750: Douchebag Ping Pong

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. Welcome to episode 750, Brian, where the bullshit never sleeps. 750. I need a nap. I need a nap. Well, that's just because we're fucking old now. That's true. That's true. I thought we were old when we started. Now we're really old.

Yeah, yeah. Everybody said that, no, you're not old. You're not old. Now I tend to agree. We were definitely not old when we started this. No, we were not. I just wanted to start the show, since it's episode 750, with a GSA, a grumpy service announcement. Okay. A couple episodes back, I talked about the knife sharpener that I had picked up and how it was amazing.

My knives were so incredibly sharp. I love to cook. This is fantastic. Be careful. Did you cut your thumb off? Because. Oh, Brian. My wonderfully sharp knife that I had just finished basically quartering a chicken with, I went to go wash it. I was a little distracted.

Oh, no. A little too much soap. A little too much soap involved. Knife slid right into my hand. Oh. I swear to God, I thought I saw a bone. It was not bone. Oh, thank God. I've never seen as much blood in my life. I didn't, of course, have any Band-Aids downstairs. I run upstairs. Blood drips everywhere, even though I've wrapped my hand in a towel.

And, yeah. I mean, it's fine. The only reason that it's wrapped like this anymore is because it's in such an awkward spot that the Band-Aid won't stay on. I just want to leave it on until it heals so I don't catch it on anything. But be careful if you get that knife sharpener. I have the super-duper knife sharpener, and I was actually sharpening mine today.

The thing about it is, and I don't know if this happened to you, is when you cut yourself with a super-sharp knife, you can't feel it for like a minute or two. And then you really feel it. Oh, you did? Okay. That's because you got the bargain basement knife sharpener. I got the super one. That must be it. Yeah, that must be it. Yeah, exactly. And which one of us is going through bankruptcy?

Mine was a gift. Mine was a gift for my birthday for last year. Somebody gave me a gift certificate, and they said, well, you're not going to go take the cooking lessons we bought for you. So why don't you go buy a knife sharpener? Because our knives are dull as shit. And I'm like, okay, that's a good idea. Because you cut yourself more often with a dull knife than a sharp knife.

You absolutely do. Yes. Well, thank you for the GSA, Brian. Anytime. I appreciate it. That's what we're here for. Also, don't buy SpaceX stock. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's get started with the game of douchebag ping pong that we're going to have this week.

SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have a lot on the table this week. And I can't wait to talk about all of these idiots. Come on, Brian. Bring us in. All right. Well, exactly a week after Anthropic announced its plan to go public, OpenAI said, we're holding open our money bag.

Yeah. What's up, man? Yeah. No date or offer price has been set by OpenAI yet for their IPO. We recently submitted a confidential S1. We expected it to leak, so we're just announcing it. Okay. Yeah. Okay, fine. They haven't decided on timing yet.

It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. Find profit. Keep your company private if that's what you want to do. So, yeah. When this comes around, we'll be given a chance to actually look at their books and see how much money they're actually using.

Following its most recent fundraising round, which saw companies like NVIDIA and Amazon pour an additional $122 billion into the company, OpenAI valuation ballooned at $852 billion. Recent reporting from the information suggests the company recorded $25 billion in annualized revenue as of the end of February.

However, they are projected to burn as much as $115 billion through 2029 on compute costs and other expenses, raising the question that we have on this show every single week about whether the company has a route towards profitability. It does. IPO. That's how they get more money.

That's basically it. Yeah. Yeah. I can't wait to see the books. But that right there, Anthropic having their S1N and then we've got OpenAI putting their S1N. A lot of these stories- Technically Grok. Technically Grok since it's rolled into the whole SpaceX.

No, it's not Grok anymore, Brian. It's SpaceX AI. Well, whatever. They've changed the name. Space Twitter. Call it that too. But no, so now that you know all of these things and all of these S1s are in, take every story that you read after this with a grain of salt because they're all designed for one thing only.

Continue, Brian. And here's the first story to prove that rule. Anthropic says AI is developing so fast, the trend points towards systems becoming capable of developing their own successor. Oh, God. Oh, no. It's alive. It's alive.

In a blog post, Anthropic explains that AI can build itself, AI that can build itself could bring enormous good for this world and the fields of science and healthcare among others. However, it might also kill us all fucking hell. Okay. That's not quite how they said it. So they are proposing a global slowdown or the temporary pause of AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.

That'll never happen. Nobody's ever going to agree to that. This is a PR move, but I would recommend a temporary pause of AI development to enable societal structures to, like, not fire people left, right, and center and maybe slow down the crazy collapsing of the middle class, squeezing out of the poor and disgusting transfer of wealth to the billionaires.

How about we do it for that? Yeah, we could try that. But you're wrong, Brian. You're wrong. You said it's never going to happen. Well, OpenAI has also jumped on the bandwagon, saying, we do need to slow down and we need an international watchdog to take stock of everything that we're doing.

So that's now, that's Anthropic and OpenAI have jumped on the bandwagon. Okay. Where are the binding proposals? There are none. There are none. But this goes back- Oh, okay. Where are the actual plans to do so, particularly right before doing an IPO in which your investors will want to return on investment?

There are none, Brian. Because I will not invest in a company that told me, hang on a second, our cars are driving way too fast. We need to slow them down. Yeah. No. What this is, this is, when you need to change the narrative, cry wolf. They've done this before.

They've absolutely done it before. There was a petition before, Brian. Oh, we've had multiple petitions. Exactly. From the same people. They all signed them. And they also come back and say, oh, well, we're not that close to AGI now, but now it's going to build itself. No. What they're trying to do is they're trying to change the narrative because now everybody sees that AI is not giving the ROI that they said it was going to do.

