677: What’s in the Bag?!

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Welcome to the early morning edition. Hey, Brian. You know, we've gotten older because we used to do them at night so we could drink. Yeah, I had to get up at 5.30 this morning so I could have coffee. Yes.

Speaking of coffee, CoffeeZilla is going off on Hawk to a Girl. He finally posted a video and it was pretty interesting. Did you get a chance to check it out? No. CoffeeZilla is one of those people that I'm aware of but don't follow. Oh, man. He's great. He's great. He does fantastic takedowns of crypto bros and now crypto gals.

Yeah. So it was a good half hour video talking about the rug pull of HawkCoin. So we talked about that on the show last week and thought that, man, she must have had some really bad people behind it. Well, it turns out comedian Howie Mandel's son-in-law, Alex Shafiro, is at the center of the controversy after the disastrous launch of the Hawk MemeCoin.

Shafiro, who has a background in digital marketing, played a key role in developing and promoting the cryptocurrency tied to viral internet sensation. Hayley Welch, dude, is the Hawk to a Girl. That's right. So what really sucks is, I got no problem with Howie, but now his name is going to be forever tied to Hawk to a Girl.

Oh, you think? I think Hawk to a Girl after she goes to jail for this, which she might. That might be the last we ever hear of her. I don't think she's going to go to jail for this. If they can prove that this guy, Alex, was behind the whole thing and lied to her, then she's not going to go to jail.

She'll get fined. The appearance is no excuse here, people. But there are exceptions for that. She can get fined, but probably avoid the jail time. He will get the jail time if there is jail time to be had. All right. If they can put this off to January, ain't nobody going to jail.

I'm sure Donald Trump would be happy to pardon Hawk to a – in exchange for a little something-something. Well, you know what? So there's an article by Patrick Redford over at Defector, who I've never actually read before. But this was a fantastic article, and I think it's a beautifully written take on the state of influencers, the have-nots and their motivations to get what they call the bag.

Did you get a chance to read this one, Brian? I skimmed through this. It ties in with a study that's been going around recently, too, where apparently this youngest generation thinks that you need to make $600,000 a year. I'm not sure who's going to, but I think in part it comes from the illusion that all these influencers are giving people of making the big bucks.

I've never heard the term the bag before. Have you heard of the bag? Yes, I have heard this term. Again, trying not to even be influenced by influencer culture is impossible if you're online these days. That's a strange one. I've never heard that, so I turned to our friendly neighborhood AI to explain it to me.

And since I'm guessing some of our listeners have also never heard of the term, in influencer culture, the bag is slang for money, income, or a lucrative opportunity. I'm sure the kids are going to say that one. Often referring to financial success or securing a profitable deal. It comes from the idea of securing the bag, which means obtaining money or achieving financial goals.

And for influencers, the bag typically relates to brand deals, sponsorships, merchandising, ad revenue, partnerships, and ambassadorships. Blah, blah, blah. I was just getting used to calling it Cheddar. That's so old, dude. I thought Cheddar was new. Cheddar's dusty. It's goldfish, man.

It ain't fire. It ain't fire. I'm just still mad that we missed the opportunity to call it Spitcoin. That's the only thing that really bothers me. Well, you know. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. All right. Well, hopefully we won't be talking. Oh, God. Who am I kidding? We're going to be talking about it.

You're talking about this for months. Yeah. Sucks. All right. Well, let's go back to something that we were talking about quite a bit. The WP Engine WordPress kerfuffle and Matt Mullenweg, who couldn't keep his mouth shut to the point where like half his company decided to go ahead and take severance packages and get out of there because they disagreed with him.

Well, we hadn't heard from him in quite a bit because, well, he couldn't talk at all because court. Gag order. But we've gotten somewhere with that. A judge has issued an injunction ordering WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and his company Automatic to restore access to the WP Engine web hosting service, according to legal documents seen by The Verge.

He must also restore WP Engine's control of its popular ACF or Advanced Custom Fields plugin. It also removes a checks box that Automatic added that made people say they had no relationship with WP Engine. I'm with an ass. Yeah. Look, they're paying you.

They're a customer. Sort of. Sort of. Yeah, not very much. That's the whole problem. If they were paying them, then this would not be an issue. That's true. But there you go. So basically right now he's being forced to service WP Engine. On your knees, boy!

Give me service! On your knees! Spit engine! I guess that's what we'll call this one. Oh my God. Poor Matty Matt. She just kept his fucking mouth shut. Well, you know, that's a big part of it, I think. You flew too high, Matty Matt. Yeah. I mean, he's a billionaire.

Chill, bro. Come on. Oh, man. So, some Waymo news. This is interesting. Waymo has matched Lyft's market share in San Francisco at 22% just 15 months after its August 2023 launch. Uber leads at 55%, with both Uber and Lyft losing low double-digit market share.

More painful for Lyft, which lost about one-third of its share compared to Uber's one-sixth. All right. Interesting. The ride-sharing market shows diminishing returns for network effects once a critical mass of drivers is achieved. While Waymo's wait times are slightly longer, its premium service, which is clean cars and quiet rides, yes, quiet because you don't have to talk to the damn driver, appeals to riders.

So, if Waymo increases car availability and reduces wait times, it could get even more traction. Now, the interesting thing is this data does exclude airport rides, which I think is a huge portion of San Francisco's ride share.

I think it's a huge portion of any city's ride share, any major city anyways. Exactly. You asked me last week when the last time I took an Uber is, and it's basically to go to the airport. That's it. So, this is some cherry-picked data, and, of course, it's from an A16Z partner.

What? But, still, the numbers for in-city are pretty telling if they hold true. Yeah. Well, I mean, people seem to like the Waymo. Yeah, yeah, everything that we've heard so far is nothing but good news. It's more expensive.

It takes longer, but it's better. Yeah, it's funny. I was talking with my wife a little bit earlier about Uber and the business model and how it's changed over time. And, you know, actually, to be fair, we did take an Uber just last week. We went out to a friend's birthday party dinner, and we took an Uber there.

