644: Grok Hole Sun

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. Good morning, good morning, good morning, Brian. How are you this week? It's rainy and it's crappy and I'm depressed. Ah, it's rainy, it's crappy, and I'm depressed too. You know, it's just like your home, Brian. It's just like your home. See, us Canadians aren't all that different. No, no, it's Coachella Day. Coachella's kicking off today.

Oh, it's my favorite weekend in LA because everybody's gone. Every single influencer, gone. Well, apparently they're having some problems this year, so I think some of them stuck around. Damn. Not selling out anymore like they used to.

All right. Yeah, well, that's because their lineups suck. That's kind of what I heard, but... I mean, you know, they have to market to a younger demographic. I get that. And the younger demographic, they're just not into music in the same way. It's a different thing. It's a vibe. It's not the artist. And you're going to Coachella to be you at Coachella, not you seeing bands at Coachella.

I can be me at home. Yeah, that's right. And it doesn't cost 500 bucks a ticket. I'm good. I actually do have some friends that are going, though. And I'm like, why? Like, because... I think it's habit. It's just habit. Well, yeah, I understand that. I mean, I went from Coachella 1 up until, I don't know, about 10 years ago.

And it was still becoming just kind of habit at that point. And then I was like, I don't like any of these bands. Why am I going? There you go. I hear the Stagecoats Festival is like doing gangbusters, though. So if you're in the country... Hey, it's way bigger than Coachella these days. Yeah. It's like Coachella does two weekends. I think they have one weekend off to wipe off the influencer grime and then spread around a bunch of hay and put a few, you know, put a few whatever tractors around.

And then they bring in the country artists for two weekends. Okay. Okay. I thought it was a traveling one that was the... I can't remember the Vegas one then where the guy in the hotel room shot everybody. Yeah. But I thought that was Stagecoats. See, I'm getting old. I can't even remember which festivals are which. Yeah. Well, you don't leave the house, so no big deal.

That's true. That's true. Yeah. Speaking of not leaving the house, I've been past for the past couple of weeks trying to get a job, you know, because this podcasting thing is, you know, it is what it is. And everybody wants you to go in the office now. I can't go in the office. Come on, people. What the hell? We talked about this. Working from the office is over. More people need to listen to our show and understand that. Damn it.

I think everybody's gone mostly hybrid, but some companies are all in on trying to get people back 24-7. Yeah. For some reason, it's all the people that want to hire me. Come into the office. I'm like, I can't. I have disabilities. Sorry. And they're like, OK, well, then stay home. On that note, though, I did put up my Voices.com profile this week to try and make a few extra bucks with all this shit that I've got lying around.

So if you want to hire me for your project, there's going to be a link in the show notes. All right. Yeah. I did. I've been doing auditions every day. Don't have any jobs yet, but I got shortlisted for one for for how to do death certificates in the I think it's the state of Arkansas or Alabama for like their public.

No, it's Georgia. Georgia Public Documents Division on how to properly fill out death certificates. I got shortlisted, but I didn't even get that job. Damn it. I'm sorry. Yeah, you'll get it. I should go to work at Coachella and I could be like a patchouli applier, you know, come here.

I'm just going to run around with one of those ring lights for everybody to make sure they have their proper lighting. That's it. That's it. I can just hold the ring light, hold the camera and then spritz on fake tan while they're under the shade because they don't want to get skin cancer, but they want to stay out in the sun all day. Right. I could do that. I could do that. New market opportunity. Woohoo.

Now I just got to wait till next year. That's right. Start marketing it now. We had talked a couple of weeks back about the FCC and their attempt to or the FCC, you know, all the federal agencies, too many of them. This one's the FCC. They basically were trying to crack down on Internet service providers and their big thing was you can't use the term high bandwidth unless you hit these certain metrics, which really didn't do much except for send all the ISPs, PR teams to chat GPT to figure out

In the old days, we just opened a thesaurus. Yeah. Well, now there's better tools for that. But they actually rolled something out yesterday, I believe, that I actually think is a great idea. And this went under the radar. They should have just led with this instead of that bullshit about high bandwidth.

They're rolling out mandatory broadband nutrition labels that show speeds, fees and data allowances. So they're requiring any ISP with more than 100,000 subscribers to show these things. So these labels are supposed to show the company's plans, fees and any additional costs, such as activation fees and upfront or rental fees for modems and other equipment.

They also need to show if you basically get early termination fees. I mean, it's all like all that bullshit that they've done to us all these years, all the hidden fees, all the hidden pricing has to be direct there, right there on these labels. They have to show each plan's download and upload speeds as well as any anything else involved with it.

You know what they're going to do, though. They're just going to roll out 19,000 different types of plans to make it as confusing as possible. But at least each plan will have to be labeled. Where's the label, Brian? Where does the label come in? Is it stuck on the router? No, of course, it's just going to be on the website.

But they did say that it cannot be hard to find. You cannot bury it. It has to be accessible from your customer account portal. And ISPs should give you a copy if you ask. Okay, accessible from your customer account portal can mean a lot of different things, Brian. You and I know this. I'm going to call my ISP and ask them to fax me a copy of this label.

Would you please mimeograph me a few copies and carry it over by young man-child boy? I also accept teletype. Ah, that'll work, too. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Yes. We'll send it to you in Morse code. Well, last week we did talk about Trump Media and how the stock was tanking after its IPO.

Well, nothing has changed. It's still on its downward trajectory. Yesterday it ended at $32.41. You know it's not going well when even the financial analysts on Fox News basically say that this is a turd. Yeah. I love this.

Trump owns nearly 60% of the company's shares. As of Thursday's close, his shares are worth $2.55 billion on paper. About half of what they were worth two weeks ago. So, you know, watch that one go down. But he's still barred from selling them for six months unless there's some shenanigans going on, which there probably is.

There will be shenanigans. Mm-hmm. Yeah, there always is. It's Trump. In the news. A federal court in California has recently ruled in favor of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Confirming the right to criticize social media platforms without fear of retaliation. The lawsuit filed by Elon Musk and X Corp against the K was dismissed, highlighting— Wait, isn't Elon Musk the free speech guy?

Yeah, isn't that ironic? Isn't that ironic? He's the free speech guy. Yeah. Why is he suing against free speech to criticize his platform? Yeah, I don't know. You're going to have to ask him, Brian. You're going to have to ask him.

Okay, get him on the horn. Get him on the horn. Yeah, it turns out it was a bullshit lawsuit, and the judge saw through it and said, Get the fuck out of my courtroom. That's nice. That's good. Yep. Something actually worked right. It's good. In other Elon news, Grok has been creating bizarre fake news about the solar eclipse, basically thanks to the fact that it trains itself on X and doesn't understand jokes.

Yeah. Yeah. So while this latest story, which came out Monday about the solar eclipse, isn't as dire as last week's inaccurate news that Iran had launched an attack on Israel, a headline that Grok created for the number one news source in the world, according to Elon Musk.

The one on Monday read, Sun's odd behavior. Experts baffled. I'd like to point out experts were not baffled. No one. No. We really do understand eclipses. Yeah. But yeah, because a bunch of comedians made jokes, and that's what Grok trained itself on, it made this an actual news headline.

