761: Whatever...

September's a great time to get your home fall ready. Freshen things up with a new coat of paint. Tackle those repairs you've been putting off, and make sure you're prepared for hurricane season. Don't wait till it's too late. Get hurricane ready with great deals on generators, flash lights, extension cords, power tools, and so much more.

Whatever's on your list, Stone's Home Centers has the supplies and expert advice to help you get the job done right. Stop in and let our team help you get fall ready. And remember, there's a Stone's store near you. Grumpy Old Geeks.

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How you doing? Let's go. All right. Let's rock and roll. Let's do it. Okay, fine. Let's do it. All right. A U.S. federal court has ruled that the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was illegal . Holy shit. Something our administration did was illegal. Shocking.

U.S. Justice Judge Rita Lynn found the U.S. Department of Defense's restrictions placed on the AI company and its clawed model were illegal and baseless. As part of the ruling, the judge barred certain federal agencies from enforcing President Trump's order to stop using Anthropic's tools. The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics, Judge Lynn said in the 59-page decision.

Neither the Constitution nor the federal statute invoked by defendants allows them to impose sweeping penalties based principally on Anthropic's critique of the administration's views. So if you remember, this was in late February after the Department of Defense and its secretary, Pete Kegstand, pressured Anthropic to remove certain safeguards from its AI systems.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amode, however, made it clear the company would refuse to allow its model to be used for mass surveillance or the development of autonomous weapons, positions which have probably changed by now. Subsequent talks collapsed. And then the next day, Sam Altman said, well, we're okay with it.

Use us instead, which led to the big backlash, which is why Anthropic is actually now making more money than OpenAI is as far as catching up, you know, which is fine. They're both, by the way, they're both scumbags. So one's not better than the other.

It's just who had the better PR department that week. That week, yes. After saying it would challenge the decision, Anthropic sued the White House and two federal courts for two separate designations to reverse the ban. Yesterday, or I guess a couple days ago now, this ruling by Judge Lynn gave the company a victory on one of those counts, but Anthropic still considered a supply chain risk pending the second decision.

Even if it wins both cases, though, the Pentagon would not be required to restart its work with the company because you can't force people to work with people and they can come up with other excuses as to why they don't want to. And as we all know, the way that Anthropic can get back in the door if they really want to is by Baron von fucking Stein's bitcoins.

Yeah, that's true. Put it in the Trump coffers and then all of a sudden everything is forgiven. I don't think it matters, though, because if you look at how much Anthropic is already embedded in all of the other government places, because like the CIA and the FBI and all those guys, remember, they were just like, well, we're going to still keep using it.

We don't give a fuck. It's still whatever, guys, whatever. You know, they didn't really do anything besides that one, you know, Pentagon deal. And but now and now now our soldiers have Grok AI and, you know, OpenAI. So great.

Special versions came out this week for their for the military. So what are you going to do? But, you know, if the soldiers get bored, we have a solution. A new lawsuit accuses Elon Musk's XAI of using child sexual abuse material to train Grok models.

The plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe, says she was abused as a preschooler and images from that abuse were later hash ed by child protection organizations. She was notified after the Canadian Center for Child Protection allegedly found AI generated abuse material dep icting her on XAI systems.

The complaint also cites online conversations among offenders discussing the creation of AI generated images involving known victims. Fucking scumbags. The allegations come as regulators and courts investigate Grok's handling of abusive content with some users reportedly arrested.

But XAI has not been found liable in this case. Well, you know, they're just a platform, of course, Jason. And I don't know if this is specifically a great thing for the U.S. military, but certainly the Roman Catholic Church. Oh, they've, yeah, they've, they've, they've picked that one up real fast.

They have lots and lots of seats going on there. The church's AI of choice, Grok. It is the church's AI. I bet they have, they get the papal bulk discount. Oh, I kid because I don't. Because, gee.

Because it's true. Because it's true. Well, two major music publishing groups have jointly filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the company of one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history. Actually, you could just kind of cast that around all of these companies. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chapel Music filed the complaint, which can be seen in full thanks to music business worldwide as of last Friday, and said that Anthropic was responsible for a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale for the sake of

training its clawed AI model. The two music publishers are seeking a jury trial, but also up to $150,000 for each infringed work and $25,000 for each instance of Anthropic removing copyright management information. Guess that was automated.

Yeah. This could easily amount to billions in damages, considering the complaint alleges that thousands upon thousands of music publishers' copyrighted musical compositions were illegally harvested to train the models. Earlier this year, two other prominent music publishing companies sued Anthropic, accusing it of illegal.

They were illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyright ed songs for AI training purposes. That was Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, and they were seeking more than $3 billion in damages with their lawsuits. And previously, of course, Anthropic was hit with another copyright lawsuit, but from a group of authors who claimed that the company used pirated copies of their protected works to train its AI models, Anthropic ended up settling that case for a record settling $1.5 billion.

These music companies are going to get that, if not more. Yeah, I hope this one goes to jury. I hope this one goes to jury trial, because that's what we missed with the author case. And you would think, in general, a billion dollars, a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there on these lawsuits.

Shouldn't these companies be out of business, considering they're not really all that profitable? Nope. They've got so much funding coming in still from every— mostly, probably from Jensen Wang at NVIDIA with the, you know, the Ouroboros Fund, you know. The cycling of money.

Exactly. And it's spinning now so fast that billions just get kicked out from lawsuits. I know. I wish one would land on my roof, please. That would be nice. That would be nice. Yeah. Land on my Jeep, please, because it's still not going anywhere. I'd appreciate that.

Researchers are raising a counterintuitive question. Could interacting with artificial intelligence make people behave more like machines? Hmm. The concern is that frequent communication with chatbots and other automated systems may encourage users to adopt their patterns, more formulaic language, rigid exchanges, and less emotional or socially nuanced communication.

The article points to a broader psychological possibility. People often adapt their behavior to the tools and environments they use, especially when those tools reward concise, structured, and predictable responses. We've actually talked about this before on the show, Brian, back before, you know, the scientists have got in and started to do the studies, but we noticed that, that people were, you know, they were getting chat GPT-ified.

Yep. Well, you're correct, sir. I should have taken the garbage out last night, but I didn 't. Anyway, what I've noticed is from just years and years of editing podcasts, especially guest-driven podcasts, what I will notice is that, you know, my host will have one set of language quirks, and then the guest will come in and have a different set of language quirks.

By the end of that episode, they have merged and melded, and they will pick up each other's verbal tics. And it's like a social, it's probably, you know, completely unconscious, unless, you know, the host is actually very savvy, which, you know, is possible.

But for the most part, you will hear verbal tics that a guest has that the host will pick up. Not generally the other way around. I think it's because the hosts generally have more social intelligence than the random guests that come on, and I think it's ingrained in them that they will do that. So I can see that happening with, you know, talking to an AI over and over again.

Yeah, there's no doubt about that, that that happens. And I know you have two wolves inside of you, Jason, and both of them like to live alone. I'm aware that you have a roommate, but you're kind of a loner. As someone who has been married for an awful long time now, and now also has had a child in his house for an awful long time now, I will tell you 100% that, yes, that happens.

We all start to adopt each other's little mannerisms here and there. It's just human nature. So if you are spending the majority of your time talking to AI, you're going to be fucking weird in a normal social situation. End of story.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I've lived with this person for 15 years. I know what you're talking about. Of course that happens, you know. It just happens. But I just noticed it specifically when two strangers get in the room, and it happens within an hour. It happens that fast. Yeah. Absolutely.

The one that drives me the worst, it's crazy, the um smack. Um. They start smacking their lips, and everybody with misoph onia just crinches their back and goes, why are they doing that? And then I swoop in and fix it. So this has kept me in business.

There you go. So, yeah. Yeah. But, you know, this is just one of those things to keep an eye out. So if you are talking to AI a lot, especially if you're using the voice chat, like Whisper Flow and things like that, it's going to happen even more often, you know. Yeah. So keep an eye on it. I saw this article over at Gizmodo by, uh, written by a guy called Mike Pearl.

He says, uh, more evidence emerges that Gen Xers feel the most whatever about AI. He said, uh, earlier this month, I noticed that there was a Pew survey that hinted that Gen X respondents might not be all that excited about AI one way or the other. Obviously, we're excluded because we're not even more than anything.