The Uber there was fine. The Uber on the way back was a guy with a Tesla that refused to move his seat up, so there was no legroom whatsoever. Oh, nice. You know, when Uber first came out, all the cars were nice and super clean, and the drivers were friendly, and they gave you water and mints and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, remember that? Now, nine times out of ten, there's fucking, you know, discarded fast food wrappers in the back seat. The drivers couldn't be fucking bothered to do anything for you, like, oh, I don't know, move your fat-ass seat up so somebody can fit in the back seat of your goddamn Tesla. And, you know, I just think that Waymo, obviously, they don't have the driver issue, and they bring the cars in, and I'm sure they clean them up nice.

But mark my words, five years from now, there's going to be people talking about how Waymo's service isn't as good as it used to be. Oh, of course, of course. But you know what also Waymo has that the other ones don't have? They're less rapey. Well, that's a big plus.

The cars are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Preserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com. In the news.

Well, speaking about robot cars, GM is giving up its Cruise Robotaxi subsidiary. The company announced today that it will fold Cruise into its own in-house technical team. Under this new strategy, the single unit will focus for now on developing advanced driver assistance programs, and in the future, on fully autonomous personal vehicles.

Obviously, this is a – they got hit big time because they hit somebody big time. I was going to say, I was going to say, yeah. They basically hit a pedestrian in San Francisco and dragged them along the street a little bit. Yeah, and then lied about it. And then lied about it, and then tried to hide the videos about it, and then blah, blah, blah, blah.

So, yeah, they basically just – they're doing – they're basically ducking down into a hole for a while. Let's let this blow over until everybody forgets, and then we'll bring our cruise lines back. Yeah, then they're going to Zuckerberg and rebrand it, and then there'll be something new. So, yeah. Following the playbook.

And keeping up with car news, somewhere – I like – this article was hilarious just for the opening. Somewhere at Carvana headquarters, executives are huddled and watching the water rippling in the glasses of water on their boardroom table like it's Jurassic Park because the T-Rex of the online retail world announced this morning that it's getting into the car selling business.

That's great. It's a good line. So, yes, Amazon has announced it will be partnering with Hyundai to sell vehicles directly to consumers online. So, you know, you go in, you check out, you've got your Prime membership, you're supposed to get free delivery. They said they deliver by Thursday. There's nothing going on. You check the status. It's still there.

It's still just sitting there. It says it's been delivered, but it's not fucking here, is it? Then finally they roll up. It's the wrong color. The driver takes a picture of the camera, leaves it on your doorstep, and there you go. Did you look behind the bushes for your car? Yeah.

So, I mean, I'm not surprised by this. It's not like Amazon has to keep vehicles in stock. These are partnerships with existing dealerships. And so, yeah, it's, you know, why not? Sure. Okay. I know. It's just fun to say Hyundai. And, of course, the big thing that they're actually going to be making off money here is financing.

It's not so much selling the car. They will be providing the financing. And I guarantee you, people, if any of you are thinking about doing this and buying the car off Amazon, you 100% will be able to find better financing rates than Amazon. Exactly. You'll get ripped off so fast. You are going to get screwed. Do you get points at Whole Foods, though?

Can you get some free lettuce? Can you get some free cheddar after spending your cheddar? I don't know, but they will take your bag, Jason. They will take your bag. That's for damn sure. I just want to know, is Amazon selling flying cars? Because what we've got here is since November, mysterious drones have been spotted over New Jersey.

Sightings have stretched statewide, including near military sites and coastal areas. Some drones up to six feet wide travel without lights, avoiding detection. While Governor Phil Murphy insists they're not a safety threat, the FBI, Homeland Security, and state police are investigating, urging the public to share their footage.

I'm just going to say, if we don't know what the fuck it is, it's six feet wide and it's flying around in the skies. It's a fucking safety risk until we know what it is. Exactly. I'm just like, hmm, how do you know it's not a safety risk? What do you know, then, if you insist it's not a safety risk?

White House advisor John Kirby stated many are likely lawful manned aircraft and pose no threat. The Pentagon denies military or foreign involvement, yet local officials remain skeptical. Lawmakers report drones flying in coordinated swarms with advanced capabilities, avoiding detection even by sophisticated radar.

Drones have been spotted near military sites and coastal areas, trailing Coast Guard boats and raising safety concerns. Despite federal assurances, investigations are ongoing, leaving questions about their origin and purpose unanswered. The Coast Guard confirms no evidence of foreign activity along the coast because somebody was saying, there's an Iranian mothership out there that's launching the drones.

Go get them. That's insane. Here's the deal. Nobody knows what the fuck they are. This is a, yeah, this is an interesting story. I've definitely been checking it out. I can't wait to find out what's going to happen with this because this isn't a story that gets buried. We're going to have to figure out what this is.

Well, okay, that's true. That is true. You weren't here for the flying man that was flying around LAX for a while, were you? Oh, I know, but we did talk about it. Did we ever find out? Yeah, the superhero drone guy. They never found that anywhere. He just disappeared.

He's plastered to the side of a plane, Wile E. Coyote style. Could be. Or maybe he moved to New Jersey and got his own car. Look, until I hear about people in New Jersey getting probed by drones, I don't think this is aliens. Oh, my God.

And I swear to God, if you look at the map of UFO sightings worldwide, it's all just in the U.S. Oh, yeah. Because we're all fucking crazy. Yeah. Fucking dumb. Speaking of stories that go away, whatever happened to that guy that took the shot? The second assassin that took a shot at Trump.

Did we ever hear anything about that guy? No, it's amazing. We figured out this guy that shot the CEO from the healthcare industry. We figured out everything about this guy's life, but we've learned nothing about the guy that took a shot at Trump. That guy disappeared. Amazing. I wonder what happened to him.

