646: Thanks, Gary!

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. I have a little follow-up on Kagi, the search engine that I paid for the last month. Yep. Yeah, I'm not paying for it anymore. Not ready. Not ready for prime time. Not worth the money. The juice is definitely not worth the squeeze, as it were, because the squeeze is $10.

And I looked at my search volume, and it said I'd made 153 searches. And I'm like, hmm, on a cost-per-search basis, this ain't worth it. Plus, a third of the time, I still had to go to Google. So, yeah. The dream is there.

It was really nice for a while, but when I really found that I needed to find that thing, they didn't have it. It was at Google. Yeah. I mean, Google, for me, has still been the best. I haven't used any pay options. Now, obviously, it's just a matter of now knowing the Google tricks, which have evolved over time, which is ignore the first two pages.

Yeah, that's kind of it. Yeah. So, you know, skip, skip, and then you're going to find what you need. Yeah. Yeah. 90% of the time, I'm either searching for images or videos, though, too. And Kagi does a shit job for both of those. Right. Well, maybe somebody will crack this nut with paid search, but I don't know.

Google's just so far ahead and has so much money. OpenAI is coming out with a new search alternative soon. Well, let's talk about how great AI is in this show. Oh, I think we've got plenty of those. Before we get to that, though, I want to talk about passcodes. I am just calling a flat-out RIP on passcodes.

I don't know anybody that's adopting them. No one. No one. And when I tried, I was fucking confused. I'm sorry. I've been a technologist for over 40 years, and they confused the hell out of me. I'm like, where do they go? What are they? How do they live? Where's the tutorial?

Oh, there isn't a tutorial. Okay, so you want me to adopt this confusing-as-fuck thing, but you're not even going to tell me how it works or what the ramifications could be? Yeah. No. So, done. I'm just thinking about, like, not even on the user end of adoption.

I'm talking about the services end. Now, I don't use a lot of services in my personal life, but in my work life, we use a ton of services. Half of them still don't even offer, you know, authentication apps. It's still mobile phone-based 2FA. Oh, geez. So, you know, passcode adoption is not happening on services side of things either.

So, I just don't see this being a thing anytime soon. Yeah. Now, everybody I know that I brought it up, I'm like, have you tried the passcode thing? They're like, nah. Passwords work for the most part, you know, if you take the proper precautions and you do have the appropriate authentication apps.

Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. Just wanted to make sure I was on, I wasn't losing my marbles on that one. No. And I'm really, like, the few sites that have adopted passcodes, stop pushing them so hard. I'm so sick of seeing, do you want to switch to a passcode? No. Yeah. And that's what originally got me down the rabbit hole is because I accidentally hit yes on Amazon.

Oh, Amazon's the biggest offender. Every login. Every login. Yeah. So, I ended up doing it on one thing and I'm just like, okay, now where is it? How do I get to it? You mean I need my phone just to... No, no, no, no, no. Okay. We're done. So, remember the Sora demo that everybody was talking about?

The one that even halted, like, a multi-million dollar studio being built in Atlanta? Yeah, yeah. Tyler Perry said, hold the phone! Yeah, and I said that, yeah, that's got to be curated as hell because every demo that we see nowadays is not really what they say that they are on the tin.

Turns out, well, I was right on that one, big time. Patrick Cederberg of Shy Kids, which is the studio behind the video, he detailed to FX Guide the extensive post-production required to refine the AI's work, which included recoloring and removing unwanted elements from scenes.

And I saw some of the screenshots, the before and after. Yeah, this is not plug and play. You need a team of FX people to make, surprisingly, FX-driven movies. But, Jason, it's on their roadmap. Oh, it's on the roadmap. This is just a vision of what we will be.

That's right. That's right. God damn it. There's so much shenanigans going on with AI right now. Well, you know, as they say, the technology is the worst that it's ever going to be. That's true. In the news.

The FCC has imposed fines totaling nearly $200 million on major U.S. wireless carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, for unlawfully selling customers' location data without their consent.

Somebody lit a fire under the FCC and the FTC in the past couple of weeks, I got to say. Yeah, I think that they see that their time may be, you know, coming to an end and they need to get some shit done. Yes, this concludes a four-year investigation triggered by revelations that carriers sold customer location details to aggregators who then provided them to third parties.

We talked about this when it was going on and we're like, okay, is anything ever going to happen here? But surely these things were anonymized. Yeah, surely, surely, surely not. Location data to a phone number. Great. Yeah, they were selling them to law enforcement and bounty hunters. So that shows you right there.

Not so anonymous. They were just selling your data. Fuckers. Yeah. The individual fines are different for each carrier. T-Mobile has the highest of $80 million. Verizon, you can hear me now, with $47 million. And the rest come somewhere in between. Not exactly chump change, but also probably less than they made, what I'm guessing.

Probably. Now, I wonder if this now marks them safe from, like, class action lawsuits or the lawyers sharpening the knives right now. I'm guessing. I'm guessing there's got to be a carve out. Yeah, I'm guessing we're going to get $1.50 out of this at some point. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. I want to ask you, are you getting more robocalls than ever?

Waxes and wanes. Like, I'll go a couple weeks without getting anything. And then, like, one week, I'll just get, like, three to four a day. My roommate and I are getting about six to ten a day. It is election season. Yeah. These are – this is the interesting thing they're doing now. Before, they were using the first – they were using the area code and the first three digits of the phone number that I was in.

Yeah. They stopped that. Because, you know, you, of course, get phone calls from your neighbors who happen to have the number right next to you, which stopped about, oh, 30 years ago. Seriously. And also, my phone's from San Francisco, so it makes it really easy to filter. I'm like, 415? Ain't nobody calling me from 415.

So, yeah, it's just been crazy. And now they're showing up as 415 numbers, but with actual people's names attached to them, which is strange. I haven't gotten that yet. Yeah. And I think – I'd say 80% are getting through my AT&T spam filter, too, because it used to just say everything was a spam risk or a possible telemarketer.

Now it's just like they're shuffling it enough or they're getting it through the filters and they're getting through as regular people. Fast forward to four years from now when we do a story. FCC has fined major carriers for selling access to do robocalls. Seriously. You know it's coming.

You know that's how it's working. So, yeah. Okay. Maybe five years from now because I don't think anything's going to happen in the next four years. That's true. Recent pew, pew, pew research study survey reveals a growing census across the political spectrum.

78% of American adults believe social media companies wield too much political influence. That's very interesting. And the concern spans party lines with 84% of Republicans and 74% of Democrats agreeing. Amazing. Okay.

