770: Streaking, Mooning, & Quicksand

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian, somewhat giddy, Schulmeister. Yes, yes. We'll get to that in a moment. First, we must say that Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show. The ads cover our overhead, but it's the donations that keep us on the air. If you want to get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition, go to patreon.com slash GOG.

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So, Brian, what makes you so happy today? You know what, Jason? You know how, like, any time that you actually, like, wash your car, it'll start to rain the next day? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, well, I attribute the fact that I just got my Canadian citizenship to the fact that you folks down in the U.S. finally woke the fuck up.

Oh, thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate you finally doing your part. I'm glad you're doing your part for democracy. I washed my citizenship, and it rained democracy. There you go. So I'll see you next week coming back. Maybe, maybe. We'll see.

There's a, you know, it's good news. I think all around, I woke up to giddiness online. There was a sense of hope again amongst my friends. And certainly, I mean, you know, we're not a political show, right? Nope, not at all.

Not at all. Not with this T-shirt. Nope, nope, not here. Oh, yeah. Anyways, let's get into the news because we can start to talk about it. Obviously, there was a big blue wave, and that was fantastic. And it's definitely a reputation of the policies that we've been living under for quite some time.

And places have gone blue that have never been blue before. And, yeah, so far, it's feeling pretty good. But, you know, there's a lot to deal with still. Yeah, it's nice to be blue, finally, and not just in the balls. So, there we go. And one thing I will say to anybody out there that happens to, oh, I don't know, be in the Democratic Party or perhaps high up in the Democratic Party.

The first thing that you have to do, besides after you've gotten over your champagne hangover, is clean up your own fucking house. I want you to sideline all the motherfuckers that have been in charge of the Democratic Party for the past fucking decade that have done nothing but fucking tweet and say, can you believe this is happening?

Won't somebody do something about this? You were the fuckers that were supposed to do something about it. Give Charles Schumer a fucking etch-a-sketch. Put him in a fucking corner and don't let him do a goddamn thing ever again. Yeah, seriously, get rid of that guy so fast. Okay, one last thing before I get into the news.

The guy from Long Beach who is now, who got voted into the Senate, he's basically going to be the head of the House Oversight Committee. And he went on the news this morning and told basically everybody that he's going after Trump and the families and that they need to lawyer the fuck up.

Like, that's what we're looking for. That's what we're looking for. That is not a tweet saying, can you believe this is happening? Yeah, we're coming for you. We're coming for you, guy. Well, Elon Musk spent at least $458 million attempting to influence the midterm elections, making him the largest political donor of the cycle.

According to Forbes, the results were overwhelmingly unfavorable. Musk-backed political groups, supported candidates in 106 House and Senate races. As of early Wednesday, just 18 had won, all reliably Republican seats that were predicted to win already.

Another 44 had lost and with 44 races still undecided. So his biggest investment was in Texas, where approximately $215 million went toward supporting Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. Democrat James Talarico defeated Paxton soundly by double digits, becoming the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate race since 1988.

Musk-backed Republican Senate candidates, also lost in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and Maine. Suck it. Suck it, Elon. Aren't you glad you moved? I'm also very happy to hear that Talarico won, even without the money that he kept asking for me from unsolicited text messages, even though I don't live in Texas, much less the United States.

So thank you, Talarico, for the never-ending stream of texts that you got asking me for $3 all the time. So I'm glad to hear you won without my money. That's excellent. That's excellent. You won with Elon's money. He won with Elon's money. And, you know, I was like, you know, that's a lot of money that could have gone to, you know, homelessness or something like that.

But it did keep a lot of media companies on the air, I guess. Probably not the media companies that I like. But that money did feed some people. You know, it was a redistribution of wealth in some form or fashion. So we'll take it. Well, keeping on with Elon, a federal judge's latest ruling has denied XAI's request to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges its data center campus in Memphis, Tennessee.

Can't believe we're still talking about this. Is running turbines without proper permits and violating the Clean Air Act. The decision from U.S. District Judge Debra M. Brown allows the lawsuit, which was filed by the NAACP, to move forward. The organization filed its legal action against XXXXXAI back in April, accusing the company that's now known as SpaceXSI of using unpermitted methane gas turbines to power data centers in the Memphis area.

Despite the ongoing lawsuit that also claimed it's violating the Clean Air Act, Elon Musk's company continued to add more gas turbines to another AI data center in the nearby Southaven, Mississippi community. In response, XXXXAI, I'm just going to keep doing that, requested to dismiss the NAACP lawsuit and even receive support from the Justice Department, which claimed that the company's operations are a crucial part of U.S. military operations.

To which I say, if you're such a crucial part of U.S. military operations, how about the U.S. military gives him some power so he doesn't need to use a bunch of fucking gas turbines? Anyways, the lawsuit gets to go on. So good. Very good. Very good. One lawsuit that will not be going on any further is the another social media addiction lawsuit.

Snap has settled the lawsuit brought by two teens who alleged the use of the applied to self-harm and other mental health. I know. Jury selection began last week and the trial was due to start this month and you and I were wetting our lips in anticipation of this. But unfortunately, along with Meta, YouTube and TikTok, which previously settled the claims, Snap has now settled them as well.

So we're not going to get a trial. The lawyer for the teens, identified in court documents as KDB and SJ, confirmed a settlement has been reached, although terms of the agreement were not disclosed. We are proud to have achieved justice for our bellwether clients so far, including KDB and SJ.

Our ultimate goal is to hold these social media companies accountable for how their actions have impacted millions of children across the country. And these settlements allow us to keep building toward that goal, Emily Jeffcott, an attorney for KDB, said in a statement. Now, Emily, the far better way to have done this would have been to actually let the trial go through, because when there is a settlement, nothing else can be done.

There can be no regulations. There can be no further damages done. There can be no more further actions taken, except in other suits. Thank God for those. So please, for the love of God, I understand that your job as an attorney is to do what your clients wish for and to get the best possible outcome for them, which in this case was probably a schmiliton of fucking dollars.

But the societal good would have been better had this gone to trial. Please, please, please don't take the settlements, please. And the thing is, they already got millions from Meta and YouTube. So it would have been easy for them to just let this go to trial.

You know, it would have been I mean, it would have been work, obviously, and they would have had to spend some money to do it. But it's like, take some of the millions and do good for the other people. You know, this does not become case law now. It cannot be used in future precedent setting. You know, come on, please just go to trial.

I know we're waiting for it. Well, speaking of Meta from before, Meta removed Facebook pages sharing realistic AI generated videos of older male coaches sexually touching and kissing young female athletes, some appearing to be teenagers. The clips depicted gymnasts, ballet and yoga sessions, sometimes presenting abuse as legitimate instruction.

Ten pages were reported through an ordinary Facebook account. A week later, eight were cleared of violating platform rules. Two had disappeared for reasons that remain unclear. Only after journalists contacted Meta were the remaining pages removed and several earlier moderation decisions reversed.

After the reports, Facebook recommended more similar videos to the reporting account. Fucking price. One accumulated over 176,000 views in two days. Algorithm don't care. Algorithm gonna rhythm. So athlete safety advocate Kim Shore warns the material normalizes grooming and could teach predators how to disguise abuse as coaching.

