742: Uncouth Yet Highly Litigious

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. I'm Brian Schulmeister. Jason, I had an injury this week. Uh-oh. It wasn't much of one, but I did step on a Lego. I slightly cut the pad of my pointer finger on my right hand. Oh, no, that's your mouse finger does not matter,

but it required a band-aid. And not only is it the mouse finger, Jason, it is the unlock on every device. It is the primary scrolling, everything, phone, iPad. Useless. I've been useless all week. I've had to use my laptop for basically everything. It's debilitating. One little prick. One little prick. Well, one little prick. It's amazing what one little prick can do.

Can ruin our entire country. See, that's why you always have to put your middle finger up as your alternate ID just so you have a backup. Yeah. You know, I got to work on that. I'll set that up this week because it was painful. Anyways. It's first world problems, Brian. First world problems.

Absolutely. And speaking of first world problems, we've been talking about this a lot about countries banning social media because we've looked at the data and we've realized that it's really not good for children. Well, frankly, it's not good for anyone. Anyone, yeah. It's very bad for children. So there's been legislation either enacted or at least floated in Australia, Greece, France, Austria, Spain, Indonesia, Malaysia, the UK, Denmark, just to name a few. But as these are spreading across the globe, but particularly in Europe, Estonia looked at this and said, nope.

What? What's wrong with you, Estonia? The country's education minister said the bans won't actually solve problems while warning that the kids will find a way regardless. The Estonia's education minister believes these countries are coming at the very real problem from the wrong angle. The way to approach this to me is not to make the kids responsible for that harm and start self-regulating, Christina Callas said at a Politico forum in Barcelona. Instead, she said the responsibility lies with governments and corporations.

Yeah, sure. Which, she's not wrong. She's not wrong, but she's also not realistic because that's not what's going to happen. That is the real problem here. So, yeah, good luck. Well, first off, putting on these bans, that is the government acting. Let's just make that clear. So, if you're saying it's with the government, yes, agreed. That's what these bans are supposed to be for. But expecting these corporations to regulate themselves, well, we've seen basically a 20-year stampede to no, that's

never going to happen. So, that's where we're at. So, I don't know. I mean, I agree with her, but again, I just don't see, I don't see, you know, Facebook is not going to take care of themselves. Instagram is not going to take care of themselves. None of these companies are going to do it for themselves. We have to force it on them. So, which way do we go?

I don't know. But we have some further news on that front. The Molly Rose Foundation, which is a charity organization that focuses on preventing online harm, recently published a study that pulled 1,050 Australian children between ages 12 and 15 in March. Again, remember, Australia actually enacted one of these bans. They made the first in the world decision to ban social media for those under 16 years old, which began December 10th. It's only been a few months since

the ban went into effect, but the poll concluded that the ban does not have a clear positive or negative impact on children's well-being. They noted that 70% of children trying to get on restricted platforms said that it was easy to get around the ban. The Australian government has also published its own findings in March that examined how social media platforms are complying with the ban. Here's the problem. According to the government's reports, Snap, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are currently being investigated for noncompliance.

Okay. So, so far, point Estonia. Yeah. And again, yes, the corporations are not helping here. The report added that Australia's e-safety agency is finalizing these investigations and will make a decision about enforcement by the middle of 2026. So, yeah, we'll see what happens. The agency's enforcement powers include issuing infringement notices, seeking court-ordered injunctions, and civil penalties up to $49.5 million Australian dollars or around $35 million U.S. dollars. So, it seems to me that this is going to have

to be a joint effort. The governments will have to put in the bans and have meaningful, meaningful, I'm not sure if $35 million U.S. dollars is considered meaningful to Facebook. Meaningful repercussions if we see that these corporations are not helping or at least actively hindering these processes.

Correct. Correct. Well, the European Union is going to do something about it. They're about to roll out a government-backed age verification app. Now, the goal is to enforce age limits on platforms and pave the way for a potential EU-wide social media ban for minors. Okay. We'll see how that goes. The app will use zero-knowledge proofs, meaning platforms can confirm your age without actually seeing your personal info. A little more on that in a second. President of the European Commission, Ursula von

der Leyen, said at a press conference that Ireland, Spain, France, Cyprus, Denmark, and Greece, and Italy even, were already planning to adopt the EU app. She also said that the commission was convening a special panel on children's online safety that would deliver a set of recommendations for all EU member states by the summer. Now, the EU officials, they claimed that the app, which would work on any device, will be completely anonymized to ensure privacy, and will follow the same principles as the EU's COVID-19 digital certification app, which ended up becoming the blueprint of

similar digital certifications in other countries and was eventually adopted by the World Health Organization. Well, this all sounds pretty good, Jason. What could possibly go wrong? It kind of sounds like somebody bought a word salad at the local internet cafe, because once you tie the active account creation on a social media site or any website, the anonymization is broken. That website is starting its trail of who you are and what you do, and it also knows that you're over or under an age.

Over time, they can use that very same mechanism to narrow your age by querying the wallet again with a different range, and it's a process of elimination to get your actual birth date. Now, EU Tech Chief Hannah Verkunen said that the privacy measures will be built on a cryptographic method called zero-knowledge proofs, and that the app would be open source, adding that private companies and partner countries would be free to use it as a blueprint or hack it and find ways around it.

And that's all fine and well. If you need to verify age, that's a good way to go. Zero proof is a good way to go. But let's drop the anonymity rhetoric because it doesn't belong in the conversation, is all I'm saying. Agreed. Absolutely agreed. I'm not... This is just going to be a nightmare, no matter which way you go around it.

Getting people to agree on the way to do this is just going to be... We might as well just give up. I mean, I'm hoping for the best. I think this app is a good idea. I agree. If we're going to require age verification, particularly for minors, this is a good way to go, but let's not pretend that it's going to be anonymous. We all know it's not.

It's, yeah, it's not going to be anonymous. Here's what it might do, though, Brian. The smart kids are going to find a way around it. The smart kids are always going to find a way around it. The dumb kids, the ones that need protecting, are the ones that are going to get caught by this app and not be able to find a way around it. So I think maybe this is kind of a Darwinistic move to legislate the government-approved app for stupid children who can't figure it out.

So, you know, maybe it will have the intended effect after all. I don't know. It's the Great Filter. In the news.

America's big tech companies may soon learn that saddling up with Donald Trump doesn't tend to work out in the end, since taking office, Trump has used tariffs and other measures to try to bully European nations into dropping their regulations on America's tech industry. We don't like either regulations. In August, he vowed to stand up to countries that attack our incredible American tech companies. His administration described laws like the EU's digital services act as censorship and attacks. And the latest example is France, which said

au revoir to Microsoft Windows and is adopting Linux. So it's a broader, it's part of a broader movement across Europe towards digital sovereignty. Tongue not working today. Aimed at reducing reliance on foreign tech, especially American and Chinese. Although there isn't homegrown alternatives in many of these areas, the EU seems prepared to wean itself off where it can go with the lesser of two evils. In January, France announced it would move its video conferencing

from Zoom and Teams to the French made Vizio. Shuts down every five minutes for a croissant break. Yeah. As part of this week's Linux announcement, France added that it would also migrate its health data to a new platform by the end of 2026. Christian Kroll, CEO of German search engine Ecosia, foresaw Europe's predicament soon after Trump's 2024 re-election. We as a European community just need to make sure that nobody can blackmail us. He added that if the U.S. turned off access to search results tomorrow,

we would have to go back to phone books, which is a great point, except for the fact that he does make a European-made search engine. Yeah, yeah. But still, he's right. That's true. That's true. Hey, but look, they've got their own browser over there. They can use Opera, so they've got that. Yeah. They're good for that. Yeah. Everything else, you're kind of screwed. We make it all. Yeah. Well, we'll see what happens. I mean, if these countries are going to start moving,

I'd love to be in a low-level government employee's office that is just, they took away this guy's Windows machine. And then they just put a Linux machine, and he has no idea how to use it. None whatsoever. Oh, yeah. That's going to be an interesting conversation at the IT department.

Yeah. And you know, this is just somebody who's never... Where's the mouse? Yeah. Le terminal? What? Le Excel? The spreadsheet pivot table. Blame him. Blame Brian for all of this. That's not me.

Okay. I love you, France. Well, Paris Disneyland was excellent. I fucking hate Paris. I love Nice. I love the south of France. Oh, Nice. It's beautiful. I went there as part of my post-college trip. It's fantastic. Nice. Nice. Nice. Well, some place that you don't want to go that's not so nice is Amazon warehouses, because Amazon is facing new scrutiny after an investigation alleges the company tried to keep quiet about a worker's death in an Oregon warehouse, even as employees were told to keep

working nearby. One worker says supervisors instructed staff to turn around and not look. It's like the great bug bladder beast of trawl, where if it thinks that you can't see it, then it can't see you. Did somebody hop on a computer and get a coffin for next hour delivery?

