668: Weaponized Puffery

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. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. The store is open, Brian. Oh, is it? The store is open. Yes, it is. Are people beating down the door? Well, this is the first time we've told them, so hopefully they will be. Beat down the door, people. Beat down the door. There's only three things up there right now, but by the time this airs, there might even be five or six.

I ran into trouble getting the damn international stuff to work, but it works now. Cool. Now we can just design. We can be designers, Brian. Joy. Yeah, I hope you get the joy out of designing because we're probably not going to make the joy out of the money. So, no.

Just one of those things. But we've got to have all the revenue streams, Jason. I know. We have to have all our tranches in a row. Yes. As the kids say. I don't know what kids say that, but I'm sure there are a few. They're hustlers. They're hustlers. All right. So, this is an interesting bit of follow-up here.

OpenAI has agreed to allow inspection of its training data by authors that are suing the company for copyright infringement. All right. Here's 70 gazillion, bazillion gigabytes of stuff. Have fun. Exactly. And we only have room for one of you at a time. They're basically going to do it in an air-gapped room at their San Francisco HQ.

So, the authors have to drive to them. So, you know, I can just see Sarah Silverman having a great day driving up there to go sit in a room at OpenAI going, what am I looking at? I'm reasonably sure that they hire people to send. Okay. Okay. Can I get that job?

Sarah, I'm free. There you go. Although, I shit on your last special, so I bet she's probably not going to hire me. Damn it. I think she's got tougher skin than that. Probably. Probably. And, yeah, so they're making some concessions. Yes. If you want to call it that.

Okay. Not really, but, yeah. Okay. Okay, moving on. Oasis, listen to you, Brian. They listened to our episode where you laid out the future of ticket sales and how they were doing things wrong. So, Oasis has opted out of Ticketmaster's controversial dynamic pricing for their upcoming North American leg of the tour.

British, they're fucked. You're done. You can't do it there. Well, it's funny. We have what I call a reverse Taylor Swift situation. People in the U.S. During Taylor Swift's last tour were wildly complaining online that it was massively cheaper to buy airfare to Europe and buy tickets for Taylor Swift in Europe than it was.

That was way cheaper than seeing them at home. We have that now occurring for Oasis, where I'm hearing from the Brits that they're better off flying somewhere in the States and getting tickets here than they were trying to get tickets at some of the homegrown shows. So, that's quite amusing.

The one thing I will point out about this, my wife is a massive Oasis fan, and basically I didn't hear anything other than Oasis ticket things for the last week while the pre-sales started and all that sort of stuff. So, what they did do, in lieu of dynamic pricing, is they just massively increased the base pricing.

Oh, okay. So, while theoretically you could have gotten an Oasis ticket for, say, around $70 to $100 during the U.K. pre-sales, but then the dynamic pricing hit, you couldn't get a ticket for Oasis under like $150 here.

Okay. So, where are you going to go see them? They are playing a show in Toronto, so we will be going to see that one. It is not until, I think, August of next year. Oh, okay. You got plenty of time. Yeah. If you're still there.

I got plenty of time to figure a way out of it, because I don't particularly care for Oasis to begin with, and Liam's voice is just shot. Oh, really? Like, if all the Noel songs, the ones that he sings, that should be fine. Anything that Liam's going to sing is just going to be a fucking disaster.

Maybe they can Milli Vanilli it. Who knows? Yeah. Or maybe you can just, you know, move back to the States and say, oh, we can't go back to Toronto for the show. Yes, but there's a Los Angeles show, you know. Well, yeah. There's no avoiding Oasis. Hopefully, they'll break up before then. Yeah.

Yeah. They'll pull a Jane's Addiction. They'll just beat each other to death. So, last week, we talked about California being able to put your driver's license into your phone, sort of. Sort of. I couldn't do it. But friend of the show, Brian Blondell, was able to do it. And as chance would have it, flew to Chicago later that week.

And he sent me a text saying, FYI, there are signs at the airport to download your license or ID. But when I tried to use it at TSA, they said they didn't take it. Okay. Well, I mean, that sort of makes sense. It is a California thing for California. And that doesn't necessarily mean that this newfangled way of having your ID is going to fly in other states or at the airport, which is federal.

Well, I mean, there were like seven other states that were ahead of us that got the digital IDs. But, yeah. But the fact that they have posters up saying, do it at the airport, you'd think that the other, you know, entities at the airport that actually take IDs, besides a bar, would actually take the ID.

Well, then again, there's the actual world that we live in and, you know, everything we talk about in this podcast. Of course, it's not going to work. Absolutely do not rely on any sort of bleeding edge technology for this sort of stuff. Do they still make you take your shoes off? Depends. I've got the global passenger or whatever thingy, so I don't ever have to.

But sometimes I do because things make sense. Yeah. Fun times. And there's a sister article over at The Verge called Don't Ever Hand Your Phone to the Cops. This is kind of basic knowledge, I think, for a lot of people. But some people who are, you know, maybe inebriated probably wouldn't do this the right way.

The thing is, if you unlock your phone to show them your ID and then you give that to them, they can just take it and play around with it and look around. See, now what we need are multiple levels of unlock. There should be a basic, the ID can pop up if you thumb it once, but that doesn't unlock the entire phone.

If we're all going to be required at some point, we probably will, to have our digital IDs instead of physical IDs, then we need multiple versions of unlock. And I think that it does that. I'm almost positive it works just like Apple Pay. Oh, good. That would be great. Yeah. I'm almost positive I didn't do the research because it's been a long fucking week.

But from what I remember when this first came out, this is going to work identical to Apple Pay. Okay, cool. We'll see. We'll see how that goes. If the chipped copper gets near your phone, it just pops up. Yeah, he's good. He's a good officer. Well, Elon had a good week.

Yeah, unfortunately. Yes. Judge John Mendez has blocked California's deepfake law, AB 2839, which aimed to curb AI-generated content affecting elections. We talked about this last week because Elon got kind of wrapped up in it because he tweeted a – or twatted or shitted or whatever you want to call it nowadays.

He recrapped. He recrapped a video of Kamala Harris that was made by Christopher Coles, the parody artist who actually sued the state of California to block the law. And, well, the judge said, yeah, yeah, actually, you're right.

This law sucks. There's really nothing about it that passed the sniff test. So I'm going to block it. And then Elon, of course, jumped in and said, victory, because he's a thwatt. Yeah, of course. Well, now you just have to go back and retool the language to have it make more sense.

Yeah, yeah. He said the statute infringes on his right to free speech and it is unconstitutionally vague. And the judge said, yep. So there you go on that one. And the next one, this one is just interesting. And I don't know who got paid off for this one.

Elon is celebrating a legal win over a lawsuit regarding Tesla's self-driving claims. But here's the kicker. The defense his lawyers used is a bit embarrassing because they basically argued that Musk's grand promises about Tesla's full self-driving tech were just, quote, puffery.

Which is legal jargon for exaggerated feel-good statements that no reasonable investor would take seriously. By the way, everybody, you're listening to the number one podcast in the entire world. Yes. Ranked higher than Joe Rogan on every chart ever.

Hock grumpy. Yep. Hock grumpy. No, no. Okay. So Tesla got the lawsuit dismissed, but only because the judge agreed that Musk's claims were too vague. And then he tweeted, justice prevails. Not really realizing that his defense team argued that everything he said in his entire career about Tesla and full self-driving was just bullshittery.

Yeah. I mean, basically, it has now been set down by a legal body that you cannot believe anything that Elon says and he's full of shit. That is the ruling. He is legally full of shit. In the news.

Well, we got some big news just in time for Christmas. Well, not right in time for Christmas, but given the way that things roll out and how we have to ship things around the country and things get moved around in time for Christmas because stuff is starting to get into stores now. U.S. dock workers have gone on strike.

Now, I don't know much about this world, but this is for the first time since 1977. The 47,000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association, the ILA, are walking picket lines. The contract expired on Monday at midnight after negotiations with bosses broke down.

