672: Elon or Not?

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, I'm back in my old studio today. Congratulations. Thank you. It's been sitting dormant for months because I haven't been able to rent it out and I just gave up the ghost. But the other reason was my roommate pointed out, you know, it's winter and it gets cold in the garage.

I went out this morning. It was 48 degrees in the garage. I'm like, you know, I love doing this show, but not that much. So here we are. Well, you're paying for the studio anyway, so you might as well use it. Yeah. Long story on that one. Got fucked over. But anyway, let's move on. What do you got for us today, Brian?

Well, we've got yet another class action lawsuit, and we all know my opinion on this. You need to take these companies for whatever money is offered because, goddammit, it's your damn job to do it. And quite a few of our listeners may or may not have used this app. Cash App, which I personally have.

Yeah, there you go. Well, heads up if you've had a Cash App account over the last six years or so, you may now be able to claim thousands of dollars as a result of a class action settlement. The company proposed the $15 million settlement earlier this year following the two security incidents that they've had.

Kind of bad if it's a Cash App. Yeah, it really is. If you're eligible to make a claim, you only have a few more weeks to do so. This is a consolidated class action complaint that alleged that Cash App and parent company Block failed to enact sufficient security measures to prevent data breaches. They've denied any wrongdoing, which is why they're ponying up $15 million.

Okay. $15 million doesn't seem like that much money. Yeah, but they say the settlement is not an admission of liability either. So if you've had an account between August 23rd, 2018 and August 20th of this year, you will be able to get some. The settlement will cover up to $2,500 of out-of-pocket costs stemming from the breaches, as well as up to three hours worth of lost time at $25 per hour.

Excuse me, I make more than $25 an hour, so what the hell? Yes, those few hours that we work. We have to sue Jack's beard instead of suing Cash App. Yes, I agree. So there it is. Go get it. Link in the show notes. Okay. I got another one this morning, just right before we started recording, and I didn't have time to put it in the notes, but there's apparently a Peacock class action lawsuit that I'm getting looped in on as well.

So if you've had Peacock in the past, however long it is, check your email because you might be part of a class action for that one, too. All right. I don't think I've ever actually paid for Peacock. I did for a while. Right. That was one show that I wanted to watch, and that was it.

Yes. Isn't this new brave world of streaming awesome? Yeah. Maybe I'll get some cash back on that. That would be nice because Peacock was definitely the weakest of all of the streaming services. Oh, no, no, I take that back. A&E Plus was definitely the worst. There was only Interview with a Vampire, and that was the only show on there, but Peacock's second worst.

So I've been saying this since the day that Elon announced this, Brian, and it's finally hitting the news. Tesla's decision to rely solely on camera-based sensors for its full self-driving technology is under scrutiny because unlike competitors using LiDAR and radar, Tesla did eliminate ultrasonic sensors back in 2022, opting exclusively for cameras.

The approach has faced criticism, especially after incidents where FSD-equipped vehicles failed to detect obstacles in low availability conditions like fog or sun glare. I don't know if you saw the video going around this week, Brian, but it was of a Tesla driving at night that just plowed down a deer, a little baby deer about the size of a small child.

Fucking Bambi. Killing Bambi. Fucking Bambi. I know. So the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating for such collisions, including a fatality, potentially leading to a recall of, wait for it, 2.4 million vehicles. Okay.

Now, we know recall means not really recall anymore, so, you know, press the update button. Experts suggest that weather conditions can impair camera performance, posing challenges for Tesla's planned robo-taxi service, which we know is never going to be here. Yeah.

Yeah. Despite CEO Elon Musk's longstanding promises of imminent, fully autonomous vehicles, Tesla's FSD technology continues to lag behind competitors like Waymo. Yeah, we know. We know because we follow Waymo. So, yeah, I said from the day, from the get, when he said we're taking away LiDAR, it's like, no, that's the thing you need.

You need depth perception. I don't care how many cameras you have. You're not going to get proper depth perception. And that's what you need for cars. You're going to need your car to work in fog. Mm-hmm. I'm just saying, especially if you're trying to go for San Francisco.

I saw a hack this morning on Instagram. Somebody was – it was basically a fog driving hack where somebody was holding up their iPhone to the window because it cleared out the fog. It made it look much better. So they were looking at their iPhone while they're driving through the fog. It was great. Who knew?

The Tesla needs a Rudolph. In the news.

Now, Brian, it's been an interesting week for Trump Social. Mm-hmm. It is now apparently in – has transferred over to meme stock land because there's two headlines, which I loved. First one was Trump Social Media Company is now worth more than Musk's X after recent surge in stock price.

Yeah. Now, this was on – this was early in the week. Yes. And so it's – Trump Social jumped to over $10 billion in value. Now, the funny part about that is X is now only worth $9.4 billion. What's the bigger headline there? Yeah.

It was $44 billion. Now, it's $9.4. That's a lot of shareholder value that just went out the window. Yeah. Everybody was – I mean, that made the mainstream news. That's the only reason I found out about it because it was on the L.A. news. I'm like, wow, that's interesting, sort of. And then, of course, at the end of the week, Trump loses $1.3 billion in net worth after the worst ever day for his social media stock.

The meme giveth, the meme taketh away. Yeah, I haven't really been following. I got really depressed when he posted the first one about it going up and just doing really, really well. And I got really happy when he posted the second one where it tanked because as Scott Galloway has long since claimed, and I also believe, I think, that the stock price for True Social, which, yes, it is a meme stock.

I would actually more consider it a political stock because his belief is that this is going to be a harbinger of the election. The better his stock does is the better chance that he has of winning the election. The worse his stock does, the worse chance he has because basically nobody in their right mind would actually fucking invest in this company.

It's purely putting your money in Trump's mouth. Right, right. It's a campaign contribution for the most part. Exactly. That's all it is. So good to see it go down. I'm happy about that. Okay. Hopefully somebody shorted it. They actually use a different term for it for True Social.

It's small handing it. Okay. Nice. Thank you. I got some breaking news, Jason. Standing desks are the new eggs. Are they as delicious, though? Absolutely not, unless yours is made of chocolate. Ooh. Yeah, so this just came out.

There's been a massive series of studies about this. And as we know, the global market for standing desks is booming, projected to reach $12.6 billion by 2032. I am sitting at a standing desk right now. I'm standing at a standing desk right now.

Yeah, I know you've got it as well. Now, I put a bunch of stuff in here from the article. You might want to go read it yourself if you're interested in this and following it. This was a study from Australia which involved over 83,000 participants, which is not insignificant. And the TLDR on this is just standing or just sitting are both bad.

You need to move your ass. Duh. So basically, you need a treadmill desk. Had one of those. Yeah. It's hard to work when you're doing that. It really is. You get used to it. You get used to it. But honestly, just move around a lot. Don't – if you're standing in one place and not moving your feet, yeah, you're going to get the same problems.

It's never been about always standing or always – I always switch it up. That's why I got the motorized one like, you know, seven or eight years ago. Yeah. I got a motorized standing desk with a really nice chair. So I sit for about 20% of the day and I stand for about 80%. And about out of that 80%, 20% is on a Bosu balance ball.

Yeah, I try to follow the 40-20 rule where I'm working for 40 minutes, I get up and walk around for 20. I know that's hard to do for some people. Oh, it's Pomodoro. But yeah. Yeah, it works. It really works. So don't do either for a long time.