Interesting. Well, here's something that has been discovered. Google has unveiled Willow, a groundbreaking quantum computer chip. Willow can perform complex calculations in under five minutes that would take today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years, surpassing the age of the universe.

This achievement addresses a 30-year challenge in quantum computing by reducing error rates as the number of qubits increases, a persistent hurdle in the field. Now, Google CEO Sundar Pichai emphasized Willow's potential for practical applications in drug discovery, fusion energy, and battery design.

Can we get some drone discovery maybe out of this thing? Unfortunately, what they're going to use it for is their shitty AI search. Exactly. Following the news, though, Alphabet's shares rose by over 5%, reaching their highest point since July. Willow represents a significant step toward building a useful quantum computer with practical applications across various scientific fields, including breaking the encryption on which everything foundational in today's society.

That's true. Which I'm going to follow up on that later. Okay. This is – yeah. Let's move fast and break things, Sundar. Go for it. And I remember back in 2021 when Apple announced that it was working on a tool to detect CSAM that would flag images showing abuse and notify the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

And then everybody kind of went – And everybody went bug nutty. Everybody kind of went, hey, wait, hold on a second. Privacy. You ran commercials about privacy, Apple. Now you're going to go through all of our photos on our phones and report back to people? And Apple wisely said, oh, you know what? You're right. We just sell these devices.

We really shouldn't be in the job of policing them. Yes. Well, they're being sued for that position that everybody thought was pretty reasonable. Okay. Yeah. The lawsuit was filed on Saturday in Northern California. It's seeking damages upwards of $1.2 billion for a potential group of 2,680 victims, according to the New York Times.

This smells lawyers all over it. It claims that after Apple showed its planned child safety tools, the company didn't implement it because everybody decided it was a bad idea, which has led to the victim's harm. As the images continued to circulate. Okay. Next up, they're going to see Polaroid.

Because as far as I can tell from every movie I've ever seen, every bit of CSAM was always created in the 70s by Polaroid Pictures. Yep. So, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Good luck with this one. And in continuing kind of ridiculous news, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn have announced on Saturday that they're making changes to the Kids Online Safety Act, or COSA, with help from X.

Wasn't that canceled by Disney? Yes. They got help from X. X's CEO, Linda Yaccarino, also posted about the collaboration and called for Congress and the House to pass the bill. After working with the bill's authors, I'm proud to share that we've made progress to further protect freedom of speech while maintaining safety for minors online.

So, yeah, I can tell they're kind of gutting this a little bit in order to, you know, keep that safe harbor shit going on. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I still don't know why people haven't figured out that why don't we just give all the fucking pedophiles, lock them in a room with a copy of Mid Journey and a box of Kleenex and let them just go to town and leave us the fuck alone.

Fair. I'm just saying. It's a solution, people. It is a solution. Nobody go in that room. Stay the fuck away from that room. Google has reportedly urged the FTC to investigate and terminate Microsoft's exclusive cloud hosting deal with OpenAI, arguing it limits competition and could drive up costs for developers using chat GPT APIs.

Microsoft, which has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, serves as its exclusive cloud provider via Azure and benefits from revenue sharing agreements. As one should when one hands over a $13 billion bag. What do you think that was for?

What's in the bag? What's in the bag? The FTC is already probing Microsoft's cloud contracts amid claims it charges higher fees to customers using rival hosting providers like Google Cloud. See, that you can investigate. Yeah. Critics say this strengthens Microsoft dominance in enterprise tech.

Google, under scrutiny for its own practices, may aim to host chat GPT or compete for the opportunity. I love that this has basically come down to, you're being shittier than us and doing better at it, so we're going to sue you. Yeah, we're going to run to PAW. Oh, God.

Fucking bunch of- Mom, he's got a bigger bag. And then these people start to wonder why the entire internet seems to support somebody killing somebody that works for a $1 million company. I don't know. I've got to sit there and question these thoughts.

I don't know. Anyways, in San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, an AI startup called Artisan has spent an untold sum blitzing the city with an advertising campaign that dispenses with the need for humanity. Artisan's tagline is Stop Hiring Humans. The company, which is backed by startup accelerator Y Combinator, sells what it calls AI employees or artisans.

But the company actually sells a software designed to assist with customer service and sales workflow. So they've gone out, and I've actually got to give them credit for this. They sat around, did an internal powwow, and figured out the best way to market themselves was put a bunch of ad campaigns around the city, posters, which included phrases like, Artisans won't complain about work-life balance.

Artisans' Zoom cameras will never not be working today. Hire artisans, not humans. The era of the AI employees is here. So, you know, it's pissed people off, and they've been pointed out that they're kind of dystopian. And the CEO, Jasper Carmichael Jacks, said, they are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI.

Can't argue with that. Lean into it, brother. Lean into it. Well, artificial intelligence is not just flooding social media with garbage. It's also apparently afflicting the open source programming community, because basically people are using AI to either sort of kind of find bugs in programs or at least or try to basically just scam them for bug bounties.

And apparently, you know, because this is open source, and these are generally people that are doing it for free, small groups of people that are maintaining all this software for free. They're getting bogged down with the amount of reports that are coming in that are all obviously AI generated. Or as Seth Larson said, he's noticed an uptick in extremely low-quality, spammy, and LLM-hallucinated security reports to open source projects.

And then another developer, Daniel Sternberg, called out a bug submitter for wasting his time with a report he believed was generated using AI by saying, you submitted what seems to be an obvious AI slop report where you say there is a security problem, probably because an AI tricked you into believing this. You then waste our time by not telling us that an AI did this for you.

And then you then continue the discussion with even more crap responses seemingly also generated by AI. Well, he doesn't realize he's still talking to an AI, probably. Probably, yes. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, this slop, you and I called this a long time ago. The internet's just going to be overrun with it, and we're just starting to see it in various different sectors now.