They want better pay as well as something more existential and harder to secure. A future where robots don't take their jobs. Okay. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. But without the longshoremen, America's supply chain will shut down. Much of the country has stocked up on goods ahead of the Christmas season, but there's always something coming in.

And the longer the strike goes on, the more likely it is that Americans will feel the pinch. Inflation may rise and goods might be scarce. According to the president of the ILA, that's the point. These people don't know what a strike is, Daggett said. You know what's going to happen?

I'll tell you. First week, be all over the news every night. Boom, boom. Second week, guys who sell cars can't sell cars because the cars ain't coming in off the ships. They get laid off. Third week, malls start closing down. They can't get the goods from China. I don't know if this guy's seen any malls recently, but they've all shut down already. They've all shut down already.

Everything in the United States comes from a ship, and robots are, of course, already at ports. Automation can handle the two biggest jobs at a port, unloading massive shipping containers with a crane and sorting those shipping containers on the shore. There are already three fully automated terminals in the U.S. More are on their way.

Equipment to automate a port is expensive to set up and still does require workers, but far fewer than required to unload goods the old-fashioned way. So good luck with that. I think you're going to have to take some sort of compromise here. You're not going to get a blanket, no robots on ports ruling because, quite frankly, it's cheaper, faster, quicker, and better.

And this just in, they have reached a tentative deal which will keep the docks open until January 15th, where this will all start again. Kicking that can down the road. Exactly. I saw the news that people were already freaking out, and they're like, I need teepee. I need teepee. Oh, God.

Yeah, not realizing that 90% of the toilet paper in the United States is made here. But what you couldn't get, if this kept going, were bananas. I need my bananas. Yeah. I went to the store yesterday and bought some bananas, but then this morning they said strikes over already. So I'm like, okay, well, I got some bananas.

I'm stocking up on potassium. This just makes me, it reminds me of the time I went over to your place to do a show during the pandemic. It was just wall-to-wall toilet paper. If I came over tomorrow, it would be wall-to-wall bananas. The mountain of teepee and white claw.

Oh, God. That's hilarious. I'll never forget that. Welcome. California Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday vetoed a bill aimed at preventing large AI systems from causing catastrophic harms, saying the legislation would have created a false sense of security.

So, again, this comes down to the legislation that was brought forward kind of being vague and somewhat nonsensical, and let's go back and redraft this thing. This law, Senate Bill 1047, introduced by State Senator Scott Wiener, back in May, would have required companies that spend more than $100 million on computing resources to create a foundation AI model, or $10 million on computing resources to fine-tune a foundation model, to perform safety tests, hire independent auditors to review the model annually,

and take reasonable care to ensure the model doesn't cause mass casualty incidents, more than $500 million in damage to physical or cyber infrastructure, or act without human infrastructure. Anyways, this basically got killed because of an awful lot of lobbying from people like, oh, I don't know, Elon Musk, who has an AI company that is underneath that restriction, so he wouldn't have to deal with it.

This is the slowdown OpenAI bill, basically. Well, moving on to more OpenAI news. OpenAI has raised a $6.6 billion round in the largest venture capital round of all time, bringing its total funding to $17.9 billion, and valuing the company at $157 billion.

We still haven't found the promise and the golden path for any of this, or how to make money. Yeah, check this out. The company has spent around $7 billion on model training and $1.5 billion on staffing. My God, I can't make my car payment, and these guys are spending $1.5 billion on these AI twats.

ChatGPT alone has over 250 million users with annual revenue projected to reach $2.7 billion this year. That's a lot. That's not bad. They could hire more staff, except they don't need them because they're just using their own product. That's about it. Elon did have a big party last night for XAI trying to do some recruitment, and he ironically had it at the original OpenAI headquarters, which is now the XAI headquarters.

Talk about following your old days. I wonder if you've got it hoping they left little piles of data sitting around. It's like, you know, coke heads looking in the carpet for the little rocks. Like, can you see if they left any models around here? Is there model dust?

There's some server racks over there. Check that for data. The interesting thing about that round was, this is according to the Financial Times, OpenAI demanded that its eventual investors abstain from also funding any of OpenAI's competitors like XAI or Anthropic, which is why probably Apple backed out of the deal because they were going to get in on that $6.6 billion deal.

But Apple is smart. They hedge their bets. You know, they're not going to get locked in to anything. They're going to invest in all of them. Yeah. You know, they could take their own money and just build it themselves if they want to. And so, yeah, that's an interesting, interesting clause that they put in there.

Who's going to monitor that? I guess they found a job for some people. Yeah. I mean, like, it's Apple. They've got enough talent and enough resources where they could just, you know, start working on this themselves. But there's also enough competitors out there to really kind of, you know, they don't want to jump too early, I'm sure, like maybe Microsoft did, because there's a new MIT spinoff called Liquid AI, and they've debuted a new Liquid Foundational Model, or an LFM.

I want the MILF to come out. That'll be good. I want the KLF. KMFDM. Doing it again. So the Liquid Foundation models offer a significant breakthrough in AI model design, because unlike the popular transformer-based architecture, these models use a post-transformer approach, which makes them more memory efficient while still achieving top-tier performance.

Post-transformers, isn't that that new movie that just came out that tanked? That's that one. I think that was Transformer 1. Ah, okay. $1 about how much money it made at the box office, I hear. Yeah. Well, speaking about these different models for training, guess what we've discovered?

What have we discovered, Brian? Well, one of the most popular techniques AI companies use to improve the quality of their large language models may instead make those models just better at deceiving humans, according to a new preprint study from Anthropoc and researchers at Chinese and American universities. Yeah, link is in the show notes, it gets pretty deep in the weeds on exactly the different methodologies used by these companies.

But basically, what they've discovered is that really, when they're trying to make these models better and provide more accurate information, what it's actually doing is just teaching the models to tell us what we want to hear. Humans get a human.

Yep. So that's great. Yeah. As they point out, the study authors wrote, the improvements you see in these models may not be real. Our results underscore the risk of applying these different training methods to control increasingly capable AI systems. Future AI systems might become better at misleading us and pretending to be correct, causing us to lose control unknowingly.

I love it. I love it. I love it. I love that we're investing so much money and placing so many important aspects of our lives in the hands of these things. And we have no fucking clue what they're doing. Oh, we do. We do have a clue. They're being just like us.

Yeah. We can be just like, we can be just like us for free, guys. We don't need the AI to do it. They just, they just fuck up faster. Yeah, they do. Yeah. Thanks for that. We talked about this guy, Jason M. Allen, back when he did this thing.

He's an executive at a tabletop gaming startup, and he submitted an AI-generated painting to a Colorado digital art competition and won, which caused much brouhaha. Critics claimed that he had cheated, but the prize winner didn't have much sympathy for his detractors. I'm not going to apologize for it, Allen said.

I won, and I didn't break any rules. He also didn't seem to care much for the complaint that AI companies like Midjourney, the one he used to create his painting, were poised to destroy the art market. This isn't going to stop, Allen told the New York Times. Art is dead, dude. It's over. AI won and humans lost.

Well, now butthurt bitch is complaining because he keeps creating his own AI artwork, and it cannot be copyrighted because it's AI-created artwork. And he's using platforms that have been accused of ripping off countless copyrighted works, and now his work that's created using that can't be copyrighted, and people are stealing it, and he's not making any money, Jason.

Oh my god, what a little whitey baby. They're stealing his work, Jason. That was created by stealing other people's work. Oh. There have been instances where people outright have ripped off my work incorporating the entire piece into a new piece, which is exactly the fucking shit you're doing.

It's exactly what he did. Oh my god, this. Okay. Siri, please send Jason M. Allen the definition of irony. Anyways, Alanis Morissette's going to play a benefit concert for him.