So Grok just going great. Yeah. Yeah. Only just insane people were baffled. Well, there's a lot of them, and they have blue checks. Yeah, they do. They do. I don't know if you heard the story here, but about half a mile from my house, a woman stabbed her husband to death, then drove like a mad woman down the 405, throwing her nine year old daughter and newborn baby out the car while it was moving, and then killed herself

by running into a tree because she thought the end was nigh because of the apocalypse. Yeah. And she was an influencer with over 100,000 subscribers. But she was in California. You didn't even have, you had like a tiny little barely eclipse.

Oh, I know. It didn't even get dark. It didn't last very long. No, I think she was, I think she was an influencer on Truth Social. So, and listen to Grok on the off hours. Fair enough. All right. Yeah. God. Anyways. And in more Elon news, Tesla is introducing a robo taxi on August 8th, according to Elon on X, which tells you it's not going to fucking happen.

This, of course, happened a few hours after Reuters published a report that they are scrapping their plans to produce a low cost EV, which bumped their stock for a little bit. But apparently that was also bullshit. So we now have bullshit to cover the bullshit. Because Grok is the only PR person left over at X.

So, you know, all of his companies are forced to eat their own dog food from the other companies. So. So the Reuters report basically announced that. And then Elon, of course, came out and said that Reuters is lying again, but he didn't clarify what part of the report was a lie at all.

So he's just, God damn it, man. I'm so sick of this, dude. Well, I got a little more. Okay, great. In recent news, a Bloomberg report has cast doubt on SpaceX's claims regarding the profitability of Starlink. Despite the CEO's previous announcement of achieving break-even cash flow and dominating the satellite space, the report suggests the company significantly underestimated the costs of launching satellites

and is losing substantial amounts on ground terminals. A couple hundred bucks a shot on those. So, yeah. So he bullshitted about the financials. Surprised? No, not really. So, yeah.

Just the hits keep on coming. The hits keep on coming. SpaceX is the one that I'll actually, like, give him a pass on. But Starlink is the one that I won't. Yeah. If you want to launch other people's satellites and get people to the ISS and get to the moon, that's great. Leave it at the moon. Fuck Mars.

We know that's not going to work. Ever. Dumb idea. And quit screwing up the sky with these Starlink satellites, you know? All the airlines have said, no, we don't want it. The only people that are using it right now are basically the Russians to kill the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians can't afford the satellites anymore.

So, hey, you know. Yeah. I don't know. I've never liked Starlink from the get. And this just, this doesn't really help its reputation in my book. No. But, you know, now we have a gazillion satellites up there cluttering up the light sky. So, thanks a lot. Oh, there's going to be more, too.

They're just getting started. And now Amazon's on track to do the same thing. Right. So, you know, we're going to be, we're basically going to be locked in pretty soon. So, it doesn't matter. You're not going to get to Mars because you can't get past, you know, near Earth orbit because of all the crap up there.

Anyway. Speaking of crap, President Biden has acknowledged that the U.S. is actually considering a request from the Australian government to cease its legal actions against Julian Assange. Mm-hmm.

Well, isn't that silly? After all this time, I guess they could just, you know, I guess they could say time served. But, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, cost fallacy, baby. Look it up. Come on. Also, last week we had talked about how basically YouTube said, hey, stop training your AI models on our videos because that's, that's our creator's copyrights.

Well, you'll be shocked to find out, Jason, that both OpenAI and Google have been training their AI models on text transcribed from YouTube videos. No shit, Sherlock. No shit. Yeah. There's a report that's come out which describes the lengths that OpenAI, Google, and Meta have gone in order to maximize the amount of data they can feed into their AIs, citing numerous people with knowledge of the company's practices.

This, of course, is not surprising at all. But, according to the New York Times, OpenAI used its whisper speech recognition tool to transcribe more than one million hours of YouTube videos, which were then used to train GPT-4. So, and Google, of course, which technically owns YouTube, but still has to respect the rights that they grant people, said, fuck it, it's ours.

And train their models on it, too, which they weren't supposed to do. No, no. Yeah. No, the big news this week is that we're out of shit to put into these, these models, these LLMs for the training data. Now, here's the thing.

They have literally gotten to the end of the internet, Jason. They have. They have gotten to the end of the internet. Now the discussions are, can we make some shit up to train against? And I'm like. Which doesn't make any sense. I'm like, take a breath, guys. Take a breath. And I want you to realize what you're saying. You are a junkie at this point.

You have turned into a junkie. But we have to keep our jobs going. Shareholder value. More money. If you cannot make this work with the sum total of human knowledge, which you have now, on your hard drives, you have everything we've ever fucking created.

And a lot of shit's wrong. But if you can't do it with that, I would concentrate on sorting out the wheat from the chaff with the data you do have. Seriously. Come on. It's like, okay, first, stop looking at X for anything.

Stop looking at Reddit for most things. I think the only one that really is going to benefit, at least the decent information, is from Stack Overflow, which got sucked into wherever that got sucked into. But anyway, it's just, it has gotten to the point of ludicrosity.

It has. I can make up a word. You did. Because- But that's now been sucked up by the AI, and the AI now thinks it's a real word. I know. I know. Well, maybe the AI will give me credit for coining the term dickies back in the day, and I can revive that. I'm still stuck on that. Damn it. But it's like, come on.

What, if you have all this stuff and you still can't make it work, is it a failed proposition, or do you just need to figure some new shit out with what you've got instead of trying to make up more shit to shove into the already broken system? Right. I mean, I'm not a genius, and I don't plan to know, to say that I know everything about how AI works.

But I'm guessing if you've got everything that's ever been on the internet, half the books that have ever been written, and you shove it all into this thing, and it still sucks, well- It's going to keep sucking. It's going to- Yeah. You know? Feeding it with more data that it makes up is not going to solve the problem. I think we all understand that, except for the people running these things.

No, it just reminds me of the guy that was telling somebody about his business. Yeah, yeah, we lose a dollar on every unit, but we'll make it up in scale. That's like- Come on. Google New Order Blue Monday, people. It was the most expensive record.

The record cost more to produce, the vinyl, than they sold it for, and then it went on to become a fucking million-selling album. They lost so much fucking money. Scale did not help. No, it doesn't. It just fucking doesn't. There you go.

Got some more pink slips in the news, Jason. The Geek Squad has been a hit. Oh, no! Yes. Geek Squad agents have been flooding Reddit with images of their badges and posts about going sleeper after the company reportedly conducted mass layoffs this week. Listen, Geek Squad guys.

You're nerds. You're not fucking 007. You're not going sleeper mode. Jesus. You got fired. Yeah. Yeah. No. Former employees spoke to 404 Media, said they were sent an email notifying them to work from home on Wednesday and were then called individually to be told the news about their jobs.

I suppose it would be hard to be a Geek Squad guy to work from home. Yeah, pretty much. You kind of have to deal with the machines in front of you. Yeah. You have to go into the housewife's home to steal all of her nudes off of her hard drive and then post them to the internet. Now, I'm always sad about this sort of thing, but you and I have IR for Geek Squad.

It wasn't exactly the best and brightest. No, it was definitely not the best and brightest. It was 00s. That's what they were. No doubt. Drop the hero. They are the zero. Yeah, not a big fan.

Not a big fan. But I got a little bit more new pink slip news that came out. And this is kind of a non-tech field that is losing a bunch of people. This is the Texas Tribune reports an automated scoring engine that utilizes natural language processing, of course.

What they're going to be doing is the Texas Education Agency is going to be taking away 4,000 jobs this year and putting it in the hands of AI to test basically scores from the standardized tests for something to eighth grade, third grade to eighth grade, I believe.

