667: Nuclear Recall

Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Colon.

BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks where we're extra grumpy this week. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I wouldn't exactly say I'm grumpy. I am unintentionally giddy. Okay. Well, you know, we were recording later on a Thursday night as opposed to our Friday morning usual thing. And my wife and I made a pasta dinner and we had a bottle of wine that had been sitting around and we're like, oh, let's just have a glass with dinner. Bottle's gone.

Okay. Good for you. So here we are. Let's go. Yeah. I'm slamming decaf coffee in my eyes twitching because I'm over caffeinated and my audio interface decided to stop working right before we recorded this. So I can't hear myself except through these headphones that I need on so I can hear you.

Well, it is helpful when you hear me. That's true. I've been doing this for over 11 years. You'd think I could figure this out by now. Well, technology sucks, Jason. Oh, it does. It really does. Speaking of technology, let's get into it. We've got a lot of follow-up before we follow up with a lot of news.

Sure. Let's do it. All right. Sam Altman released a thought piece this week called The Intelligence Age over at his blog. Did you get a chance to read it? I did read it. I have taken classes on AI at this point. I feel pretty coached up on this stuff, not in the user way in which everybody is out there doing it in terms of like, oh, look, I've generated a fucking cover letter. I've generated a response to my friends saying

why I'm not going to show up at their wedding and I fucking hate them. I've generated a picture of somebody with 17 eyeballs and 15 fingers. I've actually tried to understand the basis of AI. Whatever the fuck he wrote is a fucking complete load of shit.

So you've taken a class in AI. I have taken a lifetime course in bullshit. And I have a PhD in El Toro Caca. So let me just read this one little blurb for you. Sure. I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice.

By trying to write about it now. A defining characteristic of the intelligence age will be massive prosperity. Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs, fixing the climate, establishing a space colony and the discovery of all physics will eventually become commonplace with nearly limitless intelligence and abundant energy, the ability to generate great ideas and the ability to make them happen. We can do quite a lot. End quote. What a load of horse shit.

Yeah, there's absolutely nothing in there that has anything to do with AI, any possible roadmap. We've given, we've, first off, we've stopped even bothering just like releasing software that works and then putting out a roadmap later. We've stopped roadmaps. Ah, but we'll get to his roadmap shortly. He has put out a bit of a roadmap. But before we get to the roadmap, he puts out this giant thing on the intelligence age. And then his CTO quits. And after the CTO

quits, the chief research officer quits, the chief research officer quits, and a research VP also quit. And so guess who didn't sign off on that roadmap? Them? Yeah. Well, you'd think the CTO, the woman behind a lot of the breakthroughs, you say, I don't know, baby, be on board.

I haven't had time to catch up on it because we did decide to start a little early. But apparently, a lot of this is coming to the fact that OpenAI is going from their non-profit status to a for-profit status. And guess who was going to be king shit of the for-profit company? Sam Altman.

So the others took a little bit of umbrage with it. And there's a photograph from the New York Times that is just very funny. And somebody took that photo. And the original photo was, it was Sam Altman with Mira and a couple other people, Greg Brockman, who's already gone, and Ilya Stutzvekar. It's been a long time since he left, so I forgot how to pronounce his name. They're all gone. So it's just now, how it started, a picture of them, and how it's going. It's just a picture of old Sam by himself

now. He's the cheese that stands alone. Well, he's hardly alone. He does have a lot of Microsoft money. He's got a lot of other money coming in there. He's okay. I wouldn't say he's alone, but I would say that anybody that was in on the original OpenAI mission is long gone.

Right. And he's also got that WorldCoin thing going on, which is going to be a game changer, as we all know. Oh, yeah. The Orb, you know. Yeah, that's going. Yeah, that worked out well in Lord of the Rings. I'll get to that later. And Phantasm. So Sam Altman said that the company imagines AGI in five stages with OpenAI's O-1, because their naming scheme can't... Use your

fucking intelligence agent to rename your shit, please. And they're saying he's in the second stage. So let's break this down for a minute. Here are the stages of artificial intelligence. Level one, chatbots, AI with conversation language. Level two, reasoners, human level problem solving, which is what he's saying. We are absolutely not at that stage yet. We're still at level one, a hundred percent. Have you tried the O-1 product? I have. I have. We are still at level one.

I don't care what he says. We're still at level one. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Level three, agents, systems that can take actions. Level four, innovators, AI that can aid an invention. Level five, organizations, AI that can do the work of an organization. Now, there's one word that is not on any single line item of the five stages of AGI. And you know what

that is, Brian? Correctly. That's true. That's why I say we're still at level one. Until it's correct, it's still just a conversation. I have conversations. Well, I used to. My uncles have all passed now.

I've had conversations with my uncles. They were conversations. Were they correct? Absolutely fucking not. We call that Thanksgiving. Yeah. Until it's correct, it's still a toy. Everybody wants to say that it's not a toy. It's going to be all these breakthroughs. But until it's going to be correct, it's just a toy. It's a toy. This is 100% by been my position on this since day one. Since since it's been in the news all the time, I'm like, it's a toy. It's a game. It's fun. It's great.

Should people be getting fired over this? Absolutely not. But they are. It's a toy and people are using it horribly. And we're all being sold on the bullshit. Well, some of us are not us, but you know, middle management. This is going to come back to bite middle management in the ass so hard.

It will 100% because this is not, this is not working. It's not there. It's not going to get there anytime soon. And they've run out of things to feed into it. The thing that we've been sold on is it just needs more data. It's got all the data now. It has all our data. It hasn't paid for it. It's taken all the copywritten data. It's got all the data and it has not worked.

Yeah. All our data's are belong to us. Yes. Good callback. I mean, yeah, it's, it can do some things. It can do some things. Okay. It can do some things well, but it can't do everything. Well, we are not even close to AGI. We're just barely at level one, honestly, in my book. But hey, now here's a great, a great quote that just wanted to pass along. This is over at news.ycombinator. It's if AI is helping people code better. Why aren't products getting better?