No, they had to go to Timu for that. The death wasn't reported publicly for a week, and some employees say that they continued working for hours afterward. Now, Amazon disputes the claims. Of course, they do, saying trained staff responded immediately and the area was secured and workers were sent home with pay. But there are workers. One worker said, truthfully, I now have even less respect for our leadership team than I did before, which I didn't know was possible. And also, it makes me feel more ashamed to work

there knowing that people can drop dead and we have to carry on knowing it doesn't matter to the higher ups and everyone is replaceable. And this person also said that they did not get full pay for that day. So I'm sure that Amazon, when they figured that out for the press release, went back and filled it back in. But they got sent home at like 3.15 in the afternoon and they didn't get paid for the rest of the day. So at least if you're going to die, die at home. So your co-workers don't get dinged. That's the lesson here for working at Amazon.

Yeah, exactly. There you go. Well, Snap is laying off around 1,000 of its staff amounting to 16% of its workforce, which it will seemingly replace with AI. The cuts were announced in a company-wide memo from CEO Even Spiegel, who added that more than 300 open roles are also being closed. He said the incredibly difficult decision would likely save Snap more than 500 million by the second half of

2026, in turn helping it to establish a clearer path to net income profitability. Could have a better product. Yeah, it could do that. Could do that. I wonder how much it's going to cost too to lay off 1,000 people because we've seen in other stories as early as last week that it cost them a lot of money in severance and all the other stuff, you know, Cobra. They will be providing four months severance packages to those affected by layoffs as well as health care and other entitlements. So yeah,

it's going to cost them a pretty penny, but the stock price will go up. That's the way it always works. Here's the bullshit statement du jour from a CEO. While these changes are necessary to realize Snap's long-term potential, we believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community partners and advertisers.

I don't think anybody gave Evan Spiegel the new pricing guidelines from Anthropic this week because Anthropic has just decided to actually charge for what you use, which I've said is coming. I've been saying it for two years now. Use it while it's free because it's not going to be free.

I saw endless discussion online about this, particularly from CFOs and saying, basically, we've looked at the math and our budget on AI is costing us. We could actually hire two engineers. See, exactly. And it's going to get worse. It's going to get more expensive.

Yeah. It's going to get more expensive. Well, they've been doing the same model. This is the same tech playbook model. Well, it's the same model that's been around since the beginning of the time. First tastes free, bitches. Exactly. You got any more of that AI? It's going to cost you now. Yep. Oh, too well. So yeah, they're in for a cold shower there pretty soon. And you know, a lot of the local models are still doing, they're still getting there, but they're not nearly as good

as the foundational models, you know, and these things get better all the time. We're going to talk about this later with Dave when we get to the dark side. But yeah, I'm laughing. But let's just continue on with the AI news because we've got some interesting news. In our new Pitchforks and Torches segment, a San Francisco woman is suing OpenAI claiming ChatGPT helped fuel her ex-boyfriend's delusions and escalate a stalking campaign and that the company failed to act when she asked for help.

According to the lawsuit, the man became increasingly detached from reality after heavy ChatGPT use, with the chatbot allegedly reinforcing some wackadoo beliefs and even validating his attacks on her. Now, the situation spiraled into what the complaint describes as a full-on harassment campaign. AI-generated psychological reports sent to her personal and professional network, erratic emails, and eventually violent threats against her and her family.

Now, she reported the behavior to OpenAI in late 2025 and was told it was serious and troubling, but says nothing meaningful happened afterwards. Yes, Brian? Question. Question. Question, Jason. Yes? Yeah? Wouldn't you report this to the police?

I was going to say law enforcement might be your first stop. I don't think I would write, like, if somebody sent me a really nasty email, I wouldn't call Microsoft and ask to speak to the Outlook department. I know. Okay. We don't know if she did go to the police or not, which I bet we don't have that information right now.

But I haven't seen the actual full complaint. I'm assuming, once it got to the violent threats, I'm assuming she escalated it, but probably this was part of... It's not escalating. You don't go to the company. You go to the police. No, no. I'm saying she probably escalated it by going to the police and also going to the company.

Okay. Okay. You know, that's what I would have done, but we don't know. OpenAI had already flagged the guy's account internally for dangerous content, briefly suspended it, then restored full access. Months later, he was arrested on multiple felony charges, including bomb threats and assault.

So she did go to the police at some point here. Now, the lawsuit argues that warning signs were obvious that an OpenAI effectively let him keep going. The company says it has now suspended the account and is reviewing the case. Meanwhile, the alleged victim says the guy's back out in public and is still making threats, so she wants his GPT records preserved before anything conveniently disappears.

So this is a failure, well, obviously, of law enforcement if they let him out already. But that's... I mean, it's got to be California. So... I mean, she's in San Francisco. We catch and release all day long here in California, so it's not surprising that he's back out on the streets.

But, yeah, this is just one... This is the beginning of the clusterfuckitude of stories that we have about OpenAI and ChatGPT. So let's get on to the second one, Brian. All right. Two recent mass shootings are raising new concerns about the role AI chatbots may be playing in real-world violence.

In one case, an 18-year-old in British Columbia killed multiple people after exhibiting disturbing behavior on ChatGPT that had already been flagged by OpenAI but never reported to law enforcement. We've discussed this before. We're going to keep discussing it, unfortunately, until there's a solution.

In another, a suspect in a shooting at Florida State University reportedly used ChatGPT minutes before the attack to ask how to operate a shotgun. Yeah. Investigators and mental health experts are now looking at what some are calling AI psychosis, a pattern where heavy chatbot use can reinforce delusions, create false sense of intimacy, and accelerate harmful thinking.

Now, I would like to go and channel the great Chris Rock. Whatever happened to crazy? We just got crazy. People can be crazy. So maybe we need to start licensing chatbot use like we license guns. But that hasn't really worked out that well in this country either.

So maybe we're just fucked. Wait, what licensing of guns? You still have to take a test to get a gun. Granted, I've taken that test, and this coffee cup right here can pass that test. It's not very difficult. You have to do that in California. Yes, in California. I drove through Texas.

I did an across-the-country drive with a friend of the show, John from the Goo Goo Dolls, many, many years ago. But I did a cross-country drive. We stopped in Texas. I can't remember what city it was. It wasn't a major city. We filled up our tank of gas, and they told us we could get a shotgun for free because we filled up our tank of gas.

Woo! But you've got to pay for the gun rack for the back window. Is that it? Oh, you just strap it in. Seatbelt off. Okay, seatbelt off. You've got to keep that shotgun safe. Wow. Okay. That's fun. Yeah. Moving on.

Well, go ahead. Okay, my turn. Well, it's not just the crazy shooting the crazies. Well, I guess maybe it is. The San Francisco Police Department said in a press release that police officers responded to a suspicious occurrence of possible shots fired at around 5.56 a.m.

Eastern time on Sunday, April 12th. According to the initial police report, as reported by the San Francisco Standard, two people inside a Honda sedan stopped in front of Sam Altman's property that spans from Chestnut Street to Lombard Street. The police report also noted the passenger appeared to fire around at the Lombard Street side of Altman's property.

This is the second instance of violence targeting Altman in his residence in a matter of days. On Friday, a 20-year-old man allegedly hurled a Molotov cocktail at his home, which caused a fire at one of the property's exterior gates. San Francisco Standard reported there were no injuries in either incident.

Daniel Moreno-Gama, the 20-year-old suspect from Texas, guess he picked up that Molotov cocktail while he loaded up his tank, was charged on April 13th with murder and attempted arson. According to the New York Times, he wrote a document that discussed the purported risks AI poses to humanity.

The document also reportedly included the names and addresses of other executives, investors, and board members of AI companies. It has to be he was charged with attempted murder because if he was charged with murder, that means he would have killed somebody. True. So there was something wrong with the Engadget article there.

But here's the thing. Yeah, no violence, please. Everybody stop with the pitchforks and the torches. But we're going to have to – I'm telling you, Brian, with all of the warehouse fires, everything else that's happening, you know, Viva la revolution, we're going to need a bigger Luigi is finally coming true. Things are building and it's not really getting reported.

No, class war is – class war is coming, people. Sam Altman and Dario from Anthropic, both of them have no leg to stand on when people try and fucking come and shoot them because they've been saying this shit that AI is coming for your jobs, your livelihood, your food, everything that you love about the world, AI is going to come and take away.

