The Last Airbender series. I know next to nothing about it other than from what I've seen online is nobody has ever done it justice and every version of it sucks in some way, shape or form.

Or is that just internet haters? Well, I think that's every version except for this one. My understanding is that this one, the original animated version, which I think was originally on Nick, went for three seasons and is very loved and respected and so on and so forth.

And we just finished up the first season and I have to say it is quite good if you come to it with the right mindset. And it took me a little while to find that mindset. I was finding myself frustrated with the scripts of how quickly they will turn on a dime with very little setup.

And then one day while we were watching one of them, it struck me that I need to watch this show with the same mindset that I would watching an episode of Speed Racer. Right. Because it's very much modeled after that sort of thing. It's very much that, you know, that Japanese, the style of comedy, the style of storytelling, the visuals, it's very obviously influenced by that.

Right. And so once I was able to wrap my head around that and kind of accept that and not look at that as a failing, but as part of the... It's a feature, not a bug. Exactly. Part of the texture of this type of storytelling. It's quite entertaining and the characters are fun and it's visually quite interesting.

So I'm glad that my youngest son, Jack, was the one who kind of dragged us into this. He was like, you guys should watch Avatar because it goes back. It's probably, what, a decade old. It's in four by three aspect ratio. So it's got to be old.

Right. Right. I, too, am in four by three aspect ratio. Yes. Yeah. Right. Right. Positively geriatric. Yeah. So I'm glad I had an open enough mind to get to that point of figuring out how to make it work.

And I know that makes me sound like an Avatar apologist, but I really do think it's quite good and I've been enjoying it. So I'm looking forward to the next couple of seasons. All right. I think I'll file that one under. I'll wait and see if my son wants to watch it or gets into it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good plan, I think. Yeah. Right now I'm stuck in Ninjago. Everything is Ninjago. Right. Which, having watched it, by the way, how they have not been sued by the Disney Lucas Estate. I mean, everything is so blatantly Star Wars.

It's unbelievable. I remember at one point during, I want to say it was Jack's adolescence, there was some show called, like, Slug Terra, I believe. And it was all about these slugs that do battle. And so we were collecting slug toys.

And I was just rolling my eyes thinking, how is this a thing? How did this get sold? But he loved it. Right. So, you know, that's what you do as a parent. Yeah. So I got a notice this week that the Washington Post was going to renew my subscription for an insane, obscene amount of money.

And I said, no, I would not like to. Because for starters, I didn't know I was subscribed to the Washington Post for the last year. So, my bad. So I went in to cancel it. And their cancellation problem is, let's say, problematic.

So the first thing is, I was trying to do it on my phone and using my 1Password password manager. WAPO is one of those websites. And it's not, this isn't just them. It's sites that do this that drive me crazy. It doesn't respect autofill password managers.

So you always have to go in and you have to replace the last character manually to get it, make it think that, oh, it typed something. You know, it's some junior programmer's idea of, you know, stopping the bad guys. But the biggest problem was that I couldn't get it to actually show the password because, you know, there's usually that eyeball toggle.

It just wasn't working. So I had to go back into the password manager, figure out what the, like, show the password, remember that, go back to it, and then manually put in the last character of the password. And then the same thing with my email address to get it to kick in.

And it's just, it finally let me cancel. That part was fine. But it's just that the frustration that I have with people who just code horribly wrong nowadays drives me mad. It's like, there's no reason for that. There is, though.

It's a feature, not a bug, just like everything else. I recently, for my work, we had, like, changed credit cards or something like that. So I had to sign into multiple services. They bury all this stuff now on purpose because they want to make it incredibly difficult for you to turn off that subscription.

Everything is buried, like, 9, 10, 11, 12 levels deep, not in any way, shape, or form that would make sense. Like, they are doing all this dark trickery just to stop you from being able to stop any renewals. It's unbelievable. Wasn't there a thing in the past couple of years where there were several sites like this?

