669: HamFest

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. WordPress drama this week, Brian. Oh, the drama. Okay. Now, I have to admit, I have not particularly followed this because I knew I didn't have to because you are so deeply enmeshed in this.

Uh-huh. So, I figured I'd get the whole, I'd get the entire story from you. Okay. Well, here's the, I mean, we started to talk about it when it first hit the fan with Yeah. Little Matty Matt getting up on stage at WordPress Con, whatever, and saying that the great evil are these people at WP Engine.

So, the way that this thing started to break was that, oh, okay, Matt just has a bug up his ass because they're eating his lunch over at WP Engine. Well, it turns out that is true, but it began, it began long before the WordPress convention. And he's been, he's been trying to strong arm these people for money for ages.

Right. And he's using all sorts of tactics, but the main tactic that they're using is trademark infringement on the WordPress trademark. So. Because they use WP in their name? Apparently in some of their documentation, they overreach, and they overreach on some of their claims, saying that, you know, there are certain things you're allowed to do and certain things you're not allowed to do.

Hence the name WP Engine and not WordPress Engine. Yes. But it's been going back and forth, and it's been, I've been hanging out on the Reddits just to watch, to see, I wanted to see where the zeitgeist was. Because I had made a post on threads saying, this is the beginning of the end for WordPress.

Matt proves to be as petty as the rest of the tech oligarchs, even though he puts on a nice boy front. That, and I hate that fucking software with unbridled vehemence. So, starting with that. Yeah, you always, you always swing soft at the beginning. I know. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I slide in low so nobody knows what my real position is.

Yeah. Very subtle. Yeah. And so I got, I got some blowback from Matt himself, who came in, and it was like, here's a, here's a better article. And he says, he's like, hey, you still got my phone number. It hasn't changed. I'm like, dude, you haven't given me your phone number in 20 years. So, I've taken all of the, the, the pressosphere in.

Well, look, let me tell you something. I, I'm looking right now at Slate, which does not really get deep into internet culture or tech very often. Top of the fold, first story I see, there is some reality TV level drama happening at WordPress right now. Yeah. That's kind of it. That's in Slate right now.

Yep. Throw that in the show notes too, because we got a list. Yeah. So he, he offered an adjustment bonus for people who were not, or an alignment, but yeah, an alignment bonus for people who just weren't aligned with his ideals on how he saw this thing shooting down and breaking down with WP Engine.

And 8% of the company took him up on it, which is over a hundred people. Not insignificant. Yeah. No, including the WordPress executive director left. So, uh, I thought that was interesting. And he's saying that, you know, 92% of the company decided to stay and left $128 million on the table or something close to that.

Right. I'm like, okay, yeah, way to, way to, way to flip the script on that one. You just lost almost 10% of your company because you made a really dumb thing happen. Well, and the bigger take for me on that is that this must not be the best place in the world to work, because as soon as somebody was throwing a bit of money to leave, 9% of the company did.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that's what I was thinking too. I was like, hmm, might be, uh, I mean, we don't know what type of people left. It could have just been customer service because it was a nice deal to take. But, uh, when that, when the executive director leaves that, that actually, that's, I'm pretty sure that that's, uh, an alignment for, uh, moral values.

So, uh, David Hennemeyer Hanson has a nice writeup on it by calling automatic is doing open source dirty, which is kind of where I fall with this too, because this whole thing is around the for profit branch of WordPress and somebody who's using the open source software.

Yep. However they want, which is the deal you make when you write open source software. Once it's out of the barn, you cannot control where it happens. Only the only thing that you have, you know, rights to, or what's in that license that you put, that you release the software under. Exactly. See, I don't see the problem here at all.

I mean, I can see that there was some overreach and yes, maybe WP engine should have been smacked a little bit and saying, Hey, come chill out a bit with using our logos and saying that you do this or that when you can't. And you don't, but the underlying business model that WP engine has, because WordPress is open source, there's no issues there.

No, there is none. No. And he's just butthurt that they're better at it than they are. And, and what, what WordPress is doing, WordPress.com is, is, you know, gifting these man hours per month back to the core of WordPress. And they're saying that they're doing over 3,800 hours per month, uh, with, you know, engineering back to the core of WordPress and WP engineering, WP engine is doing about 40 hours.

And well, here's the thing, Matt, nobody said you had to give 3,800 hours per month back to the back. Yeah. You're choosing to do that. And by the way, I do that. Yeah. If you're putting that many hours into this product, why does it still suck? That's the first thing that I thought of. I'm like, that's a lot of man hours.

And this thing is still a flaming piece of shit. What the hell? So it's, it's very fun to watch on the outside. Matt overreached for sure. Uh, he did a really dumb thing, which means he's, he doesn't have anybody around him, really. I think that guides him, you know, it feels very Elon Musk.

He is, he's got a bunch of yes men around him and that's about it. Except for when he actually put the cards on the table and he found out in 9% of the company life. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know if he has yes men around. Cause he's a nice guy, you know, he's a nice guy. And one of my friends wrote in the threads article, he's like, you know, I remember the, the, we all had a party at Matt's apartment when WordPress hit a hundred thousand downloads, you know?

So it was like a, a big milestone for him back then. He was a, he was a nice kid, you know, but you give somebody a billion dollars in free run of their, their own, you know, empire that runs half the internet. Somebody's going to get a big head and do something stupid. That's just the way of the world.

And look, the name of the company is automatic. His name is Matt. He put it in the middle of the name of the company. So if you want to talk about some, some ego moves, there you go. So he's not immune. He might be a nice guy, but he's still a billionaire, you know, tech oligarch is, I still put it.

So there. No, I mean, there's no doubt about that. I mean, unfortunately, most of the internet runs off WordPress. It's not going away. It's never going to go away. But yeah, this is, this is just, I don't know, you know, is he having a midlife crisis? Something is going on. This is just stupid. Yeah, I just don't think WordPress.com is raking in the bucks that it was before.

And they're losing traction because most people aren't making websites like they used to anymore. No, that's the real thing. It's you're seeing a decrease across this industry wide. It's not just WordPress that's suffering there. There are viable, much better alternatives to WordPress out there.

Things like Ghost that are just not getting traction at all because no one cares. Yeah. No one cares. Ghost has good traction because of their newsletter interface, you know, and the fact that you can do paid newsletters with it. That's where Ghost really comes in and shines.

I found another one that I was in doing a little bit of research. I found one called Directus, which was neat because it kind of takes your, your database scheme and then just builds the UX on top of it. I love that. Yeah, that's really cool. I was looking at that when you put it in the show notes. Yeah. The reality is that there's very little money being put towards web resource anymore to, to websites.

Nobody's developing websites. Nobody's putting a ton of money into websites. Everything's app based these days. Yep. And to do that, you're, you know, your whole backend is going to be API driven and the word, the, you know, the word site, word site, too many words. In my head today, the website is just a, you know, just a front end with the least bit of effort that they could possibly do.

Yeah. You know? And personally, I think it's a shame. I like websites. I like it when people still put a lot of money and time and effort into things. I like it when I'm surprised by new sites out there that are doing something unexpected. I think it's a real shame that we're not spending more time developing things for the web, even if it, God forbid, happens to be on WordPress.

It's an overreach on a blogging platform for what they've done anyway. It's a kluge. And the one thing that really got me that was the trigger for me to write that thread was, this is a quote from Matt that he did with an interview he did at The Verge. He says, WordPress.org just belongs to me personally.