Uh, Pew's report highlighted a freaked out response among younger people. But my eye was drawn to the relative apathy on display from 50 to 64 year olds. Now, you could pretty much stop the article right there. Yes. Because we're apathetic about everything. Everything. Fucking everything.

Yes. The survey wasn't divided into tidy generational cohorts, but a new study from Glassdoor is, and its findings hinted at the same trend as Pew. 46.1% of Gen X workers had nice things to say about AI use in the workplaces, while millennial and Gen Z workers spoke positively only 38.6% and 32.2% of the time, respectively.

So, it's basically coming out that Gen Xers aren't as negative about AI as the younger generations are. They're not positive about it by any means, but they're just not as negative about it. Now, from my personal experience talking to predominantly Gen X friends, the reason is we're all just basically hoping to hang on long enough to be able to retire.

We will begrudgingly use AI to keep the fucking job until we get the cardboard box to load up our things and ice cream cake on our last day. That's the whatever. The whatever is, I'm fucking tired. I'm almost retired. Let me just fucking hang on here.

You want me to use this crap? I'll use this crap. I don't care. Yeah. See, I wish I could retire. Retirement just sounds funny. It just sounds funny. You know? I just hope to have enough bullets in the gun, like, when the day finally comes to say, I'm too fucking tired for this shit.

AI. Just finish me. Just finish me off. But, yeah, I think you really nailed it. With Gen X, we just don't give a shit about anything. We never did. We don't now. We didn't then. We don't care. Just we want to get through the day and then go and maybe have a nice glass of wine and listen to some Nine Inch N ails, which is now, like, old folks music.

Yeah, that's elevator music now. Yeah, it's elevator music. Anyway, a Glassdoor survey finds employee sentiment toward workplace AI has turned sharply negative. So this is not just Gen X. We're moving on to the regulars, the normal peoples. So the people who specifically hate it in this study are the ones that I found interesting.

Insurance claims adjusters were among the strongest critics with negative views in 98% of AI-related comments, followed by writers and editors at 81% and accountants at 80%. That's because all of that is so easily automated.

But when you're dealing with LLMs, Brian, we know it sucks at math. Yes. That's the thing. It sucks at math. The thing is, the job now just becomes correcting things, which is nowhere near as exciting, right? Like, you got into this to be a writer or you're actually really passionate about figuring out actuary life tables.

But now you're just chugging them into a machine. You're not doing the fun part of the job. And you're just combing through looking for errors. That sucks. But, I mean, you're going to have a job because there are so many errors, you know? But, I mean, if they're using machine-based learning for some of these tools, yes, it knows how to do math because it's not LLM-based.

The problem is when you get into LLM-based AI and math, it just says, okay, what's the next number? Maybe that a bunch of other people put after it, but it might be from a completely different equation that has nothing to do. So what if your LLM is trained on non-Euclidean geometry and you're trying to have it fill out a fucking Excel spreadsheet, like some row?

Well, that's not going to work because, you know, the color is going to come back purple and then it's going to get sent off to Rick Ross and then, you know, whatever. Or simple misunderstandings of data. I mean, we saw all of this with Doge and all their bullshit . Like, it just counted a bunch of people as dead because it couldn't possibly understand that there was a birth date before 1928 or something like that or whatever the fuck it was.

It was all just badly formatted data, bad instructions, and bad reading of the instructions. The accountant that I know, I have one friend that is a certified public accountant, and he won't let that shit anywhere near his office. You know, he works with, like, a couple hundred A-list celebrities.

So he's like, I can't afford to be wrong. No, you end up in jail. Yeah, yeah, he can literally go to jail if he screws up. So, or his house in the Grand Caymans. One of the two. September's a great time to get your home fall ready.

Freshen things up with a new coat of paint. Tackle those repairs you've been putting off and make sure you're prepared for hurricane season. Don't wait till it's too late. Get hurricane ready with great deals on generators, flash lights, extension cords, power tools, and so much more.

Whatever's on your list, Stone's Home Centers has the supplies and expert advice to help you get the job done right. Stop in and let our team help you get fall ready. And remember, there's a Stone's store near you. Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide.

Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line. When the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meek Pleaver Colon.

KFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. San Francisco AI startup Together AI is partnering with Saudi company Humane, not to be confused with Humane Pin or whatever the hell that was, to access 250 megawatts of data center capacity in the kingdom.

1.21 gigawatts. What the hell is it doing, you are? The move offers Together AI an alternative as opposition, moratoriums, and cancellations constrain new facilities in the United States. Nearly half of Americans strongly oppose data centers being built nearby.

Saudi Arabia is positioning itself as an AI hub while diversifying beyond oil with partnerships involving AWS, X AI, and Microsoft. Analysts warned that regional conflict creates security risks, potentially causing commercial losses, strengthening rivals such as China, and undermining critical AI systems.

Now, I know that region of the world is rather famously low on water. Yes, they are. Yes, they are. So I do wonder, are they able to cool these data centers with their oil? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Well, maybe they use the oil to get a frigate to go up to the south or down to the south pole and buy some icebergs and shove them up all the way up there.

Buy any of the icebergs that have collapsed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just pick the ones up that are floating by because they seem to be just falling off of everything nowadays. But we are hell-bent on killing ourselves, aren't we? Oh, so fast. So fast. So fast. We don't have to worry about retirement, Brian. The planet is going to be retired for us.

Yes. So, fine. Go to Saudi Arabia. Be my fucking guest. Be my guest. Because the data center thing just keeps getting better. President Donald Trump is warning communities that resist new data centers they could lose out on economic growth, saying opponents should be prepared to, quote, have fun being poor.

We already are. Too fucking late, you fucking terrorist. Yes, we are too fucking poor, you asshole. It didn't take a data center. It just took you. Ah. Maybe we should put data centers in Iran. We should put them on the goddamn fucking White House.

Let's put them in a stupid ballroom. Yeah. Just turn the East Wing into a data center. That's it. There we go. And we can get the UFC guys to sit there and mop the floor in between bouts. That would be perfect. Some Trump supporters are criticizing the message, and the dispute highlights a broader question.

How much should local communities sacrifice to attract the infrastructure behind the AI boom? I'm having discussions with people, and I'm seeing discussions about the data center thing going on. And there are some people that are not quite understanding, I think, what the root cause of the data center issue is.

People are like, oh, my God, these people just don't get it because they're using the cell phones and the computers to coordinate their protests against the data center. Why can't they be anti-data center where they're actually using the tools? Two things. One, the data center backlash is a proxy fight for the rich fucking assholes that are destroying the planet.

It has nothing to do. It's all about class war. That's exactly what it is. And if it's not class war, it's about the fucking environment because look at Elon just bought the company that makes those fucking generators, those gas generators that he shit all over Memphis with.

So now he owns the company to make even more of them, to spin up more data centers and be more environmentally irresponsible. When there are people out there who know how to build a data center that is environmentally responsible, does not use water because it has a closed loop system.

But those things are expensive and take time to build. They just want to shit these things out every 15 fucking seconds because we need to make more goddamn kitty porn. That's what Elon wants. You can't get that even when Elon puts up his generators to do it and then is told, actually, that's illegal and you need to take them down.

He has over a year to be able to do it. So there's no reason for him not to break the laws and just do this. Yeah, there's none. It reminds me, and this is where the consequences and shit come in with him. And I think about these billionaires.

In the latest two episodes ago in Silo, where the trillion aire guy was talking to the table of people and the girl's like, you know, well, you're going to, you know, you have to spend money for all these people to work there. He's like, OK, look, I've got all these people. It's going to cost me $200,000 per head for a year.

I got 5,000 people. OK, that's a billion dollars. So I can fund that for the next thousand years. You know, it's like you don't understand the vast amounts of money that these people have to not give a fuck about anything. Money literally means nothing.

I know. And it means nothing to them. It means everything to the rest of us. The 99.99999% of the fucking world that can't afford to buy fucking gas. So, yeah, it's about class war. So stop with your other, like, stupid fucking arguments about, oh, you know, whatever.