Yeah. The survey highlighted partisan differences on perceived biases within tech with a majority of Republicans viewing tech as favoring liberal views, while half of the Democrats see a balanced approach. As the government intensifies scrutiny and regulation of major tech firms, public sentiment strongly supports more, not less regulation on these powerful entities.

Boom, boom, boom. A bit fucking late. Yeah. A little late. Welcome to the party, pal. Yeah. We've been screaming that for 11 years now. How long have we been doing this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the fucked up thing is, yeah, the whiny Republicans are saying, oh, it's all liberal bullshit.

No, the liberals are a bunch of wussies and they listen to you. So all of the tech people in Silicon Valley have like steered the ship the other way. So you're getting way more press than you actually should be getting. So shut the fuck up. I 100% agree with that. I have definitely seen it swung completely the other way.

It is absolutely, it's absolutely Republican talking points. I just get pushed on me everywhere on every social media I go on to. Yeah. I don't want either of them. I don't want either. I just want to see what my fucking friends are having for dinner. That's all I ever wanted. That's it. That was it.

That is a mighty nice looking brioche you got there, Brian. Yeah. I don't need no fucking, I don't, I don't care what bill you're voting for. I don't care who you're voting for. What are you eating? Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Well, because you're going to have a little bit more time now because TikTok is on its way out or maybe not.

Or not. Yeah. The president has signed the bill that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the U.S., but the platform isn't quite banned yet. They have till January 19th, 2025 to either divest or pull out. So we'll see what's going to happen there.

Even if ByteDance does sell TikTok, they're probably not going to sell the algorithm. So you're just getting, you know, the inertia of what's already there and not exactly the same beast. And I don't think they're going to sell it. Which, by the way, would be a very good thing. That's fine. Let them keep it.

It will be good for everyone to not have that algorithm. Yeah. That's the biggest point. Yes. So good. Good. Let's see what happens. But it's 270 days away anyways. If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I would take my entire budget that I'm devoting to whatever stupid ideas, the metaverse and pants or whatever he's trying to build now that he thinks is AI, all of that stuff.

I would take my entire budget and I would push it towards reels and just get everybody off of TikTok now. Yep. Exactly. Yep. And they do have a little bit more budget because Meta has been spending money on AI, a lot of it. And their AI-driven Advantage Plus Shopping Campaign platform has apparently been siphoning money from advertisers hand over fist.

I read through some of this and oh my God. I know. Boy, did they push their finger on the AI wheel here. Woo-hoo. According to a report from The Verge, the AI system intended to automate and optimize ad creation by testing multiple combinations has been depleting daily budgets rapidly with little to no return on investment unless you're fucking Meta because that investment is paying off in spades.

Yep. Look, there's a very limited use case that I think Meta ads actually work anyways. And in general, the ROI is very low unless it's very specific. But to go ahead and put your money down on the Meta-written AI ad spending.

Yeah, I know. Are you fucking insane? Yes, the AI has one directive. Get as much money as you can. Yeah. That's what it's there for. Yeah. Yes. Oh, and however, customer service challenges. Yes.

There's never been customer service. This thing's spending my money too fast. Bueller? Is anybody there? Hello? Oh, that's right. They fired all of the customer service people so they could have more money to spend on AI. And the Metaverse apparently still is a thing.

So they're still cooking on that. But yeah, that's just like, how dumb do you have to be to turn on that switch? Like as an advertiser. Very, very dumb. Well, getting back to the idea of just having a feed that is only what our friends are having for lunch or dinner.

Again, Facebook's news feed algorithm has long been at the center of debates about some of Meta's biggest problems because it is one of Meta's biggest problem. It's also been a near constant source of complaints from users because it's horrible and it's made Facebook completely useless. But if a newly filed lawsuit is successful, Facebook users may be able to use the social network with a vastly different feed.

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is suing Meta on behalf of a researcher who wants to release a browser extension that would allow people to effectively turn off the algorithmic feed. This extension was created by Ethan Zuckerman. No relation to Zuckerberg, obviously.

A researcher and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He argues that Facebook users would be better off with more control over their feeds, like we used to have. This tool called Unfollow Everything 2.0 would allow users to unfollow friends, groups, and pages, and in doing so effectively turn off their news feed.

And then they could re-add people back in and have a curated feed that only showed friends and groups that they put back in. Now, obviously, this would not work out well for Meta. Yeah. And this isn't the first time that somebody's tried to come up with this. He was inspired by a similar project, also called Unfollow Everything from 2021, which got sued into non-existence by Facebook.

And he's trying to avoid a similar fate by preemptively suing, by suing Meta and saying we should have the right to be able to do this. So we'll see what happens. You know, Facebook Purity is still out there, but I got to say, in that game of whack-a-mole, I think Meta has been beating Facebook Purity quite a bit recently.

Yeah, yeah. It hasn't been helping too much. You know, they're a company. They're going to do what's best for the company, shareholder value, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's not about what it used to be about anymore. No, it's not. No. And OpenAI has been hit with another privacy complaint over ChatGPT's love of making stuff up.

So this was in Austria by an advocacy group called NOYB, which stands for None of Your Business. And the complaint alleges that the company's ChatGPT bot repeatedly provided incorrect information about a real individual who, for privacy reasons, is not named in the complaint because, you know, privacy, which is what this person's complaining about in the first place.

So this obviously would breach EU privacy rules. And the complaint also indicates that OpenAI refused to help delete the false information, responding that it was technically impossible to make that kind of change. Bullshit. Nobody knows how this is working or it's bullshit. It's got to be one or the other.

So they did offer to filter or block data on certain prompts, but they cannot seem to get rid of this information. So garbage in, garbage never comes out. We'll talk about that a little more with Dave. So this is just one suit, by the way. There's a similar complaint in Poland.

There's also Italy. So anywhere that GDPR is, OpenAI is having some problems because it's just spitting out information and you can't remove information. And that's a big part of GDPR. You have the right to privacy and you can have data removed on you. The right to be forgotten. Yes.

So in the first quarter of 2024, Amazon, our friends at Amazon, reported a substantial increase in ad revenue, hitting $11.82 billion, which is a 24% jump from the previous year. I wonder why. I wonder what could have happened.

What changed outside of the fact that the service that I'm already paying for to not have ads has now added ads? Yeah, I think you got it there, Brian. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. Direct correlation, right? Yeah. We do have correlation and causation nailed down on this one.

Yes, it was primarily driven by the company's decision to integrate advertisements into prime video across multiple markets. And you guess what this report is going to cause? What? Hello, ads on paid Netflix. Hello, ads on paid Paramount. Hello, ads everywhere.