And I thought it was Washington Post, and maybe it's New York Times, where the only way you could cancel was to call them? Oh, that was New York Times. Yeah. Was it? Yeah. I had to do that. SiriusXM does that as well. So that's the only way you can cancel that. You have to call.

Yeah. I know there was call for, you know, some kind of legislation where you have to have equal ability for sign-up and cancellation. So if I can sign up online, then I got to be able to cancel online. You can't put people through an undue burden.

Yep. Yeah, that sucks. So what doesn't suck, and I put this one in here just for you, Dave, because I know you're such a Muppets fan. It's Willie Nelson and Kermit the Frog singing Rainbow Connection. Yeah. Did you? It is. It's wonderful.

It is wonderful. Even though you can see the guy singing and moving the sticks, it was still very good. It was very good. I actually thought that was cooler that you could see the whole performance. There was a great comment that was something along the lines of, Willie Nelson is the only human that makes us look completely normal.

Well, it's funny because I remember, you know, it calls back to Jim Henson, and I remember him talking about when he would make appearances on The Tonight Show or places like that, that he never tried to be a ventriloquist because what he found was that the frog was much more interesting than he was, and people wanted to believe this magic trick.

So he would just talk normally and move his mouth, but everyone would be looking at Kermit or whatever puppet he was doing. I think that's really true. That's the way it works. The other thing I remember from, I saw, it was a draft of the Muppet movie script, and on the first page it laid out basically how the Muppets work, and it said that in the world of the Muppets,

frogs and pigs and birds and penguins and gonzos are completely normal within this world. So the humans never respond to seeing any of them as being surprised by what they are. Right. It's, yeah, which is true.

And I think that's part of why the Muppets, unlike really any other brand like that I can think of, that's why we accept them as being real. That's why Kermit the Frog could host The Tonight Show, and he did. And you'd just be like, oh, Guess is great.

Kermit the Frog's hosting The Tonight Show. Yeah. Yeah. I just have such great affection for them, and it is so much nostalgia because, as I've said here before, when I watch current Muppets stuff, it's mostly like watching a Beatles tribute band.

It's great. They may capture some of the original magic, but what it does most is make me realize how much I love the original. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. All right. Well, speaking of loving the original, I love us, us humans.

And we've talked many times about fake AI voices on the show and how they're coming for us. Well, OpenAI has a new one called Voice Engine, and they made a very long blog post about how they're trying to be safe with the technology. The technology, which is terrifying because now it only takes 15 seconds to train the entire model on you.

And I don't know if you guys checked out any of the samples in the article that I linked to. Yes. We're done. We're done. We're cooked. I was talking a little bit earlier in the show, Dave, about there's a program called Sonu, which is music generating AI.

And it's insanely good. And whenever I see any of these things, I think, well, they're being pretty careful now. They're putting a ton of guardrails on these things, but they've got access to this without guardrails. How good is it really? Right.

Because they're stepping this stuff back for us. They've got to be to some degree. Right. Because the music production that came out of that thing was stunning. But they do have guardrails on it. You can't put in artist names and do a Willie Nelson song in the style of Cyndi Lauper.

You can't do that. But they can. Right. Make me another David Bowie album. Exactly. Do it. Yep. And yeah. Right. And they will. Right. Yeah. And it'll be good. Yeah. It'll be good. And if you didn't know, you wouldn't know.

Well, except for the fact that he's dead. You know. So a couple of things. The last paragraph of the last section of this page you shared with us from OpenAI, Jason, talks about, they say, it's called looking ahead.

And they say, we encourage steps like phasing out voice-based authentication as a security measure for accessing bank accounts and other sensitive information. Change the world to adapt to us. Exactly. Exactly. That was my, yeah. So listen, we're going to start the fire.

You guys should be ready. No, we don't really know what to replace it with, but you'll figure it out, right? Yeah. We're going to turn the lights off and it's up to you to find the exit. Yes. Right. That is where we're at now. So earlier this week, I did a little experiment.

