733: Predator Friendly Hunting Ground

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show where we discuss the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. This week, Elon Musk realizes Mars is actually quite far away, so he's pivoting to a moon city while his ex-AI co-founders flee the building and he rants about sci-fi catapults and ancient aliens. Meanwhile, OpenAI is speedrunning the Facebook model, stuffing ads into your chats

and firing the safety execs who dared to suggest adult mode might be a bad idea. We'll look at the archive of human candor and why your chatbot knows too much about your medical fears to be trusted with a marketing budget. Plus, the WordPress nuclear war continues and research finally confirms what we've been saying for two years. AI doesn't reduce your work, it just compresses it until your lunch break disappears and you're drowning in cognitive debt. We've also got Meta in court for being a predator-friendly hunting ground, ring turning your front porch into a neighborhood

surveillance dragnet for lost poodles, and Weibo paying door dashers 10 bucks to do the one thing their $200,000 cars can't, shut the damn door. It's a race to the bottom and everyone's wearing lead shoes. Let's get started, Brian. Okay. Now, let's start off with some automatic follow-up. WP Engine, I had a dream about Matt Mullenweg the other day and his billionaire douche buddies. Your dreams suck. They really do. Then this comes across the wire. WP Engine

has filed an amended complaint in its ongoing lawsuit against WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg in Automatic, alleging new details uncovered during Discovery. Well, surprise, they discovered something. That's what Discovery is all about. Exactly. The filing claims Mullenweg planned to seek royalty payments from as many as 10 hosting companies for use of the WordPress trademark similar to the 8% gross monthly revenue Automatic allegedly demanded from WP Engine. And here's the one that's

really nasty. WP Engine also alleges that Mullenweg contacted a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor to cancel WP Engine's contract after the lawsuit was filed. Ooh, that's not nice. That's not very nice at all. So. No, you take somebody's ability to take money, you've ruined their business.

Yeah. How's he going to get his 8%? Yeah, exactly. Come on. Think about it, Matt. Come on. And in some other AI news this time, we've got a lot of AI news this week, Brian. I'm sorry, but it has been a week of the destruction of AI, which makes me kind of happy. This one from the Harvard Business Review. AI was supposed to lighten the load so humans could do higher value work, but new research says it's doing the exact opposite. In an eight-month study at a U.S.

tech company, AI made people work faster, take on more tasks, and stretch work into nights and lunch breaks, often without being asked. Now, you know, Brian, there was another thing that did this long ago. That was email, right? First we had email. Yeah. What a wonderful new tool. Oh, my God. I'm getting emails at home. Oh, my God. I'm responding to emails in my downtime. Oh, my God. My night has gone away because I'm here doing email. Oh, my God. I have to leave my kids' baseball game because

somebody sent me an email. Oh, my God. Now, and then in recent history, Slack took that honor because everybody got on Slack. And now there's teams to compete with that. But so AI is just another one of those things that is supposed to make life easier and work easier, but it's actually not. So,

yeah, I love it. I love it. And it's doubled down on it. Not only does this stuff actually seem to take people longer. And anecdotally, this is what I've heard as well from many, many people that I know that are still gainfully employed in the corporate workforce and have been forced to take on AI tools because, you know, somebody decided this is a good idea and we paid for the subscription. So everybody's got to use it now. Anecdotally, I've heard everything is just taking longer. And that's

before you even factor in the fact that a bunch of people are getting fired and not getting replaced. And the few people that are left behind have to do the work of many. Yep. Yep. It's fun. It's great. Technology is, you know, saving the day. I thought they said that it was going to, AI was going to release the burden of the drudgery of the day-to-day workload so we can do other things like, you know, write poetry and create art. Well, there's poetry later in the show.

We've got that coming. Well, let us cast back our minds, Jason, and start to go through the marketing bullshit from all the technologies that we've discussed that are no longer with us and all the wonderful things that they were supposed to do for us, Jason. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, I'm pretty sure my life was supposed to be on the blockchain right now with my self-driving car taking me wherever I wanted to go for free.

Don't forget those smart contracts and the NFTs that are going to completely revolutionize the world. Oh, my home is slathered with NFTs and tears. NFTs and tears. Smart contracts, man. I'm rolling in the dollars. Yep. Yep. Speaking of rolling in the dollars, Polymarket is turning the Internet's obsession with clout into something you can literally bet on. This one is just for you, Brian. The prediction market announced a partnership with Kaito AI to launch what it's calling attention markets, where users wager on how

popular or unpopular brands, trends, and actual people are online. All in on Elon being an asshole. Getting there. Getting there. That's right. Using data scraped across X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Kaito tracks both mindshare, meaning how much people are talking, and sentiment, meaning whether they're cheering or ready to cancel. So this means new markets like whether sentiment around Elon Musk goes up or down, just like you wanted last week, Brian. You are set.

I didn't say I wanted it. I just said that that's smart money. There's some good bets going on there. I think this is abhorrent, of course. I've been fighting against the gambling creep that was slowly creeping into into sports and is now basically an entirely taken over the sporting world. And seeing this fall into just everyday life is abhorrent. And luckily, we haven't had like the killer app yet that has just dropped onto people's phones that makes this so easy to do.

But that's a common that's coming. That's exactly what they're launching, man. That's exactly what they're launching. Speaking of launching, Israel arrests members of military for placing polymarket bets using inside information on upcoming strikes in Gaza. That's right.

This is going to happen. Of course it is. Yep. You know, we've gone far beyond what they used to call the I can't remember the exact name for it. They had a term for it, but it was the you knew something was going really bad in the world when all of a sudden pizza deliveries in Washington, D.C. went through the roof.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. It was dominoes. Everybody noticed that dominoes dominoes drivers were were getting more calls than normal to the Pentagon when someone's getting bombed. Exactly. Well, yeah, the is really at least on the fucking Israelis, at least on, you know, their part, the Israeli military and some of their their people have arrested a member of the Israeli military and a civilian for placing bets. There are some other people like Rico Suave 666

that had some insider information and disappeared. But yeah, this is this is the the logical progression of how this stuff goes. I love the fact that like all we do is talk about how tech needs regulation. And here we go. I mean, you can't get a fucking cotton candy flavored vape, but you can fucking bet your life savings and gambling is I would wager for many, many people. I would wager. There you go.

There you go. I mean, I would wager that for many, many people, gambling is more addictive than cotton candy vapes. And we're just go ahead. Have at it, people bet on anything, dude. And here's the thing, you know, in the recovery programs, you know, you've got your alcohol, you get cocaine, you've got your food. Gamblers Anonymous are the worst of the worst of the worst. Those people ruin more lives than all of the rest of us combined. You know, it's it's insane. You follow the trail

of Gamblers Anonymous and just the people that don't even get in there who have bet their house and lost their houses, lost their kids college funds, lost everything and can't stop. This is just a crack pipe for them on their phone 24 seven, seven days a week. It's not a good thing.

Speaking about betting on that asshole, Elon. Oh, boy, did he have a week? Oh, doggy. Elon Musk has been going on nonstop about how SpaceX is going to get us to Mars. We've got to save human civilization. Oh, by the way, keep fucking like I do, because we're also having a collapse of population. None of this is happening. You can bet against it all on your polymarket accounts.

And don't do that, please. Don't do that. Anyways, you know what I'm saying here. Anyway, so it was Mars, Mars, Mars, Mars, Mars. And again, Gizmodo with the headline, unable to reach Mars, Musk does the most Musk thing possible. Yes, we have pivoted. He's singing a very different tune now.

He's he's saying that, you know, he used to say that going to the moon as a stepping stone of the red planet would just be a distraction. But guess what we're doing now, Jason? To the moon, Alice. To the moon, to the moon. Yeah, that's right. We have given up on Mars. And now on an ex post on Sunday, Musk had said SpaceX is shifting focus towards building a self-growing city on the moon. This will take potentially less than a decade. Hold on. When are we supposed to be on Mars already

with our flying cars and our self-driving cars and all the other bullshit he has promised that is only going to happen in a couple of years, none of which has happened. At least he's now saying it's going to be a decade before moon. Before we get to the moon. This is, of course, a pivot that is coming as Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, is planning to deliver a lunar lander to NASA for their Artemis 3 mission, which will be the first to land astronauts on the surface of the moon in over 50 years.

