757: This Time With Chicks

I'm Kaja, I'm Koi, I'm Mike. I'm Keanu. I'm Keanu. I'm Keanu. I'm Keanu. I'm Keanu. I'm Keanu. I'm Keanu. I'm Keanu. And I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything.

Every day I'm thinking about some other new business. But Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial at Shopify.com. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schul meister and Jason DeFilippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, we're taking next week off. We are. You are having a birthday. I am finishing up my trip out here, going to Disneyland, going to San Diego, then going home.

I am going to Fogo de Chau and I'm going to have a tower of seafood. That's what I'm going to have. Go. Stop. Go. I haven't been there in ages. No, this. Well, I love that. I love that part. The cards and everything. But we're literally, I'm just, you can go and on the menu, instead of doing the whole, you know, go stop thing.

Yeah. The never ending meats. Yeah. It's literally a tower of seafood. Oh, okay. So a friend of mine is friends with the manager over there who got me a gift card so I can go enjoy it on my birthday because I can't afford a tower of seafood in this economy.

They're expensive. Yes. They're very expensive. So thank you. Thank you guys. So let's move on to a little bit of follow up here. eBay and several former executives will pay $56 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a Massachusetts couple who said they were targeted in a corporate harassment campaign.

We covered this a couple of years ago now. The victims, newsletter publisher David Harville and journalist Ina Steiner had reported critically on eBay and its leadership. According to court documents, company employees sent them disturbing packages, including live insects, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask.

Yay. Not the thing you want to get from eBay. They also allegedly conducted surveillance that sent threatening messages and tried to intimidate the couple into stopping their coverage. The settlement included $39 million from eBay and $17 million from former executives and employees.

eBay has apologized and said the conduct violated its values. Well, one would hope. One would fucking hope. Yes. That's crazy. I mean, man, things move slow, don't they? Because, yeah, we talked about this ages ago and it's just finally been settled.

Unbelievable. The courts take a while, man. The courts take a while. When you can sue everybody for anything. Yep. It goes slow. Yeah. And Brian, last week I was so wrong and I apologize. You know, I was like, I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. It's a while. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day.

I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day.

I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. I'm going to go to the next day. Well, because the hugging face emoji was their personal favorite, they picked it for the chat bot and the company name. While they initially thought the name and logo would only last a few weeks or months, the developer community completely fell in love with it.

When the business pivoted to open source machine learning, the friendly and approachable name stuck for good. So it is not about the alien face hugger, unfortunately. So I was wrong. Boo. Boo. Oh, well, it's a cute story. I like it. It's a cute story, but look, you're talking to somebody who named this company Slender Fungus.

OK. Just saying. I go with things like vapid and spew, but you guys have the fun ones. That's OK. Well, this week in AI, the sky is falling. Bullshit. I mean, the news.

Let us continue, Brian. OK. On July 24th, a coalition led by NVIDIA's Jensen Huang with Microsoft Meta Mistral hugging face and a couple dozen others signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose broad, quote, premature restrictions on open weight AI models, the kind you can download and run yourself.

Not to get too anti-Izzard here, but premature, I would say mature, mature restrictions. Learned mature restrictions. It comes as Washington debates how to respond to allegations that Chinese AI labs are stealing intellectual property from American companies.

Oh, my God. The Chinese AI are stealing our intellectual property that we stole from everybody else. Yeah. Shocker. Shocker. Well, then four days later, a different letter, Brian. Over 1100 workers at Frontier AI companies published an open letter calling for a new approach to regulating automated AI development.

It asks the U.S. government to support international governance tools that could slow the pace of AI development if needed. This one was signed by people at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta. So one letter says, don't slow us down, bro. The other says, please slow us down, bro.

So same industry, same week. You having fun yet? No. Okay. I haven't had fun since we started, since AI started. I haven't had fun since Elon went pedo. But anyway, let's get to the doom and gloom.

Okay. Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei, whose company also conveniently sells the safe, expensive AI, says he fears that AI will enable biological attacks and that open weight models are more dangerous because it's hard to put guardrails on them or monitor how they're used.

Mm hmm. So now Dario's out there. Now it's like, okay, well, we don't have the job losses. We don't have. Let's go to biological attacks in the next pandemic. We have literally moved on. He is using the Marvel playbook universe. Next, we're going to have, you know, the fucking silver sur fer is the the Anthropic, you know, logo.

When are one of the time cops coming? Yeah, seriously. He did clarify this week, though, that Anthropic has never advocated banning open models. His real worry is authoritarian government and bioweapons, not your neighbor running a chatbot.

Hmm. You mean the authoritarian government that you're kind of making deals with? Yeah, that one. That one? Okay. I think it's interesting that he mentioned specifically that it's hard to put guardrails on them or monitor how they're used. Are you admitting that you're not just a platform then that you are responsible for the things done using your tools?

Gasp. Oh, no. Ryan, did you catch him in a foible? I think I might have. I think that is basically stating that, you know, we need to monitor what's going on because, oh, I don't know. It's our tools. And we might be responsible.

They're not responsible, Brian. It's just a platform. It's hard. It's hard. It's very hard. Guardrails are hard, Brian. Yeah, sure. Well, meanwhile, over at OpenAI, Sam Altman brought a different flavor of bad news. On the Relentless podcast, Altman said, "We never got the promised four-hour work week at mass scale, quote, and I don't expect AI to change that."

Okay. Well, the four-hour work week was a fucking, you know, hyperbolic title for a book that Tim Ferriss wrote a fucking 20 years ago. So, yeah. Actually, interestingly, I think if you took the average mean over the people that are working well over 40 hours per week versus all the people that have now been fired because of AI who are working zero hours per week, maybe we are at about four-day work week.

We're about four hours. Yeah. Well, his reasoning is that people are competitive by nature and always find more work to do. So productivity gains turn into new goals rather than less work. I'm going to stop you there, Sam. I'm going to stop you there.

Because in my experience, people are not competitive by nature. People are fucking lazy by nature. People are finding any way to not do work. That's the goal. That is the goal. They're competitive by nature because they have to go buy $ 17 fucking onions at the grocery store right now because of the shitty government that you guys are doing all this back room dealing with.

But anyway, I digress. But I'm just saying people are not competitive by nature. By default, we are lazy as fuck. And we want to work four hours a week. Now, it is worth noting that OpenAI's own policy paper prop oses testing a 32-hour work week with employers and unions.

So, company says one thing, CEO says another. Okay. Gross all the way down. Now, Microsoft Satya Nadella found a fresh way to make businesses nervous. On CNN, Nadella warned that companies relying entirely on the big proprietary AI labs ultimately won't survive and said businesses should be wary of everything they hand over , such as their data and even their prompts.

Is he basically saying you shouldn't build your castle in somebody else's backyard? Ding. On the nose. Brian, on the nose. Interesting. And he says any firm without that control has outsourced its thinking. Well, anybody that uses AI has outsourced its thinking and we've all done it at this point.

So, yes, we know that. So, this is solid advice though, especially since Microsoft happens to sell the exact alternative infrastructure that he's recommending. So, this is just a fucking sales pitch saying, hey, you know those guys that we're invested in, Anthropic and Open AI that we basically have been in bed with since the beginning?

Well, those guys are going to fuck you. But if you come to us, we've got the anti-fucking tools that we can sell you so you don't get fucked by them, even though you're still going to use them. But we are the condom. We are your data condom in this brave new fucking world.

So, funny how that works, Brian. Yeah, it is, isn't it? Yeah. It's the playbook we've seen over and over again. The twat waffles keep telling us what is coming and how great or horrible it's going to be, depending on the week, because they have the agenda du jour.

It really is just keeping their name in the news. So, line go up. Line go up. But the one thing that they don't seem to want to get on their high horses and talk about is how they ever plan on becoming profitable before completely destroying the entire world economy and the environment.

That's funny, too, ain't it, Brian? They just don't have that solution. No. They should maybe, maybe, since they have the entirety of human knowledge in the palm of their hands, put it into chat GPT and Claude and say, what the fuck do we do?

How do we fix this without destroying everything? How do we fix this? But maybe this is the answer that it gave. This is possibly the answer that said, we just have to keep going the way we're going. Circular financing, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Somehow, I think it probably came back with some sort of solution that didn't involve shareholder value and continuing to make more money than God.

But nobody wants that one. No, no, no, no. Well, speaking of layoffs, Patreon is laying off 20% of its staff or 93 employees, according to a blog post from CEO Jack Conte, which means our Patreon services are about to get even worse.