Meta says its ban on exploitation covers real and AI generated content and that it proactively removed 98% of child endangerment posts last quarter. Separately, Meta says earlier tests of AI moderation found 13% fewer mistakes than human reviewers and identified 10% more violations.

I'd like to see the numbers on that. Show me your work. Show me your work. Show me your work. Also, let's keep in mind that you're not exactly hiring the cream of the crop for your human AI moderation. You're outsourcing this to God knows who, to people that don't even know English half the time. You're not exactly, like, you have to have AI moderators that actually know the language in which they're actually moderating content, not even just English, any language.

Like, you're not doing any of that. Like, it's just a bunch, you're locking a bunch of people in a room for, like, less than minimum wage and asking them to do a very tough job that is actually incredibly hard on people in the psyche. Speaking of hard on, if you look at some of the videos and you see the coach touching the little girl on her hoo-ha, there's no language involved in that.

That could be a cultural thing, though. And in the culture where they hire the people to do that, they could be going, looks okay to me, you know, and just moving on. What, do they have a bunch of moderators from ancient Greece? Yeah, could be. Could be. Socrates says that's fucking fine, man.

Yeah. Well, Apple's going to start asking developers more questions about their apps to help the company ensure that the age ratings accurately reflect their content. One of the new descriptors will require them to declare whether the app shares the real-world location of the user with another person or group. And the other one will require them to disclose whether their app has features which enable dating between real people and or virtual companion that engages a user in sexual or romantic content.

All apps declared to have dating and relationship content will get a minimum age rating of 18+. This means that they will not appear in the app store for kids under 18 if their parents or guardians have set app content restrictions on their device. If underage users who can see them on the store try to purchase or download them, they will be required to provide Apple's proof, they will be required to provide Apple proof that they're an adult.

As for apps that share location, they will not be affected by age ratings in most regions, but some countries do have rules for apps like that, like Brazil, which requires apps that share locations to have an age rating of 16 years old and up. So we've been talking for a long time about how exactly do we do this age moderation sort of stuff.

And Apple is slowly, slowly getting dragged into it. I eventually expect that we will have Apple basically doing an age verification model system of some sort. Of some sort. Yeah, they're going to have to. They're going to have to. And wouldn't Facebook fall under this rule?

You'd think, yeah, you'd think Facebook would fall completely under this rule. If I'm being served videos of coaches touching young ladies. Yeah, you know. And if they've got Facebook dating, actually, I don't know. Absolutely, Facebook dating is a thing. So, yeah. Google says schools using its education software will lose access to Google search if they opt out of artificial intelligence entirely.

The company announced new controls allowing K-12 administrators to individually enable or disable Gemini, Notebook LM, and Search, with all three disabled by default. However, because Google has integrated AI into Search, schools cannot retain Search access while rejecting AI altogether.

The policy follows criticism of Google's August decision to automatically enable Gemini for many K-12 students. Google Classroom serves approximately 150 million students and teachers worldwide. Former FTC chair Lena Kahn accused Google of leveraging its search dominance to pressure schools into adopting AI.

New York City and Los Angeles have already imposed temporary restrictions on generative AI in younger classrooms. So why is this important? Well, because AI could undermine critical thinking, facilitate cheating, and expose students to developmental and privacy risks. That's why we don't want the AI in the schools.

I'm following this very closely because my kid's school uses Google Classroom. And I absolutely do not want them using any AI. I don't want that to be part of school at all. There's a story going around the internet this week. And my wife mentioned it to me, but I didn't put it in the show notes.

But apparently, you know, it was like, I believe it was fourth grade, fourth grade, something like that. The teacher did some sort of thing like, oh, why don't you draw a picture of what you want to be when you grow up? And the young girl drew a picture of herself as a nurse. Good enough, right?

That should be end of the lesson. We're good. But no, this teacher decided to then go into their Google Classroom account and use a generative AI to now make a picture of this young girl as an adult as a nurse.

Please tell me she's a naughty nurse on the stripper pole. I don't think so. But still, the point remains. Obviously, the parent was quite upset. The parent was like, what the fuck are you doing? Why are you using this? Why are you using generative AI on our kids as part of your lesson? She drew a picture of herself as a nurse.

Is that not good enough? Is that not what we want them to do? Use their own creativity to think about their own future and imagine themselves doing something in the future. Do we need to have generative AI in the classroom? Absolutely not. Of course we don't. Now, I want to know, was the teacher male or female?

I believe female. Otherwise, he would have gotten the nurse stripper on the pole. That's what I'm trying to cover the bases here to find out where we're going here with this. I would have liked to have seen the prompt as well. Show me your work is now going to be show me your prompt.

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Well, we've talked about this a little bit on the show before, but yeah, vibe coding has taken a wild new turn, according to Engadget. Earlier this month, a developer motivated by a hatred for Adobe subscription model used Claude to reverse engineer Photoshop, Lightroom, and other Creative Cloud apps.

The team then used that information to create open source clones of those apps with similar functionality that anyone can download and modify for free. The company's called ArtCraft. Software developer Brandon Thomas, or at least software prompter Brandon Thomas, and his team first launched these Adobe clones in early October.

The pitch was that they're a one-to-one replacement for Creative Cloud apps with a similar user interface, but are free with no subscription, and you own the source code, the team said on Reddit. So, yeah, we're starting to see a lot of this out there.

People are vibe coding apps that basically exist and have copyrights and cost an awful lot of money. So, I'm very curious where this is going to go, because all of a sudden, these big companies are quite upset. All these big companies that have been putting AI into their products are very upset about what's happening with AI with their products.

Yeah, we'll talk about this a little more a little bit later in the show, but we did talk about these apps with Dave a couple weeks ago, and they're not one-to-one, you know, analogs of the originals. But, you know, for the basic stuff, they're pretty close.

They're pretty damn close. If you don't need all the bells and whistles and goo-gaas, you can just grab them and go for free. So, that's going to happen. That's going to keep happening. Yeah, absolutely. And, of course, there's a lot of debate about this, because some people feel that abusive subscription app makers are getting what they deserve, while others see it as simple piracy.

Why not both? I see it as both. Yeah. And again, we get to something that we always talk about, particularly in the Dave segment, which is just the law is not keeping up with technology. The speed of AI spread is creating new legal ramifications around patents, copyrights, that we just don't have any laws for yet.

We haven't even had the discussions about it yet, because it just happens so fast. So, we'll see. But, Anthropic is going to attempt to stop some of this from taking place. Claude will no longer allow its users to make AI recreations of their favorite video games. As first discovered by an X user, Anthropic updated Claude with some new lines of code that read, Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets.

Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original. These changes were confirmed by Adios Mani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, who on X said the company wants to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy.

Except for us infringing people's IP to create our product in the first place. Do as we say, not as we do. Please. So, I guess this has been happening quite a bit. There's been a Halo Combat Evolved, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, and even Grand Theft Auto V available as vibe-coded fan projects.

So, yeah. Last year, the company agreed to pay a record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit where 500,000 authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted materials to train its AI models. And more recently, the estate of Elvis Presley filed a suit against Anthropic for similar reasons.

