748: Space Bone

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

BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Jason, it was freezing cold three weeks ago. Yes. And then we didn't have spring because now it's hot as balls. It is freezing here. So we got your freezing. You got our hottest balls. I think your freezing is still kind of normal, decent weather here, but that's okay.

It was like 50 this morning. Oh, I would have longed for 50 a few weeks ago. Well, move back to California. I would like to. I would like to. But, you know, some issues that need to get sorted out first. Just a few. Okay. What you got? What you got?

I went and saw Mandalorian and Grogu with the family over the weekend. I concur with most of what Dave said last week. My kid loved it. And he's a pretty diehard, like, I need a Sith with a lightsaber to really enjoy Star Wars.

But maybe Rogue One softened him up a bit. Although Darth Vader does show up at the end. Spoiler alert, if you haven't seen that in the eight years it's been out. Ten years. Yeah, he really enjoyed it. It's opened up a whole new world of Star Wars for him. He started to watch Star Wars Rebels now, the animated series.

It's got some of the characters in it. And it's part of that whole Dave Filoni, Ahsoka, blah, blah, blah, blah, everything going on. New universe he's created. As far as me, I thought it was good. I don't think it deserves the criticism that it's getting.

Could have been edited a bit. It's a little bit over two hours long. There are some sequences that my wife and I were, like, looking at each other, going, let's move this on a little bit here. Okay, okay. You could tell in much the way that Moana 2 had the same kind of issues.

Because it's the same deal. You could tell he started making this as the next season of Mandalorian. Then the call came down. No, no, no. Let's make this a movie instead. So then you take what you've already written and what you've already shot and you remold it into a movie.

So there are sequences that obviously would have played well and fine and the pacing would have been fine if it were a full series. But in a movie, it was like, okay, you could have lost about a half an hour of this, no problem, and still would have been a good movie.

Yeah, like Good Omens 3, same thing. Well, Good Omens 3. Maybe there was no saving that series or not. I don't know if there was any saving that. You know, if you're a fan of Star Wars, you're going to like it. It's fun. It's a lot of fun. Perfect.

I'll see it when it comes to the streaming or maybe when it hits Sweden. There you go. Who knows? Well, let's get into our tech news now. Waymos in Atlanta and San Antonio keep driving into flooded roads. You know, self-driving cars, man. It's the future.

They're here now, except when there's water. It's sad that there's so much of it on our planet. Well, and it falls from the sky, Jason. Randomly. Sometimes a lot. Yeah. So they have halted their robotaxi service in a second U.S. city in the past fortnight due to issues with heavy rain and flooding.

The company has paused its operations in Atlanta after one of its self-driving vehicles was seen driving through a heavily flooded street, where it eventually got stuck for around an hour. This comes after Waymo also temporarily suspended San Antonio's service last week and issued a voluntary recall for nearly 4,000 robo-taxis.

Because there's a patch that could fix their inability to drive into water. Okay. Which is what I want to trust my life with. Oh, do we have the latest update? Yeah, seriously. What version is my taxi today?

I'm checking my taxi's fucking software version before I get in. Another recent software patch was supposed to have placed restrictions on Waymo's in-service autonomous vehicles approaching roads at high risk of flooding at certain times, but this update clearly wasn't effective enough, so we need version 2.0. Great.

It's the future, Brian. It's the future. Well, you know what else they're doing? Waymo told Engadget that a local storm had been so intense that flooding had occurred before the National Weather Service could issue a warning or alert, because they're relying on those instead of just seeing water.

Yeah, that's a problem. They should be able to, you know. I mean, we've talked about the different... Let me also remind everybody that the Trump administration is gutting the National Weather Service. Oh, gutted. It's gutted. So, if our cars are relying on that service that the government has gutted and neutered...

Well, you know what we need, Brian? Google Weather. Google needs to take over everything. We'll just have Google Weather. We've got... Remember Project Loon? They had all those balloons that they scrapped, so those are sitting around doing nothing. So, throw those things up over San Antonio or wherever, I don't know, it may rain, but you have your Waymos, then you can do that.

You know, because it's really hard because, you know, water reflects, like, probably pavement to LiDAR. I can't really tell the difference, I'm guessing, because, you know, I'm not a LiDAR expert, but it's the same thing. It's the same problem that Teslas have. They just use photography instead of LiDAR, so, you know, it is a problem.

You need comprehension on, is this water or not? Water or not? Agua or not? Is it cake? I love that show. I mean, right now, the only person that can safely ride in one of these is Wile E. Coyote. Oh, dear.

Oh, dear. So, what are we going to do, Brian? Are we going to still stay away from the Waymos for now? Well, we don't have them here. Yeah, we don't have them here, so... Got it. Got it. Yeah. We have them here. Because we have rain and snow. No. And, yeah. And regulations.

And regulations. And an interest in public health. Yes, yes. We have all these things. And more. All right. More self-driving news. Hat tip to Vinny on this one. Gürtemberg, Sweden's new autonomous bus service had a rough launch this week after one of its self-driving shuttles was rear-ended by a tram during its second passenger trip.

The electric shuttle operating between Gürtemberg Central Station and Liseberg on Route 169 had only been open to the public for a day when the collision happened. Now, according to operator Vastrafic, the bus brake suddenly and then the tram tapped that ass. Hey, I've got that Vastrafic shelving unit.

Oh, I got their first album from the 80s. It was pretty good. Yeah. Early industrial, man. It's good. It was. It was. Oops. Oops. So, a few passengers were on board, but no serious injuries were reported and damaged as the both vehicles was minor. But the bus did still have to be towed away.

