NASA Shuts Down Influencer’s False Astronaut Claim #1826

Lead story for Thursday, June 12. NASA shuts down influencers false claim amid social media just explosion. NASA has firmly debunked claims by an influencer named Leisa Piesto out of Brazil who portrayed herself as a crew astronaut selected for lunar and Mars missions. NASA clarified that she had no affiliation, no official affiliation, and NASA explained she participated only in a student workshop. Additional claims of university credentials were also proven false,

intensifying the controversy. Well, welcome to episode 1,826. I'm your host, Todd Cochran. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think I should just make the claim that I have been picked. I have been picked by NASA to go into space. Yeah. In my dreams. In my dreams. This controversy started about five days ago when this twenty three three year old took to Instagram to reveal that she was chosen to fly missions. She was chosen to fly missions to the moon

and Mars. So, this, you know, young, very, cute, 23 year old, yep, made these claims that, she was chosen to fly missions to the moon. How did she think that this was not gonna end well? And then she's got she's got a picture of her wearing a helmet, got her lipstick and makeup, just very, very nice. Even she's even got herself in a picture in a, a, a NASA jumpsuit. And, yeah, I wonder if she photoshopped that or or or where she got it, but yeah. NASA said, no. No. No. No.

You know you know, in a slow news day. It doesn't take a lot to become the lead story. And, actually, we got a lot of great tech stories today. So, again,

welcome to eighteen twenty six. I'm your host. A shout out to our incredible sponsor, GoDaddy. Score exclusive deals and discounts at geekinesscentral.com/godaddy. And to all of our listeners, you are the heartbeat of this show. If you want to support GNC, head to geekinesscentral.com/insider and become a GNC insider. We're lit and live. Don't just listen. Experience the show live by grabbing a modern podcast app. Of course, we're streaming live as well, at podcastapps.com.

And, of course, you can interact in real time. Check out the full Geek News Central universe at geeknewscentral.com where you find all of our partner shows and, of course, tons of new content. Lots of good information there being put put out by our team. You wanna stay in the loop? Follow or subscribe to the podcast via your favorite podcast app. Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter at geeknewscentral.com for even more insider scoops. So definitely get over to geeknewscentral.com.

You can join the conversation. It's real easy. Geeknews.chat, geek news dot chat, or you can email me [email protected] where you hit me up on exit geek news. And, of course, I'm available by my and last name on Facebook. So,

of course, you know, we are led off today, and a big thank you to GoDaddy, for for being a supporter of the show. And we want you to say big, And you can do so by going regitnacentral.com forward slash GoDaddy. Lock in that deal today. Let's start with a website or a podcast. Yeah. Let's get one created for you. GNC codes make it easy and affordable. Grab a go to economy housing economy hosting for just $6.99.

That's a full year's worth of hosting with a free domain name, professional email, and SS certificate, and it's $6.99 a month. Of course, WordPress is my favorite. WordPress managed hosting is just $12.99 a month, which includes a free domain name, professional email, and an SSL certificate. Now if you just need to grab a domain name, which I have not been any buying spree lately, I've had to control myself. $11.99. It's getting expensive to, renew 400,

plus domains. And, of course, how about a shout out to GoDaddy's website builder? Get a free thirty day trial on personal business or biz business plus plans. Again, a thirty day free trial. I use all of the GoDaddy products and services, and your support keeps this podcast alive. Use our codes. Click and save. You're backing this independent team

of creators. Again, share my codes with family, friends, people that you know do not put them on the bathroom wall because every time a code is used, just like sending us a PayPal. And thank you for supporting us and staying online. Hey. On the last show, I did ask those of you listening for some feedback on how you're using AI. And lo and behold, we got a got a audio clip that came in. I'm gonna play that before we get into the rest of the stack. We'll comment on his commentary

here. But, here's the feedback. Hi, Todd. It's Andrew here from The UK. Todd, on the previous episode, you were asking about people's experiences of using AI. So I thought I'd drop you a little voice note. Now it's not totally on point, but I think it's worth saying.

Now I'm really impressed with the kind of AI that allows us to have self driving cars, goes through medical scans, look for tumors that were missed, Or even just the AI that looks at your webcam footage and tells you whether it's a person, a pet or a parcel at the front door.

But what I'm not terribly impressed about is generative AI, which to me just seems like wholesale IP theft. These companies are basically other people's work and creativity and repurposing it as their own. And I don't think it's right. These are some of the richest companies on the planet and and they're just brushing people off. They need to be clear about inclusion in datasets, and they need to recompense people fairly, or allow them to remove their content.