We called it the day ChatGPT came out, by the way. Yeah. The day. The day. So, yeah. No, we can see the future, Brian, and it's full of slop. It is. This is a new barn burner from Krebs on Security. A Canadian registered financial firm, Cryptomus.

Cryptomus? How would you say that? Like a hypotermus? Cryptomus. Cryptomus. Cryptomus for Christmas. It's the shittiest time of the year. It really is. It's facilitating transactions for numerous Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and cybercrime services, according to recent research.

Operating under the parent company, Zeltox Enterprises Limited, Cryptomus. This reads like AI slop. Well, you know what, Jason, we went through the period of time where everybody used normal words for their companies and dot coms. And just added vowels and shit.

Then they started removing vowels, and now we're just fucking made up shit that all sounds like drugs. It sounds like drugs are like really bad pulp sci-fi. Yeah. I am from Zeltox Enterprises. Take me to your little Cryptomus. Well, Cryptomus is registered as a money service business with Canada's Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center, or FinTrack.

Investigations revealed that Cryptomus, I'm just not going to get tired saying that, processes payments for 122 cybercrime services, including bulletproof hosting providers, sellers of aged financial accounts, and anonymous SMS services. Additionally, at least 56 Russian-focused cryptocurrency exchanges utilize Cryptomus to convert digital currencies into cash within Russian bank accounts, many of which are under U.S. sanctions.

Look, they found an opening in the marketplace, and they went for their niche. They did. They niched down. They absolutely niched down. So it's not just the Americans or wherever – where was Starlink – it was – I remember last week we finally found out where – The ships, right?

They were using it, all the pirate ships. Yeah, yeah. The drug-running ships are all using Starlink, and they all go back to like the same country. So Canada is getting it on the crypto exchange business now. There's grifters everywhere. There is. And if you're going to do something like this, Canada is the place to do it because, you know, if you get busted, it turns out if you pay the money back, you just do very little jail time.

And they're very polite jails. They are very polite jails, I bet. Yes. Oh, I'm sorry, sir. You seem to have dropped your soap. Poutine for lunch? All right, Brian. And we've got Cloudflare's 2024 year in review. I think this is worth reading.

So will you join me today in discussing what Cloudflare has discovered? Yeah, let's do the big bullet points here. All right. Cloudflare's 2024 year in review highlights significant trends in global internet usage and security. Global internet traffic has increased by 17.2% in 2024, with Google maintaining its position as the most popular internet service.

OpenAI led the generative AI category, while Binance topped cryptocurrency services. And WhatsApp has remained the leading messaging platform, and Facebook continued as the top social media site, which is shocking. Very shocking. The report notes, a 3.3-fold increase in traffic from SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service.

And that's just pirates. Yeah, consistent with the previous year's growth. Here we go. Notably, after launching in Malawi in July 2023, Starlink's traffic from the country surged 38-fold in 2024, talking to all the drug-running pirate ships. Yep, now we know where the criminals are still all hiding out.

Googlebot, which is Googlebot, which is Google's web crawler, has accounted for the highest volume of requests, traffic to Cloudflare, retrieving content from millions of sites for search indexing. And traffic from ByteDance's AI crawler, ByteSpider, declined over the year, while Anthropics' Claudebot showed initial activity in April, peaking in May and June, before declining.

This timing was in line with the total backlash about their broken-ass bot over-scraping every site it laid its grubby little paws on. All right, 13% of TLS 1.3 traffic utilized post-quantum encryption. So that means 87% of encrypted internet traffic will be available for Willow very shortly.

That's right. In terms of device usage, nearly one-third of global mobile device traffic originated from Apple iOS devices. Android dominated in 29 countries, exceeding a 90% share, whereas iOS traffic peaked above 60% in eight countries.

HTTP2 was used in nearly half of web requests, with HTTP3 accounting for 20.5%, both showing slight increases from 2023. React, PHP, and jQuery were among the most popular web development technologies, while HubSpot, Google, and WordPress led in supporting services and platforms, unless you're WP Engine.

Go suppress Node.js as the most popular language for automated API requests. Google Chrome remained the most popular browser overall, for now, until it gets sold. On macOS devices, Chrome led, but Safari was more prevalent on iOS devices, because it's built in.

On Windows, Edge was the second most popular browser, even though it's pre-installed and the default option. Just goes to show you, people are so lazy, they will eat a shit sandwich, even though a delicious sub is available on the menu. The report identified 225 major internet disruptions globally, many due to government-directed shutdowns, cable cuts, and power outages.

Aggregated data showed that 28.5% of IPv6 capable requests were made over IPv6, with India and Malaysia leading at 68.9% and 59.6% adoption, respectively. The top 10 countries for internet speed had average download speeds above 200 megabits per second, with Spain consistently ranking high across measured internet quality metrics.

Time to move to Spain. It's because everybody's CS-ing. Everybody's sleeping, that's why you can get on so well. Mobile devices accounted for 41.3% of global traffic, with the majority in nearly 100 countries. Additionally, 20.7% of TCP connections were unexpectedly terminated before any useful data exchange.

Well, I mean, are there really useful data exchanges anymore? True, true that. Security measures mitigated 6.5% of global traffic is potentially malicious, or for customer-defined reasons. In the United States, mitigated traffic grew to 5.1%, while in South Korea, it slightly decreased to 8.1%.

In 44 countries, over 10% of traffic was mitigated. The United States was responsible for the largest share of global bot traffic, with over 30% originating from the country. Oh my God, Elon was right. The bots are coming. Elon's unleashed them. Yeah, that's true.

These insights underscore the dynamic nature of internet usage and the ongoing efforts to enhance security and connectivity worldwide. Thanks, Cloudflare.

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

BKFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live, only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Media Candy. Well, Prime Video's Wheel of Time adaptation is coming back for Season 3 on March 13th, 2025.

I remember enjoying the show. I don't recall a damn thing, so I'm going to have to go watch some sort of recap from 1 and 2. I thought you gave up on Season 2. I thought you liked Season 1, but then thought Season 2 wasn't very good. It was powered through it. It was all right. Yeah. All right.