Okay, yeah, that's not a good thing. That's really not a good thing. So he says, in my role as owning WordPress.org, I don't want to promote a company which is A, legally threatening me and B, using the WordPress trademark. That's part of why we cut off access from the servers. This still comes back to the plugin directory.

And WordPress.org hosts the plugin directory, which takes, I'm sure, a metric shit ton of resources, as well as the theme directory. Well, here's the deal. You don't have to do that. You did that on your own to promote WordPress. That wasn't, you know, that's on you, man.

If people want to use it, then make it use it. If it's going to be a commercial thing, make it a commercial thing. Figure that out. But do that, do that, not without shutting people off, you know, in the real world. Because that shutting off WordPress users that are on WP Engine from getting their plugin updates was a complete and utter overreach.

And really, that's what fucked us, like, credibility. Oh, yeah, totally. You know, I mean, if you were coming out now and you were trying to decide on what platform to go with, would you do this? Absolutely not. No. And that has been the fun part. I see all the stuff that, you know, we used to use back in the day that we just were like, yeah, I don't want to use that.

I don't want to use that. Drupal is back in the news and Laravel is back in the news, which I hated. All of those are horrible. The problem with WordPress, I mean, as awful as it is, it makes sense to use it just because there's so much stuff available. It's so flexible in such a horrible way.

But it beats all the other competitors. It really just does. Well, I mean, that's if you want to do self-hosting. And nowadays, it's like, if I'm going to do something hosted, I'm going to Squarespace. Fuck it. You know? They do that just as well. Yeah. Find out what your maximum requirements are and then find the least friction option out there for you.

And WordPress is never the option with the least friction. Absolutely not. Well, more than a few people sent this in to us because we had been talking about Jason's great white whale hunt for the LAPD Cybertruck out there. This is not the LAPD Cybertruck, but there is one down in the city of Irvine and they released a new promotional video on Tuesday to show off their new Tesla Cybertruck.

The video is every bit as cringy as you'd expect, but there are a few details that weren't expected. For starters, the new Cybertruck is only going to be used for the DARE anti-drug program. I can't believe that's still around. Rather than as a patrol car. And perhaps more oddly, the promo video music uses music from the Terminator movie franchise.

Oh, there we go. Way to go, guys. Yeah. Read the room, Orange County. Read the room. Now, they say the Irvine Police Department is excited to unveil what we believe is the first police Tesla Cybertruck in the nation. Los Angeles is not that far from Irvine, so maybe they should talk to each other.

Because if you've seen that LAPD one around, they're the first one in the nation. Yeah, and I've seen it twice. And like I said, this is an LAPD. It looks like a black and white LAPD squad car with the circle, you know, City of Los Angeles logo on the white door, but the rest of it's black.

This is a straight-up LAPD-looking Cybertruck. Well, it would not surprise me because reports have trickled out that a company called Unplugged Performance, which is based in Hawthorne, California, was making a big push to equip cops in Southern California with Tesla technology. So that's just south of Los Angeles, and that's where SpaceX and Tesla have large facilities, so not surprising there.

And again, the video, the promo video set to music from the Terminator. They do know that the bad guy in the second movie is dressed up as a cop. And the movies are actually about how cops are bad and power corrupts. Yeah. Realize that, right? And apparently there's also issues with did they get permission to use said music, and it's looking like no.

Probably not. And this is an interesting one, too, to talk about police and the Cybertrucks. Three police chiefs in Northern California have independently concluded that Teslas are unfit to serve or protect. So this is an article from the SF gate, and they spoke with three police chiefs who have independently come to the same conclusion.

Teslas are not equipped to handle the demands of modern policing. Studies have shown the U.S. transportation sector contributes 29 percent of the country's overall greenhouse gas emissions. If law enforcement can't rely on the most commercially available EVs in this push toward a greener future, it casts doubt on how realistic Newsom's push really is.

And this is from our lovely governor trying to make new inroads to wherever he can. I've watched enough high-speed chases on the news daily because that's our sport, you know, our national sport in Los Angeles. There's no way that these Teslas could hang with them for as long as they go sometimes.

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. In the news.

Apple Intelligence is coming, Jason. Apparently, it will start rolling out on October 28th, according to Bloomberg. They said last month that it was targeting October for the release of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, which will bring some of the first Apple Intelligence features to the iPhone and all other Apple devices.

But it did not set a firm release date at the time, so hopefully we'll find out by end of month. The first wave of Apple Intelligence features will include the text editor and summarization tool, writing tools, along with a smart audio recording and transcriptions for mail, notes, pages, and other apps, which means we'll start doing our podcast via notes.

We will also likely see the new Memories feature in Photos, which is designed to be an easy-to-use editor for making movies with images from the gallery and cleanup, which can remove objects from the backgrounds of images. I think they don't think they don't really need AI for that, but, you know, I guess it'll be better if they do it.

So, we'll see. Yeah. I've had it for a couple weeks now. The text summarization and the mail summarization is horrible. Absolutely horrible. Right. Yeah, it is not good. And as our next story will tell you exactly why it's not that good.

Man learns he's being dumped via dystopian AI summary of texts. A New York software developer, Nick Spreen, was dumped via an AI-generated text summary on his iPhone 15 Pro. Using Apple's upcoming Apple Intelligence feature, which summarizes text messages, the AI summarized several breakup texts from his girlfriend with a blunt message, no longer in a relationship, wants belongings from the apartment.

I don't know. I think I'd actually appreciate that short summary without all the, I'm sure, very personal bits and very angry bits that were left out of it. Spreen commented that while the AI-added distance felt dystopian, it also made the breakup feel much more manageable.

Oh, well, there you go. There you go. You still are correct. Maybe I'm wrong about all this AI stuff. Maybe, yeah. Maybe it does have a purpose. Oh, boy. Well, despite X's recent decision to abide by the demands of the Brazilian Supreme Court, X still isn't back online in Brazil, at least as of yesterday.

And that's at least in part because it paid its fines to the wrong bank. Oops. How do you manage that? How do you manage that? I don't know. But in late September, X had named a legal representative for the country as they were ordered to do and took down the accounts that they were ordered to do, like a handful of them, because, you know, Elon was just being a prick and said he wasn't going to do it.

But then he finally did it. And the last hurdle was to pay off the fines that it racked up, reportedly amounting to roughly $5 million. Citing Friday's court filings, Reuters reports that X paid its fines and requested to have their services restored. But then the Justice Alexandra de Moraes said the funds went to the wrong bank and the decision will have to wait until they've been transferred, which will take five to seven business days.

Can you pay an extra $5 to have it done that day? Like with the fast transfer they have now? Yeah, maybe wire it. I don't know. Do you have the routing number? Do you have a swift code? I just, we've got to sort this out. How do you screw that up is beyond me. But then again, it is two big agencies. So there you go.

Yeah. X has also lost a legal fight in Australia in which the company tried to avoid a $400,000 fine by claiming that Twitter no longer exists. The creative legal, well, first off, they're not exactly wrong. In an existential realm, yes, it definitely does not exist anymore.

Yes. The creative legal argument, which was first spotted by Ars Technica, came amid a more than year-long dispute with Australia's eSafety Commission. The commission had asked the company, then known as Twitter, to provide details about its handling of child sexual exploitation on the platform last February. In its response, X failed to answer a number of questions and left some sections entirely blank, the commission said in the statement last year.

