671: Lorum Ipsum Is My Sister

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. Brian, self-driving cars have actually become a hit in San Francisco. After all of our bitchin' and kvetchin' and moanin', they've actually finally found their stride. Can you believe it or not? I'm a little surprised. I mean, it's taken a long time.

We were told this was coming when we started this podcast. What you said? Our timeline matched. Yeah, not too bad. Yeah, I've been hearing a lot of raving about it. Not without problems. It's not a fully realized technology yet.

There's still issues here and there and everywhere. But from what I've heard from both people we know, people I know, and obviously, you know, the media, is that it's actually doing pretty well up there. Yeah, from the reports we got from Chen and David, our friends and friends of the show, they love it now.

And I think one of the things that really got me was when Chen said that, yeah, there's no driver to talk to and you can play your own music. I'm like, okay, sign me up. Sign me up right now. Yeah, I've heard less stellar things from friends in Santa Monica, which is also having quite a few of the Waymos, I think, are around there.

And they're less impressed with it. And I do wonder if it's – I mean, I haven't driven in San Francisco in years, but I know what Santa Monica traffic is like. And it's nuts. And it's not just cars. It's pedestrians and people on bikes and skateboards and scooters and everything else. So it's doing less well in Santa Monica, but it does seem to be working up in San Fran.

So just dodging the man poo. I've driven in both extensively, and I think San Francisco is way harder than Santa Monica, way harder. I mean, there's so many one-way streets. It's just the hills, the people stopping randomly just because the streets are narrow.

A lot of the same problems you have in Santa Monica, honestly, but just 10x that with San Francisco and man poo, lots of man poo. Yeah, but cars don't care about that. They'll run it over. That's true. That's true. Unless you shape it in like a stop sign and encircle the car with it, then they get confused.

Right. So it says last summer Waymo was doing 10,000 paid rides a week, and by May it went to 50,000, and now it's more than 100,000. But here's the kicker. They're taking that 100,000, and they're spreading it across San Francisco, Phoenix, and LA. So they're kind of juicing the numbers there because that's what they do.

You know, best week ever because it was our first week, you know, kind of thing. So it's interesting. I actually am looking forward to giving it a shot. I just don't know when I ever want to go to Santa Monica again. Well, I'll be there over Christmas, so maybe I'll give it a go.

Okay. Well, yeah, if you're going to be in town, maybe we'll do a GOG spot from the back of a Waymo. They'll come out and meet you there. It's about halfway from Orange County to my place. That's true. That's true. I got a bit more follow-up. Last week, I talked about the HBO documentary, Money Electric, that aired on the network.

And according to Peter Todd, who was outed in that documentary as the legendary Satoshi, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, who basically said winkingly, yes, I'm Satoshi, and then did a whole press thing saying, no, I'm not. And everybody kind of debunked it in the community anyways.

But now that this documentary has aired, he's pissed. He has told several reporters since that the accusation has endangered his life. Obviously, falsely accusing someone of having tens of billions of dollars puts them at risk from robbery and kidnappings. Todd told Bloomberg after the documentary aired, he's putting my life at risk to promote his movie.

I would like to point out that Todd agreed to be in the movie. And he did the little wink and said, you know, hey, Satoshi, so yeah, humor has a price, buddy. So there you go. You were in it. Now he's told Wired that he's gone into hiding.

After the documentary aired, his inbox was flooded with emails. A lot of them were people asking for money. Change your email address. You have it all. People want some. I wonder how Wired found him if he's in hiding. Yes. Well, he expects that this is just the way it's going to be for the rest of his life. Not only is the question dumb, it's dangerous.

Satoshi obviously doesn't want to be found for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find him, he told Wired. Okay. This guy just sounds like a real piece of work. That's my impression. Yeah. I still kind of want to see it. I just haven't had the time.

Me too. I do want to see it, even though now I kind of know it's all not worth it. But whatever. I got to see this guy in real life. Yeah, see, that's why I actually want to see it now, because of this. Before, I'm like, eh, maybe not.

But now I'm just like, hmm, this might actually be interesting. Yeah. In the news.

I hate AI. Me too. That's the name of a video, though, that Meta put out. So before we get into the AI news, I do want to talk about this video for a minute, because did you get a chance to watch it?

No, I did not. Sorry. Okay. What it basically is, is artist shaming. It's a new thing that I've never thought I would be saying. It's a video that they let this director, Anish Chaganti, make on his own. He's like, here, here's the tools. You know, here's our movie gen AI.

Not on his own with AI. True. They gave him the movie gen AI tool and said, have at it. Go make something. And what this guy came back with was just a little, a cute little video of when he was a kid making a film and how AI could have enhanced his movie because he wanted it to be in Manhattan or sci-fi.

And he's like, yeah, the AI doesn't make it perfect, but it's better than it was. And he's like, basically, he's saying that the tools aren't the problem. You're the problem. You need to have more creativity and use the tools properly.

That's the problem. It's not us. It's you. That's the problem. Okay, I think they, he is fundamentally misunderstanding the reason that people are pissed off about AI. You think? Yeah, I think. Because it's not about the tools and it's not about using them creatively.

It's about how those tools were trained and all the, all the owned intellectual property rights and everything else that was gone into training them and not being, uh, not being funded for that, not being paid for it.

That's the issue. People are tired of these companies scraping everybody's content and training on it without being paid for it. Oh yeah, yeah, no, it's tone deaf. No, and the fact that Meta put this thing out is really a testament to how much they don't give a shit.

Yes. They really don't. So. Yeah. Well, and more than 10,000 artists have just signed an open letter protesting this exactly. So they're protesting unlicensed AI training. The Washington Post reports that more than 10,500 artists have signed an open letter objecting to AI developers' unlicensed use of artists' work to train their models.

The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major unjust threat to the livelihoods of people behind those works and must not be permitted. The one sentence letter reads, the letter is, it's not really a letter if it's just a sentence. That's really not much of a letter. It's not much of a letter, is it? But it's basically gotten, you know, massive names from film, television, music, and publishing industries.

Some of the more famous signatures include actress Julianne Moore, Rosario Dawson, Kevin Bacon, F. Murray Abraham, as well as Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon, author James Patterson, and radio head frontman Tom York. And I would also point out Robert Smith from The Cure. Ooh. I saw him post that the other day.

All right. That's the whole, that's the whole point, you know, this, this shit wouldn't exist without their work, our work, you know, my stuff has been trained on it. I've found my, my photographs in there. So everybody's stuff's in there at this point, your words, your faces, your everything has been sucked up by this stuff.

Yeah, everything is. In fact, I was actually listening, I haven't listened to Pivot in quite some time, the podcast, uh, with, uh, our good friend Cara, uh, because I just basically burned out on her. But, uh, they, they're putting out a little series just about AI right now, like little, little, uh, 24 minute things talking about, you know, what's happening with it right now, what you should be using it for everything like that.

