647: DarJar

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. Jason, I've learned something living in Toronto the past few years. There are two seasons here. Okay. Not four. There is winter and then there is construction. Oh, I seem to remember this. Yeah. Yeah. And we have left winter and we are into construction.

I don't know how it's going to go for the next couple months, but we've gotten a notice. I mean, it's a nice thing. I'm glad they're doing it, I guess. But basically, they're replacing our entire road and all of our sidewalks on my street over the next three months. Oh, lovely. Great.

So we'll see how it goes. If we would have done the show yesterday, we wouldn't have been able to do a show because they had big machines and they were jackhammering and tearing up the sidewalk across the street. Today, they're filling in with concrete. So lucky day for us today. Okay. Now, Brian, that's just immersive entertainment.

Well, my kid's too old now, unfortunately. If this would have happened when he was like two, he would have been enthralled. Oh, yeah. I bet. Yeah. So anyways, let's try to have a show and hopefully it won't get too loud. Let's do it. Knock on wood. And this is just as all of the California leaf blowers just pulled out from the front of my office building.

Yeah. Somebody was saying, I forget who it was, they're saying it was a conspiracy. Like, you know, one day, one team comes in and they blow the leaves to one side of the yard. Then another team comes in the next day to blow the leaves to the other side of the yard. And it just goes back and forth every single day. That's right.

Keeps them employed. Yep. I can't wait for that gas engine band to go into effect. Oh, yeah. But you know what? I've got one of the battery-powered leaf blowers. They're really good. Yeah. They're just as loud, though. Well, air makes noise.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, no matter what. Speaking of, let's make some noise with our air. Okay. Got some follow-up here. Neuralink. If you'll remember recently, Neuralink implanted a brain chip into 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who was then able to control digital interfaces with his mind.

We've chatted about this quite a bit on the show. Yes. However, data streaming from the implant began declining, prompting an investigation. Neuralink discovered that some of the micro-thin threads from the N1 chip had retracted from Arbaugh's brain, likely due to air trapped in his skull post-surgery.

So he truly is an airhead for signing up with Neuralink now. Well, you know, I think we did discuss it. He kind of, he was in a bad state and took a chance. And, well, it's Elon. Took a chance, and took a chance, and took a chance, and took a chance, and took a chance, and took a chance, and took a chance, and.

You know, this is super experimental stuff. So the chances of it working properly, not so great. You know, killed a bunch of monkeys. Let's not forget that. Yeah. Yeah. At least he's not having an unscheduled rapid disassembly. That's true. Unlike Elon's other ventures.

But they said that since the thing started to pull away from him, they actually got to improve the performance of the device because the signal was getting lower. So it turned out to be a good experiment for the team. Probably not so great for Noland in the couple coming months.

Oh, not so much, probably. I mean, I read here, they claim to have improved the device's performance through algorithm adjustments. So I'm hoping he's enjoying that news feed. Why is there no URL? Why am I only seeing the picture now? That's so dumb. It's so dumb.

Hope that works out for him. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I'm rooting for him. I'm not so much rooting for Neuralink. Yeah. And here's a great one I found. Experts discuss the dark likelihood of abandoned brain implant technology. Very timely on this one.

They talk about neurological device abandonment. Which is not something. That's like, you know, the worst STD ever. Well, you know, a lot of these companies probably will go out of business. Yeah. And then what do you do? Well, yeah, I think you have to have them removed as one person from this study had done.

The company went basically tits up and they said, no, we want it back. So, which really sucked for the person because I guess they really liked it. Yeah. That's, that's, this is good. This stuff is definitely going to happen. So, uh, you tinfoil hat wearers out there, ironically, the brain chip you do want in your head does come from Bill Gates.

Yeah, it really does. Because they're not going anywhere. Nope. Nope. I mean, uh, you know, they're saying that they need more discussion around how these things are handled in the future and more, uh, discussion with patients. You see, the only thing that doesn't really count are if you're in a clinical trial.

So the Neuralink guys should out of luck, but when these things actually hit the market and you'd like, you know, you go sign up for your brain implant, we hope that they treat it better than an IOT device with terrible security and default passwords, you know? Well, not a great track record in this, uh, crossover between, uh, medical science and technology as, uh, another timely story popped up that I saw when you put these in an insulin pump software bug has injured over 200 people.

Whoopsie. Yeah. The FDA has issued a class one recall for the T-Connect mobile app on iOS, which is used to monitor and control the T-Slim X2 insulin pump used by people with diabetes. It was the supposed first smartphone app that can program insulin doses that the FDA has approved, but, uh, apparently not working so great.

The app had serious software problems that could have caused life-threatening conditions or even death. The FDA has received 224 injury reports as of April 15th. So basically version 2.7 of the T-Connect mobile app that you probably had to update or just updated for itself for you had a bug that initiated the cycle where the app would crash and then would be relaunched by the iOS platform over and over and over again.

This led to excessive Bluetooth communication that drained the pump pump's battery and caused it to shut down far earlier than users would expect. Oh, I'm laughing, but it sucks. I mean, this stuff was funny before it actually like really hurt people, but now we're getting to the point where this shit's starting to hurt people.

I love it. They say because the app had serious software problems, the app is software. You know, let's, let's, let's, let's, you know, there's no, there's a distinction without a difference there. Yes. Yeah. You'd think that they would have tested this a little bit, a little bit better. Yeah. You know, I just, look, I'm a, I'm a tech guy.

I love tech. I don't want tech in my body. No, I tell you what, it was fascinating though. When I was in the hospital, uh, for the stroke and the guy next to me was, uh, they, he was in for his heart stuff and they had someone from the pacemaker company that he had come in and recalibrate his pacemaker.

And I got to listen to it in real time. She's like, okay, well, I'm going to raise your heartbeat just a little bit now. Now I'm going to lower it. You're going to feel a little woozy here. And now I'm going to jack it back up. And she was just like sitting there literally on his phone, remote controlling his heart. And I'm like, Ooh, I hope that shit's encrypted.

Seriously. I was sitting there with, you know, a copy of wire shark in the next bed. Oh, strange world. It is, uh, speaking of software app, software issues, I don't think this, this, this really kind of qualifies, but so my roommate was getting the New York post delivered to the house, the paper version.

Oops. I'll continue. Rupert Murdoch getting angry at my story. Apparently it's throwing shit around my room. Poltergeist. So my roommate called to cancel it because she didn't want it anymore. And, uh, what they did was this is, this is, this is beautiful.

Logged into her account, canceled, went through 17 pages of, no, I really still want to cancel. Nope. There. I see your dark pattern there. Nope. Now you move that cancel button up one. I gotcha. Nope. Going to cancel. Cancel, cancel, cancel. Thank you. You're canceled. Three days later, gets billed for the next round of the subscription.

Right. She calls them and she gets somebody on the phone and they say, oh, no, no, that wasn't an accident. We just bill you in case you feel like coming back. What? We literally said that. We bill you just in case you decided to change your mind and want to come back.

And so your, so your subscription is ready and waiting for you. That absolutely has to be illegal. Oh, and 100% has to be illegal, but who's going to track it down and, and file the class action on them? And how are they going to prove it? They have to record the people first, having them say that.

It's, oh my God. It's like, just in case you decided to come back. Right. That's like moving and pay and they're still charging you for your mortgage. Might want to move back in. In case you want to come back. Yeah. You might want to, there's somebody still living there now that we sold it to, but in case you want to come back, we're still going to keep charging you.

Yeah. What a world. In the news.

This just in Brian, Jack Dorsey has left the blue sky board. Okay. And here's the funny part. We all found out about it on X. So here's the deal.

