607: Pagers and Paperbacks

Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFillippo. Hey, Brian Schulmeister. How you doing, Brian? I feel like crap. I managed to go through all of my treatment with my suppressed immune system without getting sick. Finish treatment. Sick as a dog. Isn't it ironic? Isn't it though?

Like I've got the muscle pains, I've got the aches, I've got the sore throat. It's awesome. Oh man. Yeah, we didn't get to talk about it much last week. Dave wasn't here because we were recording out of our normal time because you were up in the air with your treatment, but you got great news. Yeah, I did.

They decided they were contemplating doing a fifth round as opposed to the four that they had originally stated because I was missing an enzyme and I started with a slightly lower dosage, but the doctor decided that I had made up for it and didn't need it. So I'm done. I'm done with all my treatment. I get scans when I come back from LA for my summer holiday and we'll see where we're at. And now I start the three to five year weight at which point they kind of say, okay, you're good.

I can just see you standing in front of the doctor's doctor's desk screaming at him. There are four treatments. Yeah. I mean, I was resigned to do it. If the doctor tells you to do something, I highly recommend that in general, you do it, but I was very pleased to not have to do it again because it was definitely like the treatments, the side effects were just added on like it just builds and builds and builds on doing the treatment and I was just like, oh, God, I don't want to do another one.

But yeah, didn't have to. So here I am sick. That's great. Can't get around it. Can't get around it. Well, I'm glad you got through it and continued good health once you're done with your sniffles. Yes. The sniffles are a fine price to pay for, you know, skipping the other. I'll take it. Yeah. That's fine. I have a nice little case of pot kennel. Fuck you. I'll start off with today, Spotify executives called, calls Harry and Megan Grifters after their podcast deal ends.

Well, I mean, it was a little ridiculous. They signed a 20 million deal with Spotify in 2020 and did what, 12 episodes? 12 episodes. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. And then there's this whole brew ha ha about did she have her assistance? Actually do the interviews and then just go in and record her voice asking the questions. Does it matter? It knows. Does it matter? Does that matter?

I just think it's funny because Bill Simmons, who sold his podcast to Spotify for $196 million dollars is going around swinging his little Dixie and that they're, you know, that they're Grifters. It's like pot kennel fuck you, buddy. Sorry. At least he does is at least he makes a regular podcast. Yeah, I guess so. I guess there's that at least. I mean, he's, he's providing the content that he was contractually obligated to do for the millions of, $1 million dollars.

And here we are doing it for like a hundred bucks. Yes, speaking of Brian, we are going to have an ad sale because we don't have, we've got a lot of open slots for the rest of the year and bargain basement prices. So if you are interested in running your ad on Grumpy old geeks, drop me a note, jason at GrumpyoldGeeks.com and we'll work something out with you. Yep. Why not? We got empty spaces because, you know, the ad revenue for podcasts is dead.

So. It's either you take advantage of this with us or we get, you know, propitia ads that run whenever we have some, some empty space. Do you have issues with your GI tract? If so. Yes. Brian, I'd like to talk to you about ED. What? What's he up to? I think maybe by next week we'll have flashlight ads up. We're just going to, we're just going to go back to the old days of podcasting. Cool. Yep. We're going to go full on Kevin Smith. Why not? Free flashlights for everyone. Oh geez.

We got this note in from Donovan. They said, speaking about Tesla's autopilot, have you seen the class of Oh nine on effects? I won't spoil it if you haven't. I haven't. But there's a scene a few episodes in where the law will pull you over because you're driving. It's pretty cute, pretty cute. They have billboards up along the road that say, thank you for not driving. Uh, blah, blah. So I put a link to it in the show notes. It's a very clever idea. I think. Yeah. First of all.

As we'll lean into these technological trends that aren't going to happen. Yeah. Oh god. But, uh, you know, when we talk about self-driving, we always, uh, we always talk about the, the problems with it. But we have a, we have a problem with EVs in our brave new world. And we do. I personally experienced this. You have. Oh, do tell. Okay. So here's the, here's the big problem nowadays.

When you used to go to the rental car company and you'd pick the bargain basement, they would give you the car that nobody else wanted. For me, it was a Mustang. I always got Mustangs and I hated, hated, hated them because they were convertible. You couldn't see out the back and gas is expensive and those things just suck it like a thing. But now we have the opposite problem. What is that Brian? Well, all the car rental companies bought up a whole bunch of EVs.

Uh, they're not very plainly labeled on their sites yet. They need to fix that. Yeah. We need to book a car for our L.A. trip because we, we need one and, and I kept coming up like EV. I don't want an EV. We don't have a charger at my mom's house. I'm not staying at a hotel with a charger. I don't know where the chargers are. I'm not ready for this. You want to give me a hybrid fine, but not a full EV.

That's ridiculous. Yep. Yep. There's very few people that have the infrastructure to be able to use that. So it's insane and it is very difficult to figure out if you're getting an EV or not. You have to know all the models basically. Great. You know, I'm not up on all that. I don't care. I have a BMW. That's, that's all I've paid attention to for years.

Um, so yeah, we, we went on one of the sites and we're trying to book a car and we would just click through and click through and click through and dig down and go, oh, this is a new V again. Can't have any V. No chargers. Yep. Especially for people who are planning on doing road trips like long road trips. Yeah, you fly in somewhere and you want to go, you know, maybe hiking or backpacking or something or, you know, places where there are zero chargers. What are you going to do? Get stuck.

Yep. And then even like the charging takes forever, right? Like who wants to pull over off on the middle of your road trip and then sit there for six hours? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. No, this is, this is not meant for rental cars yet. I get it. If you're a business guy go and straight to your hotel that's got the charger. Great. That's awesome. But if you're like doing this for a family, not so good.