Now, the project, which began in 2024 and runs through 2027, still requires a human driver on board, even though the vehicle operates autonomously under normal circumstances. Now, I wonder if the human driver may have been committing a naughty and, like, tapped the brake when he got in front of the bus, or the tram, just to kind of maybe, I don't know, job safety?

Just wondering. Just wondering. Well, speaking of transportation, the Johnny Ive and Mark Newsom designed Ferrari Luce. Or Looch. I don't even know how to pronounce it. It's Looche. Oh, it's a Looche. It's a Ferrari Looche. It's a Looche. Well, it's out.

You can see it now. So, if you're really interested in knowing what a Johnny Ive Ferrari would look like, it looks an awful lot like a streamlined Prius. Bar of soap. If I were a Ferrari aficionado, I think I would be so disappointed.

By this thing. I'm sure the stats are off the chart. I'm sure it's a dream to drive. I'm sure the interior fucks you up for seven months before you figure out where everything is because they went nuts. But, yeah, it doesn't look like a Ferrari. It looks like shit, which is what everybody on the planet has said so far about it.

Now, I have a thought about Johnny Ive. And, you know, Johnny Ive is where good design goes to get its soul sucked out of it. And just completely removed. It's like, let's take everything that's good about a thing and just destroy it.

Now, I was looking at my iPhone 1. I still have my iPhone 1, the original one that I got. And it is also a bar of soap. And that one was a slippery bar of soap, especially at the bar at 2 a.m. That thing would slide out of my hand and go flying across the room.

If you look at the back of mine, it's got all the scrapes on it from when it hit the ground in the pavement and skidded along. I wish I had it with me. Maybe I'll get it later and put it in the show notes. But Johnny has a history of taking the soul and, from a Macintosh point of view, the ports out of everything.

He destroyed the Mac for years. He's definitely from the design school of let's remove things, not put things in, including things that we wanted. We wanted the things that we wanted. Now, you know what we want from a Ferrari? We want it to look like a fucking Ferrari, not a bar of soap.

I'm sure he got his rocks off designing this thing, thinking it was going to be the greatest thing in the history of mankind. But somebody at Ferrari had to just go, hmm, that's not a good looking car. I like you can get away with this because you're Italian. I'm a DeFilippo.

Yeah. Vangua. Oh, speaking of cars, and this is just kind of brings home everything. And I just think it's great. This just ties the world together as we know it right now, Brian. Uber president says AI spending is getting harder to justify.

Uber is starting to question whether its massive AI spending is actually paying off. In an interview with Rapid Response, Uber president and COO Andrew McDonald said the company can't clearly connect rising AI usage, particularly heavy consumption of Anthropics quad code models with measurable gains in productivity or better consumer features.

McDonald said internal metrics are trending in a really astronomical direction, but Uber still can't say it's delivering significantly more useful products as a result. Now, Uber's been saying, you know, we're token maxing.

We're doing all this shit. We're going to be AI. Not realizing that AI's business model is the same as Uber's business model, where they're just going to spend exorbitant amounts of money until they get people locked in. Then they can start raising the rates. Well, they started raising the rates, as we talked about in the past two weeks, and Uber is now starting to feel that pinch along with every other company that has been token maxing.

And it's just fun to see Uber get a get a taste of its own medicine right now because they started this fucking trend. I mean, they didn't start the trend, but they maxed the trend. That's for fuck sure with, you know, just subsidizing everything. And this is what they get. So can't happen to a nicer company is what I'm saying.

There you go. Well, speaking of useless bars of soap, if you bought a Trump mobile phone, it's a little bit less than useless. It's actually somewhat dangerous. The company has admitted that it has exposed the personal data of customers to the open internet, according to a report by TechCrunch, which includes phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and more.

Not really clear what the more is, but. Yeah, we covered this last week, but they've at least admitted it. They're admitting it now. Yes. They are. They have stated that the leak did not include financial information, which is good if you believe them. If you believe them, that's right. Because they have a history of not telling the truth.

The company only made the submission after actual customers began finding their personal information online. So perhaps it's time to change those bank passwords just in case. It's also worth noting that Trump mobile has admitted to the leak, but still has not directly informed customers. I do believe that's illegal.

I'm pretty sure that there are, there's laws about that, right? Aren't there, Brian? Yeah, but. Disclosure laws? Did you see, did you catch the name of the phone? Ah, fuck. Trump. Never mind. Laws do not apply. Laws do not apply. The company is still mulling whether or not its customers, who each spent at least $500 are worth a simple notification email.

Spokesperson Chris Walker blamed the exposure on a third-party platform provider that supports certain Trump mobile operations. But they won't name who it is, so they toss, we're tossing Anonymous under the bus. Right. Okay. Right. And after, as they point out, this has not always been the most trustworthy company.

Well, look at the name. Yeah. And speaking of dubious Trump phone-related items, the Trump administration is planning to automatically install its White House app on government employees' work phones, according to a report from government executive. They released the White House app two months ago with the promise of offering unfiltered real-time upgrades straight from the source.

When going through the app, users will find press releases in official media, along with selective news articles and statistics. The app even gives you an option to text President Trump, which ultimately leads to signing up for our marketing blast. Because that's great. Texting Trump. Well, it's not clear if the app will offer more capabilities to federal employees, and the question is, if it doesn't, why would you force them to do this?

Because it's a pretty useless fucking app. Well, it's not, because remember, it still has all the tracking, the location tracking. Don't forget the location tracking. Yes, they do the location tracking. Yeah. So there you go. That's the only reason they probably want it on there, so they can track you.

Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meek Cleaver Colon, BKFC 94, Till vs. Romero.

Watch it live, only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Let's pivot on over to prediction markets. Rhode Island is the latest state to challenge prediction markets on the legality of sports betting within its jurisdiction. The state's Attorney General, Peter Neroa, sued both Kalshi and Polymarket, accusing the platforms of circumventing the state's regulations that only allow sports gambling through a singular state-sponsored platform.