Oh god. So, I guess, I can't get past that guy. What a twat. In a victory against scammers, Google has won a lawsuit targeting two men who abused its DMCA takedown system. The scammers Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Tien falsely requested the removal of over 100,000 URLs, many targeting competitors in the online t-shirt business.

Smart. I know, I know. They even impersonated celebrities like Elon Musk in their fraudulent claims. Despite being summoned, the defendants, believed to be in Vietnam, did not respond. What? They're not going to show up? No, they're not going to show up.

A U.S. court issued a default judgment banning the pair from further abuse of Google's DMCA system. While Google could have sought monetary damages, its primary goal was to stop the fraudulent activity and protect the integrity of its platform. Ah! Ah, awesome.

Yeah. Okay. On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined Cruise, GM's self-driving vehicle division, $1.5 million. This penalty was imposed for emitting key details from an October 2023 accident in which one of the company's autonomous vehicles struck and dragged a San Francisco pedestrian.

I love this. The report states that cruise executives initially played a video of the accident during October 3rd meetings with the San Francisco mayor's office, the NATSA, the DMV, and other officials. However, during the presentation, the video stream was hampered by internet connectivity issues that concealed the part where the vehicle dragged the victim.

Hey, when it gets to 36 seconds, pull the plug. Oh, yeah. Yeah, boss. I can go. Sorry, I'm driving past the airport. Airport. Executives who the report stated knew about the dragging also failed to verbally mention that crucial detail in the initial meetings because they wanted to let the video speak for itself.

The video that you didn't let play all the way. Let play all the way. It was supposed to speak for itself, and then you just decided not to mention it. Investigators finally found out about the dragging after the NHTSA asked the company to submit the full video. The government agency says cruise also amended four other incomplete crash reports involving its vehicles to add additional details, with a small note saying, the jig is up, boys.

Oops. Busted. Yeah. So there you go. Awesome. Okay. I'm full of hope this week, as you can tell. Well, Brian, Tesla has started rolling out full self-driving to a select group of Cybertruck owners, allowing the electric pickup to drive on highways hands-free.

The end-to-end-on-highway feature enabled by Tesla's AI neural network is in early access, meaning it's only available to some owners who paid for it when purchasing the truck last fall. Drivers still need to remain attentive while using FSD, which can deactivate if it detects inattention.

Perfect. That's exactly what I want. I want the truck that's driving itself to stop driving itself and turn off when the person is not paying attention. That makes perfect fucking sense on a highway. Yeah, that's going to be great. What fucking idiot engineer came up with that one?

Mr. Musk. Tesla is betting big on its self-driving capabilities. And, yeah, because guess what? On October 10th, Musk plans to unveil a new self-driving taxi called the Cyber Cab in an event here in California, which I thought he bailed on California already.

What the hell? If there's money to be made, he's just not going to place his businesses here. Okay. Okay. Well, speaking of self-driving cars in California, Kamala Harris's motorcade was stalled or was blocked, actually, due to a stalled Waymo.

They already hate her up there because, you know, all the crypto bros and all that sort of tech tycoons are not big fans of the Democrats trying to do any legislation or any kind of anything against them. But they were going, she was on her way to her hotel in a motorcade and a Waymo just stopped right in front of her.

It was in the process of making a U-turn on California Street in the city's Nob Hill neighborhood. It malfunctioned and stopped moving. Eventually, a local police officer was forced to jump inside the driverless car and manually steer it out of traffic. Okay.

Yeah. And finally, Jeep's owners, Stellantis, has recalled about 194,000 plug-in hybrid SUVs from the brand due to risk of a fire. This recall impacts specific Jeep Wrangler 4XE models from 2020 to 2024 and some Jeep Grand Cherokee 4XE SUVs from 2022 to 2024.

About 5% of the vehicles will have the defect, according to the company. It discovered the issue after 13 fires were reported, all when the vehicle was parked and off. Yay. Now, despite this risk, they are not yet having customers bring their hybrids in for servicing, probably because they don't have the parts or don't know how to fix it yet.

Don't know how to fix it yet. Instead, the company claims a remedy is imminent and owners will get notified when they can come in. For now, they state, vehicle risk is reduced when the battery charge level is depleted. Accordingly, owners are advised to refrain from recharging. And out of an abundance of caution, the company is also advising owners of these vehicles to park away from structures or other vehicles until a remedy is obtained.

Basically, don't fucking drive your car. And keep it away from children. And park it in a field in the middle of nowhere. Which is great because from my front door, I see three of these parked in driveways next to my place. Oh. See, that's why I keep mine with the Liquid Dinosaur version.

I like my Jeep. But yeah, these 4XEs are, I'm sorry, they're 4xe's. I think that's what they're. Instead of 4x4's. Right. But it took me a while to figure that one out. I'm like, what the fuck is that? They're, yeah, they're everywhere around here.

And I don't know about you, Brian, but Cybertrucks have infested Los Angeles. They're everywhere now. I see them. I saw them a lot last time I was there. I'm sure over Christmas, there's just going to be tons. Yeah. No, they're all over the place. And I saw that damn LAPD one again.

But I was driving and it was at night, so I couldn't get a picture. But at some point, I'm going to get a picture of this damn thing. I swear, it's got to be a problem. It's your white whale. It is. It is. Call me Ishmael. But just don't call me Adam Neumann, because that motherfucker is back launching a new co-working company called Workflow.

And this is four months after his failed attempt to repurchase WeWork. The statute of limitations has obviously run out on competitive companies. Yeah, must have. Must have. Workflow aims to provide office space with a more refined and calm environment compared to WeWork, focusing on upscale design rather than youthful perks like kombucha.

Yeah, taking away the kombucha is really going to fix what was wrong with your company. By the way, I take umbrage with that being a youthful perk. I enjoy my kombucha and I'm an old man. Yeah. Yeah. Kombucha was delightful. Delightful. I'm not allowed to drink it anymore, says my sponsor.

Fucker. So, his real estate company, Flo, owns a bunch of buildings already. So, instead of going out and doing the leases like he did before, they're just going to work out of their buildings that they already have. So, he's going to expand to multiple U.S. cities and Riyadh.

Okay? Okay. There we go. There we go. We'll see if that works. Probably not. But, hey. And this one is just very, very interesting to me. Scientists claim that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the moon's nighttime temperatures dropped significantly.

A study from India's Physical Research Laboratory, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, colon, letters, found that as human activity and pollution plummeted during global lockdowns, Earth emitted less heat at night, which reduced radiation and led to an unexpected cooling of the moon's surface.

We're putting out a lot of shit if we're heating up the moon that's hundreds of thousands of miles away. Yep. Damn. I get pissed off when my neighbor leaves his garage door light on at night and it floods my bedroom. It's like, geez. So, the research highlights how changes on Earth can impact the moon and suggest that lunar temperature swings could help study climate change.

The unique opportunity provided by the pandemic may never be repeated. Let's hope not. But future moon-based observatories could further explore this phenomenon. I thought that was kind of neat. That is neat. I mean, terrifying, but neat.

I mean, terrifying, but neat.

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Media candy. Bruce Wayne, I mean, Gavin Newsom, our California governor, is again in the news because he signed AB 2426 into law, which, Brian, as you and I know, when you buy something that's digital, you don't own it.

We've been saying it. We've been saying this for, well, we've been saying it since it started, but 11 years on this show at least. Now, they're signing it into law. And starting next year, digital storefronts will be banned from using terms like buy or purchase unless they clearly inform customers they are only receiving a revocable license, not outright ownership of the content.

Now, there is a loophole that if you can download a copy of it to keep forever, then you are buying it. But where can you do that anymore? So, yeah. Not many places. Yeah. iTunes stores still. Yeah. A couple of those.

And you can download things on Netflix, but you don't own them. You can just play them on an airplane. Don't forget that. So, retailers that violate the new rule could face fines for false advertising. The law won't apply to stores offering permanent offline downloads, like I said. And Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, the bill's author, emphasized that as digital media grows, clearer consumer protections are essential.