Like the written exams, not the stuff that you could have just filled out the little bubbles and the scanning machines could read them. They're going to grade that too with AI. And what they're going to do is they used to have 6,000 graders. They're going to get it down to two. But what they're going to do is those 2,000 are going to spot check the results from the AI to make sure that they're not hallucinating.

Little tip for you Texas students that might be listening to me right now, little Johnny in third grade there. If you're given the optional written part to come up with your own topic, do not write about black history. Do not write about black history. We know what AI does with black people. Or the eclipse.

Don't write about the eclipse. Try not to do any law questions that might come up. Yeah. Avoid that. What else has been AI just been gangbusters at? Oh, everything. Fingers. Oh, yeah. Write about six fingers. My good buddy, Six Finger Louie.

You're going to get an A. Or the Six-Fingered Man on The Princess Bride. So, yeah. Have fun. Have fun, kids. What could possibly go wrong? But it's Texas, so are they really going to be able to tell? I don't know. It's a big state, man.

It is a big state. It is a very big state. I used to live there. I know. I drove through once. And it took you about six weeks, didn't it? Took three fucking days, man. It's a big fucking state. I know. And that's the first and only time I've ever seen get a gun for opening a bank account or get a gun for filling up your gas tank.

That's about it. You got to buy a hot dog to get ammo. Two. Oh, man. Okay. So, moving on. Sorry, Texas. You know I do like you. I've been there a lot. Your barbecue is fantastic. There's a lot of things in Texas that are fantastic. So, Dove, the soap company, says that it is drawing a line in the sand saying that we are never going to use AI or artificial intelligence to create or alter images of women in our advertisements.

We're going to do it the old-fashioned way with Photoshop. Photoshop. Everybody else. Now, Dove has actually always been a very good company in this aspect because they were the first company that came out with like using real women in their commercials. Like, you know, not perfect looking, all that sort of thing. So, good for them.

Good. But that's your brand. You have branded yourself that way already. So, it's not really a big stance. No, it's not. It's not. This is kind of just staying on point. Now, Versace comes out and says that. Okay. I'm listening. I got to say, the Dove for Men line is actually really good.

I enjoy their product. Yeah. I do, too. Yes. My skin's smooth. Yeah. All the men in my family use that. Use the Dove for Men products. Highly recommended. So, yeah. Now, feel free to use AI on your guys in your advertisements because nobody wants to see a beer-bellied fat fucker.

So, be my guest. Some people do. Some people do, I guess. There's a lid for every pot, Jason. Yes, there is. Yes, there is. So, to wrap this up for today, I got a little bit of influencer news because I thought this was a thing of the past.

In a tragic incident, a 39-year-old Anessa Polenko fell to her death. 39-year-old? This is so over. The old people are doing it now. The old people are dying. The old people are dying. Fell to her death while taking a selfie on a clifftop in Abkhazia, Georgia.

Abkhazia. Abkhazia. Something like that. That's what I'd go with. Prisoner of Abkhazia. She climbed over a barrier at the Gagri viewing point, stumbled, and fell over 170 feet onto the beach below. I love this. The event underscores a growing public health concern, highlighted by researchers who note that selfie-related deaths are becoming increasingly common due to the risks people take to capture the perfect photo.

Apparently, they've never heard of Photoshop or AI. You know, this is Darwin in action, as far as I'm concerned. Oh, yes. Efforts like establishing no selfie zones and enhancing safety measures are suggested to prevent such incidents. Polenko's funeral was held in Sochi, Russia, where she was a beautician.

Well, I would say safety measures, I don't know if you read the beginning of the article, she climbed over a barrier. But if there had been a no selfie zone sign on that barrier, Jason, she would have paid attention to that. That would have saved her life.

Yes. Oh, man. Not enough labels. This is why we have written on the paper wrapping that our burgers come in, not edible now. We were supposed to have fucking jetpacks and flying cars by now. We have paper wrappers that tell us not to eat them.

Oh, but you know, I'm thinking, I'm thinking this is why influencers make so much money, because there really is hazard involved in the job that they do. You know? They should all wear construction vests. I know those, you know, they do make more money than those deep sea oil rig workers.

So, you know, I guess, I guess the, the risk should, should be consummate with the pay. So I guess, you know, yeah, every now and again, you're going to lose one or two. Look, Bob, another 20 people died this week taking selfies. Guess we're getting a raise. Woo-hoo!

Media candy. Pirated copies of the highly anticipated movie Dune Part 2 have leaked online, beating the firm's digital official release date. What happened here, nobody really knows where this came from, because usually you see these copies.

This is a very high quality copy that is the same that would be released when it's, you know, you can buy it for streaming or is released to a streaming platform. It came out early, way early, or than anybody thought. Two weeks ago, if I remember correctly. Last week, this came out last week.

Last week, okay. Yeah, yeah. Because it was a very big surprise to me when I saw it come out. I'm like, well, hello there. I thought it was a Handycam copy that showed up on my little pirate stick. No, no, there was one out before that. So, and this one was a tribute to the Evo group who apparently got busted not too long ago.

So somebody, somebody's pouring one out for their homies. And I have to say, it's a pretty good copy. Don't ask me how I know. I don't know either, but I just haven't had time because I don't want to break it up. I need a three-hour block to sit and not watch this.

I haven't found that three-hour block yet. Well, when you do find that three-hour block, Brian, to not watch this, it is fantastic. And it is even better than not watching it in the theater because you can take a pee break, like several of them. I think I took five while I was not watching this movie for three hours this week.

I have taken five purportedly for the supposed fantastic movie that isn't available anywhere yet for free. Yes, I know. Yes, I know. I know. Yeah. So, you know, I not watched this in honor of our friend Brian Blondel, who actually went to the theater and spent two and a half hours in the theater.

And then the movie was turned off and the staff of the movie theater came into the theater and kicked everyone out saying, we're closing due to staffing issues. And here's a refund. Go home. Let people finish the fucking movie, for God's sake.

It's a half hour. Yeah, and for the movie that I didn't watch for three hours, that last half hour is the half hour that you want to see. So, you know, I think that, you know, I'm with Evo. Stand with Evo and not watch this movie that you can get high quality on any of your streaming platforms that are not paid for.

Yeah. That's all I'm saying. Well, actually, technically, I do pay for the streaming platform that I'm not supposed to have. Oh. I don't pay for the, sorry, I don't pay for the streaming platform that I don't have. And I don't intend to find three hours this weekend to not watch this movie. I recommend not watching it with a bottle of wine and enjoying yourself.

It's three hours. I'm going to need three bottles of wine. Three bottles of wine. That's true. I forgot about you. You have appetites. You have appetites. And Fallout, the new video based on the video game, came out on Amazon Prime.

Right. And, yeah, fucking commercials in it. Yeah. That's, they told us. I know. And like sheep. This is the real sheep, people. Yeah. You blue checkers. This is where we're being sheep. Not that other bullshit you're making up. What I love is at the beginning of this one, watching a thing that I do pay for, there's an ad that comes on at the beginning of it saying, this episode is brought to you ad free by blah, blah, blah.

After this ad. After this ad. If it's, if I, if you're making me watch a fucking ad, it's not ad free. No, that's very true. Yeah. I watched the first episode, though, and it was good. So. Yeah, I did. I saw reviews that said it's actually really good.