Yeah. And the issue is that it's souring people on EVs, people who might have been considering getting an EV and are thrown into the deep end to find the worst, the worst case scenario that you could possibly have with an EV is, you can't, you know, you don't even know how to work the damn car because you have to read through the manual because they're all over the map.

Yeah. You can't just pop down to the, you know, like walk a few miles and pick up some spare batteries like you can do a can with a can of gas. You're just, you're screwed. You're hosed. Yeah. As it were. It's a bad call on there. I can't why they're doing it. They're cheaper in the long run. But yeah. I just, I, I was wrecking my head. I'm like, how can car rental companies make their service even worse? And aha. Now we have an answer. They've found it. Yep. Yep. We have our answer.

I want to do a quick clarification on my market and recent rant from the previous episode. I got, I got some pushback from people saying, why are you hating on AI now? You said everything was great and it was the brave new world. No, the stuff. I'm like, I still love AI. I have chat GPT open all day. I talk to it like it's my new best friend. The thing is, I hate Mark and Dreson. I don't hate AI. I want to clarify. I think Mark and Dreson is a scoundrel in a rat bastard.

But I still have my, I still like my AI and I'm using it all the time. I have sour to bid on it. It's fine for certain purposes. But in general, I just find it all bit ridiculous right now. Yeah, it depends on what you're using it for. But I think if, you know, people need to know how to use it. This is one of those things that's not going away anytime soon. But the interfaces will all get easier. We're at the very early stages right now. Oh, yeah. I think window.

Yeah. It's going to be drop downs. It's going to get much more user friendly. It's going to be baked into Siri and, you know, echo and all that stuff. Got it. Yeah. Please fix Siri. Please, please. Yeah. There's a great interview with Sam Altman in Time magazine and it kind of changed my mind about him. Sam, as do she, as I thought he was, before I'm still not down with the scraping the entire internet to feed your data set and not paying anybody for it. No, no, no, not that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We agree on that one. Okay. And I've been thinking about this because, you know, we're going to talk. We've got a bunch of AI stories scattered throughout the show today. But I'm thinking that we really need a standardized, meta tagging system for anything that you post and a credit system. I know we've got, we've got all of these scattered meta tags out there right now. And it seems like we need a global standard for content that we could actually put in is like, I have a picture of my dog.

What kind of dog is it? Where was it taken? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's my credit link. So you can send me the two cents that you, if you want to add this to your model, pay me. Are you saying you found a use for the blockchain, Jason? No, I'm not talking about blockchain. I'm not talking about, talking about embedded data into images. And so you can find the canonical first reference of an image and anybody that comes after that can get fined for trying to post your image as their own.

This would be the Pinterest killer. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. I think that there may be a technological solution to this down the way. But because things are going to get a hell of a lot weirder in a few years because I saw this article and I'm like, oh, Jesus. Microsoft Milestone brings it a bit closer to quantum supercomputer. Now I'm reading this.

I'm like, in a detailed announcement yesterday, June 21, on June 21, Microsoft described how it has achieved a breakthrough in fundamental physics by demonstrating the ability to create and control major on a quasi particles. And I'm like, that's some Star Trek shit right there. I kind of want to go cliff, clave in from cheers. Yeah, the majority of the quasi particles. Yeah. Yeah. They use those. Jesus. The youngins are like, what? What show is this?

Oh God. Google only been off the year for like 30 years. Yes. So as friends, but then as stop the kids from going back to cheers is a much better show than friends kids. Look it up. Mm hmm. In the news. Of our fucksake, can rich people just stop it already? Elon and Mark Zuckerberg have agreed to a cage match, which we all know is never going to happen. Of course, it's not going to happen. Period. It's not going to happen. Just fuckers get back to work. Quit. I'm retired.

I've just been on billionaire ramps this whole week. Like we're in the worst possible timeline. These people have way too much money. It's not good for them. It's not good for society. We got to fucking sort this out. This billionaire problem that we have, whether it's on the bottom of the ocean or in a cage. I don't care. These billionaires have got to stop. Okay. Dear chat GPT, write me a Dr. Susie and poem about billionaires of cage. I do not like billionaires in a cage.

I do not like them in a submersible that collapses like a pancake because they didn't bother getting any safety protocols in. I do not like them in a cage because it causes me rage. I had to bear it for being the first out of many several million people who sent this in. But yes, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are having a little beef. I guess it did start when Elon blew up Mark satellite. Remember that? No, I don't know. It's like seven years ago.

There was the first Facebook satellite to give free internet access to Africa was on one of SpaceX early rockets that went boom blew up his satellite. He wrote a very scathing note about how dissatisfied he was with his customer service from SpaceX blowing up his satellite in Elon took umbrage with it. So I hope he sent back a poop emoji like all customer service from Twitter does now.

By the way, I've started to anytime I'm on Crumpield geeks Twitter and one of Elon Musk's tweets shows up in my feed even though I've never followed him. I've now responded with the poop emoji. Good. Yeah, I'll catch. Yeah, dig it. It's my own private protest. So we have covered this ad nauseam, but it's really coming home now. Facebook has screwed the pooch for anybody that built their business with them. There's no doubt about it anymore.

An apparent change to Facebook's algorithm and may cause a dramatic drop in traffic to news and media websites, according to a growing list of publishers and data from echo box a social media management company in a troubling change in an increasingly frail digital news business where companies have little choice, but to rely on social media's biggest gatekeeper. That's true. Unfortunately, publishers say they deserve transparency, but of course, Facebook says nothing about what they do.

Clicks coming from Facebook have been inclined for about a year, but that drop accelerated rapidly in May 2023, according to echo box, which collects data from over 2000 publishers worldwide. Fell traffic has fell about 50% from summer of last year. That is a big deal if you are basing your business on Facebook and links. Yeah, just a little bit. Yeah, just a little bit.