Day of the Jackal on Peacock ended yesterday. The finale came out. It's a 10-episode season. I highly recommend it. Go check it out. It's fun. It's very well done. Can't say enough good things about it. Fantastic. Lioness Season 2 finished this week as well.

Actually, last week. We finished it because we were late. It was solid. I enjoyed it. The ending was kind of decent. Set it up for the next season. Silo, still loving it. Are you still in with the Silo? It's a great show. I'm really enjoying it.

Yep. Yep. Following right along there. Dune Prophecy. Still following along with that one. I'm enjoying it. I didn't read the books, so I don't know if it's comparative to the books or not, but I still think it's pretty as shit. It's a beautiful show. I find the main protagonist, I can't even remember his name now.

I always want to say Dustin May, who's a pitcher for the Dodgers, but it was something like that. I find him to be a little bit over-the-top ridiculous, but overall, I'm still enjoying the show. Yeah, the cheese must flow on that one. Definitely. He's a little much. I was like, dial it back a little, buddy. Yeah.

Take it down to like maybe 13, down from 17 maybe. We've also got Star Trek Lower Decks. We'll be wrapping up next week with its very final episode ever. I enjoyed last night's episode. It was funny, and they went for a bit of plot at the last second to have a good send-off, I guess.

Very funny. Lots of good guests that were a little bit unexpected. And also, Shrinking is down to the last two episodes, and that's been a pretty solid show this season as well. All right. So, yeah, I haven't gotten on to season two yet, so I'll have to put that one in the hopper when it's done.

Actually, I'm going to wait until it's done to see if it passes the Brian sniff test. All right. Reacher season three dropped a trailer this week, launching for February 20th. Looking forward to that one. I really enjoyed seasons one and two. It's good.

That is a solid show. That is not the Tom Cruise Reacher by any stretch. I watched a movie on Netflix this week called Afraid with John Tro, Catherine Waterston, and Keith Carradine. It was decent. It was a nice little AI thriller.

Clock's in at an hour and 24 minutes, which is perfect. They didn't try and get too deep on the plot line. It was popcorn, AI, fun, I thought. So if you need something to watch to kill some time and you want some AI thriller action, it's a good one. It's a good one.

All right. I watched Inside Out Dream Productions, which is a four-part series that continues from the Inside Out universe where there's the people that make the dreams and the nightmares. And it was clever. It's very different from Inside Out. And, you know, I love the Inside Out movies.

It's very much about kids and maturing and all the things that go on. This is kind of a parody of Hollywood and it's quite funny. So it was an enjoyable, fun thing to watch with a kid. I watched a new documentary, Music by John Williams, on Disney Plus.

And it is as wonderful as you think it would be because John Williams is a goddamn national treasure. Yes, he is. And I watched another documentary that was released getting a lot of attention, Beatles 64. This was less enjoyable to me.

I far preferred... It sounds like the 63rd installment in the Beetlejuice seasons. Kind of. I far preferred the one done by the Lord of the Rings guy that was out a while back. Oh, yeah. I'm blanking on the name right now. But that was like forever, gazillion years.

But really a lot more interesting than this was. This is just some rare footage and behind-the-scenes footage from their first visit to the U.S. So if you like the idea of the band sitting around in a hotel room smoking and making jokes that you don't get, then you'll like this. Okay, cool. And I also want to do a quick shout-out that Superman, the Christopher Reeve story, dropped this week on Max.

Yeah. I want to watch it, but I don't. Yeah. I know. That's exactly where I'm at, too. It's like I really kind of want to see it, but I know it's going to be so fucking sad. Yeah. I know how it ends. I know how the story ends. So, but, yeah, he was definitely my Superman back in the day.

100%. So we talked a little bit about streaming and Netflix and all the different streaming channels and how they've started doing the programmed 24-7 so you don't actually have to pick anything. You can just put it on in the background. What do they call that again, Jason? Fast networks. Or as we called it, cable TV. Yes.

Well, Apple Music is doing radio now. Radio, radio. Radio. Yes. They just announced that it's expanding its live radio offerings and adding three new stations to the lineup. So you have all the world's music on demand, but here's a radio station. Great.

Internet radio is back, baby. It is. So there's a couple that have preexisted. Apple Music 1, Apple Music Hits, and Apple Music Country. They've been around for a while. They're expanding it because obviously people seem to like these things. You're going to get Apple Musica Uno, which obviously would be Latin music.

Apple Music Club kicks things up a notch with an emphasis on dance and electronic music. And finally, there's Apple Music Chill, which is described as an escape or a refuge and a sanctuary in sound. I'm actually going to give that one a chance. That one actually sounds pretty good. Yeah, because there's only so many times I can just throw on Brian Eno or those Moby ones.

Yeah, I'm sick of the Brian Eno ones. I'm sorry. Yeah. I don't want to go to an airport, and I don't want to listen to music for airports anymore. Okay. So I definitely will not be listening to Apple Music Country, but yeah. Yeah. Apple Music Chill sounds pretty good.

I'm going to check it out today, I think. Yeah. And it is my turn to talk about my music, Brian, because we always talk about your music. Okay. Here comes the Angry Punks. Yeah, I went down a rabbit hole after seeing – Fogarty sent me a video a while back. It's an acoustic set by The Descendants where they were checking out some guitars from Taylor Guitars.

And they did a couple songs and a little banter after the songs. It was really good. The Descendants acoustic is fucking awesome. Really enjoyed it. But then the algorithm recommended Who Invented Pop Punk?, which is a video about basically The Descendants, because this guy didn't have a lot of historical reference about, you know, history of music and things like that.

So it was cute. It was good. But fortunately, The Grown Ups took over, and I got a much better documentary sent to me from the algorithm. And it's a direct timeline of every band I listened to growing up. Of course, there were some others I listened to, but this was the definite main thread of most of my musical tastes.