And I, there was a really good article on, on slate basically saying, this is the new superhero movie. It's going to be all video game adaptations. That's going to be the new thing. So. Well. As long as they do them well, who cares? I don't care what the source material is. Just have a story. Yeah. As long as it's a good story, you know, I, the last of us was phenomenal.

Loved it. So hopefully that'll be coming back soon for season two. But yeah, I think there's three episodes out already of fallout. So yeah, I can't wait to watch the next one. So, so far it's a good start. It's a very good start. The regime wrapped up.

That was a one and done. It's not, it's not a series. Right. So it's just a mini series. A limited season or limited series. I believe they call it the old days. We'd call it a mini series. It was weird. It was weird. I can't say that I would recommend taking six hours of your life to watch it.

Yeah. I've already got three hours of my life to not watch something else. So I think I'm going to pass on this. Yeah. Yeah. You could actually not watch that twice and you would be much better off. Okay. Watching this for six hours. Thank you for saving me six hours. Jason. Well, you saved me an hour and a half after Constellation. So it's the least I can do, Brian.

It's the least I can do. No problem. And continuing on with our tribute to things that make us feel old. Sean of the dead is 20 years old this week. Sorry. My back hurts right now. Yes. Well, it's funny. The first time I saw it was in the Cinerama Dome, which makes my back.

Every time I think of that, I think of my back hurting because the seat sucked. I saw the week before it came out and there's another article that I have in here where Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost get interviewed and they talk about some of the origins of getting the movie off the ground.

And they talk about the screening that I was at. So it was kind of fun. That's cool. Kind of fun. But the news is, the real news is that they're going to put it back in theaters this year. Okay. And I'm going. God damn it. Hopefully, they won't turn it off at the end and I get to see it all the way through.

Check to make sure they're fully staffed that day. When you walk in, say, how many people are here serving up the popcorn? Exactly. Unless you want red on you, you better let that fucking movie play. It is hands down one of the best movies ever made as far as I'm concerned. Look, it's a silly comedy and it involves horror.

Two things my wife does not like. My wife loves this movie. Yeah. It's a Ram Zamcom. Yeah. It's fucking phenomenal. It's one of the best movies ever made. Yep. And Edgar Wright, I do still believe, is one of the best directors out there. And he is going to be redoing The Running Man. Okay.

The funny part of The Running Man is that the original Running Man took place in 2025. That's when this movie will be coming out. And all he has to do now is just walk out on the street because by 2025, it's going to be just like Running Man. Starting to feel that way. It's getting close.

It's getting close. So look forward to that at a theater near you. All right. I've started watching a new show over on Disney+. It's called Renegade Nell. And it's delightful. I'm four episodes in. It's half period piece, half comedy.

And then if you add another half to it, which is inappropriate math, half action. Okay. Is it an adult thing or is it a kid's thing? I wouldn't let my kid watch it. But I mean, tweens and teens up, I'd say. But yeah, there's adult joke. There's adult content.

It's a lot of fun. And it's got one of the guys from Ted Lasso is in it as this little weird fairy guy. And it's, oh man, it's just weird. But I like it. It's funny and clever. And yeah. It's like, you know, kind of a period witcher for kids.

Okay. Okay. Oh, I see. There's a super powered sidekick. Yes. Yes. Yes. Sprites. Okay. It's been a lot of fun so far. So I have to say, you know, it came out of nowhere. I hadn't heard about it. It's obviously, you know, it's British produced and all that sort of thing. So, you know, I hadn't heard anything about this.

All of a sudden, it just starts showing up in my Disney+. And I was like, all right, let's give that a go. And well worth it so far. All right. All right. I won't be checking it out. Enjoy it. All right. Saving you some time there. I don't have Disney Plus anymore. Oh, right, right. And this came out and I just had to laugh because, you know, these people just don't understand how anything works anymore.

In an interview with the channel Tweak Music Tips, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said that DJ streamers on the platform will have to share their revenue with music labels. You know why? You're broadcasting their fucking music. Is that why, Brian?

You can't do that without paying for it. Radio stations pay for it. Streaming radio stations pay for it. Satellite radio stations pay for it. DJs pay for it when they play shows at venues because you pay a fee to do that.

Elevators even pay for it. Elevator music people pay for it. Telephone music pays for it. You don't have to? No. Why? Are you a fucking special snowflake? Oh, yes, they all think they are. That's right. Twitch is owned by Amazon. They can afford it.

Oh, yeah. Well, they're basically saying that the DJs have to pay a portion of this as well because they're making money, right? So if you are a DJ spinning over Twitch and you're getting money, you owe some of that money. They're not going to pay full freight for you. No, that makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, if you're making money off of it, yeah, a cut should go back to the, it's just like a radio station. I mean, yes, we know how this works. There's literally no fucking difference. Yes. But they have not been doing so. So yes. So finally, it's like, okay, I guess we have to, I don't know, pay the people that made this music.

Yeah. Good luck. I've been working with somebody who's got a song coming out in two weeks. And now that I've seen how the sausage is made, I just, the music industry, I just don't understand. I just don't understand any of it.

God, publishing rights. Yeah. That is one of those things that you have to have like a five-year degree just to get the basics of it. Yeah. It's complicated. It is. It is so stupid. It is so stupid. But, uh, yeah. But you know, don't, don't worry, Jason.

The blockchain is going to fix that. Yeah. And smart contracts going to make it all easier. Yeah. At least the people I'm working with, most of them understand that it's all smoke and mirrors because they're never going to make a dime off the actual song. They're going to make, they're going to make money performing the song.

Yeah. You know, that's it. Yeah. You, you, you, the song is a loss leader for actually getting your ass into a place to get asses in seats and sell t-shirts. That's all it is anymore. Yep. Been saying that for quite some time. I know you have. And now I get to see it firsthand and it's like, I, we're, we're surrounding ourselves with people who understand that the, you know, that the music is not going to make any money because when you get to people, when you get around people who think that they're going to become gazillionaires off of a song and like hold onto their percentage points, like

they were doubloons. Those are the annoying people who just don't get the joke. And it's like, let's get rid of you, you know? So, uh, you know, speaking of about everything we were just talking about, I don't know if you saw that, uh, Trent Reznor's back in the news because he's firing up the nine inch nails machine again and, uh, starting to run out of money.

No, I think, I think he got fucking bored doing soundtracks. Um, and you know, wants to get back out there again, but he did do a really interesting bit of his interview where he was talking about, again, the rich get richer. He's like, he slammed on streaming media, basically saying it's great if you're Drake or Taylor Swift, it sucks if you're anybody else.

All the money goes to the rich people already. So that's pretty much what we've been saying the whole, whole time. I mean, literally since Spotify launched, that's what the narrative has been. Yeah. The big artists are going to do great. Everybody else is going to get shafted. Squeezing out the middle class of musicians.

You know, the ones that actually write good stuff. Cups and doodads. So I don't have Roku. I know you do or did, and a lot of people seem to really like it. I've got two Roku TVs made by TCL. Yes. All right. And they serve ads through their platform, but apparently they've filed a patent to explore the idea of showing you ads while you're using third-party devices connected to its TVs.

So this is, this was found by somebody called, or a company called Lopass. They're looking to develop a system for a method for ad insertion by a display device coupled to a media device by a high-definition media interface connection. So basically you've got an Apple TV, a Chromecast, whatever else that isn't Roku plugged into your Roku TV.