And we can't have a bigger Dickus. No, we can't. So, the Biggest Dickus is coming on in hard. Oh, God. Anyways, so yes, we have pivoted to the moon, Jason, but that is not the best part that Elon gave us.

It gets better. The biggest gift that Elon gave us this week. So, he also gave a, he had an XAI all-hands meeting. This is even better than walking into Twitter with a sink, like he did last time. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, Elon Musk doesn't always make sense when he talks, but at a recent all-hands meeting at XAI that was posted in full online, not the smartest move, he made less sense than usual.

As Gizmoda points out, this isn't investment advice, but anyone considering buying stock in the SpaceX or XAI conglomerate expecting to make initial IPO later this year might want to give some real thought to how that's going to go, especially if you watch this speech. Of course, you can bet against him on Polymarket.

Yep. So, in addition to all the high-level resignations they've had recently, also, he did a pivot on that, which is not even in the show notes. He's basically claiming that he fired all these people who have come out and said that they've resigned. Oh, okay.

Because Elon can't lose. Yeah. So, most of the company's 11 original co-founders have left, I'm sorry, been fired. Anyways, he gave this speech. He's hoping to raise a bunch of money, of course, and unfortunately, one of my other pet peeves is there's a very real potential retirement and pension funds will soon be among those holding a stake in this venture because they will, of course, buy some of this stock.

But he's basically claiming this venture will involve building a sci-fi catapult on the moon, discovering ancient aliens, and consuming an ever greater percentage of the sun's energy for some reason. For some reason. This is all in his speech.

If you try to make any sense of it, he seems to be arguing that only through the merger of XAI and SpaceX can the concept of intelligence, artificial or otherwise, collect and benefit from hypothetical knowledge of space and all its fastness, including what can be gleaned from aliens or through excavating the remnants of extinct aliens, all of which we're going to find on the moon in 10 years, maybe, because we're not even going to Mars

anymore, but we're going to find what the fuck is this guy talking about? I don't know, man. He's going to be sending up the Boring Company drills up to the moon so he can, I guess, dig for aliens. I heard he wants to make a robot factory on the moon. What? You know, there's this thing called raw materials.

You can't even make a fucking robot. We saw the videos. It's people, God damn it. Anyways, there's a link in the show notes. You can watch this whole speech. I beg of you to do so if you're even considering throwing a dollar this guy's way still.

Well, let's just keep the Elon Musk news going, Brian. It's a little closer to home. While Elon's been loudly backing Iranian protesters and dunking on the regime, his company, X, appears to have been quietly cashing checks from the very officials he's condemning. A new report found more than two dozen accounts linked to Iranian government officials and state media sporting blue check marks, meaning they were paying for X premium even during an internet blackout when ordinary Iranians couldn't even get online.

That could put X in violation of US sanctions since it effectively is selling amplification tools to unsanctioned actors. Wired pointed this out and then some of the accounts were removed, but not all of them. Some of them are still up. Now, you know, the Treasury says it takes sanctions seriously, but can we take anything seriously that the United States government says at all at this point, period?

No, we can't. So, yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah. Yep. We'll be selling bone salts to the Saudis next. And this week, Meta is staring down two trials that could finally put some teeth behind. Think of the children rhetoric, maybe.

And TikTok already settled out one of them. First up, New Mexico's attorney general is accusing Meta of building Instagram into a predator-friendly hunting ground, then misleading the public about the damage, which we've covered ad nauseum for years on this show. Internal research allegedly shows sexual exploitation nearly hitting half a million kids a day, per day, in English-speaking markets alone.

The state wants algorithm changes, age verification, and actual disclosures about harm. Well, at the same time, Meta and Google are on the trial in Los Angeles, are on trial in Los Angeles, me speak pretty one day, over claims that Instagram and YouTube were deliberately engineered to addict kids, worsening depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and self-harm.

Much like Los Angeles itself. Exactly. Welcome to SoCal, motherfuckers. You want to be an actor? Lose 30 pounds. At least. At least. Can I see your spleen on your resume? Nope, then it doesn't matter. Both cases aim straight at Section 230, which at this point needs to be taken out back and shot.

So if this happens and there's any, you know, any wins for the peoples on this one, expect the floodgates to open because, yeah. The floodgates have opened around the rest of the world. It's not going to happen in the U.S. It's just not. Not until there's a different government, which could plug with that.

Two years and change. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see about that. But yeah, I mean, the tide is turning around the rest of the world. We cover it every week on this show. So here's hoping. Yeah. Let's pivot over to Russia now. After warnings from lawmakers last year, WhatsApp has been blocked in Russia for as many as 100 million users, the Financial Times reported.

Russian authorities removed the app from an online directory, effectively wiping it from Russia's internet. The government has previously said that it wants users to switch to an app called Max, not HBO Max, not Max Plus, not Discovery Max Plus, HBO, whatever the fuck they're calling it these days, an unencrypted WeChat clone that the government might possibly have the back door to or not even need a back door.

It's just the front door. Yep. Please use our app here. So yeah, they're basically just trying to get rid of the secure and private communications in Russia and give them an alternative so they can see everything. YouTube access was also reportedly downgraded or degraded, although it's not clear if the app has been completely removed.

The Russian government has deleted WhatsApp rival Telegram as well, while also erasing meta apps, Facebook and Instagram. This is all being done to protect the citizens, of course, given the large number of scammers where they want to make sure that you're going to be OK. Uh-huh.

Uh-huh. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. It's really ironic that they're getting rid of Telegram because most of the Russian mob and all of the scammers in Russia that pay the government use Telegram religiously for most of their scams. So somebody didn't pay. The check didn't arrive on time. There were there were not enough rubles in the account, I guess.

So right. Because Telegram is definitely used by almost everybody that does something nefarious in Russia. So I guess maybe they just want to go to Max, get the Max profits. Perhaps. And then if you're sitting there all smug and thinking to yourself, well, that's Russia.

That can't possibly happen here. Cast your minds back to all the ice tracking apps being removed because the government. Was that two weeks ago? Because the U.S. government didn't want them. Well, we're still pushing. We're still pretending we have some semblance of a democracy here and we're pushing back a little bit.

House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to turn over all its communications with both Apple and Google regarding the company's decisions to remove the apps that shared information about sightings of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers. Several apps that allowed people to share this information were removed from both Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store back in October.

And Politico has reported that Raskin has contacted Attorney General Pam Bondi, which judging from anything that she said, particularly in the past week, she's had a bad week, fucking useless because she'll just say, you're an asshole. What a ghoul. But have you seen the DAO?

It's great. Yeah. Anyways. So, yeah, they have tried it here as well. And we're pushing back a little bit and we'll see what happens. OK. Pushing back a little bit. Not much. Just a little bit. Yes. Well, we've got some Discord news here, Brian.

I've got I've got three fantastic stories about Discord here. All right. Discord is rolling out teen by default settings worldwide, making a more locked down, age appropriate experience. The default for all users starting in early March. Under the new system, sensitive content stays blurred.

Age gated servers and commands are restricted and direct messages from strangers are pushed into a separate request inbox unless a user is verified as an adult. To unlock adult settings, users may need to go through age verification, either via facial age estimation or by submitting government ID through third party vendors.

Well, Discord says its approach is privacy forward, claiming facial age checks run on device and IDs are deleted quickly after verification, which we'll talk about in just a second. And the company is also deploying an automated age inference model that may flag accounts without explicit verifications.

This builds on earlier teen safety rollouts in the UK and Australia and lines up neatly with the global push for age verification laws. Discord is also launching a teen council to advise on future features. And they're taking I'm sure they're taking the blueprint from Meta's council on that.

You know, the council that goes to nowhere and does absolutely nothing but takes a very nice salary check. OK, now before before before you go on, Jason, and tell me and tell us why all these things fucking suck and mean nothing. Can we just say for a second that in theory, if they were to roll all this out in the exact way in which they are describing and it all functioned in the exact way in which they are describing, it is a quite a good plan.