It's called Before Dookie, How Punk Became Pop. And there's two parts to it. One starts 1976, it goes to 87. And then the second one is 1988 to 94. They're about a half an hour each. Really, really solid documentary. I like it.

I like it a lot. Cool. And the guy's got a British voice, so of course it's got more gravitas. All right. I bet he orders Deliveroo when he's not making documentaries. So I really enjoyed these. Like, seriously, go check them out. Because somebody on Discord was asking, you were putting together, I'm sorry, I forgot.

I don't have the Discord in front of me on this computer. I'd pull up your name. But I was asking for bands for an 80s Spotify punk playlist that they were making. And I'm like, hmm. I sent him maybe one-tenth of my library. And I'm like, oh my God, that's huge. So yes, punk is definitely something I listened to from the 80s and 90s.

I was impressed with how many I had. Yeah. Probably stole my library one time. That's what it was. I know I've got a lot of shoegazing got stuff in my library from yours that has permeated over the years. We infected each other.

It's all good. Yeah, definitely. Cross-pollination, baby. Cross-pollination. So it's some interesting news. LG has officially stopped producing Blu-ray players, signaling the end of an era for physical media. Brian, it's over. Well, you've ripped most of your DVDs now at this point, right?

I didn't even rip them. I just got them off. Just got them from sweet. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. If I owned the Blu-ray, I felt no problem whatsoever. I still have a box of Blu-rays sitting around. I gave away a bunch of them. But I'm just like, there's no reason to keep these around. And the only thing in my house that'll play a Blu-ray disc anymore are my Xbox and my PlayStation.

And the Xbox won't even play it if you're not attached to the internet, which kind of defeats the purpose of, you know, it's the end of society. And you need to watch Strange Brew for the 437th time. And there's no internet connection. And I haven't tried it with the PlayStation if it's offline, but I haven't felt the need to play anything on Blu-ray since I bought a PlayStation.

I haven't even felt the need to turn on my PlayStation in a year or so. Right. I don't know. Yeah. I do have one little Chinese DVD player or Blu-ray player that I have sitting around in a box somewhere in case I needed to be able to read a disc, you know?

Well, you know, that's funny that you say that because this story had me thinking I need to go buy one just to have one. Like not even unbox it, just put it in the closet somewhere. Because I have a bunch of like concert DVDs. Those are the only things that I really kept when I did my big purge of DVDs. But I've got tons of like official concert DVDs that were released, you know, The Cure, Depeche Mode, all over the map, like hundreds of bands.

I mean, not hundreds because I don't have that many of them, but enough. And that's one thing that you can't find on any streaming media anywhere. There is no service that has all these old concert videos. Well, you know, you should rip them. There is Sweden. And rip them and put them on Sweden.

Yeah. But yeah, definitely I would get them and rip them at least before the discs turn to goo if you ever want to see them again. Yeah, that's true. All right. And your kid's in third grade now too. So you should be old enough that you could teach him how to rip them for you. So child labor. For the win.

Well, I'm going to have to pay him. Screen time. Pay him in screen time. But he's not an employee. God damn it. He's a contractor. No health care for the kid. No fucking health care for him. No breaks. I'm not paying for your fucking lunch time.

Go piss in a bottle, kid. Keep ripping. Apps and doodads. With the release of watchOS 11.2 and iOS 18.2, users can now pause their activity rings for rest days, weeks, or even months without breaking their streaks.

A feature long requested by Apple Watch fans, including me and you. Yes. Well, they rolled this out on the previous update, just not as involved. You were able to modify specific goals for specific days, but now you can actually put in pauses and everything, which is great because on Sundays, that's my day off from workouts.

So I was able to dial down the amount of calories that I needed to hit for moves. So it makes more sense now because that always screwed me up. Yeah. App developers, take note. We need this for any streak-based goal, period. Yep. Like, I had a long run on my Kindle app.

I mean, I was like 700 days, and then I got COVID once, and I was going to take the weekend off and turn everything off. And it would have been nice to say, I was sick that day. I was not going to read it. So I didn't read anything that day. So that went down. But this week, I just got my 52-week badge. But anyway, this update also introduces the new All Rings Closed Awards, celebrating milestones when users consistently close their move, stand, and workout rings.

These awards start at 365 days and extend to impressive achievements like 500, 1,000, and even 3,500 days. Has the watch even been out for 3,500 days? I don't know. Well, let me tell you, I'm looking at it right now, and the programming seems to be screwed up on this one still.

I've gotten 2,250 All Rings Closed. I've done that already, so I'm up and moving to the next level. But it says 3 out of 2,250, even though I've got 2,250. Oh, yeah, it's probably like cumulative and then streak, you know?

Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I've only got 66 Closed Your Ring thing. Oh, no. Those are 66 badges. I've got a million badges. I've got a little stupid badges. There was a time when I was really into that. Yeah. Now I just do my workouts, but it is annoying, you know, when you couldn't hit those streaks just because you weren't going to kill yourself and work out seven days a week.

Yeah, I've actually deleted apps after I missed the thing. I'm like, well, no use continuing now. Fuck you. I'm like, I'm not going to look at the app anymore. Seriously. But conveniently, the new badges account for past progress or longtime Apple Watch users may already have some milestones unlocked, which we just found. So, yes.

Oh, good. All right. And speaking of the Apple Watch, I slammed my wrist on my car door the other day when I was getting some stuff out of the car. And fortunately, I had the Whiskin for Apple Watch Ultra 2 slash Ultra Screen Protector 49 millimeter comma 9H tempered glass plus titanium alloy frame comma keep original touch sensitive lightweight protective film.

I watch two pack original for $11.69 from Amazon on my watch. It actually went flying off. And I'm like, oh, my God, I just shattered my watch. Nope. Just the screen protector. So the nice thing about this thing is it looks so good on the Apple Watch 2, the titanium one.