It's almost kind of a no-brainer. But I mean, to be fair, standing desks have marketed themselves as healthier than a normal desk and not really true. I don't know about that. And I think they definitely are. But it's all about the dose, you know, the poison is in the dose.

Well, let's shift gears a little bit here. We've got some Facebook news. In a troubling development, anti-government militia groups are using Facebook to recruit and organize openly ahead of the U.S. election next week. So just like the last time, except – Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. Extremist groups like the 3%ers are discussing civil war preparations.

3% because that's as high as they can count. Including ballot box stakeouts to monitor election activity. Meta, Facebook's parent company, has reportedly banned such groups. But data from the Tech Transparency Project reveals over 260 Facebook groups and pages are still in use by militias since 2021.

With some pages – wait for it, Brian – even auto-generated by Facebook's algorithms. I had no idea that that was actually happening. I mean not even just for militia groups but just in general. The fact that Facebook's algorithms is auto-generating groups that they hope people will populate.

I hate Facebook. Yeah, this is an old thing. I thought they got rid of the practice. But, yeah, they've been doing that for, God, a long, long time, obviously. But, yeah, I remember when they were doing this and I was like, what? They were pre-populating it with content from around Facebook.

So when somebody stumbled upon it, you know, the Knitting Ponies group, they could have one ready and spun up and ready to join. They're like, oh, you're the first person to join. Would you like to run the whole thing? Sure. Great. It's going to be a fun election year. I'm happy to be out of the country for this one.

I bet. Yeah. Well, I got some pink slip news, Jason. We haven't done that in a while. For the second time in less than two years, Dropbox is laying off a substantial portion of its workforce. In a blog post penned by CEO Drew Houston, the company said it would cut its global headcount by 20% or 528 employees.

Not insignificant. They will provide impacted workers with up to 16 weeks of pay with tenured employees eligible for one additional week of pay for each complete year they worked at the company. All impacted employees will see their year-end equity vest, and the company will provide dedicated support to immigrant workers with one-on-one consultation and extra transition time.

Okay. Houston wrote, we continue to see its softening demand and macro headwinds in our core business, but external factors are only part of the story. We've heard from many of you that our organizational structure has become overly complex, much like my Dropbox itself, with excess layers of management slowing us down.

Partway through last year, they had laid off 500 employees, which was 16% of its workforce at the time. Basically, the theme here compared to what he said at the time they did the previous layoffs, slowing growth, which makes sense because, basically, cloud storage is a dime a dozen at this point.

Exactly. I mean, I went back to it after I was using iCloud for, I was using Dropbox forever, then I went to iCloud, because iCloud was included in all my stuff. iCloud sucks for a lot of things. The main fact is that you can't force an update like you can with Dropbox. So I went back to Dropbox.

So I pay Dropbox, but I just pay them a little less than I used to. That's all. Yeah. I still like the product. I'm not, you know. Yeah, they do a fine job. The integrations are great. It's convenient. It's more convenient and easier than most, but obviously, probably not for much longer. Yeah, and they've been trying to diversify, like I talked about last episode when I was talking about DocuSign, how they saw the writing on the wall for their product, you know, just basically being commoditized.

Dropbox actually has a version of that built into it, and the problem is that they're just trying to decommoditize themselves by adding on other commoditized features. So it's like, at some point, there has to have some innovation along the way, you know, and I think what we're seeing here, too, is that there's a lot of extra headcount after the pandemic, and a lot of companies are still trying to figure out how to, you know, reduce that headcount.

It's just taking some longer than others, I guess. That's true. All right. Well, let's get into the AI segment. It's unavoidable these days. We have to do it every single time, but this one is a bit of an eye-opener for me. We've talked a bit about OpenAI's Whisper.

I think you even ran some of our podcasts through it every now and then. I use it every week. I use it every week. Have you been double-checking its work, Jason? Oh, absolutely. I actually, yeah, yeah. Continue, Brian. We'll talk about it in a second. Okay. As this article states, imagine going to the doctor, telling them exactly how you're feeling, and then a transcription later adds false information and alters your story.

Apparently, this is happening a lot with people using OpenAI's Whisper. Over a dozen developers, software engineers, and academic researchers have been looking into this and found evidence that Whisper creates hallucinations, which is inventive text in this case. That includes made-up medications, racial commentary, and violent remarks, according to ABC News.

In the last month, open-source AI platform Hugging Face saw 4.2 million downloads of Whisper's latest version. This tool is also built into Oracle and Microsoft's cloud computing platforms, along with some versions of ChatGPT. Harmful evidence is quite extensive, with experts finding significant faults with Whisper across the board.

So, you know, basically, the TLDR on this, and there's a lot of examples in this article, is it's fun. Is it ready for prime time? Maybe, maybe not. Should you be using it in life and death situations? Abso-fucking-lutely not.

Oh, hell no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And the problem is, people are. Yeah. Over 30,000 clinicians and 40 health systems are using Whisper for medical transcription right now. Oh, you should not do that. Well, they are. You should not do that. No.

They are. So, you know, it's one thing to throw a podcast in there and spit it out. It's another thing to be doing banking. People in banking are using it. People, obviously, in the medical situation are using it. Bad. These aren't finished products. We all know this. It's in the news every fucking day.

And it's free. And it's free. Don't trust anything free. I don't want any of my medical stuff shouldn't be going through free systems. Or WordPress. Or Linux. Never use Linux. It's free. What the hell is wrong with you people? Kidding. No, this one is, it's just not good.

No. I was running some of Christopher Lockhead's podcasts through it. Because then I was going to take those transcripts and run them through some other software. And I was doing a bunch of stuff with it. And I noticed in Whisper there was one time, and I talked about this on the show. I don't have the example in front of me.

But there were URLs that were putting it in the middle of the conversation over and over and over again. It was like somebody hacked the model to insert, to inject their URL. But it was something like homehairpermanence.com or some shit like that. It was something totally random and didn't sound like what was being spoken about.

And it was really, really strange. And it was happening in different parts of the conversation from different speakers at the same time. It was totally not ready for prime time. So I switched models, and it went away. But I think I was using one of the faster models.

And I switched to like a medium model, and it came back just fine. But yeah, you've got to check that stuff. You can't just let it go. So I mean, it's a great starting point. If you have somebody on staff that wants to, you know, just basically run through and do the transcript, like check the transcription, it's a perfect starting point for that.

But if you're just going to take it, run it, and then put it on your website or give it to, I don't know, your patient. Yeah. Or not the patient. You're giving it to like the pharmacist, or you're giving it to the surgeon. I mean. Yeah, that's even worse. Yeah. Yeah.

Left arm versus right arm switch. Switcheroo bad. Very bad. Well, speaking of open AI, chat GPT can now search the web in a much better way than before. Or you can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which would have previously needed to go to a search engine for.

This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more. Chat GPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon. That is directly from their press release. And it showed up in my chat GPT app yesterday, and I've been giving it a go.

And it's not bad. Because it actually lists the sources as well, kind of like perplexity does. There are some that have obviously blocked it. I think TechCrunch is one of them, because basically I can put in, summarize this article with the URL.

And basically I was looking at a TechCrunch article, copied the URL, popped it in, and said, Ah, we can't get that one. No explanation. Ah, that one's unavailable. Sorry about that. Try something else. Would you like to go here or that? And everything else that I put in was fine.