So yeah, he's the Jack Dorsey started it when he was still at Twitter in 2019. They're not saying why he left, but I figured it out. Okay. I got an email from that. We talked about last week that blue sky has the greatest technology. In the world. Now you can put animated gifts on their platform.

That's right. They're way ahead of everyone. Yeah. It turns out you can only do it through a service called tenor. You can't actually upload your own gifts, which I didn't know because who uses blue sky? Besides John Scalzi. So I got this today. New features coming to blue sky.

Here's what you can expect in the next few months. Direct messages. You'll be able to send DMs, video and custom gifts. You can already use gifts from tenor on blue sky. And soon you'll be able to upload your own gifts and videos, improved custom feeds, more anti-harassment features and OAuth.

So I think Jack Dorsey was just having PTSD because this is shit that he did on Twitter in like the early 2000s. He's like, I don't feel like going through this shit again. If you guys are this dumb and this slow, I don't feel like sticking around. Yeah. Well, his beard has left the building.

Yes, but it still has two board seats. Of course it does. Well, we've spent a lot of time talking about work from home and hybrid and all that sort of stuff and how companies are trying to move away from virtual work. Well, Dell has made a move. That's for sure. It's an interesting company to do so.

And I'll tell you why in a second. It has reversed its position on remote work. Dell is reportedly implementing new tracking techniques as of May 13th to ensure its workers are following the company's return to office policy. They have basically been allowing people to work remotely for over 10 years, like pre-COVID.

They were doing this a long time ago. But in February, it issued a return to office mandate. And then you basically will either be classified as totally remote or hybrid. So hybrid workers will have to go into Dell office at least 39 days per quarter. So that's more than three days per week, which is kind of what I would at the max do.

Fully remote workers, meanwhile, are ineligible for promotion. So if you like your job and want to actually make more money, you don't have choice. You called it long, long ago. You called that. Yeah, people that aren't going in at all, that are just going to be just going to be work from home.

People are never going to get promoted. It's just not going to happen. So but they are doing employee badges and they will be tracking swipes and VPN connections to confirm that workers are in the office for a significant amount of time. You'd think they would have supervisors, but I guess if you don't match up your schedules, you got to go tech, right?

Supervisors are all remote. What are they going to do? Yeah. So they will be doing a color coding system and that Dell plans to make weekly site visits from its badge tracking available to employees for the corporate for the corporation's human capital management software to give them color coded ratings that summarize their status from consistent to limited presence.

Blue, green, yellow or red. Human capital management. Like nobody and apparently people are saying at Dell that like nobody has really understood exactly how this is going to work, how many red flags are acceptable. Managers don't really know the confusion of the source to tell the register.

It's a shit show here. And an unnamed person reportedly familiar with Dell claimed that those failing to show up to Dell office frequently enough will refer to the COO, Jeff Clark. Because he's got nothing better to do. Ironically, Clark used to support the idea of fully remote work post pandemic.

In 2020, he said, after all of this investment to enable remote everything, we will never go back to the way things were before. Here at Dell, we expect on an ongoing basis that 60% of our workforce will stay remote or have a hybrid schedule where they work from home mostly and come into the office one or two days a week.

Well, not anymore. And Michael Dell, Dell CEO and founder, also used to support remote work and penned in a blog in 2022, saying that Dell found no meaningful differences for team members working remotely or office based even before the pandemic forced everyone home.

So doesn't matter, but we're going to have people come back anyways. Some suspect that Dell's suddenly stringent office policy is an attempt to force people to quit so the company can avoid layoffs. Ah, okay. Because as we know, they've laid off over 13,000 people last year alone.

Wow. Everybody is doing layoffs right now. So not a surprise. So that could be what it is. We'll see. All right. Interesting. Interesting way to go about it. But just tacked on to the end of this article, I just do want to point out that every study so far has basically found that people are happier working from home or at least in a hybrid model and the work is getting done.

It's not – people are not slacking off. All of the studies and surveys are showing this. So there you go. I think it just comes down to profitability. If the company is not making money, they're going to look for everything that they can do to tighten the belt. Exactly.

Exactly. So it's just become a leverage to be able to fire people. Who's putting the Dells together? Didn't – wasn't that the whole thing with Dell? You know, you call, you custom order it, and then they put it together for you and ship it to you? I think so. Those people obviously have to go into work. I was going to say, unless they're shipping them to grandma's house and building them in the basement, which I don't think would work.

But, eh, okay. Yeah, and Meta's looking to make some more money, too. I finally figured out, Jason, that you can get customer service from Meta. Oh, okay. How? You pay for it. Oh. This is how they make more money now. Meta is expanding its paid verification services for businesses, adding three new tiers to the program that offer extra perks to companies willing to pay for a monthly subscription.

I read through all of this, and honestly, the only perk I can see is you actually would get customer service. Okay. That's it. That's about it. So you're paying to play. If you've got a problem with your account, you get locked out, and you didn't pay, tough shit. If you want to pay $14.99 a month, you can have one, one customer service thing.

You can go up to $44.99 a month, which is their plus plan, the $119.99 premium plan, and the $349.99 per month max plan. All right. Fast track customer support.

Yeah. For $15 a month, I love this. You get the badge, the high-ranking inserts of pay-to-play, impersonation protection, which should come with every account, the ability to add links to images. Okay. Yes. That right there is kind of, I don't know, basic for a web platform.

Yeah, but now they figured out they could monetize that, Jason. Apparently. Yep. Apparently. So all they ever had to do that would have solved all of this problem is charge every user a nominal fee per month. Mm-hmm. We all would have been happy, but not enough money.

They would have been long out of business. Yeah. Why go for the voluntary way to get money from your customers instead of turn your customers into something that they can tell to the actual customers where no one needs to give their permission. There you go. That's the easier, easier, softer way. Yeah. It's funny.

I got verified on LinkedIn this week, and it didn't cost anything, and it took like five minutes. I'm like, okay, thanks. I just uploaded a picture of my ID to one of their, you know, the ID services. Yep. Done. That was it. I'm like, okay. That's how everybody should do it.

Yep. I mean, LinkedIn charges for a lot of crazy shit, though. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's so funny now. It's like we don't – you never almost want to research somebody without using an air-gapped computer like that's not attached to any of your other computers with like just a direct line to the internet that nobody's ever used before with a VPN because as soon as you look up somebody's profile, you show up on their radar, and it's like, hey, they were checking me out.

Yep. You know, that's the worst thing about LinkedIn. It's like I don't – I actively don't want to go to LinkedIn because people will see that I searched for them, you know. It's like totally screws up my research. I love this one. Uber has hit a bit of a financial snag, Brian.

Last year, they had a net profit, if you'll remember. They were in the black for once. And we talked about all the shenanigans that they had to do to get that number into the black. Yeah. Well, it's all apparently turned around and bit the myth in the ass because first quarter of 2024, $654 million net loss.

Oof. That's a rough one. Yep. That's a lot of money. In between going from a $474 million profit to a $654 million loss, that's some creative accounting right there. That is. Yeah. They're saying that the loss is largely attributed to costly legal settlements and a decrease in rides in key markets like Latin America.

So. All right. Yeah. We'll see how they keep going. But just remember, we said that that profit was not profit. Yeah. And it's a ridiculous business model anyways. Yep. It's an app. That's all it is. They're still waiting for the self-driving cars to get here. That's what they're holding out for.

Yep. Well, a while back, I talked about Spotify and the new royalty program that they were going to roll out that involved basically, you know, had to make a certain amount of streams to get paid at all, et cetera, et cetera. Somebody's run the math. In a new Billboard report, music publisher, reporter, Kristen Robinson estimates songwriters will be paid about $150 million less during the first 12 months of its implementation in comparison to the previous model.