And as a result, they got the fine for non-compliance. In an attempt to fight the fine that led to X to claim that it shouldn't be responsible since Twitter had ceased to exist. You asked Twitter for this. We are Twitter. We are X. Australian federal judge Michael Willihan, however, found the claim unconvincing, saying that X's argument required leaps in logic that were not supported by adequate explanation.

Yeah. It's a good one. It's a good try, though. Got to give him that. Good attempt, I guess. And we had been talking about the Internet Archive recently. They've had a rough week. They've been hit with a series of denial-of-service attacks this week that have taken the service offline. According to security researcher Troy Hunt, the attack came just as the Internet Archive was preparing to disclose a previous breach of its site that resulted in the theft of more than 31 million records.

Hunt, who owns Have I Been Pwned service, said the timing of the two attacks appear to be entirely coincidental, and there are likely multiple parties involved. It's clearly not just one attack. So that's unfortunate. I do like the service, but I don't know why they're being targeted, but they certainly are at the moment.

Yeah, I got my Have I Been Pwned notification when that happened this week. It's kind of more disconcerting that it was two separate entities that took them down. It's like, hmm, okay, what do you got going on over there?

How bad is your security that you can get fucked over by two people in the same week? Yeah. It's funny, I found out about this because I was actually going to the Wayback Machine for the first time in a very long time, and I'm like, why is the Wayback Machine broken? It's as solid as a rock. I guess I got it at just the right time.

Yep. All right. Instagram and Threads are facing growing backlash over aggressive moderation. On Threads, the topic of Threads moderation failures is trending, with users reporting accounts being restricted or deleted for minor issues, such as linking to controversial articles or using common phrases.

Instagram and Threads head, Adam Mosseri, has responded to some complaints stating that he's looking into it. Well, you know, to be fair, death to the great Satan America is a common phrase, but one that probably should be moderated. Yeah, probably. Okay. I noticed that there was an uptick in Blue Sky chatter on Threads this week.

Most of it being, oh, hey, Blue Sky's here. Who are they? And other people going, yeah, I posted the same thing over on Blue Sky and got two comments, and here I got 1,500. I think I'm going to stay here. Yeah. So that was kind of that. But, yeah. Even Verge writer Umar Shakir had his Instagram account disabled because the platform mistakenly flagged him as underage.

Despite submitting ID proof, Meta's moderation upheld the ban, leading to the permanent loss of all his posts and connections. Yep. Okay. Well, you know, look, we've complained that there was no moderation, that there needs to be moderation, and I think what we're learning is the solution is not to do our AI moderation because it's not working.

Yeah, I was going to say, the llama, they've got llamas running around in the customer service department now, I fear. It is absolutely not working. So I think we need to put a pause on this, people, because, yeah, you're screwing with people's lives. And, again, it's their own fault. Like we've always said, everybody's building their houses in somebody else's backyard here, so.

Even if you use WordPress, it turns out to be that way, it seems. Apparently so. Yeah. We usually have some science news here that is uplifting and, you know, restores your faith in humanity. Well, I have some science news, but sorry, Brian, it's not going to restore anybody's faith in humanity.

China has launched its first batch of Internet satellites as part of the Shifan constellation aimed at competing with SpaceX's Starlink. However, these 18 satellites have sparked concern among astronomers due to their brightness, which interferes with night sky observations. Experts warn that the Shifan satellites are even brighter than SpaceX's, posing a serious issue for research, astronomy, and creating visible streaks in telescopic images.

We're just going to be locked in in another 20 years, Brian. So Mars, forget about it. A couple of these things are going to start hitting each other, and it's just going to be, we're going to have that whole Seven Eves thing happening. Yep, the whole cascade failure. Yep. So just, that's fine. We don't have to go anywhere anyway. Just Elon.

Let's get him out first.

Media Candy. Okay, we're going to start off with some good stuff this week, Brian. Mm-hmm. The Penguin. I'm finally into The Penguin. Three episodes in. That's all there are. Best thing on TV. Hands down. I've heard it's like a good gangster thing that it doesn't really, didn't even really need to be in the DC universe at all.

Well, I like that it is, because it's one of those ones where it takes the supervillains and the super, and just turns them into normal people. There's no superpowers or anything like that. It is a great gangster story, and that's what The Penguin story always was, so. Cool. But the makeup that they do with Colin Farrell is just, he's not in there.

When you watch him between his performance and the makeup, he is not in there. It's amazing. But the story's fantastic. It's, you know, it's really dense, lots of story per hour, and the effects are top-notch. So, all in all, I am loving The Penguin. I'm just laughing a little bit, because back in the day when Colin Farrell was having his, I guess we would say troubles.

Yes. He would occasionally be a Main Street local in Santa Monica, and I have seen him not be in there. Okay. I was across a bar from him, and he was not in there. Awesome. I'm glad he sorted himself out. Yeah, me too, because it's amazing.

Definitely watch it. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. Have you had a chance to check that one out yet, Brian? I have not. I will be, my son's a bit too young for it, so I have to wait until it's going to be on a streaming thing and watch it at night, so. Okay. It is on a streaming thing now. Now you can rent it if you like. Oh, okay.

It came up this week. I would wait until it's free, personally. Okay. Yeah, I'm not in a rush, to be honest. Yeah, don't be. Don't be in a rush. It was okay. I've heard it's good. Not amazing, but good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, I would put, you know, the new Ghostbusters movie a little bit higher than Beetlejuice.

They're on the same, kind of the same level with, you know, historical accuracy and things like that, but I like the Ghostbusters movie more. Okay. Do you want to go for the old ones? Well, in my opinion, and it's not, you know, it's not completely out of the blue opinion, a lot of people agree. Tim Burton's been on a bit of a downward trajectory, so even revisiting one of his most beloved IPs is probably not going to save that.

No, it didn't. So, but it had Winona, so who cares? Who cares? Who cares? I watched the new Salem's Lot that came out this week on Max. Uh-huh. Skip that one. Yeah, I've heard it's not great. Skip it. Go to the 1979 version, which is also available on Max.

Yeah. So, if you're going to, if you're going to take the time, watch the old one. I've watched them both. The old one is still the best. All right. Hands down. The new Joker movie came out last week, too. Yeah. Oh, boy. Oh.

Now. I've seen variations of, I've never walked out of a movie before in my entire life, but here we are. It's that bad. It is really that bad. I lasted 37 minutes. I tried. I tried. I just couldn't do it.

Yeah. I have zero interest in this at all, to begin with. And I just, what I've read of it, I will absolutely never, ever watch this. And it just seems, it's not even bad enough to be, like, amusingly bad. It's just bad. No, no. It's bad. Yeah.

That's the thing. It is really just bad. Did you see the original, the part one? I didn't, because I don't care. Okay. Like, for me, it's like, you're never going to beat Heath Ledger as the Joker. And if you want to go back before that, I still have a soft spot, speaking of Tim Burton, for Jack Nicholson's Joker.

And I just don't like, what's his face? Yeah. I can't stand the guy. So there you go. I thought the first one was okay. You know, it was a new type of Joker, a new type of reboot. But yeah. Oh, man. They killed it. This is bad.

Yeah. And I hear the twist at the end is kind of like, oh, really? Come on. Yeah. I couldn't even get that far. I was hoping to get through it, but it was like over two hours long. And I'm like, no, I just can't do it. Can't do it. I'd rather just watch, you know, it's Halloween season. I want to go watch something scary, not something just bad.

This is really interesting news because I'm a fan of the show Ray Donovan. There's a new spinoff coming called The Donovans, but it's with Guy Ritchie, which I'm happy about because his latest Netflix fare was amazing. The Gentleman, highly recommend that.