And then I tried it again a little bit later. No, it wasn't a temporary glitch. It was definitely not being able to get the story. So maybe it's, maybe, maybe, Brian, it's respectingrobots.txt. Maybe. Maybe, maybe. Yeah. Then I just copied the article, you know, content, popped it into OpenAI or ChatGPT.

It summarizes just fine. So there is always a workaround. Yeah. Have you tried it yet? ChatGPT search? No, I've, I've, I've let it go on Google. So I'm getting Google's AI summarized search results just to kind of see how they're doing.

And they're okay. It depends on what you're searching for. If it's a straightforward technical or a question or fact-based thing, it's generally pretty good. If you ask anything more esoteric, I'd scroll past it and go look at things elsewhere. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's hit or miss.

Definitely. But just keep that glue off the pasta, Brian. Keep the glue off the pasta. I'm attempting to do so. OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman revealed that limited computing power is delaying the rollout of new AI products during a Reddit AMA. So he's saying that the growing complexity of AI models has forced OpenAI to make tough decisions about how to allocate its compute resources.

That's because Elon bought all the GPUs nowadays. So, and what they're going to be doing is they're going to be working with Broadcom to develop their own AI chip, which could be ready by 2026. All right. There's only so many computers in the world, I guess. You remember, like, we had a open SETI where we donated our own personal compute time to find extraterrestrial life?

Of course I do, Brian. Well, I'm just saying, Sam Altman could pay us a couple pittances, and I'll open up my compute for a bit. I don't know about you, Brian. Did you listen to the Hard Fork podcast? I did for a little bit. It kind of dropped off my radar. Okay. I was listening this morning to, they had Miles Brundage on.

Do you remember him? We talked about him like a couple of weeks ago. He was the former OpenAI senior advisor on artificial general intelligence readiness. Ah, yes. Yeah. Well, they had him on today. Mm-hmm. And since he lives in the AIG world, you know, if you're near a hammer, everything's a nail.

He was talking about how the world is going to change when we do have artificial general intelligence. Mm-hmm. And I just want to know what the fuck he's smoking, and can I get some? Because the way he's explaining it, we just watched the, was it episode two of the latest season of Lower Decks, where there was this post-scarcity world, and everybody's like, woo, this is fantastic.

We got replicators. We don't need to do anything anymore. Yep. This guy is, he's, in his head, AIG is going to be like, we wake up one morning and we have replicators, and people are going to be able to retire. There's going to be, the economy is going to be phenomenal across the globe.

Everything is going to be great. And I'm like, is your AI going to come replace the tile in my bathroom? Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing about these people that have drunk their own fucking Kool-Aid with this stuff. It's, what do you need? What do you need in life, Jason?

You need food. Okay. We need a replicator for that. Fucking artificial intelligence isn't going to solve that. You need clothes. Ditto. Okay. Maybe robots can make some clothes so it's a bit cheaper. But still got to pay for those robots. Still got to make the robots. Still got to lube the robots. Yeah. Got to fucking lube them up every now and then.

Somebody's got to do all that sort of stuff. Still got to get all the raw materials. That isn't created by the robots. Housing. Ditto. Same thing. Maybe they can build the houses. Somebody's got to get the fucking lumber. Somebody's got to pay for the lumber. It's all such a little shit, you know? Yeah. And it's just so fucking stupid.

And, you know, the rich thing about this is literally it's only the rich guys that talk about this utopia. Oh, yeah. It's the ones that are living in a current utopia on their taking their money baths that are telling us that we don't need to be worried about this. 110 percent, man. And it's like they have such a narrow view of the world.

It's like, go outside. Is your AIG going to clean the fucking man poo off the sidewalks in San Francisco? No, it's not. No, it's not. I don't know what it is. It has its place. It's doing some interesting things.

Some things it's obviously not doing like we just covered with Whisper. You know, if if it can't do a transcription, how is it going to rule the world, Brian? Yeah, that's that's all I want to know. If it can't do a basic transcription and understand our language, how is it going to rule and run the world?

And I can't remember who I was listening to. I have kind of upped my tech podcast listing recently, but I can't remember who it was. But somebody said something along the lines of, I'm really tired of the hypocrisy of all these people that have stayed two, three, four or five years within AI companies, made a hundred million dollars.

And now that they've got all their money, they're out there talking smack and worry about this. That's also happening. I'm sick of that. That was our show two weeks ago. Well, I mean, everything I hear on every tech show was our show two weeks ago. Exactly. No, we talked, we literally talked about that two weeks ago and it's, I'm sure it's probably Scott Galloway because you still listen to, you still listen to him, don't you?

No, I, I, I went back to do just the kind of a, what you should be doing with AI special series that they're doing, but I can't listen to the normal show anymore. Okay. Um, I, I think it's a general sentiment now that we've all, we've all kind of pulled the curtain back and we've seen the fact that these guys, once they cash out, that they're, they're good.

They're, they're all good on, on highlighting the badness in the room. You know? Well, as you were just saying, if we, if we whisper AI can't even do transcripts correctly, we should be a little bit worried. Apparently not Sundar Pichai. He's not worried at all.

What's all Sundar up to now? Good old Google CEO Sundar just revealed that AI now generates more than a quarter of its new code for its products, according to a company's earning call transcribed by Ars Technica. So maybe they got it wrong if they use AI transcription. I hope they got it wrong because it's going to make me stop using Google products.

I'll tell you that much. Pichai did say that human programmers oversee the computer generated code, which is something. The CEO noted that AI coding helps with boosting productivity and efficiency, ensuring that engineers do more and move faster. There's no two ways around it. 25% is a lot.

And Google is just one company relying on AI algorithms to perform complex coding tasks. According to Stack Overflow's 2024 developer survey, over 75% of respondents are already using or planning to use AI tools to assist with software development. Another survey by GitHub indicated that 92% of US-based developers are currently using AI coding tools.

This leads us to the rampaging elephant in the room, according to this article. As AI continues to gobble up coding tasks, human experience starts to dwindle. This could eventually lead to a decreased knowledge base in which humans don't know how to fix errors created by AI algorithms that were in turn created by other AI algorithms.

So here we go. So the Ouroboros of confusion, where it's nearly impossible to detect bugs amidst generations of AI code. Fun times. Exactly. What we said about a year and a half ago, the exact same thing. Exactly the same thing. Amazon is also doing the same thing.

We just covered that about three or four weeks ago, where they're using AI to upgrade their Java installs. That was the article that they're talking about. But yeah, if you don't have the requisite coding skills to know what you're looking at, then how are you going to fact check anything?

You know, this is the slippery slope, Brian. It is the slippery slope down into the mouth of the Ouroboros. Or is it the anus? We don't know because it's all the same. Yeah. Good times. Well, yep. In a move shaking up the AI industry, the Open Source Initiative, or OSI, has released a formal definition of open AI, sparking debate with companies like Meta.

The OSI now requires fully, quote unquote, open AI systems to provide access to their training data, code, and model settings. Are you saying if you're calling yourself open AI, you need to actually be open? Exactly.

Which we've been saying all along that Facebook is releasing these, quote unquote, open source models that aren't. So that's what they're coming out saying. And yeah, so this is just going to lead to everybody going, OSI who? Exactly.

You're not the boss of me. And they're really not. Yeah. So they're really not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'll just close out news with this story. Elon Musk fans are losing so much money to crypto scams. Elon Musk isn't just the richest person in the world. He's also an investor in cryptocurrency.