And they had, uh, somebody, a 26 year old journalist who's like delve deeply into it. She's the senior journalist on AI at, I think the verge. And she just basically kept saying all these models, Scott Galloway was pressuring her to basically say, well, what's your favorite model? What's the one that you really like?

And you know, which ones do you hate? And she basically just said, they're all exactly the same. They've all been trained on the entirety of the internet, everything that's out there. They are all got everything already and it's the same basic model, just, you know, with slightly different tweaks in it.

That's, that's about it. So yeah, they've got everything already. This has been trained on everything and it's a mess and it's, it should have been illegal, but here we are. Yeah. More on that coming up. Yes. Yes. And X has updated their privacy policy with new language that allows it to provide users data to third party collaborators in order to train AI models.

In other words, he's basically found a new way to make money, which is selling all of X's data to other people to have the same data that Grok has and everybody else has. Yeah. I think this is just the loophole because the, the other collaborators are just going to be XAI. Yeah. That's it.

He's not going to sell it to anybody but himself. Well, he might. He needs money. It depends on how much money he needs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He just built the, he just built the, uh, was it 100,000 GPU farm that, uh, I guess broke a bunch of records. Because he built it in a couple months versus a couple of years just because, you know, he was in, uh, cause he brought a giant check to NVIDIA and hijacked the ones that were supposed to be going to Tesla.

Yeah. Which, you know, cause that little shareholder kerfuffle. But, uh, yeah, he's, he's going all in on XAI. So. Yeah. And in a, you know, a typical X kind of situation, uh, the policy, uh, update mentions the ability to opt out, but there's no way to do it because the policy points to the user settings menu.

But there's nothing in there yet for opting out of data sharing. Cause there's no engineers left at X to actually go in and write the check box to unsubscribe. That's why. Yeah. And in addition to the privacy policy, X has also updated their terms of service with stricter penalties for entities that are caught scraping large amounts of tweets.

Just like everybody else has done and X has done with other places. So. Yeah. No, this is just, this is the silliest arms race ever now at this point. And I just, I, I went in the other day and there's a giant banners like upgrade today, discount, discount, please upgrade.

Give us a little bit of money, please. No. Oh yeah. On the desktop version of X now, when I load it up, the entire right side is basically just, please, please join us. Give us some money. Well, to continue on with the theme, Sushir Balaji, who was an open AI researcher, has quit.

He left the company about concerns over its use of copyrighted material. So Balaji, he worked there for four years, believes the company's use of internet data to train AI models violates copyright laws. And after reflecting on the impact of AI technologies, he decided to step away from contributing to what he sees as a harmful trajectory.

After reflecting for four years. Four years at probably $200,000 a year. He probably got a big enough nut where he could go buy a house in Montana and said, screw you guys, I'm going home. That's kind of what I was thinking too. He figured he made enough money now, so now I'm going to have principles.

Yeah. It's easy to have principles on a full belly. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, OpenAI and Microsoft apparently might be feeling a little bit bad about stealing all this stuff, but they want to fund projects to bring more AI tools into the newsroom. The duo will give grants of up to $10 million to Chicago Public Media, the Minnesota Star Tribune, Newsday, and Long Island, New York, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Seattle Times.

Each of the publications will hire a two-year AI fellow to develop projects for implementing the technology and improving business sustainability. Three more outlets are expected to receive fellowship grants in a second round. I don't really like AI in my news, but...

Yeah, I would posit, Brian, that the newsroom is the one place where AI should be banned, period. Well, I can think of a few other places too, but yes, definitely there. Because otherwise they're not going to have anything new to start scraping. Exactly.

You know? They need somebody to actually create new stuff. You know, graphics are out the window. Nobody's making original art anymore. It's all coming from, you know, the other, like, mid-journeys and stuff, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And we need somebody to create new stuff.

And I think the newsroom is the last bastion of original creativity besides, you know, novelists. Yeah, we are rocketing towards that AI eating its own tail thing that we keep talking about, the AI centipede. Mm-hmm. So, ByteDance has actually fired an intern for sabotaging its AI models.

Which, like, good for you, man. Remember, remember, the 5th of November. The company denies the rumors that the damage cost them tens of millions of dollars. The intern, part of ByteDance's commercial technology team, allegedly tampered with AI model training tasks.

And ByteDance clarified that none of its commercial projects were impacted and claims of severe financial losses were exaggerated. The company also accused the intern of misrepresenting his role on social media. So, he lied to get the job and then, you know, fucked with them from within.

Good on you, buddy. Good on you. Oh, man. In another OpenAI departure, longtime policy researcher Miles Brundage has left OpenAI, where he served as a senior advisor on the AGI readiness team. And he announced his departure on X and his personal blog.

He stated that he seeks more independence in the nonprofit sector. He acknowledged OpenAI's significant mission, but expressed concerns over groupthink and urged colleagues to raise questions. Brundage's exit follows a wave of high-profile resignations that we've been covering on the show.

So, you know, it's just whack-a-mole over there. But, yeah, you know, he's been there for a while. So, he probably got a few bucks as well. But the interesting thing is I think his leaving is around the company going for profit. And also, I read his blog post, and, you know, he does seem to think that the AGI thing really needs some guardrails.

So, it really needs some guardrails. And he's one of the guys that helped write that whole level of AI thing that we talked about a couple weeks ago. You know, you go from, yeah, that's really nice to, oh, shit, we're all dead. That list. Yes, very quickly.

Very quickly. Which seems to be coming faster than self-driving cars. So, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see.

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Or a drug into Neil Stephenson, an early novel. Yeah, that too. Yeah. They released it as a free open source toolkit. This technology allows developers to mark AI-generated text in a hidden way, making it easier to identify artificial content. Synth ID uses a tournament sampling method to insert watermarks during the text generation process without distorting the quality of the output.

Google's research shows the tool is highly effective, especially with longer texts, and when the AI model has a higher degree of variability in its responses. In large-scale tests, users found almost no difference in quality between watermarked and non-watermarked responses. Okay.

I looked at how they were doing it, and it was kind of confusing, especially when you take that content and run it through something that would also obfuscate it a little bit. I think that there's ways around it, for sure. That's going to be Whack-A-Mole. Oh, it's totally going to be Whack-A-Mole.

Especially, you know, the fun part would be, that's why you have like seven different apps running at the same time. You've got your ChatGPT, you've got your Perplexity, you've got your Poe, you've got your this, you've got your that, you've got your other. And it just, you write a script to cascade everything through, to clean it all up, and then by the end, it's just a game of telephone.

Yeah. So, tell me about Napoleon, and then you get a thing about, you know, sunglasses at the end. But, it is what it is. DNA testing company 23andMe is facing significant challenges, including a data breach that compromised the information of nearly 7 million users last year, and a steep decline in its financial performance.

All things we have covered on the show. And the company's worth has dropped over 99% since going public in 2021, primarily due to reduced consumer interest in spitting into a tube. I mean, this is the thing, you do it once, you're not going to have very many repeat buyers with 23andMe is the problem.