Now you got to pay for the service to get in the door and you're going to get the ads. You still had to do that with Hulu. You have to do that with Peacock. You have to do it with all of them. You get a toe in the door and it's just a little thing. You sure you don't want to go for that extra large for just another quarter? Yeah. You know? Same pricing model as the goddamn soda fountain at the movie theater.

Yeah. Yeah. I scream at my TV every time they come on. But I still watch it. So what are you going to do? But, you know, yeah. The FCC needs to come in, though, and ban this fucking type of advertisement that they have on every show.

This television show is presented to you ad-free after this brief message from our friends at Samsung. It's a fucking advertisement. It's not ad-free. That is true. I think we're going to see a growing movement towards reinserting the cord because the pricing is just not.

My friend was telling me there's a great used DVD store down the road. I might just have to go hit that up. Yeah. I got an idea for a business. I got a business model idea here, Jason. I'm going to call it Around the Blockbuster. There we go. Yeah. You just go there. No ads. No ads. That's right.

Well, Binance founder Cheng Ping Zhao has been sentenced to four months in prison. That's it. That's it? That's it. Prosecutors have recommended three years, which I still think isn't enough. He pleaded guilty in November to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to set up an anti-money laundering program.

They also accused him of allowing criminal activity to flourish on the crypto exchange. Binance turned a blind eye to its legal obligations in the pursuit of profit. Its willful failures allowed money to flow to terrorists. Cyber criminals and child abusers through its platform. AKA most of the people that use Bitcoin. Exactly.

But he only got three months and that's it. Even though, and this was found while doing their due diligence in the documents, he told Binance employees it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. While bragging that if Binance obeyed the law, it wouldn't be as big as we are today. Okay.

Yeah. So there you go. Three months. He's had to pay quite a lot of money, but they made quite a lot of money. Yeah. And Jack Dorsey better be careful here. He could be doing his three months in prison too because reports are now starting to come out that Block has been doing the same sort of thing.

Ooh. We shall see. Oh, he's already got the beard going, so he'll be set when he gets in. Yeah. Hopefully he's doing push-ups and getting some tattoos. Am I kidding? He's going to Club Fed. Yep. Which is probably his house and ankle bracelet. I'd imagine.

He'll get the fine. That's about it. Yeah. Well, in a major advancement in the fight against cryptocurrency money laundering, a collaborative effort between blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, MIT, and IBM has resulted in the release of a new, wait for it, Brian, AI model in a groundbreaking data set.

The data set consisting of 200 million Bitcoin transactions is designed to help identify the quote-unquote shape of money laundering activities on Bitcoin's blockchain. Guillermo del Toro's latest movie, The Shape of Fraud. The model is trained on patterns of transactions linked to known criminal entities and aims to detect similar illicit money flows, marking a significant shift in how blockchain analytics are utilized.

The research could dramatically enhance the ability to trace and intercept illegal transactions in the crypto space. Or, or wait for it, Brian, it could let the bad guys know that the big brother is watching and has new tools, so they better do business differently, leading to slower and smaller fraudsters to get caught in the net while the whales just keep on swimming.

You know what, Jason? I think we just need to briefly do a mea culpa. We always like to trumpet when we're right about things on this show. Sometimes I got to say we're wrong. Okay. We never thought that there was any use case for blockchain, but there is. Criminals, 100% wrong. Yeah.

Okay. We'll take that one. Okay. We were wrong. We'll take that one. We were wrong, everyone. Yep. That is the, that is right there, right there on the table. There's definitely a use case. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, and the funny thing is they're like, oh, we have this new data set of 200 million transactions.

I'm like, the blockchain is the data set. Yeah. Anybody can go get the data set. It's right there. Okay. Yeah. I know they're saying that this is linked. Okay. 200 million data points all linked to fraudulent transactions is I think what they're trying to say.

200 million fucking data points. That's 200 million fraudulent transactions. That's a lot of fraud. Yeah. That's a lot of taxes not getting paid. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, here's a fun one. The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review Elon Musk's challenge against a 2018 SEC settlement, which mandates pre-approval of his tweets about Tesla.

Oh, God. Yeah. He sought to nullify the agreement, alleging that it infringed on his First Amendment rights, and he has lost this legal battle. So, yes. Well, he is a First Amendment lawyer. Mm-hmm. For him. Yeah. So, he wants, he should be investing in Square.

Maybe he does. Who knows? You know, he does come from PayPal, so. That's true. That's kind of the thing. Yeah. This goes back to the private funding secured tweet way back in the day. Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. On 420. Yeah. Fucking idiot. God damn it. The decision leaves Musk under continued scrutiny by the SEC to prevent future securities violations.

So, he cannot have his tweets and eat them too, is what the SEC is saying. Okay. Well, in continued Elon Musk news, he was previously hardcore about this. About layoffs. Now, he's absolutely hardcore. He sure as shit is.

About more layoffs. Next time around, he will be ludicrously hardcore about layoffs. If I remember my space balls correctly. Ludicrous speed was the fastest. So, it's only been two weeks since Tesla began reducing its workforce by 10%, a move that impacted at least 1,400 staffers or 14,000 staffers.

14,000. Even more are coming. The company let go of two senior executives and plans to lay off hundreds more employees as reported by the information. So, I don't know what you do when your company is in the shitter and it's just bad news all around. Oh, yeah. You fire people. That's what you do. And you know who, of course, you fire first.

The people that actually do the shit. Well, okay. Second. The press department. Right. Well, do they even have one anymore? Isn't it just a poop emoji? No, that's Twitter. That's Twitter. Tesla gives you ludicrous poop. I suppose if you actually have a physical product, you do need some sort of customer service.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're getting rid of those guys. Well, the customer service, I think, might still be around all four people, but they're getting rid of the press department as well. They're just going to hire the Geek Squad guys that got fired a couple weeks back. There you go. Yeah. See? There you go. Shuffle them around. Well, UK's regulatory buddy, Ofcom, rolls off the tongue, has initiated an investigation into OnlyFans for failing to implement effective age verification measures, potentially allowing children access to adult content.

What do you mean? There's a dropdown that asked me to put in my birthday. Exactly. What do you need? OnlyFans requires a credit card. Yeah. So there's your age verification right there. If you can get a credit card, but you're not old enough to look at boobies, that's a problem with the credit card companies.

My God. If you can get a credit card, you're old enough to masturbate. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Or masturbate in front of people, depending on which side you fall on. Unless you're a stand-up comic. So, yeah. They're just checking to see if Phoenix International Limited, which is OnlyFans' parent company, apparently has been not giving them all the information that they wanted, so they're going to be going after them.