Yes. If you're Taylor Swift or the Wall Street Journal, you'll probably be able to negotiate a rate. But if you're little people, you're screwed. Now, I think you've alluded to this before, but simply if you have a website that provides factual long form content that relies on advertising to make money, it's basically came over. As soon as your content gets hoovered up by the AIs, it'll be brought into whatever response Gemini or ChatGPT spits out and you're not really get any credit.

In any other circumstances, this will be copying, plagiarism, ripping off, and intellectual theft. As I said, these are some of the richest companies on the planet. And frankly, many of their leaders have questionable morals. Countries seem to be bending over backwards to facilitate the AI companies, instead of strengthening protections to enable a fairer share of revenue. They're not doing this for the betterment of the human race. They're doing it for their bottom line.

Let's not forget that these are the companies that came for our privacy, our data, and treated it with contempt. And now they're coming for our creativity. That's it. Thanks so much, Todd. Hey. Now, that's a different take. You know, here's the way I look at it. And to be honest with you, I think what you're gonna find already is the ship has sailed and most companies, most websites are creating most of their content now with

AI generated output. There's very, very few sites that are online today that are writing original content. You know, we've asked the team at Keaton Essential to write original contents, but they're probably re write original content. But probably the team members are getting access to articles that have been garnered from taking a press release and then pulled the data out and and made a blog post.

So I I think it's gone full circle at this point because, to be frank, if they don't, they're not going to survive. And what this could lead to is the collapse of the model as well. So if you don't have good input coming into the model, because everything that the model's getting is what was generated by the AI to begin with, I think, you know, you can look at, model collapse. But at the same time, my, you know, the way I am looking at this is the way we use the tool is to get ideas and

topics that we can talk about. So if we're gonna write a blog post, at Blueberry about, x, y, and z. We say, what are the ideas that we should be covering in this article in x, y, z? And we often use some of that data for the outline to write an article, that is still written by hand. But at the same time, it is very, very easy now to almost take that output

and cut and paste. Now at least here in The United States, there's some copyright stuff that's, you know, has been decided and so But I think what we're gonna find out and the way that I look at it at this time, especially from my personal site, and for Blueberry's site. If we ban the the AI and they've gotten big. I agree. But if we ban the AI from indexing our websites, we're done as a business. We will not survive the next three years. And the reason for it is very, very simple.

People are using AI now for search, and we're seeing evidence of that traffic coming to Geaton Central, coming to Blueberry that is originating from people asking, how do I start a podcast? What's a good tech site? And so on and so And then get them giving just as Google gives today, search results. Those search results are put together by an AI, and hopefully, we get a little bit of that traffic.

So there is a paradox that we're facing because Google's all in, and so is Bing and other folks in changing the way search results are found.

It's a big dilemma for big companies, small companies. And my my company, Blueberry is a very small company. Well, you know, we're under 20. Here at Geek New Central, we're a very small team of three or four. And, you know, there's a couple of principal writers and some folks that, like you, that contribute to the content on on the website, putting in original content. But I am not at all, I am not at all unaware that the site's obviously been indexed.

But I don't believe per se they've trained the model on, yes, all this written word. I get it. But it's all one big big massive jumble, right, of content that they've they've trained it on. So when you are getting when you're ask asking it to write a blog post or you're asking it for ideas. Yep. You're getting bits and pizzas from from all over the place. So there's really, you know, two ways

that this is all gonna resolve. And and and I hate to say it, but the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. It's it's already gone to the point where you have to figure out at this point as a creative, as a website owner, as a company, because we're not gonna be able to go sue them and get money. The big companies are. So what do we have to do? We have to adapt, and we have to be able to, use the the platform's recommendations to our advantage.

So it's it's it again, the prompts that I'm writing per se into, let's say, ChatGPT as an As an example, if I'm doing a research product. Matter of fact, I'll give you an example right now. I'm looking at the last three years of data traffic we've moved at Blueberry. So I have three years of all the data that we moved on every single day going back, thirty six months. So, you know, what is that, about a thousand entries. And I am going to use the research tool. Matter of fact, I asked for the

data today. I'll do it in the morning. I'm gonna ask the research, and I could do this with math. Be you know, it's just a standard math problem. I gotta figure out the averages per day, whether the usage is up, down, where the peaks are, what months are better, what it looks like from a year to year, month to month. I gotta look at all this data because next month, I go into negotiations with with Amazon to contract for the next two years what I'm gonna pay for Bandwidth to deliver podcast.