That was what they sold people on, the fact that they, well, now you've gotten your basic information, but now, of course, they're going to come back for more customized, specific things that we can look for. We're in check for, but the reality is nobody did that, because... Right. Yeah. Because I think their whole goal was, as they got more data on more people, they could get more insights.

And that's what you're talking about with coming back to get more advanced data. But, turns out, there just wasn't that much interesting data to glean once you got past the first, you know, 20, 30, 40 million people. It's like all the same shit. Okay, we're all people. That's it.

Yep. And also, you know, there are so many issues with it. There's privacy concerns. There's so many concerns about this. The fact that they weren't trying to pivot into something else at some point in the past couple years is just, it's just bad business.

Yeah, it really is. And, you know, you think about somebody like this. This is a one-trick pony. And you look at somebody like DocuSign over the years, who has obviously said, okay, they saw the writing on the wall and said, we offer a very simple, specific service. Yeah. And it has been commoditized.

Now, you can get document signing in Dropbox and just about everything. So, they've been working on pivoting. You can do it in notes. Yeah. So, they've been working on pivoting over the years because they saw the writing on the wall. 23andMe did not get the memo. No. Now, here's where the problem comes in. Customer's genetic data is at risk because 23andMe is not covered by HIPAA regulations, meaning it can change its privacy policies at will.

Yep. Which it has been doing, which means it can just sell your shit or just give it away in a fire sale. Yeah. Which is what's going to happen. Yeah. I mean, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, we said this exact same thing. This was the end game of what's going to happen with these genetic testing companies, and it's finally coming to pass.

So, 23andMe has gone fire, and now we have self-driving taxis. So, we're just 10 years too early, Brian. That's the way it always goes. Yeah. There you go. The FTC has issued a final rule on the purchase and sale of online reviews back in August, and it came into force 60 days after it was published in the Federal Register.

This rule bans businesses from creating, buying, or selling reviews and testimonials attributed to people who don't exist, including those that are AI-generated. False celebrity endorsements aren't allowed. Companies can't pay or otherwise incentivize genuine customers to leave positive or negative reviews.

Boy, that's going to change Amazon if they actually enforce this. Certain reviews and testimonials written by people who have close ties with the company without a disclaimer is also a no-no. There are restrictions on soliciting reviews from close relatives and employees too. The rule includes limitations on the suppression of negative reviews from customers.

It also prohibits people from knowingly selling or buying fake followers and views to inflate the influence or importance of social media accounts for commercial purposes. In other words, all of Instagram. Pretty much. As far as I can tell these days, because that's all I seem to see.

Fines for violating these measures could prove extremely costly. The maximum civil penalty for each infraction is currently $51,744. So, you know, if this is enforced, it could be great and really change the online shopping experience, which has become a shithole.

But I don't know. I don't think it's going to be enforced. Where are the internet police? Yeah, where are the internet police? Who's going to do it? Who's going to go after these people? So, now, if the FTC went after the FCC for this exact thing, we might actually get some policy passed because all of those public comment periods are just slammed with fake reviews.

So, does that factor into their thinking here? Will they be able to go after their own sister agency at the FCC for all the dead people that have been leaving reviews for net neutrality and shit like that? They're going to hire one person that's going to sit in a room to go through every WooCommerce store on the internet and go, that review, that testimonial is obviously pre-packaged with the plugin.

Seriously. It's just demo data. We didn't do anything. That's just the sample data that comes with WooCommerce. We promise. No, Lorem Ipsum is a real person. He's a real person. He's my sister. Oh, God. So, good luck.

Good luck. They're going to get that one guy from the FDA that is in charge of, like, you know, bottled water to come check on everybody. Oh, God. Private equity firm Permira has acquired Squarespace for $7.2 billion, marking the end of its publicly traded status and probably the next target for Matty Mullenweg.

I was waiting for his name to be mentioned. You know, I was going to give a follow-up on that whole thing, and I was just like, you know what? I don't care anymore. Yeah. And the only news I could find this week about that was, it was a little bit going on because it's all in the courts now, but Matty Mullenweg is going to be speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Ooh. I haven't been to TechCrunch Disrupt in, God, 15 years. Except he won't be able to say anything because it's all in the courts right now. It is. I don't know if that stops him very much. Yeah. So, yeah, Squarespace is now owned by private equity.

Great. So that's going to eventually peter out as a decent product. Oh, yeah. I'm sure they're going to squeeze it for every single cent they can and then burn it to the ground. Yep. Which is fine. This is the natural life cycle of technology now. That's true. The creatives come in, they build it, they turn it into a thriving business, and then private equity comes in and just fucks everything up.

Can you tell how much I love private equity? I think you're a fan. I know. I know. By the way, we will accept private equity for Grumpy Old Geeks. You want to buy us out and run us into the ground? I'm all yours. We're doing it ourselves for free. Exactly. Yeah, we're doing it without the private equity.

That's where we fucked up, Brian. Oh, God. So the U.S. Department of Justice has entered the fray in the ongoing right-to-repair battle between farmers and John Deere. Okay. So we've been following this one forever. It took them long enough.

You know, John Deere has been just horrible to their customers. I hear they're parachuting in Adam Savage right now. Adam Savage in a manual and a thumb drive. Here we go. So, yeah, they're looking into John Deere's practices, and they're saying that they may violate antitrust laws by monopolating the repair market for its equipment.

Yeah. Think? Yeah. That's what everybody's been doing. That's why right to repair is so important. Exactly. You know, these companies are going to go kicking and screaming against it. Look at Apple. Apple has finally given in. And, you know, you can fix some things.

You can – and they make it almost impossible to get the repair kits and all the tools necessary. The manuals are even hard to come by. But they're doing it to just, you know, to not be deared, as it were, by the DOJ. So we'll see how this plays out.

This is going to take years, I think. But it's long overdue. It is so long overdue. So I'm glad that at least they're finally starting the process. Good. Me too. Yeah. Depending on the outcome of the election, this could keep going or probably not. Or not.

We'll see. Or not real fast. We'll know in about two weeks what the plan is for the DOJ on John Deere. All right. Well, it's now harder to know where Elon Musk or Taylor Swift are flying to and the carbon emissions that they're putting out because Meta has shut down Instagram and Threads accounts devoted to tracking private jets, according to TechCrunch.

And, of course, you know, it's already off of X because Elon didn't like his jet whereabouts being known. The crazy thing to me is this is one dude. Yeah. One dude. This is one dude that's been doing this. Jack Sweeney. One college student dude. A college student in his early 20s who runs all the accounts, confirmed the news that he's been booted on his personal account.

Hey, man. Jack, fire up a Squarespace. Yeah, there you go. You don't need social media. I'm just saying. It's the latest in the line of pushback he has faced in the past. In late 2020, Elon Musk suspended his ElonJet account, which tracked Musk's flight on X and then Twitter. He soon made an account with the handle ElonJetNextDay to post Musk's flight with a one-day delay.