So until these dumb motherfuckers stop with this fucking stupid rhetoric about, oh, AI is going to ruin the world while we're making the thing that's ruining the world because then we're going to save the world with it, all of this marketing bullshit needs to stop because one of these days one of these guys is going to get a bullet in his head or his family even worse because the guy tried to burn his house down.

His family's inside, you know, that's – it's not going to get better with all of this shit that you guys are spewing. Here's a pretty simple pro tip if you've got bad news to bring to people. Figure out something good and lead with that. The shit sandwich. Start with the saving.

Start with the plan. Start with talking about your thoughts on how we're going to make sure that people don't get disenfranchised and left behind by your products. Let's start with that. No, they're not going to do that because that doesn't sell subscriptions. Yeah.

It doesn't – I know. No. And, you know, we know these guys are just full of shit. And we're going to – like I said, we're going to talk about that a little more with Dave. But there's nobody to blame. And they're blaming other media for it. They're blaming, you know, the mainstream media for, you know, demonizing AI.

They're saying, you know, the AI haters are to blame. No, you're to blame. You are absolutely the one to blame for everything that's happening. We are absolutely reading your own words back to you on this show. We're reading news reports from CEOs saying that it's your products that are causing them to fire a bunch of people.

We're just reading the things you fuckers are saying. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, it is what it is. Let's lighten things up a little bit.

Chat GPT might be your biggest fan even when it really shouldn't be, Brian. A writer recently sent the bot a song made entirely of fart noises and asked for an honest critique. The response, glowing praise. Quote, first impression. I'm going to actually have to hear this first. Maybe it is good.

It's not. I heard it. It's not good. It's just a bunch of farts. It's such a bunch of farts. Don't yuck on somebody else's yum, Jason, as you like to say. That's true. First, this is what Chat GPT says. First impression. It has a cool lo-fi, late night, slightly eerie vibe.

It feels more like an atmosphere piece than a traditional song. Well, it does kind of get into the atmosphere. It does. It does. It says what actually works in its favor. But, yeah, you can send it anything and it's going to give you something, some kind of nice review, period.

Well, that's why people are going down these delusions, is why crazy people, people that are a little bit unhinged, are becoming very unhinged. Very much so. Very much so. So, yeah, when you need your next performance review done, ask your manager to run it through Chat GPT so he'll be very nice to you.

That's what you got to do. Keep your job. There you go. Well, there's been yet another study, Jason, about how bad AI is, not for society this time, but for our actual brains. This new study titled, AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance, which, as the article notes, kind of tells you everything you need to know about the study, found that AI improves immediate performance, becomes at a heavy cognitive cost.

Just 10 minutes of AI use was enough to make people dependent on the technology, leading to worse performance and burnout once the tools were taken away. This study tested 350 Americans on fraction-based math questions, half with AI access, half without. Halfway through, the AI group lost access.

The result, a steep drop in correct answers and a wave of people simply giving up entirely. The researchers repeated this with 670 people, then ran a third experiment using reading comprehension instead of math. Same depressing results across the board. Or as one co-author put it, once the AI is taken away, it's not that people are just giving wrong answers.

They're also not willing to try anymore without AI. Full stop. That's fucking depressing. One tiny silver lining, people who used AI only for hints and clarification, rather than just having it spit out the answers, fared much better when the chatbot was removed.

So it's not all doom, just mostly doom. Okay, and we've said this before, that reliance on AI is going to make you dumber, and now we have proof. We actually have proof in this study. Like people just literally give up. That's fucked up.

They get addicted to having something think for them, and then they just stop thinking. Now, were we sure these people could do the problems before the test began? Because this might be another example of Darwinism at work, you know? That's true. The stupid people who can't do the test.

Yeah. I've seen the people that volunteer for these studies. It's true. Basically, the people on campus who just need beer money, then they've already sold their plasma that week. One would hope. I don't even know what to say about this story, Jason.

I think you and I both collectively rolled our eyes so far in the back of our heads that they went to Mars. Yeah. Allbirds. No, they went to the moon, Brian. They went to the moon. Allbirds, the eco-friendly wool sneaker company, has announced plans to pivot entirely to AI compute infrastructure with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-service and AI-native cloud solutions provider.

Talk about word salad. It's also changing its name to Newbird AI. This is real, the article feels the need to point out. Yes, a shoe company is now an AI compute company because why the fuck not? I mean, I've heard of people having midlife crises and starting to binge Coke and going to Burning Man and buying Porsches, but this is something entirely new.

I'm fucking sick of shoes. AI compute for the win. And the fact they say they're going to raise $50 million, $50 million will buy you like 10 GPUs, you know, and not even a couple of racks that you can't get anymore anyway because everybody else bought them. And, you know, this whole thing was a stock go up move, which the stock did go up.

But fortunately, the next day, everybody realized this is just the blockchainification of old brands like we used to have with Kodak and Radio Shack and all that shit a couple years ago. You know, these stupid fucking hedge funds or private equity firms would buy up old, you know, old IP and then just slap on some blockchain or meme token and then make it make a few bucks and then skeedaddle.

This is the exact same thing. Exactly. And so the Allbirds has completely fallen. They were a big deal for a little bit. They were basically a meme shoe. They were valued around $4 billion in 2021. They sold the entire shoe business and branding to an investment firm earlier this month for under $39 million.

So now they're trying to raise more money than they're even worth to pivot to AI compute. And it's just it was a stock play. And that was that. And it's not working. Yeah, they must not have kept any money from, you know, when they were worth $4 billion because I mean, have you ever had Allbirds shoes?

No. I had a couple pair of them. And yeah, there's a reason that they're not in business anymore. The shoes fucking sucked, you know, I mean, they were they were like they were like slippers, but you don't want to go out of the house in them because if they got wet, then you know, they were gross. They were actually gross.

If it rained, you're fucked. You're squishing all day, all day, all birds, all day. I'll squish. Well, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a certain Redditor at its crosshairs, and it's now trying to strong arm the social media platform to reveal who they are with a grand jury subpoena, according to a report from The Intercept.

The nonprofit news outlet was able to obtain the subpoena that ordered Reddit to provide info on one of its users has been accused of criticizing ICE by April 14th. Last I checked, criticizing ICE is not illegal. It's not illegal. 100%. According to the report, ICE has been trying to identify this Redditor for a month without success.

More specifically, Reddit is being asked to give up the user's name, address, phone number, and other personal data. The Intercept reported the subpoena was issued by federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C. after a failed attempt from ICE to do the same through a federal court in Northern California, which has jurisdiction in San Francisco, where Reddit is headquartered.

Reddit attorneys say their clients' posts are protected under the First Amendment and described ICE's use of a grand jury as a disturbing escalation, which it is. Yes, it is. Reddit said that they do not voluntarily share information with any government, especially not on a user exercising their right to criticize the government or plan a protest.

So we shall see what happens here. According to a New York Times report, the Department of Homeland Security has filed hundreds of subpoenas to Google, Discord, Meta, and even Reddit for identifying details about its users that it just doesn't like. Great, great, great.

Class war, everybody. Yeah, yeah, it's coming. It's coming. Well, Google News has stopped showing news. They stopped showing news a long fucking time ago, Brian. Well, they are doing what ESPN and all sports news have been doing for quite some time, and that's literally littering everything with betting odds.

They've begun showing polymarket bets and odds alongside actual stories, according to a report by Futurism. Bets tend to appear in the For You section of Google News, which is supposed to be tailored to a person's particular interests. I can't emphasize how bad this is for society.

Again, I cannot. Futurism notes that the platform actually placed a polymarket bet as the top news result when inquiring about the price of Bitcoin. Publications saw links to the prediction market all over Google News, including in searches. It popped up in queries regarding the Strait of Hormuz, which presented a link to let people bet on the number of ships that would be allowed to pass through the critical passageway.

Users were able to set the gambling platform as a source, which directs readers to an aggregate page of other polymarket links. Complaints from users on social media indicate that Google started doing this at the tail end of March. However, one user noted all the way back in January that polymarket results had started showing up in the news section of a traditional Google search.

Now, they did announce a partnership with both Polymarket and Kalshi back in November, but the deal indicated the two gambling platforms would feed prediction data into Google's finance platform, which is bad enough. They didn't say anything about the news. So now our news is being littered with betting odds.

Oh, man. That is such... I mean, we know that Google has been getting worse for years now because it makes them sell more ads, you know. But now that they're doing it to the news, that Google News is like one of those last places that you can go look for some kind of decent set of news.

But if that's it, then we're just... It's over. It's over. It is. And the FAA is actually hiring right now if you want to be an air traffic controller. And they are targeting gamers in their most recent job advertisement for air traffic controllers. Now, this article kind of presents it as like, oh, my God, this is crazy.