Way to get ahead of that one, California. 20 years too late. It's a bit late to let everybody know that, but okay. I mean, it's something. These laws do need to be on the books. I think that's fair. New people are being born every day, I guess. That's right. So, a show that I have not purchased and just have a license to, I just started watching with the wife, The Diplomat.

Oh, yeah. It's the new Kerry Russell show. It's not really that new because they're already on season two, but started watching it. Wait, season two's out? Yeah. What? Well, I think so. Oh, my God. Okay. Well, shocker. Let's see. Netflix didn't fucking tell me. Oh, no. Sorry. Season two comes October 31st.

Oh, phew. Because I just kept seeing season two every time we launched it. So, I was like, oh, okay. I guess we can roll straight into season two. But, you know, a couple more weeks. A couple more weeks. Okay. Great show. I really like it. I mean, here's the thing, though. Kerry Russell, the Americans.

Then, all of a sudden, we had a Russian problem with Mr. Trump. Kerry Russell, the diplomat. War in the Middle East. All of a sudden, we have war in the Middle East. Kerry Russell, I need you to make a feel-good show where everything works properly, because everything that you star in comes to pass. Yeah.

Yeah. Can we get Kerry Russell in Utopia? Yes, please. Rainbows and Sunshine with Kerry Russell. Please, please. It's a fantastic show. Oh, she's just so good. She's so good. And the guy that plays her husband, I love him. It's a great show. It's really, really well done.

Yeah. No, I was really hoping they were going to make a second one. So, that really made my day. Thank you. There you go. You're welcome. Yeah. Yeah, because I watched that the first week it came out. I binged that in, like, two days. I was like, I'm in. I'm in. And to not be PC and just be a, you know, white dude, Kerry Russell, keep showing your butt in shows for the rest of your life, please.

Thank you. You're welcome, Brian. You're welcome. I did watch Wolves, the new Apple TV movie with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, which I have a, I have one of those things where I, I like Brad Pitt. I like George Clooney. I enjoy when they're together in like Oceans 11 and all those movies.

Yeah. There is something about this that makes me want to hate it irrationally. Like, I don't know why I see the, I see the trailers for it. I see everything. I'm just like, oh, no, I will not watch this. Oh, it was fun. Tell me if I should watch it. It's fun. It's confusing as shit.

The ending doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And everybody, I've actually gone and watched all of the explainer videos on Wolves ending explained. And everybody's like, yeah, they didn't really explain that. That's like watching those loss explained. Exactly.

We never really came. They never really came back and explained any of that stuff. Oh, yeah. We need, we need, we need, uh, we need, uh, Wolves 2 to really figure this one out. Uh, this movie was a vehicle produced by them so they could hang out and be buds together is pretty much what it comes down to. That's what it felt like to me too.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I, we enjoyed it. I mean, it's not too long. It's, you know, like it's two hours of fun. Um, but yeah, it's, the writing is not what you would call top notch by any stretch. So basically you're just saying I should go watch Oceans 11 again instead.

Yeah. Oceans 11 was way better. Okay. I'm just going to do that. Okay. I mean, this, this was a good way to kill two hours. You know what, Brian? Have some wine, kick back and don't overthink it. That's, that's what you got to do. I'm going to spend the entire time going, why did they do the plural of wolves incorrectly?

Hmm. I think that's still a, uh, a, uh, callback to Winston Wolf. Okay. Yeah. Cause that's basically the character they play. Ah, well, they're, they're, they're basically two Winston Wolves from, uh, yeah. From Pulp Fiction, which also is a far superior movie than wolves.

So I could have four hours of better entertainment. Five hours. Pulp Fiction is a fucking marathon. So yeah. Yeah. Go, go watch, uh, Oceans 11 and, uh, Pulp Fiction instead. Okay. But you are in Canada and you have the option now, Brian, to watch the Traders Canada season two live on TV, like normal people.

I don't cause I don't pay for TV. Oh, well then you can get it in Sweden. Like I do. Uh, the first two episodes have dropped it. I love it. I am so in, uh, the Traders is one of those shows where I usually on these, these foreign ones, we usually get to watch them after they're all, they've all aired.

But I ended up just one day, I'm like, I wonder when the, when Canada's coming back and boom, um, the first episode had just dropped and I'm like, yes. So I waited to, to the second one comes out cause it always ends on a cliffhanger. So you never know exactly what's going to happen until the next episode. So, uh, yeah, it's back.

The first two are out and it's just as good as it's always been. I love the Traders. So, but they, they have, they have done something that, uh, the Americans had caught onto and thought it was a good idea. They started putting reality TV people into the, into the game instead of civilians.

Yeah. Yeah. Because civilians in these games, basically there's a lot of heartbreak at the reality TV people. They know they're playing a game and they don't get butt hurt when they're lied to consistently for, you know, an entire season. So, uh, yeah.

Yeah. When it's the civilians, it usually ends in a lot of tears, but yeah, it's still a game. So fuck it. It's, it is great. I love the Traders. And speaking of ending in tears, I watched the finale of season two of Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power last night. Okay.

I can't do this because there's too many spoilers, but it was great. It was really good. It definitely, they finally ramped up the action and moved the plot forward like a ton. Um, this was a really good season, much better than the first season, way more involved, way more interesting, uh, really well done.

Like it's just, it's just good. I can't wait for season three, but from, from what I've read, what you just said, it sounds like I should just watch the last episode of season two. Well, you could, I mean, honestly, you don't have to watch any of it because it's all just lead up for what we already know happens.

You could just watch the first, the first five minutes of the Lord of the Rings movie where they do the preamble. There we go. Okay, perfect. So you don't have to do anything. Nice. I've seen it already. Perfect. Yeah. We all know where this is going to end up. Yeah.

Yeah. This has all happened before because we all watched it before. All right. Well, speaking of Amazon and Amazon TV, oh, by the way, did they say when the next season's coming? Is it going to be next year or is it like three years off? They, uh, we know nothing, Jon Snow. Okay. It's going to be a while, I think.

I didn't know if they'd filmed these concurrently like they did with, uh, the movies. I don't believe so. I'm sure if it was coming already early next year, they would have said something about it, but I haven't seen anything. Okay. Okay. Well, Amazon does plan to increase the number of ads on Prime Video in 2025 after minimal backlash from subscribers.

Bullshit. There was minimal backlash. Well, nobody's canceling because the problem with Amazon Prime Video is that you'd have to cancel your Amazon Prime account for the most part. Yes, which nobody wants to do. Nobody wants to do. So we'll get more ads and expect an increase in your Prime Premium price.

Yes. Yes. Because currently, yeah. Currently, users can avoid ads by paying the extra $3 a month, which I just on pure fucking principle alone, I won't do. Nope. Um, so, you know, despite the lower than expected growth in ad revenue, Amazon's ad business remains one of its fastest growing sectors.

Why is that? Because it didn't fucking exist last year. That's why it's one of its fastest growing sectors. Now, see, if they were forced to, like, break apart everything and let you just buy into different parts of Amazon Prime, I think I would consider it. Although, at this point, I mean, there are only two shows now that they've gotten rid of Top Gear, whatever the hell the new name is, which wasn't that great.

Anyways, I've got the Rings of Power, which I really enjoy on Amazon. And the other one is that other sci-fi one, the Turning of the Wheel or whatever the hell that thing was called, which I am looking forward to having come back because I've enjoyed that as well.

But I'm, it's only two shows. So if I could, like, opt out of Prime Video and pay less for just Prime, I would. Yeah. I see. I've got the Boys and the Boys spinoffs and Reacher. Those are the only ones I care about that are on there. They just don't have a lot of content compared to the other ones.

No, not at all. It's just old shit, you know, and the interface is terrible. Even that new interface is god awful. But Fallout, Fallout as well, was excellent. All right. So looking forward to that one. So there's a couple of them. I mean, honestly, they've got about as much as Apple TV Plus when you think about it.