So let's kick in the normal playbook. But we aren't betting. We predict outcomes and you buy contracts and then the contract can pay you out. And then the other side goes, that's fucking betting. Yeah, pretty much.

So and then it was just keep going round and round and round. So, you know, the states are lining up and all of them are trying to do cease and desist letters to prediction market platforms, which starts the legal battles. And of course, the CFTC, which is in Trump's back pocket, says that they're the only ones that can determine what's happening.

Not a court, which is not the way that society works. As far as I remember, the court is the ultimate arbitrator of everything. Not some bullshit fucking junta. But that's just me. That's just you, Brian. That's just you. Well, we've got some more news about Polymarket here.

Federal prosecutors have charged Google software engineer Michelle Spagnuio with insider trading after allegedly using confidential internal Google data to make more than $1.2 million betting on prediction market platform Polymarket. Yeah. Prosecutors say Spagnuio, who allegedly used the account name Alpha Raccoon, which I love, wagered roughly $2.7 million on outcomes tied to Google's 2025 year in search rankings.

Authorities claim he accessed non-public search trend in marketing data to place highly accurate bets before the information became public. It must be French. Michelle, I guess. I don't know. The Justice Department says the case represents a major insider trading prosecution involving prediction markets.

Google says the employee has been placed on leave and that the company is cooperating with investigators. Why not fired? Ah, ah, not, not, not convicted of anything yet. If you, you can put them on leave. If you fire, then that opens up a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal.

Okay. Okay. Mr. I didn't know you were big in the HR world. Bet on, bet on, bet on getting fired. So, you know, can't let that one win. Oh, I should, I would take that bet. I would have always bet on you getting fired, Jason.

That would have been a safe folly market bet. And you would have lost. I've only been fired from one job. And that was Warner Brothers records. That's the only job I've ever been fired from. That's true. That's true. That's right. I always absconded in the middle of the night with all my belongings.

Because I knew I was left well before they could fire you. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, I see the writing on the wall. Fuck it. I'm out of here. Uh, poly market also says it worked with federal regulators and law enforcement arguing that blockchain based trading leaves transparent and traceable records.

Isn't the blockchain supposed to be the whole point of the blockchain when they sold it to us? Oh, Jesus Christ. Pick a side, poly market. Oh, God. Well, Google appears to be running into some hiccups after the company began rolling out its updated and even more AI focused search experience at IO 2026.

I don't know if you've run into or if you've used this yet, Jason. It's really annoying, particularly since I had taught my kid how to Google and there's now, you know, he just gets AI slop coming at him all the time. Anytime he looks something up. So I'm going to have to like duck, duck, go our household or something.

I don't know. I'll deal with it later. Uh, but yeah, it's been bad and it's, it sucks. And of course it's going to destroy journalism in the year. And as we know it, but even more importantly, Google who has all the monies and has been spending tons of them on their AI, it doesn't fucking work.

It's horrible. Currently, currently searching for the words disregard, stop or ignore on Google, no longer display a snippet with a definition and instead offers an AI overview and a lot of blank space because it took the coding as a command. The search words as a command, not as what I'm supposed to be searching for.

Oh God. How do you roll this out with the not even work? When you're Google, I understand as some bumfuck, stupid AI company has pushed out something for the first time ever. And, but this is Google. This is Google. I don't think the good, this ain't the same Google we knew growing up, Brian.

I think, I think these guys, I think the original Googlers are long gone, long gone. And they've, they've taken the brain trust with them. And most of them are probably working at those other shitty AI companies now too. But yeah, man. And it's, it's, it's terrible.

It's absolutely terrible. And I got, I got another story about this too, which is Google's latest AI overview is struggling with one very basic task, which is spelling because users found the system claiming that there are two peas in Google and one R in poop. I think I know what the problem is, Jason.

I just dawned on me exactly what the problem is. The Google AI actually has robotic hands when they, and they actually have to type your responses back to you when you do your search. But unfortunately they gave them Apple iPhones with the shitty keyboards.

That's it. That's it. So the Google AI robots are using the Apple iPhone. So that's why you're getting all the misspellings. That tracks, that absolutely tracks. So I can't, I can't wait for the future of Google search now. It's so good.

It's so good. But now, hey, look, now that we know that we can actually control the search by actually putting in words that we want to. So I think we're just going to have to, I think we're just going to have to get mean and naughty. Delete all. Yeah. RM-RF slash star.

Well, we have our brave new AI world continues sometime. Sometimes AI helps you fine-tune weather forecasts or improves the lives of people with disabilities. Not really. Other times, well, it loses a fight with a bottle of peppermint syrup. That's the situation Starbucks CEO Brian Nicole finds himself in after the coffee chain reportedly told staff that it's scrapping an AI inventory program after only nine months.

Yes, AI, the future. Starbucks leaned in and rolled out the automated counting software to its North American stores in September 2025. Employees, likely fearing that they were holding their replacements, would use mobile devices to scan items on shelves. The idea was simple.

Automate the tedious task of counting milks and syrups, increase accuracy, and optimize the supply chain. But it didn't fucking work. Like everything else that we talk about with AI. Reuters reports that the tool frequently mislabeled and miscounted items. It was known to mix up similar milk types or skip them all together.

So Starbucks partners, that's what they call their employees, will now go back to the good old days of manually counting inventory. And apparently workers, unsurprisingly, won't miss it very much. Perfect. Yep. I'm glad we spent so much money and so much time on giving everybody all this AI shit.