But, hey, they're not going to let you do what they did. No, but I got to tell you, man, some of the people that have decompiled some of these games and actually gotten to see what's going on under the hood, I talked about it a little bit last week. It's phenomenal just to see how evil some of these games are.

Just to be able to look at how they're tracking you and, you know, how they're manipulating you to get, you know, get you to spend just a couple extra bucks. Just a dollar here, a dollar there adds up to a billion dollars at the end of the year for some of these games. Like Candy Crush in the billions. I can't believe people still play Candy Crush, but they do and they still spend the money because it's pretty and it's fun.

They do. Yep. Evil. Evil people. Well, AI data centers have gobbled up so much of the world's RAM supplies that the prices of the memory units and all electronic devices that have them have skyrocketed as a result. Also, when OpenAI chief Sam Altman sat for an interview with YouTuber Cheeky Pint and Stripe, the conversation naturally turned to the RAM shortages affecting the whole tech industry.

And Sam's opinion? He thinks it's quite terrible for people to have a bunch of the world's limited supply of RAM sitting in their own computers and using it 5% of the time. And he added, like, you want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that.

Yes, like owning our own stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We can't have that when you need it. Now, to be fair, he was specifically talking about local inference, which is what you call when you run AI models on your own computer. Perhaps it should not be surprising that he would hold that opinion and talk from a global allocation perspective as the head of one of the biggest AI companies on the planet today.

So, yes, he would like to have the RAM for him because he doesn't want you running your own generative AIs and LLMs that aren't his on your own computer. In the meantime, while they're trying to put restrictions in to stop you from doing whatever you want with your generative AI and LLMs anyways, such as, oh, I don't know, vibe coding games and all the things that we just discussed.

So, yeah, we're going to control it. We stole all the IP. We're now going to stop you from doing anything that remotely smacks of IP infringement. And we don't want you to run your own inferences anymore. We only want you to run ours. So give us all the rambles. I got to say, though, this was the greatest meme generator of the entire year.

It is so great. I mean, just go to our Discord channel and Grumpy Old Geeks, and we've got a ton of them. But, you know, they're hilarious. They're all hilarious. I've got to say, though, we got to give Jeff Bezos' new hair a run for its money first because that is starting to generate memes like No Tomorrow.

That really is. That really is. I thought he might be going as Liev Schreiber for Halloween, but what the hell? What the hell is going on? I've got to say, though, the sheer truth of that, man, I'm sorry to tell you, especially if you're balding. If this man who has more money than fucking God cannot get his hair back, it's game over.

Just embrace it. Oh, yeah. I'm letting it go. I'm letting it go. You know, I got a haircut yesterday. You know, here's what I do. When I go into Floyd's now, I tell him two things or three things. I say, sides in the back with a three. Save what you can on the top and don't make me look like an accountant.

So that's it. And I've given up the ghost. It's going to go away. You know, the price for living longer, Brian, is that your body is going to get older. I'd rather live longer and just lose the fucking hair and be done with it. And it just reminds me of, what's it, Beard on Ted Lasso at the end of the season.

Come on. So good. So funny. Yeah, the Sam Altman one this morning, though, was pretty funny. It's like, well, you're only using 5% of your home at any given time. That's not really maximizing the space. So we need to take over the space in your home to build more data centers.

So good. Well, OpenAI is also clamping down on weapons-related information teens can get from ChatGPT. Even if the question appears harmless, the company announced in its latest post, OpenAI noted that it already has policies in place to prevent ChatGPT from helping users carry out violent acts or teens getting their hands on weapons.

To further limit those scenarios, OpenAI said it's going to restrict practical information about weapons and security systems that could be misused to facilitate violence, even when there's no sign of violent intent with its teen users. And they're going to do this with strengthening public boundaries for all of its users, not just teens, particularly when asked about reconstructions of past mass attacks.

It's about time. Yeah. Yeah. And here's the thing. This actually comes back to the one that we just talked about with them putting limitations on the video game decompiles and things like that and rebuilding that. Where are they building this into in the stack?

Because if you're building it into the app, it's built into the harness that is basically the app that then calls, you know, calls the actual API LLM to get your answers back. Or are they building this in at the API level? Could I just bypass all of this shit if I just make a straight API prompt and call it that way?

That's what I'm curious about. I mean, I could probably sit down and do the work and take 10 minutes, but take five if I have it LLM coded and 15 if I actually want it to work. So, but because, I mean, like the source code to Claude was released.

Remember, they got hacked and like half a million lines of code came out, which was basically the harness around that for Claude code. So I'm like, hmm, how much of this is at the harness level and how much of this is at the API level? So that's one thing to think about here, because teens can probably figure out how to use the API if they're smart enough to try and figure out how to use this to find weapons of, you know, you know, mass annoyance or however they're going to fucking do it.

So, yeah. We'll see how that goes. Reddit is testing ads in search results as declining traffic raises questions about its next phase of growth. The placements could give the company another way to make money from people already using the platform rather than relying solely on attracting more visitors.

The test comes as Google's AI-powered search changes how people discover Reddit content. That shift puts pressure on a business that benefits when users arrive to read discussions and browse communities. For Reddit, adding advertising to search could help offset weaker traffic by generating more revenue from existing activity.

For users, it could mean encountering ads while looking for posts or answers. The key question is whether the new placements can strengthen Reddit's advertising business as the way people find its content continues to change across the wider web. This brings me to a point, Brian. We keep using all these big-ass companies for, you know, these are message boards.

Reddit is a message board, right? Yeah. A series of message boards. We now have AI that can write message board software in record time that people could just create and install their own version on their own VM or spin up an EC2 instance or, God forbid, get an e-machine and walk down to the local ISP and plug it into the wall.

What I want to see is I want to see people stepping the fuck away from these big companies and just rolling your own. Look, I hate, hate with every fiber of my being that AI exists, but it does. It's not going away, and right now it's the cheapest it's ever going to be.

So get an account, pay a couple bucks. If you have a group, if you have a subreddit on Reddit that is going to start getting, you know, inshittified with the ads, spin up your own version, put a link in there and say, hey, guys, let's just go over here. You guys want to give me five bucks a month to run the server and we can just keep talking about, you know, Gandalf, you know, porn or whatever the fuck you want to talk about?

That's the way to do it. Not just rolling back into all of these big services, because I don't know about you, Brian, most of the old people I know, the only reason that they stay on Facebook is Facebook groups. That's it. And if we can take away things like that and just give people the option to just go out and just roll their own easily and they own it, it's on their machines or at least their VPSs that they can back up and do whatever the fuck they want to with.

I think that that might actually make a change in some of this stuff. No, I mean, it totally makes sense. I mean, we're going back to the old day of VBSs on dial up where you would just call up the ones that you were interested in. There's the one about sci-fi. I like that one. I'll go over there right now. There's the one about gaming.

I'll go over to that one now. I'll call that guy up. Like, yeah, like everything got consolidated and the more consolidated it got, the shittier it got. Yeah. I mean, we've always known walled gardens are shitty. We've hated them. But you had the unwashed masses out there.