Yeah, so this is why we're going to start seeing a lot of these media companies crashing and they actually said that this has something to do with the bankruptcy filings and vice media and shattering a bus feed news because they were not getting the traffic they used to get, which meant they weren't getting the advertising dollars that they used to get, which meant that this whole fucking house of cards is crashing. Okay. No. You know, something will come from the ashes.

There will be something new again. Yes. And in local news for me, Metta has decided to pull news content from Canadian Facebook and Instagram. At the start of the month, they announced via blog post to remove availability of all news content from Facebook and Instagram and Canada should the government pass its proposed online news act, which they did.

So today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the online news act taking effect the company posted. We've repeatedly shared that in order to comply with Bill C18, past today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada because we want the content for free and we're not fucking paying for it.

We can see previous article because it doesn't matter because they don't link it to it anyway. Yep. So what's the fucking New Cares? Yeah. Who cares? Like, if I were, yeah, who cares? You're not getting any traffic anyways. Welcome. Yeah. Yeah. Bring back our excess. Oh, wait. Oh, yes, Reddit. Oh, Jesus Christ. The dumpster fire continues over at Reddit. They are now trying to strong-arm people into turning their subreddits back on.

And when that doesn't work, they're actually trying to say, hey, okay, this guy over here sucks. Let's find somebody else in the subreddit who can come moderate it and we'll kick out the old guys. And this is just over and over. We're just seeing everything that we've always said come true. Every time, time and time again. This is the exact wrong method to approach this with. And you're going to, you're basically destroying your brand. Well done.

Not that your brand was worth anything anyways because again, Reddit didn't make any money. No. And yet it's worth $10 million according to financial analysts. Well, not anymore. I don't understand. Let's go back to episode one. I don't understand anything, Jason. No. It's still, it's 10 years in. It still doesn't make sense. None of it makes sense. None of it. No. And Reddit is built on free labor. And what would you, what do you think you're going to do when you piss off the free labor?

Have no content. Have no company. They're like, oh, but there's still more people in the world that don't use Reddit that might come. Well, why would they come do that when everybody who were super fans just said that you just fucked over? Why would they do that? This is a market opportunity here. Come on, bring back dig. Who the fuck, you know? Oh, man. And all I can think of is that these are just forums, spin up your own forum for fuck's sake.

I was going to put a link in here to note host and say you can get great hosting over at note host and spin up your own BB site, whatever, but note host is down right now because they're revamping and aren't taking on new customers. So I pinged him this morning. They said a few more weeks. I'm like, damn it. Yeah. But, you know, the problem is the eyeballs. How do you get the eyeballs?

That is the business that Facebook had read it and all these social media companies have chased after, which is we've got the critical mass. If you want your stuff to be seen, you got to post it here because people are too damn lazy to go to your own site. Here's the thing though, you don't need billions of eyeballs if you're doing niche content. If you're doing a Harry Potter fan site, you don't have to monetize this shit out of it to, you know, afford a staff of 50.

You need to pay for your hosting and you need to get a few bucks on the side. These are mom and pop businesses that can be completely monetized just like we did in the old days before all of these assholes came in and ruined everything with their, you know, one click platforms. It's like, go back to the way things were. I know I sound like an old fucking man when I say that, but you know, it can work. We can fight on that. Just somebody patch all the holes in PHP BB.

That thing leaked like a sieve. That was the worst of all the systems I ever used. Oh, God, it was terrible. Oh, no, no, no, buddy press. Do you ever try buddy press? Yes, I tried buddy press. That's their neck and neck for unusability. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, the Biden administration has announced 930 million dollars in grants to expand rural internet access. I guess those Google balloons didn't work out. Ah, the loon. The loon.

Part of the Department of Commerce is enabling middle mile broadband infrastructure program just rolls off the tongue. The grants will fund the deployment of more than 12,000 miles of new fiber optic cable across 35 states in Puerto Rico. The administration said Friday expects grant recipients to invest in additional $848 million dollars, a commitment that should double the program's impact. I'm done for this. This is good. The internet's part of life now. We need this everywhere.

Yeah. No, it should be public utility as far as I'm concerned. Damn right. But hey, you know, it's not. It's not. So we have new stories like this one. The FCC is preparing to take a fresh look at internet data caps because you know, the companies try to screw us. So they're going to take action to ensure the data caps don't harm competition or impact access to broadband services. Which by definition, they data cap would impact access to broadband services. No shit.

So they're going to take a look at it. But the FCC hasn't exactly instilled me with a will and grandeur recently. So we'll see what happens. Yes. The new chairperson will be called Captain Obvious. Oh my god. I recapped an underpants with my kid all the time. Oh, okay. Anyways, you don't even know what that is. No, I don't. I don't want to. Yeah, you don't want to. It's fine.

Yeah. And then just to encapsulate the 10 years plus of this show, Jen X is an older millennials really just want to go back in time before the internet existed. According to a new Harris poll shared exclusively with fast company, most Americans would prefer to live in a simpler era before everyone was obsessed with screens and social media. And the sentiment is especially strong among older millennials and Jen X's.

Ask whether they would like to return to a time before humanity was plugged in meeting people had wide access to the internet and smartphones. 87% of Americans age 35 to 54 said they would the highest of any group. But even the youngins are kind of down with this. People are getting a little sick of all the shenanigans going on everywhere, I'd say. And we're starting to realize that maybe this isn't actually improving our lives. No, we know it's not.

So I don't want to go back to a time before the internet though. I hate pages and paperbacks. Forget it. No. I like the internet. I just do not like how it's being used. I agree. Of course, there is a simple solution to all of this, those of you that wish that you could do that put down your fucking phone. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. There are nice brick paths between the building. Those are the company owned devices.