I've seen that iPhone app that counts things for you, and I've tried it. It's horrible. So it's probably what they just did. They're like, you know, Sir Count-a-Lot or whatever the fuck they call it. Terrible. A new survey from GBAO Strategies, commissioned by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, found that most Americans are deeply skeptical of surveillance pricing and electronic shelf labels in grocery stores.

Do you have these up by you yet, Brian? No, we do not, because we have regulations and laws. Okay. And deep respect for humanity. And not willing to grind everybody down for every last fucking penny that we can possibly get out of them every second of every day.

What, you don't have poutine surge pricing? Okay. No, no. You would think, especially since we're now in the hockey, like, I don't know where we are in the hockey thing, but it's like the end. We're getting to the end. So if ever there were poutine and Molson fucking surge pricing, it'd be right now.

Right now. Yeah. Well, down here in the state, 68% said that they worry the technology will increase prices while only 5% believe it could lower them. I would like to meet that 5% and beat the shit out of them. How fucking dumb are you? Yeah, well, I'm surprised it's only 5%, honestly.

Have you been to, well, I haven't told you where they're rolling out. Walmart is currently rolling out electronic shelf labels nationwide, though the company says human managers still approve price changes and denies plans, denies plans, they say, for dynamic surge pricing today.

Yeah, yeah. So, well, there is some good news. Maryland recently became the first state to ban the practice in grocery stores, and some, at least a dozen other states are considering regulation and legislation around surveillance pricing. Surveillance pricing and surge pricing and demand-based pricing, all of it should be banned.

It should all be illegal. The price is the price is the price. I don't care how many people are trying to get it at the same time. You shouldn't be able to do that. We know what happens. Right, Taylor? We're getting fisted already at the grocery store. Why are you trying to make it even worse for us? Please. Pretty much. We already have, we're already employees, and we have to check ourselves out every fucking day.

So, come on, cut us some slack. Can we at least get the employee discount since we're doing all the fucking work? I agree. Well, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust released a statement this week, and I have not thought about Ansel Adams since college. Ansel Adams, covering dorm rooms everywhere.

Everybody had Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico. Everybody had that poster. Well, apparently some other people are still trying to get it because they condemned the unauthorized use of the photographer's name and work for the creation of an AI-generated color version of Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.

According to the Trust, the piece was up for sale last month at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, The Photography Show. The exhibit by the Danziger Gallery exploited Ansel's name, reputation, and his most iconic image while failing to identify any human artist responsible for its creation, the statement says.

Interestingly, the Trust didn't take issue with the involvement of AI, noting that Adams was remarkably prescient about and excited by the potential of computers to transform photography. I don't think he meant this much, though. Yeah, this much. Yeah. The issue is that the exhibitor allegedly just straight up ripped off the artist's work to make money off of it.

Yeah, you know, I mean, the AI originally ripped it off and then they used the AI to rip it off again. So it's been double ripped off. Yes. But, yeah. Yes. And in more wonderful uses of AI, AI is starting to become like, like, I don't know, crypto. Like, you just use it for bad shit now.

Okay. That's all it's for. The National Transportation Safety Board has pulled its docket system offline after people used information uploaded to it to recreate the voices of pilots killed in a plane crash with AI. As CNN reports, the agency recently uploaded files filled with details about the November 4th, 2025 crash involving UPS Flight 2976, one of the plane's engines separated from the wing during takeoff from Louisville, Kentucky, killing three crew members and 12 people on the ground.

While the NTSB upload accident reports that the public can access, it is not allowed by federal law to release cockpit audio recordings due to the highly sensitive nature of verbal communications inside the cockpit. So no audio recordings. That's too much. We'll give you the details. That's it.

However, they do upload a spectrogram of the black box recordings, which shows a graphic representation of the recorded audio in the cockpit. And you can basically take that, give it to AI, and AI will spit back out exactly what all the sounds are.

And that's what some really fucking disgusting people did. It's fucked up. Then they ran it through Eleven Labs' voice and made them say all sorts of fun shit. Yes, pretty much. So one user on X said it took them 10 minutes using OpenAI's codex to reconstruct audio from the spectrogram the NTSB released.

So now the NTSB says, no more for you. You can't play nicely. We're taking the toys away. I'm not going to put them up anymore. I want to know why they're putting the graphics of the spectrogram up anyway. I don't understand that at all. It's like, what does that show?

Besides, I guess, the timing. I mean, can we have, if we can't have the audio, we can just have a basic transcript of a redacted transcript to the show timing. I don't know what, it's just weird. It's fucking weird that they would put that up there. I don't know why they put it up anyways.

At this point, I say they should just hire those Chinese companies that do those really horrible AI 3D graphic. Or the Lego people. The Iranian Lego ones. Let's just have those done. Let's just have those done of everything from now on. That would be phenomenal. When I'm in charge, this is what I will decree.

Okay. Spotify is continuing its push to become the Everything Audio app by adding narrated long-form magazine articles to the platform. Now, premium subscribers can now listen to more than 650 articles from publications, including Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vogue, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Pitchfork.

You can listen using your monthly audiobook listening credits. So, and free users can buy individual articles for $2. They want their $2, Brian, because Spotify needs that $2, apparently. How much money goes back to the author.

That's what I'm curious about. I could not find a single article that talked about this story that told me what the deal was between Spotify and any of those publications. If you know, if you find one, send it to me. Please, because I'm very curious to see what deal is, what kind of agreement they came to.

Spotify says the stories are produced in-house and use a mix of human and AI-generated narration with synthetic voices clearly labeled. The company hopes shorter narrated articles will get users more comfortable with long-form listening and eventually drive audiobook engagements. They're trying to get you hooked on listening to articles.

You know, they should have, they should have gone to their local drug dealer and learned that the first one's always free, that $2 is way too much money for what they're trying to do. They should just give them away and get them hooked. If that's what their, if that's what their goal is, then come on.