That's what it's about. It has nothing to do with anything. else. Product Rise. Have you ever heard of Product Rise, Brian? I have not. I'm sure they're about to piss me off, though. Actually, they're going to. Well, they are going to piss you off because they've been experimenting with some of Google's AI mode search results. And a Product Rise experiment claims that Google's AI mode recommends products that cost 21.6% more on average than the same items found through traditional search.

Right. There you have it. Want to know why people are pissed off? There you go. The study also found that AI mode listings appear 49% higher on the page, while the primary seller differed nearly half the time. Only 1.28% of products overlapped between the two search modes for identical queries on the same day.

So, shenanigans. It's all about the fucking shenanigans. Google says both modes use the same data source and encourages shoppers to compare retailers, which, a.k.a. says, do your own research. Fuck you guys. Oh. So. Good times.

Happy times. Yeah. Let's pivot over to those old self-driving cars. 20 years away still, Jason. That's what I'm saying. 20 years. Test drivers operating AVs before the ready-to-go driver lists are hugely important, and a concerning report shows a consistent trend of injuries to humans in Waymo and Zoox test vehicles.

Yeah, Zoox! Occupational safety and health administration data shows upwards of 20 injuries reported by Alphabet's Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox, according to a report from TechCrunch. Many of the injuries reported to OSHA involve hard-breaking or quick directional changes on the street, and in the case of Waymo, in Service Depot locations.

Reported injuries include sprains, back pain, and whiplash. TechCrunch said the injuries have risen significantly as AV companies, Waymo in particular, have made big pushes for service in new cities. And subsequently have racked up more test miles. Incidents reported to OSHA were also highest in test vehicles in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, some of the largest markets right now for all AVs.

So we're rapidly expanding. We're testing a lot more. We're finding out that these things are actually hurting all the people in them. But progress. Progress. I got to ask you, Brian. When I was a kid, everything I knew about whiplash I learned from the Brady Bunch. Do you remember the whiplash episode?

I do not. I think I was probably... The couple years difference between us is showing right now . Okay. There was a thing where a guy had whiplash and they went to court and one of the Brady kids figured out that the guy was faking it.

So in the middle of the court case, he threw a big book on the ground and it slammed on the ground and the guy turned his neck really fast. And they're like, well, if he had whiplash, he couldn't do that, your honor. Caught him. You know, and he goes, you meddling kids. And he pulled a Scooby-Doo and all that. I was about to say, in the back of my mind, I was thinking I probably learned about whiplash from some Scooby-Doo episodes.

Also, by the way, quicksand. I was really concerned about quicksand as a child. I was very concerned, yes. I thought it was everywhere. Yet to see any. I've fallen in a couple swamps, but yeah, no quicksand. No quicksand. I have had whiplash before.

It sucks. It is no fun. I got rear-ended one time and like, man, I should have gone to the hospital because whiplash hits you three days later when you're lying in bed and you can't get up because your neck is so fucked up. Anyway, by the way, speaking of self-driving and autonomous cars, this episode comes out on Thursday, September 3rd.

And so everybody should turn on the news because it's the big reveal day for the Tesla robo-taxis in Austin. That's right. It's launch day. So stay inside. Whiplash. Keep your pets on a leash. Yeah. Well, speaking of Tesla, a new report describes another fatal Tesla crash involving autopilot.

According to the account, the vehicle stopped in an active freeway lane and was then rear-ended, killing the driver. Oopsie. The brief report does not provide all details about the crash's location, the vehicle's speed. Well, the speed was zero because he was stopped. Traffic conditions are why the Tesla stopped. It also does not establish whether autopilot malfunctioned or whether the driver was monitoring the system as required .

Tesla's driver assistance technology is not autonomous, but they sell it as it is. Yes. What's it called again? Full self-driving. Full self-driving. Supervised. By the way, Brian, I want to... Here's something that you should never do to a Tesla if you see it in a parking lot is buy a pack of bubble gum, chew some bubble gum, and then walk around to the side of each Tesla where those cameras are on right between the wheel and the door and put some bubble gum on them.

That's a very bad idea. It would be even worse if you spray painted them because what I found out doing my research was that disabling those cameras actually disables fully self-driving as well and lane changing and other things. Because as we've said in the past, Elon is a fucking idiot because he went with camera-based systems instead of...

What is it, Brian? LiDAR. Exactly. So you can take down a Tesla with a stick of bubble gum. But you shouldn't is what I'm saying. You should really not do that when you're walking through the Whole Foods parking lot after you've bought your overp riced salad. So there you go.

That will give you the shits. Yes, it will. Oh, no more salads for me. Tesla's latest full self-driving software may still struggle around railroad crossings. In a dash cam video, a Tesla running FSD version 14.3.7, which was the latest version, stops near a flashing crossing signal, then accelerates towards the tracks.

The driver breaks manually just before a freight train passes. Rear camera footage shows the train initially obscured by brush, but visible before the car moves forward. The incident is notable because said FSD 14.3 improved detection of unusual objects in the vehicle's path.

No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. Sorry. So, yeah, I watched the video and, yeah, I mean, he was stopped and then the thing just said, yeah, I think I'll just keep going right as the train was coming. It's like, oh, shit. In the screen, there's a big giant railroad.

I'm not playing with boobies. There's a big giant railroad sign blinking. And you can obviously see it. So, yeah. Way to go, Tesla. And so, do you really want to get in a self-driving Tesla robo-taxi with no brake pedal?

Where I'm sure in Austin there are trains somewhere because it's Texas. I don't even want to get in a Tesla anymore. Like, thank God that one friend that had one, he got rid of it. Oh, well, that's a good friend. Because I still see Teslas with new dealer plates on them every single day.

And I'm like, you guys are complicit with a mass murderer. How can you buy one of those? Not even withstanding that, we keep talking about how these cars screw up all the time. They're not safe. They're not safe.

They're not safe. And also, the tire place down the street, Hank's Tires, great place if you're in the valley. They said that their business has gone through the roof because Teslas are built with those low profile tires. Yeah. And they weigh a bajillion pounds because of the battery.

So the tires wear out like three times faster than any other car. So they are selling so many tires to Tesla people. They love them. So you're going to spend more on just maintenance. Okay, you don't have to get an oil change, but you got to change your fucking tires every like six months. So they're just dumb vehicles.

Well, you know what? Hitler had Volkswagen. Elon needs his Tesla. So every, you know, mass murderer in history needs their own automotive company now. I mean, that's what it is. I wonder what Lennon would have had, you know?

Well, probably donkeys, but yeah. Okay. What else we got? The ongoing legal battles surrounding Calci are heating up. The latest development comes from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which overruled Calci's attempt to block Nevada from overse eing its prediction market platform.

This decision comes several months after Nevada's gambling regulators and attorney general sued Calci in February saying, you're gambling. Let me look this up. Let me, right here in the pages. Yeah, you're gambling.

Yeah. And you know where we are? We're gambling regulators. So we want to regulate you because you are gambling. Yes. And then Calci, of course, said, no, we're not. No, we're not. We paid all that money in Trump coin.

That's right. We should not have. And the gambler regulators are just like, well, we didn't get a cut. So you're gamblers. Yeah. So Nevada has ruled in favor. So, yeah, we'll see what happens next. Many other states have also challenged the legality of Cal ci and other prediction markets operating in their jurisdictions for similar reasons, a.k.a.

their gambling. Most recently, Connecticut's attorney general accused Calci of an unlicensed sports betting operation and is looking to ban the prediction market in their state. However, another federal court ruled in April that New Jersey doesn't have the authority to enforce regulations on Calci. Luckily, they're also facing legal actions from Rhode Island, New York and Arizona.

And at the heart of the debate, of course, is the lack of an ultimate regulatory decision that determines whether it should be states or the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission with a final say on prediction markets or as we call them gambling. Gambling regulators. Yes, that's it.

Yes. And gambling regulators already exist in any state that allows gambling. So let the gambling regulators regulate this new gambling site. Yeah. And you know what? You know why every state that has gambling has regulators? So the states get paid.

The only reason the state has gambling is because they want the tax money. So if you're fucking with their tax money, they're going to be pissed. So here's a tip, Calci and all of your other prediction markets. Cut a deal with the states for people who are in your state and they're gambling to send your cut.