When AOL joined the internet, then it just went to shit. So, you know, but at this point, nerds are everywhere. You know, we have infiltrated society. Every good group has at least one nerd with a chat GPT or a Claude Code account that could whip something up in no time flat.

And here's the dirty little secret. Once you get an account on like an ISP, you can log in for it and say, go make this, spin up the server, put it on the server, make sure the server is secure, and then we just have some SSH keys and then it just runs itself.

You know, it's not that hard anymore to take the power back from these motherfuckers and use their own tools against them. Use the fucking AI against them because that's the only way things are going to get better. You know, but make sure while you're using the AI against them to have it document everything meticulously.

So when the AI doesn't wake up that day and you need to go get in and change somebody's post or do something, moderate or whatever, that the instructions are there for you to go figure out how to do it. If you're just going to be vibe coding your way through life, you know, just saying. All right.

So forget going to forget going to our Discord channel. Jason's going to be spinning up our own version of Reddit, the grumpy Reddit. I thought about it, but then I'm just like, it doesn't make us any money, so fuck it. Yeah, exactly. Which is why nobody's going to do this anyways. But yes. All right.

Well, we'll see. We'll see when people, you know, when people start charging. Okay. I tell you right now, if Discord started charging us a monthly fee. Oh, we'd be done. I'd be spinning that fucker up right now. We'd be out of there. Well, Google and security researchers have dismantled a massive bot. net called XCPE involving more than 1.3 million Android TV boxes.

Here's the disturbing part. Google says Chinese manufacturer Videostrong deliberately installed the malware at the factory. It's not a bug. It's a feature. It's a feature. It's a Chinese factory, Brian, not an Italian factory, just to say it.

You know. Well, you called me an old Greek man before. I'm just trying to get it, you know. I didn't say you were an old Greek man. I said... These devices arrived pre-infected, allowing criminals to hijack your internet connection, generate fraudulent advertising revenue and steal data, and also remotely execute commands.

Some could even capture screenshots and disable Google's security protections. So, there's Samsung. Yeah, pretty much. Google says shutting down the operation also disrupted malware, affecting at least 10 million additional devices.

The company has now banned Videostrong from manufacturing certified Android devices and revoked its access to Google's pre-installed apps. So, apparently, buying a cheap streaming box now comes with a complimentary cybercrime subscription, no installation required. So... There you go. There you go.

Going back to that building software for your own, you know, use, like we were talking about just now with the Reddit thing, I created a new app called Meeting Pins, which is a bookmarking app for Zoom meetings, because Zoom does not have bookmarks.

And when you go to, I don't know, eight or nine Zoom meetings a week that are the same meeting over and over again, having to go find the login, find the password, all that crap is a pain in the butt. Even if it's in your calendar, it's a pain in the butt. So, I made, for the Mac side, I made a little drop-down menu bar app, and I have a companion app for iOS and iPhone.

So, that is on the App Store right now. There's a link to it. I just charged $1.49, just to try and make back a little bit of what I spent on all of the, you know, the compute to make the damn thing, and just the pain in the ass that it is to maintain it. It works really well. I love it.

You know, it's always there. So, and you can, it uses iCloud to sync, so you just set them up in any of the devices, and it passes it to all of them. So, I just got, right before, as we were starting the show, the Mac app is in review, so by the time this airs, it should be out. The iOS app has been out for a couple days.

That's the funny thing, Brian. iOS apps now, you can get through a new app, you can get through in a day now, which is surprising. Mac apps take a long time. I've been trying for a week to get this thing through on the Mac side. It's been so long on the Mac side, I'm like, well, maybe I should just make the iOS and iPad companion apps while I wait.

So, I did, and then I submitted those, and then they got through. But, okay. It's a cute little app. It's a one-purpose app. It literally is bookmarks for your Zoom meetings. That's it. Don't ask me about fucking Microsoft Teams. I don't use Microsoft Teams.

That's like, you know, asking me to make Trackalot for Android. Not going to happen, because I'm not going to buy a pre-hacked Android device from Videostrong. And then have it ruin my day. So, there you go. There you go. My wife and I have continued watching The Bear.

We're up to season four right now. I know a lot of people said that they only liked, like, the first one or two seasons, and they kind of trailed off in quality after that. I disagree. I'm still, we're both still really, really enjoying the show.

This may be a case, like, you know I'm kind of anti-binging. I'm not a big fan for binging. I like my once a week. You don't have to tell me. Yeah, I know. You get angry at me if I don't catch up on shows as quickly as you watch them. I want you to watch it before it comes out, Brian. Well, I will use Videostrong, and perhaps I can get them early.

There you go. Maybe this is a case for binging. The show, this show, we basically watch, like, one episode a night. And that's kind of how we're doing it, especially now that everything else that we watch has ended, like the Diplomat, etc. And they just kind of roll into each other really well.

The seasons roll together really well. You see the progression. You kind of get it. I can see how if, like, you went from watching the end of season two, and then you waited like a year, and then season three came out, you'd be like, what the hell? Bit of dissonance. But as you just roll through them, it all works pretty well.

It's a great show still. Looking forward to, I've got, what, one more season after season four? So, we'll see. I thought it was done. Oh, okay. Now it's got five seasons, I guess. Yeah. Oh, okay. Five seasons I won't be watching because, yeah. No. No to the bear. It's a rough one.

It's a, it's a, it's a, there's a, you got to be able to roll with, like, this just constant tension. And if you can, then it's, it's a lot of fun, so. Nope. I like my tension dystopian, please. Yeah. Well, speaking of dystopia and shows that have just ended, Silo has, has wrapped for the year.

Luckily, it's going to come back pretty quickly. But as I was scrolling through looking for a new book to read on my library app, I realized that I have not read anything that wasn't Silo by Hugh Howey. And he does have some other stuff out there. So, I decided I was going to rectify that situation.

And the book that was readily available was Machine Learning, New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey. So, it's a collection of his short story work. And I guess the big seller here is he does have two, I think, stories written in the Siloverse, as it were. So, if you're, if you need some more of that, there's, there's some short stories in there that were pretty good, pretty interesting.

I've liked the majority of them. I've got a couple more, a couple more stories to go before I'm done with it. But I've really enjoyed a lot of his short stories. So, give it a go if you were a big fan of Silo. He's got some interesting stuff in there. I like it. That's cool.

Did you get it on Libby? I did, on Libby, yeah. All right. There's a new John Scalzi out that I put on, on my Libby watch list. I am 160th in line, so I will probably be reviewing that the same time next year. So, I find that Libby goes pretty quick.

There's a, there's a big user base. So, when you see 160th in line, it may fly by. Okay. In the meantime, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm relist. I, I, it's nice that, that you can, like, you know, re-borrow something pretty quickly because I was halfway through the Jet Li biography, autobiography.

And it, I'm listening to it, and then the next day, it's like, your book has been returned. I'm like, fuck. So, but unfortunately, I could get it, get it again pretty quickly because apparently Jet Li is not a big draw, as much as I love him. But.