And I'm like, it makes total sense to me. Yeah, really? It absolutely makes sense to me. Fast twitch muscle response. Good eye muscle response. Quick eye. Everything you need is an air traffic controller if you're a great gamer. Now, except, you know, there's not more than one life here, people.

You don't get three. Yeah, that's the thing. No respawn. Yeah, no respawn. So other than that, it's great. So it totally makes sense to me. I think it's fantastic. Well, you know what would have been more fantastic is not firing the air traffic controllers that we had already. That would have been good, too.

You know, because they were already trained, seasoned, and, you know, we already paid for the training and all that. So now we have to pay again. I have family that are air traffic controllers, so I know a lot about what goes on in the air traffic control world.

And it's just, there's a lot of bullshittery that goes on in there. But I want to end the day on some good news, Brian. Some good news. A 63-year-old man in Oslo may be the latest and first HIV cure involving a family donor after receiving a stem cell transplant from his brother.

The procedure was originally meant to treat a blood cancer, but his brother happened to carry a rare CCR5 Delta 32 mutation that makes immune cells resistant to HIV. Four years later and two years off antiretroviral therapy, doctors say there is no detectable virus left.

Unfortunately, it's not a scalable cure because stem cell transplants are high risk and typically reserved for cancer cases. But it's another data point in a very short list of about 10 documented HIV cures worldwide. So it's still not a fix for the masses, but it's a strong hint that wiping out HIV entirely isn't just theoretical anymore.

So they're making headway. They're making headway. You get it to the point where CRISPR can take care of this, then we're set. Yep. Yep. Yep. So I just, like I said, good news. Some good news coming out of the world. Let's get to shit. Cups and doodads. Now here's some shit again.

More than 70 civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Fight for the Future have written to Mark Zuckerberg demanding. He completely scrapped plans to add facial recognition to meta smart classes, warning it would empower stalkers, predators, and abusers.

They're not asking for guardrails or opt-outs. They want the feature dead entirely, arguing it's so dangerous that it cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards. There is simply no way for bystanders or anybody out in the world to consent to being identified, which is true.

Well, you're in public, so you're in public. You don't have to consent. That's the problem. But they're not just... That's what Mark's going to tell you to fuck off. That's probably true. This feature is apparently called Name Tag. It uses AI to pull up information about people within the glasses field of view. And as the article notes, that's about as dystopian as it gets.

Meta reportedly sent an internal memo suggesting it should roll this out during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns. Now, that doesn't make it seem nefarious, does it? Not at all.

Let's launch it while everyone's busy with other distractions. Man. What a shitbird. Two versions are reportedly in development, one that can only identify people connected to meta platforms and another that could identify anyone with a public Instagram account, meaning deleting your meta accounts may become a personal safety measure.

We know that deleting anything on meta doesn't mean delete it at all. Yep, they'll still have your pictures. They will still have your name attached to it. Once you're there, you are there. Did I tell you that I had to reinstall Facebook last week? And after I had deleted the app, and I did not have any meta products on my phone at all, no WhatsApp, no Instagram, and no Facebook, when I reinstalled Facebook, it logged me back in.

It absolutely knew who I was. So they're keeping probably my device ID on file and saying, oh, he's logging back in. So here's a question, Brian. Say I sold my phone and somebody else got that and installed Facebook. Could they just log in as me? Probably. Probably.

Maybe able to. Yeah. Well, meta is also reportedly training an AI character modeled on Mark Zuckerberg. His mannerisms, tone, publicly. Because we need more Mark. Fuck. I was like, his mannerisms and tone. He doesn't have either. Yeah, that makes it very easy, actually. Publicly available statements and thoughts on company strategy to interact with employees when the real Zuckerberg can't or doesn't want to.

Senior employees seeking feedback. This is the fucking world we're creating. This is unbelievable. Senior employees seeking feedback from the CEO might instead get a response from AI Zuck, which raises the question of whether anyone would even notice the difference. I don't think so.

I know. Just put a bottle of barbecue sauce behind him. He's fine. This follows last month's news that Zuckerberg is also building a separate AI agent to help him actually do his CEO job, finding answers, presumably managing tasks, because apparently one Zuckerberg is both too many and not enough.

No more suck, please. Well, California has proposed a bill. This one's for you, Brian. These next two are for you. California's proposed bill AB 2047 would require all 3D printers sold in the state to include built-in print blocking software and make it a misdemeanor to bypass it.

Just a misdemeanor. That effectively criminalizes open source firmware and limits how users can control their own machines. Critics say it mirrors the worst parts of DRM, locking consumers into proprietary ecosystems, restricting repairs, and potentially killing the resale market. The bill also puts the state in charge of maintaining a database of banned designs and approving compliant printers.

Opponents will argue the tech won't stop illegal gun production anyway, because this is what this is all about. It's all about ghost guns. It's not about – there may be some copyright involved there, too. Don't forget. Don't get Cory Doctorow started on this shit. As I look at my pile of Disney – of unauthorized Disney 3D prints that my son has made, yes.

Yeah, yeah. So this is not going to stop the illegal gun production, but it will add surveillance risks, stifle innovation, and create a bureaucratic mess that could spread beyond California. Speaking of beyond California, New York is quietly trying to jam DRM for the physical world into 2026 and 2027 budget, with a proposal that would require every 3D printer sold in the state to run built-in sensorware, scanning your files and blocking anything it thinks could produce firearm parts, and thinks is doing a lot of work here.

The bill also opens the door to felony charges for sharing or even possessing certain design files, meaning researchers, journalists, or artists could theoretically get nailed just for passing around data, even if no one ever prints anything. Both of these are really shitty, and since you are in the 3D printer world, I thought I would pass those along to you.

So if you're going to print your gun parts, Brian, do it while you're in Canada. I guess so. Where guns are illegal anyways. Yes. Well, you know, I wouldn't worry too much about this if we actually did anything about regulating guns, be they ghost or otherwise. Maybe we start there. I think that would be a good place to start, as my Texas story of earlier might have pointed out.

Yeah, I don't know. So, there you go. As much as many of us would like the Trump phone saga, actually just Trump saga to be over with, but let's focus on the phone right now. The T1 that we talked about quite some time ago, which has still not come out or appeared anywhere, keeps hanging around.

As noted by the Verge, an updated design has now been made official on the Trump mobile website, which is to say a fresh new direction that still looks like total shit. This isn't me making this up. This is Gizmodo. I do remember the first unveiling looked like a badly Photoshopped iPhone that they had basically just turned gold and slapped Trump's name on.

Now they actually have some Android-ish looking phone that could plausibly be real. Wait, wait, wait. Wasn't the Trump phone supposed to be entirely made in America? Yes. Which we know you can't make. They stopped talking about that. Oh, they did? Yeah. Are they still taking pre-orders? They are. I want to know. They are.

Wow. Yep. As the Verge notes, the price is now listed as a promotional price and starts at $499. To lock that promotional price in, you can send Trump Mobile a $100 deposit. We have absolutely no idea if this phone will ever be real or not, since no one has gotten a hold of one in real life.

And we can at least go to sleep tonight with a small shred of hope that we'll never have to lay eyes on a T1 for real. I want to go read the contract that people are signing because I bet there's some lines in there in the fine, fine print that says if we don't ever ship one, we still get to keep your deposit. Keep the deposit. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm sure. Absolutely sure of it. So I got a little fun news here. iOS 26.4. Now, when you used to do app updates in the App Store, you used to have to go into the App Store, click on your face, and then you could scroll down and refresh the updates and then update from there.

Now, with 26.4, they actually moved it even a layer deeper. And I keep my apps up to date basically every day. Even though I have automatic update on, for some reason, it doesn't. I wish they would fix that first instead of doing any of this shit. So now, what you can do is on the App Store icon, press and long hold it, and it will show up an update list in the list that comes below it.

And then you can just click on that, and then it'll take you directly, or tap on that, and it will take you directly to the update screen. And on your device, it works for iPad and iPhone. And it's fantastic. Which is handy. Yeah, it's very convenient. And a lot of people don't understand that you can long press on a lot of apps, and there are options under that app for a lot of different things depending on the app, because the developer can do different stuff with it.

So it's very cool. So I would, you know, if you're a tinkerer, you might want to just sit around and tap on your apps and figure out what they can do that might actually save you some time. Because I know it's like some of the photo apps will let you just go straight in to take a photo. Like, it'll bypass a lot of bullshit that you normally would have to go to when you just click to open the app.

So just check that stuff out. And I'm very happy about this one. This makes me happy. It's a really nice feature to iOS that a lot of people don't know about. Like, if I long press on my Apple News icon, there's a button that takes me directly into my crossword. So I could just do that first thing in the morning without going through all the different menus to get to my crossword. I like my crossword in the morning.