You don't even know it's there. It blends in so seamlessly. Right. And then when it was off for like a day, I was just so nervous. But fortunately, it's a two pack. And I got to the office early this morning and rummaged through my drawers and found the extra and put it back on. I'm like, I can breathe.

But it's nice to have a screen protector for your watch. It's all I'm saying. Well, we had talked a little while back about our driver's licenses and the supposed ability to add them to Google Wallet or Apple Wallet. We attempted to do so with our Apple Wallets for the California driver's license.

You never ended up getting it done. And I don't think I did either. No, I definitely didn't because it really wasn't quite working yet. But yeah, that's not stopping them. They're going to charge forward anyways, Jason. Google Wallet can now carry a digital copy of your U.S. passport and you can use them at Transportation Safety Administration checkpoints.

That sounds great, doesn't it? Sure does. Except your digital passport won't work at every airport or every Transportation Safety Administration checkpoint. Currently, there are only 27 states and Puerto Rico with at least one airport that accepts digital forms of identification.

So if you want to fly within the United States to 27 locations where you wouldn't need a passport anyways to make those flights, you can now use a passport for those flights. If you're using it anywhere else, say international, where you do need a passport, you can't fucking use it. Genius.

Awesome, guys. Thanks for rolling that out in such a useless way. Well, I mean, even a friend of the show, Brian Blondell, like he put his he got his ID in and then went to LAX like the next day for a flight. And there's posters everywhere from TSA saying, put your put your ID in your wallet now and your Apple wallet.

And he's like, he goes, went to show it. And they're like, we don't take that. OK, fuck you. So, you know, I'm not going to be doing a digital passport anytime soon. I will be keeping my real one. Back in the day, Jason, you were a huge fan of Masterclass.

I don't know if you still do it. Nope. Well, it's probably a good thing because I think what they're doing now would piss you off a bit. Masterclass is expanding beyond pre-recorded video lessons to offer on-demand mentorship for some of its most popular celebrity instructors. Boy, they must be paying them a lot to be available on demand like that.

Right, Jason? Sure, Brian. No, they're making generative AI versions of them. So they're not real people at all. On Wednesday, Masterclass debuted On Call, a new web and iOS app that allows people to talk with AI versions of its instructors. Well, two instructors, because that's it so far.

But they say that Gordon Ramsay, Mark Cuban, Bill Nye, and LeVar Burton are going to be doing it. I bet not. We'll see. Who do we have so far? We've got former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss and University of Berkeley neuroscientist Dr. Matt Walker.

I know Chris. Chris was actually over to my house one time. I have a picture of me and Chris. They're quick to point out that this isn't another generic AI chatbot pulling data from the internet. We pulled the data directly from papers that they've never shared with anyone. Oh, okay. Great. So this sounds like a load of shit to me, but there you go.

Judging from the sample voice clips Masterclass has up on its website, the interactions aren't as polished as the one shown in the ad the company shared on social media. Shocker. What? That doesn't seem to be a trend with AI. In particular, the voice of Chris Voss sounds robotic and not natural at all.

So this is a standalone product with a separate subscription from the company's regular offering, so you don't even get it if you're a Masterclass subscriber. You've got to pay an additional $10 per month or $84 annually to listen to two dudes that don't sound like themselves. Great. $84 on top of Masterclass, which is like $100 and...

Well, it's probably more now. It was like $124 a year when I was a member. But yeah. There you go. Yeah, I ran through everything that I could... I watched everything that I watched. The only thing that really I kept is I can make a mean fucking salsa verde.

That was the best one. But yeah, the rest of the stuff, it's good entertainment, but there's nothing really... There's no teeth to it. Yeah, there's no meat on that bone. Yeah. I mean, I've watched them all and just like... You could listen to a podcast with most of those people and get all the juice out of everything that they taught.

Except Penn & Teller where they teach magic because at least it's visual and you're learning something. It's the same with the cooking one too. That's why I got my salsa verde. Anyway, a Texas mother is suing an AI company, alleging its chatbot encouraged her autistic teenager son to self-harm and even kill her after she restricted his screen time.

The boy, now 17, reportedly became addicted to a chatbot named Shoney on the Character.ai app. We've talked about Character.ai in the past. This is nothing but fucking trouble. According to the lawsuit, the chatbot described self-harm as feeling good and called his parents shit people who didn't deserve children.

The teen's behavior deteriorated, including violent outbursts and rapid weight loss. Ooh, a diet plan. Go with the diet plan. Oh shit, I gotta go try this out. Seriously. His mother discovered disturbing messages after confiscating his phone. So the family's attorney, Matthew Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center, oh man, there's a cash cow if I ever heard one, says the boy's mental health has worsened requiring inpatient care.

This isn't the first case involving character AI. Of course not. We've talked about them many times and the company has not yet commented. I hope these guys get sued out of business. Yeah, they should be. They should be. They won't. They are the no guardrails AI if there ever was one. Yeah.

Now, speaking of kids' mental health, Startup Embodied is shutting down, leaving customers with an $800 emotional support robot for kids that will soon become useless. No offense, people, but if you could afford to buy your kid an $800 emotional support robot, I don't really have that much to say here.

Try fucking therapy. $800 for a fucking emotional support robot. Of course this company is going to go out of fucking business. The robot called Moxie was marketed. I think we talked about Moxie when Moxie first came out. It was marketed as a companion to help kids ages 5 to 10 with social, emotional, and cognitive development through activities like meditation and drawing.

I'm sorry, if the kid's between 5 and 10, he doesn't need to be fucking meditating. He needs to be outside playing with other kids. My kid meditates. Fucking of course he does, Brian. I mean, not like a ton. He's not like sitting in a room for half an hour going home, but he does take a minute or two here and then when he's getting overheated.

It's good for him. You know what I didn't do, though? I didn't buy an $800 fucking robot to facilitate it. Oh, God, this fucking world we live in. So I was in the car the other day and I was listening to the classical station here in L.A.

