767: Skibidi! BONUS: Dark Side with Dave!

The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, featuring cybersecurity's hardest working podcaster, Dave Bittner. When he's not covering the daily cyber beat on the Cyber Wire, he's busting scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, tackling privacy with Ben Yellen on Caveat, and proves there's always room for one more cybersecurity podcast with only malware in the buildings.

Welcome back, Dave. Thank you. Nice to be back. Are we all up to speed on Ted Lasso? Did we all watch last night? Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. I actually stayed up to watch it because I knew you guys were—I got the memo. So, final word. Did it have the proper amount of feels for you?

I will say I was skeptical when they announced that Ted Lasso was coming back. I did not feel that there was gas in that tank. I pondered what they were going to do with it. However, having said that, I did see a path forward for Ted Lasso.

There was character development to be done. There were some loose ends. The twist of going with a women's team made total sense to me. I thoroughly enjoyed this season. I thoroughly enjoyed the last episode last night.

And what I have to say now is if they bring this back, which they might because there's a lot of money involved, it would be a horrific mistake. They tied every bow. They gave almost every major character a send-off. Spoiler alerts, people. Skip ahead if you haven't seen it.

Rebecca is happy and getting married. Keely and Roy are together and having a child. You've given the new character. She is now—she's gotten what she wanted. She is the coach. Beard, who was subtly the best part of this entire season.

Subtly. Like, fucking hilarious in every scene and usually in the background. The best. Like, he's kind of settled in. Like, I don't know where they would go without destroying the nice scenarios that they've created for all their main characters.

I have bad news for you, Brian. This was the beginning of a three-season arc that they wrote for this, so we'll see. I think that my wife and I have talked about this for quite some time, and we both feel that they really left it perfectly.

Like, that's fine. I don't disagree. I don't disagree, but I'm just telling you that, you know, they have more planned. So, Dave. Dave, what's your take? I would say I agree with most of what Brian said. I enjoyed the end of the season last night, and I've enjoyed pretty much the entire season.

I have to say, I'm disappointed that I didn't enjoy Tracy Ullman more than I did, because I usually really enjoy Tracy Ullman. I think she's wonderful. I felt she was the biggest misstep of the entire season. I felt that they drastically— 100%. … poorly wrote that character. It was a waste of talent.

Yeah, I think she was a cartoon character on the show, and so I could have done without her and that whole plot line, again, which breaks my heart, because I think Tracy Ullman is an amazing talent and always has been and always will be.

But, you know, the show has—it is Apple's number one show right now, so it's a gigantic money machine, and as Jason said, all indications are they've got a couple more seasons in them, which I will be here to watch.

I guess I'm not going to bet against Ted Lasso, as long as they keep—the team that they have, they keep surprising us, and yeah, it was the warm blanket that I needed this year, and I truly look forward to every episode.

We laughed, we laughed, we cried, we just—it was a nice ride. I'm sad that it's going to be probably, I don't know, what, four or five years before we get another season, the way that these cable shows go. I wish the seasons were longer. All these things we rehash every time one of these cable streaming shows comes up.

But I was pleased. I'd say, other than just the little asterisk about Zelda, I thought the season was very well done. I tend to agree. I pretty much agree with all of those. So, I enjoyed it. Tracy Ullman was definitely the biggest misstep.

And, you know, yeah, I thought it was good. And there is a—Apples has released the chapter of the Richmond Way book, so you can go download that if you want a little bit of extra stuff. You know? Mm-hmm. So, I don't know.

They opened the season with that, with Trent Krim doing the podcast interview. Right. Which was pretty funny. I mean, it was pretty funny. Of course he's a podcaster now. Yeah. Welcome to them. So, yeah, I wouldn't be mad at more seasons of it.

I'm not on the Brian train. I'll take it. You know, I didn't want this, but I'm happier that it existed than I was when it didn't. Well, if you're telling me that there's going to be a three-season arc on this, I do have a further prediction then. Season two will be horrible, much like season two of Ted Lasso was in comparison to season one.

Just kind of bleh. And they might be able to pull something out of it with the third season, as they did with the first arc. It's like Star Wars. It's reversed. Like, we're getting two, like, three-season arcs, and, you know, eventually, you know, 20 years from now, he'll sell it all to, you know, Disney, and we'll get a third one.