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I did finish Battlestar Suburbia this week. Okay. Talked about it last week. It was kind of like, you know, middle of the road. And then I remembered, Brian, you had a classification of sci-fi that I love. It's called Shitter Sci-Fi. Yes. Books that you read on the shitter that, you know, just get you through the day.

This is not shitter sci-fi. I'm going to call this Shitter Plus. It's good. Now available. $19.95 a month. Streamer. Yes. We have a pill for that if your Shitter Plus is streaming. Oh, my God.

Like I said, it was decent. It was decent. But there's two more books in the series that I don't feel the need to read. Okay. I think this wraps up pretty nicely. It's a good standalone. You can see where everything's set up for it to, you know, keep going.

But it didn't hook me enough to want to keep going. Right. Not interesting enough to keep staying in the universe, but a good enough read when you got nothing else to do. Yeah. And this was the audio book read by the author. And you could tell they didn't have a budget because all of his flubs and retakes were in the audio book.

He would be reading something and then start over the line again. Like, I mean, there's like 10 of them in there. I'm like, you guys should have had an editor, right? Somewhere along the way. And this is from 2018. You'd think that, you know, you can go back and resubmit audio when your book's on Audible if you fuck up.

You can just resubmit a new file with new chapters because I've done it. I know how it works. And, yeah, it was apparently not – it didn't do well enough at the publisher. The publisher said, yeah, you know, we got it out there. This is about as far as we're going to push that boulder up that hill.

Yeah. Too rich for our blood to press resubmit. Couldn't even find an intern. Maybe now in the age of AI, here we go. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, featuring cybersecurity's hardest-working podcaster, the CyberWire's very own Dave Bittner.

Hi, Dave. I'm sorry we couldn't hook up last week. It was a tough week. My gardeners – not my gardeners – the neighbors decided to take down, like, some of their 100-foot-tall trees at 8 o'clock in the morning. So it took them until 3 in the afternoon, so we could not record last Wednesday.

No, chainsaws, jackhammers, and leaf blowers are the natural enemies of podcasters. Yeah, they had six chainsaw guys in the trees at one time. Holy smokes. But it was fun to watch them. I mean, the four trees, two guys – but one guy was, like, totally like the Tarzan guy. He was swinging from, like, you know, branch to branch, like, way up in the air.

The other guys were just like, I am going to sit down here and go zoom, zoom. You know? They weren't. I have mad respect for those guys who are – the arborists who are actually up in the trees. That is not – not for me. Did I ever tell you about the rabbit hole I went down on YouTube with those guys?

No, I don't think so. Oh, dude, there are guys out there – just start doing chainsaw, like, tutorials, and you will find these guys who are just up there, like, up in the trees, shimmy up the trees, 100 feet tall, and they'll sit there and teach you everything there is to know about which way to cut and all this, you know.

It's crazy. There are a couple guys that are, like, you know, the influencers, the chainsaw influencers out there who are pretty fun. They're really fun. There's an influencer for everything. I mean, they've got GoPros strapped to their heads, and they'll – like, they're up in the trees, like, you know, narrating cutting down a tree.

It's phenomenal. And one guy, one guy, like, sprung some extra money and got a drone so he could get some, like, you know, POV shots of him cutting down a tree. Sure. It's great. Sure. No. I have a friend who did that for a while, and he had Kevlar chaps that he always wore when he was chainsawing to keep from cutting – No pants.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. I broke my ankle when I was skateboarding at the rotation station in Rockford, Illinois, when I was, like, 18. And my friends took me to the emergency room, and there was a chainsaw accident right before I came in, and the entire floor was just, like, covered in blood.

Yeah. And the guy said it just – it literally just bounced off his thigh and, like, cut straight to the bone. I'm, like, can you just put my ankle back together, please? Yeah. My friend had an incident that put him out of the business. Well, how do I say this? My friend had an incident that had his wife put him out of the business, which was he actually – he – his nose was temporarily not attached to his face.

Whoa. Yeah. So he should have worn some Kevlar sunglasses, maybe? Yeah, like, something – he was doing something, and something – you know, he had things tied up, and something got – something went wrong, and something swung in and just, like, whacked his face and basically tore his nose right off.

Oh. And – but, you know, he kept it together. Yeah, he went to the hospital, and, like, they did an absolutely amazing job. You would not know, unless you were looking for it, that he had ever parted ways with his nose and had it reattached, so – but, yeah, that was his retirement from climbing trees and wielding a chainsaw in anger.

Oh, my God. It's a young man's sport. Yeah, for sure. Oof. So we talked in the past about some things that we missed – at least I missed as a kid growing up watching TV. Like, nitroglycerin was the last thing that, you know, we don't really hear about anymore. And we talked about quicksand at one point.

And I shit you not, like, right after that next very night – and I forgot to bring it up because we weren't here last week – I've been watching the show Special Forces on Fox, where they take, you know, reality stars and they put them through some Special Forces training. It's a fun little show. Yeah, yeah. I thoroughly enjoy it.

Well, like, two weeks ago, the guys were stuck in quicksand. What? They were trying to cross this river, and apparently the banks of the river were just quicksand. They couldn't even get to the water. They got stuck and couldn't get out. They had to wait for the Special Forces guy to, like, teach them how to get out of the quicksand.

And I'm watching this, and I'm having panic attack just watching these guys. Like, they're stuck. They're like, we're getting sucked down. We can't move. And the camera guy's just standing back. He's like, hey, I ain't going in there. And they're just literally stuck by themselves on the bank of this river, like, up to their waist, and they couldn't get out until the guy, like, taught them how to get out of it.

I was just like, wow, it's still a thing. So, naturally occurring quicksand. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. In the rain on the bank of a river. Okay. And it was just – it had over-moisturized so much that when they stepped on it, they were trying to, like, get into the river to cross the river, and they just got right down in and couldn't get out.

Crazy. Well, yeah. And then, you know, I haven't thought about quicksand forever since we brought it up on the show. And I've started going back and watching Mythbusters with my kid. He's the perfect age for it. Like, it's a fantastic show for him to be watching right now.

Loves it. Yeah. We've only watched, like, maybe 10 episodes. Within those 10 episodes, quicksand episode. Yep. Classic. It was unbelievable. When I think of quicksand, I always think of the old, old black-and-white Tarzan movies that were on Saturday mornings, you know.

Yep. Throw a vine, you know. Yeah, exactly. Or the awesome Atari game that I loved, Pitfall. Pitfall. Oh, Pitfall, of course. Yeah, Pitfall. It was one of the best, for sure. I never played the remake. They did a remake where Bruce Campbell did the voiceover.

And it was apparently very snarky on the voiceover. But, hey, I love Bruce Campbell, so you can't go wrong with that. But it got me thinking, I was, what else have we lost? I was just out on my morning walk, you know. I do my morning walks now, and I don't take my headphones or anything. I just, you know, think and not listen to anything.

And it got me thinking. I'm like, you know what we used to have in the 70s that is not a thing anymore? Streaking and mooning. Mooning used to totally be a thing. When you got bad, you'd moon somebody. You know, drop trowel and show them your butt. Streaking, another thing that nobody does anymore.