They've got a patent now to figure out a way to send ads as soon as you pause your other, your other's platform. Right. Yeah. I can. That's awesome. Yeah. I've seen the interesting thing is that cable boxes do this now. Like, cause I've got a, I'm on direct TV.

So as soon as you pause, like two seconds later, you just start getting slammed with ads. It just turns into like a carousel of ads. Right now, my Roku only shows me an ad when I go to the change interface screen. So if I want to switch between any of the apps or the, honestly, for me, I switched between satellite and Apple TV.

That's it. Cause the Roku built-in apps are shit compared to running them on an Apple TV. But I can see this. It's a very easy tech thing. It's like, okay, detect no motion on the screen or pause. Then boom, up comes an ad. Is this a good thing? Well, of course, fuck no.

It's not a good thing. It's not a good thing. And of course, there was a lot of public pushback on this. And Roku has come out and said, well, we never said anything about implementing it. We're just filing the patent. It's an intriguing technology. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah. So coming soon to a Roku TV near you.

No, there's gotta be, there's gotta be a market out there for dumb TVs again soon. You'd think. You can't even find one anymore. It's so annoying. I know. All I, you know, it's just a computer monitor now is what you need. Yeah. Cause that's, it's really all it is anymore. Plug an HDMI cable into it.

Boom. The best I do is I've got Samsung TVs and they're smart TVs, but you can go in and turn off everything. Yeah. See, the problem is I got, I've got one Samsung TV that I got at a resale shop for the studio and those TVs are in mint condition. I got it for next to nothing.

And they come, cause it turns out they come from an apartment building that bought all these TVs for their tenants. And then they swapped out and got new TVs. And when they sold the old ones, the genius manager of the apartment complex didn't remove his credentials from any of the streaming services. So I get free everything on that Samsung TV.

So I do not want to wipe it. Nice. I get that. Yeah. Yeah. So at least there, there's a win, you know, cause by, by direct TV, cause it's all wireless now with direct TV, the transmitter will not make it to the garage where the Samsung TV is.

So it's like, I get free shit in the garage. It's great. But the two Roku TVs in the house still get all that. But, um, I, the one thing I wish I could do is I, I, you know, I've got that Amazon fire TV that is the most annoying piece of shit interface on the planet.

Oh, I, I have an Amazon fire stick, which may or may not have a certain streaming network that doesn't exist on it. Um, and that's all I use it for, but it is the worst interface just to even open up that app, just to boot it up. It's ads everywhere. It's horrible. It's just crap.

Well, here's it. Here it is with the actual built into the TV. First, when you turn it on, it has to boot up, which takes a long time. You can't just, you know, turn it on and go. And as soon as you do, it goes to a screen of ads for Amazon prime videos.

I'm like, uh, I, this is a very expensive TV. I bought this. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't buy it with the ad version. It's not like a Kindle where you can buy it with or without ads. I bought a fucking television, not an Amazon propaganda device, or I guess I did buy an Amazon propaganda device because I can't fucking figure out how to turn it off.

You did. You did. Yeah. Yep. That's awesome. And it won't default. It also won't default to your, I want it to be HDMI one is my input. I want that to go to when I turn it on because it's my Apple TV. I don't care how much technology you have in your Amazon stupid box.

Ah, but you did not buy an Apple TV. You bought a Amazon TV. I know. I bought a fire TV, which is just about as pleasurable as going to the fucking fire festival. At least you got a sandwich there. Oh, wait. Yeah. Seriously. Well, speaking of groundbreaking technologies that are going to change the world, we talked a lot about the humane AI pin as it was announced and before it came out to the public and it has now come out to the public.

I saw this review and I'm just going to read two paragraphs from this because I just think it encapsulates everything that we need to know about this. I don't even know what it is, really. I found myself at a loss for words while trying to explain the humane AI pin to my friends. The best description so far is that it's a combination of a wearable Siri button with a camera and built-in projector that beams onto your palm.

But each time I start explaining that, I get so caught up in pointing out its problems that I never really get to fully detail what the AI pin can do, or is meant to do anyway. In the company's own words, the humane AI pin is the first wearable device and software platform built to harness the full power of artificial intelligence.

If that doesn't clear it up, well, I can't blame you. I've got some to read too. Because this is the, I think this is Gizmodo, so of course it had a great headline. Humane's AI pin is a $700 flaming dumpster fire.

And after months of testing, the review embargo has finally lifted. And as it turns out, the $700 Gizmo, which also requires a $24 monthly subscription plan, is every bit as disappointing as we expected. Perfect. No, I was on X every now and then.

I just ended up scrolling through it. And of course, there's a bunch of fucking idiot, like, blue checkmark people that have these things that are trying to explain how great they are, because that's what people do these days. And one of them was like, you know, this thing is just really great. Yeah, there's a learning curve. I mean, you know, normally you wouldn't want to spend five days learning how to do basic features.

But once you spend those five days learning the basic features, it's great. Five days learning the basic features that you already have on your fucking phone. But now they're on your palm from a laser, Jason. Unless it's sunny and you can't see it.

It's the future. Oh, great. Great. Here's another future one. This is going to be a very brief one. New federal bill could require disclosure of songs used in AI training. All of them. Representative Adam Schiff introduced the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act.

If passed, it would require AI companies to disclose all copyrighted works used in training. Everything. Everything we've ever done is copyrighted. We already know they've sucked in everything on YouTube. That's almost all the music in the world. I guarantee you. Done. Yep.

I got another one in the next segment to tell you about, too, that you're just going to love. But yeah, this is just, yeah. Sorry. Day late and a dollar short, Adam.

At the library. Brian, did you get a chance to read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt yet? I have started it. I have thoughts. Okay. Okay. Bring them on. All right. Obviously, insanely disturbing.

I've only gotten like the first third of the way in. It's a lot of charts and it's all, it's very, it leaves little doubt that this is the cause. That the cause is our phones and high-speed internet and social networks. And they are exceedingly bad for kids.

And all of childhood has been ruined by these things. And we absolutely have to do something. I haven't gotten any further than that because I can only read it in small chunks because A, really, really depressing. And B, I don't like his writing style. I don't think he has a writing style.

He doesn't. He doesn't have a writing style. That's the real problem. It is so dry. It is like, it reminds me of being back in college and doing my dual major and the psychology courses and reading just endless fucking, you know, different studies and all that sort of stuff.

God, if he could actually write. If he could, if he could fall, if he could, you know, we've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? Like, astrophysicist, but communicator. Jonathan Haidt is not a communicator. No. He needs a co-writer. Yeah. He's an academic who needs some prose guidance.

Maybe he should put it into chat GPT. Maybe. Because this stuff is fucking important. But nobody's going to read it because it's so dry. Yeah. Well, fortunately, a lot of people are actually reading it, which is good. I'm seeing it all over the place. The one thing that I wanted to touch on, because I hadn't finished the book by the time I did my first review, and I said, oh, there's no solutions or anything.

At least the last third of the book is, or maybe 15%. I wouldn't even go as far as a third, is all dedicated to things we can do. So he does throw out a lot of ideas, and some of them aren't bad. Some of them actually aren't bad that I thought. I thought it was just going to be like, yeah, that's never going to happen.

But he's got some good ones in there. So good. I can't wait to get to that part in about a year. I was going to say, stick it out. That's why I like the audio version of this, because I could 2X it, and it gets rid of the dryness. But otherwise, yeah, it's basically, it reads like a very long academic paper. Yep.