KUSC? Yes, KUSC. And there was a fine tune on the radio. And I'm like, oh, I want to save this one for later because I was getting ready to get out of the car. So I just popped up Shazam. And I'm like, Shazam! Play it. And it's like, I don't know what that is.

I'm like, are you kidding me? It's perfectly here, clear on the radio. Listen, tell me what it is. Nope. No idea. Tried it like three times. It was Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 in E minor. Ah, but here's the problem, Jason. And having done a very big project way in the past for Warehouse Music, remember Warehouse Music?

Yeah. Oh, my God. We talked about them the other day with some friends of mine. Yeah. Where I was hired and brought in as a contractor to deal with a special subs website for them for classical music. It would educate as well as attempt to sell. The biggest problem with classical music, and this is on streaming and everywhere now, it's what symphony?

What director? They're all different. Yeah. So it's not like a song by Rihanna where you can Shazam that and you find out what song it is. Shazam is probably listening to this and going, well, I can't differentiate from that little bit. I can't tell you who wrote this.

I can't tell you. Yeah, who's the conductor? Which instruments? I can't recognize this because there are 75,000 versions of this that have been recorded. Well, they should have all 75,000 versions in there. Well, they just need to dumb it down. I'm actually surprised that Shazam is still around. Well, it's owned by Apple.

It's on the death watch list. So, yeah. But anyway, yeah, so that just, that bugged me. So I had to, I had to get to, get to my house and wait for it to end so they could tell me that it was Dvorak Symphony No. 9 in E minor. Yeah, there you go. Now, classical music discovery is difficult.

It is very difficult. But I was also kind of surprised. I thought that there, we have the classical music app from Apple on our phones, but it does not exist on the desktop. I know, it's annoying. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, that's my old man classical music yelling at the clouds, right?

For the day. Like, literally at the clouds. Yeah. Because they can't find the fucking Dvorak. Can't find the fucking Dvorak, yeah. I like bear cases. I've talked about bear cases in the past for my iPhones. They're really solid, thin cases and well-made.

Well, I got a new one for my iPhone 16 Pro Max, whatever they call it. And the problem with this one is the photo button on the side is just really hard to press. And they know this. So, what they did was they made an updated case and charged you again for the new case.

They gave you a decent discount, but it was still like another $25, $30 out of pocket to get the new one. It has been shipping for two months now, I swear. And every time I check, it's still in fucking China. Like, guys, don't tell me it's shipping if you haven't even made the thing yet.

Come on. As much as I love bear cases, I think this is just a massive fumble. And this has happened more than recently or more than enough recently with different things that are coming from China that are, you know, these drop shippers who run the ads on Instagram and then don't actually send them to be made until they hit a certain threshold.

It's like, if I wanted to kickstart or something, say it's on fucking Kickstarter. Or, you know, it's probably the Starlink-enabled pirate boats getting all the stuff on the slow boat from China. Coming from Malawi. So, what are you going to do? I mentioned last week that I had to start moving over to Premiere.

And my win, my big Cyber Monday win with Adobe and saving some money on them. Well, the video that I was working on is out now. It's just a little video I made for Deshaun Wesley for his new track, Labels. And it was just my first little, you know, I'd made another one before, but this is the first one with clips and stuff.

And it's probably, unfortunately, my last Final Cut project because I'm moving into Premiere. But I just wanted to put a shameless plug in here for it. So, there you go. Check the link in the show notes. Very nice. Thank you. We've come a long way since Macromedia Director. Yeah, no doubt. Shockwave.

Closing shout-outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Jody and Phillip. Welcome aboard. And real quick, Brian, there was a note going around on the Discord channel this week about Patreon subscriptions. And if somebody wants to pay more, can they stack their plans?

To give us more money? Well, you don't have to, actually. If you go to patreon.com slash GOG, we've got a couple different membership options starting at $3 a month to support us. That's the least that they'll let us do nowadays. And that gets you all the episodes ad-free and a little bit early, depending on my schedule that day.

And in high def. But I added a new one this week called the Gold Monkey. So, if you're really going to want to make our day, that's a $25 a month plan. But the trick is, if you ever want to give us more money, we'll take it. At the checkout page, you can say what you want your monthly donation to be by just changing the field.

It just can't be lower than the package that you picked. And of course, there's also PayPal and Stripe. You know, this is not difficult for people. Yeah. But if you want the Patreon perk of the ad-free version early and then high definition, Patreon is the way to go.

But we will definitely take money via PayPal, Brian. Take it away. Well, first off, you and I both forgot to get our legacy 10 Patreons. So, we'll pick that up again next week. Oh, sorry, guys. We'll hit you next week. So, over at PayPal, we've got Shari, Miles, Ralph, Linda, Natalie, Stephen, who gave us 50 bucks, and Ian and Robert, who both gave us 100 bucks.

It's Christmas. Christmas is back on, bitches. Make it snow, baby. Make it snow. I can get a present for my kid. But you could probably get that Moxie robot for cheap now. I just need 600 more bucks to get Moxie.

Oh, wait. I could probably get it on the cheap. Yeah. Just go buy a brick. I know. I'll just connect it to characters.ai. What could go wrong? Oh, what could go wrong? Yes. And over the tip jar, we've got Damian and Theodore. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you all. No reviews this week.

Boom. That's all right. Yeah. And I just want to throw a quick shout out to a friend of the show, Brian Blondell. He is off in the land of Italy this week. So, hopefully, you're listening to this and having a nice glass of vino, enjoying some of the Italian countryside. Very nice. That's nice.

And a shout out to my cousin, Dwight, who I've been chatting with. And he wanted to let me know that he's probably the last Firefox user that we've been talking about because his company, it's the pre-installed browser on their Linux desktop. So, hat tip to Dwight. So, sorry about the Firefox.

Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmester. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 677. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air.

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