And I blame cell phones. I 100% blame cell phones. Absolutely. The evidence, yes. I mean. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, Threads in particular has decided to serve me via the algorithm. It's never-ending. Gen Xers, what things did you do when you were growing up that you could never get away with now because of cell phones and everything?

And everybody's always like, I take the fifth. Why would I admit to it now? It doesn't exist. It never happened. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember the single song, The Streak? Oh, yes, they call him The Streak. Do you remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that was a thing. I remember that was very, and it was a novelty record. She said, don't look, Ethel. And it was just all about streaking. And it's a very funny song. I'm sure it's on YouTube and it's cute and of its time.

But I can't say I ever participated in either streaking or mooning. I think maybe growing up Catholic, I had too much shame. But there was a streaking tradition at the University of Maryland when I was there.

And I never lived in the high-rise dorms, which is where this took place. There were quads of high-rise dorms that faced each other. And I remember the one time I witnessed it, I was at my girlfriend's dorm.

And all of a sudden, out in the quad, started blaring the William Tell overture. It was just a stream of all, it was all guys. Of course. Just streaking around, you know, did a lap.

And then back inside they went and the music stopped and everyone went back to their lives. And that's how it worked. We call that a flesh mob. That's good. That's good. Yeah, that's funny. That's good. So, yeah, now you're mentioning streaking.

And I didn't think about this for years either. One of the clients I had, her name was Sheila Nicholls. She was a singer-songwriter from England. She never really troubled the charts, Pierre. She was very eclectic, but fun and, you know, whatever. She had a major label deal for a while and they foot the bills and paid for my services.

So it was great. And she was very nice. I liked her a lot. But as I discovered, like, I had, you know, part of my due diligence when I'm working with new clients is I'm looking into them. I'm Googling all this sort of stuff and figuring out everything about them. And so I know stuff. She was mostly famous for streaking at an England versus Australia cricket match in 1989.

Hmm. That's awesome. So video exists if you want to bring that up on the tube of the U. I feel like just maybe, maybe this is just me. But I feel like in the 80s, every friend group had the naked girl.

Yeah. Right. That's true. Yes. Am I right? Yes. Absolutely. Pretty much. For whatever reason, like, you had the one girl who just would happen to... Karen's top is off again. Right. There she goes. Oh, oh, oh, you all are here.

Oh, you know, like that. Yeah. Like, cause, and I was, you know, all for it. But I wonder if, I wonder if that's still a thing. Cause, I guess, I mean, nudity is just everywhere. It's still a thing, Dave, but now they're on OnlyFans. Yeah, that's true.

Now you have to pay for it. They've monetized it. That's right. That's true. Yeah. At least here in the States. In Europe, it's no big deal. Nobody cares in Europe. That's the thing. Right. You know. Right. And mooning, mooning was, I mean, I remember we would moon the school buses all the time.

You know, if we're like, you know, skating to school or whatever, you know, a bunch of us, we just moon, or the wrestling team, we're like, fuck you guys. Look at our ass. You know? Yeah. Can't say I was ever part of that. Nowadays, you'd be, if you got busted, you'd be a sexual predator.

Right. Back then, it was literally clean fun. Mooning was clean fun. It was nothing wrong about it. True. True. And fun as long as you were clean. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Joe needs to wash. Jesus. Yeah.

Old Skid Mark Johnson over there. Yeah. Can't stop mooning everybody. Yeah. All right. Well, let's move from asses to Muppets, because that's one of our favorite topics. And there's been quite a lot of Muppets in the news recently.

Because of that, an old article has resurfaced on Slate, which I had never read when it first came out. But I absolutely love this article. It's called Chaos Theory, a Unified Theory of Muppet Types. And it basically posits that every person is one of two types of Muppets. You're either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet.

Right. And I'm not going to spoil the whole article for you, because it is fucking funny. And it's worth reading. So link in the show notes. But I will tell you right now, Dave and I are both Order Muppets. What other person on this podcast is a Chaos Muppet? I don't know, but I got to read it.

But I'm telling you, I'm probably an Order Muppet. No. I'm the guy that... You were just telling stories about showing your ass to wrestlers saying, fuck you guys. That is Chaos Muppet behavior, my friend. You may have evolved into an Order Muppet. Yes.

Yes. You graduated. Also, remember, I've known you for 20 plus years. You are a fucking Chaos Muppet. Okay, I'm a Chaos Muppet with OCD. How's that? Can I be that? Yes, you can. You aspire to be an Order Muppet, but the truth runs deep.

Look, we have a saying. I saw a meme about this. There's two types of people who know how to load a dishwasher. There's the Swedish architect type, and then there's the squirrel on meth type. I'm the Swedish architect type. I know exactly where everything goes, and everything must be perfect when it goes into the dishwasher.

That's how I live my life outside of this now. Yes, because you're not an animal. Yes. Yes, I am the same way, and quite often, it is, I've learned to keep it to myself, but I will go to put something in the dishwasher, and I will look down and see how things have been loaded, and I'll say, good God, don't you people have any understanding of how fluid dynamics work?

I do that every day, Dave. Every single day. That is my life. I'm with you, brother. Yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, it's literally, it's like fluid dynamics. It's like, do you not know how water works? Yeah, I know.

I know. Believe me. Well, I'm the one that has to empty the dishwasher every morning. I wake up before the rest of my family, so I'm always the one emptying it. And every morning, I come down, and I just shake my head in disappointment. I'm like, the forks go with the forks, because then it's easy for me to put all the forks away.

The spoons go with the spoons. Yeah. So it's easy for me to put all the spoons away. I also empty the dishwasher, but I don't care if the sporks and the spoons are commingled. What I care about is when people put the knives and the forks point up, because I have bad vision, and I have gotten skewered so many times that I have almost committed several homicides with said fork and knife.

Yeah. See, our fork basket, whatever, it sort of is biased towards having the forks certainly pointing up. So that just kind of happens. Yeah, no, that is unacceptable in my house.

Let me ask you this, do you run the water ahead of time to make it hot before you start the cycle? Yeah. Yeah, you have to. That's what I say as well. But not everyone does this. Why would you sauce your dishes in cold water? Apparently I'm a chaos muppet. Because chemistry, yeah.

Some people think you can do that, but we know the truth. There's no heater in that thing that is going to actually heat up the water as it comes in to make sure it's the perfect temperature. Common sense, people. This podcast is supported by your Southern California Kia dealers.

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Well, let's keep with the Muppet news really quickly. Even though the revived Muppet show was basically universally beloved, won a bunch of awards, everybody was clamoring for them to bring it back and to do more, I guess that doesn't matter, and Disney just doesn't care.

But we did get some new Muppet content, because, you know, why wouldn't we, thanks to a commercial for Walmart. Right. We got a revisit of the Christmas Carol with Walter Groggins, and it's fun and enjoyable and not at all what we wanted or deserve, given how well the Muppet show did.

Yeah. Can I ask a dumb question? Hmm? Why should I know who Walter Groggins is? He was on the last White Lotus and was a bit of a breakout star from it. Oh, because that would be because his name is Walton Goggins. Because it's, it's not Walter Groggins, it's Walton Goggins.