The layoff announcement, which was first reported on by 404 Media, notes that while Patreon's business remains strong, it needs to adjust the company's cost structure to make it a stable, dependable rock for creators. Now, I want to read the statement. Keep it in your mind as we go through the show. We're making a number of changes to our organizational structure and how we work, Conte said.

Specifically, we're flattening the organization, refocusing teams on our top priorities and evolving key aspects of our operations to make us faster at adapting to change. Doesn't really say much, right? Right. Okay. Yeah, just keep that in your mind. As another layoff, the specter of AI looms large over Patreon's restructuring.

AI is not a replacement for human creativity, but it does have an impact on how we operate and organize, Conte said. The issue is seemingly existential. In an interview from earlier this year, the CEO stressed that Patreon needed to embrace AI as a product and engineering company, or we as a company will be dead in three years.

Why do companies keep saying this? We have to use this thing that nobody really likes or wants , because if we don't use this thing that nobody really likes or wants, all of a sudden we're not going to have a company anymore. I posit that there's a market for companies that say we don 't have any AI whatsoever.

There's a huge market for that, Brian. A huge market. Right. That's what I thought. But nobody seems to believe that. Anyways, the stance is notable because the company has largely taken the opposite tact when it comes to the creators that use its platform. Patreon announced on July 16th that it's adopting Cloudfl are's AI crawl control tool to limit what companies are able to scrape from creators' pages to train AI.

When the majority of Patreon's content was blocked by a pay wall, crawlers were a non-issue. But now that the company is encouraging users to offer their content for free and use the platform as a form of social media because page clicks, more creators work as vulnerable. Yeah.

They're not going the right direction. Okay, Brian, for us, Patreon is a platform, right? Mm-hmm. I think for everybody that has data on Patreon, it's a platform. It is basically a gateway to content that we create.

Why do they need AI to do anything on that platform that I would posit works just fucking fine? Mm-hmm. I don't need any more features. I would argue that every feature that they have rolled out has actually made the service worse.

Much worse as it keeps going. Yes. So I think that this is just more bullshittery from the D oucho sphere. So, yeah, I'm going to put a link in here, Brian. This is a link to an article called AI Mania is Eviscer ating Global Decision Making.

Now, I heard the guy who wrote this article on the Ed Zit ron podcast this morning. And I highly recommend everybody go read this article. It's a 22-minute read. So it is a long-form article, okay? And it is spot on, across the board, everything that we've been saying, that Ed has been saying, and anybody that's been in this business and knows what the fuck's going on with AI, period.

There is zero return. This is a cult. This is a fucking full-on cult. And you're going to, like, I envision you at the end of Battlestar Galactica, Brian, with your bottle of whiskey, your Jamesons, and you found out that, oh, goddammit, they really didn't have a plan.

Well, these guys don't have a plan either. No. It's so obvious that they don't. It's so obvious. And, you know, I know people will listen to us saying this because when we used to do little clips that were negative on AI, we got a lot of douchebaggy bro talk back at us.

I'm not saying that there's no use for AI. We have discovered pretty good use cases. It's really good at generating ideas as a leaping-off point . It's really good at helping you rewrite things and structure things in different ways, shapes, and forms.

What we're saying is it's not a 20 gazillion fucking dollar industry where we need all these continued data centers and billions of dollars investment and firing people left, right, and center because we can replace them with AI, which really just means that the people left that are working there, the actual human people who now say we, like Jason and Dave do in a little bit, when they're working with their AI are now working like 90 hours a week instead of the 40 that they should be working or the 32 or the four-hour work week.

I mean, it's just ridiculous. It has gotten out of control. It is like you said, Jason, it's a cult. It is a cult. It's a cult. And if you go back and I still go back to that fucking video I made on Instagram, I'm still getting shit every day from the bro cult of AI, you know?

And it's just driving me fucking nuts. But they just don't want to hear what the truth is. And the people who get it, get it. You know, the people who are competent at their jobs, get it. And it still goes back to the craftsman thing, man. If you're a craftsman and you know what your job is, AI is a great enhancer for what you do.

Like, I know how to program. I know how to code. I know how to product design things. Codex, for me, has been fantastic. But for people who don't know what they're doing, God help them. The day that they find a bug and open AI is down, they're fucked. You know? Software is complex.

Businesses are complex. And Patreon doing this fucking shit. Patreon, by the way, in its fundamental core, is not complex. No, it's a fucking payment. It's a payment gateway to content. That's it. That's it. That's it. So we spent way too long on Patreon.

But god damn it. It really drives the point home. And Nikhil Suresh is the name of the guy that wrote the article on the AI manias eviscerating global decision making. And he's got chops. And he's got, you know, the shit to back it up. He sells software for a living.

And so he's in the fucking trenches with these people hearing the stories about what's going on. And it is well worth the listen. I mean, well worth the read. And it's well worth the listen to go listen to him on Ed's podcast as well. This episode is sponsored by Delete Me.

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Anyway, let's move on to some more layoffs, shall we? Sure. BuzzFeed is laying off 180 employees. And who thought BuzzFeed even had 180 employees at this point? About 33% of its remaining workforce, as the struggling media company cuts costs across HuffPost, its film and television studio, and Tasty.

Ooh, Tasty. The reductions follow a failed AI strategy that began in 2023, when BuzzFeed promoted AI-generated quizzes and later faced criticism for publishing low-quality AI-written articles. Yep, we covered that when they pivoted.

Yep. Traffic and its share price collapsed, while annual losses reached $58 million by 2025. How's that AI working out for you? Indeed. The company has also sold brands, including First We Feast, to reduce debt. First We Feast, I believe those are the guys that do the hot ones.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, they got rid of them. New owner, Byron fucking Allen, is keeping BuzzFeed focused on AI, but advertising revenue recently fell nearly 20%. The layoffs are expected to save up to $32 million annually .

Byron Allen is a fucking vampire. He swoops in, sucks this shit up. I mean, he owns the Weather Channel, for fuck's sake. I mean, this is the guy who was the least funniest person on Real People when I was a kid growing up. He is so fucking unfunny. But he still has comedy shows that still make millions of dollars.

It drives me nuts. I am not a Byron Allen fan at all. Also, he was really mean to my roommate one time. Well, there you go. Yeah. Just a dick. Well, there's more layoffs. Uber has laid off 10% of its customer service team. And according to Bloomberg, the company cited AI as the reason for the job cuts.

Here we go. A new spokesperson told the publication that the cuts were done to simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration, and continue to embrace AI. The division affected by the layoffs is called Community Operations, the Uber's global customer support network across its different businesses and across languages.

Our organization has become too complex and siloed. Uber's vice president of global community operations reportedly told her team in a memo, adding that the department has made some strides in using AI, but to be able to scale its use, it needs to effectively effective organization to layer AI on.

What the hell does any of that mean? Who the fuck knows? And Uber will use generative AI for within the organization that makes it necessary to lay off people. However, AI agents for customer service have made great improvements lately. In addition to announcing job cuts, Uber also reportedly asked people working for the team remotely to relocate to hub offices as part of its return to office mandate, which is a way to get people to quit.

Yep. To get more people out of their jobs. It previously said that it was slowing hiring due to AI use as well. So Uber will now be employing less and less and less and less people. Also, Uber, same thing as Patreon, platform for payments.

That's all it is. It's a platform for payments. You know, it does. Cargo here. That's it. This person wants car, app routes car to person, take money , distribute money. That's it. That's it. It's all you got to be. And then have about a gazillion lawyers when driver rapes passenger.

Or driver runs into bus. Maybe it's a law firm and app payment company at the same time. Maybe that's it. Well, if you want to make some money, China's AI boom is creating a new marketplace for people to license their faces. Online platforms are reportedly paying individuals roughly $15 to $150 for permission to use and scan their likeness in AI-generated videos, advertisements, and short-form dramas.

The process can take only a few minutes with participants signing contracts that may grant companies broad rights to reproduce their appearance across digital content. For many, the payments offer quick income. But the arrangements raise concerns about consent, privacy, and control over identity.

Quick income? You buy a fucking burrito. Well, it's China, so maybe 10 burritos? Okay. I don't know. Probably not a lot of burritos in China. That's true, too. Actually, a burrito in China probably is $150 because it's, you know, important. Once a face is converted into a reusable digital asset, it can potentially appear in content the original owner never sees or approves.