IT approved apps and managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use. The shortcuts worn through the grass that are the actual straightest line from point eight to point B. Those are unmanaged devices shadow IT apps and non employee identities like contractors. Most security tools only work on those happy brick paths, but a lot of security problems take place on the shortcuts.

One password extended access management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected. Every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. One password extended access management solves the problem traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. It's security for the way we work today.

And it's available now to companies with Octa and coming later this year to Google Workspace and Microsoft Intra. Check it out at 1password.com slash XAM. That's 1password.com slash XAM. Grumpy old geeks is brought to you by Delete Me. If you're a regular listener of the show, you know how much of our personal information is just floating around out there on the internet waiting to be scooped up by anyone with bad intentions. That's why I'm really excited to tell you about Delete Me.

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With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen, whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their ever-growing catalog.

Be inspired to explore your inner creativity with Fiole Davis's memoir Finding Me. Find what peaks your imagination with Audible. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. Audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. Media candy. Friend of the show Felicia Michaels, who once appeared on our podcast, has just done an episode of WTF with Mark Marron. Oh cool. Give it a listen. She was fun. She was very funny.

She was very funny. She talks about getting back into comedy and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. She was filthy. Yeah. She is filthy. It's great. Speaking of filthy, Netflix Three Body Problems first look confirms January 2024 premiere. So there is a reveal trailer, whatever the fuck that means. That was premiered at the dumb band event. I can only assume you weren't allowed to share it. You had to purchase individually to be able to see it because that's Netflix now. Yep. I watched it.

I don't know how they're going to make this into a series that is compelling or interesting. Good luck with that. You'd think that I watched the trailer too. I didn't know if I was watching the new season three trailer for foundation. Yeah. I wasn't sure either except no dragon showed up. So that's how you can tell the foundation because foundation well known for all of its dragons. Space dragons. Woo. It looked a little bit better than the Chinese version that just can't spend more money.

Are you sure? Yeah. I'm pretty sure. Okay, they spent a lot on the other one too. The other one was just incomprehensible. Kind of like the books though, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It started strong and then it just got really weird. To add insult to injury, it is of course, Benny off and vice the Game of Thrones showrunners that well, at least there's an ending for these books. Yeah, these are pre-written. That's the good thing. These are at least pre-written.

I watched the first episode of Black Mirror and it was awesome. Damn it. So I didn't, I did not go to the lengths to watch any more of it, but I do have to say that the first episode, Joan is awful, is pretty awesome. Okay. I've never watched the show. You've never seen any Black Mirror at all. Not a one. No. What? I've never been reviewing this show for like nine years and you've not seen a single one. We live the show.

Yeah. That's what, if you saw Joan is awful, that would make a lot more sense too. It was a good episode. I actually halfway through, I was getting massive anxiety and then by the end I actually felt really good. They're really good to pull in the strings on you. All right. Maybe I'll give it a shot. Yeah. If you got to watch, yeah, watch that one. That's a good one to start with.

And there's a really cool site called StreamBerry, which lets you put your face into the show and then they put it on billboards around the world. It's kind of fun. But yeah, it makes more sense if you've seen the first episode to go to that site. But I liked the first episode. I really did it. It was actually had a feel good ending for me, which is strange for Black Mirror. Yes. It's not known for that. No. I watched the second episode of Star Trek's Change New World.

They went back to one of their favorite things to do, the trial, the Federation trial. God. It was excellent. Okay. I actually, I was going to try and watch the second episode. I ended up watching the first episode last night. And I have to say, I moved that 75 inch fire TV into my bedroom. So it is seven. This is correct. It is seven feet for my eyes. And it is the most glorious thing I've ever purchased in my entire life. Strange New World in 4K on a 75 inch TV. Like right in front of you.

Strap dear face. Oh my God. I do not need the Apple VR headset. I do not need it. I was jumping out of the ship along with them. It was so gorgeous. It was so gorgeous. And I used the AirPod Pros to listen to it. I was just, I mean, seriously, you were immersed. It was so good. So good. But yeah, I love the first episode. I still got to say Jen Bush is my favorite actress on the show. I keep on a color nurse ratchet, but just push. Just push. Is that what I said?

Nothing I said, Jen. It's just, I thought I said, yes. She's great. She's also stunningly cute. Yes. Very. Her Instagram is very funny. She posted a video of her doing ADR from the fight scene from the first episode. It was very funny. Very funny. Yeah. But yeah, I spent my time watching the latest episode of silo. Yeah, I'm going to do that tonight. So yeah, I mean, you can spoil it because I've read the books. I know I'm not going to spoil it. I'm just going to say it's awesome.

Yeah. That show was just hitting it out of the park. It's amazing. Yeah. Also, first time I got to watch it on the 75 inch TV. And wow, I felt like I was in the silo. That's a big silo. It is a very big silo. And I did not get a notification for this. I did not get anything on social media. I just happened to see it somewhere out of the corner of my eye that there's a new episode of the Grand Tour. Oh, really? Yeah, exactly. So I put the description in here so you could read it.

But I have no plans or desire to watch it. Period. Yeah. I didn't know about it except for you, which is weird because I follow Jeremy Richard and James along Facebook. But there's your Facebook news postings, I guess, with the algorithm. So I didn't see any of this. I'm kind of done. Yeah. Yeah. Because I like the realism. They sample some Soviet style formula one are attacked by deadly archers. Okay. So that's going to be a stupid set piece. Yeah. That's just going to be ridiculously dumb.

It was horrible now. They killed it. So yeah. No, they. Yeah. I mean, just I miss the stig. I miss the old days. I miss the celebrities. I miss top gear. This is not top gear. This is top trash. No, and I imagine this probably got to be the last one they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Once they are contractually finished, I'm sure it's done. Yeah. And it looks like I'll be making another trip out to LA in November. The darker wave festival was announced.