I have to ask myself that, Brian, we've had two years of, of these, you know, code copilots and things like that. All the websites it still go to are broken half the time and nothing seems to be getting better. I can tell you what the answer would be from the people that make those tools. You're not using them correctly.

Okay. That's their answer. Now, the reason that things aren't getting better is, well, first off, the entire internet is a fucking house of cards. Built on some open source code that was written about 17 years ago that has never been updated. And if anybody ever does update it, it's all going to fall apart.

And no AGI is going to fucking fix that ever. Most of the updates are put in Russian back doors. So, yeah. So, so you can't fix all of that. It's too complex. Everything is too complex. All of it. So, you know, AI is not going to fix that.

You got to rebuild. We have to rebuild the entire internet from the ground up. Look at the internet as we look at America. The bridges are fucking collapsing. Are we going to put in the money to fix it or not? Because the bridges are collapsing on the internet.

There's no doubt about that. Well, let me say that. The bridges are collapsing on the internet that we're all interested in, which is not owned by Meta or Google or Snap or TikTok. Those things are working just fine because they put the money into that.

Yeah. The other thing is the rest of the internet is being clogged up by bot-driven, AI-generated assholes who are just trying to get over those bridges and just wearing them down even more. Yeah. So, I don't know how much farther I can take that metaphor. We haven't even gotten out of our intro yet.

Oh, I know. We're still there. You're fucked up on wine and I've had too much coffee. But hey, the thing is, I just want websites to get better that exist right now. I want better software. I want groundbreaking software that we couldn't write without this stuff. All it's doing is just, you know, it's autocomplete.

It's a really nice autocomplete. And that's what everybody says that uses it that I've talked to. They're like, it's really nice for some things, you know, just for kind of basic stuff, but don't trust it with input validation for fuck's sake. Don't even think about doing that. And I was stuck on this website the other day.

I was on Simplecast and I'm moving data from one website to another. So, I have to get 600 embeds off of this thing. God forbid that I screw up and click the wrong link and I have to go back through these 600 items. Pagination is all JavaScript.

There is no, like, pick page three. And there's also no URL-based pagination. There's no query string with what page you're on, like the old days. Which, by the way, even if you're using JavaScript, you can still update the fucking query string and the URL to make it work. So, if I wanted to reload and go back to the page I was on, instead of speaking two minutes to flip back through it.

Anyway, if they can't fix little basic things like that, I know somebody's going to say it's a design decision. Blame the product developer or whatever, product manager. But I don't know. I'm fired up, Brian. I just hate this shit. I can tell. Well, let's dive a little bit deeper into people that have drank the AI Kool-Aid on this.

A London newspaper plans to revive a dead art critic with AI and lay off the real writers. Brian Sewell, who died in 2015 at the age of 84, was once described as Britain's most famous and controversial art critic. For years, he wrote for London's Evening Standard, publishing his cutting commentary in a weekly column.

Now, in a development that, were he alive, it seems safe to assume he would completely and utterly hate, the newspaper has resurrected his byline and will resume publishing articles in his name. There is no detail about how this is happening. We don't know if they created their own AI.

We don't know what the partnership is. It's probably just a publicity ploy. But the newspaper hasn't been doing well, so publicity is good. They fired a bunch of writers, and now they're just basically saying, this dead guy who everybody liked and everybody enjoyed reading his articles, we're just going to do an AI and we're going to have him write articles commentating on art.

Yeah, this makes no sense. AI doesn't understand art. AI can't create art, and it certainly can't commentate on human art. No, it can't. Great. Well, in some good news, political consultant Steve Kramer just learned that deep fakes and politics don't mix, especially when the FCC is watching, because he's been slapped with a whopping $6 million fine for blasting New Hampshire voters with robocalls with the fake Joe Biden voice trying to sabotage the Democratic primary.

This goes back a while back. I remember, we thought he was getting a $2 million fine, was the original reporting, if I remember correctly, but don't quote me on that. I could have used AI and nobody would know the difference, but $6 million is not chump change.

And he's facing voter suppression charges from New Hampshire's attorney general. So all in all, how's that AI working out there for you, Steve? Well, just great. Well, OpenAI is also rolling out their chat GPT voice assistant this week to all paying subscribers.

Have you played with it? I have not, because I've actually started to back away from AI and AI usage. It's called Advanced Voice Mode, and it's beginning making its way to users to pay for chat GPT Plus this week. The company tweeted a video of the feature in action, and I can't believe they chose this as it helps someone craft an apology to their grandmother for being late, because you can't fucking be bothered to be sincere.

Yeah, that's a pretty shitty one. Yeah. I mean, this is my problem with all of these companies is they're in search of a solution to problems that don't exist, except for the fact that you actually have to be human. What does it take for you to actually apologize to a family member yourself that you have to go and use a fucking system to do it for you?

I think it's all just Gen Z-ers. That's it. It may be, because you have a story about that later, and we'll get to that. Anyways, the company says the AVM can offer the apology in more than 50 different languages. Chances are your family members speak the same one you do. So, yeah. Thanks.

Thanks a lot. Actually, this would have worked with my great-grandmother, because she barely spoke English. She was all Italian, so I could have written something nice to her. We already have Google Translate. I was going to say, I could have just run that through Google Translate. Yeah, so you write your own words. No, which would have been better was ask my grandmother to be a go-between to talk to my great-grandmother and apologize that I'm late for lasagna.

Yes, just use humanity. Well, speaking of humanity, this is a great headline. Here's why companies are rapidly firing Gen Z employees. And the TLDR is basically they're insufferable. Many companies have fired Gen Z workers just months after hiring them, and several business owners said they are hesitant to bring on recent college graduates due to concerns about their work ethic, communication skills, and readiness to do the job, according to a new survey.