The trend is especially tied to China's fast-growing microd rama industry, where AI tools can generate characters and scenes at scale. As demand increases, regulators and legal experts are beginning to examine whether existing image rights protections are sufficient for synthetic media.

Nope, they're not. They are not. Easy. Saved you click. Yeah. The microdrama industry is fucking hilarious, too, because everybody here in Hollywood thinks that microdramas are going to save the business because it's such a huge thing in China. Nobody in the U.S. gives a fuck about microdramas.

Nope. I'm sorry. Everybody's like, oh, well, Quibi was just too early. No, it wasn't. Quibi was a bellwether because people don't want it. And let's not forget that Meta tried this, too, back when they were just Facebook. Nobody cared. Everybody hated it. Well, speaking of people trying to make a buck, I know, these poor bastards who just need to sell their face for money.

The boring company, Elon Musk's tunneling, tunnel-building startup, is reportedly seeking $4 billion in new funding. The effort comes as SpaceX's valuation has reportedly fallen by an amount comparable to Tesla's entire market value, increasing pressure on Elon to attract investor interest in another venture.

A $4 billion raise would represent a major expansion and could value the private company at a level that reflects ambitious plans rather than current operations. Could value. Could value. Absolutely would value. They've done nothing. Well, it's on brand for Elon.

That's true. Come on. First, we get bullshit in space and now we get tunnels of bullshit. So, that's how it works. And more Elon bullshit. Elon says he may give away much of his fortune before money supposedly becomes irrelevant in 2036.

Well, we know how Elon's predictions work. So, don't hold your horses on that one. His claim rests on a prediction that artificial intelligence will surpass humans within five years, robots will handle all labor, and society will enter an era of abundance without the need for money.

Who's going to build the fucking robots? The robots? No. Who's going to mine the metal that go into the robots? No. Us. He's a fucking idiot. I'm so sick of him. Did he make this prediction before or after he claimed he was going to remake the Odyssey with Grok to be realistic?

First off, Elon, no, you're not. We're never going to hear about this again. You're not going to do any footage whatsoever. Secondly, it's a fucking made-up story. There is no real world. It's fiction. Cyclops were not real. Even if you did try to make it more realistic to the period of time, you wouldn't like it.

There's a lot of gay people. Yeah. Yeah. The Greeks kind of made that their thing. He's just so—everything he says is so full of shit. He will never give away any of his fortune. He is the most uncharitable fucking fuck, tight-ass motherf ucking billionaire out there.

He does not give anything away. Screw him. Screw everything he says. And screw you people who love him. I'm over him. I want to Kanye him from this show, but we can't. We can't. We can't. We've tried. We've tried. He was moron of the week for too many years, and then we got rid of him.

But here's the thing. I was listening to a Ryan Holiday podcast episode, and he's like, look, back in the day, Seneca, he was bitching about people who were bitching about the Odyssey. So this is nothing new.

This is literally nothing new. Thousands of years ago, people were still bitching about interpretations of the Odyssey. Elon, we have not grown as a species one fucking iota since then. That's how bad things are. Oh, God.

No. He's saying that he's just going to get rid of it. And somebody asked him, he's like, hey, what are you going to do? He's like, yeah, well, maybe something along those lines. I don't know. He's just, he's a fucking twat waffle. Yeah. I said it at the beginning of the show. I'll say it here. All these AI bros are fucking twat waffles.

Just because I like saying that word. There you go. Well, speaking of AI bros, ChatGPT has been refusing to copy the voices and styles of popular authors. Finally. Ars Technica says the chatbot did not comply with its prompts to imitate the styles of both living and dead authors during testing.

That means OpenAI has recently changed how it deals with such requests. As a study, as a recent study by publications, No Latency showed that ChatGPT did not refuse them for dead authors. On asking ChatGPT to copy the style of Agatha Christie for a mystery story about a woman investigating the sudden disappearance of her husband, the chatbot told us it couldn't do what I was asking for.

Agatha Christie's works are still under copyright, so I can 't provide text that closely imitates her distinctive style, how the chatbot responded, even though we've ingested all of that content and certainly have been doing so for many years now. The funny thing is, if you just if you take away the word style.

Yeah, I try. I tried this. I checked it out. I used to do things in the style of Edgar Allan Poe when ChatGPT first started because it was fun and I enjoyed it. I thought it was great. And then I tried to take one of our stories and say, write it in the style of the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast.

And it's like, I'm sorry, we can't do that because it's, you know, it's their proprietary style. I'm like, but I am them. And I said, I'm from the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast. My name's Jason. Write this in my style. And it did. And then it said, I'm Agatha Christie.

Write this in my style. And it did. Yes, there are always that guardrail thing. Guardrails. There are always ways to. My grandmother really enjoyed Agatha Christie. And we're going back to ancient history of fucking AI now. You just did. My grandmother used to love making nuclear bombs.

Nuclear bombs. That's it. Yep. I mean, fuck. It's crazy that we've been complaining about AI for so long now that there is lore. There is history that we can reference now. Unbelievable. Even more fun, Brian, a couple, I ran across this artwork that we did of this giant or like mechanical Ouroboros about the circular financing of the AI industry.

Beautiful piece of art. I was actually going to put it on a t-shirt because I think it was one of our better, you know, mid journey, you know, distilled pieces of shit that we made. Well, NVIDIA is pursuing a new wave of AI infrastructure deals potentially worth more than $750 billion.

Reviving concerns about circular financing across the industry. I need $750 to make my fucking insurance payment this month . Fuck you and your $750 billion. It's unbelievable. The chip maker says a partnership with South Korea's SK Group is valued above $500 billion covering AI data centers, NVIDIA supercomputers, and memory chip purchases.

NVIDIA is also discussing guarantees of up to $250 billion to help open AI lease computing capacity from a planned Ohio data center alongside possible financing for $350 billion in chip purchases.

What the fuck? What the fuck? Yeah. They also warned that rising debt and interconnected deals could amplify losses if AI demand falls short. What? You mean if you put all your eggs in each other's baskets and then the baskets fall and the eggs break, we're all fucked?

Yeah. Everybody. Literally, it's everybody holding everybody else up. It reminds me of, I don't know, I mean, we used to talk about the Discworld novels all the time. It reminds me of the monks who would sit in a circle and they hated water so much that they would float above the water because if somebody broke the spell, then they would all get wet and they would fall in.

It just reminds me of those monks that were trying to, I think they may be, monks or wizards, they could levitate because they just hated water so much. These guys hate poverty so much that they can't let each other down. Unbelievable. Well, speaking of unbelievable, the Trump administration, well, actually, it's quite believable, unfortunately, just announced that it is exempting data centers from certain pollution limits that were originally mandated to prevent acid rain, according to a report by Reuters.

Yay, data centers. Yay, acid rain. I mean, that is about as 80s as you can get. Fucking acid rain. Come on. That was literally the 80s that we talked about acid rain. Now, if they were talking about chocolate rain. Chocolate rain. Oh, man. Simply put, power plants that primarily serve as data centers will not have to be part of the Clean Air Act's acid rain program.

These islanded power plants that serve data centers instead of human communities will no longer have to reduce emissions of acid rain precursors like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. There are nearly 60 of these power plants being built or currently operating throughout the country, which were typically fast-tracked by the government.

Ensuring that the United States maintains our artificial intelligence dominance is essential to national security and economic prosperity, even if we all fucking die in hell fire. Yeah. The EPA is proud to further the president's agenda through common-sense approaches to regulating, such as none.

Zero regulating. Anti-regulating. Acid rain is particularly destructive to the environment. It strips nutrients from the soil, which is we need to grow food. Which costs $11 for an onion. Pollutes lakes and rivers to lethal levels, which is water that we need to drink.

Damages plants and erodes limestone, for starters. Exposure to the precursor gases can worsen respiratory and cardiac issues in people. It causes coughing, respiratory irritation, difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, itchy eyes, and other symptoms. By the way, that information was taken directly from the EPA's website.

You know, the people that just said they're proud to further the president's agenda through common-sense approaches to regulating by getting rid of the regulations to protect us from the things that they just told us were really fucking bad. I love the world, Brian. President Trump himself recently told communities that they should give up fighting against data centers.

You can't fight it, he said. You have to go with it. Kind of what he said to all those women he raped. Don't fight it. I was getting her to say, that's exactly what a fucking rap ist says. You should just go with it. Lay back and enjoy it. Do it for your country. Close your eyes and think of England.