And the fact that Musk very publicly promotes crypto, especially his dumb coins that don't do anything, means a lot of people on social media don't find it suspicious at all when they see videos of the billionaire promising to make them rich with some shady crypto investment. Deepfake videos of Musk hawking crypto are incredibly common on sites like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, blah, blah, blah, all the socials.

Including X. I guess they can't even clean it up there. Nope. And Gizmodo has attained official complaints with the often shocking stories. And they're published in the article linked in our show notes. And I scan through this. Holy shit. That bad?

A, people are fucking dumb. And B, they're really, really, really losing a lot of money. As the article points out, it's actually kind of shocking when you read through the FTC complaints. People reported losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in relatively short periods of time. Yay.

The funny thing is they're only kind of banging on about the deepfake videos of Musk hawking crypto as opposed to the real videos of Musk hawking crypto, which he also does. See, that's the point. Was it Elon or not? Come on. Can you really tell? Not anymore.

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 Cullen. BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN.

Sign up now at DAZN.com.

Media Candy. Well, two of my favorite bands of all time have released brand new albums within a week of each other. And I don't even know what to do with myself. First up, Underworld came out with Strawberry Hotel.

It just released last week. I've been listening to it pretty much nonstop. It's not quite the glory days, but it's good. And I like having it on in the background when I'm doing other things. And there's a couple, like, really good bangers that make me definitely want to go see them live when they come through town again. And of course, my favorite band of all time has released their first album in over 16 years.

As of this morning, The Cure put out Songs of a Lost World. And let me tell you the kind of disconnect I had in my life when I put on NPR this morning, as I usually do. And NPR is talking about The Cure and does an interview with Robert Smith. NPR.

That's how my world has changed. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, The Cure used to be, like, one of the most underground bands. And there is a—I've talked about this before, too. Like, just being friends with so many people from my high school on Facebook and all that sort of stuff. And people are talking about The Cure. And I'm like, what is this revisionist history that has happened?

You did not listen to The Cure back in high school. There were maybe six of us at my high school that listened to The Cure. You called us fucking weirdos, and you were rocking out to Debbie Gibson and New Kids on the Block. But, okay, fine. Fucking Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi, exactly. But I'm very excited about it.

Two songs have been out for a little bit over a week or two. I've liked both quite a lot. It seems to be a real return to the deep, dark, and depressing disintegration style. And I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet today because it came out this morning, but I can't wait. Deep, dark, and depressing. Perfect for the election cycle.

Exactly. I can't wait. I can't wait. Yeah. Everybody, go grab your yearbook from when you were in high school, especially if you're Gen X and around when The Cure was The Cure. And just go look at the hairstyles, and you can tell exactly who was listening to what. And I guarantee you, I can count on two hands the amount of people in my high school that listened to The Cure.

But everybody listened to The Cure in Depeche Mode now, Jason. Of course. Of course. And I am proud to say that I was not one of the people that listened to The Cure in Depeche Mode. I made fun of people that listened to The Cure in Depeche Mode. I listened to The Exploited, Dead Kennedys, Dead Milkmen, all those bands.

So I didn't get into The Cure in Depeche Mode until in my 20s, you know? And I was there when it was going on. We had two kids in my high school that listened to the bands that you listened to, neither of which made it through high school. Yeah. That tracks. Yes, it does.

I graduated out of summer school, and I had to take P.E. in summer school. So, yeah. Not a bunch of winners, us. Yeah. A couple weeks ago, or maybe it was even last week, it's all starting to blend together. We did the massive list of all the shows that were coming out in the next couple weeks and months, some of which are out already.

So, you know, it was kind of like TV Armageddon. We have so much stuff to watch in so little time. And my wife discovered a new show that I think we need to add to the list. It's going to be on Netflix. It's called A Man on the Inside. It will be premiering, I believe, November 21st. It's got Ted Danson in it, and it is done by the same team that did The Good Place.

I watched the trailer. I'm all in. It looks great. It does. What they don't tell you in the trailer, though, is if it's a series or a movie, you kind of infer from how much story there is that they spoil for you, that it is definitely going to be a series. Yes. But, yeah, they don't really tell you that.

I had to go dig deep to figure that out. But I'm definitely adding that one to the queue. It looks like it'll be pleasant. Yes. Very pleasant. It looks like it'll be funny. You need to watch something like that after you listen to the new Cure album. Yeah. Or on election night.

We talked about The Diplomat coming back. Season two is out. I went and watched the first episode last night, and then I looked at how many episodes were in this season. And last season, we got eight episodes. This season, we only get six, which is a fucking ripoff. Yeah.

That sucks. I hate these small seasons. I understand it makes the show better. No, it doesn't. It prestiged me. Well, you don't get the filler episodes with tribbles anymore, and that's the problem. I like those stupid episodes. I want seasonal episodes.

I want a fucking Thanksgiving episode. I want a goddamn Christmas episode. I want all that shit. I want the Beverly fucking a ghost episode. Come on. Even Beverly doesn't want that episode back. No. No. The funny thing about it is I told you the story off the air, but I can tell a little bit of it here.

The economics behind hit shows nowadays are so cannibalistic. I had a friend who worked on a show, was a writer. The show won an Emmy. And the first thing that the network did was gut the writing staff because they figured that since the show won an Emmy, or several Emmys, that they can now coast on the Emmy wins and don't have to write as well as they used to.

That's the thinking that Hollywood has right now. So it's all about getting every penny they can out of everything they have, and it is disgusting. Yep. Agreed. Caps and doodads. Seems a lot of tech luminaries are airing some dirty laundry in AMAs this week.

And this last weekend, Instagram head Adam Mossari shared some insight into why some videos on the platform appear reduced in quality well after they're posted, and it all boils down to, air quotes, performance. Air quotes. Basically, the TLDR is, if your video isn't getting a lot of plays, we don't give a shit about it, so we crank down the quality.

Oh, that's nice of them. Isn't it nice? That is so nice. They are definitely supporting their larger creators instead of their small creators, and we're all creators now, and it's because of the creator economy. We create things, try to get paid for them, we don't, and then it gets fed into the AI machine.

That's our life now. Nice. Nice. Yeah. They apparently don't give a shit about the long tail. Some videos take longer to percolate than others. Nope, don't care about that. It's a hit right away or it's not. And that's that. Thanks, Instagram. That's so nice of you.

So nice to know that you're putting your thumb on the wheel. Oh, yeah. Well, speaking of putting the thumb on the wheel, and we thought the algorithmic feeds were bad, Mark Zuckerberg has announced a plan to integrate more AI-generated content into Facebook and Instagram feeds. That's right. During the company's third quarter earnings call, he stated that users can expect a new category of AI-generated or AI-summarized content, as well as existing content curated by AI.

At least we think that's what he said, because Whisper did the transcription of the third quarter earnings call. Well, this is actually relatively smart, unfortunately. I disagree with it. But, you know, there's been this huge thing about news, right? Especially with Meta. So I can't repost news stories here in Canada because they haven't, they're not going to pay up for news stories.

This has been going on in Australia as well and a lot of other places. However, if you're doing AI-generated summation of news stories, you get around that whole problem, don't you? Well, maybe he's smarter than the rest of us.

That's why he's a billionaire. Mm-hmm. Know what I'm saying? Hot or not, bitch. Oh, Brian, Brian, Brian. Remember Humane, the AI pin that changed the world? Uh-huh. Sure did. Well, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced a recall of approximately 10,500 charging cases for the AI pin due to a fire hazard.