Well, you know what the plus side is for this, Jason? What, Brian? Hire a silver surfers. Yes, exactly. Bring us back. Bring back Gen X. The older Gen X people, we're happy to work. We know how to work. We will actually show up in the office if you tell us to. We aren't going to fucking go, I can't do that right now.

I have to go to Air One and get my coconut juice. Yeah. We do not eat avocado toast. Oh, we do. It's delicious, but we don't go crazy for it. I'm taking your Gen X card. You're out. You're out. So six in 10 employers have said they all have already let go recent college graduates this year, while one in seven said they are inclined to refrain from hiring new graduates next year, according to a survey conducted by intelligent.com.

It's intelligent, Brian. It has it right there in the name. Within the name. Yes. And close to 1,000 business leaders participated in the survey, which is a decent sample size. It actually is. Yes, I like this. Business owners say they're not loving the idea of hiring more fresh grads anytime soon. And it's not just the old kids these days, gripe.

These Gen Zers are seen as high maintenance, more prone to getting triggered, and more focused on a good work-life balance than getting the job done. Back to what Brian said, we don't get triggered. We don't care about work-life balance. We don't care about any of that stuff.

Gen X will work for you for pennies on the dollar for the most part, too. So give us a call. Nickels on the dollar. At least she's not selling it. Nickels, yeah. Inflation, inflation. Yes, nickels on the dollar.

In the news. Unsurprisingly, we have news about Elon Musk and ex-Jason. Oh, great. After all the brouhaha that he said about Brazil, fuck you, I'm not going to do what you tell me.

And then he also tweeted about, why does everybody feel a rage for the machine these days? Just because I have to throw that in again. Because, oh my God, I have to get off X because I'm sick of seeing his updates. Anyways, after all the brouhaha about, screw you, Brazil, I'm not going to ban the couple people that you asked me to ban because they were breaking the law and all that sort of stuff.

Well, he's actually going to reverse course after weeks of refusing to comply with conditions set by the Brazilian Supreme Court so he can operate in the country again because Elon's a pussy. Big surprise. Well, also because Elon has people who are saying, why is this company that I helped you buy not making any money?

And why isn't Brazil one of the largest, I think the largest country in South America, not on your platform anymore. Oh, because you were a douche nozzle. Oh, can you just undo the douche nozzle for a minute, Elon, so we can make some money, so we can get paid back? So he turned off the douche nozzle stream for a half second and they're going back.

And then he turned it back on again because he's decided that blocked users will now be able to see our posts on X. So if you block someone, they're not really blocked. They get to see everything that you've posted and you just don't get to see them and they can't comment on your stuff, which isn't really a block in my opinion.

No, no, it's not. Because words have meaning. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But it was nice to see that hashtag block Elon was trending this week. Well, he can still see all that. Exactly. That's what makes it funny. And a Manhattan federal judge on Tuesday handed down a two-year presence sentence to Carolyn Ellison, who assisted one of the largest financial crimes in U.S. history.

Let's just read that again. A two-year presence sentence to someone who assisted in one of the largest financial crimes in U.S. history while overseeing a trading firm connected to the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, but then served as key government witness in a trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

So, yes, she did plead and she did all that sort of stuff. And she definitely turned evidence against Sam Bankman-Fried and all that. But she still did all this shit. And she knew she was doing it, too. And she knew she was doing it. Yeah.

And somehow, and this goes back to the Gen Z thing and how people don't want to hire them because she's a very young girl, as he was a very young guy. But we were dating and he was controlling me and I just didn't know what to do. And that's really kind of what it came down to.

And that was her entire defense was I was being exploited and I just I was vulnerable. And yeah, he kept buying me toast in the morning and there was a lot of avocado on it. See, in my days, you would get fired from McDonald's for doing shit like this.

Oh, my God. He had to be in charge of billions of dollars. Can you imagine when we were coming up in the industry, if we had fucking done anything like this? We would have been in jail for years. We'd still be there. We'd still be there now. Yeah. So she gets a two-year prison sentence.

Fancy prisons. That's it. Even though she willingly and entirely engaged in this. Yep. But she turned state's evidence. So I guess that has something to do with that. I mean, OK, to be fair, she had to turn in the 11 billion dollars she had made.

Well, if she still had it. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Sentencing guidelines called for 110 years. You go from 110 to two. I just the math isn't math in Brian. The math isn't math in. No, nothing matters anymore. It really just doesn't. Well, here's a fun one.

Among the first AI companies that the Federal Trade Commission has exposed as deceiving consumers is Do Not Pay, which initially was advertised as the world's first robot lawyer with the ability to sue anyone with a click of a button. I remember talking about these guys when they came out.

We did. We did. We thought it was a great idea. But there was some shenanigans behind the scenes, Brian. I'll get to that in a second here, which is good. So the FTC announced that it took action to stop Do Not Pay from making bogus claims after learning that the AI startup conducted no testing to determine whether its AI chatbot's output was equal to the level of a human lawyer.

Do Not Pay also did not, wait for it, hire or retain any attorneys to help verify AI outputs or validate Do Not Pay's legal claims. Well, if you don't have any lawyers, then you can say, well, I didn't check the legal claims against it because I didn't have any lawyers, I guess.

Oh, it just makes my day. I mean, it tracks for the entire AI industry, doesn't it? It's all fucking bullshit. It's all bullshit. Yeah. These guys got out. They must have had the same attorney as the other chick. They have to pay $193,000 and accepted no liability.

And they have some time. They've got a 30-day public comment period and they get to get their shit together. So they're getting another chance because nobody apparently goes to jail for more than two years nowadays. It's just crazy.

It's crazy. But yeah, do not pay. I bet they're going to pay, though. I bet they're going to pay. At some point, maybe. We'll see. Well, that $193,000, I bet they'll pay. Yeah, OK, but how much do they actually make? That's not in the story. How much do they make? How many people paid them?