The movie and the series. This is a Paramount Plus series, which is interesting since Paramount, I thought Paramount Plus was, you know. Cutting back. Cutting back and bailing water because everything's sinking over there. Especially once you hear the cast on this one, Tom Hardy, Helen Mirren, and Pierce Brosnan are all near their final agreement signing.

So hopefully they'll get that done because that's a pretty good cast. Well, that's a great cast. And I got, you know, now that Maggie Smith has passed, I'm down to Helen Mirren as like my, oh my God, you're a hot 90 year old. That's what you got. That's where we're at, Brian. We've passed that Rubicon in life.

Yes. We moved from Maggie Smith and we're holding on to Helen Mirren. That's it. That's it. We talked about the show Chaos that was on Netflix recently, and I thought the first episode was decent. I was getting ready to consider watching it until this news hit the wires.

Chaos has been canceled. Yes. So there you go. Not watching it. Yeah. Apparently they were pretty deep into season two pre-production, but Netflix cut the cord when they looked at the numbers. Yeah. I couldn't bring myself to go back to watch the second episode every time that something else would come up.

Like scrolling TikTok was even more interesting. I'm like, I'd rather just sit here and doom scroll for a little bit than fire up the TV. But on some good news, Reacher has finally got its early season renewal for season four. So that's over at Amazon Prime.

I love Reacher. It's a good show. Highly, highly recommended. Yeah. There you go. Earlier this week, HBO aired a documentary about Bitcoin that claimed to reveal the identity of cryptocurrency's anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. So this is called Money Electric and journalist Cullen Hoback chased the identity of the mysterious creator and came to a controversial conclusion.

And by controversial, meaning absolutely anybody involved says there's no fucking way it's this guy. According to Hoback, Satoshi is software developer Peter Todd. He has repeatedly said he is not Satoshi, but did he wink? I don't know. And the cryptocurrency community has roundly rejected the theory.

Todd is a bit of a trickster and a troll. Others in the film describe him as a contrarian. He was in his early 20s when Bitcoin appeared, and he did post on Bitcoin Talk, a forum where Satoshi posted before vanishing from the internet. Todd is a character in the documentary, present for large portions of the film as a kind of jester figure.

More than once, Todd looks directly at the camera and says, I am Satoshi, with a shit-eating grin on his face. And then for the record, I am not Satoshi, he told CNN after the documentary aired. And as I mentioned, the cryptocurrency community has firmly rejected the theory.

In the film, Bitcoin ambassador Samson Mao says Peter was ruled out a long time ago. So nothing there, I guess. I don't know. The guy did the QAnon documentary and basically found Q, so I give him some credit for that. And I was trying to listen to the Hard Fork episode this morning because it had the filmmaker on, so I fell asleep, though.

I think I'm just going to watch it just to check it out. Right. Because it's, you know, it's something to watch that's not chaos since I don't have to watch episode two of that anymore. So that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Got some time on my hands. Yeah. And we were talking about Green Day last week. They are also in the news.

Again, Green Day's Dookie has been demastered. So if you want to listen to Dookie, the seminal album that kind of broke them, you can now hear what basket case might sound like through a big mouth Billy Bass. Listen to Welcome to Paradise via a Game Boy cartridge and enjoy or not when I come around from a wax cylinder.

Other formats that they've released include an answering machine, a toothbrush, an animatronic stuffed animal, floppy disk, doorbell, Fisher Price record, hit clip, and a mini disk. It's kind of clever, actually. You can hear what they sound like on the Dookie Demastered website, but if you want to own one, you'll need to be lucky.

They've only made a certain number of each of these, and you actually have to basically enter a lottery to be able to buy them. I think I'll pass. Yeah. I think I'll pass. It's fine. It's cool. Yeah. And it's not their first album, which you said the right one. It was the breakout album. Everybody I see is like, it's Green Day's first album. No, it's not.

No, no, no. It's the one that actually did something. That's when people went, oh, who is this band? Yeah, yeah. Green Day's first album was 39 Smooth, and they only sold 3,000 copies of that one. Amazon is, since we were just talking about Reacher, which I did have to watch with ads this last season, goddammit, Amazon is attempting to dismiss a class action lawsuit related to its Prime Video Services ad-supported tier.

The lawsuit filed in California claims Amazon misled subscribers by introducing ads and charging an extra $2.99 per month for an ad-free experience. Plaintiffs argue this violated their expectations and constitutes a breach of contract. Well, Amazon wrote this in their motion to dismiss that they filed on Friday.

Even though Amazon has the right to increase the Prime membership fee, plaintiffs and other Prime members paid exactly the same fee for Prime before and after the change to Prime Video. Access to Prime Video is just one of the many Prime benefits that Amazon may change in its discretion. But plaintiffs still have complete access to Prime Video and all of its content and pay nothing extra for it.

In other words, even though Amazon could permissibly change or remove entirely any Prime benefit, it did not do so with Prime Video. Gotcha. Sorry. They're right. They're absolutely right. They're absolutely right. Is it a dick move that they did it?

Oh, 100%. 100%. Is it an illegal move that they did it? No. Cups and doodads. Well, my kid is at the age where he's starting to ask about basically, well, gaming in general because I've tried to keep that as much away from him as possible, but certainly more of the online gaming systems like his friends are playing like Minecraft and Switch and Roblox and all that sort of stuff.

So Roblox is going to be a hard no, thanks to the story I just read. Tell us why, Brian. Tell us why. I'm researching Minecraft and we're going to get him a Nintendo Switch for Christmas this year, so that'll have to be enough. He'll have to survive not being targeted by predators and bots on Roblox's platform because apparently that's what's happening all over the place.

I understand it happens on Minecraft too, but you can do family-friendly servers or I could even set up my own server for him and his friends to play on and there's ways to protect it. But Roblox is not doing that great. They've been targeted by a short-selling firm, Hindenburg Research, which is a great name.

Great name. Yeah. Over allegations that the company inflates the numbers of real humans on its platform and has not gone far enough to protect children against predators. I'm sorry, are they talking about X or Roblox? Yeah, really? Same, same. This is less than ideal to be targeted by them. The firm is famous for revealing in 2020 that the EV startup Nikola faked a demonstration of its flagship hydrogen-powered truck.

Me too. We talked about it. They were forced to pay investors $125 million and founder Trevor Milton was eventually charged with defrauding investors and sentenced to serve four years in prison. I don't think any of that's going to happen with Roblox, but basically they're just saying they're being completely dishonest about their daily active user count and have different internal numbers than what it provides to its public investors.

You cannot do that. Multiple former Roblox employees that Hindenburg spoke with said the company can track players who have multiple accounts, even though it told the SEC that it could not do that. The allegations related to child safety on Roblox are more serious, but not new. As recently as July, Bloomberg published a lengthy expose detailing instances of adults grooming children through the platform, including one instance in which a man paid for an Uber to bring her to his home across state lines.

Oops. Yeah. For a platform that sees 500 or 50,000 chat messages sent every second, Roblox has just 3,000 moderators tasked with scanning user content. It also relies on AI, which as we've discussed a little earlier in the show, maybe not be working out so well for moderation.

And the platform recently had hundreds of active accounts under different varieties of the name Jeffrey Epstein. So yeah, not going to be doing Roblox with the kid. All right. And we touched on this a little bit earlier about the things going on with Instagram and threads.