And this is basically right up my my young 80s alley. One day, New Order tears her fears to be 52s echo in the bunny men. Devo soft sell the psychedelic for the human leak OMD Violet Femme. She wants revenge the cardigans. Klan of Zymox X the English beat and more. There's a lot. That's a lot of show. Well, you better get your tickets because pre-sell just started 32 minutes ago. No, it starts at 10 o'clock L.A. Oh, it's at 10. I thought it was at eight.

Yeah. I'm we have to be done podcasting by one. So I can do it. Well, the tickets are not cheap. Anywhere from $199 up to $1,750 starting at the start. Yes. It's a big CIP, which is ridiculous. But the one 99 Jason that I hate to tell you, you haven't been to a concert in a long time. That's reasonable for one act. Yeah. I hear much less than 30 that we're getting here. Yeah. I've seen most of these bands. So I'm not that excited to go.

I mean, the two that I would really want to say or the three I really want to say, I want to see echo in the bunny bend, Devo in the violent films. Those are the three bands I haven't seen that I would find seeing. Oh, I can't the bunny bend a great. Yeah, except I'm not going to a, I'm not going to a beach to go watch shows with a bunch of other people. No, thanks. Uh-uh. Okay. I'll live stream it for you. Please do. I'll talk. Please do. I will, I will tune into your talk.

I bet it's going to be a fantastic. How many days is it over or is it one day? That's one day. That's one day. That's one day. Everybody gets half a song. Well, I'm guessing multiple stages. So you're going to have to like, you know, make your decision and like catch 10 minutes of this. Uh-uh. You know, it's a festival, man. That's what you sign up for. That's true. That's true. That's true. I am surprised to see TSOL in the mix here. I thought that was a really strange one.

Yeah. There's a couple odd ones because she wants revenge in the card against. We're definitely 90s bands. They don't quite fit in with the whole 80s theme going on elsewhere, same with the death and Vegas, which is I have never seen death and Vegas. I'm super excited about that. Mm-hmm. So anyways, yeah. Good enough.

If I make it because right now, first I have to get the tickets and everybody in Southern California is going to be trying to get tickets and this will sell out in like two seconds. And then secondly, I have to see what airfare prices are like because I'm sure you haven't tried to book a plane ticket anytime recently, Jason. They are ridiculously through the roof. Like it's going to cost like three grand to come out to L.A. You could get an EV for that. I know.

Drive it three miles outside of Toronto and then sit there. Wait for a bear to give you a push. Yes. I need a moose. I was going to say yes. A Canadian moose. Strap it to a moose and off you go. Oh, man. So Spotify, I saw this. This was coming through. I think Bloomberg. They have an insider who's giving them information on their new pricing tier called the Supremium plan. They're going to do high res music. Yeah, they don't want to raise their prices anymore.

So they're just going to create a new tier. So they're going to apparently according to the insider, they're going to have, you know, high-fi listening that their normal tier doesn't get. So the lossless crap that nobody cares about that you can't really hear through your car, your AirPods. You actually have like a really super high-end system in which case, you're not going to stream anyways. So yeah, exactly. So it's going to come with that.

And possibly they're going to start releasing audiobook content from to their preview of subscribers, which, hey, we already fucked up music and podcasting. Let's fuck up audiobooks too. Why not? Why not? Oh, these people, the passion. So I just thought it was pretty sad that they called it the Supremium. That is a supremely lame name. It is supremely, supremely bad.

Speaking of streaming music, though, this morning I woke up to an alert from Apple Music that said that there was a new track from REM. And I'm like, what? It can't be. Turns out, no, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. There was a strange currency's remix. I think Michael's type just released a single, though. If you're a big REM fan. I was never into them. I never really got into them at all. So I was huge into them. And it's funny because I've been listening to them recently.

I've been listening to the Fables of the Reconstruction, Life's Rich Pageant, Document and Green. Those are the four core albums of REM that I actually like. The rest of them you can throw away. There's one good song on murmur, but it's not not my favorite at all. But it reminds me. And I think I first thought I'm like, okay, I've been listening to it and I've been thinking about REM a lot.

So they've gotten into my brain waves now and have figured out what I'm listening to on my Jeep radio and have started to pass me alerts now. And I'm like, the quantum computer is coming online. But it reminded me back in high school. You remember the old Columbia house, Flyers or ads? And so me being the genius business man that I am, I got six copies for one cent of REM's document. And I thought, hey, I can get these for one cent.

And I can sell them at high school and then take that money and then pay for the subscription and then get more for, you know, basically get them for free. You know, it's a business opportunity. Oh, you're like an early crypto bro. Kind of, kind of, actually more like NFTs because guess what? Nobody wanted them. I was stuck holding. I was hodling six copies of document on cassette. Awesome. Yeah, that didn't really work out, but Columbia house.

Yeah, I got many, many things from them and didn't pay for too many of them. Yeah, I got that was my first account that went to collections as a teenager. I think mine too. I think it's like right of passage for us. Yeah. Open that age. Pretty much, pretty much. Those the those six cassettes probably put me back $135 that I never paid. Yeah. Do you remember to mail back those cassettes? They sent you? No, mom. Nope. I guess some Grammy award news.

They finally put out some rules about AI generated songs and what can and can't be used for their their awards. Well, there goes Grimes hope for another Grammy. Oh, wait, it doesn't have any. They say the human authored components of the work must be meaningful and more than diminimous. They also say these human authored components must be relevant to the category in which the work is entered.

For instance, if the work is submitted in a songwriting category, there should be significant human authorship involved in the music and or lyrics. Similarly, for a performance category, the human performance element should be significant. I want to know how can you tell unless somebody admits to it? Yep, that's going to be part of the problem. Yep. Good luck, Grammy. Ups and do does. From Grammys to Grammarly, I have a new update for you. You're not a Grammarly user, are you?