Yeah, I want to know how many customers they have. How many people have been duped, as it were? How many lawsuits were filed from these guys? That would be nice to know. Now, this one kind of has my head scratching a bit. Microsoft deal would reopen a three-mile island nuclear plant to power AI.

If that is not the most dystopian headline we've had in quite some time, I don't know what is. Microsoft has announced a groundbreaking deal to revive Pennsylvania's dormant three-mile island nuclear plant to meet its massive energy needs for AI development. Under this 20-year agreement, Microsoft will purchase 100% of the plant's power, making it the first time a U.S. nuclear plant will come back online after being decommissioned.

The plant, infamous for the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, in 1979 was shut down in 2019 due to financial issues. It is now set to reopen by 2028, providing Microsoft 835 megawatts of power, enough to serve 800,000 homes, which will not get those homes, but they can chat with their AI, I guess.

But they all get free co-pilot. Yeah, free co-pilot for everybody. Look, I'm kind of okay with this. I think that nuclear power has gotten a bad rap. I think there's been some problems in the past, obviously. But we've kind of dialed in the technology now, and people are just scared of this.

It's a NIMBY thing. Nobody wants it in their backyard, which I also totally understand. But this is a pretty safe technology at this point that actually provides an awful lot of power. So if Microsoft, and I trust Microsoft for the most part, hey, you know, as long as they keep that automatic, like, every single backup, every single second thing, so we can actually review the data, if something goes wrong, we're good.

Nuclear recall. Yes. They have a title. So that's not the problem that I have with this. Yeah. The project, expected to cost Constellation Energy $1.6 billion, hinges on federal tax subsidies for nuclear power outlined in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

This deal highlights the tech industry's growing demand for reliable zero-emissions energy to support the expansion of AI. And despite the innovative nature of the agreement, it faces scrutiny from nuclear safety advocates and questions about the use of public subsidies for a private company's benefit.

Microsoft can afford $1.6 billion. They can afford $2.6 billion. They can afford $10 billion. They can afford a lot more than that instead of taking our tax money to subsidize their nuclear power plant. If we're going to look into the subsidies that public companies get that are worth billions of dollars, let's start with Elon.

I was going to say, let's start with Tesla and SpaceX. At least SpaceX is doing some decent things except ruining the night sky with their Starlink. But, yeah, no. But that's just the thing. Okay. And, you know, should we go back and watch the China Syndrome again?

Because kids these days don't know anything about Three Mile Island. They're like, what's that? Yeah. Like, oh, yeah. I'm okay with this. Obviously, all the stuff has to happen. They have to do all the inquiries. They have to do all that sort of stuff. If that all works out, fine.

I don't care. Great. Go do it. Qualcomm is reportedly eyeing a takeover of Intel. It seems that Qualcomm sees Intel's struggling business as a potential opportunity. The San Diego-based chip makers reportedly expressed an interest in taking over Intel in recent days, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal.

Though the report cautions that such a deal is far from certain, as it's just a rumor, it would be a major upheaval in the U.S. chip industry. So, we'll see.

Look, I have a personal story about Intel that I will tell here, and I can't speak to the company's problems and everything like that, but I've always liked Intel.

I think Intel is a good place to be. I think it's a good company. My cousin had married somebody and moved up there. He worked for Intel for a lot of years. They're a lot older than me. He's just retired. Intel actually pays ex-employees to go out into the local area and basically teach kids.

Oh. That does not sound like a bad company to me. It sounds like a company that has a good amount of money, that supports ex-employees, that supports local communities. I think Intel's a good company. Qualcomm, I've never heard a goddamn good thing about. Well, they killed Eudora.

Yes. They killed Eudora. That's enough. That's enough. Fuck those guys. So, I like Intel. I think Intel's a good company. I think Intel does good things. I'm sorry that they're struggling in the marketplace, but, you know, yeah, Intel's fine. They're going to be fine.

You know who's not going to be fine, Brian? Chinese smart car makers. First TikTok, now smart cars. The White House has proposed a ban on Chinese smart cars. You're welcome, Elon. Citing national security risks posed by internet-connected vehicles. The ban would prohibit the sale and import of connected vehicles from China and the software and hardware that power these systems in U.S. cars.

U.S. automakers would have one year to ensure their software has no ties to China and four years to remove certain Chinese-affiliated hardware like sensors and antennas, which means we're going back to the Model A. That's it. You know, the Commerce Department is still accepting feedback before they finalize the ruling by the end of the year.

Yeah, this is a tough one. They make damn near everything that we've got. So, I don't know. Brian, what do you think? Well, we put a lot of money, theoretically, into bringing all this kind of innovation and manufacturing back to the U.S., so step it up.

Yeah. You're going to ban it? Then we've got to make it. So, let's do it. Yep. And I can see the security. We know we want to ban it. We know the security cameras are shit. We know TikTok is fucking leeching our data like no tomorrow. We absolutely do not need to be reliant on Chinese manufacturing.

We should not be for anything that's important at all. Especially cars, because, you know, I just see the nightmare scenario of, you know, you've got – it's one thing to have a fitness sensor that's talking back to TikTok and all that crap, right? To have a car with a big battery in it that could do lots of different things.

We kind of learned about battery exploding last week. Yes, so I can see the point is all I'm saying is I can see the point in this one, not to mention just the location data where everybody's driving. But anyway, anyway, and license plate readers, never mind.

Okay, I can keep going down the rabbit hole. I'm going to stop. Cloudflare is back in the news. They have a new marketplace that will let websites charge AI bots for scraping. This is not a bad idea. It's not a bad idea. Except it's three years too late.

Day late and a dollar short, guys. They've already got it. Yeah, they got it already. And what are you going to do about it? Good luck. Kudos for effort, man. A for effort. AI for effort, even. But yeah, this is just – it's silly, but it doesn't matter because it's – Too late.

Yeah, they've already got it. Okay. Well, California has a click-to-cancel subscription bill that has been signed into law. I'm happy about this. This is Assembly Bill 286, and it's been signed into law to make it easier for consumers to opt out of subscriptions.