So what I need to do and for again, I could sit down and take two or three hours, run all this data, build pie charts, all these things. But instead, I'm gonna drop that document, in the chat g p t, turn on research mode, and I'm gonna say analyze my web traffic or my data traffic over the past three years. Tell me the trends. Give me any insights that you can because I'm getting ready to negotiate a new contract with Amazon for CDN pricing, and I'm gonna say go.

And in about five minutes, it's gonna give me a report where I can QA, and I probably will. I'll probably do a little bit QA work to make sure that they did the math right. And I'll have a pretty good answer on where I need to be projected bandwidth for the next two years, whether I need to bid for less bandwidth going forward, the whole nine yards. And that would have probably been half a day. Half a day's worth of

work. And yet, the the the work that I'm gonna do in chat g p t is gonna save me a massive amount of time. So I'm in a position now where you have to make a decision whether you are going to fight it or join it. And if you're gonna join it, how can you make it work best for your company to be able to succeed? The whole landscape of the world, regardless of what we may think is going to and is changing. I think I talked about it on the

last show. I had one of my long time employees decide they didn't want to be on forty hours a week anymore. They basically to they're getting older. They wanna spend time with family. They step their time back, ten hours a week. I think I originally thought I was 35, but it's thirty hours a week. And because of AI, her productivity is basically the same as it would been if she was working forty hours.

So, you know, the way I'm looking at it from my company standpoint is we're gonna be AI forward. We're gonna use the tools. We're gonna because there's some stuff that I've done that I would have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire a data analysis to do a bunch of data analysis for me to make a decision on something that now I don't have to pay a data analysis because I don't have the budget for a data analysis. I don't have a budget to go out and hire a data analysis.

I had to kinda interpret my own data to the best of my ability, but I basically got an undergraduate data analysis for $200 a month. And it's incredible, the outputs that we're getting out of this. And again, you have to be careful. You don't necessarily wanna connect your Google Drive or your email to these, agents.

I think that's a little bit foolish because, you know, you may expose all your data to the world if you don't have your settings right on, you know, basically denying permission for them to feed stuff back. So, again, I think, you know and I understand from an artist standpoint this this challenge, that's going And you look at the art that we're creating for the show now. I could have never have done that on my own. I could have never have, afforded to be able to do art like that on my own.

You know, thank god for Sam, for so many years, submitted art to us that we put in rotation. A 120 images he give us, and we, you know, we change the image every show, but it always didn't didn't always match the the content. And when someone was looking at the show in Apple Podcasts, you know, what did they see? They just saw a GNC logo. Now, at least, they're seeing something a little more intriguing and it have the ability to say, oh, maybe I should check that out.

I I agree that there's gonna be lots of lawsuits and a lot of people paid, and the common man is gonna get zero. Zero. And so now we have to make a decision being that we are going to get zero. I'm not gonna get a penny from any of these models, and now I'm paying to use these models. I think for the common man, this is it makes sense. It gives you a a competitive advantage.

There's no reason now why someone that's young, full of energy, can work twenty hours a day, can start with just a very small number of people, leverage AI, and build something beautiful. There's no reason for it. There's no reason that you would need today more than four or five people, maybe three to launch something remarkable because you've got the ability here to put a business plan together. You can put your road map together. You can have idea iteration. It just goes on and on and on

and on. So there's huge huge opportunities, whereas you may not have been able to do that yourself. Even the lawyer that's on my team, we take and he helps chat GBT do initial drafts on legal documents. He goes through then and and QAs them, but would have took him five, six, seven hours at the billing rate of a lawyer to

put together. He now it's an hour, hour and a half, because the basis of the legal document and him having a a a legal degree, and being a legal being a lawyer, licensed lawyer, he can go through and review and make sure the language is right and and QA it, make the changes where it's needed, and he does have to make changes. And the time in money savings is simply incredible.

Documentation alone, just documentation alone, and being able to take an image of a UI, give a little explanation of it, and it produces beautiful documentation

that if I was to write it, I would not have, number one, been able to write it as beautiful. Number two, would not has been able to be as clear. Now without going through many, many rounds, many, many rounds of editing, but now I I give it an image of a UI. I said, here's the here's the description of what this page is, the general idea of what it does, And it's smart enough to look at that out and write documentation that I can then put up on my

website. Of course, added it. It maybe gets 90% right, but it's gotten so much better. And until you have a a something that you have had to pay someone else to do, and you're a small company and a budget, and you're trying to imagine, you know, being able to drop legal agreements and then just have someone do the review on the legal doc. Can you check to see if this is right? And they pay for an hour of somebody's time versus five hours of their time to create it.