Well, I'm talking about the Muppet version, Jason. This is, okay. Okay. Right. Like Placido Flamingo. Yeah. Right. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I haven't thought about that in years. And Donald Grump. Donald Grump is another one. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, he's grumpy today. Yeah. Count on it. There's ketchup all over the walls. Yeah. I'm happy that we're seeing this Muppet content and it's very cute. And I posted a clip too. There is a longer version of it that they released.

And there's a prequel clip with Walton sort of bumping into Kermit on the studio a lot and, you know, making it seem like that's the origin of this deal happening. And so that's delightful as well. We've shared a fair amount of AI Star Wars content in this particular segment as well.

So it was somewhat refreshing to see something going semi-viral that was not done with AI, just clever editing. And I have watched this 7,000 times. I love this so much. This is the Rogue One Money for Nothing edit where they cut in bits from Rogue One, edited nearly perfectly to the whole Money for Nothing intro.

It's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. These are fun. There's another one that uses Danger Zone from Top Gun. It's quite good. There's a bunch of these and I'm here for them. They are really fun. And yeah, the battle, it's just, you know, fighting footage and just cuts with rock and roll or it just works.

Yeah, it just works. And I stumbled across a website. I actually stumbled across this months ago and I've kept forgetting to put it into the show, but I think this is fascinating. If somewhat sad, it's called Worse on Purpose. And basically their tagline is corporate autopsies on the brands you trust.

Who bought them? Who gutted them? And what's still worth buying? So it basically goes through all kinds of different companies that get bought out by various other, you know, massive conglomerates and just destroy them, just absolutely destroy them. And really gets into the nitty gritty about it.

It's fascinating. If you ever feel like you're in too good of a mood, I suggest coming to this site and reading any one of the articles. It will depress you. I'm just too happy today. What can I do to tamp this down? Yeah. I don't want to go on social media. What should I do?

Yeah. So, yeah, it's a good bookmark and they do a really good job. It sucks. I was thinking about this earlier this week, this similar sort of thing. Like, I don't have a good sense for our, what are the remaining legit brands anymore?

Because they've all been mixed up. And shitified. Yeah. They can shitified and, you know, bought by venture capital and squeezed for every penny they're worth. And so, it's just so hard to say, oh, you can buy. I mean, there's a whole Reddit thread called Buy It For Life.

It's all about high quality things that'll last you a lifetime. And they're constantly talking about, yeah, those used to be good, but then they got bought out and now they're crap. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's his website in a nutshell. Yeah. I'm curious.

The only thing I can think of is Nikon. Because Nikon cameras have always been, and always will be like, you know, just rock solid. So, that's the only thing that I can think of. I'm looking around and I'm like, eh, well, shit. Yeah, everything around here is crap compared to the ones I had 20 years ago. Yeah, but all my Nikons and those things have just been workhorses.

The one I'm, the one I'm recording on right now, this is a Nikon Z6. This is like a six-year-old DSLR. And it's beautiful. Still works great. And like the Z9, I would kill for one of those. Those things are going to last 10, 15 years. So, and, you know, the old F series for Nikons, those things lasted, like, that's a company that sticks by quality.

And it, on the other hand, can suck my left nut. Those things are plastic pieces of garbage. But, okay. You asked. No, it's fine. I, yeah, I, yeah, sure. Okay. I found a website that allows you to take virtual train rides in your browser.

And they're actual train rides. Like, somebody stuck a video camera to the window of a train and recorded the whole trip. This is just a nice thing to have in the background. Or if you need to unplug your brain for a little while, you can, you can choose many different trips.

And there's something kind of relaxing about it. Can I put this on my Apple TV? Oh, I guess I could, I guess I could throw it to my TV. Yeah. Yeah. I just, just, just, uh, yeah. Hand off to the TV. Because I would love to have that on the TV. You know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a beautiful thing, particularly in Europe.

I mean, the, the trains there are so wonderful, but, uh, you click on USA and it just starts to smell like fart. And, you know, it's just no, no bueno. Particularly here on the East coast, you know, it's, uh, I, I say riding the train lets you see the armpit of society because the trains go through all the places, you know, that, you know, all the buildings that are next to the train tracks are always run down and the worst and industrial and all that kind of stuff.

You're talking to a guy who's taken the, the, uh, the train from Chicago to LA and back multiple times, multiple times. I can tell you right now that, yeah, the houses next to the train tracks, no bueno, but yeah, it's, uh, and I've, I've, I've actually taken the train from as far as Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles.

And I will never do it again. Trust me when I say I will never, ever fucking do that again. Although, as I say that right now, I'm like, that was kind of nostalgic. Maybe I'll do that again. Oh wait, no, I feared for my life every mile on the last time I took it because the tracks were so bad.

Really? Uh, oh, it was horrible. Like the, the problem, the problem is with Amtrak, they, they use the freight lines, the freight rail. Right. So they're beat to shit. Yeah. The dining car, when you eat is on the second story. You go up there, your plates are sliding all over the place.

You can't have a, I went up there to work one night and we're going 70 miles an hour through like, you know, uh, just the, the, the armpit of the Midwest and the train is shaking so violently that you can't, I couldn't keep my laptop in front of me that I went downstairs to my, my cabin.

Cause I got like a sleeper car because I, I, I, that's the only way to fly, get a sleeper car. And, uh, even there I was in my bed, like being beat against the walls. It was so violent. Never again. Will I do that? Europe. I will take the train in Europe every day of the week.

I mean, I spent three months there on a URL pass when I was 20 and it was the best thing in my life. But yeah, trains in the U S. No, did, did you guys have train sets when you were kids? Yeah. Hell yeah. And they, were they, your, your, like your dad's train sets that got, you know, set up at Christmas time.

Was it that sort of like Lionel trains? We had the silver bullet from my dad, which was like, you know, the, the thicker gauge lines. Um, and it was, that thing was beautiful. It was, but it was, we didn't have much track. So it just kind of went in a circle, but this really nice silver train. Uh, but I had the, the regular gauge trains, uh, I had those.

H.O. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had those forever. I love those things, man. Those were awesome. We had, we had, I had sets all over my grandparents' house. They loved it. Cause my grandfather worked at a, uh, a coal yard and filled the, the train cars. So he was a big train fan. So he would buy those for me for Christmas. Yeah. We had O gauge set.

We had O gauge sets and, um, we had, uh, in our basement, we had a pool table and, uh, around the holidays, my dad would, would pull out a special piece of four by eight flop plywood that was painted green that had the tracks, you know, attached to it.

Like we didn't even have the AstroTurf or that, that green sandpaper stuff. It was just painted green. And, uh, we had the O gauge, which is the three rails, uh, and the, the, these engines. And they were all the World War II era Lionel trains.

So this heavy metal, big transformers. And we had two tracks doing an oval, you know, an inner track and an outer track. And so every year we'd set the trains up and we had, you know, a little tunnel that they go through and set up the little houses.

I always liked to set up the lights and, and all that. So, yeah, it was a, it was something we did and, um, these for my family, you know, around the Christmas tree, we have Lego trains. Right. Which I love. So.