And it'll be horrible. Right. Right. Grandpa Lasso. It'll be the story of his son coaching a soccer team somewhere, along with, and his assistant coach will be Keely and Roy's child.

Kid, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah. You know, I think you're right. I think you can't bet against this team. They've consistently made an endearing show with very high highs and some lows. But, yeah, if there's going to be more, all right.

I'm going to watch it, of course. I just feel like, I feel like that was a nice end to everything. It even ended with a bow and a gift. Like, it literally ended wrapped in a bow. All right. Well, this next one I bring up because I think you guys might have an interesting take on this.

Wonka's The Golden Ticket was a new game show that premiered on Netflix earlier last month, and I watched it. And the interesting thing about Wonka's Golden Ticket, it's, you know, it's a reality competition show where generally the most horrible people win.

That's kind of how these things tend to work out nowadays, unfortunately. But what they did for this, which was crazy, was they brought back the voice of Gene Wilder with the express authorization and permission from his widow. And they worked with Eleven Labs to actually replicate the voice.

Now, I was expecting, you know, some, you know, uncanny valley when I watched it. And to their credit, zero. It really sounded like him the entire time with all of the proper inflections with, you know, people's actual names.

Everything was, it was so well done. You would not have known that he wasn't off, you know, off camera actually narrating the show. It was weird not seeing him the entire time. That was the weird part, that you didn't, you never saw him the entire show run.

But you just heard him. That's because he's dead, Jason. I know that. Well, no shit, Sherlock. That's why we're talking about this. If they can recreate his voice, look, I saw Princess Leia floating in fucking space. Okay, come on, give me a break. Sometimes you just gotta let the joke sit, Jason, without fighting against it.

That wasn't that funny. God damn it. He fell out of the great glass elevator. So what do you guys think about them bringing Gene back for this show? I will admit I have not watched it, so take that as it is.

But this makes me so angry I would smash a sidekick in a parking lot. Wow. Fuck this shit. I fucking hate this world. I fucking hate that they do this. I hate it. I fucking hate it. What about you, Dave? That's how I feel about it.

Yeah. Since Brian's being so wishy-washy in his answer. I have not seen the show, but I did go and watch the preview when I saw that you put this in here. And the preview is pretty much all Gene Wilder's voice. I will say that I think they did an amazing job of capturing his voice and his cadence.

But I do think there was something missing. And I don't know if I would have known there was something missing had I not known there was something missing. Right? I feel like Gene Wilder is such a soulful performer and so gentle and kind and represents every shred of humanity you hope from a serious actor that, to me, that was what was missing in the short clip that I saw.

You're right. I think the cadence was right on. It certainly sounded like him. If you said to me, who is this? I'd say, oh, that's Gene Wilder. So I don't know. I could be biased that I'm just predisposed because I know it's AI to go, well, that's close, but no cigar.

I don't know. And a double blind thing, maybe I wouldn't have been able to pull it out. Something that I am forcing myself to think about more and more as these things are happening more and more is, first off, I have to be more accepting. This is going to happen. This is going to keep happening.

And I can't just blindly be like, fuck it, fuck it. I fucking hate it. Even though in this particular case, I do. But the one question that I would ask, and I find myself asking definitely in this case, but in almost every case where they're using AI, is this something this person would have done if they were still alive?

And my argument with this is Gene Wilder in no way, shape or form ever would have done a voiceover for a reality show in his life. Oh, right. He never would have done this. Not in a million years. This is not true to who he was as a person.

No matter how close you get his voice, no matter how close you could get video when they're eventually going to do that, too. That's what will always stick in my mind when I see these things being done. Would this person have signed off on this? Well, you don't know what kind of bills he had to pay, you know?

I mean, you know, things took a dark turn. He had some gambling. He was on Polymarket. Exactly. Made some bad choices. Yeah. Who knows if he was still around? He'd be hawking pharmaceuticals. No, but seriously, he would not have done this. Not in a million years. I think you're right.

You really wonk his boner pills? Come on. You never know. I think you're right. And that, I think, is the barometer that we need to view these things through. Or not the barometer you view things through. That's mixed metaphors. But you know what I'm saying. Yeah. But isn't that the way when the folks who are left behind are and...