Elon did not like that. Later, he got a cease and desist letter from Taylor Swift's lawyers basically saying, While this may be a game to you or an avenue that you hope will earn you wealth or fame, it is a life or death matter for our client. In May, Sweeney's job became a little bit harder because the Biden administration passed a law saying basically anyone with a private aircraft, hey, rich guys, you can keep your registration data anonymous.

However, he said with tips and other research, he's still doable. This guy must put so much time into this and I can't, I can't, how does he make money? I don't think he does. I guess he doesn't. He's still a college student, but you're going to need a job, dude. Yeah, seriously, you know.

Here's the thing he should do. Here's what I would do if I was him. I would write some scripts and every time it takes off, run it through a voice-generated AI and create a podcast. So every time it takes off, a new episode, a micro episode of the podcast drops that just tells you that Elon's in the air and where he's going.

And then, you know, every now and then when he lands, you can just do a follow-up and say, touchdown. You still got blue sky. You can go to Mastodon. Mastodon, the Fetaverse. There you go. It's Fetaverse, this crap. Yeah, you can't get kicked off the Fetaverse, right?

I don't think so. I don't think you can. So there you go. Yeah, get rid, get out of that walled garden, my man, Jack. Come on. Embrace, embrace the open web the way it was meant to be. All right. Elon Musk, Tesla, and Warner Brothers Discovery are being sued by Alcon Entertainment, the producer of Blade Runner 2049, over alleged AI-driven copyright infringement.

Again. The lawsuit claims that during Tesla's October 10th cyber cab event, an AI-generated image mimicking Blade Runner 2049 was used without permission to promote Tesla's robo-taxi. That doesn't sound like the Elon I know. Not at all. Not at all.

Alcon had denied a request to use the image and objected to any affiliation between Musk, Tesla, and the film. The lawsuit also cites Musk's controversial political views as problematic for brand partnerships. Ouch. Yes, as their ad department knows.

Mm-hmm. Alcon is in the middle of creating a Blade Runner TV series at the moment, so I think that's why they really kind of went after it. They're like, yeah, we don't want them anywhere near our stuff. Do not pre-ruin our TV series, please, please.

With your spray-painted tires and all that shit. So, some fun science news. Brian, researchers have identified seven new frog species in Madagascar, naming them after iconic Star Trek characters. I love this. Mark D. Scherz from the Natural History Museum of Denmark highlighted that the frog's calls resemble the franchise's futuristic sound effects.

Initially thought to be one species, Bufus majoritius, was re-evaluated, though, through extensive data collection over three decades, revealing it actually comprises eight distinct species based on their unique high-pitched whistles and genetic differences. So, that's pretty cool.

The newly named species honor captains like James D. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard, symbolizing the spirit of exploration on Earth before looking to the stars. So, here we go. We've got B. Kirk-y, B. Picard-y, B. Sisko-y, B. Janeway-y, B. Archery, B. Pike-y, and B. Burnham-y.

Burnham? Seriously? Burnham? Well, you know, they were going for all the captains, so, yeah. I know, but Riker was a captain at the end. He got hosed, man. He did. They should have had a Riker-y in there.

He did more for Star Trek. Riker did more for Star Trek than Burnham ever did, is all I got to say. Agreed. Yes, which also made me think of the video compilation of Riker Sits Down. Did you ever see that? I did. It is fucking classic.

It's so good. I mean, when you watch it, when you watch them all together and notice that every time he walks in a room, he sits down by throwing his leg over the chair from the back. Like, you know, he's just delivering a pizza in a porno. That's how he sits down in the ready room.

Now, it's funny you put this in here. Did you watch the premiere of Lower Decks? Not yet, no. They absolutely give that a shout out in the first episode. Oh, really? Okay. It's subtle, but it's there, and you'll see it, and you will laugh. Okay. Okay. Yes, Jonathan Frakes admits that the Riker maneuver, where he swings his leg over the chair before sitting down, was actually just a byproduct of the low chairs on set.

He acknowledges that it can come off as an asshole move. Like, come on, that's on brand for Riker. You got to do it. Totally. Yeah. And finally, in science news, Colossal, the company known for its de-extinction efforts, has shared new updates on its project to bring back the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, which went extinct in 1936.

So, their original mandate was to bring back the woolly mammoth. And they're like, this is taking a little longer than we thought. We got anything easier? Okay, this one just went extinct in 1936. And absolutely nobody at that company watched Jurassic Park. Obviously not.

Obviously not. So, they're in the middle of doing the gene editing to bring this thing back. They've made over 300 edits. And it's getting closer to bringing it back. And yeah, don't know if that's a good idea. Have you ever seen the video of the last known one?

It's a video actually from like 1936. It's gone viral on social media a few times. They're freaky looking things. Oh, I'll have to check it out. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'll definitely have to check it out. Yeah, what's even freakier though, it says at the end of this, they say, another innovative step involves attempts to grow marsupial embryos outside the womb using an artificial uterus.

Okay, no, no, no, I do not need an artificial uterus. Now we're getting into Dune territory here, people. Oh, and the Vorkosigan series. Yeah, that too. Oh my God, I haven't read that in years. I forgot about that. Oh, so good. I was thinking about going back and doing it.

Lois McMaster Bujold, who wrote it, finally wrapped it up. There's not going to be any more. And she put a bow on it at the end. So the whole series is a standalone series of 19 or so books, but definitely one of my favorite sci-fi series that I do not know why it has not been optioned for a massive, massive, you know, streaming series at this point.

But anyway, yes, we are moving towards self-driving cars, artificial uteruses, and whatever else we talked about this week. I don't know. It's too early in the morning, Brian. My brain's fried. I know.

Media candy. Well, it felt like for a few weeks or maybe even months there, there wasn't too much to watch on TV, but I have a pretty exhaustive list of all the things that we're going to be doing and not much else because there's a lot of it in the coming weeks.

Shrinking Season 2 is out now. I've watched the first two episodes. It's very charming, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of it. The Diplomat Season 2 drops on Halloween, October 31st. Star Trek Lower Decks Season 5 dropped yesterday, the first two episodes, and I watched both.

Funny. I think they're trying to actually do a plot, which is a bit of a bummer, but there's a lot of good jokes in there still. Silo Season 2 drops November 15th. Dune Prophecy, the series, comes November 17th. Oh my god, we're going to be busy.

Star Trek Section 31, which is now a movie rather than a series, will be dropping on January 25th of next year. Daredevil Born Again comes March 4th of next year. And Star Trek Strange New World Season 3 will be at some point in 2025, but at that point, my eyeballs will be fried from everything else I just watched.

And your ass will be too sore from sitting on the couch. Yeah. Pretty much. Time for yoga at some point in there. No, I'm looking forward to everything on this list. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be good stuff. Yep. And we've got some other good news. Star Trek, Starfleet Academy has already gotten a Season 2 renewal, and we haven't even seen Season 1 yet.