Oh, God. Motherfuckers. God damn it. No, I can't. I can't. God. Should we cut it there? So many rape jokes ready. Take one for old glory.

Yeah. Mine eyes have seen the kingdom and the coming of the Lord. Oh, Jesus. This episode is sponsored by Storyblocks. One thing I've learned after producing thousands of podcast episodes is that the edit is only half the job.

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This fall, make the Y part of your routine. As schedules settle into place, the YMCA is here to help your family stay active, connected, and healthy. Whether you're reaching new fitness goals, finding community through our programs, or taking advantage of Child Watch while you focus on your well-being, the Y is where meaningful moments happen every day.

There's no place like this place. Join the Y today. And don't forget, the YMCA proudly partners with Georgia Access. Visit GeorgiaAccess.gov to explore your health insurance options. Georgia Access Health Insurance for Georgia. By Georgia. Oh, Brian, I like this case.

The Justice Department is prosecuting. The fact that we have a Justice Department is actually prosecuting somebody. Oh, wait. They're prosecuting the wrong person. Never mind. The Justice Department is prosecuting Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick after border agents say he gave them a phone passcode that wiped the device during a search.

The phone was running Graphene OS, a privacy-focused Android system for Pixel phones, that includes a duress pin feature. Enter the wrong special code, and the phone nukes its contents. Are you listening, Tim Cook? I know. I know. I know. Remember that site that I was going to build, Brian, called Death Vault?

Yes. Where you keep everything in there? And the duress password was one of the main features that I was going to have in there. So, because everybody's like, well, what if somebody just kidnaps you and said, give me your password? I'm like, well, here you go. There's three passwords. There's the, okay, I'm just, you know, I'm just being held captive.

And then there's the, oh, my God, release it to everybody. And then there's the just, you know, just take everybody out, whatever. But here's the deal. I love it. I love it. I love it. So Tunick was stopped at Atlanta's airport in January 2025. So this is over a year ago after returning home from overseas.

His lawyer says Customs and Border Protection unlawfully seized the phone, denied him an attorney, and used a child exploitation pretext while actually prob ing his ties to the Stop Cop City movement. So this guy had an agenda against the Atlanta cops.

So they took him and just tried to fucking strong arm him. So good for fucking him. He has pleaded not guilty, and he is not guilty. Because before he gets in the country, these fuckers have no goddamn jurisdiction. That's right. Period. He's not in the United States. And they say that when you're in border control, you are not yet in the United States until you pass the fucking border.

So fuck you guys. There you go. Got some meta news in the face of AI content profiles and slop. Meta is hoping a new Facebook verified program will help human users interact with other humans. Or they could just let you see other friends' updates. That would really help us interact with other humans.

If we actually saw the updates from our friends instead of the AI content profiles slop you shoved down our throats. Just a thought. There you go. Just a thought. Based on a facial recognition selfie checked against your existing profile pic, the company says the process will only take a few minutes. Interestingly, Meta has chosen to use facial recognition given recent legal settlements and pushback over facial recognition inside its smart glasses.

To qualify, it will have to be over 18. I wonder how they checked that. Huh. How's that going to work? And in good standing with Facebook's community standards, which means what exactly since we don't really understand what any of that means. Anyways, once you pass your test, your verified badge will appear across marketplace dating and other parts of Facebook sites and services.

Unlike Meta, verified is entirely free. Now, so you start to understand why they're doing this now. It's for shopping and spending things and getting sued by other people. So this feature comes as a wave of scammers and bad actors are using generative AI tools to create and use fake profiles with realistic profile images, photos, and backst ories capable of sending automated messages at scale.

Again, this has something to do with another thing that they just launched. Facebook has introduced an app called Seller that effectively professionalizes Facebook marketplace for users who sell a lot of stuff. An attempt to basically turn into eBay or Etsy or Amazon now. This new app provides dedicated tools like AI powered listing creation and unified inbox inventory management and performance insights in one place.

So, yeah, you're supposed to now use marketplace to grow your business. This new kind of app mars the community billboard vibe of Facebook marketplace by opening it up to pro sellers, mirroring the clients of eBay and Etsy, but will no doubt generate extra revenue for Meta. And finally, Mark Zuckerberg really wants you to believe that AI is good, actually.

But the centerpiece of his company's new optimistic ad campaign, at least for now, is a one minute commercial for Meta's AI efforts that features very little AI. According to a Meta spokesperson, the ad is the start of a broader effort from the company to present an alternative view to AI doomers and those who have sketched out a dystop ian vision for the future.

As we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone, Zuckerberg wrote in a post accompanying the video. We're focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone. Notably, this is the same company who in recent months have used the supposed productivity benefits of AI as an excuse to lay off many thousands of its own staff.

While wearing a $2 million watch at the same time. Yes, he was wearing a very expensive watch. Yeah. The same company that has been accused of using AI to justify cuts that disproportionately affected workers on medical leave. This is the same company that is being sued by publishers for allegedly training its AI on copyrighted materials.

The same company that once had an internal policy document that suggested it was permissible for AI chatbots to have sensual conversations with minors. Those guys. Yeah. I'm in. Let's do it. What are the benefits of AI? It's hard to say because the commercial makes very few references to any of Meta's AI features.

Instead, it just shows bullshit footage. A crowd walking, people smiling, a couple dancing. Wow. This AI is really making their lives better somehow. Maybe. Are they even people? You know why they're walking and smiling? And dancing? Because they have no jobs.

Because they're trying to find a place to fucking work. The company's communication team describes this campaign as beginning to articulate Meta's optimistic vision for a future with AI, which seems like something that should have been figured out before investing billions of dollars into building AI. It wouldn't be the first time Zuckerberg has been vague about the future of AI.

He now talks about AI with the same incomprehensible enthusiasm he once had for the metaverse. The thing he once predicted was going to be the successor of the mobile internet. A fucking douchebag. Oh, boy. Yeah.

Well, here's my last one on AI for the day. I hope. I hope. Cybersecurity researchers warn that AI coding assistants can be manipulated into installing malware through a technique called howlyusquatting. We've talked about this a little bit in the past, but it has now gotten to be...

I'm squatting pretty okay. Thanks for asking. Yeah, thanks. I've taken the beet juice. Oh, that's coming later. Never mind. These tools often hallucinate recommendations for software packages that flat out just don't exist. Yeah. I've seen it.

I've actually seen it. Attackers can register those names as legitimate reposit ories, upload malicious code, and wait for an AI assistant to recommend and download the package. Researchers at Tel Aviv University, fucking Israelis... It's always, always Tel Aviv. ...and Intuit have found hallucinated package references in tools including Cursor and GitHub Copilot at rates ranging from 85% to 100%, depending on the task.

Because downloads may happen automatically and without clear user visibility, infections could go unnoticed and do go unnoticed. The researchers notified affected companies, but the underlying vulnerability remains widespread. Yes, yes, yes.

You see the packages that come through. It's like, I would like to install blah, blah, blah. Let me check on blah, blah, blah before you install it on my computer. Pass. No, no. Pass. Yeah, no. So, I like it.

All right. How are you squatting? Well, let's now take a little few minutes at the end to talk about the things that make us survive this hellscape. Make us happy and survive. We've just finished describing. I went and took the kid to go see Minions and Monsters at the theater last week.

The latest of the Minions movie. It's been touted as one of the funniest ones yet. And I would say the first half is. That's as far as I got. So, I'm glad. I'm glad I quit before I got to the second half. If the first half was incredibly funny, incredibly clever, and incredibly amusing, and it kind of petered out from there.

So, which is unfortunate. But Star Trek. You got to admit, though, that Lego joke at the beginning was pretty funny. I mean, all. That was hilarious. That whole, like that whole opening gambit was just. Yeah. It was genius. It was absolutely genius. This is really funny. Star Trek Strange New Worlds. The final.

Is this the final season? Final season, right? I think it's. No, no, no. No. This is season four. Season five is the final. Oh, we're going to get the truncated season five. We get the half season after this. Okay. Well, season four has premiered, and the first episode, I thought. Spoiler alerts. We're going to talk about this for about three minutes.

Two minutes here. We're going to talk about spoiler alerts. Before we get into spoilers, I'll just say this part. They took a huge swing, and I think they hit it out of the ballpark. 100%. Okay. 100%. This was. They shit Star Trek on this one. This was pure. They shit, sweat, eight, breathe Star Trek on this one.