It it's it's a game changer. It really truly is. Yes. At the expense of all the data on the web. But here's the thing, The data on the web, copyright excluded, has been on the web for us all to read and enjoy, and it's out there. We've got 16,000 articles on Geek News Central that I have paid for about 90% of them to be written. So, of course, you know, we have value in that. But, also, I'm not of the size of a company to be able to go out and say, hey.

But what I am worried about and there's the flip side to this, not saying it's right or wrong. The flip side of this is what happens when Geek News Central's web traffic goes down because I blocked ChatGBT or Claude or all these models, and all of a sudden, we're not being recommended anymore. Game over. Out of business. Dead. No more budget. No more no more, conversions for what advertising is on the website. It's done. It's gone. It's over. Game over.

But I have yet to separate one test that we did is to have the temptation to go to an AI writing machine and say, just churn out three articles a day, and it very well could do that. There's plenty of tools out there that I'd give it a list of resources, press releases, whatever it may be, tie into the the newswires and say he and it gives me 20 articles that may be of interest to me, and I pick three. It writes articles about those press releases and then publishes it. It'd just be that simple.

That's not how I'm working at Geek and Essential by making sure that we all have original content, original thought. And, again, we're not a big operation. So what do we put up on the website in a month? Maybe 30 articles. Does that allow me to compete with nine to five Google, Engadget, Gizmodo who are churning out hundreds of articles a day, 95% of them written by AI and edited by a small team? They're doing that.

May have a person's name on it, but I can absolutely guarantee you the majority of those articles are being written by AI. I got a fly here that's dive bombing. I have my fly swatter with me. I don't know. He comes around I've been trying to get him for three or four days. So I I know. It's it's it's a double edged sword. I guess and if you're an artist, you know, that you you're screwed the biggest.

But, you know, you look at this image for those of you watching, this nine to five article, that is absolutely unequivocally at the top of the page. That is AI generated. It says it's not just you. Google and many other web services were hit with a partial outage. This is not a real image. This is something that was generated by AI. So here you have a leading website, and there you and we're all seeing this stuff everywhere. Right?

So it's not just you know, this is a well well reputable website, and this is why many websites right now

seeing the seeing the apocalypse that's coming, and their only revenue model is advertising. This is why so many sites have started to put up paywalls. Give me $5 a month, $3 a month. Let me give me your email so I can, you know, email you every day with what we're writing just to get the traffic to the website. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. This you know, the the amount of content that's gonna be put out that is AI generated is gonna be so large. You're not gonna know.

You're not gonna know. Now because I have done so much work in ChatGPT, it is I I can tell ChatGPT right in my voice with my concerns about listener privacy, with my concerns about owning your own brand, with my and it will it will speak essentially as I do based upon having literally a thousand samples of my writing from the past fifteen years. And it just knows how to write like me and sound like me. It's my personal doppelganger.

And to be honest with you, I'm able to do stuff now that I did not have the time to do before. Why have I added the podcast myth show? Because I've got time to do that. Because I've I've been able to squeeze more time out of the day because I'm not spending three hours writing, you know, a proposal. The proposal I got my proposal template, and I explained into the chat GBTA, or I am talking to company x y z. They want x y z service.

I said, please fill out the proposal form, and it has samples of my previous proposal. Bam. Gives me the proposal form written in a much in not rushed, produces it in sixty seconds, looks like it's been worked on for three hours, exquisite detail, even pulls stuff out of the terms of service to say, pay attention to, you know, these these, specific items in the in the terms of service because it affects your proposal, and

voila. I can send that off to a client, which would have took me three or four hours on my own. And in fifteen minutes, I've got a product. Boom. It's out the door. And in fact, I talked about it today with, because we had lunch with, my CFO and my lead support, person at Blueberry. We we met, north, over in Hamilton, Michigan. And I said that at the because I am being able to turn and burn much faster on stuff that I'm doing, Sometimes I have to take a ten minute break to let my brain catch up.

Prime example. The other day, I was able to take all the email addresses from the podcast show I went to in London. All are scanned, and including non scanned badges and everything else, and I was able to, tell ChatGPT. I said, here's the spread here's the spreadsheet here and there's in there is a is an a line item that is about the topic of what I talked about with this customer. And at the show, we talked about x y we talked about these, you know, these particular 10 topics.

You already know about our products and services on those 10 topics. Now create me a custom personal email to every one of those people that I can send them. And sixty seconds, I it gave me a spreadsheet to download. I opened it up and it had the subject of the email, which I was like, wow. That's pretty good. Personalized email. Didn't get it a 100% right. I had to maybe spend sixty seconds or ninety seconds on each email to just get it tweaked a little bit and hit send.