All the corporations have come out this past week and a half, two weeks after the token prices have gone up and they started getting charged for token. The companies are saying, oh, wait, this really might not be the be all end all. So what do they do? They come up with press releases that say, you know what? We need to slow down because this is getting so good that it might just it might just destroy us all again.

OK, I got it. So the reason why their models now suck and aren't really useful for anything is because they've intentionally slowed it down for our good. No. Well, some people might say that some people might say that they finally bumped up to the edge of what they can possibly do and they're stalling for time.

So you're telling me they're all edge lords. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. So before the you know, before it was to get the competition to slow down. So it's like, OK, we got to slow down. So we don't need all this competition moving into into our area.

Like, you know, the deep seeks were coming in and Grok was coming online. Now they're saying, well, wait a minute, guys, we need to slow this down because the emperor is walking out of the building and he forgot his trousers. Oh, shit. What are we going to do? So, yes, that's in the tech world.

In the real world, the emperor is shitting his trousers. That's true. That's true. On tape multiple times and nobody will actually come out and say it. Nobody will say it. Nobody will say it. Well, something here that's also interesting. So throw your mind back a week and a half ago, Brian, when Mythos came out and they were like, oh, my God, this is so dangerous.

We can't give it to anybody. Well, today, Anthropic has released Claude Fable 5, the first public version of its powerful mythos class AI model just days after warning that advanced AI systems may soon become capable of recursively improving themselves. Mm hmm. Wait, I thought we were slowing down, guys.

Here's the new one. It's better than the old one. Come on. Can you can you not see the bullshit? Can you not see the bullshit? Yes. All right. Well, speaking of bullshit, OpenAI has pivoted back to an old idea that we still never got from.

This was Elon's big brainchild because he wanted to copy a lot of the apps in China. The super app. OpenAI is apparently pivoting to a super app, as first reported by the Financial Times. According to the report, a redesigned chat GPT would encourage users beyond just chatting and ruining their lives that way towards using coding tools, image generation and applications built by partners such as Canva and Booking.com.

Right. Yes. So in the new chat GPT app, you'll be able to do everything because it's a super app. It's kind of a super app right now. There's all sorts of shit in it that I don't use, but. Yeah. And that you probably shouldn't use. And yeah. Another GSA. Don't give it your credit card.

No, don't. Definitely don't do that. Don't tell it to book your travel on Booking.com. No, no. Because you'll get fucking to dot com for sure. So, yeah, that's so now they're moving. That's more more press releases, more press releases. Now, now, Brian, let's take a brief detour down Scumbag Lane.

Okay. Sam Altman's eyeball scanning startup Tools for Humanity is laying off workers as it struggles to scale its World ID system. You know, the little orb that scans your eyeballs and gives you tokens. Yes. Because they're having some problems. They're having some problems. But they're valued at $2.5 billion, Jason.

Oh, of course they are. How could they be having problems? Well, and they've got partnerships with Tinder, Zoom, DocuSign. Tinder? Tinder? Tinder? Okay. They don't just scan your eyeballs, Jason. Those aren't the only balls we're scanning, baby. Oh, man.

So, the company has faced bans in investigations in multiple countries over its collection of biometric data. So, it also has admitted, here's the funny part, it doesn't have enough orbs to meet demand. I'm asking myself, so you have no orbs? Because I don't think there's any demand.

I think one orb will get the job done. It's all you need is one. I definitely know Saruman got one in his tower. Oh, there we go. Can I ask to borrow that one? Perfect. Ping-ponging back now. Let's go to Elon Musk in the douchebag game.

We need a three-person ping-pong table to bounce around. I think you can, I think you should put that in the new super app from OpenAI. Elon, he doesn't just play chess. He plays 3D chess. There we go. It is 3D ping-pong. Yeah. Well, no, no, no. He's, well, no, Trump plays 4D chess.

Trump's playing 4D chess. 3D chess is just kind of regular chess, I guess. I guess, I suppose it is. Okay, here's a headline for you. Elon Musk's first-gen Orbital Data Center craft spans wider than a Boeing 747 and runs an interchangeable chip payload. A1, or AI-1 satellite compute payload is 120 kilowatt, peaks at 150 kilowatt.

This comes from Tom's Hardware. Let's have a chat, Tom, about your headlines. Your headlines suck balls. But first, your headline also says, is, as in it exists. It does not exist. SpaceX has unveiled the first detailed design for AI-1, an orbital data center satellite intended to run AI workloads in space rather than on Earth's power grid.

Elon Musk says the spacecraft is the first generation of a platform SpaceX ultimately hopes to build by the millions. Elon, you can't even build enough cars. How many robo-taxis have you have so far?

Two? That work? There's supposed to be tens of thousands of them on the road right now. You haven't built any of those little mini service centers for all the people that you told would have full self-driving Teslas, but don't because they need complete upgrades in their system. So you're going to build all those little mini factories. You haven't built any of those either.

Nope. You know what he has built a lot of, Brian? Cybertrucks. Got a lot of those laying around. I wonder if they can convert them to fly. To satellites. Yeah. Can you put some wings on that shit and throw it up into space? So again, announcement comes right before the IPO on Friday.

Hmm. Yeah. Fuck you guys. Well, Google has just signed a $30 billion AI deal with SpaceX. According to a SpaceX filing with the Security and Exchange Commission, it will receive $920 million a month, $920 million a month.

I'm pretty sure that's the tater tot budget over at Google. From Google in exchange for the computing power from XAI's data centers starting in October this year until June, 2029. This agreement will give Google access to 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs as well as CPUs and memory.

Since Google has its own global network of data centers and continues to build more, you may be wondering why it has to pay SpaceX for more computing power. Well, a Google Cloud spokesperson told CNBC and the New York Times that this is but a short-term timely agreement in the tune of $30 billion until 2029.