You got to give the VIG. You got to give the VIG to the state. Period. That's right. It's not going to work without it. Well, speaking of, Calci has issued its first ever lifetime ban barring former congressman George Santos after accusing him of manipulating a market tied to his attendance at President Trump's State of the Union address.

Calci says Santos made large trades between February 2nd and 25th, then posted misleading public statements about whether he would attend, influencing contract prices. The platform says he profited $17,839 and has imposed a $71 ,356 penalty.

Okay. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission separately fined Santos $35,000 over the same trades. Calci also temporarily suspended three political candidates for trading contracts related to their own race amid broader concerns about insider trading and manipulation on prediction markets.

So here's the thing. How's Calci going to collect on that? That's, you know, what? You banned me and now you want me to pay you? Why am I going to pay you? You're just a fucking company. You didn't take me to court. This is just, you know, your internal, you know, fines.

What the fuck? What do you expect? Now, the $35,000 he has to pay. Because that's an actual thing. Yes. The rest of it is just, just delete the email that you get from Calci asking for their money. Yeah. Seriously. Put a little block notice in Gmail and you're done.

You've never heard from them again. Now, here's a fun one, Brian. This one makes me happy. An amended class action lawsuit against Meta expands privacy claims over its AI-powered smart glasses to include bystanders who never bought or used the devices.

The complaint alleges people were recorded without informed consent when nearby users activated the glasses' AI features, with some bystanders reportedly minors. It follows an investigation alleging that footage captured by the glasses, including intimate scenes, sex, nudity, and identifying documents, was sent to human contractors in Kenya for review and AI training, which we've talked about before when this started to happen.

Now, plaintiffs say Meta's claims that the glasses are, quote, designed for privacy and keep users, quote, in control are misleading, arguing that millions may have had their faces, voices, bodies, junk, and personal information captured and processed without consent.

Fine. Yeah. Meta denies the allegation, saying data may be reviewed to improve products while claiming it filters identifying information and takes privacy safeguards. Meta says it sold more than 7 million pairs in 2025. And, yeah.

So, do they have penis anonymizing software now? It's ridiculous. Now, the thing about this is it's like with bystanders, you know, out in public, they don't have a case.

If it's just somebody walking down the street, you don't have a case of privacy when you're out and about. No. But if you're, say, like in somebody's home and they're filming you or just at any kind of private gathering and there are kids there, those kids are getting sent to AI or getting sent to Meta to train their AI, there's a case there, I think.

Definitely. There's a serious case. Yeah. Anything that fucks with Zuckerberg makes me happy. It puts that. This is this is what Gen X people over 55 get their rocks off on. Mark Zuckerberg getting the shit kicked out of them. That's it.

Yeah. We want all these guys taken down. And, you know, to be honest, it's getting back to the class war thing. This this is the big problem. Everything we talk about on this show, it all comes down to these these trillionaires, these insane trillionaires. And I got to tell you, Elon's got to try a little bit harder.

Because there was an article over at Gizmodo that said, while he is the richest man in the world, he's only fourth in a race to bribe the most politicians. Come on, Elon. Gauntlet has been thrown down. Come on. I'm number four.

I'm number four. Elon currently ranks fourth in a new list of the biggest political donors in the lead up to the midterm elections, according to analysis by The New York Times. The New York Times looked at the 20 biggest donors who have afforded a combined $1.2 billion into candidates for federal elections this cycle.

And this is why everything fucking sucks. We need to stop this shit. The top five include, it's just a murderer's row, Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz with 150. 115 million. George and Alex Soros, 103 million.

Jeff Yass, 94 million. Elon Musk in a paltry fourth place at 90 million. And the Republican nonprofit One Nation, $76 million, which is an arm of the Senate Leadership Fund. All donors in the top five, except for the Soros family, are supporting Republicans.

Musk has authorized his super PAC, America PAC, to spend at least $100 million, but other reports have suggested he plans to spend as much as $200 million before the midterms are held in November. I assume that other $100 million will just be to fuck up the voting and cheat. Yeah.

Yeah. Like last time. I was reading the Gizmodo article about what they're doing with the postal system and the voting, the mail-in votes. And I had to close my laptop because I was going to throw it against the wall. Yeah. If all that comes to fruition, I give up.

Anyways, the U.S. political system enables a form of legal ized bribery, as any regular person would understand the term. However, what we've learned is regular people do not understand terms like full self-driving. Or Meta's Glass is built for privacy.

Or Calci is not gambling. So I don't think people understand shit anymore. Although in a very funny bit of the story, all-in podcaster Jason Calacanus. I can never say his name.

Calacanus. You fucking hung out with him. Come on. I know, but I always want to call him Calacanus. Well, no. Because he's an anus. I was going to say, you have to put the emphasis on the an us. Calus. Yes. Calacanus. Even framed it in those terms on X writing.

It's so uncouth that the affluent donate these dollar amounts and that politicians accept them. He is a friend of Musk, and he continued, bribe a cop and they throw you in jail. Bribe a politician and they make you king. Well, even a stop clock is right twice a day. Yeah, but he's still writing it on Elon's Nazi bar.

Well, he's still an anus.

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So, I have an update on my Seneca RSS reader that I built a while back. I built. I didn't write. I didn't write it myself. I built it. I product designed it. I have multiple computers around my house. I have two laptops, two desktops, and two iPads.

And so, when we do this show, I need to have news everywhere because I'm just like, depending on what mood I 'm in and what I'm thinking, I can get into it and get my reader going. And I originally built the RSS reader. I'm going, there's a point to this whole conversation here.

I built this RSS reader to do the things that I wanted a good RSS reader to do, which is the way I process news for this show. I sent you a copy of it. You tried it out. It's an RSS reader. But it has a couple enhancements that most RSS readers don 't have, which is get the original article and parse it and give me a reader mode, which every RSS reader should have, by the way.

It wasn't that hard to implement. But, so, this last week, I made it so everything syncs. All of my machines have the same app on it. And, and I made the iPad version of it. So, it's on my iPad, not my phone, because I don't want any of this shit near my phone. Took about two hours of whacking codecs over the head to make it work.

And it's awesome. It is awesome. And what I really found is having news access on every device around my house is a depression machine. Because I can look at the news anytime I want and I can make notes for this show.

And I'm like, oh my God, this, oh, and I'm taking a dump, making the, making the dog food, hanging out in the yard, doing whatever. I'm like, I can pull up my news and I can crank out a few articles and get this shit done. Now, the funny part about all this is I have like 25 news sources in my feed that I, that I, you know, go through religiously.

The one that was the most depressing out of all of them is one of yours, Brian. The Atlantic. Yeah. Fuck the Atlantic. That is, that is a sadness generator. That is a hate machine. There's nothing good about anything those people write because every single headline, I just want to go out and shoot a puppy.

It's just like, fuck. But you know what, Jason? They're never wrong. That's the fucking problem. I don't even read the articles. I just see the headlines and go, yeah, fuck. Yeah. And I can't believe I pay them to be depressed, but I do.

I'm a subscriber. Well, we do because I pay for half of that with you. That's right. So, you know, but yeah, I just, I can't, I'll leave that to you because we've got, I don't think we've ever used an Atlantic article in this show. I usually don't. I read their articles and then there's like bits or pieces that I'll go and then I'll search them out because, because Atlantic tends to be long form too and very well written.

And we don't want that. We want the beats so you and I can riff on it. So I'll, whatever I've read about in the Atlantic, I'm now informed by their opinion. And I go find the article somewhere else, like in Gadget that just gives you the bullet points. You know what I mean? Well, there is a button in Seneca that you can press that will summarize everything for different levels of how long you want to be able to talk about it for.

But I was thinking though, you know, cause I, I use, we, we bitch about AI all the time and I, you know, we all do it, but I use it a lot for making things that make my life better as far as software goes. Like I rebuilt all those old websites and I write, write this software.

I've got track a lot that's out there. Version 1.5 is out. Go buy it today. 299. Version 2 is going to be 499. So get it while it's cheap. Anyway, I build these things using the, the, you know, the tokens that I get from my paid subscription because I find that I sleep better at night.