Now what would have took me literally probably two days of because I always do personal emails. We don't do any, mass, you know, email with the same message. So it to get those emails out was a couple hours. And, again, each yeah. But still it was tedious. They still had to edit the emails, but I had a starting point. And it produced an email that was and you know what's happened? I've gotten more responses and meetings set up from doing it that usually, it'd be crickets. We would have 3%.

I had nearly 50% response rate, from those emails. People booking additional meetings that could turn into business. So it's just I'm not having to answer my email, but when I'm emailing a stack of people that we talk to over two days and it and, again, I it did create the email initially, and then I edit it. And then maybe it got something a little wrong, and I had to personalize it a little bit. But when the person got the email, guess

what? They felt like they got an email from me, and it was because my doppelganger knows my voice, knows what my it just it has all this information now, good or bad, and it's able to mimic me and write in the tone I want, and it it works. So I understand where you're coming from, Andrew. I do. I do. But I think this is a train we can't stop. I think I think, you know, this this this thing has has left the station. And now, what we have to do is figure out how we survive.

They're already talking about job impacts and that people that are AI literate, at least in The United States, are garnering 50% higher wages than those that are not. Because what can you do? You get more performance out of AI literate employee than you do as someone that's resisting. Now I'm at an age where, you know, I I I I got a finish line in sight, and I know how much more time I've got to do to, you know, to put in before I can hopefully retire.

But I don't have the same energy that I had when I was 40 years old. So for me, and for people that are just coming to the workforce, it's it's you gotta have this AI literacy, and I just think things are are gonna change. I I appreciate your your feedback, but, you know, I'm looking at this as this tsunami that's offshore, and it's it's 800 feet tall. And, I'm in this little itty bitty house, three miles, inland, and, knowing that I'm gonna get ate up if we don't if we don't, adapt.

And it's really that's that's the that's the the basis of it, to be to be honest. And if you're a business out there, and you're not using these tools, there's a train coming, and, it it need to get on or you need to get on the train and move with this now. So but it's good. It's, you know, it's I think at this point, no there's no privacy anymore. That that that's been gone for ten years. When I when I can before AI, when someone could tell me just by a few markers

that, yep. This is Todd and here's your address. So here's something interesting. We have a list of all of our customers' emails and ZIP codes. Certain types of advertising in Google, you can upload those emails and ZIP codes, and Google will not advertise to those clients the products that they already own from you. Did you know that was possible? I didn't.

But it's something that's available in Google. If you don't want if you're spending advertising money in this big 800 pound gorilla and you upload that list, it's probably not perfect. But, again, an email and a ZIP code is enough for them to say, okay. We won't serve that customer your ads, which if you think about it, wow. I didn't know that was possible. It's been available for years. So so much for GDPR. And, of course, it's only for US.

Anyone outside The US, we don't have ZIP codes for, so you you can't submit them. So, yeah, it's it's it's it's wild. It really, really is. Okay. Yes. I guess moving on here. Google, many other web services have been hit with a partial outage. It's complicated as this thing is. I I am not surprised. Smart tires are now gonna report on the health of roads in a new pilot program. Do you remember the, Pirelli Cyber tire? Well, I I don't I I do, but I

don't. But they've got a sensor equipped tire now that can inform the car it's fitted to what's happening, both with the tire itself and the road it's passing over. The technology has been slow making its way into the real world with rarefied stuff like McLaren, Attura. Now Pirelli is going to put some cyber tires work for everyone, not just supercar drivers.

In a pilot program for the regional government of Opelia in Italy, the cyber tires are sensor to monitor temperature and pressure using Bluetooth low energy to communicate with the car. Electronics are able to stand more than 3,500 g's as part of the life on the road because, yes, your tire is spinning at such a high rate. It it's in credit raising incredible g's. But, anyway,

it's gonna talk with the vehicle and tell them what's going on with the road. Nvidia has hit the gas on automated vehicle software. Nvidia's officially rolled out its autonomous vehicle despite telling a UK car magazine that full sell full self driving vehicles are not likely before the next decade.

But yet the AI accelerated chipmaker declared at its GTC Paris event that the NVIDIA DRIVE AV SAFR plant a platform is now in full production claiming it offers automotive industry a robust foundation for AI powered mobility. So, they're they're using everything for AI. Elon's way ahead of this, of course, as well. Amazon has changed its nuclear deal in Pennsylvania to bypass grumpy regulators. I don't fully understand this. It's called new front of meter agreement.