So, yeah. Okay. Get those data points. Well, Jason, I saw this in the news, and I sent it to you, and you said, hell no.

Hell no, we won't go. Do you want to do this again? Hell no, we won't go. Yes, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is to return to theaters this summer, the extended and remastered versions of all of them. You and I, at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, sat through the extended versions of the first two movies and the world premiere of the third movie, and that was quite a day.

That was quite a day. Fun was had, and burritos, and very, very, very, very many drinks, which I don't think our bodies could go through again. No. Well, no. My ass is still flat from sitting in that chair for 14 hours, so. And I can't, the best part about it was sneaking out between movies to get the Bloody Marys at the Arclight bar, which doesn't exist anymore, so, you know.

The Cinerama Dome isn't even open anymore, is it? I have no idea. I'd be sad if it was completely gone, but I do remember seeing it. It's the building still there. Yeah, the building's still there, but the Arclight cinemas behind it are closed, and somebody was going to swoop in and pick up, I think somebody bought Cinerama Dome, but it's in Hollywood, and I don't know if you've been to Hollywood lately, but it is straight out of Escape from New York.

It is not a place you want to go. Gotcha. At all. Well, maybe we can go to the Malibu version. I don't know. But we will not be attending that. If we could sit on the beach with, like, a blow-up projector, and I could have some, like, you know, alcohol-free Mai Tais, and we could watch it, I'm in.

All right. I'm not going to go sit in a crappy, like, theater seat anymore and watch it, but it's going to be fun. Well, I finally saw Dune Part 2, and I found it in the same situation in which I will watch The Lord of the Rings on my couch in my own home. Yeah, I watched it.

It was, look, it's beautiful. It was absolutely gorgeously shot. Is it Dune? Dune-ish? It's Dune-ish. I mean, better than Foundation. Anything is. So, yeah, I enjoyed it.

It was fine. The subtleties were lost, but, I mean, it is, you know, it's in a fucking 7,000-page book. What are you going to do? So even split over two movies, you're not going to get all the beats. Definitely gorgeous. I would be interested to see if he continues, but really not crowd-pleasing popcorn-shoveling books after the first one.

So good luck with that. Yeah, if they foundationed Dune 2, it would all take place on the ocean. That's true. It'd be like a Waterworld reboot. Yeah. Now they're sea worms. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's riding Shamu.

God. Yeah, it was good. It's just absolutely gorgeous. I'll definitely give it that. And the Bad Batch series finale aired this week, so the show is officially over. I did enjoy it. It was very good. For those of you out there that were hoping that Filoni was going to retcon all of the horrible crap that happened in the new movies that came out, no.

No, no, he absolutely did not. The whole purpose of this show was basically to set up explanation for the worst line in all of the Star Wars canon. Somehow he came back. Oh, somehow. So this is all about explaining the cloning thing that the Empire was going after.

So somehow Palpatine came back. But regardless of that, if you ignore the fact that that was kind of the main thrust, it was a very well done show. I'm not all that into the animated shows for adults, but, you know, it was good. Yeah, it was fine.

It was good. Better than The Book of Boba Fett, but not as good as all the other live action stuff. Okay. Yeah, Boba Fett was just bad. That was just horrible. Just bad. Except we did get the two best Mandalorian episodes out of it for a while. That's true. That was the best part about it. Yeah. I finished Fallout.

All right. A lot of buzz online. Even though I got through all the ads, I did finish Fallout. I loved it. I thought it was great. Very cool. So, yeah, it's definitely something that you could sink your teeth into. It wasn't as disturbing as The Boys, which is great, which does come back, I think, for their final season in July.

So, that's going to be back. I'm looking forward to it. I still like that show. Even if you have to fast forward some of it, it just gets a little too much. I couldn't get into it. I liked, I thought a lot of the banter was clever, but they just went so insane just to go so insane, which I get.

I understand it, but it's not something I really want to watch. Yeah. I mean, it's based on an over-the-top comic book, too. I like Carl Urban a lot. I love Carl Urban. He's my McCoy. Yeah, he is definitely. And he's my Demolition Man. Mm-hmm. Really good in that.

So, Roku, their OS home screen is getting video ads for the first time, is the title of this article. What I've noticed, though, the video ads, yes, they're starting to pop up. Here's what's pissing me off. They're using these fucking dark patterns, these dark design patterns, and they're changing the interface.

So, in the old, the way it used to be, the old days being last fucking week, when I'd pop on my Roku TV, I'd hit the home button, I'd hit write twice and go to my Apple TV, because the Roku built-in apps are garbage, absolute and utter garbage. So, I'd go to my Apple TV.

Now, when I press the home button and I go over to, I am square in the middle of an advertisement. They shuffled the entire row of inputs that you can go over to, down one row, and then put three blocks of ads right above it.

So, if you're like me and used to be able to do this with your eyes closed, which I normally did, because I wasn't looking at the TV, I'm like, okay, I know what I got to do. I'm going to the Apple TV. Boom, boom, boom. Okay, press, done. You know? Muscle memory. Now you're running an ad. Yep. So, fuck you, Roku. This is the last time I'm buying a Roku TV.

That's for sure. All right. There you go. Well, TikTok and Universal Music Group have signed a deal that allowed Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, The Weeknd, and other artists to return to the platform the company's announced in a press release, except for Taylor Swift, who decided she'd take her own ass back to it before time, breaking the fucking line and screwing all the other Universal artists.

Thanks, Taylor. Thanks, Taylor. So, anyways, this is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned, because I now have my wife back, and I'm not single-handedly running this household, because this is all she's been working on, and there's been lots of yelling and bad vibes. So, good.

They made some sort of deal. A key part of the deal is artist protection from generative AI. TikTok and UMG will work together to ensure AI development across the music industry will protect human artistry and the economics that flow to those artists and songwriters. Blah, blah, blah. So, anyways, they made a deal.

It's probably not going to matter too much anyways, because, you know, TikTok and the algorithm are not going to stick around. Yep. But, there you go. Hey, get what you can out of it. Get what you can. Exactly. The first trailer for the new Lee Miller biopic starring Kate Winslet.

Lee is out now. Looks pretty good. As a Lee Miller fan for my college photography days, I'm looking forward to this one. Look, there is nothing that Kate Winslet cannot do. I don't know. You didn't watch The Regime. Even I, well, even I heard that actually her, she was great in it.