This comes back to us telling everybody, if you get a class action lawsuit notification in the mail, it is your duty, your obligation to follow through with that, to get the money. Because if you don't get it, it goes either back to the company or just to the lawyers. So you have a moral obligation to follow through with a class action lawsuit.

And that, that, that's, that was your tenant, Brian. I give you full credit for that. Mine is if you pay for an AI service, you burn every fucking token that they give you. Every single one. Because if you spend $20 on their service, you can get $2, 000 worth of value out of them and you can bleed them fucking dry.

So I don't care what you have that thing doing in the background. And I'm going to tell you right now, there's a, there's a tag that you can run that's slash goal. G-O-A-L. And then if you do that, it won't stop until it figures out how to get to that goal. Which is, you know, half the reason probably hugging face got broken into.

But hey, you know, that's a, that's a story for another day . But anyway, I just love making, making this software. So I might actually release this one if I tidy it up a bit. Because it is actually a really good RSS reader now. I built in so much stuff. This is the RSS reader I wanted always.

You should absolutely release it and charge a buck or two for it. You know, why not? Yeah. I mean, there are power nerds out there that would actually really like this one. Because it's, it is, it is slim. And it does exactly what it's supposed to do. And now it syncs across every device in your house instantly.

Using CloudKit and it's fucking great. You know, I, I have, I went to test it. I basically had all my iPads and all my laptops and one desktop. And, and I, I, you know, I started, I started an article for reading later. Instantly. All of them updated. I'm like, okay, this is fun.

I can get behind this. Because I, I had to get rid of Reader 5. Because Reader 5 I was using with Feedly. And Feedly, my login was with Google. And then when I turned on enhanced security in Google, broke Feedly. I can't use Feedly anymore.

Because they don't support Google enhanced authentication. Which I found most places don't. So if you want to use enhanced authentication through Google, it's amazing how many things stop working. I lost Spark. I lost Reader. So that's why I wrote this. It's because I, I couldn't use Reader anymore. Right. So, yeah.

Anyway, uh, one last AI bit for me. I've got, I've been running the new iOS and iPadOS and mac OS. You know, all the betas. The one thing that I use this fucking watch for, this, this Apple, this $1,300 Apple Watch Ultra 2. Hey, hey, shithead.

Five minute timer. Because I make tea and it takes me five minutes for my tea to steep. Every day, 10 times a day. Hey, shithead. Five minute timer. Used to be like that. Used to be instant. It would turn on. And if it, and, and, but it was smart enough to know that it offset the time that the timer started from when the interaction started with your voice, you know, calling, hey, shithead.

Yeah. You know how long it takes with this new Siri? 15 seconds. That's, that's insane. 15 seconds for my watch to pick up, do the little, and then turn on a timer. It still gets it kind of from when the, the voice interaction started, but it's not exact like it used to be.

They have added so much quote unquote power to it that it doesn't actually do the, the simple things that it used to do. And it reminds me of Alexa. Remember when Alexa fucked the, screw the pooch. I was just about to get into that because that is, that has been my experience with Alexa. I had, I went all in on Alexa.

We have them all throughout the house. I use them to play music. We use them to do video calls with my mom. They have gotten so bad at everything else. Everything else. It just, it can't answer the basic questions. It can't, it screws up getting me the weather. It's takes forever to start playing the music that I've asked it to play.

It's gotten so bad that I, I just, I, I got to figure out. I'm going to, I'm going to want to keep one for the video calls because video calling my mom is, is great. We still like to do that all the time, but I got to do something else for music around the house, which takes us right into our next story.

We, we have followed the, the saga of Sonos since they shit the bed and destroyed themselves for quite some time. I heard, actually I'd saw in the news and I didn't put it in because I thought you would, but maybe you haven't had a chance to check it out yet. They have a newer version of their app that apparently fixes more problems, but now it's AI enhanced.

So it hasn't been released yet. I checked it. I checked it before the show and it's like until, until it ships, I don't want to talk about it. Yeah. So we'll talk about that when they get there. But my experience with Sonos, I had one at the office when I was working here for a while is I liked the speakers. They sounded great.

They certainly sound better than, than my Alexas do, but I hated that app so much. The one thing that I've always liked about the Alexas is I can launch Spotify from my, from my Mac, from my phone, from whatever, and literally just pick the speakers and start playing from, from Spotify directly without having to go through another app.

Well, JBL is basically trying to come into this market. Now they've announced a Cove series of wifi speakers, which are going to focus on home, home audio. So I love JBL. I've, I've always loved JBL speakers. When I was really into music, I had some of their high end speakers and that's what, that's what I did all my testing on.

They do the party speakers, which I'm just charging up now because once I'm done with this podcast, I'm, I'm going away for a long weekend before school starts for the kid and got the party speakers. So when we're out by the Airbnb pool, we can listen to music. JBL is great. So they've got these speakers. I totally want to check them out.

Maybe I'll switch to this for music around the house from now on. And it apparently syncs up. You can do it with your TV for surround sound as well. Kind of all in one solution, maybe because I've been burned by Sonos and I hate that app. So until I get a chance to check out the JBL one app, I'm not even going to consider it because it's all about the app, right?

It's all about the convenience. How many hoops do I have to jump through just to play music ? That's what I want to know. Like I want to be able to just send from Spotify or send from Apple music, just direct. But, and if you can't do that, I'm out. Well, here's the thing. You can actually send to your Sonos speakers now if they're on the network.

Yeah. You can, you can actually send to those. I haven't tried it recently, but you know, you get the list now when you do your audio settings and it will show you all of the different devices. The thing is, I haven't been able to figure out if I can group them or not because I haven't really tried or cared because I have the Sonos app.

I will give that a shot though this week and report back to you if I can group my Sonos speakers and then play through the other, the other services. Because I know like when I open Audible and I want to, you know, pick the soundbar in my room, I can send to any of my Sonos speakers around the house for any audio app.

You certainly couldn't the last time I used Sonos. Yes. But yeah, it's a newer, it's a newer thing. So, but I will try that out because yeah, I don't use Spotify anymore, but I do use Apple music and I have Apple music tied in through the Sonos app. And it sucks because every time I go to use it, they're like, oh, would you please re-auth?

And I'm like, I don't want to fucking re-auth. I just want to use it because I re-auth like, like, you know, three weeks ago. Stop. You know? And, and the interface sucks. So you, cause you have to make special playlists that work with Sonos. I just want to open the Apple music app, find my Rammstein album and hit play and have it fucking tear the house down.

That's all I want. That's, that's all any of us want from any of these things. That's it. So, well, we have some news. Twitter is back. Sort of. Sort of. A good host led by Stephen Coates, the former legal counsel for the original Twitter have just introduced a new version of the social media platform.

It's running right now at the URL twitter.now. I had an awful lot in our show notes about this. And what I realized is I don't give a fuck. Good. I'm glad. Because you just said it's running right now. No, it's not. Yeah. I put a, I put a graphic in here the other day.

It says we're down. We're on it. Already learning things the hard way. We'll be back as soon as we can. Love you guys. It still has not been up since I put that graphic in the other day. So. They're fail whaling. Anyways, there's all kinds of lawsuits flying around now because Elon's saying, hey, you can't do that. They're saying, oh, but you let all the, let all the things go.

And you blah, blah, blah. Who cares? I don't want to be on the social networks I'm on now, much less a new one. Exactly. I'm on the socially responsible social networks and I still fucking hate it. So who cares? Yeah.

Who cares? This is, this is going to go nowhere. Sony has, has really. Wow. This, this is good. Sony has told a court that reasonable consumers are fully aware that when they buy a digital game, pressing the button that says buy now, that doesn't mean they own it.

I would like to point out again, the button says buy, not rent, not, not anything else. It says buy. Yeah. In June, four players sued Sony Interactive Entertainment for allegedly breaking California law by not making it clear on the PlayStation store that players are buying licenses to games, not actually owning the games.

It almost feels like how she's getting involved. We're fucking with words now. This argument was made because the PlayStation store uses terms like buy now and confirm purchase. Players are under the impression that they're buying a copy of the game that they then own rather than a license to access the game, which can be rev oked by Sony at any point in the future.