Yeah, that's true. You know. But speaking of Apple TV Plus, Sugar has just been renewed for a second season with Colin Farrell. So I'm very excited about that. No dates are set yet, but this is news directly from Apple. So should be good, hopefully.

I liked the twist and I liked the ending. The show was weird as fuck, but I got into it and I liked it. So we'll see. And in what's the date today? We got like another week or so for this one. It's the fourth. We're recording on the fourth. Okay. So 12 more days.

We get Shrinking Season 2, which gives me 12 more days to watch the end of Shrinking Season 1. I'm very excited that's coming back. It was such a fun show. Yeah. It's another show that I watch with my wife. I always enjoy those. So can't wait for it to come. Ups and doodads.

Hat tip to Baird on this one. This just came in. Google has introduced a new feature that lets users search the internet by taking a video. This innovation allows people to point their phone's camera at something, record a clip, and ask a question about it. And with Google's AI providing search results based on the video, which would be kind of neat.

The feature available globally on Android and iPhone is part of Google's push to enhance search with artificial intelligence. Ooh. I use their, what the hell is it called? The one where you take a picture and it gives you shopping results right away. Oh, yeah. All the time. Lens or something like that?

I can't remember what they call it. Yeah. He has a Google lens or something. I forget what it's called. But that is part of the Google app. So get that. I think this is going to be part of that as well. I can't wait to try it. I checked yesterday and I don't have it yet. So I'm hoping that it'll be coming soon because it sounds kind of neat.

It does sound neat. Yeah. Because one of the tests that they did was like they took a picture of a bunch of fish and said, why do fish like this swim in the same direction or some shit like that? I don't know. But, you know, I want to be able to like point at the clouds and with these birds flying over and say, what kind of birds are those? Or what kind of butterflies are these?

Which I could probably do already somehow, but I like them. They're drones from Russia. Yes, they are. Or Amazon. Or Walmart. Yeah. So which store owns these? So you and I, neither one of us own an EV, but this is some EV news.

If you own a juice box EV charger, be prepared for some major changes. The company behind the popular home chargers, Anal X. Anal. I, you know, you can pronounce that Anal X if you like, which I do, is leaving the North American market as of October 11th.

This means they're stopping all software updates and removing apps used to manage the chargers. While your juice box hardware will still work for home charging, features like scheduling and other online functions will be gone. Wow. That company is just non-lube anal-ing them. No doubt.

Commercial charging stations will be hit harder, losing much of their functionality. Anal X says... It'd be harder, guys. Anal X says they're shifting focus to regions where they're offering, where they offer electricity services, blaming high interest... North of the border. Yeah. Blaming high interest rates and a slowing EV market for the exit.

Customer support is no longer available and users should visit juiceboxnorthamerica.com for any issues. Wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, all the more reason not to jump into the EV market at this point in time. Like, this stuff has to get sorted out. That's ridiculous. Yeah.

That's a bad one. That's a bad one. Zeeshan Alvi, the owner of a medical testing laboratory in Chicago, is pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud on Monday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Alvi's facility, known as Lab Elite, was releasing negative COVID-19 test results to patients that either weren't performed or were inconclusive.

This is not the first of these companies. And I'm sure it won't be the last as we dig further and further into this. These people should all be put in jail. The only reason anyone figured it out was that some patients received positive tests while waiting on their results from Lab Elite and were confused about the contradictory information from the Chicago lab.

In a court filing from 2023, prosecutors laid out how he submitted roughly $83 million in false claims to the Department of Health and Human Resources sub-agency from February 2021 to 2022. His lab was raided by the FBI in February 2022, and the 45-year-old pleaded guilty this week to $14 million worth of fraud, acknowledging that he knowingly submitted false claims.

Meta has confirmed that any image analyzed by its AI through Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses can be used to train its AI models. Brian, is anybody shocked at this? No, of course not. You know, we're basically signed all in to these things if we decide to use them.

They're just going to use it to train the data. That's part of their TOS. That's part of their EULA. End of story. Yeah. Suck it all up. Yeah. And honestly, you're a sucker anyway if you're buying anything with a camera in it that's owned by Meta. So what did you think they was going to do, you know?

Remember, does this make my ass look fat camera that they were supposed to be in your bedroom? Yep. That was a great one. Yeah, that lasted about a hot second. Well, speaking of Meta's Ray-Ban glasses, two Harvard students have created a controversial experiment using facial recognition technology built into Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Dubbed iXray, the project uses the smart glasses cameras and pulls up personal information about people, including their home address and phone number, just by recognizing their face. Why didn't they just call it iDocs? Yeah. But this is what we always wanted. This is what we wanted from Google Glass, you know?

This is what I wanted. I wanted to be able to go to a bar, see a hot girl, and find her Facebook page. Yeah. And find out if she's got a boyfriend. Exactly. And if he's bigger than me. Yeah. That's it. What century is the boyfriend in right now? Yeah. Is he here? Is he home? Let's track that.

So they're using basically off-the-shelf facial recognition called PIM eyes to do the lookups. And they're not going to release the technology to the public, but they're just doing this to show how readily available the tools are and how they can be combined to expose people's private lives.

So good on you. Good on you. Fair. I mean, we knew this was coming. If we could have done this sooner, we would have. Oh, yeah. 100%. That was the promise of Google Glass. Yes. They just had to give them the glass holes first. So, you know, Scoble fucked it for everybody.

Totally. I've been working with the Walk the Distance app since I finished the fantasy, whatever the hell it was called, app that basically did the walkthrough. Not Lord of the Rings. Not Lord of the Rings. That was a lot more fun. This one's a little bit boring.

I got to be honest. It's got a lot of different walks in it. I've been doing some of the city ones. All it does is, and you can tell this is made by people in San Francisco because it pulls up Google Maps and it starts in San Francisco and it pauses and then shifts over to whatever city you're walking in.

It charts your progress through the city. It throws up little things from like Wikipedia about notable places in the city. Very boring. Not all that fun. But what it does have in it is it has like some notable big trail walks like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail.

So I was thinking it might be fun just for that. Like do the Appalachian Trail and see how long it would take me to walk the 10 gazillion miles involved. But yeah, it's just it doesn't have the whimsy and fun that the other app did. So this may not last long on my phone. See, that's what I always liked about the badges from my Fitbit back in the day.

You know, it's like I'd get the one that you walked the Great Wall of China. You know, you've walked Russia. You've done the Transcontinental Railway and all these other things. I love those. I love those badges. They were cute, too. That was back when gamification was pretty new and neat. Back when it gave a shit. Now it's just like you want to gamify this?

Get out of my face. And what are you doing with my data?

Back to Meek Pleaver Colon, BKFC 94, Till vs. Ramiro. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, featuring the dastardly, dynamic, and delightfully devious Dave Bittner.

Dave can be heard daily on the Cyber Wire podcast or on Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, or with Ben Yellen on Caveat, or on Control Loop, talking industrial cybersecurity. Dave's new show, Only Malware in the Building, is hosted by Selina Larson with Rick Howard and, of course, Dave Bittner. They break down the most impactful malware stories into actionable insights in the most delightful way.

I have to say, Dave, you guys put some serious production into that one. Don't we? I do, I do have, I have notes, Dave. Of course you do. Not for you. No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, so this is the, so this is the shit sandwich, right?

You get the kiss and the slap. Right. Okay. Go, first of all, before you jump in, let me just shout out to Trey Hester, who edits that show, and does an amazing job. Mm-hmm. Well done, but.

Very well done. Yes, and. Rick might want to try and not do so much acting, is all I got to say. Oh, I see. So it's a note. It's an acting note. I said, I have notes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you a note? No, okay.

You know. You're going to give him line readings? Have a rehearsal or something. Yeah, do a walkthrough. Just do, do, do, yeah, you know, the Harry Potter thing was very cute, but yeah, I just got to say, at least you mentioned, you mentioned it first in the show.