She was actually the best part. The story was kind of crap. She was the best part of it. I take that back. Yeah. She was really good in it. Okay. Well, check out the trailer. It's looking, it looks pretty good. I can't wait for it. If you're, I don't know if it matters much if you're not a photo nerd, but she has a pretty amazing story.

Cool. Caps and doodads. So when I read a headline that is so succinct that it paints the entire story in just the headline, and I think to myself, if the journalist was able to discern this so quickly and nail it within one sentence, what were those captains of industry, the supposedly so smart people in the boardroom at these companies thinking when it's so obvious?

Okay. Hit me. But then I realized shareholder value, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Schnell, schnell, alles verdringen. Money, money. And that's why. So here's the headline. Walmart thinks it's a good idea to let kids buy in real life items with inside Roblox.

Okay. How does this work, Brian? Well, Walmart's discovered experience started out last year as a way for kids to buy virtual items for Roblox inside the game. But today, the partnership is testing out an expanded pilot program that will allow teens to buy real life goods stocked on digital shelves before they're shipped to your door.

So they're putting a store inside of Roblox. Yes. Literally. Now, according to this article, you walk over to a laptop in the game to scroll through items that you can purchase. That's meta.

Yep. Now, they say this is available to children 13 and up, but I think we do know how verification goes. And parents have forked over credit cards for a lot of these kids in the game so they can buy small things here and there. Yeah.

So this is going to be awesome. So awesome. I love the future, Brian. I love the future. Yep. It says in the article here, unfortunately, while Roblox's latest tests may feel like an unusually exploitive way to squeeze even more money from teenagers or more realistically their parents' money, this is really just another small step in the company's efforts to turn the game into an all-encompassing online marketplace.

Great. This is the future we were promised. I'm sure that's what the inventors had in mind when they came up with Roblox. It's like, let's turn this into a global marketplace so we can take money from children. Actually, they probably did think that. They probably did.

Now that I come to think of it, that's what games are for. Let's take as much money as we can from children. Yep. Pretty much. It used to be a quarter of play. Yeah. That was it. Yep. Back when a quarter meant something. That's right. And from the heights of innovation file, Jason.

Okay. Bring it on. You know, these crazy things are happening in technology that really just blow your mind. For instance, over at Snapchat, you can finally edit your chat. Woo! This has been around how long now? Quite a while. Yeah.

Well, yeah. Woof. Well, they finally cracked that nut, Jason. All right. All right. Bet those developers are getting paid for the overtime. But, yeah, you've got now a five-minute window to rephrase your message, fix, typo, or otherwise edit your chats.

Messages that have been edited will have a label indicating the text has been changed. Ooh, okay. The heights of technology we're scaling here. Yeah, but you have to be a Snapchat plus subscriber. Oh, that's right. You've got to pay for the privilege. Yeah, that's right. Now, and I sent you a screenshot of an email I got this week, Brian, that just tickled me pink.

Tickled me pink. We're trying to land people on the moon, but wait for it. Blue Sky, the budding social media platform, now has animated GIFs. I'm sorry, that's GIFs? Ah, fuck you.

At the library. Well, I've gotten a bit bored and just wanted something nice and easy to read, so I went back to my go-to right now until I finished the series, the first Contact series by Peter Cowderon. And I downloaded one called Hello World, thinking it would just be a nice, you know, kind of short book, pretty involved.

No, I don't know how I got confused. I guess I didn't, well, I didn't read the descriptions. I just assumed, you know, go for it. But this ended up being a collection of short stories that he'd written. So it's a whole bunch of just kind of bite-sized nuggets, some of which are first contact, some are like other things that he had written, all of which were pretty good.

And it kind of, like, hooked me on the whole idea of, like, oh, you know, maybe I don't need to delve into a whole novel right now. What I really want is, like, a story I can read every single night. And so after I read the Peter Cowderon one, which was very good, Amazon has started to roll out what they're calling their original stories collections, which I've discovered.

And there's a whole bunch of, there's probably non-sci-fi ones. I've only found a bunch of sci-fi ones where they basically get really well-known sci-fi authors and put together their own anthologies of short stories by them. I'm not entirely sure that the economics work out on this for me. I'm probably paying more than I should be paying for these short stories because some of them are really short.

But I did do, I read through one of them. It's called The Forward Collection, curated by Blake Crouch, who I've not heard of. The first short story is ARC by Veronica Roth, who wrote the Divergent series. Summer Frost by Blake Crouch himself. Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin. You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles.

The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay. And Randomized by Andy Weir. I'm like, okay, Andy Weir, sure, let's give this a go. They were all actually pretty good short stories. And I found a few other of these collections from sci-fi. So I might be doing these for a little bit because I've actually found the joy of just being able to curl up at the end of the night and read an entire story soup to nuts, which is just really good ideas in general involved in most of these.

Now, if you're buying this and you're going for the Randomized by Andy Weir as The Jewel in the Crown, it's the fucking worst story of the bunch. And it's like 20 pages. 24-minute read. He probably shat that one out on the shitter. On the shitter. Like, that is a nothing story.

But the other ones were actually all pretty good. So I'm kind of hooked on this little Amazon idea that they're doing. And hopefully these authors are actually getting some money from Amazon to do these things, probably more than they get paid for a book. Yeah, because I just went to go look at it, and it was like $10.99 for all six of them.

The thing is, I had already gotten them. I got them this morning on a computer I was logged in on. They're all free with my Audible account. So I got them all on my phone already. Yeah, and a lot of these are free if you're doing the – what's their program? Oh, the Kindle Unlimited?

Kindle Unlimited, where you're paying more for your Amazon Prime already. Yeah, where they just keep piling things on. Almost all of these are Kindle Unlimited things that you can get. Okay, so yeah, if they were on Kindle Unlimited, I just got them through the other way around where they get you for paying more.

Yeah, but all of them are pretty good. So I was pretty impressed by it. I've actually started on a different collection as well. So we'll see. Okay, cool. Again, I don't mind paying for books. No, I don't either. So I buy a metric shit ton of Audible credits every year.

So I'm down with that. But I also like to get free things. And I like these short stories because these are perfect to go to bed to. Exactly. Yeah, they're fantastic. I'm in. I'm in. Because I've been rereading a book I've – because on my walks lately, I've just been doing the same book over and over again.

Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McEwen. It's an older book. It comes back to – I used to be the guy who could fit everything he owned in his car. And that kind of guy. I was always down to a minimalist lifestyle, which went out the window when I got a house.