Avoids direct delivery snags. So, basically, they were wanting 1,920 megawatts of nuclear power being delivered to a single data center or a series of data centers through 2042. But, apparently, they were saying, no. You can't direct feed, because that's not fair for everyone else. So what they're gonna do, they're gonna have a shunt of some sort, whatever that means. A shunt, I guess, a tap, I would assume.

The new the new deal isn't a colocation agreement, but a frontometer deal, meaning 1,920 megawatts of energy Amazon has purchased from the nuclear power plant won't be delivered directly, but will be shunted to the grid to cover Amazon's increased consumption. No colocation drag on the grid. So the reason so they were basically, they didn't want this because they said cities down downstream would be affected because of, the facility getting so much juice.

Well, that's just the tip of the iceberg, ladies and gentlemen. People are gonna need juice. Now case in point today, Kirk came up with a, an article over on Axios. And the Axios link will stay up in the show notes. But because I'm not paying Axios, I had a big fat ad on the front. And so I went and looked to see if anyone else was talking about this Axios article, and I did. I found someone talking about it on LinkedIn.

But, apparently, Lyft has announced three new ad formats, sponsored map vehicles, sponsored rides by mode, and vertical video, and wait and save. So they've hired a bunch of people to serve this. And, anyway, this is an exclusive by Axios that I couldn't read. So but I'll have the Axios link in the show notes to give, to give credit. Now speaking of, companies that have not been so nice, you know, John Deere, people love their John

Deere tractors. I'm a John Deere fan too, but John Deere has to face the FTC's right to repair lawsuit. A federal judge rejected John Deere's attempt to get the lawsuit tossed out, And, so they're gonna have to go to battle here. The FTC in several states, good Illinois, Minnesota, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, sued John Deere in January claiming the company spent decades limiting the ability of farmers and independent repair shops to fix their equipment.

Also, it brings up the specialized software John Deere uses repairs equipment, which is only available to authorized dealers, AKA John Deere John Deere dealerships, forcing farmers to solely rely on the more expensive authorized dealers for critical repairs. In the ruling, the judge rejected John Deere's challenges to the FTC constitutional structure along with the arguments to the government's monopolization claims are insufficient. So we will see where this leads, and quite frankly, I hope

they're forced to open things up. Hey. Hey. If you have an Anker power bank, stop using the Anker power cord 10,000. Now let me

give you the model number. So the model number printed on the bottom edge is a one two six three. If you have a a one two six three power bank, get that thing out of your house. They've had 19 reports of fires and explosions and has caused as much as $60,000 in property damage. So again, this is the Anker a one A1263. I went immediately, looked at my power banks. I don't have any of these.

And And that's another thing too. If you have an old power bank, please please please dispose of them properly. Don't throw them in the fire. Don't throw them in the dumpster.

But I will say one thing. Where do you, where do you recycle old suitcases? DJI rumors point to three major product launches next month, including a new three sixty camera. So we could be a few weeks from DJ's three sixty camera plus a flagship wireless mic. I like the action, the DJ action, action camera. It's really fantastic. It's what I carry in my bag now. Much more happy with that than, the GoPros. Longer battery life, holds the battery, doesn't run out of battery.

I I'm really a big fan of the DJI action cameras. Collected a lot of content over the past year that's just sitting on SD cards that sometime in the future, I'll make it to YouTube. Google, yes, has a new AI model and website for forecasting tropical storms. It's working with the US National Hurricane Center to test out its new AI based tropical cyclone models. So we'll see how this works because, yes, they are testing it. Google DeepMind, whoo, and Google Research

launched a new website today. It's called WeatherLab. Let me look and see if it's what it looks like. DeepMind. This is kinda for those of you watching, this is kinda what it looks like. So, you know, they're giving predictions over time. So we'll have to for those of you in hurricane zones, just be aware that that is out there. So maybe maybe this will turn out to

be something or not. But it'll be interesting and see how it a b compares up against, folks that are actually doing weather forecast. So again, AI might might be affecting, weatherman jobs. Very well could be. Maybe the AI will end up doing weather prediction. The Pixel six a phone keeps catching on fire so Google's could put limits on their batteries. So some Pixel six a phones have been overheating. Google says they'll address the issue with the

software update. The update will limit battery capacity and charging speed. So, again, it's quite old camera, but they've had some issues. Now, just remember, if you've got an older phone, you got an older laptop, you got an older tablet, if they start to swell, if they feel hot, super hot when they're charging, it's time maybe to think about a new battery and or replacement. It's not worth it. It really, really isn't.