Oh, yay. Recorded last month, Spotify is raising their prices by $1 per month for individual plans and $2 per month for shared plans. These price increases will help subsidize the cost of bundling 15 hours of audiobooks per month as part of paid plans. Instead of raising royalty rates, however, Spotify will pay a so-called bundle rate to songwriters for streams from premium subscribers to further offset the cost of book licensing.

Okay. This allows the streamer to value music at about 52% of the total bundle or around $5.70 per subscriber for the current 1099 plan, including audiobooks. According to Billboard's calculation, songwriters and publishers will earn an estimated $150 million less in U.S. mechanical royalties from premium duo and family plans for the first 12 months.

This is in effect compared to what they would have earned if these three subscriptions were never bundled. So, yay, Spotify. Yay, Spotify. And it's all about audiobooks that nobody cares about on Spotify. Loss leaders again. And, well, more losses for songwriters.

Yeah. Yeah. And probably audiobook publishers, too. I'm sure they're getting the shaft. I'd imagine, because I'm sure it's cut rate. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Cut rate negotiations. Well, we talked about Meta's paying to play. Nintendo is done paying Elon Musk for X integration. Nintendo has apparently had enough of it. The API fees. The Mario Maker said on Wednesday, that's starting on June 10th, direct integration from the Switch's image album to Elon Musk's Nazi-curious platform wouldn't no longer work.

Bravo. Bravo on Nazi-curious. I love it. That's a great one. So, with Nintendo's departure, that's all three major console makers that have pulled the plug on native screen sharing to X. Apparently, it was costing them almost over $40,000 per month to be able to do that. And then they went, why?

Why? Exactly. Why? Yeah. So, there you go. Yeah. It's funny. It's funny now. I'm finally okay with calling it X, because there's nothing that remains of what was Twitter in there anymore. It's dead. It's bad. Like, I used to still surf it now and then, just because I had a pretty good curated list.

But it's just horrible now. I can't. It's done. I took down all my posts, and I don't even have it bookmarked anywhere. It's just, it's not worth going back to. Yeah. It's like, there's nothing there. Yeah. Well, what we knew what was going to happen is happening. The TikTok thing, now they're turning around and suing the U.S. government to stop its app from being banned.

So, this will just go on forever. In the lawsuit, TikTok claims that a divestiture of its business from ByteDance is simply not possible, and that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act violates its First Amendment rights. No, it doesn't. I did not know that an app has First Amendment rights.

Yeah. No. So, yeah. Coming soon to a jury room near you. And this will just go on and on and on, and we will not hear anything about this anytime soon. And it will just never end, and your kids will still get sucked into TikTok forever.

No, I think it's going to end. I'm pretty sure it's going to end. Was it January 19th is the cutoff date? Yeah. Something's going to happen. If you want a really, really good explanation of why TikTok must go from a guy who actually knows some shit, check out the latest episode of The Tim Ferriss Show with Matt Pottinger, who's the former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor.

Say that 10 times fast at this time of the morning. Yeah, this guy knows what's going on, and he explains it very well, very succinctly in the episode. And it's right at the top of the episode. So, if you just want to get the TikTok tea, just listen up until when they start talking about Taiwan, then you can, unless you want to hear about Taiwan.

But all of the TikTok stuff is up front in the episode. It's like 15 minutes. Well worth the listen, because he explains it better than we could. All right. And it just comes down to, it is much simpler. It's actually not much simpler. It's much more complicated than just taking our user data.

It's all about manipulation. It's 100% about manipulation, and it's a very long-reaching goal that they have. They have a very intricate playbook that, you know, goes for decades. So, well worth the listen to. Did you get a chance to check it out? Not yet, but I will listen to it tonight.

Yeah, please do. It's very, very good.

A couple weeks back, we had our kid, and we were over at the cousin's house, and they watched the original Ghostbusters, which I have to say totally has legs. It was awesome. It was very funny, but it got my kid super into Ghostbusters, and he wants to see basically all the movies.

So, we're kind of going in order, which involves taking a bit of a detour towards Ghostbusters 2016, which was the reboot by Paul Feig, I believe, with Melissa McCarthy and Kate McKinnon and all the girls. It was the girl reboot. Yes, it was. Widely, poorly received, particularly by, you know, white men.

I remember saying, I remember saying something at the time that it wasn't bad, but I didn't, you know, can't touch the original. But on the rewatch, I'm going to say, it's funny. Yeah, it is funny. It's good. It's pretty good.

I like it. So, don't understand all the hate that was there for it. I mean, I get, you know, it's hard to compare to the classic because it's the classic, but certainly better than Ghostbusters 2. I like Ghostbusters 2. It's all right. This one's better.

Ego! No, I remember liking this one. Yeah, it was good. I highly recommend it for anybody that didn't like it the first time around. So, if you're not racist and sexist, check out Ghostbusters 2016 if you missed it. There you go. All right. We talked a little bit last week about how the Lord of the Rings extended versions were going into the theater and reminisced about our experience with that the first time around.

Our numb butt cheeks, yes. And then we just don't discuss The Hobbit, which was a bloated mess of tiny books built up into three very long movies and just sucked. But we are getting a new Lord of the Rings film. Okay. The Hunt for Gollum, which will hit theaters in 2026.

Everybody seems cautiously optimistic. There's a lot of why, but Andy Serkis is directing it and playing Gollum. And it's being produced by the same group of people that did the first three movies. That was really good. We got Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens and, of course, Peter Jackson.

They're all on board with this one. So, we'll see. Okay. Yeah. I don't know about this because they're talking about, you know, having Gandalf and Aragorn in there. I'm like, uh...

See, Gollum... Gotta recast them. Yeah. Gollum, you can kind of get away with having Andy Serkis back as, but nobody else. Nobody else. That was a long time ago now. Yeah. Yeah. I like at the bottom of this, though, they say that there's going to be a new anime-style film. Yeah. That sounds interesting, too. The War of the Rohirin.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. That's a few hundred years before. And I haven't heard anything about The Lord of the Rings, The Rings of Power, coming back yet. I'm assuming they're shooting it. They spent enough money on it that there's got to be more. It wasn't bad. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not abandoning that. No way, no day. Yeah.

Yeah. And other stuff that I've been watching, I caught up on Franklin. That's dropping once per week. I'm still enjoying it. Okay. I think, you know, if it goes more than two more episodes, I'm out. There's only so much Franklin you can take.

There's only so much Michael Caine staring at people and people being French and wearing weird makeup that I can actually take. But it's enjoyable. Oh, Michael Douglas. Yes. I think Michael Caine's dead, isn't he? I don't think he's dead, but he officially retired from acting. Ah, that's it. Okay. Yeah.

Got it. And another Apple TV Plus show has come out that was actually written by one of the sci-fi authors in one of the bundles that I talked about last week. Yep. Crouch. Dark Matter. I gave the first episode a go. And? It's okay.

And? Jennifer Connelly is smoking hot. She's older than me. She's still stunning. That's my takeaway from Dark Matter. I will watch the second episode to see. Because the first one's all set up, right?

So you don't really know what's going on. But it's well done. That's for sure. It just reeked of constellation to me. I'm. Yeah. I mean, it's this. It's like, okay. Okay. No. I can't. I just watched a shitty show with the same premise.

I know. And wasted seven hours of my life on. I know. And I got, you know, through this one and kind of scrubbed through it. And I'm like, no. I can't go down this road again. I can't. I can't. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll let you, I'll let you take the hit on this one. I'm going to say it's going to not be a high priority viewing for me.

If I find myself with absolutely nothing else to watch, there's not even a Dodgers baseball game on. And I remember that this exists. I will go back and watch it. Okay. Well, I'm doing one for you now. Sugar also on Apple TV plus. Okay. This show was interesting.