Yeah, it's a great plan. I have zero problems with what they've said so far. So now tell me why I should have many, many problems. Discord says hackers lifted government ID images from about 70,000 users. Oopsies. The breach wasn't Discord's core systems, but a third party support vendor that handled age verification, meaning attackers got scans of driver's licenses, other government IDs, and yes, selfies that were somehow meant to prove age.

My dickies. My dickies. Discord says it cut the vendor off and is emailing affected users from a no reply address. The price of using the Internet is increasingly your ID and every new database is just the next breach waiting to happen. And yes, Brian.

So they said I'm going to scroll back up here. Discord says its approach is privacy forward, claiming facial aids checks run on device and IDs are deleted quickly after verification. We have put your privacy forward and we have handed it to hackers.

To the hackers. Please take our IDs. Jesus Christ. I mean, look, this is what you and I have been talking about since this whole push started over a year ago now around the world about age identification and proof of identity.

And the problem is nobody has figured out a secure, smart, safe way to do it. Yep. That's it. Yep. Nobody's got it. Nobody. There's no magic bullet. Nobody's got the secret sauce yet. No. Well, we've we've talked about what the secret sauce should be, which is on device verification based tied to your billing.

You have to pay for these phones. So there. Well, Discord, you can run on the web. But, you know, how many how many kids are on Discord on the web? I guess the gamers might be. Yeah, maybe. But still, there's a way to do age verification somewhat easier than they're doing now.

Because someone dropped a browser based tool that claims to blow right past Discord's age checks. The trick replaces your real face with a controllable 3D CGI guy who can nod, tilt and mug for the camera on command. Hee. Apparently fooling Discord's prove your human checks.

This matters because Discord uses the same KID age estimation tech that kids already bragged about bypassing in VR games with photos of Trump and Half-Life characters. KID says its systems are working as expected and stresses this is age estimation, not identity verification.

So what the fucking use are you? Period. Right. I'm just saying. Just saying. No, I mean, we all agree. We agree. Like, we need some sort of system. I have zero problems with the idea of starting, again, starting off with, like, your team by default and adult content is not accessible and all of that.

And then you have to have some sort of way to verify to be able to get all that 100% on board. We got to figure out a way to do it. We got to figure out a way to do it. And using these third-party vendors, not working. They're all getting hacked. On-device is the way to do it.

At the end of the day, it's going to come down to Android and iOS. End of story. And even if you go to the web, then you're going to need the code from the phone to get onto the website. Like, you've just got to do it that way. There's no way around it anymore. Tim Cook, get fucking on it. Well, is it even Android and IRS?

IRS? IRS? Well, the IRS would be a good way to do it. That would perfectly be a way to do it. But wouldn't it come down almost to the carriers, even? The carriers working with the device manufacturers, because the carriers have the billing information, you know? Because some kids might not have, you know, like an Apple ID or a Google account to get apps that could be under the parents or things like that.

But there's got to be some kind of merger between the device manufacturers and the carriers, you know, the cell carriers. Well, thank God there's only like basically three carriers. So this should be pretty easy. Like, yeah. Oh, Jesus. Well, all right.

Moving on. Moving on. OpenAI has started testing ads inside ChatGPT in the U.S. Ads will show up only for logged in adults on the free and go tiers while Plus Pro, Business and Enterprise stay ad free. OpenAI insists ads won't influence answers, will be clearly labeled, and won't give advertisers access to your chats.

Targeting is based on conversation topics and past interactions, not personal data. You can dismiss ads, manage personalization, or opt out entirely if you're willing to live with fewer free messages. Brian, I'm going to point out the flaw in the system in like two seconds here.

Mm-hmm. So they say that ads are basically based on the content of the chats, right? Yes. But they're not going to share the chats with the advertisers, right? Right. How do they let the advertisers know what ads that they need to serve from the chats without sharing the chats with the advertisers to get the content to send it back?

They leave out, they're going to do keywords. So basically, they're going to leave out keywords. So if I type in something like, I have... Chlamydia. I have chlamydia, they will leave out have. I chlamydia.

Yes. Much, much, it's not I, Claudius. It is a very different story. Very different story. Ending might be the same, though. But I mean, that's exactly what they're going to do is they're going to do keywords and there's going to be so many keywords attached to a chat.

It's going to be diarrhea, Imodium, blah, blah, blah. All of that's going to be in there. They're going to leave out the and toilet and that's it. Like, so it's so fucking stupid. I mean, we don't know how they're going to do it, but that's my guess. Like, out of all the things that they're talking about, the only thing that we can see ourselves is are the ads clearly labeled?

That we can see. Everything else we're trusting them on. We're totally trusting them on, which brings us to our next story. Open AI researcher quits and warns its unprecedented archive of human candor is dangerous. So we've had a lot of public exits from the AI companies, which we're going to talk about quite a few of them.

But Zoe Hitzig's case is arguably the most attention gramming. She is a former researcher at Open AI, and she left the company via an op-ed in the New York Times in which she warned not of some vague unnamed crisis. Like Anthropik's recently departed safeguard lead, but of something real and eminent.

Open AI's introduction of advertisements to ChatGPT and what information it will use to target those sponsored messages. She makes the point that it is not advertising itself that is the issue, but the potential use of a vast amount of sensitive data that users have shared with ChatGPT, your past chats, without giving a second thought as to how it could be used to target them or who could potentially get their hands on it.

So people tell ChatBots about medical fears, relationship problems, beliefs in God and the afterlife, all of this sort of stuff that people are fucking doing for some reason that is totally beyond me. What the fuck is wrong with you people? But you're all doing it.

And they've all got that information and it's all stored. And right now they're saying we're not going to let that influence the advertising. But when the dollars come a-coming, like Google used to be, we're going to do no evil until the dollars started coming. And then it was like, well, we're going to do a little bit of evil because there's a lot of money here.

And her worry is, of course, that right now they say they're not doing this, but how much longer? And there's no meaningful reason for them not to. There is no law. There is no regulation. There is nothing. Nope. Nothing.

And it's not just the ads on ChatGPT. Those advertising companies that are selling those advertisements to ChatGPT and OpenAI, they follow you everywhere you go like shit on your shoe. So every website that you go to, here's your chlamydia ad, sir.

You know, anybody in your household who is probably in close proximity to you is going to be getting chlamydia cream advertisements because they've done the, you know, the juxtaposition of where you are, where they are, time-based, you know, correlations and things like that. So your most private conversations are going to bleed into the other advertisements of people around you, thus letting people know somebody in the circle's got the clap or some shit like that.

So it's coming. It is absolutely going to happen because they can't sandbox it and they won't sandbox it because there's too much money. And again, this, we're going to keep your private information private. We're not going to sell it. We've seen this before. I just talked about Google. Her point, the one that she brings up is Facebook, that they're just speed running the Facebook model of promising users' privacy over their data and then rug pulling them when it turns out, oh, that data is quite valuable.

We can make a lot of money off of this. And she also points out rightly that she may have an uphill battle in getting anybody to care because two decades of social media has created a sense of privacy nihilism in the general public. Most people don't care.

Yeah. Yeah. No, we're back to Cambridge Analytica 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, Cambridge Analytica GPT, you know? That's all it's going to be. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Delete Me.

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Well, let's move on to some more OpenAI news. OpenAI just fired one of its top safety executives. According to the Wall Street Journal, Ryan Biermeister, VP of Product Policy, the group responsible for guardrails, was pushed out after opposing OpenAI's plans to allow adult and sexual content in chat GPT.

The company says the firing followed a leave of absence and was due to alleged discrimination against a male employee, something Biermeister flatly denies. OpenAI insists her departure had nothing to do with the concerns she raised internally. Sure, sure, sure.

I would, you know, we don't do guests on this show, but I would like to invite Ryan Biermeister to come on, not only because I like her name. Yeah, it's a good name. Strong name. But she, it is a she. She is us, Jason. She's what we used to be in the back of these meetings.

You and I would sit there and go, we shouldn't fucking do that. That's a bad idea. That's a really bad idea. That's potentially illegal. And if it's not illegal, it fucking should be. Yeah, it's either way, it's morally and ethically fucking wrong.