As reported by Gamefile, Sony recently filed its response to the lawsuit claiming that customers are not only told your purchase of this digital product amounts to a license, but that reasonable consumers already understand this anyways without having to be told. You might be right about that, Sony. As reasonable consumers, we realize we're fucked left, right, and center by everyone these days, so we expect fucking nothing.

Fuck you, Sony. Well, after, after a couple of weeks of bitching about Star Trek Strange New Worlds and their, their genre du jour, wow, that was a great last episode. They just did a normal episode. And it was so, so good. It was fun. It was, there was no Strange New World in it, but it was still fun.

No, but it was still fun. I texted you right after. I was like, finally, that episode was awesome. I know, it was right when I was starting it too. And I was just like, and I was tired and I'm like, maybe I 'll just watch this tomorrow. And then you're like, now that's Star Trek. And I'm like, oh, fuck. Staying up late.

Yeah. So it was great. I loved it. Yeah. Ted Lasso continues to be good. I just watched the latest episode last night. I think it's a great thing. I get, you know, we're not, we're not in the, the early pandemic. We're not all sad and need, need some wholesome, spun country wisdom to, to get us through.

We're all actually pissed and angry right now. So the mood doesn't connect, but still a good show. It's fantastic. I'm enjoying it. Silo. Finally, something happened. Finally, something went boom. Yes. Jesus. Took a long time to get there. This season's been slow as F, but that was a great last episode.

And I think the season finale is going to be a, a, a burner as they say. Yeah. Yeah. And then three more years and then we'll get the next season. So yeah. Great. Yeah. So that's great. Caught up on two movies with the kiddo. We watched a wicked for good. Cause we had seen the, the first part of it.

And then, uh, boy, that could have been one movie. This is, this is the Hobbit spread over three movies. They could, they could have condensed this down to one, but you know what? It was, it was really well done. It was a lot of fun. So. Wait, wicked was three movies? No, it was two. I'm just the Hobbit. The Hobbit was three. Felt like three. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, did I miss one in the middle? I mean, I, I, I, I've seen wicked in, uh, at the theater, you know, I've seen it in person and I know that, okay, yeah. The second act sucks. So I'm like, okay, you can cut out 80% of the second act and just skip to the end. Yeah.

Nowhere near as good as the first one was, but still, you know, you got to finish it out and it was fine. Yeah. And then of all things, uh, my wife suggested to my son, after he's now caught up on all things, star Wars, he's literally watched all the star Wars there is to watch, except for Andor, you should see space balls.

And in the back of my mind, I was like, he's 10 Mel Brooks. It's probably still a little bit young for Mel Brooks, but what the hell it's space balls. We're not like diving into blazing saddles or anything. Really? So, uh, we, we watched space balls and I've got to say it's , it has legs, but they're teetering a bit.

Okay. Just because the effects and the pacing and all of that is so slow, but my son lost his fucking mind. He was laughing so goddamn hard. So, uh, yeah, there's, there's a few bits that are, are pretty adult and, uh, there's, there's some F bombs and some other stuff that, that he hasn't really experienced that.

I don't think he was, he was quite a, well, he was thrilled about to be honest. Yeah. So, yeah. So, uh, it, it was fun to watch it with him. And then, uh, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, Mel Brooks writes to 10 year olds, like the jokes, most of them are for 10 year olds.

So it's, it's all farts and, and ball humor and stuff like, you know, getting kicked in the nuts. Like it is perfect for a 10 year old. So he had a blast. Yeah. I mean, think about blazing saddles. The fart scene around the, the campfire is, you know, classic, classic. So I, I was scrolling through Netflix, trying to figure out something to watch, to fall asleep to.

And I saw that they had Atlas Shrugged one through three on there. I remember trying to watch part one a long time ago when it first came out. And I was just like, okay, now take the source material out of the equation, you know? Yeah. Cause I've read Atlas Shrugged three times.

I mean, we all have. I'm very familiar. I'm very familiar with the source material. This is just one of the worst movies that's ever been made, period. Okay. And then they decided to get more funding and make two more . And they're all terrible. So I, I do not recommend Atlas Shrugged. I don't care how curious you are.

If you, if, if you're, you know, Ayn Randian curious, no, don't. It's fucking terrible. If you want to, if you want to be curious, just read the fucking book. It's fine. It's a novel. It's fine. It's a, it's a way of form of government and how to live your life in a morality play.

It's a piece of shit. But anyway, you know, we all, we all go through our Ayn Rand, uh, phase when we're like 18, 19, and we're trying to figure out the world. And it sounds really good. And then you get older and you go, what the fuck? That never works. That is just, we're living it right now.

This, this is the result of that kind of bullshit. Yeah. If you want, if you want to watch something good, go just, if you want to go watch Fight Club. Seriously, just go watch Fight Club. That'll be much better for you. And that, that is basically the journey that you and I have taken. And most Gen Xers, we start with Atlas Shrugged and we end up at Fight Club.

Yep. I mean, I watched, I was, I sat in the theater for three showings of Fight Club the day it opened. That tells you how Gen X I am. I am, I am so Gen X, I shit Fight Club. Anyway. And I, I, I, I actually have, if you scroll down in the notes, I had it in here because I watched it again last night because there was nothing else to watch.

And I'm like, I need me some fucking Tyler Durden in my life. But what I do have a lot of in my life right now is the fucking Traders. Traders Australia season three is wrapping up next week. It has been phenomenal. Love it. They have, they have, they have come back from the brink after season two, which was the worst season of Traders in history on any continent, which everybody agrees on.

It was horrible. Traders Ireland season two just started this week. Fantastic. Love to see her back. Traders U.S. New Blood starts in like three weeks. So that's Alan Cumming and the U.S. version with no celebrities. That's fun. Here's the problem.

I have so many overlapping seasons of the Traders and there 's 20, 20 contestants per house that are doing these. So we have to watch the coming, like the previously on just to remember which you know, you think you have problems with universe creep and sci-fi? This is so much fucking worse because you have to remember all of the machinations of who's doing what to who.

Then after that, oh my God, the Traders Canada starts like right a week after the Traders U.S. New Blood starts. And then after that, the Traders U.K. Celebrity season two starts. So you'll be happy to note that as I've avoided any of these shows, I really don't like I don't I'm not a big reality TV show fan.

I didn't want to get into this. My wife has decided that because she likes the U.K. Celebrity season two cast so much, we will be watching the Traders U.K. Celebrity season two. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. I got sucked in. Oh, then you're going to.

Well, I have them all downloaded in my Plex server so I can I can shoot you copies of every I have literally seen every English language version of the Traders since it started. So I think I probably have a terabyte of the Traders on a hard drive in my bedroom somewhere.

And the gentleman season two starts tomorrow or today when you're watching this on Netflix. The gentleman season one was like this 17 years ago, I think, based on the Guy Ritchie film of 2012, I believe, or 2012. Who the fuck knows?

Because it has been so goddamn long. This thing has been in the can for like a year and they just never released it because things kept getting pushed. Some reshoots or whatever. But the upside is the gentleman season three has already been greenlit. So worth watching.

I love season one. That's why I'm so pissed off. Season two took so long. And the movie go back and watch the movie. It had all right, all right, all right. That guy in it. Can't remember his name right now, but I just remember him. So McConaughey. Yeah. Yeah. Matthew McConaughey. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's all I got.

I got eyeballs deep into the Traders right now. All right. All right. All right. September is a great time to get your home fall ready. Freshen things up with a new coat of paint. Tackle those repairs you've been putting off and make sure you're prepared for hurricane season.

Don't wait till it's too late. Get hurricane ready with great deals on generators, flash lights, extension cords, power tools, and so much more. Whatever's on your list. Stones Home Centers has the supplies and expert advice to help you get the job done right.

Stop in and let our team help you get fall ready. And remember, there's a stone store near you. Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero.

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

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Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave featuring cybersecurity 's hardest working podcaster Dave Bittner. When he's not covering the daily cyber beat on the cyber wire, he's busting scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, tackling privacy with Ben Ye llen on caveat, caveat, and proves there's always room for one more cybersecurity podcast with only malware in the building.