There's seven episodes out now. Everybody. If you don't know that there's a big twist. In episode six, if you pay attention, you can figure out what it is fairly early on. I think I clocked it in episode two and was just kind of waiting for it.

Right. It was, it was one of two options and, uh, they went with option number two. I can't tell you if I recommend this show at all, at all. I love Colin Farrell. I think he's fantastic. Uh, he's actually really good in this, but the story itself is just kind of like, what the fuck, what the, what, what am I watching?

Uh, is this like film noir remake? I watched the trailer and now I'm reading the episode descriptions and I'm saying, I don't think this is for me. It's not. I'm going to tell you right now. It's not for you, Brian.

First, I thought they were trying to do more like the Perry Mason style redo, you know, like, you know, the really sharp hip dude with, uh, uh, you know, just a film noir aesthetic type of thing going on. But modern day, I'm like, okay, cool. I can get behind this. Then I say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

What the fuck's going on here? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Totally mislabeled in the, in the genre's category. What completely. So, uh, there's, I think one or two more episodes. I just watched episode seven last night. It didn't get any better.

Um, so I'll let you know. I'll let you know. Uh, well, for the Disney plus viewers that have recently gotten Hulu added to their package, something new is coming to Disney has expanded its partnership with Warner brothers discovery to offer a streaming bundle sometime this summer that will include max subscriptions along with Disney plus and Hulu, which is going to bring a bunch of things together.

Well, I don't really need Hulu, but I've hardly ever watched anything on Hulu, but I do watch stuff on max. You're max. Thanks. Yeah. So, so when this bundle comes out, I won't need your login anymore. Which is just in time as they're starting to do all those sharing crackdowns anyway. So we're getting cracked down on.

Yeah. I'm going to get cracked on some point. I'm sure. So, uh, it'll now be part of Disney, uh, plus, which I will not ever be getting rid of because we're a Disney family. Got a kid. I love to see stuff. So I will be adding my max subscription to that when I no longer have access to yours. Uh, no word yet.

I thought that the discovery app was going to be rolled into max, but it is, is it now already? Oh, totally. It's been since max launched. Yeah. No, really? Okay. I still have the discovery app itself as well. So, oh yeah. Well, it's, they still kept it as a standalone service for people who wanted to, which makes absolutely no sense because it is the exact same content.

So when, when, when that kind of bundling happened, I got rid of my discovery. So I was like, okay, it saved me, you know, eight, $7, $8 a month. Yeah. I got the, I subscribed to discovery purely for my mom because my mom likes a lot of those shows, you know, and doesn't care about a lot of the max shows.

But at some point, if this all gets rolled in together and the discovery stuff is in Disney plus, then great. I got, well, look, we're going back to cable here. People. Exactly. I'm like, it's all getting rolled up together. I, I, I'm happy about this. I'm like, keep bundling them together. Cause it's one place that I have to cancel.

It's great. Yep. I don't watch anything on Disney plus, but I watch a bunch of stuff on Hulu. So I've got that Disney plus and Hulu bundle. Right. So this'll make that. I'll be getting Disney plus for free or whatever. I'm just like, okay, put them all together. So I just have one bill. You do get all the star Wars chase. Who cares?

You have to, for our security segment, this is no longer security. Well, that's what I have BitTorrent for, but I still have, I still have Disney plus. So whatever, I'll just keep watching. I don't have paramount plus right now because I don't care about discovery. So call me when strange new worlds comes back. We'll do.

I watched discovery last night. Uh, and you're fine. Oh, that sunk cost just keeps sucking you in. Doesn't it? I got to do something on a Thursday night, man. Remember the old days when we would just listen to the cure and rub one out?

Yeah. Go back to the old days. I had a girlfriend. Yeah. Well, ups and doodads. Remember that gushing review of the rabbit are one that we talked about about two weeks ago when it first came out and you could, I just didn't understand how this could be such a glowing positive review.

I mean, talk about rubbing one out. Jesus. Well, the other shoe is dropped everywhere else. And gadget has their review of the rabbit are one and $199 AI toy that fails at almost everything. The review starts with, I hate the rabbit on one.

Okay. Now we're some choice. It's yet another sign that standalone AI gadgets like the humane AI pin are fundamentally useless devices meant to attract hype and VC funding without benefiting users at all. It's like trying to build a skyscraper on quicksand.

Today's AI models are great for parlor tricks, but they're ultimately untrustworthy. How do you create a device around that? The more I use the rabbit R1, the more I felt like it was purposefully designed to drive me insane. Don't buy the R1. Even if rabbit somehow manages to deliver on some of the promises of its lamb, like the ability to train the R1 to handle the variety of tasks.

I have no faith that it'll ever actually work. My advice extends to every standalone AI gadget. Just stay away. Your phone can already do this. Yeah, there you go. Yep. And Gizmodo jumped in too. They've got another article, everything you should know before you buy the rabbit R1, which is basically don't buy it.

Yep. What a useless piece of crap. Yep. Yep. Speaking of gadgets, did you watch the Apple announcements this week? No, because my iPads are great. My phone is great. My laptop is great.

My watch is great. Don't need anything new. Yep. Pretty much the same here. I still got the M1 iPad Pro. Works phenomenal. It's as fast as it needs to be. I just can't see why I would get a new one. I'm sure the AI stuff will be great, but they released the new M4 chip that's all AI and machine learning, which they've had for ages.

So I think they're going to, as soon as these things start to roll out, I think everybody's going to be like, oh crap. Because they've been working on these chips for a long time and everybody's got them in their pocket. So we're going to see the master plan from Apple coming. But they have the new iPad Pro, which is the thinnest device they've ever made.

So they made an ad for it. Yes. An ad called Crush. Yes. Did you watch the ad, Brian? I did. Okay. Now, I assume that you watched the ad after you read all the negative feedback from it? Yes. Or did you watch it before?

No. Why would I watch an ad willingly? Yeah. I spent most of my life trying to avoid ads now. Yeah. So, I mean, I watched the ad when I saw that the kerfuffle was going on. I'm like, what's the big fucking deal? That was my personal take. But I'm, you know, Gen X and don't care about anything anymore.

My soul is a black hole. Your soul has been crushed. It has been crushed. It has been crushed into the weight of the world. So I'm just like, okay, what's the big deal? So I read all of the complaints and everything. And I don't know if I can agree with them all that much.

What do you think, Brian? Well, I see their point. And then when I got kind of deep into a couple of the articles, and it goes back to, you know, the Big Brother ad that Apple did way, way, way back when we were actually young. Yeah. And how that was, you know, that was a great example of here's a, we're showing you a tool to help, like, break the monotony and crush the system so you can do anything you want, versus this commercial, which shows them destroying all items of creativity that we could use.

Yeah, that's true. So, I mean, there is a very valid point. It is, for Apple, for what they claim to be and what they want to offer to people to be creators, it is insanely tone deaf. But, having said all of that, it's a fucking ad, and it's a Tempest in a teapot.

Yeah. My favorite one, though, was, that made me actually, you know, rethink my position, was somebody did a version of it and said, here, I fixed it for you. And all they did was play the ad in reverse. Exactly. And it works. That's what they should have done. It actually works. Yeah. Like, if all the stuff, if the instruments and all the creative paraphernalia came out of the iPad instead of getting crushed by it, it totally works.

Yeah. So, I don't know. I thought that was actually pretty good. Reverse it. I'm like, yeah, I get it. Yeah. I mean, I understand where they were coming from for the ad. It's like, okay, we put all of this stuff into this little tiny thing. It's like the old Radio Shack ad.