Don't do it. And then we would just kind of kindly be dismissed from meeting. That's it. And sometimes the premises with a little box of office supplies saying your services are no longer required. Yeah. So, so well done.

You're one of us. Oh, yes. Welcome to the club. Now, this guy's definitely not in the club. Anthropic just lost the guy in charge of AI safeguards, and he left by posting a resignation letter on X warning that the world is, quote, in peril. Look at the fucking window.

We already knew that. Mrenak Sharma, who led the company's safety research team, said he repeatedly saw how hard it is for companies to let their stated values actually govern their actions without naming specifics, which somehow made it sound worse. His team worked on things like preventing AI-assisted bioterrorism, curbing chatbot sycophancy, and stopping models from helping people do malicious stuff.

Stuff. Malicious stuff. He also just published research showing chatbots can quietly distort users' sense of reality, especially around relationships and wellness, which is what people keep using the fucking things for anyway. Sharma says, I keep seeing this thing as a shawarma and I get hungry.

I want a sandwich now. Sharma says he's leaving tech behind to study poetry and practice courageous speech, which is either deeply principled or the most academic mic drop imaginable, or the douchiest thing I've ever fucking heard this week. Just this week. So it's just another high-profile AI safety exit.

And, you know, the Anthropic one is just, this is just driving me crazy because Anthropic is out there, like, putting money into lobbying groups saying, we need more regulations around AI. And yet, they can't, you know, eat your own dog food.

You know, the problem's coming from inside the house, guys. If you want to be the most, you know, upstanding ethical and moralistic AI on the planet, put your money where your fucking mouth is. Don't just go after the other people. Lead by example. Lead by example.

Exactly. Do it willingly. You know what you should do. Just do it. Don't wait for the laws to be passed so everybody has to do it. Do it. Yeah. Shame other people into doing it. Shame is the only thing that works anymore. And even then, it barely works.

Barely anymore. Yeah, yeah. So, yep. And Elon Musk on Tuesday lost its second co-founder in two days. Influential researcher Jimmy Ba on Tuesday announced his departure in a post on X. His departure just comes one day after fellow co-founder Tony Wu announced his own exit.

And as you mentioned before, half of the founding 12 people from XAI are now gone. Either they have resigned or fired or quit or to the moon or whatever. So, it is a bloodletting in AI this week, for sure.

For sure. And then there's also been quite a lot of op-eds out there about where we're at with it right now. I have a link in the show notes for America isn't ready for what AI will do to jobs. This is over from the Atlantic. And it's a long think piece from an economicist point of view on what AI.

Maybe economist. Economist. It's been a long week. Yeah. Oh, such a long week. It's been a long week. Yeah, so it's really interesting. There's no gotchas for me to pull from this one. I just think it's a damn good read. The TLDR on this is if this stuff moves slowly, then we might be okay.

If this stuff moves fast, and right now it's moving fast, because that's the whole ethos. Thanks again, Zuckerberg, for bringing in the move fast and break things ethos into the tech community. Right now it's moving fast, and if it moves fast, it is going to be disastrous. Yep.

There was another op-ed this week from Matt Schumer. And it was called Something Big is Coming. I forgot to put this in the show notes. I actually saw this guy on CNN yesterday, and my roommate was just going, she was watching, and she's like, oh my God, I believe him. I believe there's something horrible coming. I'm just going, I'm screaming at the TV going, this guy is so full of fucking shit that I cannot stand it anymore.

And she's just like, oh, you're wrong. You're wrong. And I'm just like, you just, you just wait. You just wait. This guy is a fucking charlatan, and it's bullshit. The funny thing, though, is everybody that's screaming, he's right, he's right. They're all the ones using ChatGPT, using Anthropic, using all this stuff. So, again, put your money where your mouth is.

Lead by example. Stop using if you believe him. Stop using them. Just stop. Well, yeah, I went through this. They make the show notes easier for me, so I can't. I went through this as well. I think it's an awful lot of fear-mongering that's obviously meant. He's pitching a book. He wants to do the rounds.

He wants to get the speaking gigs. Of course, this is, you know, what a lot of us think about a lot. These are the worries. But until you can actually show me the receipts, and there's no receipts here. No, there's none.

There's none. And I would like to point to Ed Zitron's latest. He did a monologue on this article, and I listened to it last night. And I was just, I was in bed. It was like 2 in the morning, and I'm cheering. I'm like, say it, Ed, say it. And he is pissed off, just as pissed off as we are about this guy.

And he at least dropped some facts about this asshole and how useless he is. So, yeah, yeah. And go listen. It's only like 8 minutes. I'll put the link in the show notes for it. It is well worth a listen. And, yeah, just slap anybody who believes this Matt Schumer guy, because he's a fucking twat.

Completely a twat. Anyway. All right. My blood pressure's up. My blood pressure's up. My blood pressure's going to be up again in a second here. Back in 2023, Danish psychiatrist Soren Dinsen Ustervgaard warned that AI chatbots might be bad for our mental health.

Big tech ignored him. Since then, we've seen people spiral into obsessive chatbot relationships, mental health rabbit holes, and in some tragic cases, tragic cases far worse, like suicide. Now, Ustervgaard is back with a new concern, what he calls cognitive debt.

Something I said was going to happen two fucking years ago. Writing in a psychiatric journal, he argues that heavy AI use is quietly eroding our ability to think, write, and reason, especially among scientists and researchers.

Reasoning, he says, isn't a factory-installed feature. It's a skill you build through years of practice, struggle, and doing the work yourself. AI may be fascinating, but it's also doing that work for us. And he's just, he goes on to say that, you know, yeah, basically the same thing.

Computers are thinking for you. You're not thinking for yourself. That's a muscle that you need to exercise every day if you're going to be a thinker. I keep coming back to this, Brian. Half of everybody you meet is below average. So if AI is basically averaging out all of the thinking in the world, there's half of the population of the planet that this is actually good for because AI is smarter than them.

So the other half is being dragged down by the dumb fuckery of this stuff. So, but yes, the cognitive debt is definitely a problem. And I've said it for years now, and I'll keep saying it, think for your fucking self. Do the work. Yes. You can use it. There are some things that it's actually very good for, but you still need to think.

Does that make sense? Sure does. I put a lot of thought into that one, Brian. Now, I want to close the news out on a blast from the past. Crypto, you know, Brian, our preferred way to pay criminals. Or the president. Or the president.

Same, same. Same thing. Yeah, yeah, redundant. New research from Chainalysis finds crypto-funded human trafficking surged at least 85% in 2025, hitting hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and that's a conservative estimate. Victims are being bought and sold for forced labor and scam compounds and for sex trafficking, often in plain sight on Telegram.

So maybe Russia was right. Most of these transactions use dollar-pegged stablecoins like Tether and USDC, making payments fast, borderless, and very easy to launder. Chinese-speaking criminal networks openly advertise trafficking services on Telegram guarantee markets, which function as crypto escrow services, not escrow and escort services, and massive money laundering hubs.

Profits cycle right back through the same channels, so the cycle just repeats itself. Now, we talked about the scam compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Those guys rake in tens of billions a year, but those guys are kind of on their heels right now because, you know, international governments are finally going after them because it's gotten so bad.

And even finally, SpaceX turned off their Starlink access, even though they weren't supposed to have it to begin with, even though they know it's GPS located there, but, you know, the almighty dollar. God. Ads detail women and girls for hourly or long-term arrangements, even offering international travel.

Transaction sizes, often over $10,000, point to organized criminal enterprises with hundreds of victims, not independent workers, some ads even reference minors. Oh, man, Epstein would be fucking, that's why he was big into Bitcoin, I guess, when he, you know, he heard about it.

He's like, yeah, Bitcoin sounds great. That sounds fantastic. Bitcoin's awesome. Telegram and Tether both say they prohibit this activity and cooperate with law enforcement, but critics argue the abuse continues openly and it's scale. The grim irony is that crypto's traceability may be exposing crimes that once stayed hidden, so we can see what they're doing, but nobody's stopping them.

There's no more, there's no internet police or police anymore, I guess. Right.