You know, I live in this town called Columbia, Maryland. It is one of the 1960s planned communities, you know, where they, people were trying to build a better town. And the founder and developer was James Rouse, who's a famous developer. He did Columbia.

He did Daniel Hall. He was, you know, one of those guys. Very well known. So as a resident of Columbia, what you often hear the original pioneers who came to Columbia is they say, what would Jim Rouse do? Right. We have very much have that problem.

And he died 20 years ago or so. So I went into a chat GPT-4 and I said, are you familiar with the writings of James Rouse? And it said, oh, yes, I'm familiar with James Rouse. He did this, this, this, this, and this.

I said, great. Write an editorial about what James Rouse would think about the development of Columbia in the time since his death. And it did. It did? It did. Oh, my gosh.

It usually won't do that. Yeah, well, it did. Well, first, what it did was it wrote it as if someone were writing about Jim Rouse. Right. And then I said, okay, that was great. Now do it as if you are Jim Rouse addressing a room full of Columbia residents.

Right. And it wrote it as if it were a speech from Jim Rouse. And it was really good. Like, it had his cadence. It had his folksy way of speaking, his comments, his, you know, very much nailed the style of this man who was a very folksy kind of man.

He was good friends with Walt Disney, actually. So, I took it to the next level. I loaded a speech that Jim Rouse had given into 11 labs, had them analyze it.

I took a paragraph from this thing that ChatGPT wrote in his voice and had 11 labs spit it out as what I labeled Uncle Jim. And it is scarily good. I mean, it has his cadence.

It has the way he pauses. It has the words that he would stretch out in his folksy kind of way. And it does all that. And I've been sitting on it because... When's the next town hall meeting? Well, exactly. What would Jim Rouse do?

Well, here's the answer. And I press play, you know, and then out come the torches and pitchforks, right? They tar and feather me and send me out of town on a rail. But it's really had me thinking because, like, to your point, this is with the guardrails still on it.

Bringing someone back from the dead with an accurate version of the voice. And we're right on the leading edge where I'd be able to make a video with him. Yep. Yep. Yep. He'd have five or six fingers, but yeah. Right there. Give it two more weeks.

Yeah, give it a couple more weeks. Like, we were just talking about this about a year ago and saying it's not going to be that long. And we're there already. We're there with the voices and all that. That's true. Yeah. That's true. You're absolutely right. Absolutely right. Great. Oh, Jesus.

The one thing, though, that we need people for is the podcast that you guys recommended last week, What Went Wrong. This requires people because there's stories of shit that happened that nobody knows about. Ah, but it's shit that happened that nobody knows about.

So you can't verify it. So the chat GPT can totally make this shit up. Don't. Don't. Damn it. Suppose you're a camera operator. Pretend you're a camera operator on JAWS. Motion picture films. Yeah. Right. Based on the behind the scenes accounts of what it was like to make JAWS.

Write me. Yeah. Yep. In the voice of Steven Spielberg. Thank you. Shit. Right. Never mind. Done and done. Yeah. Okay. Well, before we're all taken over by the machine, before Ryan Gosling takes us all over, I recommend this podcast.

It is actually really, really good. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Oh, good. Yeah. I've listened to one as well. It was very good. Yeah. I put a couple of things in here in the show notes just real quick. I don't know if either of you guys, I'm sure we've talked about this, but I can't remember if either of you guys ever had any of the, you know, 150 in one kits from Radio Shack.

No. Do you know what I'm talking about? But I know what you're talking about. Yes. Yes, I did. The little project kits. Yes, I did. And then I ended, I hated them because I was, I did not have the patience to figure out how it worked. Right. You just wanted to throw all the wires together and get a radio?

Yeah. I expected it to, I look at it and then out comes a volcano and a radio and you're again. Can't I buy this finished? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I had the 150 in one kit and I, it was one of the best gifts I ever got for my birthday and I just loved it.