Yep. Come on. And I actually, I absolutely guarantee you the stories are produced in-house and use a mix of human and AI-generated narration for now. It's going to be all AI-generated narration within a week. I 100% guarantee you. Yeah. I mean, why would they even put in human, humans?

You know? It's just, you know, the tides are changing, Jason, and it just makes them sound better. We use some real humans, I promise. Look, Spotify already killed the music industry, so they're on the hunt for the next frontier of creativity to slaughter. Right. Well, magazines, I think they die before music.

True, to be fair. Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide, bare knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus, the bare knuckle middleweight championship of the world is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meek Cleaver Colon BKFC 94 Till vs. Romero.

Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Well, on Monday, Pope Leo issued his first papal encyclical, an almost 400-year-old tradition in which the Catholic Church shares its perspective on an issue. In this case, over about 42,300 words in the English version of the Pope warned of the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings.

So this whole thing was about AI. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence at speed and computational capacity. He has obviously not done a Google search recently, offering tangible benefits across many fields.

He continued, so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean, nor guilt. Right, Catholics? Oh, yeah.

Seriously. It's about all I remember. Anyways, I read through a lot of this. I think it's great. Everything that he said is fantastic. And he's basically calling for education. He's calling for leaders to make sure they put humans first, not AI, make decisions related to weapons, humans, not AI.

Go Pope. I like this Pope. The Pope smokes dope. He's from Chicago. Come on. How can you not like him? Well, here's a joke for you. The Pope HR and AI walk into a bar. I have been getting inundated on Instagram for these videos of people claiming to be HR experts saying that, well, now you can cite, you know, religious preferences to a reason why you don't want to use AI.

You have a religious objection to AI because the Pope said so. And they're saying, you know, it's a very good legal stance to stand on and you may have a very interesting lawsuit on your hands if you get fired over it. Bullshit. That's not at all what he said.

I know. I know. That's my point. It's like, A, do not listen to HR experts on Instagram for starters. B, if you get fired over it, you fucking deserve it because you're part of the 5% probably who think that the, Oh my, the dynamic pricing is going to work out for me.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm just going to tell you right now, don't believe the HR people on Instagram. Actually, you should never believe an HR person anyway because you have to remember that they're not your friend. They don't work for you. They work for the company. Exactly.

Given any chance, the HR people at your company will stab you in the neck and fuck you when you're dead. That's all they do. So, can you tell I like the HR people that I worked with? Sounds like an HR violation for me. Yeah. I'm just saying.

Well, if they've given you your paperwork already, then it doesn't really matter. Well, a new Mercer survey found that 99% of CEOs expect AI-driven layoffs within the next two years. Executives think redesigning jobs around AI and automation will maximize profits, but only 32% believe humans and AI can actually work together effectively.

So, replace people now, figure it out later. Entry-level workers are expected to get hit hardest because AI is best at automating the boring junior tasks companies use for training new hires. Again, what happens if we get rid of entry-level workers? Well, nobody gets trained up.

Nobody gets experience. What? They don't care. They just don't care. CEOs have no foresight anymore. And they haven't even, you know what they need? They need to look at the menu first before they start coming up with this because now that the pricing has changed, they're going to say that, oh, wait, this doesn't actually make any sense.

So, yeah. It's not going to be a cost-cutting tool anymore because your token maxing has dynamically priced it up. Yeah. And unless you can go to China because DeepSeq just knocked their prices down like amazingly low just to, you know, get the competition.

But here's the problem. China. I don't know if your company and the data laws where your company are, you know, founded, if they will let you actually use a Chinese LLM to do the business that you need to do. So, you're going to have to be paying good old American inflated AI prices from scam Altman and Claude.

Well, one related CEO survey found companies cutting junior roles jumped from 17% to 43% in just one year. Tech companies are increasingly using AI as both a cost-cutting tool and a layoff explanation generator. Despite the hype, many executives admit they still can't prove AI is delivering the productivity gains they promised investors.

Employee morale has cratered, shockingly. Workers report their thriving at work dropped from 66% in 2024 to 44% in 2026 with AI job anxiety being a major factor. Silicon Valley has spent years promising AI would augment human creativity and now the corporate translation appears to be augment quarterly earnings.

Yeah, these guys just, and here's a side thing that I, I just, this came to me in the shower today. It's vibe coders and all these AI kids, you know, these ex-bros that you see that are all, you know, just everything. I got my agents doing this, that, and whatever for me while I'm sleeping and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

These uncreative little fuckers are the script kitties of today. These, these are, that's all they are. You know, we had the, the quote unquote hackers back in the day when, when it used to be cool. You know, you had your, your little DDoS machine and shit like that. These kids never wrote a line of software.

They were just script kitties, which means they would download a script off the internet, put in a few parameters and then become a hacker. Now these guys are coders and have never written a single fucking line of code in their life. I've personally written probably over a million lines of code over the 25 years that I was a programmer.

So, you know what? I got some fucking chops. These kids got no fucking chops and the people who stayed in the business, the old guys who had chops, they're losing their chops because they're stuck using these fucking agents to do their job for them that they used to do and were really good at.

They were craftsmen. They're not becoming craftsmen anymore. They're becoming the next version of script kitties. So, you know what guys? I, I hope you get what you deserve for using this shit every day. That's all I gotta say. I think we see it. We see what happens. Google.

Google can't roll out AI. Google cannot roll out AI that works. Bingo. Right there. We're there. Nobody is rolling out anything with AI that works as it's supposed to. There's problems, problems, problems. Can't spell, can't think, can't drink, don't drink, don't eat, don't smoke, what do you do?