Short-term timely agreement. On a long enough timeline, Brian. This is just to bridge capacity to meet the surging demand for Gemini Enterprise, its AI subscription for large businesses. So Google is not the only competitor in the AI space that SpaceX is selling compute power too.

The Musk-owned company also has a contract with Anthropic, giving the latter access to XAI's Colossal One data center. According to the documents SpaceX filed for its IPO, Anthropic will pay at $1.25 billion a month through May 2029. So it appears that Elon did manage to find another path to profitability, even though he spends all that money and more on stupid shit.

Well, here's the thing about this timing with the SpaceX IPO. So you've got the Anthropic deal going through. They're going to pay, you know, a couple billion a month or a billion a month. And these guys are going to pay, you know, a couple hundred million a month. Problem is like SpaceX owns like owes like $20 billion a month on their debt that they have to pay for.

So this is all they're all just scrambling right now to get these deals in place to shore up that monthly debt payment that he has over at SpaceX that some people are talking about, but not enough people are talking about, especially the people that I know that are stupid enough that have put aside a shit ton of money to buy SpaceX on Friday.

What are you thinking? But yeah, so by the way, I don't know if you've heard the theory that the crypto market is crashing because all of the tech bros are taking out their cryptocurrency to get their money together to go buy SpaceX. And my roommate's like, hey, isn't that a great time to buy crypto?

I'm like, no. Well, every douchebag that kept the crypto market, you know, afloat has left. So they don't care about crypto anymore. So, you know, and they're about to lose all that money on their SpaceX IPO. So coming back, please, please, please. This episode is sponsored by Delete Me.

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One more time, that's www.joindeliteme.com slash GOG, code GOG. 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. Well, we talk a lot about the data centers. One place that won't be having any anytime soon is Seattle. The Seattle City Council has unanimously approved a moratorium on the construction of any new large AI data centers for one year. They have supported the ban after the Times reported back in April that five large data center project proposals in the city would consume up to one-third of Seattle's current demand for electricity.

The city's residents also raise concern about the center's potential water usage and noise pollution. Now, while Seattle's greater metropolitan area serves as home to Microsoft, Amazon's headquartered in the city itself, and Google and Meta have big offices in the city as well, they don't actually operate any data centers within Seattle.

The moratorium will mostly affect developers and providers. In addition, the council approved a bill that requires the city to study the impacts of AI data centers on Seattle's electricity and water usage, utility rates, land use, local jobs, and public health to gather the information needed for permanent regulations.

Yes. There you go. Once they sign it, Seattle will join a growing list of cities and counties that have either put a temporary or permanent ban on new data centers, including Denver, New Orleans, and Minneapolis. So, yeah, not in my backyard. Well, you know whose backyard it's going to be in, Brian?

India! Yep. Meta is planting its first major AI flag in India, signing a deal with Reliance Industries for a 168-megawatt AI data center. The facility will support Meta's global AI operations, run on renewable energy, use desalinated seawater for cooling, and can be expanded as demand grows.

And there's also going to be unicorns and rainbows, Brian, unicorns and rainbows. Mm-hmm. The move comes as India becomes the new hotness for AI infrastructure, with Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and others all pouring money into the country. I wonder why.

Oh, well, it kind of makes sense. Superlax regulation and very, very, very bribeable officials. Bingo. Okay, moving on. Well, Google is lowering the cost of its cheapest AI subscription to make Gemini models even easier to access. This is coming as news recently has been more focused on how all of a sudden token maxing has become a very expensive proposition.

So Google, who can afford it, have basically said, we shall lower our prices for a little while. Yes, they can. Let's squeeze out the competition. Yeah. The Google AI Plus plan will now cost $5 per month, according to a post from Vicas Console. The company's product lead focused on Gemini AI subscriptions, down from its original $8 per month price.

But it also comes with double the storage, 400 gigabytes instead of 200 gigabytes. So you also get all kinds of AI crap that you don't need, like AI-powered email tools, a new daily brief agent that can summarize your upcoming day, and access to Gemini Omni, their newest AI model for generating video from any input.

Oh, the one that doesn't work that I tried last week that ran through all my tokens. That's a great one. I would much rather spend $5 not to get a video than $20 that I'm paying now to not get a video. But somebody said I should pay $100 to not get a video because then it would be a much better video that I did not get. That's true. Think of the quality of that video that you don't get to see.

Perfect. It's perfect. 4K, maybe 8K. Who knows? And you've got double the storage to hold the nothing. That's fantastic, Brian. That's fantastic. I know. It's great. A federal judge in Mississippi has sanctioned all four attorneys involved in a contract dispute after discovering that both sides relied on AI-generated legal filings containing fabricated court cases.

In a sharply worded order, Judge Sherian Icock said the lawyers wasted the court's time and highlighted the growing risks of unchecked AI use in the legal profession. The case became a rare example of AI effectively arguing against itself with attorneys for both parties citing non-existent precedents generated by AI.

It's so great. The trial was canceled. All four lawyers were disqualified from the case. Fines ranging from $1,000 to $3,500 were imposed. And two attorneys were barred from appearing before the court for two years. One lawyer admitted using an AI tool to draft an entire brief, while others either used AI for research or signed filings without reviewing them.

The judge also criticized one attorney for continuing to submit AI-generated filings with elucidated citations, even after being warned by the court. Ah, Mississippi. Well, we've been picking on AI quite a lot, and for good reason, again and again and again.

But I am reminded that there are some decent uses for this technology. I've mentioned again that I've just recently finished reading I Am Not a Robot, My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything by Joanna Stern, in which she basically said most AI is completely useless and a complete waste of time.

However, in the medical professions, in conjunction with a highly trained doctor who knows what they're fucking doing, it can actually be very, very useful. And case in point, we have some news coming from the University of Cambridge.

So wherever you stand on the role of AI in the future of humanity, it is undeniably proved useful in the field of medical research. And a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge have utilized the technology to create what they call a universal vaccine that could be used to prevent future pandemics before they take hold.