Nope. So, and they've added Tatiana, what did you say her last name was? I can't pronounce it. I believe it's Maslany. Maslany. Okay. Tatiana Maslany, also known as She-Hulk in Space, is coming to Starfleet Academy. I'm actually bummed we're not getting another season of She-Hulk.

I like that. I know. It's one of the few... Dude, it was so good. It's one of the few Marvel things I've enjoyed, which must be telling, because I hated the rest of the Marvel stuff, and because I like that, I guess that means Marvel people didn't like it, so... Yeah, I think it was too expensive. There was a lot of effects in that.

I mean, She-Hulk... It was fun, though. It was so much fun. It was so much fun. But speaking of She-Hulk, Black Mirror, Outer Banks and She-Hulk actor Nicholas Cirillo joins cast of Season 7. I don't remember who Nicholas Cirillo was, but I'm just glad that Black Mirror is coming back with a Season 7.

There you go. And it's coming back with six new episodes, including a sequel to the sci-fi adventure of the USS Callister, which is apparently one of the show's most popular episodes with Jesse Plemons. Remember that one? It was kind of a Star Trek ripoff? Yeah. Yeah. So, they were going to do a revamp on that one, or a prequel, as it were, so...

Or sequel, sorry. Told you. Early. Coffee's not working yet. In terrible news, in terrible news, Good Omens is going to end with one 90-minute episode instead of the full season, because Neil Gaiman's pecker is becoming problematic. Say that five times fast.

Neil Gaiman's pecker is becoming problematic because he poked Amanda Palmer first, and now he moved on to his interns. Damn it. I'm actually, I'm not entirely sure this is bad news. I mean, obviously, they're cutting it short because they don't want him to write anymore for it.

They want to distance themselves, so they're going to work with whatever he had done before his problematic pecker was discovered. Yes. And so, that's that. But honestly, they're working completely off script at this point. Yep. I don't mind it. Wrap it up quick. That's fine.

Pack it full of jokes, make it interesting, and don't stretch it out even longer. Yeah, the good news is Rob Wilkins is going to be one of the execs now. He's basically taking over for Neil Gaiman. And Rob Wilkins, if anybody doesn't know, is basically Terry Pratchett's right-hand man for decades.

Yeah. So, you know, we're getting the Terry Pratchett royalty in on this one, which is fantastic. Also, Josh Cole, who is the BBC Studios production head of comedy. So, we've got two pretty good heavy hitters coming in to take over, so I'm not too worried about it.

Should be fine. I'm looking forward to it. And I'm okay with just basically a movie. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bummer, though. You know? Well, what are you going to do? Yeah. Yeah. It is off script, though. Oh, yeah. Don't fuck your interns. That's what you're going to do. Oh, damn it. No, allegedly.

Brian, allegedly. Allegedly. Yeah. Midnight Mass is a series on Netflix. I think it was from 2022. My friend Dean turned me on to it because I told him I was so disappointed with the new Salem's Lot. And he's like, oh, you got to check out Midnight Mass.

It's a seven-part miniseries. Very spooky. Very, very good. Highly recommend it if you like the spooky things. It's kind of like a Salem's Lot-ish type of retelling, so I highly recommend that. The fun part about this is, you know, I've been getting into more spooky stuff because Halloween's coming.

Now, I did some math. I was looking at, as people who listen to the show know, that I've been sober for quite some time now, coming up on, you know, well over a year and a half. And I looked at my dates, and I'm like, okay, what are we doing here for Halloween? Am I getting close? Turns out, Brian, on Halloween this year, I will be 666 days sober.

Okay. Fuck yeah. That's kind of cool. I couldn't have planned that any better because, you know, I have an affinity for 666. It's not because I'm a Satanist. It's because I'm Gen X. And when I was a kid, I snuck into my parents' room and watched The Omen when it was on HBO, when HBO first came out.

666. Exactly. And I'm a big fan of Iron Maiden. I bought a Rottweiler because I was such a fan of The Omen. Poor Bam Bam would have been nine years old in a couple days. Boo. But, and I was on Sean Penn's Sunday School, episode 666.

I have a long history of 666. So, I think that this is a good sign, Brian. It's a good sign for sobriety. Okay. I'm proud of you. Go check out Midnight Mass is what I'm getting back to. Thank you. And everybody knows I was a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I did a re-watch on the show about five or six years ago. The series has been bounced around all the streaming services, but it's finally back in time for Halloween on Tubi. So, you can watch it on Tubi, the fast network. I unfortunately can't watch it anymore because I became really good friends with the guy that played Spike.

And I watched that and I'm like, that's not him. No, that's not. I hang out with a different guy. So, when I watch it, I'm like, no, I can't do it anymore. You ever have that when you meet somebody famous and get to know them and you can't watch what they do? My version of that is I can't really listen to their music anymore. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. The Lincoln Lawyer Season 3 came out this week. We're almost halfway through it. It's as good as the other seasons so far. I like it. Pretty formulaic. But I'm digging it. I'm digging it. Lioness Season 2 got a sneak peek that comes out October 27th.

Looks pretty good. Looks pretty good. Nicole Kidman's plastic surgery has finally toned down enough where she doesn't look like an alien like she did in Season 1. Oh, her forehead moves now? No. Well, I don't know about her forehead. Her lips were the big problem. Her lips were so poofy in the first season.

You could tell it was right after she got them done and it just did not look like her at all. At all. So, I guess I'm going to have to look for a Paramount Plus deal now because Lower Decks is back. All the Star Trek stuff's coming back. I want to see Lioness. So, yeah. I got Hulu with ads for free, though, last week from my Rouse card.

That's how much they're giving this stuff away. They're like, here's your Brussels sprouts. Would you like some Hulu with that? I'm like, sure. Maybe if you go get a tank of gas at Arco, you might get Paramount Plus. Keep your eyes open. Maybe. Oh, funny. Joseph wrote in within a few minutes of this news breaking, and I had already seen it.

So, first. But anyways, Cruel World Fest date lineup and ticket release has been announced. Probably more at Brian's alley than Jason's. Lots of fun names there. Here's the info. Tickets go live on October 25th, which is basically right now at 11 a.m. I will not be buying tickets because I don't feel like flying back for this one.

I'm a bit underwhelmed, really, by the lineup. I mean, don't get me wrong. I like almost every single band that's playing it, but I think I'm underwhelmed because almost all of these bands have already done the Cruel World Festival or Darker Waves or Coachella or any of the other SoCal festivals that have been held in the last year or two.

And it makes me realize that there just aren't that many bands from our youth that are still out there touring because they're all playing the same festivals over and over again now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Next year in cashing in 2025. I did look at the lineup.

I was totally underwhelmed by it. I'm just like, I know. Well, again, I like every band. It's just. You don't love them, though. That's the thing. Well, I love Garbage, but I hardly consider them like a throwback band, although they are at this point. I have OMD's fantastic live.