You know, you see all the camcorder and the this, the that, and the other. It's like, now everything's in your phone. It's like, yeah, I get it. I get what they were going for. Yeah. Crushing it and destroying it, probably not the best way to go. Like, imagine if Spotify would have put out an ad like that. Oh, God.

Oh, God. Just see Slipknot being crushed under a breast. Oh, man. No, I mean, it's just an ad, I guess. Just an ad. Just an ad. So, Eleven Labs. Yes. The people who have basically going to ruin my career as an audiobook guy, which is, I can't even call a career at this point, but I saw a new project out from them today, and they are making music now.

That's the new thing after Sona. I mean, it's a big splash. Did you listen to the song that it came up with at first? I did. I did. I think Sona's a little better still. Yeah. This is their first, you know, first attempt. So the thing is, they've got the voices kind of down.

I started to go through their Eleven Labs projects. It's a new feature that they have for audiobook creation. Right. And, yeah, it's really good. It's really fucking good. We're all screwed. We're all getting crushed. Yeah, I got more on that in a little bit.

We're definitely getting crushed. But it's kind of insane how good it's getting over there, how fast it's getting good. Yeah, I really don't have much else on that one. I don't have much else on that one, but it's like kind of a black hole of despair that is my soul just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

You know, we're still good until they figure out irony and dark humor. I think we're okay. You still got to – machines can't do that yet. Although I say okay, but I say okay and then I look at our bank account for the podcast and we're not okay.

No, we're not okay. No, irony is going to be a slider in two weeks. How much irony would you want? How much schmaltz and shtick and all that? Randy Travis has jumped in on the AI song bandwagon. All right. Now, this was a collaboration to make this work.

And the one thing that's driving me crazy is none of the articles about this song actually named the company that they used to make the voice. It is an unnamed U.K. company and they used a couple different models and they, you know, tweaked it around and took his old songs and got it together.

If you ask me when you play the song, you cannot fucking tell the difference. I can't. I can't hear it. I'm not a professional musician, but can you hear it? Not really, no. It sounds good. It sounds really good, you know. I mean, as good as a Randy Travis song can sound because I'm not a country guy, but from an actual musicality and song perspective, it sounds really good.

It's a lot cleaner than I would expect from a Randy Travis song. But then again, all production is now, even from real people, because we've used all these digital tools and everything is so precise and clean these days. So, yeah, there's no difference. Yeah. And they did have another artist create a reference track that they then matched with his voice.

So, it wasn't just going straight from, you know, type in the lyrics and give it a little beat and comes out like that. They actually had a song and then had somebody sing the song and then they overlapped. They took those lyrics out and then put his lyrics in that were generated. So, you know, it was actually more of a construction than just a, oh, I'm going to type in make me a Randy Travis song, you know.

Yeah. No, we're screwed. We're getting crushed. Pretty much. Pretty much. AI co-pilots are changing how coding is taught. I saw this article. Where the hell did this article come from? Oh, this came from Spectrum, IEEE Spectrum. And it's something that I'm actually kind of fascinated with.

So, we've got these new tools that are coming out that are actually, you know, just really good at coding. Really good. I've been playing with them. Like I told you, I used them for a project the other day. And I just said, write me a PHP script that does this. And it's like, okay, copy, paste, change the path name and it works.

It's like, fuck you. So, what they're going to be teaching now in colleges is less about syntax and actual language construction, but more about how software development works. And, you know, the underlying, basically just the underlying theory about software and how projects work and things like that.

And let, just let the, you basically write it out. This is where the napkin comes in. You write out your thing on a napkin. You take a picture of it. You send it to the thing and you come back and you have a website. Then you go look for funding and take off the sticker that said blockchain and put the new sticker on that says AI and then you're off to the funding races.

Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, these tools are good. And the one thing that AI, machine learning, whatever, would be really good at, you'd think, would be programming. It doesn't make sense. So, then it comes down to the ideas, being able to articulate it properly to the AI tools and being able to piece it all together and having an underlying system that makes sense in the first place.

So, yeah. Yep. And it actually makes me want to code again. It kind of does. It kind of does. Well, the next one, Dan Shipper from the website, every stupidest name for a website. Have you learned anything about SEO? Jesus. They tested the capabilities of GitHub Copilot Workspace, which is the new coding environment from GitHub and Microsoft over there.

Over 24 hours, Shipper had to perform various coding tasks from simple tweaks to building complex features. He found that while Copilot Workspace was slower than alternatives like ChatGPT or Claude, it offered higher quality code generation and an integrated coding experience. So, it probably ties in with the Microsoft IDE.

Yeah. Which is a really nice IDE, by the way, even though I don't use it anymore. I checked it out before my brain stopped working and it was actually really nice. I was a fan. Was it Visual Studio? What the hell was it called? Not Visual Studio, right? Not Visual.

No, no, no. It's something different. Whatever that one is. Anybody who needs to know knows the name of it already, so pass that along. But, yeah, I think that, you know, with teaching how software works and then you start to be able to write code in just like normal language, you know, I think that the whole paradigm for programming is changing.

And it's one of those things where it's like, you know, I can't read code anymore, but I still remember the fundamentals, so it does kind of make me want to jump back in a bit. Yeah, yeah. But then I'm like, you know, let's use this to build a WordPress alternative. I don't know. But what are you going to do with it? That's the problem.

Make a better insulin pump app. Well, I was going to say that maybe those guys need to be getting on board here. Yeah. And we've talked about AI chatbots as the girlfriend alternative. Yes. There's an article over at The Verge called Teens Making Friends with AI Chatbots.

And it's basically a rundown of how teenagers are, they're kind of going down the rabbit hole of different apps like Character.ai and all these other ones that are just chatbots for lonely people. Somebody to talk to. I'm not surprised at all by this, and it's very concerning.

But when real friendships have moved to virtual, like these kids don't get together. They stay in their own houses, and they just like, they talk to each other via social networks. Like, that's, you're halfway to a virtual friendship already. Exactly, because you don't really know, unless you're Zooming, which nobody really does.

Yeah. They text, that's it. Yeah. Or chat on Instagram DMs. Every now and again, they get a picture popped up. But, you know, most interactions nowadays are virtual for these kids, which is really shitty. Yep, it is. Really, really shitty. It's funny. My son has a really close friend at his school, and, you know, we make sure that they have playdates.

I take them to the park. They go to the park after school together all the time. And they're like, you know, it's never enough, because when you're that age, nothing is ever enough. They would eat 7,000 ice creams, because 6,999 is not enough. But they were like, oh, can we call each other and do virtual playdates?

And both sets of parents are like, no. We're not even going to get you started on that crap. Not even. We will get you together in person. Thank you very much. Yep. And the thing about character.ai that has me really kind of peeved, and this comes back to how words matter.

They have a chatbot. Literally, the name is psychologist, which I can guarantee it's not just like Elon's full self-driving is not. It's not a psychologist. It's a fucking app. It is an app that is also recording everything that you say to it.

Yes, and storing that tied to your account. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, keep your kids off the character.ai, folks, if you can. Playdates, like Brian said. Yes. Playdates. Now, oh, Brian, Brian, Brian.

Somebody is trying to do something that has me a little upset here. Okay. Gratitude Plus. It's redefining social networking by focusing on privacy, positivity, and personal connections. Okay. Sounds like a long goal there.

It's the woke truth. This innovative app created by New York-based developer Daniel Schaefer encourages users to nurture healthier relationships and improve mental wellness through features like journaling, mood tracking, and private circles for family and friends.

Okay. Okay. I don't know why I'd want journaling and mood tracking in there. That I'm sharing with my friends. Yeah, exactly. Gratitude Plus resembles the old dead app Path, which I really loved. Path I thought was fantastic. Now, it says it's designed to foster smaller, intimate groups rather than broad social media networks.