It's the first time a vaccine with an active component designed entirely by a computer has been used in human trials, which reported no significant side effects. Now, it's a small trial, and the vaccine was given to 39 healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 to 50. It was designed to protect people against a number of the Sarbeco coronaviruses, a group of viruses that include SARS-CoV-2, which was responsible for the global COVID pandemics in 2020.

Now, so they basically made this groundbreaking antigen so that it would trigger a protective immune response in the volunteers, as well as related bat viruses that could cause pandemics in the future. And because of the way it was developed, it should provide protection against diseases that haven't even emerged yet.

It's basically like a super vaccine that basically knocks out this entire class of different things. So, pretty cool. Yay AI for that. Can I get the tech bro version? Can I get inoculated against tech bros? Yeah, that costs more money.

Okay. Do I have to pay that in crypto? Shit. You do. If I wait a week, it'll be free then. So, here's the thing about this is they used AI to do it. They don't say which AI. But later on in the article, they do say machine learning. Yes, they do.

So, this comes back to our 10-year-old argument that AI is not AI unless it's AI. Because nobody has a fucking definition. I think they actually had real data scientists working alongside the other scientists. I don't think that they pulled up fucking Claude and went, hey, here's an idea.

Come up with something like this. That's not how it works. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're not using an LLM to actually build that out. Because there are many ways to train AIs and systems with machine learning. And not all of them are as shitty as the ones that we've been talking about the rest of the show.

Exactly. All right, let's take a step away from the AI stuff into other crap that is horrible. Kalshi. Kalshi is taking a new step towards preventing insider trading on its platform. They really wanted to take that step. They just shut down.

Exactly. Turn it off. But for certain bets, the prediction market will require users to disclose where they work. The new rules will be rolling out in the coming weeks and are expected to be applied to topics such as company performance and national security, although exact guidelines have not been disclosed yet.

Considering how willing prediction market users have been to flout the rules, it's hard to guess whether this policy will substantially curb insider trading. It won't. Or whether people will simply find new ways to orchestrate lucrative wins. They will. While several states have attempted to sue prediction markets and regulate them as gambling platforms, as we've discussed multiple times on this show, the federal government has intervened and claimed sole jurisdiction for the sector under the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

While members of this administration are actively building their own markets, serve on boards for these markets, or are heavily invested in said markets. Exactly. Can I put in a polymarket contract on when Calci will get sanctioned or vice versa, depending on which, you know, U.S. government bureau that I'm with on who's fucking who this week?

I suppose you'd have to prove that you don't work for any of them now, because that's their big leap forward. Okay, great. Well, international efforts to curb the businesses have gained more traction, such as a complete ban in Spain, while the domestic leadership investigates how to, oh, it's my favorite word, regulate them.

That really is your favorite word. The entire time we've been doing this show, Jason, every single thing we complain about could be solved by regulation. Every single one of them. Every one. From episode one to maybe 150, I was just like, oh, we don't need no more stinking regulations.

But then I finally came around and I'm like, oh, I see your point. I see your point. Oh, man. Well, Sam Bankman-Fried has officially applied for a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. Oh, how much did you have to pay for that? Well, we'll get to that. The disgraced FTX founder is serving 25 years after being convicted in 2024 on fraud and money laundering charges tied to one of the biggest financial collapses in crypto history.

So far. So far, the request lands an administration that's already handed out hundreds of pardons, including one for Silk Road founder Ross Olbrecht, better known as the Dread Pirate Roberts. Trump has repeatedly claimed he only pardons good people, which is becoming a fascinatingly flexible definition, giving the growing list of fraudsters, grifters and financial criminals receiving clemency.

Unlike many recent recipients, Bankman-Fried actually filed the official paperwork to request a pardon. Too bad nobody told old Sammy boy that Trump, A, can't read. And, oh, that he doesn't want any competition on the crypto grift because, wait for it, Reuters is reporting that since returning to the White House, the Trump family has pulled in roughly $2.3 billion from crypto ventures.

Jimmy Carter had to sell his peanut farm to become president. Well, Trump ain't playing with peanuts here, baby. And here's the fun part. That almost exactly matches the $2.3 billion that investors have collectively lost.

Wow. What are the chances? It's amazing how that works. Sometimes. It's just crazy coincidences happen, don't they? My God. It's crazy how that lines up. Crazy how that lines up. So, most of the money came from World Liberty Financial and its Wolfie token, where the Trump family reportedly takes a 75% cut of token sales and controls a majority stake.

Now, the token has dropped from around $0.31 to about $0.05 since launch. Meanwhile, losses tied to the Trump mean coin were calculated directly from blockchain data, though a handful of early traders managed to cash out before the music stopped. I'm sure they were in the cabinet. Lawsuits are flying, major investors are warning they may not survive another year, and Eric Trump just keeps getting richer.

Couldn't happen to a bigger douche. No shit, bro. No shit, bro. Silicon Valley's AI boom is creating a boom with the boom boom, Brian. According to a Forbes report, a small group of high-end escorts are charging between $3,500 and $6,000 an hour, with day rates reaching as high as $23,000 by offering attractive companionship, combined with the ability to hold an intelligent conversation about AI, crypto, venture capital, and, you know, bro shit.

That's a bro shit. That implies that there are intelligent conversations to have about AI, crypto, or venture capital. Good point. Touché. Touché. What's notable is that the service often extends far beyond sex, with clients paying for hours of conversation, dinners, travel, and emotional connection.

Why don't they just use their own fucking chatbots that they're making? Silicon Valley's newest wealthy technologists are discovering, Brian, that human rapport, social skills, and genuine attention remain stubbornly resistant to automation. I guess you could pay for it, though. Yes. And I love how this is being, like, covered as something new.