The bill was introduced in April 2024, forces companies that permit online or in-app sign-ups to allow for online or in-app unsubscribes as well, as it should be. As they point out, and we've talked about this on the show, Adobe is one of the more notable examples of this behavior, particularly since subscriptions can cost $60 per month.

Earlier this month, the FTC sued the company over early termination fees and roadblocks to unsubscribing, calling the practices illegal. California's new bill is designed to kibosh that sort of behavior, though companies have until mid-2025 to comply – to complain, complain, which is what they will, and countersue, or actually comply, which is what it says.

The FTC has proposed a similar law last year that would apply across the U.S., but the finalized rule is still to come. Once again, California is actually leading the way in a lot of this sort of stuff. We are closer to getting GDPR in California than anywhere else in the United States, for sure.

So I applaud this. This should be the rule of the land. It should immediately happen. If you can sign up in one click, you have to be able to sign out in one click. End of story. I love this. It is illegal. It's going to be illegal to not have an unsubscribe button, but you can steal my car, and I can't even file suit anymore.

Well, that's a different problem. California is a fucking mess. It's just a mess. Yeah, the rule in California is don't go outside. Just seriously, don't go outside. And if you want a little fun thing, I'm just going to end on a little piece of fun video here that you're going to have to go.

Click in the show notes at GOG.show slash 667. Dramatic drone video shows Chinese rocket crash landing in a failed test. And this could have been from like an opening scene from the three-body problem season two. It was – the music was dramatic. The video was dramatic. It didn't even look real.

But it was a fun way to burn up a few minutes, and it definitely does not end well for the rocket, which makes me also say let's keep your electric cars over there for a while longer. Again, why we shouldn't have their car parts over here.

Media Candy. Well, it's been a hell of a week for 25-year-old me, Jason. Okay. And 16-year-old me and 30-year-old me. The Cure have announced the release of Alone, their first new single in 16 years. Alone, the first taste of the long-awaited Songs of a Lost World album, premiered today.

We're recording this on Thursday, September 26th. And it is a hell of a track. It is very disintegration. It harkens back to the best album of all time, as far as I'm concerned, and South Park. It's absolutely fantastic. One of my second favorite bands of all time, Underworld, has also released a new single called Black Poppy.

It's the first single from their upcoming album, Strawberry Hotel, which is releasing in 25th October. And as I posted earlier today and said to a few friends, this is a sign of how old I've actually gotten to be. Two of my favorite bands have put out brand new singles with brand new albums coming out.

And I'm just kind of mildly pleased about it instead of locked in a room, listening to them nonstop crying. We all grow, Brian. We all grow a little bit. Yes, we do. So two of my favorite bands have two new singles and two new albums coming out.

And it's going to be a fun... I'm not listening to any podcasts this month. That's all I'm saying. Okay. Well, I actually got to do some work this week on that project I was mentioning before. And I get to listen to music again. And it has been so long since I've actually listened to music because I've been doing podcasting all the time.

There were two Rammstein albums I'd never even knew existed. So I've been rocking out to brand new releases from Rammstein that are at least five years old. Well, new to you. Yeah. Exactly. New to me. It was great. Best week ever. Bad Monkey on Apple TV Plus with Vince Vaughn is something we've been getting caught up on.

We're actually all caught up on that show. And it's adorable. I love it. And I hate Vince Vaughn. But I don't hate him in this show. Really? I think he's really good in this show. Yeah. I've kind of burned out on the Vince Vaughn since Swingers or the early stuff.

The first thing he ever did. Well, what was the other movie? The whole thing with the, we're going, we're streaking in the quad with Will Ferrell and all those guys. Oh, I never saw that movie. Yeah. That stuff was still funny. But Vince Vaughn has not been funny for a good decade, if not two.

But if you think this is good and you hate him, maybe I should check it out. It's actually really good. It's a really good show. Okay. And the nice thing, this is one of those things where they have the same amount of time as most of the other shows I watch. But in that same like 50 minutes, there is so much story and plot line moving forward that you just like, it feels like you're watching a movie, but it's only 50 minutes.

And then you go watch another show. It's like, you know, two things happen. It's like, you know, it's just, it's a very dense plot and it's really fun. I just, I thoroughly enjoy it, thoroughly enjoy it. And just to cleanse my palate, no pun intended, we're watching Culinary Class Wars, which is a Korean cooking competition on Netflix.

You guys are going deep. Yeah. Yeah. We're out of all the American stuff. Although as soon as I get done with this, there's a new guy's grocery games that's on the DVR that I got to go catch. Well, all the Halloween wars are coming back and my son is very excited. I don't bake. I'm not a bacon show guy.

Can't, can't do that, but it's a weird one. It's, it's kind of just like a Korean game show with a hundred chefs and it's just this crazy production value, but it's fun. The, the, the chefs are fun, not learning a lot about cooking, but I don't care. It's just fun to watch for the people. Fair enough. Yep.

Well, I probably put this too late in the show notes for you to load it up your technology that you have in front of you for this show. Uh, but the BBC sound effects library is now completely free to access and license free. You can, uh, there's a link in the show notes and you can find basically over a hundred years of the sounds that they've used for the BBC.

And, uh, it's all free game. Unless you're a commercial entity, then you have to click the buy sound next to the actual sound to go pay for licensing. So. Well, if they decide we're a commercial entity, I will send them our receipts. Exactly. We can show you the receipts, my friend.

Funny thing is I've had that library for like 10 years and I never used it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The only problem is it's like, it's like hundreds of gigs. It's huge. It's like 900 gig and I've been, I've been schlepping it around for years. I'm like, I think I, now that it's out there.

Well, now you don't need to. Yeah, exactly. Now that now I can not use it on the website URL that you've kindly put in the show notes instead of not using it on the almost terabyte of drive space. It's been taking up. So thank you for that, Brian. Uh, finally, the last of a season two trailer has dropped.