That's fine. Now, it goes on to some of the other different things here about the different experiences that they have. Now, there's one that gets me here. Gratitude Plus not only serves as a private diary, not so private if you're sharing it with an app, but also as a community where users can support each other anonymously, making social interactions more meaningful and supportive.

That sentence does not make any sense in the world to me. Nope. Support each other anonymously, which makes social interactions more meaningful and supportive? No. If we have learned one thing over the last 10 years of the internet and the social networking age is that anonymous is not used for making things meaningful or supportive.

It's used to tear people down and shit on them. Anonymity does not make anything better. No. So, yeah. You need accountability. You need to be tied to a real, to yourself. That's it. That's what's meaningful. Yeah.

Kind of. Yep. With over 10,000 users, including 650 unpaid subscriptions, Gratitude Plus is setting a new standard for what social media can be. Yeah. Not making any money. This is like the Venice Beach social network. It's all good vibes, man.

Let's go to Erewhon and then hop on Gratitude Plus and talk about how great our $50 smoothie was. I was going to say, now that we're broken, we just bought $30 worth of ice. Yep. All right. Well, I'll take a look at it. I'm not going to pay, but. Yeah.

So, here's the thing. It's 40 bucks a year for solo. Family for two to four people, it's 75 bucks a year. Now, here's my pro tip if you do want to try it out. There's a seven-day trial, which I don't think is enough time to test it. No. But if you go to the plans page and then immediately don't sign up for a plan, go to the next page, they immediately offer you 50% off.

Okay. It's just like, it's like the, you know, the girl on the date, she's like, oh, no, no, no. I can't give you a kiss goodnight. And then you say, okay. Then she's like, but aren't you going to sleep with me? It's like, come on, mixed messages, people. Treat yourself a little better than that is what I got to say.

50% off after just skipping one page. All right. Okay. But still, yeah, anonymity does not make anything more meaningful. Agreed. I was going to say. Nope. I don't know if you've seen the news about the new portal in New York City between New York City and Dublin.

Have you checked that out? I saw a reel showing it this morning on the crapper. All right. That will be the next portal. We'll just have crapper portals. Cute. It's cool. Yeah. I think it's cute. Yeah. I think it's cute. Yeah. And it's even better because there's no audio.

So you'll get, you'll fuck you back and forth to each other. Hold on a second, though. This is an always on video connection between New York City and Dublin. I know. How long is it going to be until there's a bunch of fucking waving dicks? Probably not long. I've already seen them drag one drunk lady off of the one in Dublin.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think it's great. I'm looking forward to it. I love it. But my God, I hope they have some filters. I doubt it. I doubt it. I just hope they're recording it.

That's all I want. I want to see the live stream. Yeah. So I picked up something this week. The Moalia laptop stand-in. Make way. Laptop stand with 360 rotating base, computer, notebook, laptop, riser, metal holder for desk collaborative work.

Fully foldable for easy storage. Fits all MacBook laptops up to 16 inches for $35.99. I needed a laptop stand. Yep. And this one looked, I looked at a ton of them. And I was looking for something that was pretty sturdy and firm and could still fit in my backpack.

This is fairly sturdy and firm. It's actually really sturdy and firm. Not really foldable like I thought it was. It will fit in a backpack, but it'll take up half of it. It's not that wee. But for use around the house, for like in the kitchen, I needed something to raise it up so when I'm cooking, I can still do, still see it at eye level and things like that.

I put it on my nightstand and it raises it up. It's a really nice adjustable laptop stand is all I'm saying. Works great for iPads too. I like it. It looks great. I was thinking about ordering it, but I realized my use case is like I'm usually watching my son after school but still trying to work. So like he's sitting around or whatever. This thing rotates and he will grab my laptop and turn it around so he can start doing whatever the hell he wants to do instead of my work.

So no. I need a non-rotating version. Get out of here, kid. I just put it on a bunch of books then. Save you some trouble. That was pretty good. I did find one of my favorite single-use websites this week, the one-click shrug emoji copy.

Nice. If you ever see the shrug emoji and you ever want to use it, I actually have it set up in TextExpander. I've got a shortcut for it because that's how I roll. But if you ever want it, this is a website that literally does one thing, copies the shrug emoji to your clipboard so you can paste it somewhere else. There you go. Very useful.

I saw this come through. SEO strategist Lily Ray shared some honestly horrifying data last week revealing some of the Internet's biggest publishers have seen huge losses in Google traffic over the last year. And this is data that comes from Systrix. And it basically says that anybody who charges money for subscriptions has seen their SEO traffic like almost over 70% for some since September 2023.

There's been new algorithmic changes. Google basically is a shit show now. Nothing is working right. SEO is just trashed because of AI. It's just a mess. It is absolutely a mess. SEO doesn't mean shit anymore. No, it doesn't.

It's destroyed. Thanks a lot. Speaking of things that got destroyed, which I actually noticed this week, you were talking earlier about deleting all of your stuff over on X. And I just never got an email, never got nothing. And I was like, I wonder if that tweet delete stuff is still working now that Elon's destroyed this platform. And I looked at my thing, which is basically just reposting our show when it comes out because I don't tweet.

But no, nothing's been deleted for quite some time. So then I went to look at tweet delete and it's a paid service now. They did not bother to email me about that. Missing out on a chance there. Not that I would have paid them anyways. But thank you for your service at the time because you destroyed all the stuff back from what I used to tweet.

And now I would just go through and, well, I mean, I don't care. I'll just leave our shows. It's fine. Yeah, I covered this when they went to paid only because I paid for it because I was my actor friend. I was clearing out his account and getting rid of all of his tweets. And I signed up for it, paid for it, and it didn't work then.

And they're like, oh, it's going to be a couple of weeks before it works again because there's API issues because they change their APIs. We don't have access. You got to do all this shit. And I'm like, wait, you're charging me monthly. But for the first month and a half, you haven't been actually doing anything. Can I have my refund now, please? And fortunately, they were cool enough to give me back my money, but they didn't actually do anything.

So it's a paid service, and they probably didn't email you because it's not working at all. Right. There you go. And, yeah, it's just – God, between that, the SEO problems, all I see right now is I'm just fascinated with the death of the web. The indie web was making a comeback up until recently, and I think that is just going to go the way of the dodo.

It is never going to happen. It's going to go the way of the Mastodon, Jason. Yeah, that's – the web is going to go the way of the Mastodon. The Mastodon is going to go the way of the dodo, and then we're all just back to Post-it notes and making funny GIFs of AI. It's all screwed.

And I even thought about this this morning, the hotel art industry, which is, you know, that just – I don't know if you've ever dealt with hotel art buyers and things like that because they're buying hundreds of thousands of pieces of art every year to fill up their hotels. They're not going to have to do that anymore.

They're just going to go to stable diffusion or whatever, make up some pretty art based on what the room should be, and then, you know, the framing business is the only one that's going to be still doing good from this. But, you know, I just – the whole death of the web thing still has me – all I've been thinking about lately is what's going to happen in the next two years.

And it's like we never thought that once the web got started that it was ever going to go away. It's going to go away. It's going to change so fundamentally. It'll be nothing like what we were doing 30 years ago. I liked everything you said, but the hotel art industry thing was such a weird tangent. Okay.

I don't know where the fuck that came from, but I liked it.

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. Where's your new AI show, Dave? You've got to have one of those coming. There's got to be. Well, maybe they're all AI now. Who knows? Okay. That's it.

You never know. I'm just – I'm on an island somewhere with a cool drink in my hand and just punching in those prompts and, you know, just – it's all being generated. I'm looking forward to you hallucinating on our show.