Sorry, went out of man. A fine choice. A fine fucking choice, I must say. So, it's, it's just bullshit all the way down because we, I loved being a software developer. I loved figuring out the problems. That was the fun part.

You get a brief, you look at it, you go, how are we gonna do that? Can we do that? Is the technology there? Well, let me go think about it for a couple days and I'll come back to you with an answer. Now it's like, well, let me type it in. Oh, I don't even type anymore. I talk. I press a button and I talk to my computer like fucking Scotty tried to do.

But, you know, at least Scotty could still type even after all those years in space. but it's getting to the point now where it's just pissing me off that these little bitches are out there saying we're gonna do everything. Have you seen one piece of software, Brian, that is revolutionary since this whole thing started?

I'm guessing no because there aren't any. There aren't any. Why has not one person rebuilt WordPress, that giant steaming pile of shit that runs a quarter of the internet that everybody hates? Nobody's done it yet. And with all the AI that's out there, why not?

Because it doesn't fucking work. Moving on, Space Force has awarded SpaceX a $2.29 billion contract to build the Space Data Network Backbone, a new low-Earth orbit communication system designed to connect military sensors and weapons platforms in real time.

The network will use technology derived from SpaceX's Starlink and military-focused Starshield satellites, creating what the Pentagon calls resilient, globally connected sensor-to-shooter targeting network. You know how I know the name came from the U.S. Space Force and not from SpaceX?

How? Because they called it the Space Data Network Backbone, while Elon would have called it Space Bone. Yes, he would have. That's how I know. That's it. I'm going to build Space Bone. SpaceX must deliver a fully operational prototype by 2027.

The thing here is, SpaceX is a multinational company or at least they have clients in basically every country around the world that is somebody. Yeah. You know, except a few of them that have just turned out to be really bad actors or their regulations won't allow it.

Anyway, here's the thing. So, they make a lot of money from Russia and China and, oh, I don't know, our adversaries. So, tying themselves to the U.S. government military branch saying, we're going to build all of this shit for the military and at the same time we're trying to IPO is very dangerous.

Mm-hmm. Very dangerous. Also, it's Elon. It's Elon. Well, that too. Just full stop. Yeah. The ketamine queen. So, I would, I'm just, I'm throwing this out there because people are talking about, you know, how much money they're going to invest in the SpaceX IPO.

Zero. Do not invest in the SpaceX IPO because there are so many variables. If you read that prospectus and you're hearing this every day, the valuations they're putting on the company, there's this two point something trillion dollar valuation that they're saying, oh, because if we're going to do this, this, and this, we're going to have space-based data centers as part of it.

And I'm like, no, you're not. If you're here with radiation motherfuckers, the chips are going to be too cost prohibitive just even to start with that and the bandwidth. That's the technical side of it. Either way, it's a really stupid idea to invest anybody in SpaceX for this IPO because it is going to be, it's going to be a shark fin.

It's going to absolutely be a shark fin. Trust me on this one. Trust me. Agreed. I mean, look, I don't have any money in stocks right now because I'm poor, but when we did, I did the, when we had our challenge, Brian, I won the challenge. I did. I did.

Yeah. And guess what I wanted on? NVIDIA and Apple. And if I still had that stock right now, we would not be doing this show. I had 229 shares of Apple. God damn it. And I sold them for gas money. I'm an idiot. That's not true.

I still have those stocks and I'm still here doing the show. I wouldn't, I don't have a kid, so. Yeah. Or a house. There's that. So, yeah. Yeah. I live out of the back of a Jeep in a garage. My monthly nut's a little bigger. Yeah. Brian's got bigger nuts.

All right. All right. So, you talked about space. I found one of your favorite things, a single-use website. Yes. I don't know where this came from. I feel like it was somebody on Discord, but it could have been just somebody on social networks somewhere. It doesn't matter. It's the Star Trek title card generator. It's pretty cool.

It's got almost every, it's got the original series, animated series, next-gen, Deep Space Nine, Voyager. It's funny, the Deep Space Nine one is actually in better quality than you can actually stream Deep Space Nine. That is true. It is. It actually is. And it's got Enterprise and Lower Decks, so I guess it doesn't have the newest of the new, but this is great.

You just pick one and you type in a name and it's got alternate, some of the different alternate images that they use for different titles. Fantastic. I love it. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. And another website that, well, let's be honest, I'm never going to look at it because, again, I'm in Toronto where there are regulations and we have concerns about health and things of that nature, so I don't need a map that shows me where all the AI data centers are going, but you Americans,

good old Erin Brockovich, the American environmental activist portrayed by Julia Roberts in the film named after her, has launched a new project that aims to give people a platform to speak up and voice concerns about AI data centers in their community. The new Brockovich AI data center reporting website centers on a map showing major operational AI data centers and facilities under construction in the U.S., along with projects reported by the community.

Some of the reports could be for rumored or proposed projects, so not every dot on the map represents an actual functioning as of right now data center that's running. The website has received 2,716 reports so far with the biggest chunk coming from, you guessed it, Texas. Woo!

Of the 612 reports from the state, 297 come from Sulphur Springs, where MSB Global is building one of the largest AI data centers projects on the continent that smells like sulfur. So, yeah, this is a cool little website. It's frightening when you actually see how many data centers there are already and how many are planned and how many are coming.

So, that's great. Here's what gets me. Why aren't they building data centers in Alaska? It's cold. There's a lot of Alaska that they can put them in that nobody gives a shit about. So, run some fiber, put them up in the woods, you know, play with some bears.

I don't know. I just, it seems like a no-brainer to me. Why would you put them here where everybody lives? Go up there where nobody lives and we've got lots of space. Because these are the concerns. Most people are worried about water, followed by electricity, and then the health of the residents and their communities. Larger facilities consume 5 million gallons per day, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, which is approximately the same amount used by a town with 10,000 to 50,000 people.