It's the world's oldest profession, Brian. And these little two-pump chumps, they can afford to throw down a few bucks to spend time with these women that they would never be able to get otherwise. True. This episode is sponsored by Clean My Mac. Look, if you use your Mac for actual work, podcasting, editing, uploading, scripting, or pretending 17 browser tabs count as research, you know the machine eventually starts to fight back.

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Brian, there was a lot of underwhelming Apple news this week from WWDC, but it looks like you actually found a bright spot. Well, I mean, not technically, as this app has been out for about two years that I'm about to talk about, but it seemed appropriate. And people, there was a really good article over at Slate about it, and it reminded me about it because I had installed this app when it first came out and was underwhelmed.

But it was a different landscape back then, and I'm seeking to be underwhelmed by this type of app now, so it's perfect. So less whelm in our app. Well, as this article states, if one thing characterizes the past few years of major app releases, its features users didn't ask for.

I did not ask for a chatbot inside my email inbox. I did not ask Instagram search bar to become an AI prompting tool, my Google search results to give way to summarizer bots, or the new iPhone to come with something called Image Playground. This includes sports apps, and as the author says, of which I have many.

I have both the ones he discusses. Major League Baseball's official app, long one of my favorites, his favorite, mine too, has gradually surrounded baseball scores and videos with window dressing that has made the app feel heavier. The ESPN app, my other major app that I use for the sports ball, Jason, now prioritizes both its live TV offerings and self-contained TikTok scrolls called Verts, with the simple score section sitting in a vast sea of other buttons and hard to get to.

I want a sports app that gives me the fucking scores. Is that too much to ask, Brian? Apple has had an app for the last two years called Sports. Ooh, I don't know how you can find that one. You know what it does, Jason?

What does it do, Brian? It shows you sports scores. Not news articles. Not trending TikTok-y style videos. No videos at all, to be fair. Nothing. Not a single one. Just sports scores. You pick the teams you want to follow, it shows you their scores.

It alerts you when they're playing. You can have live updates or you can disable them. The best feature of this is the fact that you can actually personalize it. It's fantastic. Now, my biggest complaint about Apple and the sports world, as you well know, Jason, is the gambling angle.

Yes. If you watch Apple TV Sports, they are pushing the gambling. They're pushing odds, odds, betting, betting, betting, betting, betting. They built it into the app, but you know what? Simple slider. Turn off all that info forever in the preferences, and it's gone. Wow.

Just sports scores. Nothing but sports scores. I love this app. Yeah, that's one thing that Apple can do is because, you know, they're not getting paid to put those in the app. Well, they're probably getting paid something, but it's not like the app developer's future and, you know, his kids, you know, food on the plate depends on that.

So, you know, there's a lot of those scores being shown to have those scores being shown to as many people as possible. And the click-throughs, you know, because I'm sure that those, their revenues are tied to how many people click through and bet. So, Apple doesn't have to worry about that. So, they can turn it off. So, there is literally nothing here but sports scores.

And they have rolled out this whole thing for the World Cup. It is beautiful. It is simple. It is easy to follow. It's got the groups. It's got the stages. You click a couple buttons. You see the scores. If you want to know what TV channel they're on, you can click through that. It'll tell you what TV channel it's on.

It is fantastic. I've already deleted ESPN from my phone. This is my new sports app moving forward. Thank you, Apple. You did something right. If you ever put fucking Siri in this thing, I'm going to kill you. Well, WWC did just start, so you may want to go check the keynote to see how bad it's going to be.

I think they've forgotten about this app, to be honest. I think they said it and forget it. We coded it once. It works fine. Yeah, just leave it alone. Just pray. Pray that this piece just never finds anybody at Apple who just goes, I forgot about that. Maybe I should fix it.

Uh-oh. It's like you never want to tell people about your favorite restaurant, you know? That's true. Yeah. Oh, by the way, speaking of sports, no chance for getting tickets for your Germany game there in Toronto? It hasn't happened yet. And if I want to spend, let's see, last going rate was $1,400 per ticket.

Okay. To see a game. T-O-G dot show slash donate. I have determined that I'm better off just watching it at a pub. Okay. There you go. It is what it is. There was a, there's a thing about, I saw the ticket thing that's happening here in L.A. And apparently the first game that's playing, there's like 4,400 seats that haven't been sold yet because they cost too much.

Because it's the same here. There's tons of tickets that haven't been sold because they've just tried to, I mean, not virtue ears, young listeners. We know we have a few. They've tried to rape everybody. Yeah. Flat out rape people. It's disgusting. But there's an upside. There's an absolute upside to this, Brian. Mm-hmm.

All of the scalpers who bought all the tickets are probably going to lose their shirts. I hope they have to hold the bag. There's a little karmic retribution. HODL! HODL! The only thing I'm planning on doing for the Germany game that's here in Toronto is I'm literally just going to scan the secondary markets like 10 minutes after the game has started and hope that there are people that are just desperate to unload and not lose everything.

Are you going to do it while standing outside? Yeah, yeah. I'm going to go all the way down there. I'm going to go near the area and I'm just going to scan, scan, scan. Yeah, I'm sure you'll find something. I'm sure you'll find something. Bring that. In other app news, there was a brouhaha with Meta.

Wired dug through Meta's API app code and found a hidden facial recognition feature called NameTag designed to ID anyone you look at through your Ray-Ban smart glasses. The app containing this dormant FaceDocs feature had already been downloaded on over 50 million devices. It's not like we're not going to, here's what we're developing.

They already put it on everybody's devices, but it wasn't enabled, so we should all calm down. Oh, relax, Brian. And relax. We didn't enable. We didn't enable. Sure, we put something that kills you in your dinner, but we didn't enable it.