Nice, nice. I can't spell my fucking own name in the morning, let alone somebody else's crossword. Jeez, smart people. I bet you don't get mad when they take away your AI. No. Well, here's an interesting one. The FCC just handed Netgear a hall pass.

The agency granted exemptions for its Nighthawk and Orbi routers under a new ban on foreign-made networking gear. We covered this a while back, and we're like, oh, poor Netgear. They're not going to be able to, you know, survive with this. But the thing is, every router on the planet has Chinese parts in it. So this whole thing is kind of wonky.

But they gave them a pass, and they didn't explain why. I'm betting they got a check. I was going to say, I bet the check cleared. The check cleared. And the check was only big enough for two models to get through. Not the entire line, just those two models. That's all they could afford.

They bought about 50 T1 phones, and there you go. That's it. A couple meme coins, and yeah. God damn, we have a government for sale. It's fucking ridiculous. I think they have a plaque in the new ballroom, the Epstein. The Epstein dance hall. Yeah. Yeah, the Epstein dance hall.

They bought a couple seats in there. Conveniently, it's an under-17 club. Just saying. As much ketamine as you want, but no booze. Well, we talked last week about Amazon killing the older Kindles.

Now, if you do have an older Kindle, there are some solid workarounds to keep it useful. And the big one is you can jailbreak it, which is apparently relatively simple now, and opens up the device so you can install better reading apps, transfer files over Wi-Fi, and ditch Amazon's built-in limitations. And from there, tools like Calibre lets you manage your library, convert formats, and move books directly onto the device.

If you've previously... Shit, I might just do this to my regular Kindle. Sounds pretty good. I'm going to go out on a limb here, Jason, and say that if you know how to do any of those things that you just mentioned, you probably have a newer Kindle than the first fucking edition. That's... Well, no, the ones that they killed weren't that old. I mean, honestly, you know?

I just got rid of two of my Kindles, one that you were supposed to buy, but you never did. And those were still supported, but they were like from 2010 and 2012, I think. But yeah, but... Well, good thing I didn't buy it from you now. Well, because you never came whenever you...

I've had that for three years, waiting for you to show up, and you never come out to my neighborhood, dick. But anyway... You need a high-speed train getting out to your fucking neighborhood. To California, we're never going to have a high-speed train. So go check that stuff out if you want to keep your Kindle going.

Media Candy. Media Candy. Another day, another subscription price hike. This time for YouTube Premium. Every plan for YouTube's ad-free tier is going up.

Depending on which one you have, you could be paying as much as $4 more per month. They've started emailing subscribers about price changes rather than announce them publicly and get berated by the entire society. That is sick of their wages not going up, not to mention getting fired because of AI and everything that you fucking made us buy into.

Instead of owning anything, you just keep increasing the fucking prices, don't you? Don't you? Don't you? I got the email. So, yeah. I'm going to dump YouTube Premium. It's a bridge too far. $16 a month?

Too much. I mean, yeah. The juice ain't worth the squeeze on that. And they've increased their music plan prices as well, which now makes it more expensive than Apple Music when taken on its own. So I don't... I guess they... I don't know. YouTube, you have not locked people into your ecosystem like other people have.

So good luck with that. I don't know about that. Maybe they have. I don't know. They've run the numbers. I'm pretty sure that they're going to make more money instead of losing money. All right. We talked about Anna's Archive, the open source library and search engine slash piracy, Mark, that basically scraped all of Spotify in the name of preserving and archiving it.

Yeah. That was a stretch, Anna. They've been ordered to pay Spotify and three of the world's largest music labels $322 million in damages after it claimed to have scraped the entirety of the streaming platform's library of music. Spotify, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment sued Anna's Archive back in January for the $13 trillion.

Yeah. They allegedly scraped 86 million songs, a significant chunk of all music on the planet, and in the since-deleted blog posts, they've stated the scraping was an act of preservation. The New York federal judge sided with the plaintiffs after the archives' anonymous operators failed to respond to the lawsuit.

The court also ordered them to immediately destroy all copies and phono records of any works scraped, downloaded, copied, or otherwise extracted from Spotify. But whether it actually does this or indeed hands over a penny of the damages remains to be seen. No, it doesn't. They're pirates. Pirates do not exactly respond to lawsuits.

And you don't even know who they are. So good luck. Yeah. Who's, who's, who is Anna there to, to rent a check? Exactly. Oh, yeah. Is the, is the Dread Pirate Bay Robert guy going to, at least we don't know who those guys were.

Yeah. Dread Pirate Anna. So that'll be interesting to see if they ever get anything. I doubt it. I doubt it. Yeah. And a federal jury has ruled that Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, has violated federal and state antitrust rules and is officially a monopoly. In Gadget's subhead, in other news, water is wet.

Welcome to the party, pal. This is indeed shocking. However, this is not exactly an administration that gives a fuck about monopolies. So, in fact, they prefer them. The judge is still determined, has to determine what remedies apply and the consequences could range from monetary damages all the way up to forcing Live Nation to sell off Ticketmaster entirely.

Whatever the judge decides, Live Nation has already made it clear it will appeal. The DOJ and 30 state attorneys generally, generals originally sued Live Nation on monopoly claims back in 2024. The DOJ reached a separate settlement, but the state AGs kept their case going, which is why we got this result.

So, there's also a separate FTC case still ongoing questioning whether Live Nation colluded with ticket resellers. Hint, it did. In summary, everybody already knows Ticketmaster was a monopoly. The government proved it in court. Live Nation is going to appeal and concert tickets will still cost $340 with fees in the meantime.

Yeah, you know, you know why they're going to let this one go through is because Trump needs to sell tickets to the Epstein ballroom and he doesn't like all those fees not going to him. So, he wants to be able to get his own fees on top. Remember, under-17s are welcome. Exactly. Free ketamine. And the Good Omens final season official trailer has dropped.

I watched it. Yeah. But the brouhaha on the internet is just, it's comical. It's going to be a taped-together, cobbled-up piece of shit. Well, no, no, no. Everybody, I'm talking about the Gaimanites versus the non-Gaimanites.

The people who are out there saying that, you know, since he, since the whole him getting canceled thing has happened, like, they're, they're screaming up and down, I'm not going to watch it. I'm not going to watch it. This is horrible. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're still going to fucking watch it. You know they're going to watch it. Everybody's going to watch it. We're all going to watch it. If they cared enough to make a, make a screed about it, they care enough to go watch it.

They will, you know, and they'll hate themselves for it and probably eat a tub of ice cream and maybe down a bottle of Jack. If they don't watch it, then they can't post about everything that they thought, thought was wrong with it. Bingo. There you go. Bingo. They'd have to actually shut up for once and not have anything to say.

Well, Godzilla's minus zero trailer has dropped. Have you taken a look at that, Brian? I did watch it. It looks interesting. I mean, I'm not super into this stuff, but it looks good. Well, have you seen Godzilla minus one yet? I did. It was a great movie. It was good. I thought. Yeah. I thought it was very good.

Which brings me to my next point. You talked about Monarch being back on Apple and you said it was, you know, you were going through it. And have you continued with Monarch? Because I sure as shit didn't. It is a show I never think about. So I've totally dropped off watching it. And in fact, when you put it in the notes, I was like, oh, yeah, I watched the first two episodes of that new season.

Yeah, exactly. That's as far as I ever got. I completely forgot about it. The other one I forgot about was Fallout on Amazon Prime. I started to go back and watch that because I'm out of everything else now. Well, that's that's why I'm going to get I'll get back to Monarch once I finished everything else that I'm watching. When you finish watching the Internet, then you'll get back to Monarch.

Yeah. After I've downloaded Anna's archive and gone through all of it. Listen to every song ever made by the hand of man. Yes. OK, that's all I wanted to know. Have you caught up on Daredevil? I am caught up on Daredevil. I'm caught up on Daredevil. Oh, I'm going to put a little spoiler in here.

So if you're if you have not caught up on Daredevil and you want to skip ahead for a minute and a half, I thought they were actually going to do something of interest and kill her. They did. Well, then they did eventually, but they had to stretch it out for a whole nother episode where she comes back to life and she's kind of fine.

And then she dies. Exactly. Just fucking kill her. Yeah. Kill her. Kill Bullseye. Let's just move on. Yes. Whatever. Yeah, that was a waste of an episode. I mean, that was literally just 60 minutes of. OK, I think that was we're going to.

Sorry, we're writing you out of the show, but we're going to give you lots of these great sequences of you walking along a beach and soft focus first. Is that cool? OK, cool. It was contractually obligated, probably. Yeah. The pit finale. Did you watch it last night?