And to just kind of scrub my mind from that, I actually went back and started re-listening to the book Wool by Hugh Howey, which Silo was based on Apple TV+. Yep. And because you had mentioned how close it was, how close the series was to the book.

And I was like, wow, I can't really remember the book. I remember they were in a big tube. That's all I can remember. It was a bunch of people in a big tube. Yeah. So I went back and I started reading it. And holy shit, it is basically the script for the show. They actually adapted something and did it right.

Exactly. Yeah. I'm impressed. But I'm going to actually finish it, because it's a very good one. The issue I had was I got it so long ago that if I go to Audible and I just go to Wool and try and buy it, or the Silo series, you can't buy the copy I have anymore.

I actually have to dig into my library, go back and search for it to find the version that I paid for, because they've redone it. This is one of those weird things where he self-published at first, and then multiple editions came out, and then there was something called the Omnibus, and then they were split up, and then they were put back together again.

And then he signed with an actual publisher, so then they were all re-released again, and it's all incredibly confusing. Very confusing, yes. I think I got the version that he released. Yeah, me too. Which is really good. I mean, it's really well-written. I mean, well-spoken. The actress who did the book is fantastic.

But the interesting thing is when I tried to find the link to put it in the show notes here, I searched for Wool Audible. Now, I don't know if you remember, Brian, but I'm using the Kagi search engine now. That's right. And the first two videos, it gives me a link at the top to go straight to the Audible listing, and right underneath it, it says two videos on YouTube.

Wool, audiobook, full, two of them on YouTube. So I could just go listen to the book for free on YouTube, and they're not hiding. They've been there for years, and together they've got over 100,000 views.

And nobody has decided to go take those down for some reason. I don't know why. I just thought that was very interesting. So nothing more than that, but it's like you can't get around people stealing your shit anymore. No, you really can't.

But I got to say, just a quick touchback on that. The Kagi search engine, I'm loving that. It's a little bit slower to return results, like by a quarter of a second. I can tell there's a definite lag while it goes back out to its search providers to grab the results and shove them into a page.

But it's worth it because I don't spend time scrolling. The actual results that I'm looking for are, I'd say, 90% of the time above the fold. All right. That's good. No ads at all. Well, if you're paying for it, they better not be. Exactly. So, you know, so far it's worth it just on the time saving and the fact that I could have saved myself 20 bucks if I'd have seen search for the audio book that I was looking for.

I wouldn't have had to give the money to Amazon. Right. I just stole it from YouTube. Right. Oh, and now that it's – but here, since it's on YouTube, you know it's in ChatGPT. Yes, it is. It's sold from there. Yeah. So ChatGPT thinks we live in giant tubes now. Woo! With no eclipses.

Yes. I also needed something to read as a break from the Anxious Generation just because, you know, you can't just sit there and curl up with the good old Anxious Generation at night. So I went to one of my old reliable what we call shitter sci-fi authors, A.G. Riddle. He's got one out called Lost in Time that I had not read before.

Whew. Yeah, don't read this one. He's got some good ones. This one was horrific. All right. As far as the shitter sci-fi goes, this one should just be used as the teepee? Yes, it should. If you have a physical copy of this book and you run out of toilet paper, this is the one to use.

The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave with podcast super host Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the CyberWire podcast for all your cybersecurity news.

The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean. And the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy. Oh, yeah. And the host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings, too. Any more shows, Dave? Are we topped off for the week? Yeah, that about covers it.

Yeah. Okay, okay. Just making sure. It's been a while since I asked. No, it's enough. It's enough. All right. It really is enough. It's plenty. You got an hour or two. I'm sure you can squeeze in one more, Dave. I'm sure. Sure. Why not? Yeah. I wouldn't even notice. Well, if everybody's not listening to any of Dave's new shows, check out Schmackters.com for the best.

Wow. Stomping on his promos. I had to get one in there. I had to get one in there. What is Schmackters? Do I dare ask? Schmackters is a new show I do with James Marsters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame and Mark Devine of Sex in the City fame. Oh, wow.

A couple of actors who answer fan questions. Got it. Yes. Okay. Well, that's fun. Are you co-hosting the show or just behind the scenes? I am. I am mildly on-air talent. I do the intro and the outro, and I read the questions and chime in every now and again with a delightful quip.

Make sure you listen to my new show with Dave Bittner called Schmodcasters. I think Kevin Smith has that one locked down. Yeah. It's mectacular. Yeah. Oh, my. I want to kick off here with something that came across my feeds and tickled my fancy.

Someone set the MIT open source license to music, and it's pretty damn good. So the back story here is there is a- Suno. Suno.ai. There you go. I've been using this. Yep. Okay. So you're familiar.

Oh, yeah. I'm familiar. Yep. There's this tool called Suno, which is an AI engine for generating music, and it is hilarious. So because it is hilarious if you're not a musician, in which case it is frightening.

Fair point. Fair point. Fair point. I think it's hilarious. I think it's hilarious in that you can give it any ridiculous prompt, and in mere moments, you will have a beautifully rendered piece of music that reflects with great earnestness the ridiculous prompt that you gave it.

I asked it to write an 80s pop song about the embarrassment of going to the prom with pimples on your face, and it did it. And I, in honor of my Hacking Humans co-host Joe Kerrigan, I asked it to write me a heavy metal anthem about a guy named Joe who hates everything, and it did it.

And Joe loves it. So anyway, this was brought to my attention because someone took the MIT open source license and had a breathy, soulful woman's voice set to sad piano music. It's very good.

Yeah. It's really good. Like, I listen to it more than once. Yeah. We will add that at the end of the show because I'm pretty sure you can't copyright it. Well, that was my next point, is that, isn't this interesting?

I actually made this point over on the Cyber Wire Daily podcast that right now, as it stands, current interpretation of copyright law is that things generated by artificial intelligence are not eligible for copyright.

So the case I made on Cyber Wire was, what happens if I go to one of these engines and I say, make me a new David Bowie album? I say, the stuff he did before, let's dance. Input that, make me a new David Bowie album. I don't think we're that far from that being a reality and it actually being a good David Bowie album.

I think that's already there. This is a discussion I was having with Jason. They put guardrails on this so you couldn't input artists' names directly. Right. I bet there's the un-guardrated version. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's already there.

Like, it's not perfect yet, but it's there. And then the one thing that you can do, and we're getting back into like, I mean, I remember having these discussions, you know, 30 years ago when we were first getting into web design. Okay. So if I take this artwork here and I make seven to eight different changes to it, then it's no longer copywritten.

So if I download one of these Suno AI songs and I fold, spindle, and manipulate it and I bring it into GarageBand or I bring it into Pro Tools and I add some stuff and I chop and paste and move it around, now I can copyright it. Well, that was going to be my next question.

Yep. How much do you have to add to something that is uncopyrightable to make it copyrightable? Yeah. We don't really know yet. We don't have that answer yet either. Yeah. And what if you're the estate of David Bowie and I share this album, which is not eligible for copyright, what do you sue me for infringing?

Yep. That's a million-dollar question right now. Right. Yeah. Let me tell you, my wife is at a table, a virtual table, discussing these sorts of things daily. Yeah. And what if I, if I, if I call it a parody, that brings in a whole nother level of protection against someone coming after me.