But if you're active on Meta's threads app, which I have been dipping my toe into, but this is what I'm encountering a lot. And it's kind of keeping me away from it. All the engagement bait that is flooding the for you feed. Now, Instagram chief Adam Mossari has acknowledged the issue, saying the company is working to get it under control after a spike in such posts.

He didn't say what steps the company is taking, but he said there would be more to come on the issue. Yeah, this shit's all over. Like, I don't know which is worse. X is for you, MAGA fucking feed, or the insane threads for you feed. This is all fucking engagement bait.

It's just horrible. Horrible. I don't know. Which ones do you get the most? Because the ones I get are, they all start off with, I don't know if anybody cares, but. There's a lot of that. I see a lot of fake posts about celebrities that have not died dying. There's a crap ton about workout and losing weight and all that sort of stuff.

And just, there's so much of it. So much of it. And a lot of like, I'm going to have this explosive story that I can't wait to tell you about on my blog. And then if you like, look at it, there's just nothing. And they never write anything ever. I'm getting hundreds and hundreds of, hey, I'm like X days sober.

Yeah. A lot of that too. A lot of sobriety. A lot of how to quit drinking. A lot of all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I'm surprised you're getting that too. Because I figured I was getting it just because of my keywords. Well, I figure I get it because they have next to nothing to work off from me. So I'm getting it from you because we're friends.

Oh yeah. It could be. It could be. But I know those are total engagement baits. Because you look at them and they've all got just tons of, tons and tons of likes and hearts. I'm like, okay, good luck. Yeah. I was briefly getting into threads and now I'm kind of turned off by it because every time I load it up, I'm just buried under that crap.

That's the thing. It's like after, I got pretty good engagement on that, that Mullenweg thread. And, you know, of course, half of it was people telling me I'm a dumb fuck. And the other half are like, right on, bro. So just kind of ignore it. So the internet. Yeah. Yeah. The internet, basically. Oh, the one thing that I did say that I wanted to kind of clarify that I forgot at the beginning, I said, this is the beginning of the end for WordPress.

People took that as me saying, oh, WordPress is dead. WordPress is dead. No, no. It's just the beginning of the end. The cracks in the armor are there. He shit on the bagel too much this time. And people are going to choose new platforms as they become available. So this is a market opportunity for people to change.

That's all. It's the decision makers have looked at this and went, we're going to avoid this platform moving forward. Yeah. Because I mean, look, you can't kill these things. Drupal is still around. You know, come on. The sun will expand and take up the entire fucking solar system.

And there will still be sites running WordPress. I guarantee. Some dumb ass is still going to be there going, why can't I get my WooCommerce thing to look like I want it to?

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. Brian, I'm sorry, but I read a new Audible original this week.

I'm sorry. I listened to a new Audible original this week by John Scalzi called Constituent Service. I'm surprised he didn't release it on Blue Sky. He probably did. It's a very short story. It's only three hours long. But it's read by Amber Benson, who is a Buffy alum.

She does a great job. And it's about aliens on the planet and a human going into municipal service in a sector of the city that is overrun by aliens. Or not overrun, but that's where most of the most of the people that live there are aliens. It's cute. It's fun.

And you can't read it yet. Although I think this is old. I think it's an old story. So there may be print versions of it out there. But the audio version is new. I think he's just finding old shit that he's got in the drawer and selling it to Audible because he's too busy on Blue Sky writing nothing. But it was good.

I liked it. And if you have an Audible premium account, it's free, which is how I really found it. Right. Flipping through it like, here, would you like some free stuff? I'm like, I always want some free stuff. Come on. I also read Earn It! Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers by Steve Pratt.

Steve Pratt was one of the founders of Pacific Content, which was a major podcast publishing house that got bought by Rogers Communication, who ultimately destroyed it and shut it down. So way to go, Rogers. It's a good book on how they built and basically did their podcasting division.

And it's very smart stuff. These guys were the Navy SEALs of podcast production for a while. So if you're in that game, there's some good stuff in there. There's definitely some good stuff. None of it really appropriate for us because we've been in the business too long and we're kind of screwed.

We've been doing it for 11 years. But if we start a new show, Brian, we're set. Okay. We're set. It's a good marketing book, though. Highly recommended. And in just a couple days, Brian, new Neil Stevenson. I don't know if I'm going to read this.

Oh, okay. Brian, it's the first installment. Here's the thing. I like it when he does near world or near world sci-fi, like future world, near future. I like it when he does massive future sci-fi.

I don't like his historical stuff. I haven't liked a single book he's written that's been historical. And this is historical. See, I like some of them. Diamond Age, I still think it's his best book. I liked Cryptonomicon a lot. I hated it. Hated it.

See, yeah. If you don't like Cryptonomicon, then you're definitely not going to like The Baroque Cycle, which I listened to for 72 hours. Absolutely hated it. I bought the whole goddamn thing. Yeah. I used it to press laundry. That's about what it's good for. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to wait for a few reviews to come out for it because what was the last one?

Termination Shock? Yeah. I listened to the audiobook version, but I had bought the hardcover thinking that, oh, I'm just going to sit down and read the hardcover. No. I ended up putting it up in the little library down the street where it's been for like six months because nobody wants it.

Poor Neil. But, oh, you know what I did find, though? 30 years ago, Neil Stevenson wrote a little story, a short story in Wired Magazine called Spew, which was the name for my first website 30 years ago, which I have a copy of the Wired Magazine where he's on the cover that has that short story in it that I just found the other day.

Oh, there you go. I'm trying to think, like, the last, okay, I didn't hate that last Neil Stevenson book as much as you did. I read it all. It was fine. But I'm thinking back, like, the last book I actually really liked from him came from 2011.

It was Remdi. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's the last time I liked a book of his. What's funny is I thought that was William Gibson in my memory. I'm like, wasn't that William Gibson? Oh, wait. Did Seven Eves come out after that? Which I did love that one.

Seven Eves was good. Yeah, that was really good. Anyway. I'm surprised he didn't do a follow-up on Seven Eves, which was ready for a follow-up. I mean, that was Taylor made for it. I know. I was hoping there'd be one. He was, and even in the back of the book, he talked about exploring the universe more because he did such a good job of universe generation. And then he just left it.

Yeah. So, crazy. Yeah. But now we've got... Anyway, speaking of your... Yeah. Yeah. No, thanks. Pass on that. Speaking of yours, shit for free from Audible, I still have my Amazon Unlimited, Kindle Unlimited that actually ends on Sunday because I had found the one book, The Mists of Time or The Echoes of Extinction series.

I'm now a cruise through and finish the third book on it. I'm breaking my rule because I don't want to have to pay for any of these books, Jason. And since I've got the free trial, I'm powering through. Zipping through. Yeah. And they're all fine. It's very, you know, it's crapper sci-fi.

You know, it's insane characters that just never would be this smart or this powerful or make all the right decisions or have all the wonderful things happen to them happen. So it is what it is. You've got your hero. Mists of Time, Echoes of Extinction, book three by D. Ward Cornell, finished.

And I'm zooming through book four because I have until Sunday. Otherwise, I'm going to have to buy it. Get reading. Yep. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave with podcast super host Dave Bittner.

Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, because people are nosy. And the host of Controller, because industrial machines have feelings, too. Dave is also the co-host of Only Malware in the Building, a shiny new show that comes from our friends over at N2K.

And who's the other company, Dave? I always forget this. Proofpoint. Proofpoint. There you go. So check out all of Dave's amazing work. So it's not all for nothing. Right. What we lack in quality, we make up for with volume. There you go.