No trains for me. I just found, I found it was an American Flyer Vintage S Postwar Silver Bullet Diesel Locomotive. Okay. Um, trying to load it up to get more. Cause I, I, I think that gauge would be the, the one that you're talking about. Yeah. Oh, gauges. That's, it was very popular back in that, those days.

And then I think after that HO, the smaller HO became, you know, the thing, but there are some, you know, so the other thing is like, I suspect model train layouts is going the way of a lot of those hobbies, right?

Like ham radio, like, you know, like who's, are, are there any young kids coming up who are going to build elaborate model train sets? Maybe a few, but I don't know. Oh, this was an S gauge track. Okay.

Not, yeah. S gauge. I don't know what S gauge is. I mean, you know, there's just, there's, you know, there aren't toy stores anymore. There aren't, there aren't things of that nature. You know, I think of all the specialty shops and toy stores and things that I've found with Lucas over the years, I've never seen a train set in them.

Not once, not, none of those like modular, you buy all the different parts at different times, nothing like that. So yeah, I think it's just gone. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. The last thing I wanted to share is something I saw yesterday that absolutely blew my mind.

And, uh, there is a gentleman who has figured out how to geolocate things based on the sounds of the airplanes flying overhead and the Doppler shift the airplanes make.

And he, a lot of time airplane sounds are inaudible, but he goes and pulls them out of the waveforms. And this is one of those stories about someone who is so obsessive and knows how to work databases and knows how to do the programming and the math and all of those kinds of things.

This is a fascinating and unsettling video where this guy walks through the open source data of, he starts off with every flight in the United States. Well, actually what he starts out with is an audio recording that is over just a picture of some trees.

That's all he knows that it's somewhere in North America. And he sets it upon himself to figure out where it is. So he starts with the database, uh, and he knows what day it was. So then he starts off with all of the flights in the United States and he's able to whittle it down, whittle it down by the Doppler shift, by all of these different ways.

And he figures out where this was recorded. The security camera that's sitting on a pole in the corner, like somewhere in Maine, shooting at a bunch of trees and he figures it out. And I mean, ultimately it's, it's just math, right? It is.

It is so much that you have to crunch, but it's just math. Right. Right. But it reminded me of, uh, what was it? The, the movie, the fugitive where they used the, you know, they had the background sounds of the L train. They use that to figure out this is that taken to the next level.

Uh, I can't believe this guy doesn't work for Palantir, right? Well, he probably does. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it makes me think, it always makes me, this kind of stuff always makes me think of being a kid when my dad took me in to see Blade Runner. And first I freaked out because I knew I wasn't old enough and I was like, are you sure I can go in there, dad?

Are you sure I can go in there? Uh, but that's not the point. It always makes me think of that scene where they have the photograph and then they analyze the photograph and he has the computer go into the photograph and then turn around and then there's a mirror in the background of the photo, enhance that and zoom in on that.

And then they find like, they see, I can't even remember the plot point exactly, but I, I remember going as a kid, holy shit, like someday that'll be possible. And we are at that point where that kind of stuff is now possible. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so like I said, this is a fascinating video, but I found it a little unsettling.

Like it's one of those things you, you find yourself thinking about for a while afterwards because of what it opens up and the ways that you, that other people could use this. There's nothing exotic about anything he's doing. It's all off the shelf tools. You just need the persistence and the knowledge and, and all those things to do that.

And of course, thanks to AI, the math part of it is probably within anyone's reach now, but, uh, it's, it's fascinating. So if this is your jam, check it out. So my jam, so my jam. I can't wait to check that out. I just put a link, I put a link in the chat though for, for one last, uh, model train thing.

I knew that there was one celebrity I just heard on a podcast that was a huge, huge model train guy, Rod Stewart. Yes. Rod Stewart is a huge train guy. He will actually take some of those trains with him on tour. It's just cause that's what he does. I guess like when he had his residency, he had his trains in the, in the, the back of the stage for, for after hours.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Back in my point, you can't drink and fuck all night. Anymore? Says who? Yeah. Okay. Maybe I am a chaos Muppet. Yeah.

Which, which of my friends is most like animal? Okay, guys. All right. Go moon somebody today. Oh yeah. That'll, that'll, that'll end well. Sure. Yeah. Now that they can geolocate exactly where you were when you did it, they'll be able to find you.

Yeah. Just don't fart when you do it. Don't leave an audible trace. Are there any planes overhead? No. Yeah. Go for it. Right. All right. With that, see you next time. Now it is time for us to say thanks to all of the people that make this show possible. Over at Patreon this week, we have no new subscribers.

You're not keeping us on the air that way. But we would like to say thank you to Jed, Paolo, Chris, Matt, Joe, Zach, Stephen, Jeff, Wing, and Val for keeping the lights on. We appreciate you very much. And thank you, Brian, for not putting in somebody's name that I couldn't pronounce this week.

Much appreciated. I'm not the person that makes the names up, Jason. That's on them. You make the list, though. I think it's true. And we have a whole bunch of PayPal people because PayPal stopped sending notifications, mostly because I apparently unsubscribed from the list that sent them to me.

Yeah. Let's clarify, PayPal didn't stop sending the notifications. Brian unsubscribed from the email that we had set up for you. I rage unsubscribed from yet another person trying to get a guest on our show. And apparently, instead of unsubscribing from their list, I unsubscribed myself from the Grumpy Old Geek's email list.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, because you're saying, like, you're not getting any from our other, like, our group email list that we get. And I'm like, I get shit all fucking day long. So, yeah. It was such a blissful two weeks where I got no emails. I thought PayPal was broken. I'm like, well, you should go see if PayPal works.

But then you figured it out. I went in there and there was a whole bunch of money. So, there it was. We'll take it. Then we figured it out. So, thank you to Jay, Levy, Thomas, Judge, Online Computers, Charlie, Daniel. There's that hundo that you said you sent. Donald, Jens, Joseph, Tom, Edward, Sloan, Brett, Linda, Cutter's Edge, and probably some other people because I wasn't sure exactly when I had cut off.

So, thank you all so much. We are getting notifications again. I appreciate it. All right. Now, for the tip, Joe, I would like to say thank you to Sarah and Matthew. And for merch, we got Phillip from the UK and Michael from Lakeland. So, we got some new merch in there. Like I said, the new sizes are up and everything's ready to go.

So, take a peek. Get Brian's shirt. I haven't been paid by my clients lately, so I'm wearing my old laundry that I have around. So, if you're a fan of Jawbreaker, yeah, they're a great band. Go listen to them. No reviews this week, sadly.

But, hey, you know, I would like to say R.I.P. to the fucking Cheeto. Get the fuck out of the way because your time's coming. Lawyer up, bitch. Just like our friends in Long Beach say. All right. Until next time, then, I am Brian Shalmester.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 770. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? To us a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every dollar keeps the show on the air. And if you love the show, share it.

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And I put up a classic, Brian. The Cybertruck Enthusiast shirt is now back available for sale. That was a limited edition, but I brought it back because it is just so much fun. So snag your grumpy gear now at shop.GOG.show. It's just like the McRib. Back for a limited time.

I love the McRib so much. One of my favorite sandwiches. Stay grumpy.