Uh, I looked at it for a second because it's not coming till 2025 and 2025 is a long way away. So I'd rather not get my hopes up yet or dashed against the rocks as it were. There you go. But, but for everybody else out there, who's, uh, the last of us fans have added, if you want.

Okay.

Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports, most dangerous strikers collide bare knuckle Liverpool's own Darren, the gorilla tail goes to war with Cuban powerhouse. Joel soldier of God Romero. Plus the bare knuckle middleweight championship of the world is on the line.

When the reigning champ, Dave, the redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger, Jack, the meat pleaver colon BKFC 94 till verse Romero. Watch it live only on the zone. Sign up now at the zone.com. Caps and doodads.

Steven writes in. Hey, grumps. I usually take your advice in many ways and had been using brave as my default browser ever since you demanded. So I do so. So thank you for taking our advice, Steven. Uh, then I just, I never went to brave. Yeah. Then I discovered arc, which has been pretty cool.

And now I've switched any Chinese reasons I should stop using it or just any reason, regardless of country. Nope. No reason, regardless of country. Everything that we said earlier about China. I don't think arc's Chinese, but I don't actually know. I think I, I used it for a while. I did know who it was made by for a bit.

Uh, but it was just wonky for me. It was just a weird browsing experience. It's a non-traditional browsing experience, Brian. Right. Which went, which was great when I was dicking around, but when I wanted to get work done, I found myself needing my extensions and all the other crap that I usually use.

So. Yeah. I need the traditional experience. Yes. Yes. Non-traditional did not work for the day-to-day job. But if you're liking it, keep it. Who cares? That's all good. Brian's a traitor. He's still using the, you know, Chinese stuff, I guess. So whatever. Still using Vivaldi, but I haven't, yeah.

Press it to private, which probably doesn't mean shit. So. I think Vivaldi is okay. It was, uh, it was opera. They got bought by the Chinese. Oh yeah. I've been off opera for years. I've been using Vivaldi forever. Okay. There you go. Yep. I'm still liking Brave. So Brave works for me. Well, Duolingo, best known as a language learning app, now makes a piano.

And I think we talked about this piano before because it's not theirs. They teamed up with Lug for this instrument. So this is basically a rescan of pre-existing Lug piano, which is not a bad thing. The Lug X Duolingo piano is a three octave digital keyboard with built-in stereo speakers, wood sides, and a rechargeable battery for portable use.

The keys are one of the biggest selling points because they allow for dynamics, piano de porte, which does not happen in, in anything at this price point. So it's pretty cool. Um, I'm actually thinking about getting this now because we're thinking about starting the kit up on piano lessons.

So this would be a nice little sort of thing to put in the corner as opposed to like my massive keyboards that are still in the garage because, you know, I don't write music anymore. And, uh, yeah, this is a pretty cool little thing. I, I don't know if it was the Lug that you got into or it was something else at one point that, uh, Lumi.

Oh, Lumi is the one that you recommended, right? Yeah. I got, uh, that was the one that was, uh, the Kickstarter that was a year late. And when I got it, it didn't really work all that well. And I got two of them even. So yeah, that was the one, the, the, the joke about that one was the earlier you ordered, the later you got it.

They didn't, they started at the wrong end of the queue. Ass wipes. Yeah. So, well, this one looks actually pretty cool. I don't know if I would do it with Duolingo, but the, uh, Lug itself seems pretty awesome. So I'm looking into it and this might be a Christmas present for the kiddo. Nice, nice.

Got to get them started early. Yep. So there's been a brouhaha brewing on the internet, Brian. Uh, yes. So Matt Mullenweg, one of the creators of WordPress. Yep. Got a, got a hair up his butt and decided to call out WP Engine and, uh, who's the, uh, The company that actually provides all the services that, uh, WordPress could have provided to them, to, to people themselves.

Yep. Well, that you can also get from WordPress.com. So if you want to pay for them, but they're all direct, they're open source. Are they not Jason? They are. Oh, are they interesting? That would mean that you wouldn't really be bothered by other companies building things off your platform.

Well, you would be surprised how Matt, how Matt put it. Uh, he calls them a cancer on the community. So interesting. Yes. Um, here's the thing. I don't know if you use WP Engine, Brian, uh, the company that I worked for most certainly did, and I'm glad I'm glad I'm not working there right now.

WP, WP Engine is a shit stain of a company. I have been using them for years and it is the single worst implementation of WordPress I have ever had the displeasure to use. So I am 100% behind Matt for calling them out on their bullshit and telling people to stop using them.

Now, here's the problem. Having said that, having said that, uh, Matt is now finding it, uh, finding himself in a pickle because the WP Engine people said, uh, you're going to talk to our lawyers because we're going to sue your ass now. And then Matt said, hold my beer.

I'm going to sue you back. And what we're also going to do is turn off your access to all of the stuff that you weren't really paying for that automatic is paying for. And, uh, this is going, this is turning into a, a little bitch fest going on on the internet right now, which is, which is great because it's not so much a little bitch fest, Jason, because let's be honest, let's run through the numbers here.

WordPress is 75% of the internet. And I would say probably 50% of that is on WP Engine. Oh, WP Engine is a $500 million a year company. They are no joke. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yes.

But, uh, automatic is a over a billion dollar company at this point, I believe. But, uh, so here's the funny bit. I don't know if you remember, Brian, when I, for the first day that I got to San Francisco, uh, the first night of some of my friends, MJ Kim and all the other folks, uh, got, they lured me to a bar, you know, to go hang out.

I know it's me. It's just like beverages this way. They pointed, I showed up unbeknownst to Matt Mullenwake, who also arrived in San Francisco the same day they invited him to the same bar because Matt and I had been in a fight for well over two years at that point.