I'm just saying, Rick, maybe, you know, hit the community college once or twice before trying to dive back into your Harry Potter impersonation. And our show has become a YouTube comment section. Yeah. All right. I wasn't supposed to go that deep, but you guys, you guys made it go that deep.

When did Star Trek become so damn woke, people? But it's a very good show. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. Well, thank you. So you got your iPhone 16, Dave? I did. I did. I got it with the first batch that came out.

In fact, my UPS guy came to the door. Both my wife and I got iPhones on the first day, and my UPS guy came to the door, and I answered the door, and he said, I got some toys for you. And I said, oh, thank you very much. Yeah. My guy showed up on the Saturday following, finally.

And he was early because he wasn't supposed to be here until Monday. And I'm like, whee! Oh, nice. He was very surprised at my reaction because I knew exactly what it was. I'm like, oh, gibbity, yes! Okay. Yeah. So it's a phone. Yeah.

Yeah. That's it. It's a phone. But it's got that cool new button on it. The camera button is awesome. I guess. I haven't really touched it. Okay. I mean, so for me, the main upgrade was the slightly longer lens on the long side, which I appreciate because a lot of the photography I do is nature photography.

So having that extra bit of reach is helpful for me. I have to say, I have not taken the time to dig in to the functionality of the new button. So I'm curious for your shorthand on what the true advantages are for the informed user.

So the upside is when I'm walking the dog, I walk the dog with my right hand. My phone is in my left hand pocket. I can reach my left hand into my phone, take it out, press it with my middle, hold the phone, press the camera button with my middle finger, slide it up and down to zoom properly, press the button one more time to take a photo and then put the phone back in my pocket, all one handed while I'm walking the dog at the same time.

It is handy as hell for when I'm out in the neighborhood and I see something interesting or exciting. Okay. So what you guys are basically saying is the main feature was the bank account draining service. Yes. Very good at that. Yes. Yes. The cash transfer mechanism at Apple works very well.

Okay. That is true. I am happy to wait for another, another level before upgrading. So I'm still, the thing is I'm still paying the same thing as I was before. It's just, I got a new phone out of it because I do the payment plan. I'm like, that's what I do too. Yeah. Apple has like a 0% thing.

And so I'm just, I'm just locked into the fact that Apple is going to get, they're getting 50 bucks a month from me in perpetuity in exchange for having a new phone every other year. And that's a good deal for me. I'm, I'm pleased as punch with that.

That works. Yeah. Works fine with me. And at the end of the three years, cause I do have the three year cycle at the end of it, I've got a really nice phone that I get sent to my dad, you know, and he's happy. So. Right. Same with me. Yeah. It gets passed down to my son. So yeah, it all works out.

But mostly it's just a phone. There's really, there's nothing earth shattering about it. I have installed the iOS 18.1 beta so that I can have the pretty Siri. Yeah. It's nice, isn't it? It's cute.

Yeah, it is nice. There's a really subtle thing. One of our listeners sent to me that when you press the volume up and down buttons, the interface bumps in a little bit next to them. Like there's a little visual cue that the buttons are being pressed.

Like the, the, the, the screen warps a little bit. I see that now. Just a little tiny bit. It's very nice. It's neat. Yeah. I like the dark mode icons, but again, you don't need the new iPhone 16 to get those just the new iOS. Um, I love the dark mode icons. Actually, I've had that on for three weeks now.

They're great. Yeah. Yep. Uh, I did, since I did move up in size, I have the, uh, you know, the, the bigger one. I, I, I, I, my phone has been embiggened. Yeah. I found that I don't need the iPad mini as much anymore. So I use it a lot more for my Kindle app, which is nice.

The, uh, the one thing that I am really desperately wishing that they would put in, into, uh, the OS is an app level rotation lock. That would be really nice because, you know, I just, I really like it locked in one app and then the other. And then, then if you're in bed and you just turn a little bit, then it switches and then you lose your page.

That happens in email all the time. Like I'm reading an email and then I turn and then I go back to where it wasn't. It goes back to the top of the email. And I'm like, that's really stupid. Yeah. Come on. Can I just lock one, one app, but it's just, you know, device for the whole device at the same time, which sucks.

Can you, that's my, my only complaint. Oh, I see. So you, because I was going to say you can, you can assign that functionality to the activity button, right? But then you have to remember, so you just want it to be stuck so you don't have to remember. Yeah. I'd like, I'd like, you know, just a rotation lock in any app settings, you know, or a system setting, maybe the rotation lock, whatever.

There's a, there's a, there's an elegant way to do it, which I have not put that much thought into, but no, no. Yeah. The action button is weird because I didn't, I had a switch before. Me too. I assigned mine to the flashlight since I ended up using that the most. So. Okay. But other than that, yeah, it's pretty much the phone.

The worst thing about it is just moving everything over to it and getting all of your apps to, you know, passwords working right and face ID working again and all that crap. Yeah. I have a funny thing on mine now where if I go to my settings menu, uh, probably two or three days ago, this thing popped up in my settings menu that says right underneath of my name and

my Apple account and that sort of stuff, there's a window that popped up that says, get ready for your new iPhone. You're eligible for extra cloud storage to move your apps and data. Now, this is my new iPhone. I already did all of that. And there seems to be, there seems to be no way to get rid of this because if I, if I go through to the next screen, it's, it gives me two buttons, either continue or not now.

If I hit not now, the thing is still up there. The window that says, get ready for your new iPhone is still there. So yeah, it's, you know, I got rid of that. I got rid of mine on mine. Yeah. All right. Well, if you figure out how, let me know.

Cause I mean, it's a new small, small potatoes. It's a new, yeah, it's a nuisance. And I guess it's one of those, uh, little attention to detail things that makes you go really come on. Like, yeah, Apple has slipped on that. For sure. A little bit over the years for sure.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Some of this interface design stuff is really like just head scratching. Okay. Hmm. Yeah. The real annoying one is, uh, I get, I still have an Apple care plus thing that shows up on my phone saying that there are 42 days remaining to add Apple care plus coverage to your AirPods.

I'm like, okay, can, can that go away? I hit not now on that. And then that doesn't go away. Like I'm, I'm not going to get Apple plus coverage on a pair. Or, oh, here we go. I just, you know what? They, they may have added this since we've been talking, Dave, I hit not now. And it pops up and it says, remind me later, don't show again or cancel.

So I will hit don't show again. And it goes away. How about that? Wow. Interesting. All right. Anyway. Good for you. Yeah. So far I, I, I like the new cameras. It's, uh, it's nice. It's an, it's, it's what it should be.

An upgrade. Right. Right. I just, I, I do pine away a little bit for the excitement of when the devices were newer and there were more substantial things to be added. Like, oh, this version's going to have GPS.

Oh, this version's going to be able to record video. You know, like we've pretty much taken care of all the table stakes things and we're nipping around the edges, which is fine. Um, but it, it's definitely not as exciting as it used to be. The sad thing is we know the next major thing that they're going to bake into these things is AI everywhere, which I don't necessarily even want.

So I've got it turned on and I don't really notice it that much. It does some like, you know, interesting, uh, it does a decent job of summarizing all of the text messages that I've ignored saying, Hey, this is this. And in the podcast app, it'll give me a summary of the shows.

Like, this is a show about shoes, you know, or whatever it is. You mean it does the same thing that we write ourselves anyways? Kind of, but it summarizes it in a more human readable way. I guess. Just shorter. Yeah, kind of.

It's not really groundbreaking at this point. I guess they're going to be rolling out more stuff, but yeah, I do miss that. Um, if I had, uh, one of the Apple vision pros, uh, I would be able to take the spatial video with this, but since, you know, I bought this, I don't have enough money to buy anything else for a while.

So I think that, uh, I would be skipping out on that, but Dave, if you ever get the Apple vision pro, you can take the video for it now too. So. Okay. So I don't think that's in my future. Yeah. I'm waiting for the Apple vision rank amateur. Right.