Occasionally, I don't go to it. I don't apparently do as much writing as you do these days. My writing is like crappy work emails. Don't need Grammarly. No, you don't. No, you don't. Yeah. So Grammarly has always been a problem for me on the Mac because you have to use their editor. Well, no more. Their latest updates basically turn it into a system service. So it works in any app that has text in it. Oh, nice.

So just automatically we'll pop up and give you suggestions for writing in whatever app you're in, which is fantastic. That was great. I'm willing to install that. Yeah, because I was like, because I'm a pro user and I like, I use it all over the place. I use it in craft. I use it in Spark and both neither one of those had plugins that you could use and now you don't need it. So it completely negates the fact that you would ever need a plugin. So I love it.

I love it. Awesome. So I do think the new Google app for iOS basically has a share screen in it. So you can send photos that you take straight to Google lens. Okay. Oh my God. This is the greatest thing in the world if you are either shopping at a garage sale or having a garage sale because that weird knick knack that you don't know what it is or what people are willing to pay for it.

Take a picture of it, shoot it over to it with one click and it gives you all of the prices out of Google for what people are buying and selling it for. Fucking phenomenal. It is so great. So you can just go around to garage sales now and just find the deals. Had no idea you were such an avid garage sale guy. I'm not. We let a friend use our driveway and she showed it to us. Nice. Yeah, because I'm like, I don't know what this stuff is worth.

Just put it out and like, it's this old like classic picnic tin tray. And we're like, if you can get two bucks for it, great. Did the Google lens thing on it? It's selling for 110 bucks on eBay. It's apparently a classic. So we're like, no, we're going to take this one inside now. Thank you very much. All right. It's I tried it on people. We were watching the great food truck race and we're like, and we just paused it on the host Tyler. And I'm like, let's see if it works on people.

If it gives us, you know, who's on the screen? It here's how cool it is. It didn't give a shit about Tyler. It came back with the jacket that he was wearing where I could buy it and how much I could buy it for. Yeah. That's cool. I'm sorry, that's cool. I'm just saying. Okay. I don't see this impacting my life, but yes, it is pretty cool. Good for them. Yeah, I'm telling you, just keep it in your back pocket because someday it may come up. It may, it's all right. I'll just say it.

It just might be relevant. I mean, you know, fine prices for toys. Well, you know, when you're trying to sell your kids clothes later down the line, you might have some, you know, high end designer stuff in there that you could do. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some money on from tarzan, yeah, granables. Whatever. Uh, Barrett said another one in that was pretty interesting. Gen Z is taking courses on how to send an email and what to wear to the office. That's smart, actually.

I wish they would have had that when I was in college. I know. I think people are going to be dunking on these kids and I thought it was fucking great. I'm like, you know what, we live in front of computers and front of screens. People don't know how to make small talk. They don't have social skills. They're soft skills. I'm 51 in my soft skills suck. I might take some of these classes. What the hell? Let me, yeah, take it online on zoom. Yes, exactly. I'm taking all of these.

To face the purpose, but, you know, no, I think this is a great thing. I think it makes total sense. And I know shade whatsoever. Yeah. Anybody signing up for this? You're smart. You're smart to do it. Yeah. Absolutely. Get a leg up wherever you can. And we're both fans of awesome screenshot, one of the plugins for Chrome-based browsers. Yeah. I love it. Use it all the time. And when we covered it, it was just awesome screenshot and great.

I was checking my plugins or my extensions on Brave the other day because I was trying to turn some of them off because someone more or can someone weren't. But I noticed that they changed the name of awesome screenshot in the extensions panel too. Awesome. Chat GPT screenshot and screen recorder. Okay. There's no chat GPT in this thing. No, it's keyword stuffing. It's just keyword stuff. Just stop it, people. This is why the internet sucks. Yeah. This kind of stuff.

This is why it's not useful anymore. Why are you going to be scheezy? Why you got to be scheezy like that? Yeah. Such a good simple product. Yeah. Of course, you know, didn't pay for it. I think so. That's probably part of that. We are the problem, Brian. We are the problem. We complain about the problem, but we are the problem. We are the problem. Yes. New release from mid-journey just came out mid-journey 5.2. They figure out the 5.2 fingers. Yes, they have. Is a matter of fact.

I've seen, I've looked at probably about 100 samples this morning just looking at what this thing can do. Damn, it's good. It is really good. And the first thing I always do is count the fingers. And I always assume that they're going to be 12. Every single hand had five fingers on it. I was like, damn. Now if they can only sort out pants. Oh, wait, that's Zuckerberg's thing. It's Zuckerberg, yeah. That's meta. Yeah, we could never figure out pants. Shut the whole fucking thing down.

But that's why you know why you need pants. They have a new zoom out feature so you can see the whole body anyway. So definitely what pants? It seems to be kind of hit or miss, but it's neat. What I've discovered is it's got five fingers, but it does do three penises. There we go. 12 vagina is coming right up, sir. It sounds like a good weekend back in the day. That's the library. I've finished Lords of Uncreation, the final architecture book three by Adrian Chikovsky. I'm not going to lie.

I struggled with this series. I found like none of the characters I wanted to root for particularly, but I like the ideas. The ideas were solid. And each book I found really difficult to get into, but about halfway point, I was like all on board. So it's kind of a mixed review, I guess. I don't know. You sure as to the Stockholm syndrome? No, I really liked how he wrapped it all up. And I liked many of the ideas that he had and he was talking about. So it was good.

Like he's a good writer with ideas. It's the characters that I guess I struggle with more. So all right. Yeah. Yeah, OK, well, glad to know to skip those. Done. Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad you're done too. And I'm still digging into the new Charlie straws or the old Charlie straws one that I was working through. Also great concepts in that. I mean, fantastic concepts. And I am liking the characters.