So I'm just trying to remember my roots. But it's a really good book. And it covers a lot of the basic topics about how to get rid of stuff. But it's not so much about getting rid of stuff. It's just about how to organize your life so you're only doing the things that you need to do. So you can actually go do the things you want to do, which I find that I – as someone who has more time to do the things I want to do, I need to do some things that I need to do.

As we get older, there's less I actually want to do. Yeah. Unfortunately. Unfortunately. Yes, I'm going to go clean the gutters tomorrow, actually. Oh, dude. You have no idea. Tomorrow is – spring has sprung here. So it's going to be a back porch and getting out the furniture and cleaning the grill and all things I theoretically want to do.

Well, at least your wife wants you to do them. Well, someone wants me to do them. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, I looked up at the gutters on the garage, and they were literally plants a foot tall sprouting out of them. So I'm like, I think it's time to clean those. And I pulled it – I did the first chunk of it.

And it is some of the best, richest dirt I've ever seen. So now I've got to save it all so we can plant stuff in it. Like, this is a good hack. I just – not clean my gutters, get great potting soil. Just grow your basil in the gutter. Yeah, that's the thing. You just need a step stool. Yeah.

And walk under the gutter really quick because it just might fall on your head at any given second because there's about 700 pounds of dirt in there. This is an interesting one. Audible is going to test using prime video data for audiobook recommendations. Okay.

Which I thought they would probably be doing already. I mean it makes sense. There's so many adaptations. And if you like this kind of movie, you'll probably like a book that's similar. And yeah, it all makes sense. Yeah, and the source material. So if like wool comes out or silo and you want to read wool, they'll cross-promote all of that stuff, which I figured they were doing already.

And I have an idea for Amazon actually. There's this site that you acquired a long time ago where people actually put in all of the books that they really love and are reading and they have discussions about it. And the interface has been solidly stuck in 1994, but you own it.

It's called Goodreads. You might want to go ask your accountants because you do own it. And it is a place where we voluntarily give you information about what we want to read, not where you forcefully take it from our prime video habits after making us watch these fucking commercials that we didn't ask for.

Yeah, just go try out Goodreads. Just take a look at that. It's always been disappointing that they did not integrate Goodreads better with everything else that's going on. But I do have a request. Don't touch the interface. I find it charming. It's charming. I do. It's so 1994.

It's amazing. Here's the thing. They can keep it charming and old school. Just make it faster. That would help. Throw it on AWS. You own that. Yeah, seriously. Just give it a few more compute cycles, please, because that that e-machines that's running off in the back office under someone's desk right now really doesn't get the job done is all I'm saying.

If the intern on the fifth level kicks out too hard and knocks the power cord out from underneath his desk, Goodreads goes down. What was the one? What was the social network that Google made that was big in Brazil but was literally running under a guy's desk because he made it in a weekend?

Oh, God. I can't remember. It began with an O, I thought. Yeah. I can't. Yeah. Something like that. But it was funny when that thing finally – it was like getting millions of people, and it was seriously on a computer under the guy's desk because he did it in his bonus time. And the higher-ups were like, oh, we have to fix that.

Let's put it on our whole thing and make it bigger, and then they ruined it. Yeah, and nobody cared anymore. Yeah, it was perfectly fine running under the guy's desk. It was great. But no, you had to fuck it up. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave with podcast superhost Dave Bittner.

Dave is the host of the CyberWire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy. And the host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings too. Hi, Dave. Hello. Have a bit of follow-up to get going here.

A couple weeks ago, you told me about LM Studio, where you can run large language models on your computer. Right, right. So I grabbed that, and I was playing with it. And I just kind of started to go down the rabbit hole because it's kind of neat. It's kind of neat. Right.

It was an irresistible nuisance. I feel like I avoid these things on purpose in the same way that I won't install TikTok. I just, I cannot let my time get sucked into these things. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, but it is so much fun. So I was listening to the AI for Humans podcast, which I highly recommend.

It's really good. It's got Kevin Ferreira and some other guy. I just know Kevin from the old G4 days. Well, let me just stop you there for a second because my impulse is to say that recommending a podcast that's called AI for Humans, isn't that like two years ago recommending the Cryptocurrency for Humans podcast?

Kind of. Kind of. Okay. Just checking. Yeah. It's, I think these guys have been around a little bit, but I'm not sure how long. I just, I just kind of got, I just got introduced to them this week. All right. I'll give it a listen on your recommendation. It's, it's pretty fun. It's worth watching on YouTube because they do an AI guest every week where they use some of the tools they talk about to generate the AI guest and they do the voice, the video.

It's, it's pretty damn funny. Highly recommended. All right. I'll check it out. And I'll tell you why in a second, because they introduced me to a, a, another rapper called Pinocchio, which is similar to LM studios, but it's kind of like a easier interface and things like that. And you can, there's a lot you can do with it.

So that is another rapper to these large language models, but it does other things like give some of them web interfaces and things like that. I swear to God. But I thought you meant a musician. I did too. I was like, I was thinking like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious five. Well, if you were a rapper, that is how you would spell Pinocchio.

Right. I'm looking at P I N O K I O. That is totally a rapper name. Like, does he have fat beats? What are we talking about here, Jason? Right. Did you just catch the new drop from Pinocchio? Yeah. There's a model for that. There's a model for that. So name aside, it still throws me when I try and find it in my app folder.

I'm like, what the, how do you know that can't be out spelled. Yeah. But yeah, so there's, there's cool things you can do with Pinocchio. There's another thing called O Llama, which they talk about, which you can tie them all into. It's basically just making it very easy to get a lot of stuff done.

O Llama, my Llama. Yep. I was looking at the Pinocchio demo video and I was, and the more I watched it, the more I thought, whoa, this is deep. Also, you know, the security side of my brain was going, you're going to give this program how much control over your computer?

All of it. Yeah. But then after I watched the video and was duly impressed with everything this thing could do, I started scrolling down at some of the free scripts that were offered and holy crap, this thing can do a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

I basically have canceled all of my subscriptions to any AI product. Okay. There's, there's literally no need anymore. Hmm. So now here's the fun part, which I didn't know existed. So, you know, Llama 3 came out this past week or so.

There are versions that you can get through Pinocchio and O Llama that are the guardrails free versions of the, of the models. Hmm. So you can get Facebook's Llama 3 model with no safeguards whatsoever.

So want to learn how to make a nuclear bomb? Ask at it. Ask the dolphin because it's called dolphin. How does that come to pass? How do they, how does something like that get into the wild? I don't know how they do it, but they've been doing it for a while. So. Okay. Yeah. But I, I asked, I, because I'm, I'm now I'm like, this is my new, my new jam.