Pillage the legacy, yes, for money. They see dollar signs or want to have that second beach house or just whatever, shore up their financial future and someone comes up with a wheelbarrow full of $100 bills and says, how bad could it be? Come on.

Come on. Come on. Yeah. I look at this and think, and the only thing that gets me is like, well, could a person who is living also do this instead of trying to resurrect the dead? And the answer is, irrefutably, yes, you could have gotten somebody that was just as entertaining to host this dumpster fire of a reality competition show.

So, exactly. Well, so let me ask you this. We know, for example, famously that Tom Hanks' brother does a bunch of the voiceover work for Woody for video games and theme park stuff.

And he sounds enough like his brother that that's like a job that he has. Had all of this started back, way back, if we'd had AI, when they started needing more voice stuff for Woody, would they even have asked the brother?

First of all, would it have been? No, it's Disney. They would have fired everybody. Well, I'm saying it would have been in Tom's contract, probably, that for the video games and the theme park stuff, we can use the audio that you've generated. They'd come up with some way to trick him into signing off on it.

So, yeah, that reminds me of that. What would they do? Right. I mean, I suppose the difference there is Tom Hanks is actively signing off on this and saying, okay, yeah. He has the agency to do so, as opposed to, we're just going to, like, plunder my dead relative's estate as much as I possibly can and sign him up for things that he never would have done.

There are people in the music industry, and I've worked for some of them, managers that actually manage legacies now. They don't manage active artists. They manage dead artists, basically. And there are two types of them.

They're the ones that sign off on everything, and let's just make as much money as we humanly can. And then there are the managers that actually try to protect the legacy, that try not to tarnish it, that try to stay true to the artists, that would never sign off on a hemorrhoid ad, that kind of thing. Well, I think we need to be more like that latter camp and not the former, particularly with somebody as beloved as Gene Wilder.

I mean, he's beloved, so. Yeah, it's true. I put a link in here to what I think is a lovely interview with Gene Wilder and Alec Baldwin. It's at Gene Wilder's house, and I know a lot of people don't like Alec Baldwin, and that's certainly a legitimate point of view.

But it's a lovely interview, and I think shows that gentleness that is part of what we find so attractive about Gene Wilder. So if you're interested, I think it's about an hour-long conversation and just really nice, not long before Gene passed away.

Very cool. I'll check that out. Alec Baldwin is one of those people that we refer to now as problematic, but still highly talented. Right, right. Yes, there's a complex background, yeah. Yeah. Well, we love a good prop sale in this segment, and there's a new one that's come out.

It's Stanley Kubrick's estate. We'll be auctioning some items, including the Starchild prop used at the end of 2001, A Space Odyssey, so you can hang that up and confuse everybody that comes into your house. What the fuck is going on? I don't know. We've got the axe that Jack Nicholson used in The Shining.

There were a few of them, but this is the one that Kubrick owned and created. We've got the costumes worn by the Grady twins in The Shining. We've got all kinds of stuff, directors' chairs, all that sort of stuff. I am not a huge Kubrick nerd, but two of my roommates in college were film majors, and I went to USC, which is a pretty big film school.

So I know there are an awful lot of people out there that basically think he is the second coming of Christ, so I'd imagine that these things are going to go for quite a pretty penny. Yeah, I would think so. Also, my recollection is that Kubrick was pretty brutal when it came to getting rid of things.

Like, a lot of the spaceship props and things from 2001, he just destroyed after the movie was over. Yeah, I mean, maybe it was a case-by-case basis, but my understanding was that he wasn't very sentimental about this stuff, and when a movie was over, he was done and moved on to the next thing.

So it's interesting to me that these things survive. But again, who's selling this stuff? Who down the familial food chain is signing off on all this stuff hitting the market now? Yeah, but again, I'm more okay with, okay, here's some of his personal collection of props, rather than...

We used AI, trained it on all of Kubrick's movies, and here's a new Kubrick classic that he had nothing to do with. Right. But, so... Yeah. I have a very, very loose connection with Kubrick, only in that I have a friendship with Garrett Brown, who invented the Steadicam, and of course was responsible for much of the look of The Shining, because it was one of the first movies that used the Steadicam.

So I've been fortunate enough to, through Garrett, hear many of him, Garrett's a great storyteller, one of the best, and so I've been fortunate to be in the room when he's woven tales about his many adventures behind the Steadicam.