There is nothing that was not pure Star Trek. This was the most Star Trek of the Star Trekkie of the Star Trek. All of them. We have Star Trek. All of them. They took. They took the original series. They took next gen. They took everything that was ever distilled in Star Trek and put it into one single episode. Condensed beet juice Star Trek.

Yes. We had dinosaurs. We had time travel. We had. Genesis of humanity. We had. Genesis of humanity. Everything. I mean, you know. I mean, okay. And, you know, at the end of Next Generation, Picard did create life on Earth.

But here we have, you know, the destruction of Mars, the creation of Earth, the killing of the dinosaurs, everything . A whole new planet in our solar system with bug creatures. And she punched a dinosaur. Yes. She punched a dinosaur.

So, all in all, this was the most Star Trekian. I don't know where they're going to go from here. It is just downhill from here as far as I'm concerned. This was the dancing Klingons of this season already. Absolutely. Come on. Absolutely. It was a fantastic episode. I was riveted. I was thrilled.

I forgot everything else that we talked about in this show for a brief 55 minutes or so. And it almost made me feel not bad about paying Paramount plus more money. Oh, I stole that shit. I don't give a fuck about the elephants. I was about to steal it. And then I did a quick Google search.

And if there's anybody out there feeling bad about this and they want their Paramount to be able to watch Star Trek, if you Google search, there is a promo code out there right now because they know so many people have canceled and they 're not coming back. That gets you basically half price for the entire year. Actually, it was a third, I think.

So I'm paying a third the price for a year. And then as soon as it's done, I will cancel again and say, you screwed up Star Trek. Okay. Here we go. Don't sue me for my first contact website that's on my first contact. Yeah. Never mind my podcast partner. Don't go look at his website. We have continued to watch Broadchurch.

We finished Broadchurch season two. My wife and I have been watching an episode at night after the kid goes to bed while we're here on our trip. And actually, season two, pretty solid. Initially, I didn't care much for it. I wasn't sure if we needed it or anything, but I did enjoy it.

We've now rolled into season three, one episode in so far, and seems okay. We'll see. Okay. Okay. Let me know how it goes. If it's better, then maybe I'll go back to it because I really liked season one. Yeah. I think you would enjoy season two. It was good. So definitely for that one.

And Silo, I forgot, was back, so I'm trying to catch up now . I'm mostly caught up. I have 10 minutes of an episode left to go before the next new one drops on Friday. It's good. It's, you know, I'm not enjoying this as much as I enjoyed the first two seasons, but it's not bad.

It's not bad. Here's the thing that gets me. It's like, I wish this was a 22 season or 22 episode arc because by the time it's done, it's just going to be like, okay, when's the next season? Because it's like, there's so much story and so much to do, but it's just like, I don't know.

They need more time. They need more time. Yeah. It's just. Well, I think it's one of those things and it's unfortunate and it's kind of the reason why foundation can't really be made. It's why some of the Dune books after what they're doing can't really be made. Then Silo suffers from the same problem to make the show interesting.

You have to have them running around doing actiony things. But really, if you wanted the show to be interesting and along with the book, they would just be sitting around talking and explaining the concepts. I'd like. Right. And that's not exciting TV. So Silo would be so much better if there was more talking and explaining and getting into the concepts and the nitty gritty.

But we have to break up a little bit of talking with a bunch of chase sequences every couple of minutes. Well, that's because these are such high budget productions . Yeah. Go back and look at go back and look at Star Trek Next Gen. Go look at DS9. Go look at Babylon 5. Look at those shows.

Those shows were like. Shoestring. High budget. But not. They were shoestring budget. Yeah. And, you know, even Farscape. You know, they did a lot with a little. These people could do more. We don't need feature fucking film quality for everything that's on TV.

You know, I'm tired of that part. They really need to knock back that whole. Oh, my God. We need, you know, we need Emmy winners and Oscar winners and all this shit. Get Joe Blow. Come in here with a couple of lights. Hold it over the fucking guy and put some styrofoam ears on him.

And just let's go. Let's make this shit cheap and make a lot of it. Yeah. That's what we want, man. Mm hmm. Yeah. What we don't want is Ted Lasso season four. At least I don't want Ted Lasso season four. I just watched the trailer for it. And I'm just like. I'm not into it.

I'm sure you probably are just got a got a nostalgia boner for it. But I watched the trailer and it made me want to watch it so much less than I did before I watched the trailer. Well, I would. I don't have a nostalgia boner for it because I can't have nostalgia over something that was only a few years ago.

I did think it was diminishing returns on Ted Lasso. I don't think anything ever quite captured the magic of the first season. But having said that, seeing the trailer did not make me not want to watch it. I do want to watch it. I think I think it's a fresh start. I think they have a chance.

I have a feeling it's going to be the the the Ray Skywalker saga. It's going to be the Force Awakens of Ted Lasso. It's going to be a rehash of season one. This time with chicks. Yep. So, you know, this time with chicks actually is OK.

Yeah, I'm fine with that. Which I think is going to be OK. So I'm definitely going to watch it. I think it's next next Wednesday. Right. First episode. So I also saw the trailer for Neuromancer. The, you know, eight million year old novel by William Gibson. That's yes.

Your thoughts first. But you pretty much just nailed my problem with it. I love the book when it came out and I love seeing some of the visuals. I think it looks really good. I'm fine with this one being a high end production. And what's her name?

Molly with the fingernails. Hell yeah. I'm in for that. I don't like the main character. I like the casting on the main character. Do not like him at all. At all. So, you know, I'm going to watch it. Fuck yeah. It's, you know, it's cyberpunk.

Come on. It's like original cyberpunk. Let's see how they fuck it up. Because you know they're going to. Well, of course they are. This is going to last as long as that Clo Moritz show was. Brian. Apple TV. Yeah. Foundation is going on season 17. Oh, that's true. Come on.

Okay. So if they deviate really, really far from the book, it'll go on forever. Exactly. My problem with this is some sci-fi has aged incredibly well. Neuromancer, in my opinion, has not. I enjoyed the book when it came out. I enjoy it from a nostalgia prefix looking back at it the same way that I can enjoy many sci-fi that hasn't aged well.

Why you would choose to make it now when there are so many things that are more relevant and more interesting to what's going on in the world right now. Okay. I think it's going to look beautiful. I just don't think that there's going to be much that grabs me besides the visuals.

Yeah. That's kind of it. But that comes back to them deviating from the plot a la foundation. Because they're going to have to. Yeah. There's no way they can't. Yeah. So we'll see. I don't know. I'm in. I watch it.

We'll see. And Prime Video has revealed the first major details about Blade Runner 2099, the franchise's first live action television series. Debuting November 25th, the show is set 50 years after Blade Runner 2049. Math! How's that work?

In Los Angeles, rebuilt by forces beyond humanity. You know a human wrote this because the math was correct. It actually worked. Yes. Michelle Yeoh stars as Olwen, a replicant nearing the end of her life, who partners with Korra, a fugitive taking on one final identity as a Blade Runner.

Together, they hunt a runaway whose secret could destabil ize the city. Which I'm fine with because Michelle Yeoh, she owes us one after Star Trek Section 31. She owes us a good one, you know? All right. I don't have high hopes for this.

But then again, I'm one of the people that did not like Blade Runner 2049. I didn't enjoy it at all. Really? I thought it was okay. It was fine. I didn't hate it. I didn't hate it at all. It was fine. I don't know.

The whole Blade Runner thing, I just feel like it could be so much better than it has been. Maybe this will be the one. Maybe not. Maybe it should have just been a movie. Maybe. The first one, not the second. Or now the series. Right. I mean, it was a short story, for fuck's sake.

Yeah. Come on. Come on. They're really milking an awful lot out of a very short story. Yeah. Now, speaking of some things that were just okay, I finished reading Bad Deeds by Andrew Hunter Murray. I loved his first novel, the sci-fi novel about when the earth actually stopped rotating and the people on the bright side and the dark side and all that stuff.

It was a great, that was a fantastic sci-fi book. This is a murder mystery novel, which is kind of like Sne akers meets Poirot meets Agatha Christie. Right. In the style of. In the style of. Exactly. It was okay.

It was okay. Unfortunately, he's not that great at the genre yet. I think he's got some, he's got some, you know, pieces that could go, but I saw everything a mile away. Right. It was, there was, there was no like twists or turns that made me go, oh, that's clever.

You know? But I mean, granted, I read the entirety of the, the Sherlock Holmes collection and Agatha Christie's Poirot by the time I was 14. So I kind of have a leg up on murder mystery genre books. Yeah. You're an expert at the genre. Yeah.