Yes. And by the way, this is episode 669 of Grumpy Old Geeks. That's a lot of crap. Nice. Nice. We're still digging for gold. Oh, man. So I got a little follow-up this week. Joe writes in, hi, Grumps. It was mentioned that you wish iOS had an app-specific screen rotation lock, something I wished for as well.

Not too long ago, I realized you can use shortcuts automation to toggle screen rotation on an app-by-app basis. It works flawlessly. I can share specifics on the setup, but also it's likely spelled out online if Googled, which it was. So I found one of those. But thank you, Joe. And thank you, everybody else that wrote in about that, because I got a lot of them.

Yeah. Hey, idiot. It's there. Just got to go find it in shortcuts. I'm like, oh, just where I look every day for something. Yes. Well, yeah. I mean, it's not just find it in shortcuts, it's program it, develop it in shortcuts. So I'm happy that this is here, but I think it's a great reminder of how powerful shortcuts is.

Like every now and then I'll see something come by where someone has done something absolutely bonkers using shortcuts that is amazing. And for me, at this point in my life, totally intimidating, you know? Yeah. I always think about the shortcuts app and then I just never, ever launch it or do it.

They should enable you to share like applets, but then I guess it opens up the whole system and causes problems. So I think there is a way to do some shortcuts that you can share, at least with yourself and anybody on your iCloud account. I did that once for a shortcut. But the thing about shortcuts is it just reminds me of work.

You don't want to do work. Right. That's true. Right. I'm like, I did that shit for 30 years, guys. I just don't want, I just want a button that says, don't twist it when I roll over in bed. That's it. That's all I want. Now I'm having like nightmare flashbacks of writing all the drag and drop, like batch automated droplets that I used to make for Windows machines to do my work.

And oh God. Oh, doing defragging. And oh, she's. And then like, oh my God, so much stuff. So many drag and droplets. I had a ton of them for DeBabbalizer. Yeah. DeBabbalizer. Oh yeah. DeBabbalizer. That's right. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yeah. That was a scripting machine. Yeah. We did the preliminary poster for the Truman Show in DeBabbalizer. Our friend Dave Riegler sat there for a weekend and wrote out a way to do it in DeBabbalizer. It wasn't perfect, but it looked pretty damn close. Wow. That's neat.

Yeah, I missed DeBabbalizer. Yeah. That's what it was. Anyway. I mean, talk about a great piece of software that, you know, did exactly what it said it was going to do, did it well. I mean, that thing was rock solid and in everybody's toolbox back in the day. Oh yeah. Yep. Oh yeah. Ah, the good old days.

Well, thanks everybody. I haven't tried it out yet, but maybe I will this weekend. There you go. Do some work. David writes in, love the latest show. And after listening to your discussion with Dave about USB-C, I thought you might all enjoy this fascinating video looking inside a USB-C cable. Keep up the great work.

And it's a link to Adam Savage and it's a look inside Apple's $130 USB-C cable. First off, I would never buy a $130 cable. And secondly, I lasted about 15 seconds into this video before I went, nope, don't care. Well, I saw Adam Savage and did the same.

Oh, good guys. Dave did. All right. Well, I watched this when it originally came out, which was a few months ago. Yes, maybe even longer. And I don't know. We'll have to swing back around, put a pin in the disdain for Adam Savage.

But I enjoyed this video. I think it is remarkable what's inside of this cable. It ain't just wires, folks. It's practically, it's its own little computer. It's a computer. Yeah. Yeah. Inside this cable. And it's amazing that it works at all.

So, you know, once again, just amazing technology and engineering that makes it all work like magic. Yes. Now, let's unpin that pin. Jason, why the disdain for Adam Savage these days? I don't know when that flipped.

There was a time when I loved Adam Savage and I loved his stuff. I think it comes back to his old podcast being so bad. Oh, the audio quality. The audio was so terrible and they just didn't care. That's true. And it made me so angry that I really wanted to listen to it because I liked Adam and I liked the crew.

Right. But the podcast was so bad, it just left me angry. And I think that that's the, I think that's my genesis story of Adam Savage becoming a supervillain. So I don't feel as strongly as you do. What I feel I did was I burned out on Adam Savage. I have topped up the amount of Adam Savage I need in my lifetime.

Like, I remember when the pie, I remember when the cherry went on that pie and that was the end of the expanse. Yeah. And you saw him floating in space. I remember that moment where you were just like, fuck that guy. He's in everything and I didn't need him there and it totally took me out of the expanse.

I read his book. I didn't mind it. And I think the thing for me is I don't like tested. I don't like Adam. Adam needs Jamie. There's something about the combination of them that makes it good. And I love Mythbusters.

It's the same as Top Gear. It's the same as Top Gear. You need all three or it's none. It's Ernie without Burt. Yeah. Yeah. It's Ernie without Burt. Yeah, definitely. So, you know, Adam Savage by himself has zero interest for me anymore. But I would watch the shit out of Mythbusters anytime it comes on TV.

Well, I like tested and I like watching – I like watching Adam answer listeners' questions. And I think part of what I enjoy about it is his general tone of positivity in a cynical world. I agree.

And that's probably why I hate him. Yeah. Same here. Right. Who needs that? Who needs that shit? We all know it's bad. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, fair enough. All right. So I wanted to go into a little bit of film here because Dave's on with us and I thought he might have a take on this.

Megalopolis, any of you guys planning on seeing it? No. No. Certainly not in theaters. I'm curious in the same way that you can't look away when you drive by a car crash.

I've heard – I've read some reviews. I've heard most people say that it's terrible and it's a waste of time and money and the human spirit. But every now and then – See, that's the Joker. They got their movies messed up. That's the new Joker.

Well, all right. Fair enough. Have you seen the one review that has gone viral? I don't know which one. It's not a real reviewer. It's somebody on X, of course. But it basically just said, this movie is a flaming pile of shit, but you get to see Audrey Plaza's titties. Oh, okay. It's gone beyond viral.

It's hilarious. This is what the movie will be remembered for, that particular tweet. Yeah. You have to keep watching. I got about 25 minutes into it last night. Oh, you did? Okay. Yes. And? It's interesting, actually. I kind of was – and I just hate Adam Driver.

I'm just not, you know, on Team Adam. Okay. Not my Kylo Ren. No, not at all. Not at all. No Adam Savage. No Adam Driver. It's the Adam. Yeah. Fuck Adam Carolla. That's right. Yeah. All right.

Adam Neumann. Adam West. Adam West. No, we like that one. We'll keep him. He gets a pass. He's grandfathered in, literally. So, it reminded me a lot. I don't know if you guys have seen the movie Titus, the old Titus Andronicus retelling with Anthony Hopkins from back in the 90s.

No. Oh, it was a modern – it was kind of an avant-garde telling of Titus. And it was brilliant. I love that movie. And this had flavors of it, besides not having Anthony Hopkins, which is a, you know, one that was something that you want.

There's definitely a lot of talent in there. There's definitely a lot of talent in there. In Megalopolis. I don't know about the writing so far. It's very strange. It is very strange. I would think it would probably be fantastic if you were like the director and stoned out of your gourd the entire time.

As apparently he might have been. Yes, exactly. By all accounts. Yes. Allegedly. It was allegedly. But I think I'm going to actually – I'm going to finish it. I'm going to stick with it because I found it more interesting than the Joker. The Joker was just an unminigated shit pile.