10,500 people are looking through their box of tech junk right now. So the Recall FX unit sold between November, 2023 and May, 2024, which would be, I don't know, the only time they shipped. While no injuries have been reported, there has been one incident of a charging case overheating and melting.

So they're playing it safe. All right. Otis Chandler, a name I'd never heard of before, he's a co-founder of Goodreads. Mm-hmm. He has launched Smashing, an AI-powered app that curates web content, including news articles, blog posts, and podcasts tailored to user interests.

The app introduces an AI questions feature, enabling users to explore different perspectives on stories, such as political viewpoints or investment analysis. Users can create multiple interest feeds and engage with content through upvotes and downvotes, refining the app's recommendations. Also, this was one of the other people that we're involved with.

This is Jeff Veen, who is web royalty. He was one of the godfathers of web usability back in the day. He was at Hotwired initially. He'd written a book. I've met him a bunch of times. We ran in the same crowds when I was in San Francisco.

I expected a hell of a lot more from old Jeff. But I got to say, it looks good. It works good. Like, the UI works really well. The app itself is a steaming pile of dog shit. Have you tried it yet? I haven't tried it. There was one a while back that was kind of news related that was very, very similar.

And I can't remember what it was called. But what I discovered is I don't want it. I don't want curated news. I just want news. I want to curate myself in my brain in the time so I'm not in a fucking echo chamber. And I'm not only seeing music and soccer news, which is what happens if I let something curate for me.

Well, it's supposed to get smarter, Brian, as you go. It doesn't. It's tailored to your interests. No. You just go down a black hole of specific things and you don't get a big picture anymore. I want the big picture. I don't need this. No, thank you. Just go fix Goodreads.

Seriously. Why hasn't nobody – I know we say it all the time. Why hasn't somebody rebuilt Goodreads? Because there's probably no money in it. There's no money in it. Yeah. The only money comes from selling books on Amazon and getting an affiliate deal. Well, Goodreads is owned by Amazon.

Monopoly, anybody? So try and get a sweetheart deal from Amazon for selling books on your platform versus Goodreads. Never going to happen. Anyway, that one that you're talking about, that was with one of the co-founders from Instagram. I can't – the name is – Yeah, I'm blanking on it.

I'm blanking on it, too. Because I deleted it so long ago. I know. We deleted it when they introduced gamification. Oh, yeah. They did go out of business. I remember that. They decided to shut down whatever that company was called. Yeah, that's – was it called Ello? No, they're still selling T-shirts.

No, actually, Ello's gone. It's like some kind of teaching app now or something like that, some kind of nonprofit. I'm blanking on that one, too. Oh, it's a reading thing. It's a kid's reading program. That's it. That's what it was. Yeah. Yeah. I ran out of shits to give about Ello, unfortunately.

But, yeah, Smashing, I've tried it. And the problem is I do get the same articles over and over again, and they're all old. It's not breaking news. I need breaking news. And, you know, I've read everything. I've literally read everything that they've recommended already. So it's like, okay, well, you're useless to me.

I'm perfectly happy sticking with Apple News. I just launch it. I don't ever click on anything. I don't give anything a thumbs up or a thumbs down. So I just get default settings. I want to talk a little bit about SetApp today because I love SetApp. There's a link in the show notes to go sign up.

We get a little coin if you do sign up. But I do love it for its own purposes. Before we were even an affiliate with SetApp, I've been using it. I was listening to the Mac GeekGab podcast this week, who we also partner with for a little scratch my back. I'll scratch yours. But I legit listen to the show, too.

They talked about an app called Marked that you can get on SetApp. Marked is a godsend for me because I use Markdown in some of the apps that I have, like Obsidian. And trying to get Obsidian to export text the way that I want it does not work, period.

It is a nightmare to get—I have a nice formatted piece of text in Obsidian. I want to export it into an email, and it gives me all the markdown shit. And I don't want that. There are things that are supposed to fix that, like plugins for Obsidian, that don't work very well. Marked, on the other hand, fixes that problem and lets you export it in a variety of formats.

And you can get that on SetApp today if you want. But I just—for the Markdown people, I talked to some people in our Discord chat about this. They've had the same problems. And it's a nightmare getting Markdown to do what you want it to do outside the app that you're in, unless the app that you're going to is another Markdown-compliant app.

And you know my love for Markdown, Brian. I just love it to death. But this week I was going down the—this all came top of mind because I was just listening to the Mac Geek App podcast episode, the latest one, when they were talking about Marked, because I was wrangling with my Obsidian subscription for Sync.

And I paid like $100 last year to enable Sync for Obsidian across all my devices. And Obsidian is a note-taking app where basically all of my knowledge gets dumped into. All the notes that I've ever taken, all the blog posts, everything that I've ever done is in Obsidian. And for that, it's a wonderful thing.

It beats the shit out of everything else. Beats Ulysses, beats Kraft, beats Apple Notes, beats all of them. The problem is it costs $100 a year. I ain't got that right now. And I was trying—I was doing the testing. I'm like, did Ulysses get any better?

No. Did Kraft get any better? No. Did Apple Notes get any better? Eh, somewhat, but not good enough. The problem with Ulysses and Kraft is everybody's moved into this block editing format. I don't know if you've run across this, Brian. We're used to text editors, you know, where you have a paragraph.

You put your cursor in the paragraph, and it puts the cursor—you click, and the cursor goes right to the spot that you want it to go. Nowadays, you click a paragraph, and it selects the entire paragraph, like it's an object. And you can drag the paragraph around, and you have to double-click to get your cursor to go, and sometimes it does it, sometimes it doesn't.

It is—it's maddening. It is absolutely maddening. So Google Classroom does that, which I've started that. My kid is now getting homework, and it's done in Google Classroom, and I want to throw my fucking laptop out the window every time I'm trying to help him, because I'm trying to click in the middle of the thing, and I'm putting the cursor right there, like human beings do, and that's where it's supposed to go.

It's not supposed to grab everything. It's supposed to go right where I put my cursor. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if this is just an old thing, but it's just the way it should work. And this new paradigm of text editing— No human would stack books like that, Jason.

So, Brian, I recommend that you avoid Ulysses and Kraft if possible. I shall. Yes. But sign up today for Setup and get marked if you have this same problem. Link is in the show notes. And shout out to the Mac Geekab podcast, too. Oh, by the way, I also finally signed up for Setup.

I didn't do it forever, but I looked at the price of upgrading my CleanMyMac and then versus Setup, and I went ahead and did Setup, and the new CleanMyMac is phenomenal. Isn't it great? It's a little too pretty. I like that part. But it does such a better job. It cleaned out so much more stuff off my computer.

It was great. Yeah. It's really, really nice. And like I said, I use SparkMail, and SparkMail is in Setup, too. So that was a $40 a year savings, you know, it adds up so fast. It adds up so fast. You end up saving so much money. But, and I was just going to say on the Mac Geekab podcast, I consider, I used to consider myself a super elite Mac user.

You know, I was top of the team, you know, whatever. I could do anything that I wanted to do on my Mac. Nowadays, I'm just kind of a power user, not just a super duper ding dong power user. So every time I listen to this, I find something new. They've got great tips in there. So definitely worth a listen if you have a Mac, and you just want to learn how to use it better.

It's fun. It's a fun show.