I just saw them, though. New Order's kind of crap live. I'd rather see Peter Hook touring it than those guys anymore. I mean, I like a lot of these bands. And as you pointed out, Devo is in this lineup. I just saw Devo in what I thought was supposed to be their last show. Yeah. And they did a residency in Vegas that our friend Fogarty went to as well.

I thought that was like the last hurrah. And now they're coming back already? I'm like, damn, that money ran out fast. They never went away. That's the thing. So you posted in your, I thought Devo retired. And I wrote, why, yes, in 2023. Funny sort of thing, their retirement. And I have a link in the show notes to them discussing retiring over a year and a half ago.

God. Which they obviously have not done because they've played every festival known to man. And I don't know if you've noticed this on Instagram. Everybody that's playing that show is running sponsored ads for this festival. It's just like, I can scroll like, you know, for like 10 posts and four of them are for this festival.

Yeah, I think that they, I think they know that this is going to be a hard sell, that the novelty has run off. And these are the same bands recycling around now. It was cool as fuck when they first announced them. And the, you know, these bands were playing for the first time in ages and all together and everything. But now that we've gone a few seasons of the same show.

Yeah. Yeah. We might need to change the channel, unfortunately.

Apps and doodads. Hat tip to Vinny on this one. Adobe has made its painting app completely free to take on Procreate. And this is the painting app Fresco, which I don't, have you ever tried Fresco, Brian? I have not. No, I haven't either.

I knew I got it when I had the all you can eat Adobe package for a while. Yeah. Because there's like 30 apps in there. Oh, I know. And 20 of them I'd never heard of. And I still just use Photoshop and Illustrator. That's about it. Nowadays, I'm just using Photoshop even. But I downloaded it.

I got it because now it's free. And the nice thing about it is you have full access to the Adobe fonts, which is, you know, one of those things that you really want because it's like one of the main selling points for any of this stuff. So go grab it now. It's on iPad, iPhone and Windows PCs. Cool.

Yeah, I think they're trying to go after Procreate because Procreate came out and said, hey, no AI ever. And they're like, we got some AI. Fuck it. Let's throw it in there. Saw this one this morning. This is brand new. MidJourney has launched a new edit feature that lets users modify existing user images.

Because before, I don't know if you ever tried this with MidJourney, Brian, you could upload a reference image and it would kind of use that for its generation, for what you wanted it to do. But it wasn't using the actual image, which was a bummer. But now you can upload the image and, you know, kind of draw around it and tell it what you want.

And then it kind of fills it in, which is what we always wanted when we were uploading images. Now, Photoshop's had this for a bit, but Photoshop is a little hamstrung because, you know, they quote unquote say that they are abiding by copyright. Sure you are. Fuck that. Yeah.

No, I want some Wild West shit here. If we're, you know, if we're breaking the internet and breaking the world, let's make some fun shit for it. So there's a video on the link in the show notes that I watched this morning and it's pretty impressive. But it is a demo. So caveat emptor.

I'm going to give it a shot for sure because there's some things that I've always wanted to do with MidJourney that I tried for hours and hours and hours to get it to do it. It would never do for my reference images. So now this might be the way to go. And you can do it on the web interface, which is really nice instead of having to go through Discord, which is a pain in the ass.

All right. So, but you have to be a, I think you have to be, there's, there's a, if you're not a paid user, you have to have some kind of crazy. There's, there's restrictions around it. Like you've had to make 10,000 images or some stuff like that, but definitely worth checking out. Perplexity.

Have you been playing with perplexity much? We talked about it last episode. No, I, I, I, I fired it up. The thing for me is I don't, I haven't delved into the AI content creation the way you have. Like for me, it's, it's a novelty. I play with it for a few seconds and I'm done. I, I, I'm not really, I do it sometimes for our, for our artwork.

I'll do some image creation because that's easier than finding, you know, weird things that fit our quirky sense of humor. But, uh, and I don't really do text creation for anything. I write my own stuff and I'm just old school that way. I'm old man yelling at a cloud now, Jason, except really a cloud, the AI cloud.

Fuck that. The other people's computer cloud. Yep. Um, so I've been using it a lot for marketing research and things like that. There's a lot of stuff in the marketing world that is, is really useful for all of the AI stuff. And I'm actually taking a couple of classes, one from Google and one from Ben's bites in the coming weeks, which I'll be reporting back on the Google one sounds really interesting.

Um, the Ben's bites ones, not so, not sure so much about, but it's free. They're both free. Right. Um, if I dig them up, I'll put some links in the show notes. So yeah, I'd like to take the Google one. Yeah. The Google one sounds actually pretty good. Um, you, you have to do have to do some homework, but you do get some free compute credits, which is nice.

Um, but anyway, back to perplexity, uh, this week they launched the Mac app. So if you have a Mac, like you and I both do, uh, you can get the perplexity app that runs next to, of course, your chat GPT app. And you got your apps for this and your apps for that. And I got the thing and the, you got the Claude and the other, uh, the problem with the perplexity AI app for the Mac OS is that it comes with these built in key commands and they're fucking dumb.

It, it completely hijacked shift command V, which for me is I use everywhere because it's also paste without formatting for most apps. Nobody can get that shit together. Yeah. And, uh, I actually went into, you can actually go into the keyboard controls in, in your system settings and, you know, manually put in paste without formatting a shift command V this one supersedes even that one.

So, but they do make it very easy. It's very easy to go in and remove those key commands. Okay. So, but the app is actually really nice. You can even talk to it and upload files, do all the normal stuff. I don't have a paid perplexity account, so I'm kind of hamstrung on a lot of it, but, um, with the new stuff that they've got coming out, it actually, I might end up, uh, pulling the trigger if I can get some client work on, on it next week.

So it, uh, it looks, the new stuff they've got looks pretty good. So checking that out. Like I said, for a lot of the research stuff that I'm doing, the AI stuff makes a lot of sense. Right. But you know, for the image creation stuff, yeah, you, you, you, you, you're making a deal with the devil.

You're making a deal with the devil. But definitely. Anyway, uh, blue sky is teasing creator payments while new signups explode. Not, not, it's not just John Scalzi anymore, Brian, is it? Okay. I don't know.

I don't know. I'm not, I have a blue sky account, but I don't ever look at it. Okay. I thought you were still checking that one out. No, uh, no, I've got a, I've got a bookmark. That's about as far as I've gone. I've got a bookmark. Uh, so they've announced a $15 million series a, which seems kind of small when you, when you think about all of the other funding that we've heard about all the other AI crap, the $6 billion and $15 million seems like pocket lint nowadays, especially once the funding round is led by blockchain capital.

You know, the funny thing is like $15 million sounds completely reasonable to me for what this is. And I think we've just been so blown away by the insane amount of money that so many people are raising that is so above and beyond what they actually would need. Now that doesn't include AI because you need so much compute and that costs a shit ton of money and you have to drain the Amazon river and you got to pay off the correct politicians to do that.