That's the one I'm looking for. Yeah. The Apple vision intern. That's it. So I got a little bit of, uh, extra followup here. A long time ago when I was starting my studio, I had all those USB-C cables around and I kvetched about it.

And then, uh, I don't know if I just found this randomly or somebody sent it in. There was a, uh, uh, Kickstarter called the C2C caber QU USB-C cable tester that I signed up for and sent off for, and they sent it back. And it was just this little board, this little electronics board.

You put a battery in, you plug some cables in and it had a bunch of lights on it that you had to actually go get a degree in electronics engineering to figure out what they meant. Right. So I, I used it, I plugged it stuff into it once, couldn't figure it out and put it in a box. Because you know who this product is for, Jason?

Who? Engineers. Yeah. Not me. Not me. Yeah. Well, they figured that out. Now they have a fancy new one called the BLE caber QU, a digital USB-C to USB-C cable tester that has, has, uh, idiot lights on it now.

It has a little LCD, uh, screen on it that will tell you what the cables are. But it's, the first one was like $19, which I thought was, okay, I can, I can try this on $19. I think the new one was like $80. I'm like, nope, not worth it. Well, the screen costs a lot of money. I'd be fine with just a red light or a green light.

Cable works or not? Well, no, the problem that I was having was like, is it a Thunderbolt cable? Is it a USB-C data cable? Is it a USB-C power cable? Right. That was the thing. It's like, you know, there's only a couple options on those things. I just want, you know, A, B, or C, please. Yeah.

And, and, and does it still work? That's the other one. Right. Yeah. This is pretty cool. I've noticed a lot of my cables are dying, just, just shit in the bed lately. Yeah. Just after, you know, a lot, a lot, decent amount of use, they just start to go and they're decent cables, you know, they're not, they're not cheapies and they just started to finally fry out.

That's interesting. I mean, the true high speed cables, like I'm, I'm looking on my desk here and I have a Thunderbolt cable that goes between my laptop and my, um, OWC Thunderbolt dock.

Right. So that baby's carrying a lot of stuff, you know, that, and, and so those true cables, it's really is remarkable engineering going on in there. I mean, there's just the notion of how much data is coming across that little, that little cable and the little computer chips that are in the plugs and just managing it all and balancing it and all that kind of stuff.

I guess you can see why they'd be fragile, but you know, say it's a miracle, any of this stuff works at all. Yeah. And you, you, you use a universal audio Apollo twin, I believe, which requires a ton of data to. Yeah. I've got the Apollo X four. So basically the same thing.

Yeah. I got the twin X, which doesn't work. That's why I was five minutes late for the recording today because I had to unplug it and put in my Apollo solo, which still seems to work for this show, but. Huh. So I would say about this device is it is cool.

I would love to have one. Even not, I'm not going to buy one, but if I had one, I, I, I do desire, it is desirable to me. Yeah. I wish they had some technology where they could come up with better names for their devices. I believe the German.

Oh, well there, that explains it. Well, there you go. Well, I guess if you, if you read the entire name as one big, long German word, then it makes sense. Right? Yeah, that's true. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Say Austrian.

Say Austrian. Close enough. Austrian. Okay. Close enough. Yeah. Ask an Austrian if close enough to German is good enough for them. Nope. I think most people say they're close enough to Germany. Right. It's like asking people from New Zealand if they're Australian. You know, you get a very strong response to that.

That's true. I do have a device that is in the same category as this that I purchased when I was going through my journey with all of my solar panels outside. It's basically a USB power and amperage meter.

So it'll tell you just for power purposes, if a USB cable has power on it, and then how much amperage is being pulled through it. And then it tells you the voltage also. So that's handy. And I have made use of that pretty regularly to see if something's working or not, or, you know, am I really getting power through here?

It's a nice little device. It was probably 10 bucks, something like that from Amazon. Swanky. They're out there. Yeah, yeah. It's a, you know, nice little thing to have in your box full of electronic devices. But no, this thing's cool. Like I say, this hits my desirability buttons, but not for $77.

Yeah, yeah, because that's the only one that's left now. Because the other ones, you could get it, if you were early bird, ultra early bird, you could get it for 44 bucks. Okay. But now you just get the regular Kickstarter discount for it's about 77, it says, for 69 euros. So we were late. That's what you get for being late.

Neat device though. Like it. Yeah. Well, we got a write in from Sally. She says, first off, thank you for the great podcast. I need your help. I work in a tech adjacent field, institutional research at a community college. And we are already trying to deal with AI, which as you have taught me, isn't really AI.

There are faculty who want to use it to catch cheating administrators who want to use it to be cool and cutting edge staff who want to use it to summarize endless pages of federal regulations. And those in my area who want to use it to write SQL code that is beyond their ability. Often they are in a single person's office and just don't have the capacity. So now my college is putting together a work group to write a white paper.

Yes, we do such things and think we are important to make recommendations to the executives. But listening to your discussions about AI has ruined me and makes me sound like a tinfoil hat person against technology. So I need some guidance on resources that would address security issues that would impact students. Would their work be used to train the AI and be a violation of students' rights?

Potential hacking concerns, et cetera. Are there higher education specific issues we should consider? I don't like AI for a lot of reasons, but I majored in Renaissance epic poetry and know my limitations. So if we're going to buy the hype, how do we do it with the least harm? Anyway, I always enjoy the podcast, even if I am not as geeky, but definitely as grumpy and keep telling people about it.

Thanks for any suggestions. Now, I know we've got a couple ideas here. I would like to point out that once again, I did take a course in ethical AI. Okay. And the end of the course basically said, good luck. Right. And thank you for your money.

Thank you for your money. Basically, yes. So there are ways to implement AI ethically. The problem is almost every single model has been trained not in that fashion. And it does not behoove any of these major companies to be ethical to move forward because they need to win.

So I don't, you know, specifically with like, if you're feeding stuff into one of the big model AIs, you are basically agreeing that anything that you feed in is going to be used to train their AI. So good luck with that. You're not going to be able to get around that one very easily, at least not without paying quite a lot.

I think you can pay to opt out at this point, like big companies do. So I have a couple suggestions here. I would start off with just a plain old Google search for ethical use of AI in higher education.

I have included a link to such a search in our show notes here. Let me Google that for you. That's right. And then a couple of folks who have written articles on this. So there's one from Cornell. There's another one from an organization that the ENAI, which is the International Journal for Educational Integrity.

So as you might imagine, this is a hot topic right now. So there are tons of publications about this. So when you do this search, you're going to come up with just dozens of higher ed organizations who've put their opinions in on this.

So there's lots of reading to be done. I think we are in early days here. I personally believe that this is going to change the way we educate people. I talked to, for example, my caveat co-host, Ben Yellen, who teaches college courses.

He's a law professor. He's telling me that they're dealing with this. He said he occasionally he gets papers that were obviously written by AI. And so they have to figure out what are the guardrails like? Because he anyway realizes that they're not going to be able to say no forever.

It just doesn't make sense. No, it's not possible. You can't stop progress and you can't stop something that's literally being shoved down our throats everywhere we turn around. Right. Right. I liken it to things like spell check and grammar checking.

Right. There was a time when probably when the three of us were growing up and in high school. Writing something through a spell checker was cheating, Dave. That's what I'm saying. Our high school English teachers thought that, you know, because spelling counts. And then but now even grammar is corrected for us.

So God. Right. You know, what's truly shocking to me, though, is how how many things I read that obviously they either ignored the spell checker and the grammar checker completely or they haven't shut off. Yeah. How is that even possible? Well, you know what?

Some people are doing that and they're putting in bad grammar and bad spelling to make you think that humans wrote it. Yeah. Ooh. Yeah. Blind. Yes. Yeah. I've seen that. So you include that in your prompt. You say, be sure to include at least one spelling error per thousand words.

Yeah. Or they just go through and just fix it themselves and, you know, start removing their Oxford commas and shit. We did a story maybe two weeks ago that was actually specifically about that. And it was about how bad AI test checking for AI is actually going.