Yeah. They quietly removed the code within 24 hours of Wired's report. Nothing says totally fine exploratory feature like a panicked midnight scrub of your code base. Instead of say apologizing, Meta's VP of communications took to X to complain that Wired buried the not-enabled caveat in paragraph four.

His official position, this was intellectually dishonest and pure advocacy-driven clickbait. No, it were facts. They were absolutely facts. They were facts. Meta's CTO, Andy Bosworth, called the reporting incredibly misleading and absolutely dishonest without specifying a single thing that was actually wrong, misleading, or dishonest.

Yep, exactly. Yep, exactly. And this isn't exactly new. Meta has been eyeing facial recognition for smart glasses since at least 2021, and a leaked internal memo from earlier this year showed they were actively planning to ship it. So, just exploring is doing a lot of heavy lifting here in their statements.

Yeah. Yes. If you don't want people speculating about face recognition in your products, maybe stop repeatedly saying you want to add face recognition to your products and then shipping the code for it. Yeah, no shit. Come on, guys. Do better. Do better. They can't.

They can't. Well, a proposed bill in Pennsylvania would require devices like smart glasses and potentially other wearables to show a visual indicator whenever they're recording audio or video. Yeah, right? So, you want to see the red light. You want to see the red light blinking or green light or whatever color light.

I'm sure they can't be disabled. Yeah. It would also ban disabling that indicator and require retailers to explain Pennsylvania's recording laws to buyers. I'm sure that'll sell a lot of gear. Wait, before you buy this $10,000 little device, let me tell you about what you're not allowed to do with it there, son.

When I was copying VHS tapes back in the 80s, I always skipped over the bit about how it's illegal to copy VHS tapes. Yep. Yep. Oh, man. The bill comes after reports that people have been drilling out or covering the LEDs on Meta Ray-Ban glasses to record without being noticed.

Most smart glasses already include recording lights, but there's no broad legal requirement to include them or keep them functional. So, you can do that all you want. It's legal. Now, it's a problem if they just go with wearables, this bill, because my watch can record audio all the time, but there's no indicator.

And adding it would be fucking obnoxious if my watch started, you know, lighting up, especially because it's, you know, I'm taking audio notes or things like that. This needs work. But so, maybe just stick to cameras and video recording instead of saying all wearables that can record audio and video.

I think it's a little too broad, even for me. All right. Well, Snapchat is making another change meant to further restrict the reach of its youngest users. Wait, Snap has users? Apparently. When did that happen? They've got enough users that they've paid a few million dollars in money on various lawsuits about the kids.

Okay. They've still got a big user base. Unlike most other parts of Snapchat, videos shared to the spotlight are public and be viewed by anyone in the app. Up till now, Snap allowed users as young as 13 to contribute content to the feature, although the app didn't. App didn't link younger teens' profiles to their public posts.

Now, Snap will no longer allow anyone between 13 and 15 to contribute to the version of Spotlight that's visible to most of the app's users. 16? Game on. Here you go. Instead, the app is creating a new... We call the 16 to 18 the Epstein Gap. There's a good show title.

No, no, not going to happen. Instead, the app is creating a new profile feature where younger teens can create short-form content that's only visible to their mutual friends in the app. That's a good way to do it there, actually. Profiles will also host stories posts, which are also hidden from non-friends for younger teens.

Snap, like other social media companies, has faced increasing scrutiny for its handling of teen safety and privacy. They are currently facing numerous lawsuits over its record on child safety. So, this is an attempt to do something. I would say cutting it off at 15 might be a bit young for public consumption.

But then again, what do I know? Nothing. Yeah. Ask your wife. She's a lawyer. She might know better. There's a reason. There's a legal reason why they picked these numbers. It's not just out of the kindness of their own heart. Somebody told them what these numbers are. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, there was some news that came out of Apple this week.

So, everybody has known that Apple has been working towards creating a foldable phone in the same way that everybody knew that Apple is working on creating a fucking car. And we've never seen that one, have we? Nope. No, but we are going to see the phone, apparently. The developer beta of the new iOS 27 had a few dead giveaways.

Sam Henry Gold spied the latest indications that a foldable is in the works in the iOS 27 framework. Documentation contains references to terms such as fold state and angle degrees, as well as language for the total number of built-in displays on the host device. Each of those point to an operating system being used on a foldable rather than a traditional single-screen smartphone.

A 9 to 5 Mac has confirmed the existence of these references and that they were not present in iOS 26. So, further intrigue came from Apple's own developer, State of the Union, where the company said it was adding support for resizing iPhone apps in both macOS mirroring feature and on the iPad.

Sounds useful for iPad and Mac users, but it sure seems like a prelude to introducing an iPhone with a new form factor. So, we shall see. I don't think I would want one of these. But, I don't know. Apple does good stuff. When it comes out, it's good. Yeah. I'm not poo-pooing on a foldable yet.

I've seen some of them, and they're pretty cool. You know, instead of having two fucking devices, you know, get rid of the iPad mini and just give me one device. But, you know, the proof is in the pudding, as they say. The proof is in the pudding. And I do have a little Apple news on my side, though, Brian.

My first script-kittied app that I made is in for review. So, we're going to find out. It should be out soon. If it gets through review, I'll be talking about it next week. But, I'm very excited. I finally got everything done.

I typed four more prompts and then uploaded some images that it made. I didn't write anything for this app. That's great. I came up with a name, and then I specced it. I completely just product designed this. I did nothing other than that. I mean, I didn't even make a GIF.

Like a single GIF for this thing. It's beautiful. So, and I don't claim to be a programmer on it. I didn't vibe code it. I product developed it. That's all I did. P-D-d-d-d. Yeah, I did. I did not P-D-d-d-d-d. P-D-d-d-d. That's different. No, no. So, I read a book this week, Brian, on my walks out in nature.