You know, of course, not only did he do The Shining, he did the speeder bikes for Return of the Jedi, he did the rope bridge for Temple of Doom, like, got some good credits under his belt. And I actually got to see the actual Steadicam that he used on the Kubrick film, so that was pretty neat as well.

I have a link in here to a little clip of Garrett talking about his experience on The Shining, so if that's your jam, it's a nice little behind-the-scenes kind of thing. Cool. I have been putting together my Lego Enterprise D. I would say I am, well, I'm, it's two books, two big books, and I'm through the first book, so I'm through, I've built the, what's the part of the ship that's not the saucer section?

What do they call that? The part with the battle bridge and the nacelles. The badonkadonk. The spaceship part of it. The non-saucer section. You build that first, so that's done, and I'm probably, fifth of the way through the saucer section. It's a fun build. It has not been grueling in the way that the Millennium Falcon was.

A lot of gray parts, though. A lot of gray parts. I think the big difference is that the way that they have all the bags numbered now just breaks it up into bite-sized chunks, versus when I built the Millennium Falcon, I just took all the pieces and put them in a big pile, so I spent a lot of time searching for just the right piece.

But something struck me earlier this week. I've been just putting a couple, probably an hour a day into putting this thing together, and I find it very relaxing. I find it very therapeutic to do. And one of the things that struck me as I was assembling something was, throughout my entire life, a point of consistency has been the clicking together of two Legos.

Like, the amount of pressure it takes, the sound, and the appreciation I had was the incredible amount of engineering and attention to detail that goes into making Legos so consistent, right?

Like, it is a precise amount of pressure and grip and force that it takes to put bricks together and to pull them apart. And that's why Lego is so expensive. Because they're very well made, and they last, you know, pretty much forever.

So, anyway, I thought that was worth capturing this moment of nostalgia. I actually said to my son, because he loves to build Lego also, I said, you know, this is, I had this moment of appreciation for over 50 years, this tactile feeling that provides great comfort and continuity throughout my life.

And I hope for him, having grown up his whole life with Lego, that he gets to experience that as well, 40 years from now when he's building whatever it is he's building with his kids, that maybe he'll have the same tactile feeling.

Yeah, I can see that. My kid loves it. He's probably going to be doing it forever. Since you have the Lego Enterprise D, I do have to ask, there's one part in particular that I really wanted to get from the set. I don't need the whole set. How's Riker's trombone?

Is that a euphemism?

It's good. It's fine. Do you, I mean, do you want it? I'll send it to you if you want it. I don't have to have it. No, no, it's okay. It's okay. But I do think I want, at some point, I'm going to look for a secondhand Riker with the trombone just to have that character sitting around somewhere, because I'm just tickled thinking they did that.

It is. Yes, yes. I agree. And all the minifigs who can have fun little things with them do. And again, it's that attention to detail. There isn't a whole lot. Well, I'm not that far into the saucer section, but it seems to me like it's not like the Millennium Falcon where you're building the cockpit.

You're building, you know, the place where they play holochess. Like, there aren't interior. No, there's no bridge. There's no 10 forward. There's no holodeck. There's no crew quarters. But so far, I haven't seen any evidence that there'll be any of that stuff. I could be wrong.

But it just seems like the scale is so far off because the ship is so big. But so that is disappointing. But I guess it's surprising that there wouldn't be at least little references to those things.

And maybe there will be. I don't know. I've still got a ways to go. So we'll see. Yeah. But it's fun. It's been a fun build. I've been enjoying it. I thought, I don't know if you guys have seen this new, I think it just dropped today. There's an open source project that's looking to provide online alternatives to the entire Adobe suite of tools.

Have you guys seen this? I've seen it bounced around on X. I've seen a bunch of different ones. This is actually a different one than I saw. Yeah. There's a couple of these projects out there right now that are doing the same thing. Yeah. I've seen Photoshop done many times.

But this is the most complete one that I've seen. And I think it's wonderful that these things are available because an Adobe subscription is not cheap. And it's nice to be. And sometimes you just need to rotate an image or, you know, and you don't want to pay to do that.

But I wonder what goes into something like this. Because you figure the Adobe legal team has revved up their engines and are coming at, would have to be coming at something like this. But I don't know. I don't think they can. I mean, it's just replicating the features.