These are interesting times and I really think it's going to be a wild ride as we figure these things out. And if you're interested in these sorts of things, you should listen to Caveat, where me and my co-host Ben Yellen discuss these sort of policy issues every week.

That's Caveat wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget Schmackters, where they don't talk about that shit at all. I wonder, I wonder if these things know Pig Latin. So you could put the, put the artist's name in Pig Latin and have it translated.

So you're not actually using the artist's name, but that's the workaround. I was thinking about that too. My grandmother likes a special artist. Well, one of the things I tried to do. So how I ran into the guardrails was that I asked it to create a moody, ethereal piece in the style of Peter Gabriel.

Yeah, I can't do that. Right. Well, that's what I found out. It said, oh, no, you used an artist's name. Can't do that. But that got me thinking. Replace it with 80s pop. And then there you go. Well, how precisely can I describe an artist without using the name so that they are the only choice for what the engine can generate?

That would be an interesting exercise for someone who's not me. Yeah, so someone who has the time. Yeah. Write me a song in the style of a solo artist whose name may or may not be related to bees and was once in a group of a threesome that might have been called cops.

Right. Right. Yeah. Interesting. That rhymes with. Rhymes with bling. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes. I'm warning you.

This is a rabbit hole. Oh, yes. It is. It is. A total rabbit hole. Yeah. I am just about out of my free credits, and I'm not sure what's going to happen after that. Oh, I blew through mine real fast. I signed up already. I don't know. Oh, okay. Oh, good. We're going to send you our prompts to test that.

You guys sent me all your stable diffusion ones before, so my turn. There you go. There you go. I did the Apple Vision Pro demo this week. Ooh. Please tell me I was inside and not in public. Have either of you guys done this?

No. I don't leave the house. How am I going to get one? Okay. So I made an appointment at my local Apple store, and I went in and sat down and was greeted, and I went through the entire demo. And let me tell you, it is very impressive.

Okay. So I've been trying to think of a way to describe what this experience is like, because we've all had the experience with headsets, with the goggles. And they've been around for decades.

This is something else. Imagine, remember what it was like the first time you went and saw an IMAX movie. Are we talking old school IMAX with the dish?

We're talking real IMAX. Okay. Yeah. With the science museum IMAX. Yeah. Laying back and looking up at the circle. Yeah. Right. My recollection is the first time you go to an IMAX movie, or even if you go to an IMAX movie that's full of first timers, when they put the first big impressive thing on the screen, there's an audible gasp from the audience because they go, you know, and because

it's something that you have never experienced before. And that's what I felt like. I remember that. Just a quick tangent. What was yours? Your first item. IMAX moment. To fly. Okay. At the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

The one that I remember is when they opened the shuttle doors in the Cardinal Bay. Yes. And everybody grabbed the armrest because it felt like you were going to start falling. Right. Right. Brian? Mine was at Disneyland. They had the big IMAX theater, and it was an American patriotic bullshit where they did, you know, waves of grain and Purple Mountain's Majesty and all that sort of stuff.

Yes. The circle vision types. Yeah, circle vision. Yeah. It's very much like that as well. So part of the point I'm trying to make here is that if you have not seen an IMAX movie before, I can describe it to you. I can tell you.

I can say, oh, it's like a movie, but it's bigger. Oh, it's like a movie, but it wraps around your field of view, and it's got better sound, and it's sharper, and you'll go, oh, that's cool. But then you go to the IMAX movie, and the screen pops up, and you go, holy shit.

Right. That was my experience with Apple Vision Pro. Okay. All right. It is just so far beyond anything I've ever experienced with something like this. I left the demo feeling as though I had just been on a theme park ride.

Like, I had that kind of, hmm, my senses. Yeah, I was amped up. My senses were a little bit scrambled because I wasn't sure what just happened, and in a 20-minute demo, it all comes at you so fast, and part of the reason they do the demo is to overwhelm you into buying the thing, right?

I was going to say, you're left with a sense of awe and wonderment, but not with an Apple Vision Pro. No, no. Well, that's the question, Dave. Do you think it's worth the cost? Yeah. No, I do not. Not for me. But I can see how it could be very compelling, and I think it is a look into the future.

Now, a couple of other points here. I included, I copy and pasted into our show notes this sort of famous GIF of jumping rope, power towers with power lines, and there's one that's like jumping rope in between the other ones.

Are you guys familiar with this? Yeah, it's classic. Yeah, classic. All right. So, the thing about this GIF is that some people can hear the thumping of the tower when it hits the ground, even though it's a GIF, and GIFs have no sound. There's no audio in a GIF, but some people can hear it.

Part of the Apple Vision Pro demo is there's a part where a butterfly flies toward you, and you put your finger out, and the butterfly lands on your finger, and then the butterfly takes off.

When the butterfly took off, I felt the butterfly on my finger. I felt the butterfly pushing off from my finger. The brain fills in the data. Yeah. Right. Which is impossible, right? There's no butterfly. But I felt it.

And my jaw just went gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, because time and time again throughout this demo, I just felt like this is so far beyond my expectations. When you put yourself in what I would describe as multi-monitor mode, this is the mode where you would be using Apple Vision Pro to do work.

So you have, let's say you have three, the equivalent of three monitors around you, and you can turn your head, and you can look at them and manipulate them. They look like they're there. It is so high resolution, and it's so compelling. And there's no lag when you move your head around that you're convinced they're there.

You want to reach out and touch them. And of course, your hand goes right through them. But it's, you know, all I can say is I highly recommend that you make an appointment, go to your Apple store, sit through the 20-minute demo, because there's no way that I can describe to you what it feels like.

And I think it is something special here. I was trying to think of, like, what, under what circumstances would I think that this was worth investing in? Because I've always been, like, a home theater nerd guy.

You know, like, I was building home theaters, you know, when it was still pretty new. And, you know, you were hot stuff if you got yourself a Dolby surround receiver. You put the speakers in the back of the room. Right, back of the room, listen to that. And I had a, you know, 32-inch television, CRT that, you know, five guys had to haul in because it was so damn heavy.

But then when HD came along, like, that was a real, well, I guess first DVDs, and then HD came along. And that was, for me, was a really compelling reason to upgrade my home theater. And I do have a pretty elaborate home theater in our house now with a projector and all that kind of stuff.

And so part of the demo is you watch some of the Mario movie in 3D, and they put you in a movie theater environment as if you're sitting in the cinema. And that was another moment where my jaw dropped because I felt like I was in a cinema.

I really believed I was sitting in a cinema watching this movie by myself. Did they pipe in the smell of somebody who brought in their own fucking spaghetti to the theater? Right, a tuna fish sandwich? Yeah. There's somebody crinkling a potato chip bag behind you.

Some kid kicking the back of your seat the whole movie? Yeah. It wasn't that realistic. I felt the gum on my shoe when I lifted up. It was still stuck to the floor. Right, right. I could hear the subwoofers booming from the theater next door. By the way, it's another thing about this is the audio is amazing.

Like, for a system that doesn't shove anything inside your ears or put anything over top of your ears, it's completely compelling. You think, again, you think you're in the environments. It's just remarkable technology.

So, again, bottom line, it's totally worth your time to go to your local, I almost said your local radio shack, your local Apple store. Old heavens die hard. Yeah, oh, man. Go to your local Apple store, make an appointment, and check this thing out.

Let me just ask you again, another kind of more practical, remove ourselves from the fantasy here. You're wearing it for, what, about a 20-minute demo, right? Right. What do you think you would feel like if you had that on two hours? Exhausted.