And they're like, if you guys are going to stay in town, we need you to be friends because we, you guys have to be friends. So we, we shook hands and left as, as, you know, frenemies, I guess, as it was, because all the people that invited us were the really cute girls in tech. And we're like, we're not going to shit net well anytime soon.

So Matt and I, Matt and I patched it up, but it was only because of the, uh, the ladies of San Francisco. But Matt has a history of starting shit is all I got to say, because he started shit with me and I held onto that grudge for years and he's doing it again. You held onto a grudge, Jason.

I know it's silly, isn't it? So, so we're going to see how this goes, but then for some reason, WP Engine starts going after Matt as a person. And so he decides, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make a blog post to show how awesome a person I am with all of my charitable contributions.

And he does a laundry list of his, of his charitable contributions over the past, like 12 years or something. And, uh, millions and millions and millions of dollars that he gives away. Uh, yeah, I didn't get any of those. So fuck you, Matt. Uh, anyway, so.

Grudge reunited. Yes. There's a great reply to him posting this on threads. It says, uh, uh, would recommend deleting and hiring a PR person. This isn't going to read how you want it to. So that was, that's it. It's that, that one's going to be fun to watch.

Fire up some popcorn and off you go. Now, the next one is even better. Marcus Brownlee, AKA MKBHD. We've talked about him on the show. We actually talked about a YouTube video that he made a couple of weeks ago about the new Prius. He's a reviewer.

You know, he reviews technology. Am I, am I correct in that assumption, Brian? You are. Yes. So he decided to become an operator and make his own app. So he makes an app called panels, which is a wallpaper app.

So again, wallpaper for your iPhones. Okay. It costs $12 a month or $50 a year. So you can get high definition wallpapers. You mean the things that you just download to your phone and set up yourself for free?

Yeah, exactly. Or, or, or, or from you, you build in your AI engine of choice for free. Right. You, you can, you can get the standard definition downloads if you watch an ad. So the internet lost its, you know, it's shit as it always does.

So everybody reviewed it, uh, saying it was a piece of shit. It's garbage. Cause the first thing that you get is him wanting your personal data for a wallpaper app. It's, you get the privacy, you know, ask app not to track type of thing. It's like, okay, it's a, why are you asking for my personal information when I'm going to pay you to download a shitty wallpaper?

Okay. So that was the first bite in the ass. The other one was just, why is it's 2024? Why is anybody trying to monetize wallpapers? It's silly. Right. So skewered over and over and over again. So, you know, he's on the other end of the review cycle now. So he, he posts his obligatory mea culpa.

We'll try and do better at this point. And then, uh, a, a very nice hacker figured out all the links to all the wallpapers are preloaded right after the app is launched. And all you need are basic man in the middle skills to get them all for free. So, cause the files with the links aren't authenticated or protected.

Oops. Oopsies. So, and, uh, he, there was another thing where he said, you know, it took a lot of work to launch this as an iOS and an Android app at the same time. And somebody pointed out like, no, it's just a shitty react app. You dumb fuck. It's not that hard to make. He just, he got his ass handed to him over and over again this week, which is just nice for a reviewer to see sometimes because somebody who's never actually made something.

I give him balls for stepping into the arena, but if you're going to step into the arena and you've got that big of an audience, like, come on, man, come with something big. The sad part is he is going to make more from this failed launch than you and I are going to make an entire lifetimes, probably five times over.

So he's got a very big audience and a lot of people are going to give him money. All right. Well, do it right, people. Do it right. Uh, here's another fun one. Johnny Ive, who left Apple five years ago, is teaming up with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, on, wait for it, a new AI startup.

Yes, they're going to do a new AI startup and it's probably going to be some AI button with no pins or ports or anything. It's just going to be a cube that you stick to your chest and yell at it. But it'll be white and it'll look good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so they're, they're actually trying to fundraise right now and, uh, see, fundraise their gazillionaires.

I know. I know. Okay. Just checking on that. Yeah. They, they, they, Ives did put in or Ives, sorry, Johnny, Ive did put in some money himself. So did Steve jobs is late or, uh, the late Steve jobs wife, uh, Lauren Powell jobs and from her fund put in some money, but they are targeting to raise $1 billion by year's end.

$1 billion. Yeah. No, thank you. I'll pass. And they're going to make one of them and it's going to cost $1 billion. Well, getting back to AI a little bit, spotty Spotify's beta AI playlist feature is now rolling out for premium users in the U S and Canada and Ireland and New Zealand.

It lets you create and refine custom playlists using text prompts. It initially arrived in April in the UK and Australia. The company describes it as a tool to effortlessly turn your most creative ideas into playlists, such as play me a bunch of fucking shitty jam music for my fucking road trip.

Okay, great. Um, it's not available for me yet. I do want to try it. I'm curious to give it a go and see what it comes up with. Uh, if the initial results don't quite hit the mark, you could refine the playlist with further prompts such as less peppy or hold the nickel back, hold the nickel back.

So it leans on personalization, choosing tracks and things you like based on your listening habits. So it doesn't particularly sound very AI to me. It sounds very machine learning, but again, those words have no meaning anymore in this atmosphere. So same shit.

Correct. Correct. And a public service announcement. I found a great site called archive.today. I usually get to it by archive.is. Uh, it's a time capsule for webpages, Brian. It takes a snapshot of a web page that will always be online. Even if the original page disappears, it saves a text and graphical copy of the page for better accuracy and provides a short and reliable link to an unalterable record of any web page, AKA the only way I get around paywalls nowadays.

Does it have the Hulk Hogan tape? Uh, it does not have the Hulk Hogan tape, I believe. That's not an archive. At the library. Brian, this week, I listened to a short story called the original by Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Cowell.

Oh, go fuck yourself with you and that and your Bobaverse. So sick of these fucking audible exclusive bullshits. Yeah, this is a four year old. I get nobody reads anymore. I get it. But fuck you guys. It's a fucking book. No, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a fucking book.