Yeah. I don't think you can trademark it. Image editing in general. So if you're building it from the ground up. Yeah. You can trademark the term of art for a feature. But, yeah. Right. But look and feel. Well, I haven't. No, I mean, look at Affinity. Look at Pixelmator.

Look at all the other ones. You know, it's all pretty much the same set of tools. Yeah. Most of which Adobe stole from previous incarnations before Adobe anyways. So, yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. I guess it is a long continuing. I don't know. Photoshop was pretty much the, you know, they came at the beginning.

Photoshop has been around since the dawn of, you know, everything. So I don't know about still for that. But, you know, the other Adobe products, fuck yeah. Just get even hoes. But, yeah. So have you used any of them, Dave? I just poked my head in there to see what they were like.

This one seems very AI forward. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess you have to. Yeah. It still blows my mind, the stuff you can do in a browser. Like, I don't think I'll just be an old man and I will never get used to that.

What we're doing now is in a browser. It is crazy. I know. Yes, I know. I know. It's all magic. And, you know, yes, I, yes, you're right. You're right. You're right. I guess I, you feel like because we came up in the era when software like Photoshop and After Effects were at the very bleeding edge of what the hardware was capable of.

And that's no longer the case. Yeah. Right. So, yeah. It makes sense. You could do it in a browser and the computer doesn't break a sweat. But that's the recalibration that has failed to happen in my brain, I guess. Yeah. The first time I was on my phone and I actually just took, I was, I saw, had a picture of Bam Bam and I just pressed it and held it a little too long and realized that, oh, they built in the feature that they will actually can separate her from the background and I can just move it to another picture with my thumb.

I'm like, well, that's the fucking future because that used to take about 18 hours of the lasso tool on my 2CI to sit there and try and separate there and do it in channels because that was before layers were even introduced. Remember, one level of undo. Yeah.

One level of undo and channel ops. Oh, that was the worst. Channel ops. And we loved it. We loved it. It was so magical at the time. I got a new case for my AirPods because I almost lost another AirPod. I was sitting on a park bench the other day waiting to meet up with somebody for lunch and I went to, and I looked down and I noticed my AirPods case was open and I looked inside and one of my AirPods was missing.

Fortunately, it was on the ground right beneath me and I said, okay, this is, I've already lost one. This is too close a call. So I ordered a more robust case that has a clip and just handles opening and closing.

Like the case opens one way and the AirPods case opens another way. So you're much less likely to have it just pop open on its own. It's not relying on the magnetic closure of the original AirPods case to stay closed when it's being taken in and out of your pocket.

Now I should mention, I carry my AirPods with me all the time. They're on my key chain, primarily because I rely on them if I'm ever in a place where I need earplugs, like to turn the volume down of stuff. I like, that's why I like to have them with me all the time. I would go to a concert or a show or something like that.

So anyway, put a link in the show notes for that. I'm quite pleased with what I got. It wasn't terribly expensive and it's definitely an upgrade. Cool. Cool. Check them out. Two other quick things in here. Just this thing just made me laugh out loud. Somebody put together a little clip of, it's called Han Shot Never.

And for those of us who have been involved in the Han Shot First or Not debate over the years, I think this is the final word. This famous scene with Han and Greedo in the cantina and Han simply doesn't shoot at all. It's hilarious.

I don't know why it struck my funny bones so hard, but I was laughing out loud at it, the way it escalates. Also, I guess because Greedo is such an idiot. It's so stupid. You can't shoot, like you might as well be a stormtrooper. Very, very funny.

So if that's your jam, check it out. And then finally, there's a music video here that also made me laugh out loud and also the song they made here. And I assume this is all generated with AI because that's my assumption now and less proven otherwise these days.

And this song is a banger. It is a banger, but it's also really funny about it's all about the AI takeover and vibe coding and sending things to production at five o'clock on a Friday.

What could go wrong and firing the person on your staff so you can use the money that you saved to buy tokens. And it's really funny and also a banger of a song. So check it out. I'm kind of depressed that, again, with the assumption that this is all AI generated at how good it is and how funny it is genuinely.

And that annoys me, but not enough to make me not laugh and not want to share it. It was very fun. I enjoyed it. Yeah. All right. Well, that's what I've got this week, gentlemen. I'll see you next time.

Or will you? I might be AI. Me that shows up. You never know. You never know. you