Woo! That's right. You know, I do want to mention something that's kind of related to something you guys were talking about earlier in the show. Jason, you went off on a little side conversation about hotel art. Yes, I did.

So, it's an – so it reminded me of an analogy that I've been finding useful for this coming wave of AI, which is that imagine a hundred years ago or so – I don't have the timing exactly right. But imagine a hundred years ago you were a professional portrait painter, right?

Yes. You painted people's pictures. I'm in my pantaloons. Yes. I'm prepared to – yes. And you were very punctual in your portrait painting. And so people paid you to paint portraits. Oh, boy. Was his name Peter by any chance?

Right. Peter the portrait of a pickle? These were portraits you painted to perfection. So, imagine that is your profession and suddenly – In your pantaloons. In your pantaloons. Suddenly, this invention comes along, the photograph.

Yes. Suddenly, people come along who can take pictures. Rather than requiring a painting of someone, you can take a photo. Now, I imagine when photos were brand new, the portraiture artists were saying, oh, well, I mean, this is interesting technology.

But photography will never be art, right? I mean, sure, you need to have technical knowledge. You need to know the chemistry, how to work the lenses and things like that. But I'm sure we're safe because there will never be – there will never be artistic photography.

They'll never be able to infringe on our ability to make art using our paints and our canvases and so on and so forth. Well, we all know how that worked out, right? I mean, now, most people hang photos on their walls, not portraits.

It is extraordinarily rare for someone to have a portrait painted. And, of course, we think of photography as being very artistic. And so, I wonder if we're in a similar state right now with things like generative AI where we're at this very leading edge of it.

And the people that it's affecting are wondering how it's going to affect them. But they're also poo-pooing the idea that generative AI could lead to anything truly creative or anything truly artistic. And I just don't know that history will bear that out.

I wonder if it will be somewhat similar to the way that that sort of thing rolled out in that for a long period of time when photography first came out, that kind of became, you know, that became what people did. They took pictures. That's what went on their wall. But the insanely rich people would still pay for portraits.

So it becomes almost a class thing. And it's still to this day, if you think about it, you know, you've got the Obama's portraits. The president's portraits go in the White House. Very rich people still have portraits done and get paid, you know, pay a lot of money for them while everybody else uses photography and just puts pictures up.

So is it going to be one of those things where the masses will be listening to their crappy AI-generated music while the rich people will have Coldplay around in their house to play them the concerts? Right. Well, and there are way fewer portraiture artists than there were back then.

So it will become much more specialized, much harder to make a living doing that sort of thing. Yeah. We need a Bob Ross revolution. Yeah. You'll need some kind of sponsor to be able to make a living if people even make a living. If it is a vocation rather than an avocation.

Yeah. I don't know. Well, I mean, if you really want to get into it, go look at the history of any disruptive technology. You know, there's a lot of – Cory Doctorow has spent years. A career. Years going on on these things. So you can read a lot of his stuff.

You talk about when, you know, sheet music was turned into the piano roll. You know, mechanical pianos are going to take over our jobs. Oh, and when cars came out, what happened to the horse whip makers, you know, the buggy whip makers? You know, there's all sorts of disruption that happens.

And then it, you know, kind of plays itself out. Photography just got to the point. I love that – that's what I went to college for because I was going to be a professional photographer. And nowadays, it's like anybody's a photographer. Now, as we talked about earlier in the show too, 11 Labs is going to kill most of our careers that use our voice for a living.

It's getting worse and worse. And musical instruments. Everything is in a state of flux right now. And I think, you know, as far as predictions go, it's anybody's guess. But there are a lot of clues from historical disruptions that we could probably take to heart to kind of, you know, just peek a little bit around the corner to see what's coming.

And that's kind of what I was talking about, the death of the weapons. Like, I've read a lot of those stories and I can see how things are kind of trending. And it's like there's going to be so much disruption in the next couple years. Which is probably why you can find me at Home Depot in the tools aisle coming very soon.

You know, I had a couple of like legit security sort of ish articles that I'm now killing because we're on an artistic bend. But in the talking about AI, one of the things I was going to say is I was actually thinking now, like I've poo-pooed AI. I've made fun of it.

It's still kind of ridiculous, but there's no stopping it at this point and it will get better. And at this point now, I'm like, OK, I've got some free time. I think I start to I need to take a legit AI class to start really getting into this. So I'm throwing it out to the cloud for recommendations from our listeners or anyone else.

I do want to start like legit studying this now. Hmm. OK, I got some recommendations on the show notes. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I got some. And going back to your point, Dave, my friend Bill Snebold, who is a legit artist, he did more movie posters than anybody.

In my industry, he's done so many movie posters and he was the lead artist on them. And he is like completely dove into AI and generative AI. And when you see the stuff that he comes up with compared to just the average person, it's it's night and day.

It's like when you when you put, you know, a skilled craftsman with a new tool that lets him do what he because he's a visual artist. So all he cares about is making beautiful art and it's a new tool and he's treating it like a tool. And the stuff that he's coming up with is just insanely beautiful.

And he's just got his you know, he's got it down to a science on how to make this stuff. And it's just like, how the fuck did you do that? Well, Jason, that ties really directly back into what we were talking about earlier about the the AI co-pilots that are doing all the coding. It's if you understand the basics of the software, you know, how to construct an actual piece of soft software to do something that's now more important than knowing the coding.

And it's kind of the same with art. If you understand the theory behind art, if you understand the theory behind music, if you understand color palettes and all that sort of thing and you can direct it. You're just taking out doing the brushstrokes yourself now or playing the instrument yourself. But you have a deep understanding of the math and the logic behind things.

That's more valuable now. Yeah. What if you are a remarkably musical person, but you can't sing? Yeah. Right now you can. And I guess the what this is coming down to, I think, in a lot of domains is that the gates are coming down.

Right. I mean, to your point, Jason, about photography, you know, everybody has a high quality camera in their pocket. You know, I got out of the video business a decade ago because everybody had a 4K camera in their pocket.

But that is the writing on the wall. That is the dark side of the gates coming down in that the art, the skill and the whole industry becomes devalued. Right. And we're seeing that with music 100% now. We're seeing that with photography. We're seeing that with all sorts of different things.

Writing. All writing is devalued. Now coding. Yep. Yep. Yep. So what the fuck are we all doing? How are we going to live? Well, but I think the point is, or a point is, you can either dig your heels in and complain about it and wish that it weren't so, or you can figure out how you're going to adapt and use the skills that you have.

Exactly why I want to take those classes. Right. So let me ask you this. When you say you want to take classes, to what degree of depth are you talking about? Are you talking like computer science depth classes or more high-level, broader types of things? Probably more high-level, broader. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, you know, I took like a digital ethics. That's the kind of stuff that I like to take. It's absolutely useless. I'll never get a job from it, but I'm too old anyways. Like, I'm never going to go back and learn computer science from AI and build something from the ground up. But I want to have a high-level understanding of the tools and the process.

Yeah, because I think, I mean, you have to figure out how to leverage actual human intelligence instead of just being the parrot that AI is. Exactly. How do you, where do you make your mark? Where are you solving the expensive problem? Yep. You know, that's how you make a living. You solve expensive problems. So what are you doing to add to the chain to really make it work?

And, you know, the craftspeople, plumbers and electricians own beach houses. Yep. Oh, yeah. No. That's always going to be useful. No. My HVAC neighbor has two Maseratis. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to AI your way out of those things.

Yeah. It's the creative. And the pipe is leaking. It's always very dangerous. Yep. And never more so than now. Just for the listeners, I put a link in the show notes. It's called Dream Prince is my friend Bill's website. He's got a bunch of other stuff. He's worth following on LinkedIn, too. But check that out. Those are just a few of the things that he's made that he sells that are pretty neat.