Yeah. Yeah. But this actually has the makings of something just weird and trippy. I don't know. See, I tend to like movies that are bold, that take bold swings. Like I like – for me – If you tell me The Last Jedi is your favorite Star Wars movie, I swear to God.

No, no, no, no, no, no. You're joining Adam Savage in the shit pile. No, no. I'm thinking of like Moulin Rouge, like Baz Luhrmann films. Love that movie. Yeah. Like, you know, it's self-aware. It's bold. It's stylistically bold, self-conscious of its own style.

And some people don't like that. But I do. I like it. And so that makes me wonder if I might enjoy this for that. As an art piece so far, I like it. It's not – it doesn't make any sense yet at all.

I mean, it looks very pretty. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. I'll finish up my review next week when I get a chance to finish it. It's not super long, so I'm happy about that. Yeah. But, yeah, it is definitely not a mass market movie.

Right. I think by any stretch. Yeah, it's absolutely being marketed as if it is. Yes. Yeah. With fake reviews and everything. Yes. Yeah. Okay, let's move on to something else. Let's talk about Tesla's cyber cab. Mm-hmm. Because, Dave, you said you like when we come up with random topics and we just go.

So here's a random one. Sure. I stayed up last night to watch the live unveiling, which was an hour late. Had to wait for Elon to come down. To dismount his ego for a minute.

Yeah. So I stuck it out to listen to about 15 minutes of his blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, until he got to the time when we talked about how much it was and when it's coming out. And I'm like, this thing's never coming out this decade. Forget it. Right. It's going to cost $30,000 and come out in late – or they're going to go into production by late 26, maybe 27.

Uh-huh. Maybe 29 or 30. 30. Right. Look at 30. So let's remember the Cybertruck, which was going to cost $40,000 and come out in a year or two. And what, it came out at $100,000 and took four or five years, something like that.

Yep. And is a piece of crap. Yep. Absolutely. Yep. I'm just saying build quality. The thing's a piece of crap. You drive down the road and pieces fall off. Yeah. That's not a $100,000 car. I'm sorry. Well, look, even the Teslas that have been around for quite some time now are shoddily built, frankly.

They're just not great machines. Right. Right. But – And they have shitty customer service, which makes it even better. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's – you know, it's a dumpster fire. It's just – I don't understand why we continue to give this man the attention that we do.

I wonder – I'm trying to think of a comparison. So is Musk the P.T. Barnum of our age? He's got a lot more power and money than P.T. Barnum ever did. Right. So I was thinking the same thing. So is he what happens when Richie Rich grows up?

Or fails to grow up. Fails to grow up. Yes. Right. Right. Yeah. Pretty close. I mean, it's just – it's somebody that gets everything that they want and has created a complete fantasy world around themselves. And somehow, so many people seem to buy into it, defeat it.

I don't get it. Right. And to me, this is the thing. Like, one of the biggest issues with allowing billionaires – and I've said here before, I believe the fact that billionaires exist is a policy failure. I have nothing against rich people, but I do think when you get to the point of being a billionaire, which I consider to be wealth hoarding, we have a problem.

And one of the big problems is these folks – you get this class of people who, through their wealth, get to lead consequence-free lives. And that throws things out of balance. And that's what we've got with him. Yep. I agree. He's a man-child.

And – but has tremendous power. Huge government contracts. You know, SpaceX. And just the notion that people are relying on him during natural disasters I think is terrifying. It is. It's 100 percent terrifying.

It's – he's become a government unto himself and to some degree. And that's horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. I mean, I think that back to the cyber cab, it's just a joke. It's silly. It's silly. I'm looking forward to Dave's new podcast, We Love Elon, on all things going well in Elon's world.

Mm-hmm. And then maybe I could – yeah, I'll team up with a virtual – the Elon AI, something like that, and just talk about all things going well. Yeah, it's Grok. You can get it now for $9.99 a month.

Mm-hmm. Over at X. Right. I just could not see myself ever getting in one of these because it goes back to the – for me, it's just still they're using the wrong technology, you know? Yeah. They need to be using LiDAR. Cameras just cannot tell depth.

It's so crazy how polarizing he has become because, as I've said, obviously, he has a gazillion fanboys. They're not all bots on X. Some of them are actually real people. Oh, they were all shouting, we love you, Elon, last night. I know. But even here in Canada, which is somewhat removed from all of this – the politics and all of that, I have a friend here that has a Tesla, and he felt the need to tell me we bought it before we knew he was an asshole.

Yeah. Yeah. I've seen bumper stickers. I've seen bumper stickers, yeah. I've seen bumper stickers, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I have friends of mine who have – I have a friend who is quite well-to-do and owned every Tesla there was.

So, bought the roadster, had, I think, the first Model X – no, Model S was the first one. Model S, yeah. First Model S, like, east of the Mississippi, had a Model Y, had a – you know, just was in on all of them.

But then, at some point, when Elon revealed his true self, my friend just sold them all, got rid of all the Teslas, and got other much nicer electric cars.

Yeah. You know, loves the electric cars, but, you know, so someone who has the ability to do that, and I would say most people do not have the ability to just uninvest in those and replace them. I mean, you know, I mean, even – I know people don't have the kind of things that I had, which I never bought a Tesla, but I was heavily invested in Tesla, and Elon did make me an awful lot of money, but when he – same thing, when he revealed his true self, I divested myself

of Tesla, I sold all my shares, like, I don't have a share anymore, and I won't, never will. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder what the true effect of all that is on Tesla, the company, because I know a lot of folks who previously would have considered getting one, and now wouldn't.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think it's got to be hurting, so. Yeah. You can't make it up with, you know, a bunch of crazy-ass people buying Cybertrucks. That's not going to save the company. You actually really need a real car that people want. Right. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. How many Cybertrucks could you possibly sell? Apparently all of them in my neighborhood is everywhere. We've got a few of them around here, and I just shake my head every time one rolls by. I don't understand it, but, you know, I hope it makes their buyers happy.

So, speaking of natural disasters, I am thinking about getting my ham radio license. Okay. Is this a hurricane-sparked or a magnetic storm-sparked? No, no, no. It is hurricane-sparked.

So, as I mentioned here before, when I was in college, my roommate was a ham radio expert. He was president of the ham radio club at our university. We had a whole rig in our room, and all of his friends were into this. So, I was very ham radio adjacent.

So, I got to see all the stuff. I got to participate in a lot of the stuff. I went to ham fests with him and enjoyed that. You know, very geeky. We had to explain to my girlfriend that ham fests were not actually about ham and bacon. I would be very disappointed if I went with you.

I went to the Renaissance Fair with you. I got the turkey leg. I'm up for ham fest. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, I was – there's some folks on Mastodon that I follow who are ham radio folks, and they were talking all about the degree to which ham radio has really stepped up and provided useful functionality during these natural disasters.

And I've been playing with a little software-defined radio kit. You know, I got an old MacBook Pro with a little dongle you plug into the USB port with an antenna. And you can just tune into Spectrum, which is great fun.

You know, you listen to the local airport and the local ham repeater and all that kind of stuff. So, I was just thinking, like, you know, why not – what's keeping me from doing this? Is this something – were there to be trouble in my area, would it be beneficial for me to have a ham radio license?

Mm-hmm. I think it may be. I don't think it'll be that hard to get, especially with the experience and just being around it as much as I was. I suspect I'm not – I'm certainly not going in blind, having been around it as much as I have.

Mm-hmm. So, I thought, why not? Maybe this would be a fun thing to do, a fun project to get my license. There are all kinds of, like, super cheap ham radio rigs now from China.