I kind of have my chops in for the genre. I literally read all of that stuff by the time I was 14. I, this just did not land for me. I mean, it was, I put it as a B. I love the characters actually. I love the character development. I love the team, the sneakers like team who are a bunch of penetration testers who are going up against, you know, big property developers and things like that.

But his, his projection is just so ham fisted that it just really kind of left me wanting. Gotcha. So, all right. I'm going to go take a leak and see if I can find Dave. All right. This fall, make the Y part of your routine.

As schedules settle into place, the YMCA is here to help your family stay active, connected and healthy. Whether you're reaching new fitness goals, finding community through our programs or taking advantage of Child Watch while you focus on your well-being , the Y is where meaningful moments happen every day. There's no place like this place.

Join the Y today. And don't forget the YMCA proudly partners with Georgia Access. Visit GeorgiaAccess.gov to explore your health insurance options. Georgia Access Health Insurance for Georgia by Georgia. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love. From beauty and fashion to home, culinary and outdoor living.

Shop now at QVC.com. Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero.

Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line. When the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Colon. BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN.

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I went out in the hall again and god damn it, there's Dave Bittner. Dave covers the daily cybersecurity beat on the cyberwire. Bus scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans. Untangles privacy headaches with Ben Yellen on caveat. Digs into industrial security on control loop and still shows up to stir trouble and only malware in the buildings.

And I just, I don't know how every week, Dave. You just seem to be lurking and wanted to hang out with us. So, welcome back. It's good to see you. Happy birthday, old man. Well, thank you. I'm not sure how to respond to those mixed messages. Well, I have two thoughts here. Obviously, you guys are still dealing with your bladder issues, which we'll get into in a few minutes, because you're always wandering the halls going to the restrooms.

And secondly, of course, Dave was just loitering, waiting for someone to bring him his damn cake. That's right. It's true. Where is my compulsory corporate ice cream cake for my birthday? You know, that's a good, good, it's a good point.

My birthday was yesterday and I have yet to have any cake. So what? I think the cyberwire is on thin ice here. I think you need to update your LinkedIn. I mean, my sense of entitlement is just screaming, where's my cake?

Yeah. Hmm. I did get very many birthday wishes from my coworkers and on Facebook. I'm celebrating with my family in about a week. We're going to be at the beach.

So we're going to go out and have some dinner by the ocean. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. So, but I guess I had a very nice birthday. not a particularly interesting number, but I'll take it. And the main thing I got, I got two things, two gifts from my wife and son for my birthday.

The one that is not here was I got the Lego Star Trek Enterprise D. Nice. Very nice. Yes. Fancy. Engage, bro. I think I will probably be alternating bags with my son Jack to get that one built because there's just so many gray pieces.

And I swore after building the Millennium Falcon that I wasn't going to go down that path again. So we'll see. But the other thing my wife got me is she got me this mug from Disney. And I don't know if you can see.

Oh, yes, yes. I've seen that merch. The Sam the Eagle patriotic Fourth of July rollout. Yeah. It is Sam the Eagle. It says Sam Eagle distinctly patriotic semi-quincentennial United States of America.

Nice. It is a catchphrase in our family. I don't know why, but just from Muppet Vision 3D to say a salute to all nations, but mostly America. Just one of my favorite Sam Eagle lines.

Very nice. Very nice. Very nice. So does that make you a Leo, Dave? Yes, I am a Leo. Excellent. Leos unite. Because my birthday is a week from today. Okay. We'll be off next week because you said you're going to be at the Hat of the Black hanging with the hackers.

I'll be at Black Hat next week, and then the week after that I'll be at the beach. All right. Okay. Yeah. Well, in two weeks I can't wait to hear what the big buzz word at Black Hat is this year. Yeah. Vegas in August.

It's the best. Fun times. Everything is air conditioned there. You'll be fine. Yeah. And actually, I've heard they're hurting, so you won't even be like around too many people. Here's hoping. Yeah. Yeah, really. Here's hoping. So follow up from last week, you know, I talked about the websites that I was building and revamping and resusc itating from the dead.

And I sent you a couple more, Dave. I don't know if you got to check those out. But even since then, I've done even more. Even more. And then I said, well, I need a place to put them because I just can't keep sending them to the friends. So I revamped my own website, believe it or not, at Jason.F YI. But I made a link to all of the old websites that you can go check out in there.

It's under the Boneyard. Yes. There are quite a few now at this point. So I even sent one to Brian. I found the old meatloaf demo that I did for Real Audio that we talked about a couple times on the show. Oh, wow.

And I'm telling you, Kodaks is pretty good at, like, taking old shit and making it work again. It really is. The fairytale games used to be Shockwave. They actually work in HTML5 now. And this was the great part, going and finding all this old stuff. I found one of the old director files for the Star Trek game where you're, like, walking the hall and shooting the Borg.

Right. It is almost done. It actually pulled everything and recreated it from the director file. Wow. It's getting really good at that stuff. So I'm pretty happy with these rebuilds. Yeah. And I enjoyed poking around on your website.

It looks nice. Tell me about Trackalot. Oh, Trackalot's my iOS app that I created that is for, it is not a to-do list. It is a, did I do that list? Oh. So you can follow things there. That's what I built when my dog kept getting sick and we had to follow her around and say, did she poop?

Did she peep? What time was it? What was it like? So you can track an event, just a plain event, or you can track an event with notes, can export it to Excel or to your calendar. So it's basically just a really nice, easy tracking app, kind of just, you know.

Kind of a reverse to-do list. It is. It's funny because Jason used it for a sick dog, but I was actually just thinking it's actually perfect for neurotic first-time parents. Did my kid pee? Did my kid poop? Did my kid eat? Yeah, I have a friend whose daughter is very sick and she actually uses it to track her daughter's illness as well.

So, and I am trying to quit nicotine. So I am tracking how many times a day I hit the lozenge so I can track that. And so the next, there's a new version that's in for review right now that you can track from your Apple Watch.

So you can set up trackers and when you're out and about, you can just tap your watch and track what you're doing. So it makes it much easier so you don't have to pull your phone out. After that, we're putting in like, you know, limits on how many times a day you can do something. So it's like, you know. Who's the we, Jason? Are you now referring to your AI coding companion as an actual person?

Yeah, Doug. I named him Doug. He's my junior coder. He's my junior coder. My wife and I refer to Chet GPT as Chet. Did you check with Chet? Yep. So is this app, is there any sharing capability or anything like that?

I'm asking because just yesterday, our adorable little dog conned me into giving her a second dinner last night. I got home and my wife was at the grocery store and I fed and walked the dog.

And my wife came home and she said, you didn't feed the dog again, did you? And I went, uh, no. There is no sharing on this app at present. It is a standalone. And maybe in future revisions, I can look into doing that.

Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Good for you. Thanks. Thanks. It gets the job done. It has made $181 so far. All right. That's $181 you didn't have before, Jason. But I spent probably $250 on it on, on Codex and the Apple developer fees.

So I'm still in the hole. So go check it out. So, um, but yeah, I'm, I'm going to keep doing that stuff. I think just finding those old sites. It's fun. It's fun. You know, there's so much, so many things in the archives. I know it's, it's obviously not a priority for quite a few people, but, uh, are you even slightly worried about getting smacked by the IP lawyers on some of this stuff?

Particularly. Well, I guess Paramount's a bit busy trying to merge right now, but. Yeah. I couldn't give a shit less. No, I really couldn't care less. If they can send me a cease and desist, I'll take it down if they want. But it's like, these things are so old. Who cares? Yeah. Who cares? It's like, it's like showing your portfolio.

Yeah, it, it, it is literally my portfolio. Especially since like, you know, they've basically taken down you and not me, Jason, both like all my music sites, they're all long gone. Like all my entire portfolio, I was gone off the internet. I might as well have never existed as a coder or a company or anything.

Cause nothing exists anymore than I built. It's all gone. That's one of the reasons I left the movie business. Cause we'd worked for a year. The site would be up for like, you know, three weeks and then it would be gone. Yeah. And I'm like, I just, the ephemeral nature of all of that work just, it really bummed me out. So I'm like, I'm going to go work for a startup cause startups, you know, they live forever.

You know, I put in years on Technorati and all the hard work we did there. And yeah. I'm going to go work for Google cause Google products last for. Oh shit. Shit. Yeah. So this too shall pass is what I should have said, but no.