I want to, this is like when I'm bored at night, I'm just trying to find out, I'm just trying to learn. I'm playing around, learning how all this stuff works. And it's fun. This is fun. The folks at Pornhub are asking what happened to Jason? Exactly. Traffic is down. Uh huh. Exactly.

That three minutes a day where he would log in consistently. We're losing our shirt on that one. Yeah. Okay. So I got Llama 3 running and I actually used LM studio for this one because it was just easy to one click install and then start chatting with it. So I said, who hosts the grumpy old geeks podcast?

I'm like, this is the newest model from Facebook. It should be up to date. It replied to me, I'm glad you asked, which I didn't ask for him to tell me how it, how it was feeling, but I'm glad that it's glad the grumpy old geeks or GOG podcast is hosted by Gary, Jason DeFillippo, Brian Schilmeister, and Dave Bidner.

Now I will freely admit, I have not listened to our show after it's come out in a long time. Are you doing more after I get off the microphone here with Gary? Who the fuck is Gary, Jason? I'm not, I'm not cheating on you.

So it tells me, it tells me how great our show is and all this stuff. So then I asked it, who the fuck is Gary? And it replies back, Gary with an exclamation point. Like that's supposed to answer the question. But then it goes on to say, Gary is one of the original hosts of the grumpy old geeks podcast.

And he's been a driving force behind the show since its inception. He's known for his sarcastic wit, clever observations, and geeky expertise, which he brings to the table in lively discussions with his co-hosts. Gary is often the self-proclaimed grumpiest of the geeks on the show.

But despite his gruff exterior, he has a heart of gold. It is always willing to share his insights and opinions on a wide range of topics. He's an integral part of the GOG dynamic. And his banter with Jason, Brian, and Dave makes for some of the most entertaining moments on the podcast.

So there you have it. Gary, the grumpiest yet lovabalest of the grumpy old geeks. I'm so pleased that doctors, learned people, are relying on AI these days in their professions, politics, you name it. Captains of industry are firing people for this shit.

What is the thing called? What's that effect where we feel like history has changed? What's it called? The Mandela effect. The Mandela effect. Is that what's happening here? Is there some alternate reality where Gary has just mysteriously blinked out of our version of the universe?

Must be. Actually, I'm just waiting for Gary to start speaking. I'd like to meet this guy. Waiting for Gary to fucking invoice us. He sounds like someone I'd like to hang with. So why not? So I told it, there is no host of the grumpy old geeks podcast named Gary. And it says, I apologize for the mistake.

It seems I've provided incorrect information. There is no host named Gary on the grumpy old geeks podcast. The actual hosts of the grumpy old geeks podcast are Jason DeFillippo, Brian Schulmeister, and Dave Bittner. Again, I apologize for the error and any confusion it may have caused. So I'm like, okay, problem solved.

Solve the data set. New chat. Who are the, who hosts the podcast grumpy old geeks? And it came back with the podcast grumpy old geeks is hosted by the, by three self-proclaimed grumpy old geeks, Brian Brushwood, John Kramer, and Scott Johnson. Fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg. Okay.

So this is Facebook's model, right? Which pulls, presumably would pull data from Facebook itself. Now we have a presence as grumpy old geeks on Facebook in which our bio is clearly listed. No Gary. I was going to say, have you checked it lately? Has Gary infiltrated our Facebook account?

He has not. Okay. I don't know if there's somebody that's hijacking and doing a man in the middle attack as we publish the show to insert Gary as we go. So I just, I just copy and pasted that exact question into chat GPT four, a paid version of chat GPT four.

Okay. So this is open AI's most expensive version of chat GPT. Yeah. And so who hosts the grumpy old geeks podcast? The response is the grumpy old geeks podcast is hosted by Jason DeFilippo and Brian Schummeister. They have been discussing what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame on their show for many years.

Solid. Yep. Yep. Solid. No hallucination there. Are there any other hosts? Dave is going to get upset now. Yeah. Grumpy old geeks podcast. Yes.

Grumpy old geeks is typically hosted by Jason DeFilippo and Brian Schummeister. They discuss technology, cybersecurity, and other geeky topics for the humorous and often critical perspective. They occasionally have guests on the show as well. Okay. Here we go. Can you name any of the other guests?

Certainly. Some of the guests who've appeared on the grumpy old geeks podcast include Tom Merritt, Patrick Norton, Veronica Belmont, Tim Stevens, Shannon Morse, Dan Benjamin, Molly Wood, Leo Laporte, Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak. These are just a few samples, but they've had a variety of guests over the years from the tech and podcasting world.

Those must have been the shows you did with Gary. I know. Because I was not those. Okay. Let's see. How can I ask it without asking it? Uh, is there anyone else who does a regular segment on grumpy old geeks?

Name starts with D, rhymes with rave. Oh, it's not grumpy. It's grumpy. All right. Let's see. Here we go. Yes, there is another regular segment on the grumpy old geeks podcast called Security Hysteria, which is typically hosted by Dave Bittner.

In this segment, they discuss cybersecurity news, threats and trends, offering insights and analysis on the latest developments in the field. Well, look, they got the name of the segment wrong, but at least they got my name right. It only took eight prompts to get to you. That's right.

After the, uh, uh, the appearances by Leo Laporte on the show, which I missed out on. So yeah, the only person I personally know in that list is Veronica Belmont and I doubt she would come on. So, okay. Well, not a single person that we actually had as a guest. That's amazing. They're all colleagues and adjacent podcasts, but never been on the show.

And I, if you keep running that, who, uh, who hosts the podcast grumpy old geeks through a llama, it will give you a new answer every time. It gives me just different people every time. So, I'm so glad the important decisions about our lives are now being made by AI. That's great.

Yeah. Right. Medical decisions. Yes. Exactly. Insurance. Police, police activity. That's great. Right. Does this person deserve to get chemotherapy? Gary? No. Nobody. Right. He deserves 20 to life in the pen.

Dr. Gary. It's Dr. Gary to you. Mm-hmm. Wow. Okay. So. All right. Well, that's, if nothing else, it's entertaining and a little disturbing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, um, I did want to do a quick follow-up on the questions I had about vision issues last week.

Uh, I got a few kind notes from folks who had a couple of suggestions. Of course, you know, the number one thing is go see your eye doctor. And, uh, that is, that is scheduled. That is on my list. And I will say I'm pretty up on that. Like I am a, you know, I, I go regularly.