I've abandoned a lot of devices over the years because the batteries that started to swell and or overheating, it's just not worth the potential, of a fire. And being that I'm traveling a lot, I make sure that all of my wall warts that are used for charging are all turned off or unplugged before I go anywhere and it's not plugged in to any device to sit there and trickle charge for a month while I'm gone. So, you know, just be careful out there. A major Interpol operation takes thousands of in

post dealer sites offline. Dozens have been arrested. Operation secure looks to hit malware operators where it hurts. So this has been going on for a while. For January and April, police agencies in 26 countries have worked together to locate servers and move into a disrupt criminal campaigns. 32 people were arrested. ATM in Vietnam, 12 in Sri Lanka, two in Nauru, including the individual suspected have been running the entire operation found with, a hefty sum of cash and lots of SIM cards.

So gigs of data and lots of stuff. So, again, another criminal unit stealing money from companies and so shut down. And And I think this is this next article is partially right.

Many businesses are thinking twice on using AI bots. We know that customers like to call a friend. We also know that if we can get them an answer, either via just normal search or an AI search result, it saves and frees up time for my team members. So, you know, we've been looking heavily at how we can get better refined, and also great documentation. But people, to be honest with you, they don't wanna read. They wanna talk to someone. So I understand this.

Even if you give them the answer, they may still call. But if we can prevent one, two, three, four, five calls a week, that's at least an hour of my team's time back, just by having the ability for people to find the answer on their own. But, when there's a telephone number, people will dial nine out of 10 times without doing any search. An experimental retina implant have get has given a mice infrared vision. These four mice.

A team of scientists in China's Fudan University recently brought a proton retinal implant that can replace the failing photoreceptors and potentially provide infrared vision as a bonus. They've only tested in animals so far. So that's China. I'm sure they'll be testing on humans soon, but anything that we can do to give sight back to those that are blind or vision impaired, you know, I'm all for as long as it it works.

If you're an Amazon Prime Video subscriber, you're sitting through it up to six minutes of ads per hour if you are not paying the extra $3 a month to get the ad free. I don't watch enough Amazon Prime Video right now to give an extra $3, But they were supposed to have limited number of ads, but over time, it's crept up now to you're getting six minutes of ads even because even if you're paying for Amazon Prime at $15 a month or 139 per year,

you still are getting ads. Now, again, you gotta pay them another $36 a year if you don't want ads. So, again, I don't watch enough primes Prime Video to be annoyed. I do pay for YouTube. Boy, they're super annoying. Made has cracked down on a Nudify app after being exposed. The lawsuit comes one week after an investigation found hundreds of AI undressing apps advertised on Meta. So Nudify, basically, take a picture of a person and Nudify them without their consent.

How do they do that? Do they just make a fake god. They don't can you imagine someone trying to do a notify of me? You know, come on now. But, they're going after this group and taking these these apps down. It's just more and more of this is is gonna be out there for sure. NASA raises odds of killer city asteroids smashing into the moon. Now it has a four point three percent chance of happening in 2043. So April potential. The Earth was initially in this ring.

And, so again, they're up to 4.3% chance this is gonna happen in, in 2043. So we will see. 2043. See how old am I? Yeah. I might still be around. We'll see if I don't stroke out in the meantime. Yeah. Probability has risen by striking the moon. The Kickstarter funded films are coming to Tubi. Tubi is partnering with Kickstarter to distribute more than 20 crowdfunded films. That's awesome. And Tubi is owned by Fox, if you

didn't know that. It's partnering with Kickstarter and, begins to follow more than, more than 20 videos that uniquely resonate with Tubi fans will begin exclusive streaming on the service. Additionally, Tubi plans to invest in Kickstarter's film stream collective fund. So, a lot more people will be able to see crowdfunded films. Telegram has rejected allegations over links to Russian intelligence. Unauthorized access to any data is impossible, said

the provider. I'm just gonna tell you, use any app. Any app. Doesn't matter which one is. Telegram, Signal, anything is possible for your data to be released. Just be aware. There's nothing out there that is secure, secure, secure. The only thing that's secure is something you don't tell or type to anyone else and you keep it secret for the entirety of your rest of your life. That's the only thing that can be a secret. Apple's iOS 26 requires kids to get parental permission to text new numbers.

That's awesome. So what's the age range on this? So there'll be five categories, include including three for 13, 16, and 18. When parents set app content restrictions that exceed those that will not appear on the App Store, those kids can request exemption if if the ask to buy setting is enabled. So have already employee safety features like web content filters, app restrictions for kids 13, but

now they go 13, 16, 17. So you want your phone, young one? I'm gonna know who you're texting. This is very good. This is kids are gonna hate it, but oh, well. Solar orbit captures images of the sun's pole, South Pole specifically for the time. Pole's magnetic field is all messed up right now, but they got a image of it.