Hi, Dave. Welcome back. The hardest working man in podcasting. I'll take it. I'll take it. Stop me before I podcast again. Okay. Turn it off. Sure thing. We're done. See ya. So we've obviously spent quite a bit of time talking about your digital piano or keyboard that you worked on.

And I was walking with my son the other day and he almost made me fall down because he mentioned that perhaps he would like to learn how to play piano. And I was like, oh, well, you've always enjoyed music and been quite musical. So now you're ready to move past the recorder that the school burdened us with last year.

That sounds all right to me. Can you get him an accordion? You know, my two cousins had, unfortunately, had to play accordion. And every Christmas they would have to do the Christmas songs for us as we younger kids hit our jingle bells and they hated their lives.

I do own an accordion, by the way. My dad loved his accordion. He still has it. I have one. Yeah. Yeah, they're great. He even still has his Al Yankovic songbooks. Not Weird Al, but the actual Al Yankovic. Like he has the songbooks that he learned when he was a kid .

He loves it. He loves it. Yeah. Sort of a lost art, I think. I think so. Yes. I don't know. Not too many accordion. I mean, Weird Al. You've got Weird Al. Yeah, that's about it. And Oktoberfest. That's your time to shine is Oktoberfest.

It is your time to shine, yes. True. Yeah. But as I was reeling with this new information, I did see in the news that Roland has unveiled a new digital piano, the FP40, which has built-in Wi-Fi, primary use cases for teaching apps and related software, which is pretty cool.

And it's got built-in speakers and it's got like kind of everything that you'd need. It's got a teaching app built into it, too, called Pian osphere, which offers guidance, real-time feedback, and a rich library of popular songs and high-quality courses. So, I'm now taking a good, strong look at this thing.

And it's about $750, not cheap, but thousands, thousands of dollars less than many of the Rollins that I owned in my past. Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of piano for the money. It is. It is. If you look into it. Yeah. If you were closer by, I'd give you this one to give to your son.

This is the old Yamaha that's getting swapped out for the Kurzweil that I repaired. Yeah. But it would probably cost a lot to ship to Canada and probably not allowed to ship to Canada anymore. So, they'd have to tear off the fuck out of that. But, yeah, that's pretty cool.

It's amazing how much they pack into these things these days and just how good the piano sounds are. Yeah. Yeah. And it seems that the teaching system is actually really quite good, which is nice because I am a decent keyboard player, but not to the level of like I 'll really be able to teach.

Also, I'm a horrible teacher. So, yeah. Really? Yeah. Do you not have the patience to? I know you'll find this shocking, but I do not have the patience. Yeah. It does take a certain personality to be able to teach.

Yes. I decided, you know, if you can't be good, teach. I'll just be good. Oh, okay. That's the way it works. I love this. I saw this piano that they just dropped this past week or so. I included a link in the show notes to my favorite digital piano review channel on YouTube, which is called Miriam Music, also Canadian, eh?

Eh. And so, they sort of keep tabs on all the new releases and things, and they're impressed with this one. Yeah. So, for what it's worth. You know, the drawback, of course, is do I want to drop $ 750 on something that he might like for about a month?

And then that's that. So, I suppose then it gets me back into it. And while I vacillated between, oh, I really want to pick up my guitar playing skills, I could actually just go back and work on my piano playing skills, and I would use it. So, we'll see. Yeah.

The other nice thing about a piano like this is that it plugs right into your digital audio workstation. So, like, if you want more instruments, if he gets into composing or anything like that, it just plugs right in. Yeah.

Just becomes your master keyboard. Yeah. Right. Right. They work great. I'm reminded... Are the keys weighted? Yes. They are, yeah. Oh, yeah. This is like real. That's the other... They've got triple sensor systems. So, yeah. It looks like it's really good.

Yeah. Weighted hammer action keys, which means... Ooh. They're good. It's supposed to be a good system. Yeah. Again, for this tier of piano, which is technically a consumer-grade piano, it's really high-quality stuff relative to...

Yeah. Maybe this is in the realm of prosumer? Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. I think so. Definitely. Sure. Yeah. People would take this out on gigs. For sure. But this being a Roland piano, it reminded me of the old El ton John song, I Don't Want to Go On With You Like That, which featured one of the first Roland pianos, the Roland RD-1000.

And I was talking about how good the sounds are on this piano. I don't know if you guys remember when digital pianos first came out, they had a sound that wasn't... Good?

It was... It was piano-esque. Yeah. Right? It was... Pian-ish? It was more... Yeah. I mean, it was more piano than synthesizer. It wasn't like a Moog synthesizer or something like that, but it had a hammer sound.

But this Elton John song is probably, I think, indicative of the sound that we were used to in the 80s. Between this and the piano sound that was built into the DX 7. Yes, the DX7, which was on everything.

Right. It was kind of ubiquitous. So I included another link to someone just demoing this old Roland piano. The music video for Elton John's song was often referred to as the greatest commercial Roland ever had because it's heavily featured in it.

But it's fun to look at this thing and just see how big and comparatively clunky it was to modern digital pianos and how few sounds it had in it. Like, I don't know, eight, something like that. Yeah. But, yeah, it's fun to look back.

I actually had one of these when I was in college. I had a Korg sampling grand is what it was called. And it was just a digital piano. So I was a music student. And so I had one. But I wish I still had it. But I donated it to a school long ago.

Get one off of eBay and fix her up. Well, yeah, been there, done that. Now that you have the skills. Yeah, that's true. That's true. No, I think I'm good. My cup runneth over when it comes to digital pianos at the moment. I've still got two cents in my garage, but they're not really good for learning on.

I've still got a Yamaha SY85 and Korg Karma, which had this kind of revolutionary early, they didn't call it AI, but algorithmic settings on it that would do arpeggiations based on what you were playing. It was a lot of fun.

Yeah. I really like Korg keyboards, too. Me, too. I thought they were great. Speaking of having too many of a good things, there's been R2D2 update. Now I have two. Are you going to paint one orange?

And so it could be Chopper or R2D5 or whatever? These are all options on the table. Mm-hmm. Again, my lovely bride got another alert that they were available. And I don't know why, but I guess she just loves me so much , she bought another one.

And it arrived. So it's sitting in the living room, unboxed. I guess I could have one at the office and one at home. I mean... Or you could save it for when there's a drought of R2D2s and actually, you know, make some money on it.

That was my son's idea. Put it up on the E of the Bay at a highly inflated price. Yeah. He also thought it'd just be good to have it around for spare parts, which I think is legit. That's a good idea, too. Because I'm sure it's not... I'm sure this is not a prosumer R2D2.

No. They are... They are... As is many things these days, they look really good and are as cheaply made as possible. Yeah. Yeah. So... They turned that planned obsolescence dial all the way up. Yeah. Yeah. So, now I have two R2D2s.

10-year-old me's head would have exploded. Right? Absolutely. Two full-size R2D2s. I would have been happy with two Kenner minifigure R2D2s back when I was a kid. Right. It's like that scene in Back to the Future. Nobody has two televisions.

Yeah. Okay. Well, I only have one of my Arduino kit that came. Oh. It came. It's here. I've opened it. I've looked at it.

I have not actually used it yet because my Jeep's still broken and I'm trying to find a way to make money to fix my Jeep. So, I feel really guilty, like, playing around with an electronics kit right now while I'm... While my, you know, my car sits there rotting.

But I do want to say that it does not come with the electron microscope that is required to read the tiny little type in the book that comes with it. Because this is obviously made for children because only they have the eyesight that can understand the three-point type that is in that book.

Yeah. I need the old person edition. I'll tell you one of my tricks before I gave in and finally got my reading glasses that I'm currently wearing is I used to take pictures with my iPhone and then zoom on the picture that I've taken.

You don't even need to take a picture anymore. There's a... You can hit magnify now and it will just use it as a magn ifying glass. I found my hands were not able to hold straight enough. So, it was better to take the sharp picture and zoom. Oh. Well, see, I stopped drinking a while back. So, I don't have to.

Yeah. Sobriety fixed that problem for me. So, it's cool. I can't wait to dive into it. I'm ready. I'm ready. And the fun thing is, as I flip through the manual, since I 've taken that YouTube course that I talked about last week, I understand a lot of what's in the book now.