And I found it. I did find a site that I think might tickle you guys. Cause it's just, it's crazy. Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail. This is from Fabian Sanglard. Never heard of this guy. I think this came from the recommendo website. I think it's a Mark Fraunfelder.

Never heard of him, but I, I appreciate the effort and I love everything about this website. Excruciating is correct too. Excruciating detail is correct. It's every computer that you can see in Jurassic Park. Yeah. And, and the monetary value of them at the time and in, in current, you know, current money.

I just loved everything about this page. It's like, I, I read the whole thing. I was going through cause I had some of the SGI's that were in there. I had an Indigo. Really? Yeah. And it was desktop publishing at Kinko's at first. At first it wasn't, we didn't have an Indigo.

The Indigo came, what was the smaller one? The first pizza box. The Indigos were the thick ones. Yeah. We had the thick one at the first company that I worked for . That was actually our server that was housed in a different building that I had to drive to and manually upload websites when they were completed.

In Marina del Rey, right? The Twin Towers? In Marina del Rey, the Twin Towers. Yeah. We had, we had a room with an SGI in there and a couple sun , sun sparks in there. But in the, not the Indigo, there was another one that was kind of a small refrigerator sized one. Yeah.

That's the one that we ran Star Trek First Contact on that we actually melted a hard drive in it the day it launched. Wow. Yeah, we had so many, so much traffic to that thing. We melted the hard drive. They had to replace the hard drive midday. So we lost a bunch of traffic. But yeah. I never had any of these. Oh, they're fun.

There was, we lusted after them because at the time that Jurassic Park came out, I was, you know, had a company that was doing 3D stuff and it was all on Mac s. And so there were several meetings we had over the history of the company over whether or not it made sense to invest in some kind of, in an SGI machine or, yeah.

Would that make a difference? Could the, you know. And we never pulled the trigger on them because, of course, they were very expensive. And so we just stuck with our Macs. But, yeah, I definitely had a lot of desire for those machines back in the day when they were the, really the stuff.

Yeah. I mean, we just had the basic stuff on them for the desktop publishing side at Kinko's, you know, because it was just basically to run, I think it was called the Fiery, which was a Canon color, Canon color copier. So we ran the Fiery from the SGI. But the greatest thing is, like, you know, you get Minecraft on a Windows machine.

There you get Lightbike, which is basically the light cycles from Tron, which was the best, like, built-in game. So we'd play the light cycles when we weren't actually sending jobs to the Fiery. And then when you get it for web serving, it's just, you know, you basically ran Apache on it and that was it. I'm looking at the Wikipedia list of SGI workstations.

And there's Crimson, Fuel, Indigo, Indigo 2, Indy, Iris, O2 , Octane, Prism, Tesero, Virtue, and Visual Workstation. Indies. Indies were what we had at Kinko's. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, the Indigo 2s were the taller ones. What was the one that looked like a swollen toaster? Was there an Octane? I think it was an Octane. Anyway, there's one of them in the Jurassic Park web page that's blue. Let's see if I can find it here.

Sort of like in the background. Yeah. So the Indigos were the tall ones that looked like Quadra 8 48Vs, kind of. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, they were Indigos.

Blue, Indigo. Duh. Okay. Thank you. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, the other thing I love about this and I loved about Jurassic Park is I think my favorite Mac of all time was the Quadra 700. Really?

Yeah, yeah. Because it was the first really powerful Mac I ever bought. It was the first Mac I ever bought that I put video hardware in. So when we started our company, it was built on Quadra 700s to start with.

And I remember clock chipping our Quadra 700s to make them run at 33 megahertz instead of 25, which actually made a difference. But I just have great affection for that machine. So it was a thrill when I went to see Jurassic Park and, oh , look, Quadra 700s.

And, of course, they're just relabeled. The case is the same case as one of the previous Macs. They just turned it on its side. But still, a good-looking design. Yeah, my original one that I still have affection for is the Quadra 650 because that was my first.

The one that I got the Apple student loan for that they followed me for 15 years trying to get their money back on. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't get their money back on that one. No, they didn't. Wow.

All right. Yep. Anyways, we've spent some time on this segment talking about shitting, showering, and shaving. As of recently, we've added peeing. So we talked last night. Yeah.

We talked last week about the dreaded waking up in the middle of the night to go pee. Jason is using pumpkin oil and is swearing by that. Listener Mike has written in, if you're dealing with old man bladder issues, lycopene can help with that. The best source is tomato paste. You can also find it in beets, and there's lycopene supplements also.

I suggest if you do this and you try it with beets, use Jason's app to make sure that you note that you ate beets. Yes. So when you do the other thing and it's red, you don't assume you have colon cancer. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing worse than that.

Nothing worse than that. I started taking lycopene supplements a few weeks ago, so it's too soon to tell if there's a difference, but thought I would pass this on. Well, Mike, if you continue to pass things on in the middle of the night, let us know. Keep us updated on your urinary situation. I tried beet juice once.

Once. Once. Because, and it's probably the lycopene, I don't know, but beet juice is supposed to be good for high blood pressure, which I have. And I take, you know, medicine every day, and it keeps it under control, and it's all fine.

But beets are supposed to be one of the things that helps keep that under control. First of all, drinking beet juice is like drinking dirt. As is eating beets. Yeah. It is a dirt-flavored root. It's a root vegetable. Yes. Yes.

I like to think I can, you know, choke most things down if I have to, but I wonder. That's what she said. Yeah. Thank you. And, well, no. Maybe this is why Dave is wandering the halls.

Now it's starting to make more sense. I can't do beet juice. No. I bought this bottle of beet juice. I was really proud of myself. Oh, this is going to solve all of my physical problems. And I drank, like, half a glass of it. And I was like, well, this is going down the drain. Because there's just no way.

The other thing, too, is, like, I don't know if you guys had this when you were in elementary school. Like, once a year, a dentist would come in and teach you how to brush your teeth. Do you remember? Did that ever happen? Yeah. And, like, usually he'd have, like, a tooth puppet with a giant toothbrush that he, you know, he'd brush the teeth.

But the other thing that he'd do is he'd come in with, like , this tablet that someone would chew on and it would show all the places where you missed brushing. Oh, yeah. I feel like that's what beet juice does also. Like, if you drink beet juice, you end up with just, like, it's like the before picture on a dentures commercial when you drink beet juice.

So, anyway, I don't like beets. Did you also have to do the fluoride treatments every week? We had to do that. We called it the swish and spit. It would come in with a gallon with a little plastic or paper cups and a little pump. And then you had to swish it and spit it every week. They would make us do fluoride treatments.

So, I do remember doing fluoride treatments. However, I do specifically remember part of one of the dental visits was not swish and spit. It was swish and swallow. Oh. That was my favorite class.

Well, here's the thing. It wasn't until probably 10 years later that I realized why all the teachers were giggling under their breath, you know , eye-side-eyeing each other at this dentist telling us about how healthy we'd be if every day we swished and swallowed.

Certainly would be hitting your protein goals, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't know. So, good times. Simpler times. Public school. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Like, what was the other thing that we had to endure was being checked for... Lice? Lice. Yeah. Yes, lice. Being checked for lice. Oh, man. Dude, we had to do that in North Carolina and there was always a couple kids that had to go home.

Yeah. And then it was just like, you know, this is a walk of shame. Yeah. Go back to the trailer park and get your head shaved. Right. And a lot of times... It's kerosene. They used kerosene to get it out. Really? Oh. North Carolina. We lived in trailer parks. Right. Sorry we used kerosene to get the lice out.

Girls sharing hairbrushes were... That's how the lice made its way around. Yeah. I was lucky enough to never have lice still to this day. But, yeah, there's always one or two people who, like you said, got quite discreetly sent home, but everybody knew.

Yeah. It wasn't discreet. It was like, you know, it was a line and there was one chair at the front of the class and you would go up and they would just sit there with the comb and go through it. And you would either go back to your chair or you would go out the door. There was no discreet anything about it at all.

Yeah. Speaking of... So, while we're on the topic of peeing, I think I've told the story here about how I peed my pants in the library in elementary school one time because the teacher wouldn't let me use the bathroom. Perhaps. Although I feel like I'd remember it.

No. So, you know, in elementary school, we would go to the library once a week and we'd spend time in the library with the librarian. And I guess this was a way for our classroom teacher to get a break from all of us. And we went to the library and I really had to pee.