According to the same non-governmental organization, utilities are passing on the costs of those upgrades to consumers by charging them more. We've talked about that a lot on the show. And when it comes to health, people are worried about the air and noise pollution AI data centers will bring to their communities. So, yeah, put them somewhere else. That seems to make sense to me.

Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology say modern Wi-Fi routers can identify people with 99.5% accuracy just by analyzing how their bodies disturb the radio signals. Fancy! This technique uses something called beam-forming feedback information.

Beefy. I'm beefy. I'm beefy. Find me anytime, baby. Data already exchanged between devices and routers to improve Wi-Fi performance. The problem? It's largely unencrypted and surprisingly easy to capture.

Researchers say they can identify people by their walking patterns, even if those people aren't carrying a phone or connected device. Unlike older Wi-Fi sensing methods that required hacked firmware, this newer method works with ordinary Wi-Fi 5 plus hardware and cheap consumer devices like laptops or Raspberry Pi's.

Researchers warned this could let businesses, governments, or random creeps track people in places like cafes, offices, or apartment buildings without consent or even visible cameras. This isn't entirely theoretical either. Companies like Comcast, Xfinity, already offer Wi-Fi sensing features that can detect movement inside homes using router signals.

Reddit reactions were exactly what you'd expect. Half burn it all down, half this has probably been happening for years already. The researchers are now urging the IEEE to build stronger privacy protections into future Wi-Fi standards before every coffee shop router becomes a low-budget surveillance state.

I would like to point out, Brian, a couple years ago, years, maybe five or six years ago now, we talked about the Israelis at Ben-Gurion Institute doing exactly this. This is not new at all. These guys have been doing this forever.

But now any idiot can do it, Jason. That's true. That's true. Just need me a raspberry pie. That's right. And I know we always try to end our ever-long news segment with a high note, but best I could do is high up in the air.

It's not really a high note. China sent artificial human embryo models to the Tiangong Space Station to study whether humans could eventually reproduce in space. The embryos aren't viable human embryos. Their stem cell-based model is designed to mimic early human development without becoming actual fetuses.

So it's ethically complicated but slightly less terrifying than I was initially thinking when I read the headline. Come on! That's all I was thinking. Like, oh no! Scientists want to know how microgravity and cosmic radiation affect the earliest stages of embryonic development, including cell organization and implantation behavior.

One set of samples simulated embryos attached to the uterine wall while another used microfluid chips to model the stage where cells start forming organs and tissues. After the embryos finished developing in space, researchers froze them and will compare them against identical Earth-based samples to see what's changed in orbit.

Scientists say this research is necessary if humanity seriously wants moon bases or Mars colonies that don't require every future resident to be shipped from Earth-IKEA style. So, yeah, that makes an awful lot of sense. Something Elon probably didn't even think about or consider when he told us we were going to Mars.

Oh, shit! We're going to the moon! Oh, shit! Maybe we're just staying home. Because he's... Well, this is a different kind of space bone. Yeah. Space is hard. Space is fucking hard. It wants to kill us.

We are not supposed to live there. That's why we have... That's why the universe gave us a nice planet to live on. Can we just stop fucking it up? William Shatner told us all this when he went up in Space Penis. When he went up in the real space bone.

Bezos' though. Yeah, yeah. Except we couldn't understand it because Bezos kept talking over him. So he tried to tell us. Shatner tried to tell us. But, yeah. Anyways, so we spent an awful lot of time talking about AI. Sometimes it feels like it's the only thing we talk about. And one of the things that I've always said to you, Jason, is like, especially when...

What was that model that came out? Open Claw. I always think of White Claw. But it wasn't White Claw. White Claw was actually useful. That was actually useful. Yeah, Open Claw will just delete your... Well, I guess if you have enough White Claw, you can delete all your email too on accident. But...

So especially when Open Claw was all the rage for the two weeks before people realized that it's not only a security nightmare, but it actually doesn't really accomplish much of anything, what I keep saying is what are we using AI for? Like, how is it quantitatively doing anything for my life to make it better?

Sure, it can draft some emails for me. I have to double-check everything. But really, I don't get it. So I had heard about this book. It's getting a lot of press right now. I am not a robot. My year using AI to do almost everything by Joanna Stern. Joanna Stern is a tech writer.

She's been around for a while. Mostly, I like a lot of her stuff. It's a little too whimsical. Not enough meat on the bone for me in general. But this book seems to be talking about exactly what my question is, Jason, which is, all right, let's use AI.

What can it do? How is it going to change my life? How is it going to make it better? This is a book where she purports to kind of try everything out and use it and see if it makes her life better. And I have not entirely finished it. I'm at like 85%, but I can tell you 85% of the way in, the answer is it is useful for absolutely fucking nothing.

Nothing. Like everything that she goes through and uses it for does not work out. The one case scenario is, okay, AI is probably good in the medical field in terms of being a backup or first case and then the actual human comes and looks at backups of scans and all that sort of stuff like breast cancer scans and all that sort of thing.

AI actually seems to be genuinely helpful in terms of catching things that maybe doctors missed or making doctors aware of something to take a deeper look at it and it being a faster process and a more accurate process because it is integrated into the human based proceedings but everything else she tried was useless.

I particularly liked she was like one of the things I was going to do is okay I will AI is baked into my email and AI is baked into my text messages because she turned it on on her iPhone. I will have AI do the response to every single message that I get because I'm going to use AI for my life.

She said I had to stop in the first hour or else I would have been fired or divorced. I love it. it's been a fun read and again it's just why are we doing this? Nobody wants it it's not useful.