Of course. Differing degrees of quality. So, one also has to question, will they actually work in some sort of maybe non-natural disaster since they're all from China? Right, right. And I did get – yeah. So, here's the flip side of it.

And this is my concern, which is I went to a ham fest earlier this year, having not been to one in 20 years. And it was depressing.

Not a lady in sight. Well, no. Well, that's – that hasn't changed. It's always been that way. But, first of all, it was – this takes place at the local fairgrounds.

It was about an eighth the size of what it used to be in terms of the number of people who were there, the dealers, the people – because it's very much like a flea market kind of environment, people buying and selling stuff.

And it was just old, old white guys with long beards. So, it's the same. Well, it's the same but distilled, right? Yes. Like, the – it's – these are the lifers who are still in the hobby.

Who are hardy enough to have survived. Right. Right. So, I wonder about putting time into something that is in decline. But I'm not – the thing is I'm not going at it, like, for social reasons.

Like, I don't anticipate myself hanging out on the ham radio at night chatting and trying to collect, you know, the purse cards. You'd have to grow stuff. You'd have to grow a beard. Well, that I can do. I can do that overnight. Okay. But I don't know. So, I'm – that's what I'm worried about.

Well, the only thing I would say to you is we ourselves are also in decline. So, you know, getting into something that's in decline, that's going to be our lives, moving forward, what's left of it. That's it. We're right here. Yeah. I think about that when I think about my personal music choices when I go to concerts these days.

I'm like, okay, well, we're just all old and we're in decline and so is the band. Why is it so loud? Yeah, exactly. And the other thing is will it bring you joy? And that's all that really matters. If you think doing this will bring you joy, if there's such a low barrier to entrance for you to dip your toe in anyways, why not?

Yeah. You're not stuck with it if you decide you don't like it, Dave. That's the thing. And it's a low investment. And also, I think part of what spurred this was my feeling of meh after the last round of iPhones came out. Yeah. Right? Like I'm feeling like so much.

I need a gadget. Hot new technology. Right. Exactly. Like a ham radio. I just need something. I need to spark up some old vacuum tubes. Get on the wireless to Istanbul. Yeah.

So I think I need to scratch my gadget itch. And I don't know. I think I'm liking your second post in our notes here as a good gadget scratch as opposed to ham radio, personally.

Yeah. So I put a link in here to a TRS-80 computer on eBay, which I used to have.

I used to have one of these. This exact computer I used to have. Somewhere along the years, I no longer have it. Yeah. And that makes me sad. The problem is, I don't need this. Like, I look at it. So this is what I want to talk to you guys about.

I look at this on eBay and I want it, but I don't need it. I don't have a place for it. I don't have time for it. All of the things that I would have to do to reignite this. I'm chasing nostalgia. I'm chasing feelings I had when I was 15 surrounding this device that are impossible for me to catch.

And so I'm trying to have the discipline to look at this thing, enjoy it from afar, know, boy, wouldn't it be nice to have that, but have the wisdom to know that despite the fact that I can totally afford this thing now, I don't need it.

And it would ultimately lead me to disappointment. Okay. Okay. I think you answered your own question. I was going to say, I think you got it in one there, Dave. Although, again, to play devil's advocate, what would be the harm in grabbing it now, putting it in, say, your attic or your garage for, you know, those days when the podcast dollars aren't running in anymore and you're down to just...

For the garage sale. You're down to nine or ten shows. That's all that's... You got plenty of free time. Yeah. The problem is... Well, there's several problems. But an issue is that all of these old computers run in emulation, you know, so I can run...

I want to boot one of these up, I do it in my browser, for God's sake, and all the software is available. All of it. All of it. So if I want to play... But it's not the same. It doesn't feel the same. It's just... But it's never going to be the same.

What you do is you can never go home again, Dave. I know. You can never go home again. That's right. So that's what I'm getting at. That's the feeling I'm getting at. You're feeling old. Yeah. I know. It's true. You know, I guess the weird...

The closest thing I have to that... I mean, there's many things, like the music thing, but the one that struck me and it changed, and I'll tell you why it changed. For me, it's been going back to Disneyland as an adult, because that was such a part of my youth, of my teenage years, and there are so many memories associated with it, and friends, and shenanigans, and life experiences learned for the first time, and it all took place at Disneyland.

So it's a very nostalgic, heavy, and triggering place for me, and it was always weird to go back as an adult, but the thing that changed it is now going with my son and seeing it through his eyes, that's made it bearable again. So I think you need to get your kid into Radio Shack TRS-80, and you go ham-festing with him.

Oh, yeah. That's going to happen. Just what every kid, every teenage boy wants to do. Go to a ham-fest with their dad. Oh, my gosh. That would be just so great. Yeah, the Disneyland thing, I think, is like, if you've ever went back to your old middle school, or your old elementary school, and you go in the gym, and you're like, this is so small.

These hallways are so small. Everything's so small. Yeah. It's like that. But boy, I mean, you had the world's greatest playground. Oh, I absolutely did. And I'm always very pleased with that. Like, people are always just like, didn't you ever get sick of it, or how it's so fake, and it's Disney.

And I'm like, I had the best fucking childhood you've ever heard of. Right. Right. So cool. I'm going to tell you a little quick story, Dave, before we wrap here. Yeah. So I went down that memory hole not long ago with cameras, because when I was a young lad, I couldn't afford really nice cameras.

And it was the time when the Nikon F4 had come out, and I'd always wanted an F3, and I wanted all of these different cameras. And I had a Pentax K1000, which you could buy at Sears for $99. Right. Love that camera. Eventually, I bought one of those. I bought a Nikon F3, and I bought a Nikon F4 off eBay.

Those things, I dragged around the country for years. They would sit on my shelf. I finally got some film, took it out, shot a little bit with the film, never got it developed, and then ended up selling them for half of what I paid for them at the garage sale. It's fun to, now when I see them, I'm like, man, I wish I had those cameras.

And I'm like, slap myself and go, no, no, you don't. No, you don't. They just take up space, and they cost money. Right. No. You don't need the thing. You just need the idea of the thing. Yes. That's it. Yeah. You know? And I look at eBay now, and I see them, and as you posted this, I'm looking at Quadra 840 AVs, and I'm like, oh, it'd be fun to have one of those, and they're $1,600.

I'm like, oh, no. Really? Wow. Yeah. Yeah, for a mint condition, 840 AV. Wow. Or $1,499. Yeah. But, yeah, no, the time has passed. Move on. I know. I need to let it go. But if you're going to do the TRS-80, get the chassis, rip it out, rip out the guts, put in a micro PC that you can run all the emulators on, and then plug that into your TV.

So you have the box, you have the keyboard feel, you got the clickety-click, but you have all the software ready to go at actual human speeds now. You don't have to wait. It's like those Atari joysticks they sold at Urban Outfitters for a while that basically had all the games built into it, just the joystick. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what it is. All right. Well, we'll just, you know, invent a time machine, Dave, and solve the problems. Yeah. Well, thanks, guy. I'm going to go leaf through some old Radio Shack catalogs. I'll see you back in the next week. I'll send you the links. On the last show. Closing shout outs!

Over at Patreon, nobody signed up. What's wrong with us, Brian? Quiet week. We've only got two people over at PayPal, Ralph and Miles. Thank you both so much. Nobody at the tip jar and no reviews. What happened, Brian? And nobody notable died. Oh, man.

Did this week actually exist? This is a horrible outro. Man. Well, I guess let's cut it here. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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 669.

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