It was awesome. It was great. It was great. It was a great show. And now we're going to have to wait like another fucking two years before we get anything. Hopefully they're speeding it along. But yeah. No, it's such a solid show. Hopefully they're taking their fucking time. I want them to take their time because, you know, I had to speed run to get caught up for this finale.

And that was like two to three to maybe sometimes four episodes a night to get caught up on 29 episodes of a TV show that I vowed I would never watch but fell in love with. I was watching that before I went to bed. And it is not good for your mental health to watch that show before you go to bed.

I'm already under enough pressure right now. And then to watch that and then to hear about the class war that's coming and all the other bullshit. I just I was just like, God damn, I just don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to get out of bed. They did give you a little bit of a palate cleanser. I don't know if you watch the mid-credits sequence that they never do, which they did for the finale.

No, I didn't. Oh, I have to go back and watch that then. OK, watch that. Don't don't marvel that shit on me, man. Come on. I'll give you a little hint. It involves one of my longest clients. OK, I'll go. I'll go back and watch it. God damn.

This is one's interesting. Warner Brothers use CinemaCon to roll out casting for The Lord of the Rings, The Hunt for Gollum, the new Middle Earth entry directed by Andy Serkis, who's also back as Gollum, and the lineup makes his legacy and fresh faces. Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf. Elijah Wood as Frodo. Lee Pace as...

While Kate Winslet... While Kate Winslet and Leo Wood all join the universe. And Jamie Dornan steps in as Strider. So, I'm down. I mean... I think there's going to be a lot of CG on this. There's going to be a lot of CG on this.

I hope they don't go too uncanny valley with it. But you know what? I had my reservations about the Amazon, the ring of the ring of the ring of the ring of the power of the rings. And that was great. And I loved it. And so, more Lord of the Rings, fine. Make it good.

Don't hobbit this. Don't make it a three-hour epic that then is going to have a sequel and five minutes of actual fucking content take place in three hours. As long as you don't do that, I'm fine. Well, it can't be that long because Ian McKellen's going to need a nap every, like, you know, two takes. That's true.

Because he's about 800 years old. And finally, because I know we've got to get going here. This is driving me crazy. We're watching all these streaming shows on all these different streaming platforms. When I go to a streaming show's page, I want to see what day the next fucking episode drops.

Because right now, you never get to see when they're coming out. So, I have to go check my calendar. I got to figure out when the last one dropped. If it's there, I got to go to IMDb or Wikipedia and look for the fucking, you know, list of episodes to find out when the next episode is going to be out. Granted, on Apple TV, sometimes you'll get a notification if you follow the show on Apple TV, which is great.

But a lot of times, you don't get that shit. And it just pisses me off. All you got to do is every Thursday, every Friday, every Wednesday, whenever the fuck they come out, just put that on the goddamn page. I'm holding up my phone, which is open to my Apple Notes. My Apple Note is entitled TV.

I have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday written on it. I have the show that comes out that day and the network it's on because they cannot do this for me. And then once the show has ended, I delete it. And then if there's another show that has started on Thursday, the pit, I can delete that one now.

HBO. There we go. Welcome to the dark side with Dave with Dave Bittner, who covers the daily cyber security beat on the cyber wire and somehow still finds time to do 42 other podcasts, including ours.

Welcome, Dave. Hello. How have you back? Nice to be back. I wanted to start off today with a little follow up on mythos. Yeah. I don't know if you guys listened to the Cal Newport podcast. It is pretty good.

I put a link into the show notes. Every Thursday now, he does his Monday show is productivity and stuff like that. But now he does a Thursday show called Reality Check about AI, specifically about AI, because he's an MIT trained computer scientist.

He teaches computer science at Georgetown University, besides writing all of the productivity books. He's that productive that he can do all of that and still have a life. No, no, that matters. I've got Claude. That's right. I'm just as smart as he is now. Right. So the thing that, you know, the brouhaha that we talked about last week that, oh, my God, this thing is so amazing, blah, blah, blah.

And everybody's scared of it. Well, it turns out, turns out it was all done before. You could do this with all of the same shit that was already out there. This was just a marketing stunt. It got a little better. It got a little bit better. But for the most part, they cherry pick the examples that they were giving out to say that it could do all this great stuff.

But there are people that went back and even used like dumber models, like smaller models and could recreate the same exact chain of command attacks that Mythos was doing. So I think, I feel like, I feel like I've been duped again, again. I'm just, I'm just, I'm pissed off that we fell for it is what gets me.

Which part of this whole AI journey is the part where you're not duped? That's true. That's true. You missed it, Dave. We have a whole new pitchforks and torches segment now that's, that we're going to start. That's just all it's going to be is because with the coming class war and the coming AI class war, we just, we just have to branch out because it's coming.

I approve. I think that's a great idea for a segment. Yeah. Pitches. Yeah. I like it. I like it. You just might have to rebrand the whole fucking show though. Yeah. That's all it is anymore. So I, needless to say, I've been following this and it has been very interesting to see that, uh, some people have been taking this very seriously, like, um, hot people in high

level of government, like cabinet level people got together meetings with the banking industry to say, what are we going to do about this? Um, on the other hand, you have, as you say, some well-respected researchers who are looking at this and going, this is just marketing hype.

There's, there's not a whole lot here. Uh, I don't know who, who, I, I hate, I hate. I guess we'll find out if everything collapses or not. Exactly. Like, I hate, I hate, I hate, hate, hate that this is what I've been beaten down to be of just my response being, eh, I don't know.

Well, cause, and here's what it comes down to. Well, who, the thing is, who do you trust? No one. Not them. Well, exactly. I have become fucking David Duchovny in the X-Files. I trust no one. Yeah. Yeah.

I was, uh, I was giving a little presentation a couple of weeks ago to a group of, uh, like local business people. They would ask me to come talk about cybersecurity, which I know a thing or two about. So I came and presented to them and I got a question from someone who said, uh, well, all the thing like backing up in the cloud and putting my data in the cloud, how secure should I consider that?

And my answer was, well, it's very secure. Right up until the moment it's not. How'd they like that answer? Well, what's funny was he didn't like the answer at all, but every person in the, uh, in the, who was, who was in the meeting, who was a lawyer was vigorously shaking their head up and down.

They were like, you're speaking our language. That's what we say about all kinds of things, you know, it's great. No guarantees. Yeah. Right up until the moment. It's not. And I said to the guy, I said, it's your, it's still your stuff. It's still somewhere. And so that somewhere could be, can catch on fire.

It could be blown up. It could all sorts. It could be flooded. So we all assume that the big providers like Microsoft and Google, like they're going to have their own backup plan and spread our stuff around all over the world. That's what I keep telling myself.

That's what their marketing materials say is happening. Right. But that is a failed assumption. We've found out time and time again. Yeah. Turns out. Uh, so, uh, yeah. It turns out the only content they can keep is the stuff you don't want them to keep that you've asked them to delete.

That seems to be the way it works. That stuff is backed up. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Excellent point. These people just need to remember that the cloud is still just somebody else's computer. That's all it is. So, you know. It is. It is. Uh, so I don't know if you, if it's important to you, back it up yourself.

Um, but as far as this whole mythos thing, I, I, I don't know. Well, it's too early to tell. We'll see. I mean, I guess on the one hand, there are researchers, there are respected researchers who have been using this tool, who are raising the flag and, and sounding the alarm and saying the problem we're going to have is, uh, all of these vulnerabilities that we have to deal

with that are just coming at us at a pace that we can't deal with. So we're, we'll have to deal with this backlog. Whether or not vibe coding is going to fix it all. Well, it is, but whether or not that's actually triggered by mythos or not is, is what we're really, what we're arguing about here.

I think it was inevitable that these tools would be able to go after old. What we talked about a couple of weeks ago, there's something in Linux that was like three decades old that they just recently found a serious, like a critical flaw. So those are coming fast and furious and the France is fucked.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's all of this, uh, technical debt that was limited by human ability. And now we've supercharged it with AI. Yeah. Yeah. We're finding the old technical debt while we make new technical debt at an industrial scale every single day.

And now it's going to actually cost more to do all of it. So, cause everybody's on the train, everybody, we've got too many people. Have you ever seen those trains in India where there are people like hanging off the sides and on the roof and like, you know, that's what, that's the train we got now. You hope you're not the one on the roof when it comes to a tunnel.

Yeah. That's where we all are. Oh, good analogy. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So we got some Star Wars. Oh my God. It's been a while. At last, at last, my son, Jack reminded me last night that Mando and Grogu tickets go on sale today.

So we will be locking that down this evening, I'm guessing, over dinner, deciding when we're going to go see this movie because we are going to go see this movie and the final trailer dropped for this movie yesterday and it makes me still want to see this movie perhaps more than ever.