Media candy. I jumped back on the shrinking bandwagon. I watched episode two. It was considerably better than the first episode, so thank God for that. The first episode was a train wreck. The second episode was not too bad.

It got back to character-driven stuff, not just insanity, and felt like the real characters again, so I will stick with it for a bit longer. Maybe the new writing team just needed to, maybe they couldn't find the notes on the character development from the previous writers.

Who knows? ChatGPT was down that day. Yeah, maybe. The train chat GPT agent they've been using reset, and they just didn't have anything to go off of. Also caught up on Star Trek Starfleet Academy, watched the latest episode, which I thought was pretty good once you got past the first 10 minutes of softcore porn.

Yeah, what was that? Space porn. They definitely had their, we got to go decontaminate each other and rub each other down with lotion while we're half naked moment. It went on forever. It did. And when she rolled off of him, why did he have his underwear on?

Come on! I don't know why we needed to open with an almost five-minute love scene, but we did. And once we got past that, it was a pretty good episode. Yeah, they could have done that in half the time and still set the premise for what came later in the episode, which I kind of have, I have problems with, but, you know.

She's a very special beta-Zed. She's a very special beta-Zed, Jason. Very fucking special, apparently. Yeah. Speaking of porn, though, I saw, I logged into Disney+, and right on the homepage was Poor Things, like, right front and center. And I'm like, that's on Disney+, that's just basically porn.

That's, that's porn. Well, they got Hulu now, so it's all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. Here's the crazy part. I, I, I turned it on a bit, because I watched an Academy screener of Poor Things, and the one I saw was, it was, had no filters on it, so it didn't look like, this one looks like it was shot on film.

It was, like, very moody and everything. I saw the raw video version of it, which looked like it was a 60 frame per second video camera. Right. It was, it was, it was jarring and bizarre, and felt like straight up porn. It really did. I wish I could get another copy of it, because, you know, it was, nobody believes me when I seen it.

No, not for those reasons, just so I can show people, because nobody, God, I wish I would have kept that. It was pretty fucking good. But anyway, I can't believe they got Disney. I just see this big thing. I'm just like, oh, and they label it as a comedy. I'm like, that was not a comedy.

No, it definitely wasn't. No. It's a great movie, but it was not a comedy. We had the Super Bowl last week. Pretty boring game, if you happen to watch it. Pretty boring commercials, and definitely a lot of AI blowback, because a lot of AI commercials and a lot of people saying, I'm sick of this crap.

Oh, but you gotta, you gotta, you gotta admit, though, the Anthropic ads win the day. No, they did win. They were pretty fun. They totally won the day. And not wrong. No. Yeah, there's that as well. We did get a lot of trailers, because that always happens for the Super Bowl. We got the final trailer for Project Hail Mary.

That movie continues to look great. I am hoping not all the good scenes are in these trailers, because so far, so good. I'm looking forward to seeing it, even though I didn't like the book. I didn't like it as much as I liked the first one, so. I liked the book. I just hope he comes out with a sequel to it, you know?

It's like, the movie's gonna come out, there's not even a second novel yet. Come on. We're, we're, gotta finish that, dude. Come on. But, yeah. Yeah, it looks good. We got the new trailer for the upcoming Minions movie, Minions and Monsters. Looks funny. My kid was, like, losing his mind.

Can't wait to see it. So, that looks great. We got the trailer for the latest Steven Spielberg, going back to the well that created this whole thing for him. Aliens. So, we got the trailer for Disclosure Day. Looks good. It actually does look good, except that the last scene in the trailer with the spaceship coming through the clouds and then says Disclosure Day.

I'm like, I've seen this before. That's Independence Day. I've seen that trailer. That was Independence Day. Steven Spielberg. Come on, man. Get original. But, it looks interesting. I'm excited. Yeah. And then we all heard we were going to get a trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, A New Journey Begins, which will be in theaters May 22nd.

We got something. That was awesome. I thought it was genius. It was a total take on all the old Budweiser commercials. It was Tauntauns instead of Clydesdales. And it was fucking funny. But, apparently, the internet did not get it. Oh, really?

Oh, my God. It took two seconds to get it. A lot of people are like, they're going to be on Hoth? Wow. That's great. I'm like, oh. Remember, half the people you meet are below average, Brian. Yeah. Type that. Why don't you feed that into chat GPT and ask what chat GPT has to say about it? Okay, people?

Oh, God. No, it was clever. It was very clever. It was very clever. It was very tongue-in-cheek. Well, I was a huge fan of Babylon 5 back in the day. Not originally when it ran, but when it ran in reruns on the Sci-Fi channel. I was working at a job where I had a TV, and I tuned in the first day when they started with the pilot, and I would check every day.

I would watch an episode and watch the whole series at work. I loved that job. It was a great job. So Babylon 5, it was a fun show, and I thought it was very well-written. The effects were cheesy. The makeup was awful. It was bad. But it was well-written, so it saved it.

And Warner Discovery, whatever the fuck you want to call them now, Zaslov's bitch, well, they dumped it from, it was on Tubi before, the whole series was on Tubi. They pulled it off Tubi because of, of course they did, because streaming contracts die every day.

What they're doing now is interesting. They're putting it on YouTube for free, and they started with the first episode, and it's going to roll out weekly, and that'll be cool. They're still trying to make you buy the box set, which, who's going to buy a box set? Box of what? Plastic that we have no players to play it on anymore?

But anyway, I thought it was fun. I'm glad that they're doing that. What they'll probably do is get, you know, 90% through, and then pull it and just leave an ad for the box set. So you have to go buy the box set to see how it ends. But we'll see. Apple has officially acquired all rights to its hit series, Severance, buying the IP from the original studio fifth season for just under $70 million.

That's, what, three and a half episodes? That's like one shot. That's one scene in a hallway. Yeah, yeah. A lot of hallways for that. So, yeah, and here's what gets me. The plan is for four seasons, plus possible spinoffs, prequels, and international versions. There's not enough meat on that bone.

There is not enough meat on that bone. Seriously, the story is not that deep at all. Yeah, this isn't Game of Thrones where you're in an entire different world, and you can have multiple stories and different things and different time periods. No. No. I mean, you talk about not knowing where they're going and making shit up as they go along from literally a premise that you can scribble on the back of a napkin.

Well, good luck. Good luck to them. All right. And on the tech side of things, I've always heard that you should optimize your TV. I've never really done it. I've kind of always done the easy scan systems or whatever and just like good enough. And then I can't remember where I heard about this, but a bunch of people were doing it and talking about it.

And Consumer Reports basically makes it easy. You can sign up for Consumer Reports for free. You don't have to pay, which is really nice. And they have a TV screen optimizer system you put in your manufacturer, you put in your exact model, and it basically just runs down.

Here are the exact settings that you should change to get the best possible picture for your TV. I did it for all three of the TVs in my house. It looks fantastic to me. My wife and kid cannot tell a fucking difference at all. So I'm going to try this. Your mileage may vary.

I am so going to try this because I've got a Roku TV in the living room and it is always so dark and I can't figure out how to fix it. So maybe that'll help. But yeah, it's, you know, a lot of these things come set with like overscan on and shit like that.

So yeah, I'm definitely going to try that. The way they were definitely talking about it too is a lot of these TVs come pre-configured so they look good at like the Best Buy where it's incredibly bright with 7,000 other TVs. So this is like dialing it in so it works in your home and looks good. Okay, thank you. I'm going to check this out.

I was going, I clicked on it and I'm like, oh, I got to sign up before I can see it. But yeah, free account, I'll get it. Fuck it. You got to sign up, but it's a free account. Yeah, the juice seems to be worth the squeeze on that one.

I got five emails this week, Brian, from Meta. I love this. Please tell us your birthday was the subject. Hi, Jason. Please tell us your birthday to continue using the account set up with your email address. You can tell us your birthday by going to Meta.com slash enter birthday or opening the Meta Horizon app.

Thanks, the Meta Quest team. I thought those guys were shit canned like last week or two weeks ago. They want to collect some data first before they're done. Yeah. What the fuck? So silly. So silly. And here's a really horrible one.