Mm-hmm. Because it's been nice here. It's stopping to get nice now. But I read The Thinking Sideways, How to Think Like a Chess Player and Win at Life by Jennifer Shahad. Mm-hmm. Don't read this book. Okay. There's no 4D chess in there? There's no D-chess in here.

I mean, she's a chess master. Great. Good on you. But it's one of those meta self-help books that all it does is pull from every other self-help book that I've already read, you know, over the years. There's not one piece of net new knowledge in this book that I did not already know. So, you could say she kind of vibro-ed it.

She probably did. The worst part is she read the audiobook. Now, most authors that read audiobooks are bad. But you can mitigate the badness of the reader of the audiobook by just hitting one and a half times. Mm-hmm.

Sure. Done. There's no speed in the verse that could actually fix this book. Her reading of this book was so terrible, but I powered through it because I was waiting for that nugget. I wanted the nugget. Just one little nugget of something that would get me through and there were no nugs.

It sounds like me with that book, Breathe, remember? It's exactly the same thing. I was desperate to enjoy this book. I was desperate for something actionable and interesting. That little nugget and it just, I finally gave up. I'm like, there's no nugs here. No nugs. No nugs at all. But, you know, so I'm on to the next book.

I don't know what it's going to be yet. 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 Guns. Ramiro, 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 Cullen, BKFC 94, Till vs. Ramiro. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. But I did see another good thing this week.

It's called thinking fast, slow, artificially. AI in your brain. Now, Wharton researchers arguing that Daniel Kahneman's classic model of human thinking needs an update for the AI era. For decades, we've had system one, fast and intuitive thinking. And system two, slow, deliberate reasoning. You're familiar with these, Brian, obviously.

You probably covered this in college. I did. Yep. Now they propose a third system, AI itself. The researchers call it system three, an external cognitive layer that people increasingly rely on to make decisions, solve problems, and even structure their thinking. This is where it gets fun.

The catch. They found evidence of what they call cognitive surrender. This is the first time I've heard this. I've heard of cognitive offloading. But cognitive surrender is a new term. And I really like it. It's when people stop evaluating AI outputs and simply accept them as correct. When the AI is right, performance improves.

When it's wrong, it's really wrong. And you're a lawyer in Mississippi. So I just, I really like this. It's a good piece. I highly recommend checking it out. Link will be in the show notes. So, but yeah, in other words, AI can make you smarter, but only if you keep your brain in the loop. Otherwise, congratulations.

You've just upgraded from thinking fast and slow to not thinking at all. That's right. Good one. Good one. And I sent you something this week, Brian. I sent you a very long newsletter, which we won't name on the show because I'm a paid subscriber. And I sent it to you who are an unpaid subscriber. And I felt kind of bad about that.

But it's so long. I ripped it out as a PDF so I could put it on my iPad. And then I'm like, God, I hate when I have to read books on an iPad that are in PDF, because when you go back, you lose your spot. So I'm like, huh, why don't I convert it to an EPUB and then read it in books? Because that way it will save my space or my page, you know, and I can just go back to it when I want to, because it's a very long piece.

And so I found Cloud Convert. I think I'm the first person on the planet or the last person on the planet to find this site because it's basically a cloud converter for every fucking format that you could ever think of. And it's beautiful. It's run by the Germans, Brian. It's run by the Germans.

So it must look. Yeah, it does work. It absolutely works. And the front facing website is free, free to use. They make their money up on the API on the back end for business, which is genius. And it's totally solid, totally solid. Worked like a charm.

Absolutely worked like a charm. Cloud Convert, my new favorite single serve website. Fantastic. I watched a couple movies this week, I guess, sort of, kind of in a little bit. Hoppers. I watched this with my kid, obviously. I didn't just go and watch a kid's movie by myself.

You only do that when you're in the Epstein gap. Yeah. I just watched the verts then. Get my gambling on. Oh, no. So I watched the Pixar movie Hoppers. Surprisingly dark. Like, way better than I thought it would be.

I love that dark is better. It is. It is. There's some darkness to this one. It was very funny. Very good. I enjoyed it a lot. It had a very great meta moment, which I thought was hilarious because, spoiler alert, not that anybody that's an adult needs a spoiler for a Pixar movie.

What happens in this movie is humans figure out a way to basically put their consciousness, their brains into animal robots and go explore the animal world and find out that they're able to talk to them and blah, blah, blah. And so one of the protagonists is learning about this and talks to the researchers that have figured out this technology.

So it's like Avatar, right? Right. It's nothing like Avatar. Okay. There's no unobtainium? So it was quite funny. You know, if you've got a kid, you're going to enjoy this one. And I also mentioned, and you forgot multiple times, so I'm mentioning it again. My wife and I rewatched all of Downton Abbey, the series.

Remember that, Jason? Yeah, I do. I do. Okay. Talked about that? Yeah, I do remember that. And I boldly proclaimed that we're stopping at the series. There is no way we're going to go watch those horrible movies because all the movies were horrible. And my wife said, hold my red wine. And she started watching the goddamn movies.

So I'm here to say that the first one, Downton Abbey, the motion picture, is not an entirely horrible piece of crap. It's only slightly a piece of crap. Okay. I will be reporting on the rest of them again, which I do remember being massive pieces of crap because I'm sure we're going to watch those too.

Okay. You watch them, so I don't have to. That was a great part. That's right. The series, though, worth a rewatch. Oh, okay. Well, I don't know. I'll leave it to you. I'll leave it to you on that one. I have been watching Widow's Bay on Apple TV+. The penultimate episode was this week. It's just a great little show.

It's just, it's fun. It's a fun horror comedy thing. It's its own thing. Right. And you just can't, you just can't miss with it. I really enjoyed it. This is one of those ones that I think actually would be better as a binge watch.