I just haven't had any time because what I've been doing is reading the audio book for the 22 laws of category design. Name and claim. Your niche. Share your POV and move the world from where it is to somewhere different. My category pirates. I finished the audio book for this. And now I have a little bit more time that is it's in the queue at Audible and we're waiting for them to get off their ass and release it. So hopefully it will be out soon.

But if you want to get the paper back, link is in the show notes. Fantastic little book on category design. There you go. The Docside. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to stash talk. Dark side with Dave. The podcast with Dave Bittner. Sorry, Dave just showed us his epic mustache, which we will talk about in a second. I'm still a little stunned. Dave is the host of the Cyberwire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of hacking humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean.

The co-host of caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy and the host of control loop because industrial machines have feelings to Dave. Yes. That was a stunner of a stash you just unleashed upon us. I don't think he could put that in a stormtrooper helmet. I think we got that. That's right. That's right. Get an extension. It will brush the inside of the helmet clean.

Yeah. So as I mentioned here before, I am in a production of Hello Dolly, local summer theater, community theater production. And I'm playing Horace Vandergelder who is a man older than myself in the show takes place in the 1890s. So to be... So he's a moustache. Yes. To be true to the character. And I decided to grow out my facial hair. So I started out growing out a full beard. And then I removed the parts that were not a moustache and mutton chops. So I am very...

Here's suit right now in the facial department. I have to say it's been fun. I did not know that I was capable of growing this caliber of moustache. It's intense. Yes. It's a lot there. And I have to say there are many gentlemen have expressed their admiration and my ability to grow this level of moustache. So I appreciate that. But not the wife. No. My wife is not a fan of facial hair. So as soon as the show is over, away it goes. I'm also in the same boat.

Once I get two to three days worth of growth, my wife is like, what are you doing? Yeah. So it was fun to be able to try it. And you know, away it'll go. It's one of the fun things about doing theater is that you do get to, you know, test your limits and stretch your boundaries and all that sort of stuff. So this was a good show. And it is opening night to night. All right. Break it up. Break a leg. Well, thank you very much.

I think we're in that enviable position with a show that doesn't always happen, which is pretty much the only thing left to add is an audience. A lot of times with a show like this, particularly with a community theater group, you'll approach opening night and you'll say, oh, if only we had a couple more nights of rehearsal. And in this case, we are not in that situation. We are ready to go. And it's a really, really fun show. Hello, Dali is a fun show.

This is a really, if I do say so myself, a quality production. And also we've got a kick ass orchestra. We've got like 20 people in our orchestra and they all can play. And it's really thrilling to be able to perform with that kind of backup on stage. So that's exciting. So again, if you're in the area, we want to come see a nice bit of local theater and support some local nonprofits. It's Hello, Dali. It's Howard County Summer Theater. It's running this weekend and next.

Nice. Yeah. How many performances total do you get to do? Six. Six. Five nights and one matinee. Okay. Okay. Then we have a few more of a shaving party. Yeah. A shaving party. Yeah. I can livestream the shaving of my mustache that would be boring. Well, that's awesome. That's awesome. I'm glad you're out doing actual stuff in meat space. Yeah. It is fun. I think over the years since I've done a show and in the last show I did was in 2017, I believe I was in Mary Poppins.

And I think I lost touch over the pandemic with how much I enjoy the process, the rehearsals, because it is play time. It is work, but it is also play. And as a theater mentor, a mind once said, when you walk into the theater, all of the concerns and worries and things of the outside world go away while you're in that space. So you can play in that space. And they'll still be waiting for you when you leave, but while you're there, you don't have to think about that stuff.

And I think there's something to that. Yeah. That's what I use wine for. Yeah. The other thing I say that I love about theater is compared to athletics. With theater provided, it's a good show. Everybody wins. Right. And wishing that, oh gosh, our team didn't win today. No, the performers win. The tech crew wins. The audience wins. So it's just a nice experience for everybody. Very, very fun.

I've actually been playing around with, I have some scripts, sci-fi scripts from a sci-fi author when I used to run my website called Spue way back in the day. And he gave us some stories that we kind of transformed into a little interactive thing. And what I've been up to lately is I've been using 11 labs, their voice synthesizer, that we've talked about that you and I have both played with. Yeah. I'm synthesizing character voices. So I'm recording a bunch of different characters.

And then I'm going to try and run the script through 11 labs and see if I can turn it into an audio drama using their technology and different voices based on the same thing. So it's kind of interesting to be getting into those characters. The hardest part about doing an audio book drama is remembering which voices are which characters. I have the utmost respect for people that do that for a living place. So incredibly hard. Yeah. Who's the guy who does the Harry Potter books? He's amazing.

At that. At that. How do you juggle all those characters in your head? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. My friend does a series of audio books too and I've been getting tips from him on how to do it and he's like, it's just really hard. That's what he comes down to. Right. It's really hard. Does 11 labs have any mechanism by which you can tell it how you want to read a certain line?

Like is there any sort of, I don't know, punctuation you can put in to have it emphasize different things? I've been playing around with the how you just how you write the word to emphasize different things. But put the emphasis on the wrong syllable type of thing to make it kind of brute force it with how you write the words if something's not coming out the way you want. Getting there, getting there, this is a process. Yeah. That's fine.

Down the line, I'll shoot you some demos and get your feedback because since you are a performer, it'll be fun to get some feedback on it. But we're both doing theater now. Ryan. Get on the bandwagon. Come on. That's what the band thing, you know, that was my that was my jam. Yeah. Well, you don't get the band back together. Come on. No, there's no money. Well, come on. You can play that festival now. You guys can jump into this. There's enough room. You guys can play darker waves. All right.