If it was two hours of what I was experiencing in the demo, which is, you know, one thing after another, just to try to overwhelm you. No, more like a feel on your head. Yeah. Yeah. Is it still prohibitive that way? I felt pressure on the tops of my cheekbones.

Right. It was not bad. I wouldn't say my sense was that it was particularly heavy, but I did know it was there. Yeah. It does – it disappears from your visual senses.

Like, it is completely compelling. It is so high resolution that – and the fact that there's no lag means you're not dealing with motion sickness issues. I did notice, you know, being the old video nerd that I am, that at the very edges of the image, there's some chromatic aberration, which is where you get a little color bleeding from the lenses.

Yeah. And that's just physics. But – Well, there's a German guy that might write in and tell us we're wrong about that. Right. Right. You've apparently not looked at light before. Let me explain. The other thing, when you're looking through it – so I'm sitting in this Apple store, and it's in the mode where you're looking through the goggles, and you think you're looking through goggles, even though what you're seeing is a video feed.

Right. So, in my mind, this is an incredibly compelling technology demo, and I can't wait for the coming versions when this is cheaper and more accessible. And lighter weight, and all of those things that eventually it's going to be, if Apple sticks with this, or someone else sticks with this.

By the way, I think this is just the kind of thing that Apple does best. Oh, yeah. They'll keep doing this. They're not going to drop this. I hope not. I hope not. Yeah. I walked away feeling like I'd just been to a theme park, that I'd had some – like it was one of those Circle Vision movies at Epcot, and I was exhilarated and a little tired, a little overwhelmed, trying to process all the stuff that had come at me.

It's not something that I'm going to buy anytime soon. It's not worth that much money to me, but if it were $1,000, I'd probably consider it. One of the things that is making me pause is that – I mean, our phones are $1,000 now.

Right. Yes. But I think the fact that this is something that you can only experience on your own – in other words, it's not like investing in a home theater where the whole family sits down and enjoys it together. This is a solitary exercise.

I mean, yes, other people can join you if they have them, right? Right. But I'm not buying them for the whole family. So I think that's part of it. It's not – it's – I don't want to say it's antisocial, but it's nonsocial by design, which sometimes can be a good thing if you're doing work and you want to be in your own world, literally in your own world.

You can do that with this. Well, I did read a great article this week about a couple that does make their own homemade porn with them. So that is definitely not an antisocial event. No. No. Yeah. Three in the crowd, though. Yeah, that's right.

Or not. Yeah. No, I – you know, it's definitely interesting. I'm definitely looking forward to trying one, but I don't – see, I would go, I would do the demo, and then I would feel sad when I left because I don't have enough money to – take one home with me.

So it's just like going to a titty bar. And I think I'll just skip it and, you know, just wait. I'll just wait a bit, you know. I'm definitely curious now. I just got to figure out – Apple Store isn't close to me, so it's going to be an event for me to do this.

But I'll do it. I'm going to do it. I think as people who have spent as much time and have as much history with the march of technology as the three of us have, I will gently twist your arms and say you owe it to yourself to experience this because it is a very special thing that is different from other things.

It's not just, oh, this is a better headset. Like, mm, it is that, but it's also its own thing. It's more. Yeah. Okay. I have a question for you because you wear glasses and so do I. Did you have to send them your prescription when you set up the appointment? Or did they just check that when you got there?

You go there and you hand them your glasses and sitting right out there in the Apple Store is this little Zeiss machine that scans your glasses for whatever prescription it is. And then they put the inserts into the Apple Vision Pro.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, it is cool. And then the first thing that it does is it calibrates to your eyeballs, which is also pretty cool. The lenses move around in there and, you know, they look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this. And it, because it's tracking your eye movement the whole time.

That's your pointing device is what you're looking at. And not if you're looking at VR porn, baby. I think we see what the value proposition is. Jason has one use for such a device. That's right. I have a particular set of skills.

The, uh, the, uh, yeah. Officer, how did we find him? Well, he was passed out. You know how there was always that rule about you want to make sure that your monitor is facing away from the doorway coming in? Jason's going to have to start locking doors.

Yeah. What do you mean start? Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, if, uh, just to you guys, to our listeners, uh, I, I, you know, again, this is like somebody describing an IMAX movie. If you've never seen one, I know I'm going on and on about this and you're probably like, oh, how good could it be?

Trust me. All right. I have a lot of time on my hands in an Apple store about half a mile away. So I think I might have to take you up on that. There you go. You're going to beat me. Yep. Definitely. Come on, Brian. All the cool kids are doing it. I will.

That's why God invented credit cards. Come on. Can't they just come to my house and do the demo here? I do. I, I, I, it might come to that. Um, yeah, if they don't sell enough of them, they might just start doing that. Uh, the one thing that I have heard from people who kept theirs and didn't return them was that, uh, media watching is the, you know, that's the killer app watching movies on it.

Yeah. I think I would love to see somebody figure out how to do sports with this, you know, to sit at, sit at mid quarter. If you supported a basketball game would be unbelievable. Right. Just unbelievable. I'm sure they're working on it. Wait, no, no, no. Apple's got the deal with MLS.

So it's going to be soccer first. I was going to say, did you get to see the MLS video? Did they play any of that for you? Yes. Was it any good? Because that's sports. Yes. They, they had, there was a little clip of, um, soccer. There was a little clip of baseball, um, all kinds of different things, but they're, they're breathtaking.

They're just breathtaking. Damn it. I'm going to end up buying one of these. Maybe we could all pitch in and share one and we can ship it to each other. Like, of course, whoever got it after Jason, it would be all sticky. Oh boy. And whoever got it after Dave, you're like, why are their ears glued to this thing?

There's fur all over it. What else? Yeah. Jesus. True. All right. With that. All right. Yeah. I think we've covered it. Yeah. I think so. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Conrad.

Welcome to the club, Conrad. Thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got Ralph, Miles, and Sherry. Cool. Over at the tip jar, we've got Jeff Panos, NL, and Joseph. And just a quick reminder, if you sign up at Patreon, you can get everything ad-free and a little early for just three bucks a month. Oh, and don't forget, Hi-Rez.

Do-do-do. And we have a new five-star review. Amazing. I started to listen to you a few years ago, and I've loved the show ever since. I recently listened to your first episode, and still funny and informative, but very different. The quality has definitely improved. Keep up the good work. Yeah. Well, so has the alcohol consumption during recording.

That probably helps quite a bit, too. Yeah. That has gone down, and the quality has gone up. There's an inverse ratio there, for sure. So, some sad news. I missed this one. This happened, like, two, three weeks ago. Now, Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow, has died.

He was a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. And I don't know if you've ever read Thinking. I mean, you were a psychology major. So, you know. Yeah. Thinking Fast and Slow was definitely one of those. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff in that book that does not hold up.

There are some things that have definitely been debunked since then. Right. But it was – he started off a whole sub-genre of, like, psychology and economics together. And he was a good guy. I think I did, like, three shows with him, three interviews with him.

And he was a very nice guy. Very nice guy. Made it to 90. Yeah. And a Nobel Prize winner. So, not bad. Yeah. And a big happy birthday today. Today we're recording this on Friday, April 12th. It is our good friend Dr. Teeter's birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday, buddy.

Happy birthday, man. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason Filippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 644. GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment.

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