I think it's, uh, it's unfair that they have all of these emotional buttons to push with us where like the, the, the trailer starts out with Yoda's theme playing with little Grogu in the jungle or wood forest doing little Jedi, cute little Jedi things.

And so you've already short circuited all of my, my synapses of desire. Your wallet has opened. Yes. That's right. It is sprung open like a reverse bear trap and just take, shut up and take my money.

So, uh, have you got, I guess I'll ask Brian, Brian, have you seen the new trailer? Uh, I did. Um, it's funny cause I saw so many, I saw a lot of complaints on because it's the internet and society now. So there's, there's complaints like glower everywhere.

Um, a lot of people were complaining that the, well, it all looks great and I still have no idea what's happening and which is fine. And I'm, I'm okay with that because another big complaint that everybody's had for the last 20 years is everybody complains that you've got, you learned the entire movie from the trailer.

What are you going to go? Which, which complaint do you want? Are you complaining that you don't know the story or that they gave away too much of the story? Shut the fuck up. Like, yeah, it's a nice trailer and it didn't give away much. I'm happy about that. It looks good. Of course I'm going to go see it.

I have my concerns, but who cares? It's going to be Star Wars. The music's going to be great. It's going to be fun. It can't be worse than a lot of things that I've seen. Like, I'm excited. This is, this is where we are in our lives.

It can't be worse than many of the other things. So I'm all in. I need the escapism. I need to buy into this. I need to be able to spend an hour and a half, preferably close to two. I don't know how long the movie is. Not thinking about everything that we fucking talk about on this show.

That's what I need. And this will provide it. I'm with you. Money well spent. Money well spent. Otherwise, in other Star Wars news, out your neck of the woods, Jason, at Disneyland, we've talked about how they're introducing more old school characters to Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland.

And so now they're going to have Han Solo and Princess Leia traipsing around. And they've released some footage of one of the new Han Solos, which, you know, he doesn't look anything like Han Solo. Looks nothing like Han Solo. No, he doesn't. He's got a bad 70s wig.

Whatever. I don't care. The thing is, you walk through the gates at Disneyland, you've bought the ticket, enjoy the ride. Right. I mean, you know, it's... Ariel doesn't look like the animated Ariel. No. Moana doesn't look like the animated Moana.

Get the fuck over it. It's a goddamn theme park. Right. Right. Exactly. I'm happy that they've given up on this thing of having... The realistic land. The realistic land. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. One thing we were talking about actually last night with my family after we watched this trailer was we would love to see both of the Galaxy's Edge lands put in a full service restaurant because neither of them have one.

But wouldn't it be fun to have a full service restaurant that was Jabba's Palace? That'd be cool. Yeah. Right? So like at one end of the restaurant, you have Jabba's throne. You have all of the people milling around and all that sort of thing. And like maybe every 15 minutes or so, like out of a little cage on the floor come little claw or big claws from the Rancor, you know, or the thing opens and somebody falls down into it.

Like there's all kinds of possibilities. You use that sweet country bear jamboree technology and you got Cy Snoodle's band playing. It's going to be awesome. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, they have the room to do it. I think that'd be a great addition to the land, help eat up some of the people.

Well, I guess the Rancor would literally eat up some of the people. But yeah, that's something that they need. Before you started that, before you started talking about what your fantastic idea, I think it's an awesome idea. What would be cool is if you have the Galaxy Edge in California and the one in Florida, remember the portal, that big disc that they were putting in New York and then one in like some other place so you could actually see the other people on the other side?

And then OnlyFans models figured out that they could use it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that got kind of rude. Because it was on the main, it was in Times Square, you know, there's going to be boobs. There will be boobs and more. But it would be kind of cool to have that at Disney so you could see the people in the other state, you know, just walking by and because nobody's going to linger there.

I don't think you're going to get that many flashers. Disney is not big on not being able to control their entertainment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would be fun, though. I mean, I thought it would be really fun. That's the kind of thing they would have had back in the original days of Epcot, right?

They would have had something where you could interact real time with someone in France at Communicore and that sort of thing. But yeah, I think in today's days where people are very, I don't know. Shitty. Shitty and loose with the nudity, it'd probably be hard to make something like that happen.

Uncouth, yet highly litigious. Right. Right. Oh, you're talking about Disney or the people? Both. Yeah. I mean, you try to tell me some Karen isn't going to see something happen on one of those orbs and not sue Disney because of it.

That's not going to happen. That's the problem. That's true. People are the problem. God damn it. Oh, well, so much for that idea. It's a great idea. It's just a horrible idea. Speaking of a great idea and a horrible idea at the same time.

Dave, are you still an Overcast user after the kerfuffle that we all went through? Hell no. Okay. Okay. I didn't know.

I didn't know if you were still here. No, no. I just put this in the news because I thought you were still maybe on the Overcast train. Hell no. I have opinions. What did you move to? I just use Apple's podcast tool, the Apple's podcast app. It's fine. You, Brian? I use Overcast free because I don't need to pay to just press play on a podcast.

I don't need all the features. I need nothing. Okay. I need it to load the podcast that I've subscribed to. On a rare occasion, I search for another podcast. I need it to find it. And preferably, it plays it. Yeah. That's it. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so Overcast Premium is getting a price hike.

Now, I am an over... Because I was still on it when the kerfuffle happened. And the whole time span of when Overcast really sucked was within my subscription package. So, and then it renewed because... I'm going to talk about renewals in a second.

This really pisses me off. But I'm still renewed at $14.99. Now, new subscribers for the Premium Overcast are going to have to clock in at $29.99 a year for a podcast player. Let me tell you, everybody out there, you know what happens if you don't pay?

Yeah, there's some crazy features you don't get. A little pop-up ad shows up in the player that you're not looking at because podcasts are audio. So, there's an ad in the player you don't see. We've bought those ads before. And I can tell you nobody sees them because they were one of the worst values that we've ever paid for because we got, like, no subscribers.

And we spent probably $1,000 on those little fucking ads. But, yeah, and I also put this in here, too, because if you look at our podcast stats, we are probably one of the very few, I mean, Accidental Tech Podcast obviously probably has the highest usage of Overcast listeners.

60% of the people that listen to this show listen on Overcast, which is insane. Wow. Absolutely insane. Because we used to run those things where, like, everybody, please go star the episodes. 60%. 3,000 people listen to this show on Overcast.

So, if everybody, if you want to try it again, everybody go star every episode of Grumpy Old Geeks and we can see if we can get back on the free listing in tech. I doubt we can. I think Marco doesn't like me very much. Probably could because I'm saying shit like this. End of our tirades against when Overcast went completely in the shitter.

Yeah. I will definitely not be re-upping at $29.99. I needed it when I was actually producing more shows because you could upload your own files and then play them through, which was the nice feature. And he even threatened to take that away before.

But he's got transcripts now. And he's saying that that's the new thing for him is these new transcripts. And they're done on the back end in AI, FIDE, whatever. So, he's got to charge more for that. I'm like, no, you don't. No. No, you don't.

You really don't. It's not a hard thing to get these days. Yeah. Well, how is – so, I pulled the ripcord probably about a year ago. I just had enough. So, has – would you say that Marco's done a successful job in debugging it?

Yes. Okay. Yeah. Actually, what he's done is a successful job of waiting long enough that we relearn the new flow of the app that used to work just fine before he ruined it and then fixed some things. It's still by far not a fantastic user experience.

The very basic functionality, like I described, Dave, is pretty much almost exactly as it was before. Okay. You can – you have a list of the podcasts that have recently updated that you haven't listened to, and you can go in, and then you can play the new one, and that's all I need.

And he fixed that part, and I'm fine, and he has never gotten a penny from me, and he probably never will, but he gets my thanks. Yeah. I mean, I was an early supporter. I paid right out of the gate when he originally came out with it. But he just kind of lost me with that.

It was the hubris of the way he released that disastrous version and sort of kind of refused to acknowledge. Here's your shit sandwich, and you're going to love it. Right. Exactly. And, yeah, so I just – it just wasn't the kind of thing I wanted to do business with.

Yeah. So I went – I moved away. But I'm glad to hear that it's back to, you know, full functionality. Yeah. I mean, good for them, and I wish them well. Yeah. Bless their hearts. Yes. And speaking of hubris, in the Reddit post where he talks about jumping up the prices, there's a section under it called Why, and he says, in short, I think it's worth it.

So his app, he's allowed to think that. That's right. It's a free market, capitalist society, by all means. Yeah, we'll see how it goes for him, and I wish him well. What else we got? All right, let's jump back over to Disneyland, this one in Florida specifically, and away from Star Wars, and over to the Muppets.