I got to say. Very cool. So on to more fun stuff. Star Wars Tales of the Empire has now dropped on Disney+. It's a six-episode journey into the fearsome AI empire. All right. Where we all lose our jobs. It's some bad guy stuff.

It's Morgan Ellsworth and Jedi Barris Ophi. And, yeah, I watched all of these. They were great. I don't know if anybody else did. No, I haven't watched them yet. But I'll probably check them out this weekend. Yeah, they're short. They're quick. I blew through, like, I think half of it in one night and half the next night.

And they're very well done. I'm loving all the Star Wars content coming out. Cool. Cool. I'll check them out. Yeah, because now that I'm not going to watch Dark Matter, you're going to take over for me on that one. Yep. I got some time on my hands. Check them out. I saw this come through. Death Jar Jar strikes in Lego's crazy new Star Wars series.

Now, I don't really care about the Lego series and the whatever. But Darth Jar Jar. Dude. Sorry if I offended someone there. The Lego Star Wars stuff is fucking hilarious. Yeah. They're really good. Okay. Yeah. I was just going to say that they really screwed up with the Death Jar or Darth Jar Jar because it should have been just Dar Jar.

Oh, Dar Jar. Come on. Why is he not Dar Jar? Yeah, that's good. Well, you don't mess with the Darth thing, you know. Ah, okay. I guess it's trademark issues. I will say you are 100% wrong about Lego Star Wars, Jason. It is some of my favorite Star Wars.

Oh, I didn't say they were bad. I just said I don't care. So in that, I was completely correct. I'm fairly 100% certain that I don't care. But they are cool. Well, yeah. You are the expert in what you do and do not care about. That's true. Yield to your expertise.

Continuing our Star Wars theme and also things that we love. Have you guys seen this ad for the iPhone 15 with Boba Fett? No. No. Okay. I think we're going to have to pause for a moment to go take a peek.

All right. It's only like two minutes long. Okay. Playing? Did we lose Jason? I don't know. Jason. Oh, sorry. I was still watching it. I watched it at 2X. Oh, okay. No, I was just getting to the end. Okay. That's pretty cute.

That was great. Yeah. I like that. That's, you know, you leverage your IP very well there. Yeah. Not surprisingly, if you watch through it a few times, the thing is full of Easter eggs. Like full of Easter eggs. I would recommend people look at the building numbers.

And if there's a number on anything, just check it out because chances are it's related to something deep, deep in Star Wars lore. So, but yeah. Okay. So they made up for the other ad. Yeah, I was going to see what you thought about that ad.

We discussed a little bit earlier in the show, Dave, but. Well, it didn't upset me the way that it upset other people, but I could certainly see how other people could be upset about it. And I think their being upset about it is perhaps justified.

But, I mean, I got what they were going for, but I can see how some people would. But Jason did make a really good point earlier. The ad would be perfect if it was just played in reverse. Yes. Yes. If all the stuff was coming out of the iPad instead of being destroyed by it.

Yes. I did see someone did that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It made it much better. But, you know, now they've got this one. I think this makes up for it. Yeah, it's a good one. I like it. Yeah. Sticking with Apple for another minute here, their most recent iPad event, which I don't know if you guys watched or not.

But as Apple does at the end of the event, they say that this entire thing was shot on iPhone. Yeah. Which is true. From a certain point of view. As Stu Masiewicz pointed out over at ProLost, they were using Panavision lenses on their iPhones.

So they're using lens adapters to get just, you know, beautiful, milky, shallow depth of field and basically a look that the lenses on the iPhones are not capable of generating. So, you know, is it cheating?

Yeah. Yeah. Does it matter? I don't know. It's a bit like, yeah, I drove there in my Toyota Corolla that had a flux capacitor put into it. Right. Right. Yeah. But, I mean, the point is it's still on a freaking iPhone.

Right. And, you know, it's not bad using ProRes. So, come on. No, but I think, yeah, your point is good is that the newest iPhones have so many true Pro capabilities now. The fact that you can plug in an external hard drive.

The fact that you can shoot in, what is it, Apple Log in ProRes. So you have all these stops of latitude and high data rates and the imagers on the phones are top notch. Like, if you want to make really good looking stuff, an iPhone can be a component of that.

Yeah. And just look at the stuff that Apple did in their event. I mean, the stuff that looks as good as anything else out there. Well, for the price, it damn well should be because iPhones aren't cheap. No, iPhones aren't cheap, but, well, I guess you can't buy Panavision lenses.

But, you know, they ain't cheap either. Yeah, exactly. So the lenses are definitely worth more than – worth way more than the iPhones are. But, you know, I mean, most high-quality lenses cost more than an iPhone. Yep. Yeah.

So I think it's cool. I'm down with them. You know, the more that they keep doing that, the better the phones are going to be. Right. And I think it drives them to keep adding these features to the iPhones for the folks who want to use it in that way. Why not? It just adds value to the platform.

Yep. Definitely. So I got one last thing for the day. My roommate was stuck on hold with the IRS the other day, and she had it on speaker. So I got to hear the Muzak. Sharing the joy. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. For, like, 45 minutes. And the funny part is, this was on the we'll call you back thing. It was like, okay, she gets on hold and says, okay, we'll call you back and blah, blah, blah. So pick up the phone when they call. Okay, this is the IRS. You're getting your call back now. Postman will be with you momentarily.

And 45 minutes later, still nobody had showed up. Now, whoever composed the IRS hold music is an evil fucker. Because it's kind of a meandering bit of music that takes little notes from different pop songs and wheedles them in and out.

Except for the one bit where you get to and you're like, wait a minute. That's Hotel California. The fucking hold music for the IRS is littered with Hotel California because you can just never leave. Evil, evil, evil.

I mean, they should just be playing the Beatles' Tax Man on a loop. That too. Bravo to the evil genius who composed that. The Eagles are famously litigious about the rights to their music. But I suppose if there's one organization that they're not going to mess with, it's the IRS.

I think Joe Walsh had some tax issues. This might have been part of the settlement. This might have been part of the settlement. Exactly. Right. That's fair. All right. Well, that's all I got, guys. All right. All right. Very good. See you guys next time.

Take care. See you next time. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Rick and Pedro. Welcome, folks. Thank you so much. Over at PayPal this week, we've got Ralph. Okay. And over at the tip jar, we've got Marcel. Light week over there.

The old. We didn't get two new reviews, though. It's been a while since we've gotten two. It's been a while since we've gotten one. Yeah. First up, as a five-star, I've been listening for a long time. This rate's near the top of my list. Some politics I don't agree with, but I love these guys. Great listening. Thank you.

Thank you, unnamed reviewer. Yes. And we also have It's Good, G-U-D, five-star from Chris. And it's just, they do good. All right. Short and to the point. We'll take it. Yep. We've got a couple sad passings this week.

Bernard Hill from Lord of the Rings has died. Great character. Yep, definitely. He will not be in any of the upcoming movies or sequels or prequels. Well, they have to be recast anyways because they're prequels, so. That's true. That's true. And RIP to Steve Albini.

Yeah. This was a shocker. That came out of nowhere. I was not expecting that. Neither was he. He had a heart attack. Good point. Yeah. He wasn't expecting it at all. Yeah, he was 61. Yeah. Which really sucks. Yeah. Very influential.

So many albums that I've loved have been produced by him. Yeah. No, music would not be the same without him. Yep. So, he will be definitely, definitely missed. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Ryan Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are GOG.show slash 647.

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 at gog.show you can find a link to our discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans head over to gog.show slash contact to send us your feedback comments or links to cool shit you think we should talk about and gog.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars tell us that we did good stay grumpy