Well, I didn't beat the wire on my Amazon Kindle Unlimited free trial to finish the series. Echoes of Extinction series by D. Ward Cornell. I didn't feel bad about it, because I'm sure they get like pennies on the dollar if you're part of Kindle Unlimited.

So I bought one of the four books, put a little money in his pocket, I think. So, you know, I think that worked out pretty well. Probably still pennies on the dollar. Probably still pennies on the dollar, but a few more pennies. So I read book four, the final book, Destiny from the Echoes of Extinction series. I'm glad I read the series.

I'm glad I'm done with the series. It was a little, it wasn't the best writing, some good ideas. The main character was just wildly implausible and almost kind of, well, no, I'm not going to say that, never mind, because I did enjoy the series.

What I will say about it, though, is I think he got bored with the series, because that is one of the fastest fucking endings I've ever read in my life. I thought this book was kind of, it was gliding into an end. And then I realized that I have like five pages left. I think he just went, I'm so fucking tired of writing this shit.

Done. He expansed the ending. He totally did. It was just like, it went from like, it could have easily gone another hundred pages and fleshed out some stories more and given a more satisfying conclusion. Instead, it was just like, almost like a man, like waving a magic wand and everything's solved and we're done here.

Okay. Okay. So I think that, that pretty much killed any idea of this one getting bought up for a series or a fucking movie, because the ending is just wildly implausible and comes out of nowhere. Well, if the, if the guts are good, maybe, you know, they rewrite that shit anyway.

So, or, you know, they just Battlestar Galactica. That's true. That's true. I picked up the new book, Nexus, a brief history of information networks from the stone age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari. Haven't started it yet because it's going to be a long one. I picked it up and I put it back down.

No, but what I did pick up this week and put back down was Polo. Polo Stan, the new Neil Stevenson novel. I gave it a shot. I tried. I listened to like the first hour of it on Audible and no, absolutely not.

Could not get into it. Could not get into the alternate history shit. I'm like, no, I just, it's too confusing. It's too confusing for my, my old ass brain, I guess. And I just don't care that much. I, the, the, the characters were not that it didn't hook me.

It did not hook me one bit. So. All right. I don't even think I'm going to try it then. Yeah. I mean, I just, there's, there's a, I have a certain threshold for giving a fuck about characters nowadays. And Neil just doesn't, he does not meet that criteria anymore.

I'm sorry. I used to, I loved his old books. Diamond Age, still one of my favorite cyberpunk novels of all time. Snow Crash does not have legs by the way, but this was just, you know, nah, not, not for me. All right. Fair. I was a bit worried that Christopher Moore was heading that way as well.

Another one of our favorite authors. And, uh, cause the last few books didn't really grab me as much, but, uh, he did announce a new book and judging by the title and the cover, I think we're going to get a return to form there. Okay. Lamb two. Kind of. Lamb two, the resurrection. I think it's, it's more in that fool's universe that he did, which is pretty good.

So that's a fun universe. Yeah. Yeah. The Dark Side with Dave with dastardly dynamic and delightfully devious Dave Bittner, whether it's decoding all things cyber on the cyber wire, exposing deception and tomfoolery with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, diving deep into privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat, or breaking down industrial cybersecurity on control loop.

Dave's got you covered. Now don't miss his latest venture. Only malware in the building. This monthly show hosted by Selina Larson with Rick Howard and Dave himself unpacks the most impactful malware stories into bite-sized actionable insights. Perfect for tech pros and security execs with a dash of charm and wit.

Hello, Dave. Welcome back. We missed you. Hello. Hello. Thank you. I know it's good to be back. That's quite an intro. I have to say, I, I, I need you to be my PR person. I love it. Give me a dollar.

I'll do anything. I know. Exactly. Exactly. Your rates are reasonable. Yes, they are. So I want to jump into some Halloween talk because we are, we are recording this on November 1st. And I think we probably, all three of us had widely varying Halloween experiences.

Okay. Okay. I want to, I'll start off because mine is, mine is very simple and short and, and I think we'll, we'll lead the discussion here. So we don't answer the door on Halloween because of dogs. We have scary dog. Well, now we just have one scary dog, sadly. Miss you, Bam Bam.

So we have a Doberman who terrifies the children. So we put the bucket of candy out front. This year we bought a nice spooky bucket and we bought an 85 piece bag of candy. By the time it went in the bucket, it was about a 65 piece bag of candy because you do lose something to snackage along the way.

And we always keep the little Hershey bars because we make s'mores. So anyway, 65 pieces go into the bucket, go on the fence last night, go out in the morning. I like to see what happens. Two years ago, they stole the bucket. Last year, last year, the bucket was still there, but there was one Reese's cup left at the bottom of the bucket.

We're like, who leaves behind a Reese's cup? That's like the gold standard. Tell me about it. I go out this morning out of the fifth, the 65 pieces that were there, there were about 50 left and, and, and most of which were Reese's cups. You got some weird ass neighbors.

Yeah, I'm telling you. And I live in a decent, normal, middle-class neighborhood. Here's the problem though. I also live next door, next door to Calabasas, which is where all of the rich people are. So I see caravans that used to stop in our neighborhood full of kids, keep on driving.

Going to Calabasas where they have full-size candy bars and probably sushi. Right. Right. A sushi chef. Please limit yourself to one roll each. They answer the door, go trick or treat.

Do you have any food allergies? That's how it rolls over there. Yeah. So how'd it go for you guys? Well, I would say our Halloween is, I would describe, fairly typical. Um, I live in a townhouse community, so that makes it very efficient for kids.

So they like to come to our neighborhood because houses are very close together. Um, I remember when I was a kid growing up, the first house I lived in was like one of those 1960s, uh, suburbs where you have little tiny houses on acre lots. So by the time you came home, you were bathed in sweat from running from door to door.

Kids have, they learned, they don't do that anymore. They come to our neighborhood. And, uh, and on either side of our neighborhood, our, our other townhouse communities, but ours is the nicest of the three. So they all come to us because I think we have the best candy and my wife, uh, is a full size candy bar giver.

Um, but in our court where I, I live, um, all the neighbors have gotten together and we put up a little tent and we have a table and we put all our different bowls on this one table so the kids can come basically have one stop shopping and just go down the line and get all their candy and off they go.

So we make it even more efficient for them to do their thing and move on to where they're going next. Um, my favorite group last night was a group of high school aged kids. There was four of them. Three of them were dressed as Ghostbusters and one was the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

My son was the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Nice. So that was, that, they won the night for me, but. That's very cool. Yeah. It's a typical, uh, I'd say we probably had, um, um, a hundred people, something like that.

That's respectable. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. All right. Well, I guess it's my turn. Um, we live on one of those streets. Uh, caravans come here. The neighbors, uh, my, my particular block on our street, uh, get a, a, uh, permission from the city and, uh, and a permit to shut the street down to, for traffic, uh, for four hours, uh, starting at five till about nine o'clock.

Uh, everybody on the street does go to, goes to outrageous lengths for decorating. Uh, we have a guy that runs up and down the street with a chainsaw, notably without the blade in it, uh, but fully powered up gas, you smell it, you hear it, people scream. Um, it is a big deal.

We do not do full size candy bars because we would not be able to afford the mortgage. If we did, we bought 1,260 pieces of candy. Uh, they were gone within two hours. So we were dark for two hours and we will have to, uh, increase our candy budget next year.