I'm one of those people, I go schedule my eye appointment and on my way out of my eye doctors, I schedule my next eye appointment. I'm with you. Yep. Same. Probably there. Honestly, uh, loss of vision scares the pants off of me. Yeah. Same here. Yeah.

You know, and that's, you know what, that's the reason I've never done LASIK. Um, cause I just feel like. What if? Well, right. And I, up until now, I feel as though my vision has been, uh, corrected enough with glasses or contact lenses and it hasn't been enough of a hassle to put my eyeballs, my two only eyeballs under the knife.

So, um, anyway, uh, someone who did lose their vision for a couple of months after my stroke, I can tell you that it sucks as much as you think it will. So let's just keep going to the eye doctor. Right. Right. Um, so, uh, some people wrote in some very nice things, you know, as you would expect the whole spectrum of things from very evidence-based, uh, factual sort of things.

It could be this, it could be this, it could be this too. I did my own research. I did my own research. Don't sleep with the tinfoil hat on. Drink vinegar. Start drinking raw milk. Yeah. So, um, and look, you know, look, everybody has to do their own journey. I don't want to disrespect anybody who found their own, uh, piece in whatever path they took.

Oh, so the other thing that I found that was quite helpful was I switched my computer from dark mode to light mode. Okay.

Very helpful. And I, I think the reason for this is just, there's just more light coming at my eyeballs. So they're stopping down a little bit, which when you stop a lens down, it makes it sharper. Yep. Um, so why as cool as I think dark mode is, uh, it's actually much easier to read things in light mode.

So I had to adjust to that, but it does help. We did. We discussed when dark mode first started coming out. We discussed this back on the show way back in the day when it was a new thing and it's scientifically proven that dark mode is much worse for your eyes. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Okay.

It's not really recommended. No, I don't use it at all. Okay. All right. Yeah. I use night shift. I use the night shift feature on all my computers. So at night it, you know, it really gets orange. Uh, that's the only thing I really do with it. But yeah, I, I turned off dark mode cause I mean, even, even on my Kindle, when I try to use dark mode and you like blink your eyes, all you see these giant white bars where the words are, you know, the contract, it's just, it's, it doesn't work right.

So. Yeah. I think part of my affection for it was it kind of took me back to, you know, my original days on TRS 80s and Apple twos where. Did you turn all your texts green? Well, almost the TRS 80s were white. The apples were green. And if you're really cool, you had amber, but yeah.

Yeah. You had, you had to have money to get the amber. Right. Right. Do you remember those slow fade phosphor, phosphors on some of those old monitors that. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. Oh man. Good times. Good times. The good old days. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to share this week was this interesting reprint.

I saw someone publish. This is an interview in creative computer magazine with the guy who did the animations of the death star trench run, the computer animations of the death star trench run in the original star wars, which are all wireframes.

Right. So, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Really interesting interview about how they did that. How slow it was to do that and a window into what the capabilities were at the time, which of course were practically nothing.

So this person who did this, his name was Larry Cuba, and there's a quote here I'm going to read. It says, Larry Cuba suggests that in the future, computers will be able to generate pictures of such quality that they will look as though they had been photographed by a camera. In the case of Star Wars, it was thought that such photographic realism might be confusing to the audience.

So a wire cage model was specified so that the audience would readily understand that the images were to have been created by a machine. Now we just count fingers. Yeah. Yes. Yes, indeed.

It's a cool old article. And sometimes when I read old articles like this, it reminds me of how much we take for granted now and that it was not always so. And so I find myself delighted by those little, oh, oh, right.

That's how it was. Oh, I forgot. Like, that's how hard everything was back then. Well, it's crazy to think just how readily we adapted to all of this stuff. Yeah. Although some arguments can be made that we actually didn't do it that well. Yeah, we haven't really done that. And it's all the angst and insanity going on these days.

But yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I guess it's all just become such a part of everyone's lives. I mean, I think back to those early 8-bit computer days, and it was a big deal to say, like, oh, your family has a computer? Mm-hmm. Yes.

Oh, our office just got a computer. A computer. Yeah. Right. And everybody gets issued one. Oh, you work with computers. Right. Right. Oh, because now everybody has one. Yeah. Yeah. It's like podcasting. Mm-hmm.

Oh, you do a podcast. You're that nerd. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a living. I love how the cover of this creative computing magazine, it's from May, June, 1978. Computer Games, Oregon Trail, Business Computing, Payroll, The Mechanical Mouse, or Modeling the Cat Falling.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm going to have to subscribe to this sub stack. I do like the fact that they did it in computer font, the whole article. It's like, great. Yeah. It's old school. Yeah. All right, gentlemen. All righty.

That's it for this week. Thanks. If, I'm not sure if I'll be here next week, but if I'm not, Gary will fill in for me. Yeah. Just give, I'll give Gary a call. We'll give you a call. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon this week, we have no one. Boo. So, just a reminder, as little as $3 a month gets you the shows early, ad-free, and in high res. Join us. Join us. Patreon.com slash Jim G. One of us. No?

Okay. Over at PayPal, we've got Charlie, Howie, Simon, Pedro, Judge, Jonathan, Nikolai, Levy, Nikola, and Thomas. Thank you all so much. Over at the tip jar, we've got Adam, Josh, Matthew, Sarah, Theodore, and Christopher. Thank you all so, so much. You have no idea how much.

No. Look, Jason's gutters aren't going to repair themselves, people. No doubt. So, let's get into this here. We do have a new five-star review from Mike Mathea, the one and only. I've listened to a lot of podcasts through the years. Most of them have kept limited attention, bored me, or were in the wrong lane of traffic.

Not this one. This is the only one I still listen to on a weekly basis. These guys are grounded with reality, have excellent taste in media. The best. Thank you. All right. You can put that on TikTok now. Oh, you can. That's right. Tell your wife thanks.

I will. It's funny. We used to get people who came back and said, oh, I just went back to the beginning and listened to the whole show, the whole series. Nobody does that anymore. We don't get that anymore. There's a few too many. Yeah, I think once we hit like the 450 mark, that kind of went waning real quick.

That dropped off a cliff. They're like, no, we're not going to do that. So even if you listen to two a day, it would still take you almost two years now to get through it. You could have all that content for the low price of $3 a month. Get on it, people. Just saying. Get on it.

We're going to have to start adding ads. Oh, wait. Shit. We do. We do. Until next time, I'm Brian Gilmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show. slash 646.

GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment. Sharing the show with your friends, enemies, or anyone in between is free and can be almost as good as cash. Almost. $3 a month, people. Come on. Get on it. 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 on the air. GOG.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that we can also read on the air. Stay grumpy.