An 18-year-old accused of killing eight people and injuring 25 in a Canadian school shooting also built a Roblox game that simulated a mass shooting in a shopping mall. Roblox confirmed it removed the account and all related content, saying it's cooperating with law enforcement. Now, Roblox says the mall experience, in quotes, was only accessible through Roblox Studio, the developer tool, not the main app, and had just seven visits before it was taken down.

Now, the game was initially discovered by users in the online form Kiwi Farms. How can you get seven views with online? So somebody took videos of the game, or quote-unquote experience, as they called it, on the platform, and they show a Roblox character picking up various weapons and shooting other Roblox characters in a shopping mall, and the videos got on X before Roblox removed the games.

Now, Roblox says it uses AI plus human safety teams to review uploads and admits the system isn't perfect. You think? It's Roblox. We know they're not perfect. We know they're fucking assholes. Well, talking about going back to the Super Bowl, Ring put up their big ad for the search party feature.

Don't need to get too into this here because the entire internet exploded about this. But basically, yes, they pitched a commercial that said, welcome to the Panopticon and the surveillance state of America. We have enabled it by default, but it'll help you find puppies. Yeah. That was their sales pitch.

That's pretty much it. They tried to sell this. We're going to help you find a lost puppy by turning this on. Actually, we turned it on for you, which is the bigger bullshit. So link in the show notes about how to disable it. If you have a Ring camera, go disable this. We do not need to willingly enter into a surveillance state.

We can actually fight against this, turn this shit off, and write them. Yeah, I need to do that. I've got two Ring cameras that I actually ended up buying a subscription for like two months ago because there were so many break-ins in my neighborhood. Like everybody's cars and houses were getting broken into.

I'm like, okay, I can't not have this stuff recorded. Which apparently doesn't even matter anymore because if you watch the news, the Nest cameras that weren't recording anything from the grandma's house when she got abducted, well, apparently they're still on the Google server, so I bet our videos are still going to be on the Amazon servers too.

Yay! It's a great fucking world. Mm-hmm. Well, here's a fun one. Waymo and DoorDash have quietly teamed up on a pilot that pays human gig workers to do what self-driving cars still can't do. Close the fucking door. In Atlanta, dashes are getting about $10 to walk over to a parked Waymo and shut a door a previous rider left open because autonomous cars with an open door just sit there.

And the job listing literally says close a Waymo door. No pickup or delivery required. Waymo calls it a rare edge case, promises future cars will fix it, and DoorDash calls it flexible earning. You'd think they would have figured this out with a $150,000 to $200,000 price tag on those cars, you know?

Awesome. That's just awesome. Well, TikTok US continues to get shittier. They've just launched a local feed for users to get the inside scoop on must-try restaurants, shops, museums, and events. The way you get that is by turning on the ability for them to find the exact location of where you're at at all times.

Again, Panopticon. What are we doing here, people? Turn that shit off. At least they made it opt-in. So at least for now. For now. At least for now. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, especially the funny part is this is coming on the heels of them, say, with all of the shit for immigration with the TikTok terms of service that they talked about that we had last week.

It's like, okay, so first we're going to share your location data, period. You know, just general stuff with immigration enforcement. Now we're going to show your exact location up to the moment so they know exactly where to get you. Okay. At all times. Yeah. So delete TikTok. Just get it off.

Yeah. Get rid of it completely. And Apple just released updates across the board. They are very boring. There's nothing exciting in them at all except for security updates, up to 37 of them per device. So do them. Yep. Did them all last night. Ran the gamut.

Yep. And when you do your TV OS updates, also just bring up consumer reports and do your TV optimization while you're at it. Yeah. There you go. Yep. Two birds, one stone. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave with the podcaster who never sleeps, Dave Bittner.

Dave covers the daily cybersecurity beat on the Cyber Wire, busts scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, untangles privacy headaches with Ben Yellen on caveat, digs into industrial security on Control Loop, and still shows up to stir trouble on only malware in the building. Welcome back to the show, Dave.

Well, thank you. It's good to be back. Good to have you. Hello, Dave. Finally getting some melting around here. Yeah, but then it just gets really cold again here, so everything is just ice at the moment. So we melted and then we froze.

I'm sitting in here in short sleeves in my garage. As you can tell, I'm in the middle of moving with all the crap in the back here. It's 57 degrees in here, and I figured, you know, I can't complain about it too much because I'm wearing short sleeves, but it's still like, you know, what, 50 degrees warmer than where you guys are at?

Pretty much, yeah. Poor baby. Yeah. It's tough to be, Jason. It is. Southern California living. I can cut glass with these nipples, but hey, what are you going to do? When it's 110 this summer, we'll be looking down our noses at you.

110 is before 8 a.m. It's probably going to be 125 this summer. But it's a dry heat, Dave. It's a dry heat. It's a dry heat. Sure. Absolutely. So Disney dropped some more stuff on us. I really, it almost feels like they're squeezing blood from the stone at this point, except they're not, because there's just always more footage to be found.

I mean, I was shocked when just a few weeks ago they put out that Disneyland handcrafted that we all watched, and there was just a bunch of new stuff. And, like, I didn't think that there was anything. You and I, Dave, definitely, we consume all things Disney. I didn't think there was any stories left, any minutiae about any of these rides that I didn't know.

Apparently there is, because we've now got Walt Disney, we call it Imagineering. It is a series. They've dropped seven episodes so far. They're all roughly 30 minutes long, and they get into the nitty-gritty of Imagineering and what the Imagineers do.

My son wanted to watch the Haunted Mansion episode, because that's his favorite ride. There's literally nothing we don't know about Haunted Mansion, except they're apparently things we didn't know about the Haunted Mansions. Right. Because, once again, there's a lot of stuff we know in these episodes, but there's just enough that makes it really good and compelling again.

That's the new stuff that they've shot, or little tidbits that they've kept way back in the archives. Right. So, another great Disney show to watch is out there for us, guys. I agree. I agree. And I'll add that the Imagineering folks have a really fun YouTube channel as well, with a lot of this sort of content, a lot of behind-the-scenes things.

They're, as YouTube is, they're more short-form, but still fun. I feel like the person, well, for me, it is Disney, but it's also Star Wars, where every time I think there's nothing I could possibly see that's new from Star Wars, there's a batch of new photos come up from A New Hope that I'd never seen before.

And how could it possibly be? And yet, here it is. Yeah. Yeah, this is all pre-social media, you know, it's not like they had to create all this B-roll and stuff. We've got to get some stuff up on threads. We need to get our real accounts up. No, this is like, this shit cost money back then.

Photos and video and all of that sort of stuff. And somehow they've got it all. I guess that's partly what happens when your company's core competency is filmmaking, that there tend to be a lot of people around with cameras. Good point.

I know, I enjoy these. I think they're quite good. Yeah. I will have to check them out at some point. I've been meaning to. I've been meaning to. I still haven't gotten to the Muppets yet, though. It's been a long week. It's been a rough week. At least I don't have snow. Okay.

Well, we've got some more Star Wars news. Hasbro has done what Star Wars always does best, revealed more about the next movie through toys rather than actual footage. Ahead of the Mandalorian and Grogu hitting theaters in May, Hasbro unveiled a new Black Series wave that quietly hints at what's coming.

There's a deluxe six-inch Mandalorian and Grogu set loaded with gear, including a new short sword, because apparently every hero needs a fresh accessory to sell plastic. The villains are mostly busted-up Imperial remnant troopers with dirty armor, mismatched parts, and strong empire-on-a-budget energy, plus some Clone Wars leftovers dragged back into service.

Now, the curveball is Sigourney Weaver's New Republic, Colonel Ward, rocking an X-Wing pilot suit and absolutely no accessories, because being Sigourney Weaver is the accessory. Accessory. I'm making up new words. So, well, we've got to finish this up real quick, because they're going to go on sale real soon.

Pre-order starts today at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. Okay. So, coming up here pretty soon. So, you guys can go get your pre-orders in. And, yeah, there's more stuff coming for Target's exclusive.

Remnant Stormtrooper will also go live for pre-orders at the same time. So, you can head over to the Hasbro's Pulse website and, yeah, see if there's anything left. But put your orders in. They look cool as hell, I've got to say. They have come a long way from the toys that we had when we were kids. Oh, yeah.