Again, the solar orbit has been observing the sun since 2021, but it recently went on a side trip to Venus to get a get a boost, speed boost, which certainly tilted its orbit and gave it a good view of the sun's polar region. So that was how I was able to capture images that will historically be known as humankind's ever views of the sun's pole as our galaxy planets and other spacecraft we deployed over around the sun, around an imaginary elliptic plane along the star's equator.

But again, there was enough of an angle 15 degrees below the equator to get the image. So very, very cool YouTube video on that. So worth watching. You'll be one of the in mankind to see the sun's South Pole.

Google faces a billion dollar quid bruising over Play Store fees in The UK, and this is all about the 30%. So a billion pound legal action against Google over Play Store fees can proceed to trial. The case hinges on apps sold by UK developers on Play Store and for Android customers. Google charges up 30%. So, again, once again, they're going after these App Store fees in a big, big way. So how many have a bike?

I currently do not have a bicycle, and I know a lot of people even here in the country are driving around in ebikes. Well, there's a new one that can accommodate two passengers. It boasts robust security features and a battery that's easily removed. It's called Auto. Top speed of 33 miles per hour with a 20 mile limit while riding in a bike lane. How about a dirt road? So it's called Olto. How much does it cost? Let's see if we can get a price on this thing. $30,495.

That's not a that's not an electric bice that that you can you I think you can buy, like, a their stuff ain't quite cheaper than that. You can buy a motorized motorcycle for that much, I would think. My goodness. Coinbase based up subscription plan by offering it with American Express credit card. So they're going to have a branded credit card exclusively to Coinbase one, the platform's monthly

subscription product. How much you're gonna be able to get it? You're gonna be able to get, how much is the card gonna cost? Cardholders will be able to earn 24% back in Bitcoin, and they'll get other benefits alongside the American Express network. The Coinbase one costs $29.90 a month, and the basic tier and pure rewards, it costs $4.90 $49.99 a month. So is that what the credit card's gonna cost? That's pretty amazing, but that is gonna be that cheap. I am I reading that right?

That's probably the cheapest American Express card I've ever heard of. So I don't know what it's gonna give the back in. You know, if you if you and American Express is definitely expensive. But if you take advantage of every offer they have to save money, you can pay your fee back and then some. But if you don't, it's an absolute waste of time. No need to have an American Express card unless you take advantage of all of the of the cash savings. That's the critical part.

IOS 20. Okay. We already talked about the child account stuff. That's a dupe. And okay. Yes. We will allow ads. We always do. Hollywood Reporter says the sag after suspense strike after video game companies paving way to return to work.

The union had taken a stand on AI, among other concerns, says look to advocate for voice and performance capture, work. So after nearly a year on strike, a year, how much money these folks lose in a year? A year? How much money did they lose? Doesn't talk about any of the it delivers historic wage increase over 24% for performers, enhanced health and safety protections. So a year they run strike. My god. Okay. Obviously, I gave Andrew some feedback.

What say you in regards to my commentary about AI? Where are you in the game here? Okay? I love to hear. I love to hear back from you. It's real easy to to send me an email, [email protected], or you can do like Andrew did and send me send me an audio file. We'll play on the show. Love to hear your thoughts on his and I thoughts. And believe me, I understand completely where he's coming from. But I'm a reality standpoint. I have employees.

They need to make payroll, medical, dental, four zero one k, you know, all the things that go along with running a business. And, you know, you can't there's a hill that you you know, it's just like video and podcasting. It's like, you know, fighting with a loaded wheelbarrow up a hill. You know? You're gonna roll down the hill or you go up the hill. And the same thing with AI.

Do you fight it and end up broke and no job and out of business, or do you embrace it and try to stay ahead of the curve, which is almost impossible? I don't know. Where where do you lay in this? And by the way, again, I can't believe that young lady decided that she was gonna say she was an astronaut. How how how did she think? How did she think that was not going to, come back and and and and haunt her? But, hey, get over the website. We definitely appreciate when you do.

Support our writers over there, and, you know, just support a click to the website. Come over and take a look. Snoop around a little bit. We appreciate when you do. Again, [email protected]. Don't forget about our sponsor, GoDaddy. Take care. Be safe. We'll see you back here on Monday for another edition of the Geek and Central podcast. Everyone take care. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.