And I, to this day, I say many of the things that I learned about electronics and how electronics work came from playing with that kit. So we've got a link here for someone who has made a modern updated version of one of those kits. It's a 65 in one kit using modern production techniques, you know, rather than all the electronics being embedded in cardboard, it's embedded in actual circuit boards and it's more modern and up to date.

But if you're someone who has a great nostalgia for any of those old Radio Shack kits, do check this out. It's a lot of fun to, to look at. It looks really cool. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's even got the solar cell on it. Nice. Of course. Right. Nice. It is like a single red LED, which was, yeah.

Ooh, LED. Wow. Right. No, this totally brings back memories. This is great. Yeah. Yeah. And then last, I have a link here. I stumbled upon a page that I'm still trying to make heads or tails out of.

I read it. It is, and I describe it as being an eye-rolling example of the kind of AI-generated sludge sludge that's clogging up Google's search results. This is a page that describes in great detail how to power your solar panels indoors with incandescent lights.

Now, is it bullshit, or is this like Tesla-level perpetual power machine? We've solved the problems of the universe now, Dave, because we can just put a light bulb with a solar panel, and we have never-ending power.

Yes. I think it could be that. One of the things I love, so I'll just quote here. It says, many people would not believe it, but incandescent bulbs are one of the most reliable sources of making solar panels work indoors. Try to opt for the incandescent bulb with a filament in it.

Some even go for halogen light bulbs to generate some light and heat. Okay. So, obviously, this is AI-generated bullshit. But what I'm wondering is, is this only for SEO? Why is this here?

There is an embedded link for like a product. So, I'm wondering if this whole thing was just created for SEO, for something that's only sort of barely mentioned. It just, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

And yet, here it is. Yeah. And the picture that they have also doesn't make sense, because there's a guy on a ladder. On a roof. That is on a roof, which is leaning against nothing. Because if you look at the angle of the ladder, he's floating in the air, not towards the roof.

But it's a house within a house. Yeah. So, you see? Well, that's right. Those are the indoor solar panels. Yes. It's a house within a house. And yes, I believe that this is, once this page is discovered by a real scientist, the world will change.

Right. That's the only thing that's holding us back. It's out there. Yeah. The AI has solved our power problems. It's out there, right. It's out there for the taking, if only we can accept it and turn it into reality. No, I mean, you've stumbled upon one of the ways that this podcast actually started, Dave, which is me looking around the internet going, what the fuck is going on?

And then you're just imagining you and Jason out having a beer and you saying that and somebody saying, there ought to be a podcast. You need not imagine it, Dave, because that's exactly how this started. At Finn McCool's in Santa Monica, that is the exact conversation that was had.

We were like, we should record this. Oh, I see. I see. 11 years later, here we are. Yeah. People would love to listen to us bitch about things. No, we didn't have those illusions. Oh, this is fantastic.

Yeah. Well, all right. All right. That's what I have, gents. Thank you so much. I will see you guys next time. All right. See you next one. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Allie. Welcome, Allie. Welcome. And over at PayPal, we've got Nikolai, Judge, Jonathan, Nicola, Thomas, and Levy.

Thank you very much. Over at the tip jar, we've got Matthew, Sarah, and Christopher. Thank you, everybody. And just a reminder, for as little as $3 a month, you can get the show a little bit early and ad free. Just go sign up at Patreon.com and look for GOG.

Woo. Oh, fantastic. Until next time. That's all we got. No, no reviews this week. So until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Gilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 643.

GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we keep bringing you this top notch entertainment. Sharing the show with your friends, enemies, and Ryan Gosling is being almost as good as cash. Almost. At GOG.show, you can find a link to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans. Head over to GOG.show slash contact to send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about.

And GOG.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that we can read on the air. Stay Gosling. Man, I really hope Ryan Gosling was the guy in the window. Me too.