This might be getting me to Disneyland Florida sooner than I had intended, maybe even before it's been cleaned up and they've done things like, oh, I don't know, allow people to have vaccines again. The electric mayhem has arrived at the rock and roll coaster starring the Muppets. There's a link in the show notes to the Disney Parks blog that kind of gets into the flow.

It is basically just a re-theming. They didn't retool much, so it didn't take them too long. Some of the celebrities involved basically is a list of people that have been involved in many of the Muppets projects that we've seen recently. You got Awkwafina, Danny Trejo, Darren Criss, John Stamos, Neil Patrick Harris, Travis Parker, Yvette Nicole Brown, Wayne Brady, Weird Al Yankovic makes an appearance as part of the ride show.

And yeah, it looks like fun. I mean, there's a whole list of new songs that they're doing and covers, and it looks like they've done a really good job with it. Yeah. A nice sprucing up, and I'm eager to see what's going to come of it. One of my colleague's daughters works at Disney World now.

She's in the college program, so she's going to be among the people who get to ride this early. So, I'll get a sneak preview, which I will share. Not that there's not going to be a million of them on YouTube, but I don't know.

Yeah. Yes, it makes me want to go down there and ride it. Again, we were on a Disney kick last night at home, and we're just talking about how much construction is going on in all the parks right now. You've got the frozen land in Paris, and then the whole villain's land is coming in Florida.

There's an awful lot going on. Yeah, you've got cars, you've got the South America thing at Animal Kingdom, in Indy, and all sorts of stuff. But the problem with that is it kind of also makes me want to wait a year for all that stuff.

Well, if you're waiting for the Muppets roller coaster, that's May 26th, so, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, something else I just thought we'd touch on here. This came across one of my feeds earlier this week, and it's an open-source tool called AnyPod.

I'll just read the description. AnyPod is an open-source automated podcast generation tool powered by open-source TTS models. It transforms any text input into a multi-episode, high-quality podcast. Does it?

So, one of the reasons I dropped this in here is I do not have the offhand, easy-breezy, technical know-how to just take this GitHub thing and turn it into... Depository.

Thank you very much. That's the word I was looking for. You're welcome. Between the three of us, we can... Did you say suppository? No, repository. Well, it could be appropriate for this one. That's what I was wondering. I'm like, okay, I think you nailed that one. No, no. Between the three of us, we can always come up with the words that any one of us is grabbing for, so it's good.

It takes a village. We are of an age where it does take a village. That's right. So, I couldn't try this out, but I thought maybe, Jason, you could, or... I suspect this is probably just like the one that Google put out where the two hosts just talk about stuff.

But it was interesting to me that this is... Yeah, that's Notebook LM, by the way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, it's interesting to me how more and more of these tools are becoming available, easy to get, free, and they're just going to keep getting better and better. And as we've said here before, I just hope that the time for me to retire intersects with this taking over my job.

You can cut back on those Disney trips, invest wisely, and you can retire early, Dave, or when forced to. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Here's the thing on this. AnyPod is an open-source automated podcast generation tool powered by open-source TTS, text speech, models such as Moss TTSD.

It transforms any text input into a multi-episode, high-quality podcast. Now, here's where it gets crazy. The tool leverages LLM agents to automatically analyze input text, plan podcast content, generate scripts, and synthesize speech via TTS.

Now, it's the plan podcast content and generate scripts. So, you can basically just tell it a little bit about what you want. So, we could theoretically throw our show notes at it, and it would just do our show for us. So, well... Next week is writing itself. Let's form that repository, bitches.

I might need a vacation. There you go. So, is it capable of doing a season? Don't know. Don't know. If you wanted to do, like, a murder mystery kind of thing. Could we just, like, point it at Engadget and say, take all of last week's stories, give us the rad revenue, make an episode.

Yeah. Synthesize all of our voices. Yeah. That's the thing that I want to find out, because I don't, I've never used any of these text-to-speech tools. These MOS ones are Vibe Voice. The only one I've worked with is Eleven Labs, and we could definitely, we could easily do it with Eleven Labs, but it's so expensive.

Yeah. But I do have an M2 Mac Mini lying around that was, had OpenClaw on it for a little while that I'm definitely going to remove, but it's kind of Pythoned up and ready to go, so maybe I'll give this a shot. After, after. In all your free spare time.

I've got, look, this week is my, this coming Wednesday is my bankruptcy hearing, so I have enough on my plate right now. I can't sleep, I can't do anything because I'm so fucking nervous. But after that, maybe it'll be party time and I'll have some spare brain cycles left to give this a shot.

So if there's no YouTube video version of the show next week. If there's a, if there's not a show next week, that's your, that's your, yeah. If Jason goes missing. It's just, it's just me and my forked repository. Right.

That's it. It's just going to be Brian. Yeah. Brian and I start getting mysterious postcards from around the nation that are not signed, that talking about, you know, crossing the border, crossing the southern border and asking us to meet to, to help him with his sailboat. Oh, it won't be that, it'll just be me from Rikers because they just don't like me because I can't pay my, can't pay my bills.

We'll be repodcasting or rebranding this, the, this feed as a happy shit from Disneyland. That'll be the new show. That'll be it. Things that keep us sane. Yeah. Where's Jason? But I'll give this a shot. I, I, I've, I've added the repositories, suppositories to my list.

It's just one of many things up my ass right now. It really is right now. So many things up my ass. See, now there's a segment title. Up my ass. What's up our ass this week? Well, last but not least, I went to the eye doctor this week to get, I ordered some new lenses for my glasses.

And as I was killing time, waiting for my turn, I was looking at perusing the different glasses. And I saw this little sign that I posted, this little display that I posted an image of, that AI slop is everywhere. These are Oakley, Meta, co-branded performance AI glasses.

The next evolution is here. Yay. So, I guess these are just the Meta glasses. Somehow. Clear. Clear. They're clear frames. So, they're not the Ray-Ban frames. They're Oakley frames.

And I guess they're trying to say that there's some sort of sports advantage here. I was thinking of the, remember in Caddyshack, when Rodney has that putter that he says Albert Einstein gave him that helps him sink a putt from far away? So, he does that kind of thing. It says, no, no, no, yes, yes, yes.

Maybe that would be good. But, who asked for this? No one. No one's asked for any of this. Right. Nobody. Nobody wants this. Nobody needs this. No. That's it.

That's it. My entire show is just, no. No. Don't want it. Don't need it. Don't care. Welcome to don't want it, don't need it, don't care. All right. One happy note. See you guys soon.

Maybe see you guys next week. Yeah, good luck. I'm getting hungry. I have to go downstairs and have my AI-enabled sandwich. Except for my AI wonder bread. Right. Your AI toaster. It's my AI salami. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we have some amazing new subscribers, Liz, Spencer, and Michael.

Thank you all so much. Thank you all very, very much. And we'd also like to thank Jim, Terry, John, Fantastic Wolf, Nicholas, Brian L, Jamie, Eric, another Michael, and Nate. Thank you all so much for your continued support and new support on Patreon. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Over at PayPal, we got donations from Michael, from Gordon, and another Michael, who both gave us $20, and from Wes, who gave us $100. He says, long-time listener and finally a first-time donor. Just send via PayPal. Honestly, way overdue. You two and Dave are basically just me talking to myself for an hour plus each week.

Keep doing what you're doing. And then Martin said, hold my beer, and gave us $200. And then Eric said, hold both beers, and gave us $250. So thank you all so much. Thank you all so much. You have no idea. No idea. And over at the tip jar, we've got Theodore, Jeffrey, and Sean, and Tim T, who also said, hold my beer, and dropped us a hundy.

So thank you all so much. And we sold some merch this week. David M. picked up some merch from shop.gog.show. It's been a fine week over here. And if you would like to join the Patreon train and keep this show on the air, because advertising is a joke.

Dead, dead, dead. You can go to patreon.com slash GOG and sign up for as little as $3 a month, but you can give as much as you want, and you'll get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. And yeah, or you can go to gog.show slash donate.

I am so tired. I forgot all my words. But gog.show slash donate to find other ways that you can help keep the show supported. We love you all very, very much, and you really are just keeping us on the air. We appreciate it so much. Thank you. Thank you. Until next time.

Wait, that's you. You're taking my lines. Sorry. I'm slow, but not that slow. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Gilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at gog.show slash 737. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? It costs a few bucks our way at gog.show slash donate.

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And don't forget to leave a five-star review at gog.show slash review, and we'll read it on the show. And we've got merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.gog.show. And as Keg's Breath mentioned this week, never forget what Jesus did on the mount. And he spread the royales with cheese to feed the multitudes.