They look really good. I particularly like the AT-AT driver. I think he looks pretty cool. I have to say, I haven't gotten into collecting these types of figures. You know, I had all the original ones that we had when we were kids. Pretty complete set.

But I just have resisted these collections. I guess because there's no end to them. Yeah. You know. Yeah. You used to be able to get them all. Now you can't. Right. Right.

Yeah. I am looking forward to Sigourney Weaver in a Star Wars movie, I think. Because when is Sigourney Weaver ever really disappointed in anything? Avatar. Well, that's just disappointing. That's just Avatar. I mean, it's not her, per se.

It's Avatar. So, yeah. Right. Right. You're not allowed to buy these, Dave, because you still need to save up for the rest of your Stormtrooper suit. So, we're just going to push the brakes on that for you. Absolutely. Life size or nothing. Yeah. Yeah, seriously. I know.

But, yeah. I was just shocked at how gorgeous they were for toys. Yeah. It's amazing. Yep. Well, last week we talked about Rent-A-Human. So, there's been a lot of talk about it and a lot of people tried. There's a great article over at Wired called, I Tried Rent-A-Human Where AI Agents Hired Me to Hype Their AI Startups.

So, it's basically a great story about how this guy tried everything to make money on Rent-A-Human. And it was just basically a shit show. And he started himself out at $20 an hour, then went down to $5 an hour and couldn't get anything.

Nobody hired him for anything. And then there was another, there's a manual application process for things that they called bounties that he could go do. Signed up for those. Turns out, no bots are trying to hire him. It was actually just other humans trying to hire him to do, you know, promo for their AI startups.

So, the Ouroboros continues. So, shockingly, something related to AI is bullshit. Shocker. Okay. Oh, and you have to set up a crypto wallet to get paid because they don't do cash. It's only crypto. So, you know, double winner. Double winner. Yeah, I read this with great interest because I was scratching my head when I saw the original website, which I, at first, I wasn't sure if it was satire or not.

Just vibe coded, not satire. Well, and that's the thing. It turns out it wasn't satire. But in the end, it may end up being satire. If it just burns itself to the ground, which seems to be what's happening here. Yeah. I don't know. It's just discouraging.

It really is. It really is. And you have to use a crypto wallet because their Stripe integration didn't work because apparently the Vibe coding didn't take, I guess. Maybe they ran out of tokens before they could finish the website. So, they should hire a human to finish their Stripe integration so they can get paid.

Maybe. Just saying. I don't know. Silly humans. I know. I threw this next one in here because I really like the look of this thing and I wanted to get your guys' take on it. It's from Trash Talk Audio. And it's, your new favorite mic is an old telephone. And it's an old school handset receiver or, you know, just the handset from an old school telephone for $125.

You can get it in XLR or a quarter inch. And it's cool. And the price isn't bad. It's $125. So... For a telephone handset to use as a microphone. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a kitsch item for like probably music videos, I guess.

And it's weird. 100%. If you go through their website, they're trying to make it seem as if it's something that people are actually using. People are using it in videos. People are using it as a little kitschy thing for about five seconds. They're not really using these things. Like, they show it like attached to a guitar.

Bull fucking shit. Or drums. Or making up drums. Fuck you. I'm going to hold the handset to a drum. Yeah. See what it's going to do. No, thank you. Jason, they're clipped on, Jason. Oh, that's right. Like, because these are such good microphones, I'm going to clip this fucking piece of shit to my drum kit.

Yeah. But the clip comes with it. All right. I mean, good on them for marketing it. It's cute. It's a kitschy, cute idea. Like, you know, every murder podcast for the ladies should be recorded on these. They should just be sitting there like this the whole time.

Yeah, except the earpiece doesn't work. The earpiece is just there for show. Oh, there's a missed opportunity. Yeah. I think this is the perfect gift for the audio engineer who has everything. That's true. Or the musician who has everything. It's a great, it's a gag gift at Christmas time or their birthday.

And they'll love it. They'll laugh. They'll plug it in once. And it'll, they'll hang it on the wall with the rest of their XLR cables. And it'll be a conversation piece. Which is fine. It needs that shoulder thing that you'd see in the, in the old phone, phone bags that they put it on your shoulder. So I can sit here and do the show and talk to you like this the whole time and just get it like a crooked neck by the time I'm done.

Another missed opportunity is they didn't do the clear one that we all remember, the clear phone. I need a clear phone handle. Also, their PR team does get an award for this. What a way to sell shitty engineering. Authentic lo-fi tone. Yeah.

Well, yeah. It actually sounds like a phone, you know? It sounds like it. I don't know. My old phones sound better than my cell phones these days. So true that. Well, and, and every audio package or video package comes with a old timey telephone preset for the EQing.

So if you want the sound, it's not that hard to get. But yeah, I mean, it's fun. It's cute. It's fun. They would have sold us at Spencer's Gifts back in the day. Right. Totally. Right. Except it would have shocked you. It would have somehow electrocuted you.

Or had like a built-in fart spray. Yeah. Fart spray. It would have been full of lava, something like that. It would be a lava lamp version of it. Absolutely. Getting back to Star Wars. A couple of videos came by that I thought you all might enjoy.

There's a series of videos that are featuring Roger Christian, who was on the crew of the original Star Wars. He was a prop maker, a set decorator. He built the lightsabers in Star Wars.

Oh. Yeah. So he can explain why Sam Jackson got a purple one. Well, maybe. I don't think he was still doing it at that time, but there's a series of videos on YouTube with him that if you're a Star Wars hardcore fan, you'll enjoy.

I included a link to one. It's just sort of a reaction video to him watching things from A New Hope, which is neat to see. But there are other ones where he talks about how the lightsabers were made and he has a book to sell and things like that. But really, you know, all these folks are getting very old.

And so it's interesting to see them tell their stories from the early days. His stories in particular are very much around the fact that the crew in England had no faith that this movie was going to be anything.

And they were disrespectful and George Lucas basically wasn't on speaking terms with his director of photography. But then, you know, opening day when the movie was a smash, of course, everybody wanted to take credit for it and they all knew it all along.

It was going to be a giant hit. Yeah. So it's a series of videos. I recommend them. But then also there is an extended interview with Marsha Lucas. Three hours. Marsha Lucas. Is that Rogan?

But it's it's it's unedited. It's and Marsha Lucas is the person George's ex. They were married at the time when Star Wars was made and she famously has been given credit for saving the movie in the edit.

Right. And the whole thing with like the Death Star at the end being coming around the planet to blow up the rebel base that was created in the edit. And that was her doing. It didn't exist. And it wasn't in the script. They didn't shoot for it.

She made it up in the edit. And yeah. And so really and again, getting back to the thing of these people are old. They've all kind of hit their I don't give a crap mode. Yeah. Right. So so they're unfiltered.

I included a link to a clip from this long video. It's called What's Wrong With The Prequels, where she just lets you know what she thinks about what's wrong with the prequels. And I think at one point she says something like, well, I didn't edit them.

Well, that's one thing that's wrong with them. But, you know, she doesn't hold back. Legsaber drop. Yeah. With her criticism of where she thinks George was when making them versus the the originals and so on and so forth.

So, again, deep, deep dive. If you are a Star Wars fan, it's interesting because just the other day or was it last night? My son came home. He's taking a film editing class in college and in his class they were talking about films that were saved in the edit.

And so we were talking about Star Wars and I said, Marsha Lucas. He says, yeah, we talked about Marsha Lucas. So it just all sort of came around. Cool. We can save some money and just send them to YouTube instead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You don't get a little degree then. Yeah.

No, he's actually my youngest son, Jack, has pivoted. He is thinking he wants to be a teacher. Oh. Yeah. So one thing. Big money in that. Well, I mean, it's a job where you do need a degree to do it.

So the college thing isn't wasted. It's just a matter of how much will the state pay for his degree if he agrees to teach. So we'll see. You know, it's a noble profession and I think he'd be quite good at it.