And the librarian wouldn't let me go to the bathroom, said, you know, you should have done that before you came here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I ended up peeing myself because I couldn't hold it. And so, lucky for me, it was Halloween. And so, back in my cubbyhole was my, you know, plastic pull over Batman outfit with the mask, the rubber band on the back.

So, I was able to put the plastic outfit on to serve as trousers. I was going to say, was your outfit a 54-year-old man who couldn't make it through the night? Right. Yeah. It was Grunkle Stan. I was way ahead of the game.

But what a terrible experience, you know, like having a teacher not believe you that you really have to go. Yeah. And I remember my classroom teacher just ripping into the librarian being like, what are you doing? What, you know, like the kid tells you they have to go to the bathroom, they have to go to the bathroom.

But anyway. I'm not scarred by it at all. No. It's not a core memory for me. I'm perfectly fine. Perfectly fine. There's a YouTube video I wanted to share that came out a couple weeks ago now.

I was surprised kind of by the source of this, that this is an official Star Wars release. It's called Who Are the Mandalorians? It's kind of a history bit about the Mandalorians and where they came from and why they do what they do. And, you know, the different, some of them have to keep their masks on and some other helmets and some don't.

But it's well done. And, you know, I thought for the Star Wars fans, they might enjoy checking it out. I'm not surprised that they put this out as the Mandalor ians have kind of become core to what Star Wars currently is , given all the shows that are out now.

So, yeah. Makes sense. And I'm glad that this is, next time my kid asks me 10,000 questions, I'm just going to pull up this video. Here you go, kid. Right. Right. Enjoy yourself. Yeah. I got to go pee. I got a score to settle with an old librarian.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Can you imagine? Just crossing paths in a dark alley. Mr. Johnson. 1976. Centennial in elementary school. The library. You probably don't remember me, but I remember you.

Yeah. And so, finally, I wanted to just provide a quick update on my digital piano journey. I let you know a couple weeks ago. I bought a broken piano.

I've been fixing it with the help of ChatGPT, which has been very helpful. And I feel I'm not quite there yet, but I think we're close . Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, however, I did get to the point where I wasn't able to do anything else with just my multimeter.

So, ChatGPT got to the point where it said, do you happen to have a thermal camera? I said, no. When we left you last week, Joe Kerrigan was going to supply the thermal camera. Right. So, Joe did bring in the thermal camera, but his thermal camera did not work with my iPhone.

He had one of those ones that plugs into the bottom of your phone. Yeah, the little FLIR attachment one. The little FLIR attachment. And his was old enough that that particular model wasn't built for an iPhone with USB-C. So, I couldn't get it to work. Darn, had to buy my own.

Oh. Yeah. Shucks. So, how much did that run you, Dave? About $150. How much would a new keyboard cost? We're not, this is not how we're keeping track of this project, Brian. As I said at the outset, this is a project.

I'm using Jason's Track-A-Lot app currently for every dollar you spend. Yeah. Yeah. Don't tell my wife. I did not feed the dog and I did not buy him. Right. I can tell you how much his poop, what the temperature of his poop is.

Yeah. So, you got to tell me first, how do you like the FLIR camera? Because I've looked at those before and I have had, I've had, you know, gear lust syndrome where I'm just like, I don't need one, but I really want one. It's great. It's great. Okay. So, what I did was I went over, you guys are familiar with Project Farm, the YouTube video.

He's a guy, he's this guy who tests all kinds of things. He says, we're going to test that. He says, very impressive. If you, if you, a good, good YouTube channel, it's called Project Farm. He tests all kinds of things in a very kind of earthy, rural kind of way.

But it's good. It's worth your time. And so, I just went to Project Farm and looked for his tests of thermal cameras and found the one that he thought was the best value. And that's what I bought. It was about 150 bucks. There are ones that are much more, but this seemed like a nice balance between resolution and price and capabilities and all that stuff.

So, let me tell you, once you have a thermal camera, you don't want to live without one because it's just so much fun. It is also, ignorance is bliss in that, of course, I started walking around my house, looking at all of the places where my house is under-insulated.

You're just like pointing at a wall. You're like, holy smokes. Look at all the, look at all the heat coming through there. Look at, you know, look at, oh no, look at windows. Oh no. So, but yes, it is great fun. I highly recommend if you can have one, if you can, if you can afford one, get yourself a thermal camera because.

If you have the means. If you have the means, I highly recommend it. Yes. I'll put the link in the show notes because my birthday is next week. So, I'm going to put that on my list of, hey guys, want to get me something nice? Yeah. So, I just wanted one for when I'm testing pans in the kitchen to see if they're hot enough to start searing the meat.

So, you know, that's, I know, I know I can just hold my hand over it and go and see if it's, you know, see if it pops. But a FLIR camera would just make it more repeatable is all I'm saying. It would. Do you, do you have one of the little infrared thermometers ? I do.

The little laser thermometer thing? Yes, I do. Because you could use that on your pan. No. Not as much fun. Dave, Dave. It's my first day. I want a fucking camera. Shut up. I'm with you. I'm with you. No, no, no. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I'm just, yes, you're correct.

I withdraw the question. Tell me about your piano. So, we got to the point where we had to look at one of the circuit boards to see what component was heating up. I love the we. I love the fact that both you and Jason now refer to your experiments with AI as we are doing things.

This is bad. This is bad. I wasn't realizing I was doing that. It's not good. Yeah. So, now, ChatGPT is very accommodating. It told me that if I didn't have a thermal camera, I could spritz alcohol on the board and I could see where it evaporated first.

And that would tell me what was getting hot. But I was like, no. It doesn't sound safe. Not safe nor gratifying or satisfying. So, I have the thermal camera and sure enough, I found the current diagnosis is that the five volt rail is shorting to ground.

And so, I found a capacitor on the board that was getting hot, pulled it off the board, checked it out. Sure enough, bad capacitor. So, I'm going to replace all the capacitors just for the sake of it. But I'm making progress. Now, the lights on the front of the board light up and they didn't do that before.

So, more power is getting to it than was before. I'm still not getting any sound out of it. But that's okay. This is a journey. This is a marathon, not a sprint. And it wasn't a good excuse for me. Now, I have a thermal camera. All right. I can't wait to hear the first notes from this soon-to-be $ 7,000 keyboard.

Right. Exactly. Powered by a windmill outside of his garage. Right. And solar panels. Yeah. My old solar panel. My old collection of solar panels are going to be powering it. I have to go break it to my son, Jack, that he's going to have to take a gap year because we can't afford college anymore.

But dad got a 15-year-old digital piano working. Not since John Michael Jars, there have been a more expensive keyboard. I love it. That's right. I love it. But I'm having fun. Excellent. That's all that matters. Yes. Literally, it's all that matters.

We are having a good time. We are having a good time. We are having a great time. The royal we. Well, you and Chet enjoy your journey. I will. And enjoy Blackhats. And have safe travels. And enjoy the beach. Yep. And we'll see you in a couple weeks. All right.

Very good. Thanks, guys. Bye, Dave. Well, this is the part of the show where we thank the people who give us money to keep us fed and on the air. So, Brian, what do we got? We love these people. We have no new people on Patreon. And because I didn't do this ahead of time because vacation and everything else.

To quote the famous, oh, God, what's his name? Right wing commentator. Fuck it. We're doing it live. Got some legacy people. Number one, SMY. Number two, Francois. Leith, Dave, Roger, Robert, Kevin, Steve, GK, and James.

Thank you all so much for your continued Patreon donations. Thank you very much. And over at PayPal, we do have a Patreon subscriber who said, here's a hundred bucks because you're awesome. And that's Joseph. Thank you very much, Joseph. We appreciate it. Like you would not believe.

We would not believe. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And over at Stripe, we have donations from Kathleen, Jennifer, Gary, and Adam. That's right. That's the old tip jar. And you can find the tip jar if you go to GOG.show slash donate. You can find all the places where you can help support the show. And remember, if you go to Patreon.com slash GOG, you get the show early, ad free, and in high definition.

You can also go to YouTube and sign up there and become a member. And I don't know if we have any YouTube members today because also vacation for you, but just slacking for me. And I forgot to go check because we forget to put it in the show notes. And I'm silly that way. But please, your continued support is what keeps us going.

So check out GOG.show slash donate. Any chance you get, we'll appreciate it a lot. That's right. And we are off next week if you've forgotten from the beginning of the show because, you know, it's been a long time since we told you that we were going on vacation. So we will not be here next week.

But yeah, join us the following week. And Brian, you have a lovely vacation. Have a great birthday. Thank you. I will. I'll be at the gym. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.

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