Like it's not going well. Like they haven't been able to do it. Right. So that, you know, you know, that's what, that's definitely a use case. You want to, as a, as a, as an educational institution, as a teacher, you'd want to be able to run everything through an AI to check really quick to see, didn't AI do this?

Did my student do it? But the thing is the false results are through the roof still. The AI is bad at detecting AI. And one of the things I don't know where we stand right now is what happens when the student who is falsely accused of cheating using AI lawyers up and sues the university because the university hit them with an ethics violation, with a cheating violation.

Right. I'm sure we're going to see that real soon if we hit, if they're not out there already. Well, yeah, I'm sure they are. I just don't know. Like when you sign, when you agree to being educated at a university as part of the agreement you sign. Is it in the U.S. University's TOS?

Exactly. Exactly. That you will abide by any of their judgments, no matter how, no matter the evidence. I don't know the answer to that. But, you know, that's what lawyers are for. So we'll figure it out. I was just thinking of this one. This might be a fun one. So when everybody's papers come in, you take all the papers, then you run them back through an AI and say, give me a quiz based on the knowledge that's in this paper.

And then have the students do a spot quiz on what they just turned in. On their own papers. On their own papers. They should get 100, theoretically. So if they don't get 100, there's your cheater. But that's the next level of whack-a-mole that we're heading towards.

That totally makes sense. Prove to me that you know this material. Yeah. And just as a final point, I think I would make right now, just because this is early days and as it's always pointed out, this is the worst this technology will ever be. It's all going to get better. But at least for right now, especially in the educational realm or anything, anything really, I'm going to expand it everywhere.

Think about if you actually need AI. Don't do AI just because it's the cool cutting edge thing to do. Do you need it for whatever task you want to accomplish? And if you don't, don't fucking use it. Yeah. Can this theoretically be done on the blockchain instead? Exactly.

Could the students submit NFTs? Right. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm sure that didn't help much, but good luck. Well, before we go, just I want to touch on what Sally mentioned that they majored in Renaissance epic poetry.

Just this week, I was discussing with some of my colleagues here about, we have a local Renaissance festival, which is widely recognized. Turkey legs and mead. Well, that's where I'm going with this. This is one of the best Renaissance festivals, so I'm told.

Not that I have ever explored the Renaissance festival circuit, but I'm told that the one here in Maryland is quite good. And one of my colleagues here who was born in the UK was saying that one of her pet peeves is that when you go to a Renaissance festival, everyone speaks with a British accent.

And the Renaissance did not happen in the UK. And my pet peeve about the Renaissance festivals is the thing with turkey legs. That turkey legs are an iconic part of Renaissance festivals. Turkeys are a new world bird.

There were no turkeys over there. Turkeys are here in North America. Well, I know two people. I know two people I'm not going to the Renaissance fair with. Fucking buzzkills. I just want to wear my I want to wear my Star Trek uniform to the Renaissance festival. Wait a minute.

I just admitted that I have a Star Trek uniform. Hold on. Wait, wait a minute. Shocker. It's a triple bombshell. Like any of our listeners are going to be shocked. That I have a Star Trek uniform.

Yeah. Wait, wait, wait. We do have to. What? Which show? Which uniform? Oh, TNG. I'm not an animal. Okay. Okay. How do you take care of that lycra? The original uniforms were made out of wool or so I'm told.

I've heard that as well. Mine is polyester, so it holds up quite well. Okay. Yeah. You know, on the times I wear it, it's still in pretty good shape. And remarkably, because my wife bought it for me when I was in my 20s and I can still just about squeeze into it.

So if I suck it in, I can. Looking a little Kirk-ish in one of the movies? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, it's a, I need, what I really need is a 21st century girdle to help me squeeze into it. But, oh, well. You just got to do some yoga with McFadden and Sirtis from that infamous episode.

Yeah, I'm up for that. Closing shout outs! Over at Patreon, we've got John. Welcome, John. Thanks, John. Over at PayPal, we've got Charlie, Dennis, Simon, Jonathan, Judge, Nicola, Levy, and Fruit Cup.

Thanks, man. All right, Fruit Cup. Over at the tip jar, we've got Sarah, Matthew, and Adam. And just a reminder, if you sign up for Patreon, you get the shows early and ad-free and in high definition. And we now have that yearly option, which will get you 5% off. Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! We also have some new five-star reviews.

The first one says, Pleasant Find. Coincidentally, Apple Podcasts made me aware of this great show. Okay. There we go. We'll take it. We've got a five-star from Lee. I love the podcast. I'm a new listener, so listening to your backlog of episodes after hearing Dave is on here. I love both you guys.

You guys get me through my job as I'm allowed to listen to my stuff whenever I want. If I can afford it, I would Patreon you guys. I would Patreon you guys, but one day, LOL. From a younger and aged but grumpy old in-soul geek, I love the ending you guys have of Stay Grumpy. It's bloody brilliant. With love from a British Geordie dude.

All right. Thank you. Right. Thank you, Lee. And a few old man shout-outs this week. Brian, I don't know why these just kept coming across my Instagram and Threads feeds and whatever other social crap I was on. So I missed a few of them, but I want to put these in context.

September 21st, 2004, American Idiot by Green Day came out. That's 20 years ago. My God, Jason. Has it been 20 years since we all went to that show at the Wiltern? It has been 20 years since I got fired from Warner Brothers Music for going to that show. You got fired for going to that show?

We didn't even watch. We were upstairs drinking the whole time. That was the problem because I ended up spending the next three days in a hangover. There may have been some powdered substances involved, but I was in the music business then. I thought that was cool. We were supposed to do that.

That's what you were doing when you kept disappearing. I got you. I was supposed to come back to work the next day. That was, yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah. So 20 years ago for American Idiot. 25 years ago for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Well, you want to really feel a little, Jason? Okay. Hit me.

Tony Hawk and Eminem are both grandfathers now, and technically Courtney Love is a grandmother. I know. I know. Isn't that straight? Tony Hawk's and Kurt Cobain's children have had a baby. That's fucked up. That is so fucked up.

We old. We old. And Knight Rider premiered 42 years ago. This is just, where does it go, Brian? Where does it go? I don't know, man. It goes so fucking fast. It really does. The American Idiot thing just threw me for a loop.

I wish I still had the original that they gave me, because that was the first day at work. First day I started at Warner Brothers Records, they gave me the pre-release version of American Idiot. And that's actually, technically, the only project that you and I worked on, like, together. At the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was working with Green Day for that whole album cycle.

Yeah. You were the contractor, and I was with the evil label, and they hated you, and you hated them. And I was in the middle laughing my ass off. Fucking Warner Brothers. Yep. They had no idea what to do with any of that. They just got lucky. Seriously. So, some sad news. Some very sad news.

Dame Maggie Smith has finally died, and that puts the end to Downton Abbey as far as I know it. Well, she was out of the show anyways. So, yeah. But definitely, yeah. She was the heart and soul of that show. She made everything that she was in better. She was great in Harry Potter. All of her old movies. Fantastic.

What an actress. So, which made me start to realize, as things just kept rolling in, who hasn't died this week, Jason? We lost John Amos, Pete Rose, Dikembe Matumbo, Chris Christopherson, and Ken Page, the accomplished Broadway actor and the voice of Oogie Boogie in The Nightmare Before Christmas, very topical at this point in time, has also passed away at the age of 70.

Well, you put that in there, and so I had to go look. And, well, Beverly Hills cop actor John Ashton, who played Chief Taggart, has died at 76. And American picker Frank Fritz died at 60. What a fucking week. Until next time, I'm Brian Gilmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFilippo. 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 668. Feeling generous? Keep this top-notch entertainment rolling by dropping us a few bucks at GOG.show slash donate. Every bit helps. And spread the grumpiness. There's a share button in every podcast player out there.

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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 DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com.