So you need a bunch of money. You need lots of money. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, but I mean, they've gone from 1 million users to 13 million users in just a year. That's pretty impressive. I'd like to see the threads numbers. I think they're higher, but there's also. Well, threads numbers are insanely higher because they cheated.

Yeah. They basically, if you had an Instagram account. Yeah. If you had an Instagram account, you had a, you got a threads account for free. You know, that was, that was cheating. We don't even, I can't even in good faith count the threads numbers for anything. Yeah. Um, but here's the thing. They said, they're exploring new features like paid subscriptions and create a payment system, which whatever.

Uh, but the platform remains clear. It won't embrace crypto or NFTs. Okay. Even though, even though your, your funding round comes from a company called blockchain capital. That's so we'll, we'll see if that promise holds.

It won't. Okay. Uh, in more, uh, doodad news, you've got, uh, AirPods pro twos, right, Brian? I do. Yeah. Well, very soon I'm, I'm on the 18 one ahead of the schedule launch. Cause I do the public beta.

Uh, I got this last night. The new firmware for the AirPods pro two is out and with 18.1 for iOS, you can actually do the hearing aid stuff and the hearing tests. So it's cool. I tried it. I actually went through it and did it last night.

Here's the amazing part. My test indicates that I have little to no hearing loss. I could not believe it. Um, so I'm right in the range. I put some screen caps in here so you can check them out. Uh, I could not believe that, uh, my hearing is not screwed from all those years of concerts without earplugs, but yeah, well, we, we actually were going at an age when, before they really started to crank things up.

So hopefully that will be helpful, but, uh, I've seen ministry live. Me too. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There's a loudest concert I've ever been to in my entire life. Oh my God. Left field, the electronic band. Oh my God. That was the loudest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.

Okay. Anyways. Uh, now this is, this is good news. I'm going to definitely check this out. The problem is I'm going to have to Google. How do I update my firmware on AirPods because it happens so infrequently. I can't remember the process to do it because there is no process, Brian. Really? I thought you had to go into like the Bluetooth and then it did something.

It just updates itself. It does it on its own. So here's what I do every night. I plug in my AirPods to charge and then plug it right next to my plugged in phone and hope that it happens. That's it. That's all you can do is hope. Um, what you want to look for is you, you do want to go into your Bluetooth settings and, uh, do the, uh, get info on your AirPods.

And then if you scroll down to the bottom, it'll tell you your firmware version. You're looking for seven B 19. That's what you're looking for. Okay. So, and then you just kind of hope I, I opened and closed mine a lot, connected them, disconnected them, did all sorts of stuff. I didn't, I didn't stoop to killing a chicken, but I think it may resort to that at some point.

Um, but this is Apple. So it might have to be a vegan chicken that you have to kill. I don't know how that works. All right. I'm okay. I'm still on six. Well, it might, it might take, uh, it might not be triggered until you get the 18.1. Update on your phone. Sorry. Yeah.

That's coming up, I think in a week. So you should have it soon, uh, or sign up for the public beta for a day. Then you'll get it. And then just then turn it off. So, cause it's, it's the golden master now for 18.1. That's out. Right. So you should be good to go. Cool. Uh, yeah. And you've upgraded to Sequoia, right?

Of course. Yes. See, I, and there's a new feature in Sequoia that I didn't know what it was. I thought it was maybe one of the apps that I was running. It was driving me crazy. Every time I dragged a window to the top of the screen, it would, automatically full screen it. And I'm like, what the fucking shit of it? Turns out it's a feature, not a bug.

So, uh, it's a new snap window tiling mechanism that they have built into Sequoia. And once you know, it's there, it's kind of neat because if you go to your window, uh, settings, you can actually do, there's a full screen tile, uh, option.

There's also a move and resize option, which lets you break apart your window and you don't have to run a secondary app like magnet that we used to run. I don't know if you used to run magnet. No, no, I got rid of it a while ago. Yeah. It kept screwing up, um, on mine, especially because I was running it on a laptop.

And when I plug it into an external monitor, you have to like redo all the settings and it didn't stick the settings all the time. So that was the same problem I had. Yeah. Yeah. So this is built into the OS. I put a link in the show notes on, uh, how it works and how you can learn how to use it. So it's kind of cool.

Cool. Uh, I sent you a link this week on a chat to somewhere about the web design museum. Did you get a chance to check that out? I did. I looked through it. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. I didn't see anything that I worked on in there, which was kind of a bummer. So I may have to send them some old screenshots. Um, oh, wait, no, no, no.

I take that back. Titanic was in there. They had, they had a, a small subset of the screen. screenshots from Titanic. Um, but, uh, it's pretty cool just to go back and look at some of the old websites that we used to know and love. Uh, they start from way back in 91 up to the mid 2000s.

So it's a fun little jaunt for us old time web designers to go check out. Definitely. Yeah. There wasn't anything that I had done in there. Kind of bummed me out too. I was like, I did some big sites, damn it. Yeah, you did. You did. Do you have any old, uh, demos that you, uh, put together? Because if you've got somewhere, I was going to say, if you've got screenshots of the homepages for those, send them in.

Cause I think I'm going to send, I've got like all the old movies I worked on back in the day from, you know, the phantom I've even got, uh, Oh, what was it? Uh, beautician in the beast as a winner. There you go. Uh, I found another cool tool, uh, called diff text.

It's an online differ. Uh, I, it, it's one of those things where if you need it, you really need it. And if you don't, you'll never fucking care, but I'm used to the command line diff tool. If you've ever had to use that just to check multiple files to see how they differ. Uh, this is pretty cool.

You just drag in some text and, uh, it tells you exactly what the differences are. All right. So it's a fun one. Link is in the show notes. And I want to talk about setup for one second. Uh, another hat tip to Vinny on this one this week. Uh, he sent us a note saying that his, uh, email client du jour was going tits up.

So he was looking for something different. So I'm like, go check out spark on set app. Uh, because my, my spark subscription had lapsed about a week or so ago. And I let it lapse because it was costing me like 40 bucks a year. And I'm like, since I had a set app subscription, the, um, the people at spark had joined set app.

So now I don't have to pay spark for my subscription. I get it free with my set app subscription. Well, not free. You have to pay for set app, but it, the cost over the year is, is much less than getting all of the different pieces of software. Right. So, um, also clean my Mac has a nice update that comes with set app as well.

I don't know. Have you checked out the, the 5.0 version of clean my Mac? No, I think I have to pay to upgrade on. Oh, that's right. Yes. See, maybe you should get set app, right? Maybe I should. Because it comes for free on all of your Macs. Yes. Uh, it's beautiful.

It is a really, really nice upgrade that they've done for clean my Mac. I am very impressed with that. Uh, but you also get bartender, iStat menus, and a ton of other stuff like Downey for downloading videos. Uh, TimeMater for time tracking. Renamer is a really nice batch, uh, file renamer.

Tons of stuff. So I, I'll put a link in the show notes. Go check out set app. But I still recommend Spark for email, for sure. Okay. Uh, we talked about Suno when they first came out. It's one of those music AI places. And of course, they got the shit suit out of them by every major label. Because, you know, of course.