It's an audio drama, Brian. It's an audio drama and it was fucking amazing. So maybe go listen to it. It was seriously the best sci-fi story I've read in years. I'm sorry. Listen to in years. Well, in five years when it comes out in book format, I guess I will read it.

Go try and find a transcript on archive. Just shut up. See if you can find one. This is what AI is for. I'm just going to train my AI to fucking create PDF copy of. Yep. But if you have a, it was free.

If you have an audible plan that gives you the free stuff. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Best story I've read and I didn't even have to pay for it. Yeah. You didn't even read. Yeah. It was awesome. It was fantastic. It's great. It's great. Yeah. I also didn't read Not Till We Are Lost. Yeah, that's awesome. How's that one?

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. It's quite excellent. I can't wait for you. I love books that you can't read. They're the best. Yeah. I can't wait for you to use your eyeballs to find it on your little device. Might be fucking blind at that point, the way my vision is going. I know.

We'll get you some readers, Brian. We'll get you some readers. I got readers. God damn it. I hate this trend. I fucking hate it. I get that. I get that Amazon that started as a bookstore no longer gives a shit about books, but come on.

Brian, it's four years old. It's not a trend for this one. This is old. No, this is a horrible deal. I don't understand it. Just release the goddamn book at the same time. Listen, Brian, back then, Brandon Sanderson needed the money to build his secret lair. But didn't he do a whole thing with Patreon?

Well, yeah, but you know, this started a second deal. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do people that feel that paid for his other thing feel about this? Did they get the earlier release? But they might have in some fancy little box that they get to unwrap and look inside and say, there's nothing in here.

And he's like, put your ear to the box. You can listen to it. If you're subscribed to Amazon. Oh, my God. It's good to be the king. It's good to be the king. So I finished the first Echoes of Extinction by D. Ward Cornell book, the book that I found when I made my free sign up for Kindle Unlimited and didn't have much to go for.

It was actually pretty decent. I didn't mind it so much. So since I've got one week left, I downloaded book two. It's a book force. It's a four book series reverberations Echoes of Extinction book two. I'm going to read the shit out of that until my subscription is up and I lose any access to any of these books ever.

And depending on how I feel about this one at the end, I'll either read book three and four or I will not and get an audible subscription to actually read books that I like by authors I like who are assholes and don't put out books anymore. Oh, dear.

Wine's working, eh? Yeah. Also true. Closing shout outs! Over at Patreon, we've got Hilky, Manboobie, Anna, Christopher, Jared. And Jared says, finally able to support y'all again.

Divorce and layoffs suck ass. Now I'm a government lackey and ironically make more than I have before. No complaints here, though. Woohoo! Thank you, Jared. I'd like to also apologize to Anna really quickly for putting her after Manboobie. Yeah, sorry about that. Sorry, Anna. So Panos wrote in and said something very funny.

He said, gotta hand it to you, Jason. It was the first time someone pronounced my name like a very, very nasty disease. I almost crashed my car laughing. And to be honest, his name is spelled P-A-N-A-G-I-O-T-I-S. Panagiotis is kind of how I read that.

But I looked it up. It's Greek and it is pronounced Panagiotis. So sorry, Panos. It's Panagiotis. But Panagiotis, yeah, you want to get a powder for that. Somebody also actually wrote us and said that we should go to Greece to do a show to be called, and we can call it Grumpy Old Greeks.

If they're paying, I'm going. If you want to pay. We'll do a show. We'll do a show for you. We'll definitely do a show. You fly us out there. Over at PayPal, we've got Joseph and David this week. All right. Over at the tip jar, we've got Ross, Josh, and Shiloh. Thanks so much from everybody. And just a reminder to everyone, if you go to Patreon and sign up for at least $3 a month, you can get the show early and ad-free.

And we now have the option to sign up for an entire year, and you get 5% off. So have at it, folks. Woo-hoo. And we have a new five-star review. Those clouds aren't going to yell at themselves. Jason and Brian deliver great, well-informed tech insights with effortless, sarcastic humor that resonates with my Aussie Gen X self.

Dave's touch of the straight man cracks me up. Love the book, Rex, and at the library, too. Thanks, guys. Canning.mat from Australia. All right. Thank you, Canning.mat. And I want to give a big shout-out to Andy Suchansky, who I believe still writes our outro music.

Do we still use that? We still use it every week. Every week. Oh, good. We still do. Because how much you listen to the show. Well, I never listen to the outro. Well, okay. I never listen to the show. Let's be fair. He has returned to Toronto, so I'm going to go out and get some pizza and some beer with him next week, and it'll be a good time.

So love Andy Suchansky. Go check out his music on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever else you want to do as well. So, and I wanted to put in something. Maybe I'll start to do this. I probably won't. I'll forget next week. But the quote of the week, because I saw this one, he's listed as day-to-day, but then again, aren't we all?

From Vin Scully. Okay. Deep thoughts. Deep thoughts. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for tuning in to Grumpy Old Geeks. Dive into the show notes and all the links from today's episode at GOG.show slash 667. Feeling generous?

Keep this top-notch entertainment rolling by dropping us a few bucks at GOG.show slash donate. Every bit helps. Spread the grumpiness. There's a share button in every podcast player out there. Use it to share the show with friends, foes, and everyone in between, and we'll be forever grateful. I can hear Jason opening up like a candy pack right now.

Head over to GOG.show to find the link on our Discord channel and chat with us and other show fans. Got something to say? Send your feedback, comments, or awesome links to GOG.show slash contact. Show us some love. Leave us a review at GOG.show slash review. A five-star rating might just get your review right on the air.

Also a one-star. We're going to read them all. Let's be honest. Stay grumpy. Welcome to Extra Fucking Grumpy Old Geek. I'm not going to say fucking out of the gate. I'm not going to say fucking out of the gate. Let me try that again. Saturday, September 26th.

Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meek Cleaver Colon.

BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on The Zone. Sign up now at DAZN.com.