Waiting every week is kind of not the best, I find. This is definitely one that I could just sit down in like two days and just power through. Well, that sounds fantastic, actually, because obviously with the World Cup starting tomorrow, I will not have a lot of time to watch TV.

And this is something, because it's kind of horror-y, means I can't watch it with my wife. So this will be a post-World Cup late-night binge for me. Perfect. Yeah, and they're short. They're like 35 minutes. Yep. So you can get through it pretty quick. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, and I hope they come back for a second season. All right.

And more good news for my kid, and maybe your kid too. My kid is thoroughly invested in the Ghostbusters series. He likes all the movies. He likes the new movies. He likes the old movies. And Netflix has revealed that there will be a new Ghostbusters animated series titled Night Shift and is slated for release sometime next year.

So this will be high up on my kid's list of viewing, I'm sure. All right. Speaking of animated shows, I did finish Devil May Cry Season 2 on Netflix. Mm-hmm. Great. It was great. I really enjoyed it. Same with the first one. I think this one was actually better than the first one.

And it had very little to do with the game, but as far as good, good, solid anime, great story, great animation, great voice acting, all in all, it was just a fun, fun show. Highly recommended. Highly recommended. Now, this morning, Brian, the trailer for The Social Reckoning dropped.

Mm-hmm. The, uh, yeah. Do we need another one of these movies? Facebook. No. Okay. Nope, we don't. All right. Jeremy Strong is playing Zuckerberg. He nails, nails the voice. It is uncanny how good he gets the voice done.

He does get the robot look down for, for Zuckerberg too, but it's just not as convincing. Because the problem with Zuckerberg is we see him all the fucking time. We know what he looks like. I don't need, I don't need another, I don't need a Facebook movie, honestly. It does have Bill Burr, plus there.

I can't go, anything Bill Burr's in, I'm always down with. Um, so this is the, uh, the original screenplays based on the events that gave rise to the Wall Street Journal's shocking expose, the Facebook files. The film is inspired by, inspired by the true story of how Francis Haugen, a young Facebook engineer, enlists the help of Jeff Horowitz, sir.

Uh, a Wall Street Journal reported to go on a dangerous journey that ends up blowing the whistle on the social network's most guarded secrets. Now, inspired by, yeah. So. How dangerous could this journey have possibly been? Actually, it probably was pretty fucking dangerous, you know.

Uh, I'm sure it wasn't, uh, wasn't an easy thing. To do for her. Um, these guys have all, all the money in the world and no soul. So. People do have, tend to, you know, have bad shit happen to them. Quite often. So. Uh, I give her, I still give her credit for having the balls to do that, but I just don't need a movie about it because I watched it in real time.

Yeah. And Jeremy Strong, it was fantastic in, uh, what is it? Uh, Succession. Can't go wrong with him in Succession. Um. Oh, what? He, he was in that Trump movie, too. He, he played, uh, he, he was, he had a great role. Fantastic role in the Trump movie. Fantastic role in the Trump movie.

Uh, but I've had enough of the same guy. Right. It's like Will Wheaton reading an audio book. Once you hear one, you've heard them all. Can we, can you stop being in movies about evil people? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe try getting some range. I don't know.

Try superhero. Maybe get in the MCU. I hear they've got openings nowadays. Okay. So let's get to the people who keep this show on the air. Our Patreon subscribers. We have no new Patreon subscribers, Brian. So that was really kind of a letdown of an intro to the Patreon segment, I guess.

It's a good ramp up, though. Good ramp up. It was. It was good. I got the energy. I got the energy. But we still want to thank some of our continuing Patreon subscribers, Mosquitoes, David, P, the artist only known as P, Nathan, Eric, Lars, Elwood, Nancy, Nico, and Robert.

Thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you. And what we have lost in not getting any new Patreon subscribers, the PayPal folks have stepped up. Chase gave us a $50.99 donation and Naylin gave us a hundred bucks. Woo, doggie. Thank you. Over the tip jar, we've got Patrick and John.

Hi, John. Over at YouTube, I didn't know you could do this at YouTube. Dale gave us a $50 tip. You can tip us on YouTube. Who knew? Who knew? Apparently, Dale did. All right. And we have a ton of people who are members over there that I want to thank because I haven't yet.

So we're just going to go. We're going to go with the handles over there because I don't have everybody's real name. We've got Fozcat in the house, Silly Cheese Goat, Daniel Penna, Juan Jose Garcia Rip Roll. Dave Gearns, Dead Rock Jason 77, Pineapple Freddy, and TK421 Storm.

So thank you all for joining us on the membership over at the YouTube. That's a new thing we've got going and people are signing up. So the thing about the YouTube is you do get the show early and ad-free if you are a YouTube subscriber. You get the show. Well, you always get the show ad-free on YouTube if you're, I don't know how the fucking YouTube thing works.

I have no fucking idea how this works. But who knows? You don't get the regular ads on YouTube. I don't know if you get the baked in shit, whatever. But anyway, check all those out. We'll talk about that in a second. But we've got some merch, too. Nick from New York, Dan from Oakland, and Michael from Minnesota. Tip on the merch.

If you want express shipping, make sure that you include your phone number in the United States. The post office won't do priority shipping without a phone number. Found that out the hard way this week, but we fixed it. And all is well. Yay. Yay. So if you want to help support the show, there are many avenues, as we have just discussed.

But you can find them all at gog.show slash donate. But patreon.com slash gog is the bestest way. You can sign up for as little as $3 a month. Get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. All of that good stuff. And anything else that you want to give us is just great.

There's a bunch of tiers. There's a bunch of tiers on YouTube now, too. So you can sign up for a membership on YouTube. You can hit the tip jar. You can hit the PayPal. You can buy merch. Buy merch. Yeah, anything that helps support the show keeps us going. And we love you all very dearly for it.

So very fucking dearly. We have no idea. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at gog.show slash 750. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at gog.show slash donate.

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