I think I'm going to start an investment fund purely for candy. Get another job, brother. So yeah, we, uh, we have a crazy, crazy time for Halloween. It is a lot of fun, a lot of kids, um, and, uh, everybody has a really good time.

I particularly want to give a shout out to, uh, one of my neighbors, uh, Peter, who's about two houses over who sets up an adult drink station for the parents walking up and down the street. Uh, I went over with my coffee mug and got some, uh, some nice, uh, heavily, heavy poured, uh, ciders a couple of times throughout the night, uh, when I actually had a break from throwing candy into bags.

So yeah, it was, it was nuts. It was pretty crazy. Now, when you bought the house, did you know that you were moving into a destination Halloween location? I feel like it should have been disclosed. It was not. Uh, one of the first things our new neighbors said to us, because we did move in, we've actually moved in about three weeks before Halloween when we first moved in.

And one of the neighbors came over and said, you need to go buy candy now. Oh, wow. And that's when we were informed that Halloween is a bit of a big deal on the street. Okay. So yes, we were not, uh, it was not disclosed. Uh, it would not have deterred, uh, us however, because my son has been a big fan of Halloween since he was very little and loves it, loves it more than on Christmas.

Uh, I also am a big fan of Halloween. My wife kind of sighs through it all. So yeah. There's a similar street in Baltimore and Hamden, uh, part of Baltimore here that, uh, they do Christmas that way where the, they shut down the street and every home is obligated to be extremely decorated and the whole street becomes a, a place, a destination.

But you know, for, I guess they give out candy canes, but yeah. Wow. Yeah. We don't have to do it for Christmas. Uh, it was determined that October and Halloween was enough. So, and I, I, you know, we don't have enough storage to put all that kind of stuff away. So we do a whole like nightmare before Christmas theme.

We have like a 12 foot inflatable oogie boogie that we put on our front balcony and, you know, we've got the Jack and that's just all kinds of stuff. It's, it's crazy, but it's on the front of your house. It looks, it looks, you did a good job. It was impressive. Oh, thank you. Thank you. We work pretty hard on it and spend an outrageous sum of money.

That's fun. But it's all for the children. Of course, of course, of course we are. We have a single, uh, 12 foot tall ghost that we put on the back deck. We have a, our deck, back deck is three levels, two screened in, then one like, you know, top one that's not screened in.

So we put the ghost all the way up on the top there and he looks out over the lake that our house is next to and kind of lords over the lake. Uh, and then he, uh, in a couple of weeks, well, he'll come down this weekend and then in a couple of weeks, a 12 foot tall Turkey will go up to replace him on the corner.

And then the 12 foot tall Santa? No, 12 foot tall Bumble from, uh, we're off the red-nosed reindeer. Yeah. Yes. And instead of putting the, and Bumble actually has a star in his hand and instead of, uh, putting the star on a Christmas tree, he's putting the star on the, um, menorah that sits next to him.

So that's my wife's thing. And yeah, so, so yeah, it's great. And, uh, it's nice to have a little place that we're basically nothing else is. And people seem to like it as they come around the lake, you know, it's a park. And so people enjoy it and they tell us they do so, but it's, it's nice to, um, it's a nice excuse also to keep it kind of constrained to just have the single ridiculously large inflatable

thing on the corner of a deck that's, you know, 30 feet above the ground, uh, means I don't have to decorate the whole house. Otherwise you start to slip into Griswold territory. Right. Exactly. You should see our, we're, we're fans of the inflatables. So, uh, we have a 10 foot Grim Reaper archway that sits in our gateway in the front for the past month.

So when you come in, you have to go through the, the, the big Grim Reaper, which is kind of fun. Then we've got like, you know, we've got lots of inflatables around the yard and we, I bring out the, the big led floodlight. So the house is purple at night and we got, we got, we do it up pretty, pretty decently. Yeah.

For Christmas, we don't do anything for Thanksgiving because that we're, that takes away from the eating time, but, uh, for Christmas, we definitely go all out. We've got, we've got, uh, uh, uh, white Santas, black Santas, white angels, black angels. We've got a 10 foot tall dreidel that, uh, goes in the middle of the yard.

We, we hit everybody. If we could, if we could find more diversity for, uh, for blowups, we would, we, we do have a, uh, we do have a, uh, Rudolph Rottweiler that goes in the front yard as well. So, yeah, we, we, we do it up with the inflatables. I think those are the greatest things ever.

By the way, when I bought my bumble last year, uh, and I was shopping around for inflatable bumbles, you know, you're like, oh, look, there's a six foot bumble. That's not big enough. Ooh, there's a 12 foot bumble. All right. That'll do just fine. You can buy a 40 foot bumble.

Nice. Yeah. Yeah. It's like $2,000 I think, but you can buy a 40 foot bumble. And believe me, the thought crossed my mind. Why not? Well, particularly because I live in a condo association. And so just any time that I can just turn the screws a little bit and well, then just look, it's just a, it's just a holiday decoration.

The rules say I can have a holiday decoration. So you can't have a security camera that's out of code, but damn, you can have a 40 foot bumble. That's right. That's right. So just FYI, yeah, if you're interested, they do exist. And I think that's a, that's a happy thing in this world that you can buy a 40 foot bumble.

Our Walmart up the street has had Christmas decorations up for the past two weeks now. And we're looking forward, you know, to kind of get the jump to see if there's any good inflatables in there. And they had one really cool display and we're like, ooh, ooh, how much is that one? Because we wanted another archway to go where the Grim Reaper goes.

We want a good one for Christmas. And we found, we had to go through like seven people because we couldn't find a price or anything. We finally got a manager and they're like, oh, that's not for sale. We bought that on Amazon. Wow. Yeah.

I think a regional manager came through because it is now gone. We don't put stuff up that we can't sell people. Right. Make me an offer. Makes sense. That's funny. Well, I put in the link here. I want to say not long before we recorded today, Disney dropped the official trailer for Skeleton Crew, the upcoming Star Wars series with the kids.

Have you guys watched this trailer? I watched, yes, I did watch it. Nuff said. No, I think I might be into the show. I'm just so taken aback by the fact that Star Wars is rocking Major Tom for a trailer.

Yeah. I liked that. Like, that pushed my buttons very effectively. And the fact that they made their own version of Major Tom where they changed, they're doing it in some Star Wars universe language, I thought was especially nice.

But, I mean, this is Star Wars' version of the Goonies. Yes. And let me tell you, I am here for this. Like, I was just smiling, grinning from ear to ear while I watched this from the moment the first note dropped on Major Tom.

I was like, okay, you've got me. And I am ready to go. What I particularly like about this show is this feels like this is the first real Disney Star Wars show I'll be able to watch with my son. I think he'll dig this one. Oh, okay. Yeah.

You know, I wasn't going to really care about it, but you had me at Star Wars version of the Goonies, so I think I might have to check it out now. Yeah. It looks good. It does. I'm very intrigued. It is not at all the show that I thought it was going to be. I'll put it that way.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, a couple more weeks, we'll know. Okay. So I threw in a random one here because I just, I wanted to get you guys' take on this because I thought it was funny. I had an episode of Schmackters that we did where we talked about, is a hot dog a sandwich, which is, you know, the age-old question.

And I got voted down on that one. So I, but I saw this, it's called the Cube Rule of Food Identification. And I think it's... Let me tell you, Jason, this took me on a journey. Yes, it does, doesn't it? I had many emotions while scrolling through this.