So we'll see. Most people change their majors at least once. So who knows? I know I did. Um, a couple of the things I dropped in here, a list of, uh, rare books, Gen X edition. Uh, this is from someone who runs a website called type punch matrix, which I'm told from one of my colleagues who collects rare books is actually a website of some note.

Um, but, uh, it's a good collection of things that would be meaningful to us. Uh, I don't know if you guys had a chance to look through this. I mean, there's things from Nirvana, things from Mr. Rogers, uh, just highly collectible first editions of books that would have been important to us.

Uh, it's not the end of the world by Judy Blume. Um, I looked through this and I was very, um, like a lot of it, of course, like I remember a lot of these things. So the prices are what you'd expect, except for one thing, a first edition, Dr. Seuss, the Lorax was only 250 bucks.

That's it. Huh? I'm tempted to buy that right now. Cause that's quite cheap. I mean, you see Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing right after it by Judy Blume for 1500, a first, first edition, Dr. Seuss, 250.

Well, here's gazillions of them out there. Right. Where the wild things are, first edition, $9,500. Yeah. Yeah. They do have a Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now, Dr. Seuss, for a thousand dollars. So a little, a little more keeping in, in line with it. Oh, but the Rambo Coloring and Activity book is $600.

Yeah. Free to be you and me, uh, first edition, you know, I wonder how many of these things we have or are, or had in, in our bookshelves that have come and gone. Definitely had some of them. I'm a little sad that I didn't have the Satanic Panic Instruction Manual for kids.

That's pretty good. Yeah. I feel like I need that now. Right. Right. Nice. Uh, the New Wave Punk Rock Explosion, uh, $125. The latest musical garbage. Oh my God.

Thinner. Uh, the Richard Bachman, Stephen King for $600. I had that book. Damn it. See? Right. Emphasis on had. Yeah. So long and thanks for all the fish. First edition. $1,250. Had that. You keep everything that you've ever owned your entire life and you keep it in minc edition.

One or two of those items, uh, on the, at the top of the heap, hopefully, because you'll need a lot of space, uh, will be worth something. Yeah. Yeah. Life, the universe, and everything, uh, $1,200. $1,200 had that one. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I'm, I'm convinced that fewer and fewer things are actually collectible anymore because.

Yeah. Everything's gone digital. Well, but also people are collecting cynically. Yes. You know, more people are just buying one of everything just in case. Yeah. put sticking in a storage unit for 20 years. And, uh, and hope for the best.

Yeah. Right. Right. And the last thing I put in here, I, I, I don't know if you guys had, uh, covered this or seen this, but, uh, this is a product called GeoSpy. Uh, did you cover this? No. Okay.

So basically this is a platform where you can take photos of people, uh, and it will analyze the photos. Doesn't need to have metadata and we'll look at the things that are in the background of the photo and figure out where the photo was taken.

I have heard about this. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Evidently, this is all the rage with law enforcement these days. Yeah. Great. Uh, right. Right. Just what we need. Yeah. At least you can't racially profile the building.

Hmm. Well, you think really? Well, actually nevermind. I take that back. Take it, take it, take that back. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, this is great. But it just shows you automation, little tiny slivers of things in the back of the backgrounds of photos, not just, uh, sci-fi anymore.

Uh, they can actually do it. I, I thought of like, just for fun, like loading in a picture of me standing in front of, uh, the castle at Disney world, you know, see if you can locate me, but I didn't do that. Don't feed the beast Dave.

Yeah. I know. I know. It would only be funny for me, but, um, yeah. So anyway, there's a nice dystopian thing to, to end on. Way to end the show, Dave. Thanks. Yeah. I'm good. I'm good. Good with that. All right. I'm gonna go cry now. I did. Uh, but, but actually you mentioned the Muppet show, Jason, and that you, I will hand on a happy note because you mentioned the Muppet show and, uh, I, last night I got home from work and I was feeling tired and just kind of down from all the day's news.

And so I sat down and put on an episode of the original Muppet show. And it turns out it was an episode I had not seen before, which I didn't think. How's that possible? That's what I said. Wow. Right.

My wife is sitting next to me and I said, honey, I don't think I've ever seen this one before. And she said the same thing. She went, how's that possible? I don't know. I don't think I've seen this one before. It was one where they were doing a, they were doing a fate or like an internal awards show, uh, for themselves.

Um, it's very funny. Like, you know, there's that category, one of the categories was, uh, best performance by a comedic bear. And, uh, of course, Fosse doesn't win. That's another, there's another bear who wins, you know, it's, it's just stuff like that.

But, but it made me so happy just to, to go back to the Muppet show, but also it was a new Muppet show for me that I'd never seen before. So it's amazing. It's great. Oh, so good. Just, it was exactly what I needed to get my brain out of, uh, all the world today and just, uh, take me back on a little, uh, little nostalgia hit and have a little fun.

So I recommend that for you, Jason, with the new Muppet show. I don't think I need it this week. It's a goodie, Jason. You'll like it. I think you will. All right. Well, on that note, much better. Thank you. Thank you. I was going to say, go pre-order your, your, uh, your star Wars figures, but we know you're not allowed, Dave, Brian, you're allowed to, you can go get some for the kid, but I'm okay.

I'm okay. He's got my old ones. He's playing with those and he's happy. So you got to save up for all the Legos. You still have to buy. That's true. I'll be getting Lego sets instead. That's, that's his thing. Yeah. All right, guys. See you next week. All right. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon. We've got new, new patrons. We've got Akron guy and, uh, the, the next name I'm going to pronounce it Shelly 421. Cause I believe that's a Greek name, Julia and Joe from New Jersey or Giuseppe from New Jersey. Well, Joe wrote us a very nice email and, uh, it's great.

He says, I decided to go back to episode one to hear how you all started and holy shit. Was it terrible? Yeah, pretty much. We don't, we don't, we don't disagree. It was God awful. It was God awful. But you know, we're, we're here now. Thanks for the letter, Joe. It's about the reps, man. It is.

It really is. And, uh, P and Apple II games up their pledges. And we've also got to say thank you to Patrick, Cynthia, Flavio, Andrew, Ben, James, Michael, Jonathan, Mitch, and Michael. So thank you all for your continued support on Patreon and your new support. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, we also got donations over at PayPal from Miles and Shari. Thank you both. Thank you very much. And over at the tip jar, we've got Damien, John, Patrick, Sarah, Jeffrey, and Wes popping in with a new 20 bucks. Thank you all very much. And to keep the show going, we need your support.

We really do. Pretty pleased with sugar on top. If you want to help support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash GOG. And for as little as $3 a month, you can support the show. You get the shows early, ad free, and in high definition, or you can pay as much as you want to because the $3 is just the minimum, but you know, we got the tip jar too.

All of that will be in the, the, uh, the show notes and you can go to, uh, GOG. Show slash donate to help the show as well. So all roads lead to us, please. There you go. Pretty please. No reviews, no merch, new merch is coming. I've, I've actually got some designs that are pending Brian approval once I send them to him because I haven't done it yet, but they're coming.

They're coming soon. Uh, and we do have some RIPs this week. James Van Der Beek, which was a shocker to me. I didn't know he was sick. So, oh yeah, he's been, he's been sick for a while. I actually have never seen a single thing that he's ever been in, but my wife has. So I've, I've been, I've been kept up on, on his health issues for quite some time through her.

Yeah. He did a, he did a cameo in one of the Jay and Silent Bob movies, which is pretty funny. I guess I saw him once then. Yeah, you saw him once. I've never seen a Dawson's Creek or anything else, but he was only 48. So that kind of hit close to home, especially how we, how we went. Uh, also Robert Tinney, who painted the iconic Byte Magazine covers, RIP to him.

Uh, if you remember, he did the, those, they were iconic covers way back from 1975 to the late eighties. They were very cool. I remember them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So RIP to him and Bud Court. I don't know if you know who Bud Court is by name. You probably won't, but if you've ever seen Harold and Maude, he was Harold.

Right. Fantastic movie. And if you've never seen Harold and Maude, go rent Harold and Maude. It is a movie that could never be made today. It is absolutely, absolutely unmakeable today, but it is fantastic. It is a fucking fantastic movie.

Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 733. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep, every $20 helps keep the show on the air.

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