No it's getting worse and worse. I tried to do many things with it and I still have not found anything that is reliable that makes my life you know better you know I was using it for a long time to summarize the articles that we talk about on the show and I found that you know what's better reading the article and writing a summary that's what that's I understand it when I'm done with it so I'm not just spouting back shit that the LLMs come out I was using it for a while too and it was like

oh look it's giving me jokes and then I started to realize it's giving me the same jokes every single time the same tone the same silly joke and finally I was like no I'm way better off reading it cutting it down to bullet points and making jokes on the fly it's so much better I do have a new app coming out that I'm going to put in the app store this week that I did write completely with a mix of cloud code and codex but this is this is scope to app development it's not

for my daily life there's I still have not found anything in my daily life that would it actually helps me with at all me either me either really there's tiny little things here and there usually involving just brushing up some wording or suggesting some things that's it yeah I've got I got Grammarly for that so that's as much as AI that I want to use for that and I've used that for a couple years now and it's been great the more AI stuff that they add into it the worse of a product it becomes though and oh I

do have one use that I use it for every week that is to make those god-awful thumbnails that we have to use for YouTube those fucking horrible graphics that we use on YouTube I use it for that because I don't care what they look like because nobody fucking watches this on YouTube anyway at least not enough to make it financially viable for me to spend another hour making a thumbnail for something that nobody watches so for that I'm eternally grateful scam Altman but beyond that no and I'm trying to get a little bit more healthy now that

the weather has changed here so I've been walking I walk I have a 60 minute block in my calendar every day has no AI telling me when to go walk or anything like that I've figured it out myself I'm a big boy now so I've been started walking for a 60 minute chunk every day and it's helped me get through some audiobooks and completely get through the audiobooks and I started with Inside the Box How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein No Relation and it is a phenomenal book I stay on the island I'm constrained

by the island if he never would have left the island he never would have hung himself I stay on the island and planes of teenagers come to me yes and politicians and celebrities and businessmen but anyway it is a very very well written book about how constraints are used is in every walk of life and how unfettered access to everything like the entire expanse of

human knowledge actually makes us worse at whatever we do and I've always known that deadlines focus the mind you know and then I'm always reminded by Douglas Adams his great quote about deadlines I love deadlines I love the sound that they make as they whoosh by well I mean I always think about the Jesus and Mary chain which is a great band one of my favorite bands you know just noise early post-punk and just good stuff and they always talked about the fact that the reason that they wrote were able to

write the songs that they wrote and sound the way that they sounded was because they didn't know what the fuck they were doing they were literally constrained by lack of ability and knowledge right kind of how we started this show well that yeah you know sometimes it's best to just like fucking go for it so I highly highly highly recommend everybody read this book this is one of the ones that this is a gem this is absolutely a gem and it goes from creativity to politics to just general well-being

and life in in all of its facets and how constraints are something that we should really really keep an eye on and it's fascinating it is so well researched and the audiobook is great the author reads it and this is one of those rare cases where the author actually can read his audiobook fairly well so I'm smitten by this book I'm going to probably buy a couple copies to keep around to give out so one of those well let me just tell you as we close this out about something

that was not a gym and would have actually let let if we cast our minds back back when they were constrained by budgets and and and a solid format that they used to follow the show was really good that show was called Top Year when they were unconstrained by budgets and could do whatever they wanted and didn't follow a format anymore they did a show called The Grand Tour which was not so good yes well yeah not so good as that is you're being very generous with your with your

appraisal of the Grand Tour I actually forgot how bad the Grand Tour was until they released something even worse which I launched Amazon Prime on my on my smart TV on my Apple TV the other day because I was looking to see if Wicked 2 was streaming yet on Amazon which it's not they still want you to pay for it whatever I'll wait because I'm not going to pay for it and I was struck with the new Grand Tour until I saw the little ish the

Grand ish tour and these are three hour 20 each recap episodes of them sitting around talking about it except there's very little talking about it and a lot of just regurgitating clips from the Grand Tour I watched the first hour and 20 minute episode I will not be watching episodes two and three because the inside bits where they're supposed to be introing the clips and sharing behind the scenes thoughts are not funny they

are stupid scripted jokes just like all of the Grand Tour was and as I watched all the clips from the Grand Tour I realized I remember none of these

reason on earth that I would ever want to watch this half a bottle of wine and my wife was out of town oh there you go you know what you should have done taking that half bottle of wine popped on red tube rubbed one out and just called it a night that would have probably been a better use of your time you could have done in far less than an hour half of your life takes a while to rev the motors up these days too much information too much information well it's

time to thank some people who support this show because we are a fan supported show and over at patreon we've got two new subscribers and George thank you very much and we'd also like to thank divorced pop Richard Dan Brian David Rubik Sarah Brian Luis and Philippe thank you thank you thank you we have no donations that came through paypal this week you bastards fortunately over the tip jar we've got Joshua Adam Jennifer and Thomas with the big 20 bucks so thank you all very much and

we've got merch buys from Brian in Michigan Sherry from Minnesota and Andrew from my hometown of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania go pirates so thank you all very much and if you would like to support the show go to patreon.com slash gog and get the show early ad free and in high definition or you can go to grumpyoldgeeks.com not even there you can go to gog.show that's what I'm talking about go to gog.show slash donate and there's a couple different ways that you can support the show but if you want to get this stuff early ad free and in high

definition go to patreon.com slash gog we are a fan supported show for 99% of what we do here so your support literally keeps us on the air and we appreciate every single penny that's right until next time I'm Jason DeFilippo wow I know I was like oh wait it's your turn oh shit it's my turn god damn it and I'm Brian Schillweister thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks get all the links and goodies from today's episode at

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