Oh. I understand all the symbols and what each, you know, things do with the transistors, the resistors, all that stuff, you know. Yeah. That all makes sense now. So, when I'm looking at it, I'm like, oh, now I'm really kind of jazzed about it. So, if I can get a job and fix the other shit that's wrong with my life, then I'll get to it.

But right now, it's on hold. So, it is cool. I think you should get one, Dave. I do. Really? Yeah. Everything that I've read from all the people that are, you know, into starting electronics, they're like, it's a great kit to start with. It's just, you know, get that.

And then when you're done with all the tests, you still have an Arduino at the end of it that you can use for other stuff. You know? I get, yeah. And I'm sure there are kits that people have used Arduinos with their R2D2s. I'm sure. Exactly. Exactly.

Now you need two kits, one for each R2 unit. Oh, my gosh. Yes. Yes. It is interesting. Like, you sort of alluded to this, that the Arduinos are designed for kids. You know, a lot of the electronics. No, this kit is designed for kids.

That's what I mean. Not the Arduino itself. The kit. Yeah, yeah. Okay. This particular kit. I had to learn a lot of the electronic stuff, relearn a lot of the electronic stuff in order to pass my ham radio licenses when I did that. So that was a nice review.

I go to my local ham radio club has a monthly meeting, which I go to, which is fun. It's actually over at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab , which is a cool place to go.

But we've got, you know, there's this one youngster, I'll call him. He's 52. Yeah. He's my age. I actually, I'm the youngster in the ham radio club. But now he's just starting off college.

Delightful young man. Delightful young man. Lots of spicy energy in his personality. Vim and vigor. Piss and vinegar. Vim and vigor. Absolutely on the spectrum. That goes without saying, Dave.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't, and I mean that observationally without judgment, but, but it seems. And so part of what happens in these meetings is if someone 's been working on a project or something, they'll bring it in and they'll do a little show and tell like, oh, look, I built this little Morse code device or I built this new antenna or I built this little receiver or something like that.

And his response to everything, no matter what it is that someone brings in to build is, I could have built that with an Arduino. And sometimes people are like, yeah, okay. Great.

But the best response, last meeting he said that and the person he said it to said, so could I, but where's the fun in that? So. Well, it's better than to smack it across the face, which is what I. Imagine that he's probably leading up to if he keeps saying that over and over again.

He's definitely. Yeah, he's on, he's on that path. Everyone's been. Has anyone ever been kicked out of a ham radio club before? We will find out. Right. Next week on how the ham spins.

Yeah. Yeah. I just said to my friend, she said to me, oh, you took up ham radio, huh? And I said, yeah, because I didn't have enough nerdy hobbies. So. We'll see. We'll see how long he makes it.

Everyone's been having just a ton of patience and understanding for him because. You know, I mean, he's, he's, he's not coming to all this from a bad place and he just can't help himself. It's just how he's wired. Yeah. Yeah. So we're all trying to, trying to, uh, put guardrails on him and not shut him down, I guess is probably the best way to say it.

Uh, so the last thing I put in here was a website that crossed my path. It's called the brutalist report. And I love the subheading, the day's headlines delivered to you without bullshit. And it's basically just like a little RSS, you know, reader .

It's a plain text, nothing fancy. Just, you can dial in what you're interested in and it'll just build little, little lists of things to go. A list of headlines. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just the way it used to be. It's very retro.

Uh, a couple of little things you can dial in about it. And, uh, I, I just find myself attracted to the simplicity of this. It's very old school. Thought you guys might be too. So. Yeah. I'm just trying to see if there's an R, if there's actually an RSS source for it that I can pop into my RSS reader that I built together.

But, um, yeah, there's a, there's a lot here for sure. I'm actually just going to take some of these sources and throw them in my other stuff. Right. Right. Yeah. But, uh, nice and simple. Yep. Definitely bookmarking this. Mm-hmm. All right. Great.

More depressing news to read every day. All in one convenient package. Can't get enough. Packaged, yeah. All right, gentlemen. All right, guys. Let's call it a day. Yep, yep, yep. Go spend some time with your R2 units. I will.

One on each arm. And finally, to the people who keep this show on the air. Over at Patreon, we've got two new subscribers. D Drew 37 and Daniel. And we'd also like to thank Sackis, Anne, Chloe, Peter, Florian, Tom, one of 13 subjunction, Jeff, Timment, Matthias, and John.

Thank you all so much for your continued support on the Patreon. Thank you, thank you. And over at PayPal, we got another donation from Online Computers. And 20 bucks from Nathan, who said, I just wanted to say thank you for recommending a gift of time. I got the audible version to make the misery of sitting in traffic a little bit more bearable.

It was a fantastic read slash listen. Since you don't get a cut for the recommendation from our overlord Bezos, I hope the small amount brings a smile to your day, just like your recommendations did to mine. Thank you. P.S. Not written by an LLM. Awesome. And if you like that, I just got his other book, Time Pe bbles, on Audible.

So I'll let you know. I'll be reviewing that next week. But the guy did write another book. It's not from the same Gift of Time series, season thing. It's a completely different standalone time travel novel, but it's from the same guy. So check it out, Time Pebbles. I'll be reviewing that next week.

Over at the tip jar, we've got Adam, Sarah, Matthew, and R. A. with a big 40 bucks. Thank you very much. Thank you. And your shirt's doing gangbusters, Jason. Well, one of the shirts is doing gangbusters. My Elon Kills Babies shirt? Not so much.

I thought that might be a bit more of a limited audience, yeah. It was a bridge too far. But I sold one, so you know who you are. And I really hope that you keep that, because it is a collector's item. It is absolutely a collector's item, because you are the only one besides me who actually owns one of those, which makes me sad.

So, Daryl in Canada with a family purchase. I like that. Brian in KC. Sarah from Paris. Shopify shit from Australia. Nick from New York. Paul from Florida. Josh from Knoxville, getting shirts for the whole extended family.

Paulo from the Netherlands. Andy from L.A. Dan from Oakland. Michael from New Jersey. And Nicholas from Wisconsin. And Nicholas, I fixed your address, because I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have gotten there where you'd actually sent it. So, yes. It was a very funny address, and I'm surprised they actually took it.

But thank God there was a zip code. So, I fixed that for you. I'm so glad that everybody loves the new shirt. It's great. We've got more shirts coming, because maybe we'll just be a fucking shirt company. Screw this podcasting thing, because the shirts seem to do better than anything else that we've done so far.

But, yeah, the new shirts, you've got one coming, and I've got two coming. And I think the shirt that I sent you, Brian, that I'm making might have to be a limited release for copyright reasons. Yes. I think it might be. Or trademark reasons. Yeah, I think we're going to do a limited edition drop on that one.

It'll be available for a short amount of time. But it is awesome. And I think you're actually going to like it. If you are, in fact, a grumpy old geek who was active in, what would that be? The mid-90s? Mid to late-90s? Yeah. Yeah. It's very fun. So, until next time.

Oh, wait, wait, wait. What am I doing? If you want to help support the show, go to patreon.com slash GOG, and you can sign up for as little as $3 a month to get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. So, that's one way you can support the show. You can sign up on YouTube if you want to get the show early and support us there.

You can go to gog.show slash donate to find all the other ways that you can donate to the show. Your money just literally, this is not an ad-supported show because ads don't give us shit. So, buy some merch. Give us some direct donations.

Anything that you got, we will take because my Jeep still doesn't work. Jason needs a new fucking Jeep. There you go. Anyway, so thank you, everybody. Our Arduino is not going to fix it. Yeah. My Arduino is definitely not going to fix it. No, it is not. Unless it learns how to 3D print a giant set of tires and a new lift kit.

That would be awesome if I could do that, but it can't. So, seriously, all of your support is so appreciated, and we love you all for it. So, until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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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Swing by gog.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans. That's actually a lot of fun over there. I pop in there more often than any other social network. Got thoughts, feedback, cool links? Hit us up at gog.show slash contact. And don't forget to leave a five-star review at gog.show slash review, and we'll read it on the show.

And we've got merch and more merch coming, some of it possibly trademark stomping. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.gog.show and stay grumpy. I feel like I should say something smart. Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide.

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

BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion , home, and culinary all in one place.

Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead. With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.