I started with, yeah, okay. Then I got, oh my God, this is kind of genius. Then I got infuriated. Then it brought me back down to, hold on a second, this may make some sense. And then I ended up very, very angry. Yeah, it's worth going through.

The TLDR for me was that a hot dog is a taco. No. I don't, I can live with that. I can live with that. Yeah. That splits the difference of, is it a sandwich or not? It's a taco. Well, look, when you, when you get down to a key lime pie being a quiche and a corn dog being a calzone.

Right. And a steak being a salad. Well, that I'm, that I'm on board with. I can sell that to my wife. Yeah, really? So if it's in your self-interest, it's fine. Yes. Yeah. And I do like the end, humans are just ravioli.

Well, well worth the scroll, I think. It is. It's well done. It's fun. Similar to what Brian described, it was a journey for me as well. I think I started out more on board with it. But as we went through, yeah, it became more and more absurd.

But I think mostly what triggered my anger was this feeling of existential crisis. Like, because there's nothing in here that's wrong. If you accept the framework by which they have decided to categorize and describe things, it's completely logical.

It makes total sense. If you're buying to each increasing premise, then yes. Right. Right. So, but I think that's part of what made me uncomfortable, was having to take a hard look at myself and how do I think about things.

Reassess all of your life's assumptions. Exactly. It just does. It makes you question everything. It really does. So, yes, worth a look. A lot of fun. Do check it out. Yeah, very good. Very good indeed. Definitely fun. Final story that I have for us.

Ticks many of the boxes that we talk about often in here and some that are kind of somewhat personal to me. I don't know if I've ever mentioned, but my son had developed a peanut allergy at some point. He seems to be growing out of it. Plus, we've done some therapy on it. So, he can actually eat like two M&M peanuts a day now.

And we see no ill effects in another year. We're going to get him tested. He may be out of it completely. But for a few years there of our life, it was rather stressful because you basically just have to look online for things. And you worry about like people's bake sales and even going to places like, say, Disneyland, which is admittedly pretty good about things because they always have these printed sheets.

If any of your kids ever have a food allergy or if you do, you can go to Disneyland. You can go to any vendor that sells food. They will have a sheet that lists every single ingredient known allergen that could be in any single one thing. So, that makes it a lot easier, which is nice. And obviously, we're talking about Disneyland.

We talk about Disneyland all the time. Now, there's a security aspect to this story. So, a fired Disney employee allegedly altered menus to change allergy markers. So, this could really screw things up. Unfortunately, this guy, Michael Schuer, was fired by Disney. And they did not change passwords.

Hence, the security issue. He used still viable passwords to access a third-party created proprietary menu creation and inventory system. And over the course of his misdoings, he allegedly changed the allergy information along with adding profanity, altering prices, and changing the font to Wingdings.

Wingdings is what initially tipped off employees. Gee. See, he went one step too far. He would have gotten away with it. One step too far. Yeah, I was about to get that fucking churro that he put in there. So, yeah, this guy got busted.

He broke into multiple copies of a third-party company's FTP to change allergy markers and altered QR codes, et cetera, et cetera. Directed a menu to a boycott Israel website. And he also apparently tried to break into Disney employees' accounts nearly 8,000 times.

So, I think this guy was pretty pissed off at the mouse. I was going to say he yelled a grudge. Yes. Yeah. That's crazy. Brian, you've worked for Disney, so have I. I have. Disney security is like, I mean, it's insane. It is absolutely insane how usually good they are at security.

I mean, to do anything. I know. At every level. Not just the park. Like, I have a friend that worked for Hollywood Records, which is owned by Disney. So, I've been onto the Burbank campus, and I've been to the Disney record label, which you'd think with this music, it's loosey-goosey. Hell no.

No, I did an email newsletter template for Dancing with the Stars one time. And I had to fill out 20 forms and get fingerprinted before I could even get into, like, a Dropbox account to be able to upload my template. It was ridiculous.

Yeah. Disney's pretty tight on security. So, the fact that they didn't change passwords immediately or revoke this guy's account upon getting fired is almost unbelievable to me. But apparently so. I'm just thinking about your son, Brian, and, like, Dread Pirate Roberts with iocane powder, slowly working to build up a resistance to peanuts over time.

Well, that's kind of what it was like. We started with – basically, they make a peanut solution. And, you know, you start with, like, 5 milligrams, then you go up to 10 milligrams. And we got all the way to actual physical peanuts where we would, you know, weigh out 10 grams and 20 grams. And, yeah, it's been, like, a two-year process, but he seems to have come out of it now.

So, although, you know, just to be safe, all the Reese's peanut butter cups he brought home from trick-or-treating last night are fucking mine. Well, you can't be too careful with these things. Yeah. You can't. You can't put it in the vault. It's just science, right? Yeah, exactly. Over at Patreon, big thank you to Stavros for increasing your donation.

And Kiwi Graham, welcome aboard. And Kiwi says, cool, discover the podcast via your cross-promo with MacGeekCab. How about that? Nice. Also, welcome to number six, David, James, and Dag. All right. Thank you all so much. Over at PayPal, thank you to Charlie, Simon, Jonathan, Judge, Nicola, and Thomas.

Thank you all so much. Over at the tip jar, we've got Adam. Thank you, Adam. And just a reminder to everybody, if you sign up for Patreon, for a minimum of $3 a month, you can get the show early and ad-free and in high definition. And if you so desire, you can pay for the year up front and get 5% off.

Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! We have some new reviews. We've got a five-star review. Pleasant find. Note, uBlock Origin is not ad blocker. It is a free extension that blocks trackers, pop-ups, and can even be used to remove Google's stupid AI overview that's being shoved down our throats. And it is and has always been free.

I think we got a little confused between the feedback and the review, but we'll take a five-star review. It doesn't matter. Hey, you want to give us, you want to yell at us for five stars? Go for it. Yes. But thanks for the clarification. And we got a five-star from Tech with Snark. I first started listening to GOG in my 20s.

I just turned 40 now. No regrets. Five stars. Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. So old. So old. So old. So old. I want to give a shout-out to the Los Angeles Dodgers, my baseball team, which won the World Series on Wednesday night.

And thank God, because those have been late nights for me. I don't know if I could have done two more games. So I'm glad it's over. And we only lost one city bus. Not bad, actually, all things considered. It was quite the conflagration, too. If you saw that thing burning, it was like, whoo. Somebody put some accelerant on that puppy.

Maybe it was electric. Could have been. Could have been. Yeah. Could have been the batteries. Could have been the batteries. Somebody stole your battery. I say we go get the motherfucker. Deepest condolences to friend of the show, Brian Blondell, who lost his beloved dog, Charlie, after 17 years this week. Sorry, brother.

Love you. Hang tough. Yep. Sorry to hear it. And Jerry Taylor, co-creator of Star Trek Voyager, has died at age 86. Wow. Good run. Good run. We also lost Terry Garr, star of Young Frankenstein, Tootsie, and a million other things, at 79.

She was awesome. She was awesome. Yep. Until next time, I'm Brian Shulmester. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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 672. Feeling generous? Keep this top-notch entertainment rolling by dropping us a few bucks at GOG.show slash donate.

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Just drop us any rating and we'll read it on the air because we're desperate that way, you know, for attention and the love of our fans. That's how it works. And money. Stay grumpy. Woo! 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 Cullen.

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