They just- They should have been called Sue Yes, not Sue No. Uh, so they've, they've now moved into the, we better start making partnerships phase of, of piracy. And that's what they're doing. Uh, they're excited to announce that they've partnered with Grammy-winning super producer, Timbaland, to celebrate he's sharing his new single, Love Again, exclusively on Sono, ahead of its official release.

And you'll be able to remix it using their AI tools. They're giving out over 100k in prizes, plus the top two remixes get an official release. So your, your, your creations too, can be put into the gristle mill. Yeah, exactly. Oh, uh, at least they're trying.

Yeah, they're trying. They're, they're making deals. They're trying to do something. I, you know, this is a Pandora's box thing. It's open. We can't stuff it back in. Let's figure something out. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Uh, and I, this is a follow-up on an old story that we've been, we've been following for a couple years now.

The, the, uh, the demise of the floppy disk. It just won't go away. San Francisco is spending $212 million to upgrade its Muni Metrolite rail system, which still relies on five and a quarter inch floppy disks for its automatic train control system installed in 1998.

Why bother when the self-driving cars are doing so well up there? I know, I know. Why don't they just buy a bunch of Tesla cyber cabs and be done with it? Uh, so yeah, they're getting rid of the old system and they're getting a new system from Hitachi rail. All right. Part of a $700 million overhaul.

So, you know, it's, you know, part of, part of the plan, I guess they had, Brian, they have a plan. They have a plan. Good. Unlike the Cylons. Is that a Cylon grunt? Still upsets me to this day. I found it's the 20th and 20th anniversary.

Cause we old, uh, they're all getting together somewhere. I saw all the posts on social media, Katie Sackhoff and, you know, I, almost everybody from the show is they're getting together to celebrate the 20th anniversary. Well, more AI stuff taking a firm stance against tech companies, unlicensed use of its authors works.

The publishing giant penguin random house will change the language on all of its books, copyright pages to expressly prohibit their use in training against artificial intelligence systems, according to reporting by the bookseller. So basically they're adding a robots.txt file to every book. I think that's what I was going to say.

Yeah. Sounds like robots.txt to me. Yeah. Matthew Sack, an AI and copyright expert at Emory University School of Law said penguin random house's new language appears to be directed at the European union market, but could also impact how AI companies in the U.S. use its material under EU law.

They won't. Under EU law, copyright holders can opt out of having their work data mined. While that right isn't enshrined in U.S. laws, the largest AI developers generally don't scrape content behind paywalls or content excluded by sites robot.txt files. Actually, that is fucking not true as we've covered a gazillion times on this show already.

So not true. That is 100% not true. They're all in trouble for it. So good luck, penguin random house in the U.S. If you want it not to be trained on AI here, don't fucking publish it here. That's it. Don't publish it. There we go. Oh. Idiot.

So I saw this new thing last night called Bookcase by Astropad. It is a phone case, sort of. And what it does... Did you look at this thing? This is the most ridiculous fucking thing I've ever seen. It is so fucking stupid. It is so stupid.

It's basically a case with handles on it so you can hold your phone. And what it does is, is when you clip the phone in, it turns on Do Not Disturb. It's basically what it does. It turns on Do Not Disturb and opens the app that you want to open, like your Kindle app or whatever reader mode app that you're going to go through.

The case itself has no electronics besides an NFC reader or an NFC chip at the top and a magnet. The handles on it don't do anything. You can't swipe. You still have to reach over and change the page normally. And...

But Brian, right now, for launch, it's 20% off. It's usually $50. Now you can get it for $40. You can basically turn on Do Not Disturb mode in this stupid little case for $40. Now...

It's so dumb. It's so dumb. It's so fucking dumb. I almost have no words. It's not even aesthetically attractive. No, it's not. I don't know, Brian. It's just... It is definitely the worst thing I've seen this week.

Well, I'm sure you will not be able to purchase it within a few months. Closing shout-outs! Over at Patreon, nobody. Nobody loves us on Patreon today, Brian. I saw a tumbleweed blow past when I loaded it. I know.

Just a reminder, if you sign up over at Patreon, patreon.com slash GOG, you can get the show early, a little bit, depending on the week. Probably not this week. You get it ad-free, and you get it high-res, and you basically keep the show on the air, is the important part.

Yeah, you warm the cockles of our bank accounts. Yeah, it's only... It starts at $3 a month, and if you want, you can get the whole year and get 5% off if you want. But please, sign up, patreon.com slash GOG. I mean, really? What are you going to do, buy a bookcase by Astropod? Seriously.

You can fund us for over a year instead of buying a bookcase by Astropod. And over at PayPal, we've got Tom, Joseph, and David. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Over at the tip jar, we've got Eric and Ross.

And no reviews. Ooh! I do want to throw a birthday-related shout-out here. Belated birthdays, actually, because I meant to put this in last week, but I forgot to check the note that said, put this in the notes. So, happy belated birthday to friends of the show MXV and Gabriel Pagan.

Happy birthday, everybody. Happy birthday. And, well, not so happy death day. We've got a couple deaths this week. Philip G. Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist behind the controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, has died at 91. All right. You were a psychology major.

You followed the Stanford Prison Experiment. Yeah, we covered that. Yeah, that was a problematic study. You think? Yeah. Oh, man. And Ward Christensen, the BBS inventor and architect of our online age, has died at age 78.

Yeah, I read that article because I wanted to see which program he had written and if I'd ever used it. And I had not used his particular flavor. It came a little bit later on. Yep. Yep. So, you will be missed, Ward. You did good work. You did damn good work.

I had a lot of fun as a kid running BBSs. So, thank you all for that. And in sad news, Dodger icon Fernando Valenzuela has passed away at the young age of 63. Yeah. I'm not entirely sure what happened. But he's been sick for a while, but kept it very private.

So, whenever the family decides to release that information, they will. God, from Nando mania, such a part of my childhood. My dad took me to Dodgers games. I saw him pitch many, many times. So, just an amazing pitcher and a huge part of the L.A. Dodgers story. He's worked for years doing Spanish commentary.

He's always been around. We've lost Fernando and we've lost, what's his face? Why am I blanking on his name right now? The legendary announcer, Vin Scully. Vin Scully and Fernando are the Dodgers in my mind. So, it's kind of sad. But speaking of that, the World Series does start tonight.

The Dodgers versus the Yankees. Another matchup I haven't seen since I was a kid. I think a lot of people are pretty excited for it. And what better motivation do the Dodgers need? Do it for El Toro. Come on. Yeah, that's all anybody's talking about here down in L.A.

Yeah, it's a big deal, man. It is a big deal. It is a big deal. I used to play Dodgers versus Yankees on my video games back in the day. So, we'll see how it goes. Good luck, Brian. Good luck. Thank you. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

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A five-star rating just might get your review read on the air. And stay grumpy. 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.

KFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com.