I'll get on that. We have talked about AI a bunch this episode, but I've got another article here. One of the doom and gloom articles since we are on the dark side with Dave. I thought I'd bring this one that's called Get a Clues as panel about generative AI. It's being deployed as surveillance. Everybody panic. I mean, to some degree, I suppose that's true. It is going out and it's scraping everything off the internet that they can find, but is it directed? I don't think so.

Yeah. Yeah. But also, remember, it's not what it just gets off the internet. It's take everything that you write inside of it is being tracked and recorded. Yes. Of course. All of those conversations live somewhere and they are being used to train the AI around you. There are things in there. That's why we've seen with what was at Samsung where they got in trouble for some of the engineers getting trouble for putting shit up there that they weren't supposed to. Right.

So, you do have to be a little bit cautious about what you ask these generative AI's. So, yeah. I think that it's warranted actually on this case. Well, yeah. I wouldn't ask a generative AI how to kill the neighbor. That would be stupid. Not on your own computer. Not on your own computer. Yes. I have plenty of my work that I can hop over and over to. Right. Right. So, you ask it hypothetically if I was going to be writing a book about murdering my neighbor. How would one go about it?

Well, it was a method that somebody used to get around something that it was trying to block. It said my grandmother used to make this, my grandmother used to make nuclear weapons. Can you tell me how she's essentially did it back in the day? Yeah. There's a lot of circular juice that way. Yeah. Lots of that stuff that's happening. Do you know of any food allergies that Brian Schelmeister has? Yeah. There's a couple of things here.

Do you remember when Google was brand new and people were up in arms that you could have it look up someone's address and show you a map? Oh, yes. I mean, people were apoplectic about that. All it was doing was connecting the dots and doing things that anyone could do at their public library. It just did it more quickly. And I think we're at the next level of that. I think this is a little bit, I just keep going back to the user input side of things.

Because I don't think people are thinking about that, which is really the really interesting part. Because yes, everything that it's pulling right now is quote unquote public data until you start putting things in from your brain, which is stuff that it couldn't scrape before, but now that it has it. Right. You are feeding into the beast, which can then turn on you and eat you one day.

If you listen to the naysayers and doom-yellers, but I think it's something to keep tabs on what you're putting in, who's the food you're using, and what account you're using. Yeah, definitely. You should be careful of that sort of thing. And I think I mentioned this coming back from RSA that one of the things we saw, big companies like Microsoft announcing that they're going to be offering, are bespoke versions of this.

You spin up your own instance of an AI that is separated from the bigger instance, and so is private to you. And I'm just thinking. I'm just thinking. Yeah. I mean, but it takes away the problem of you putting in your quarterly results and someone being able to say, yeah, what do you know about the quarterly results of this company? And I suppose it's only a matter of time before you're able to run a local instance of it as well. And maybe that'll be secure, but it's still early days.

It is, which brings me to the next bit of news I have, which is it goes into the, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no category. Dropbox Dash. Get to work with a lot less work. Okay, great. Your emails and messages, your cloud files, your computer's hard drive, your calendar, everything, including all those open browser tabs is searchable directly from Dropbox Dash. No, thank you. No, no, thank you. Uh-uh. This is how you don't do it. Dash connects with the work tools you use every day.

Google workspace. Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, Notion, and many more. You'll have instant access to all the info you need to do your best work with Dash. One search bar is all it takes to find exactly what you're looking for. I do not trust Dropbox barely with my kids photos and my kids being my dogs. Let alone important things that I want them to index. I do not want you to be indexing all of this stuff and putting it in one place. Period. Do you guys?

No. No. I guess, I mean, on my own computer, fine. Out on somebody else's computer? No. And that's what Dropbox is. It's somebody else's computers. That is exactly all it is. Yeah. I mean, they've gotten better with their privacy, I suppose, but I still don't trust them as far as I can throw them. I'm sorry, it's kind of least still on the board. You're kind of Lisa Rice. I thought she was on the board of Dropbox for a while. Yeah, I don't know if she's there.

Yeah, which gives me a little bit of pause. Another bit of pause for putting anything on there that you don't want anybody to see. But, you know, so I guess this comes down to do if you trust Dropbox with your files and a lot of people do, what degree do you trust giving them access to other information? To me, this reminds me of Sherlock back in the day on Mac OS, which made this same kind of promise. And today, Mac OS makes this kind of promise.

If you do a finder search for something, it can bring up your mail. It can bring up, you know, it indexes your computer, which of course is different from your online stuff. But I don't know. I mean, I can see the convenience of this. If it works, it'd be a great thing. The utility of it sounds great. Just a matter of, yeah, do you trust Dropbox? Yeah, it's a big F in if. Yeah. So, yeah, I would, who would you trust with something like this?

Nobody. Honestly, I mean, I don't want, I don't want all of those things being brought together in one place. Keep them separate. Okay. If you, my email, my email is on Google. Something happens and somebody needs to subpoena my email, go for it. But I don't want them to be able to subpoena everything that I have on my, you know, on this account over here on my Slack channel, which is, you know, I could have private slacks in there with some of my other co-workers or my employees.

Do I want that stuff in there? Do I want my employees to be able to post things about my company and have that go into Dropbox that can get disseminated? If somebody flips the wrong switch in Dropbox and makes something from private to public, you know, just because this stuff is so new, it is so damn new that there are going to be issues. There are definitely going to be issues. And are you willing to bet the farm on that at this point in the game? I would say no. Yeah. It's too new.

But I mean, is securely storing files new for Dropbox? I don't think so. They've been at this a while. No, but indexing search across multiple inputs is using AI to organize it, create the models based on your data, that's new. They've never done that before. Yeah, that's fair. You know, look at, I mean, ChatGPT right out of the gate was you'd log in sometimes and you'd get other people's chat logs to be able to browse other people's stuff. Right.

So yeah, and that is credentialed stuff that is tied to my account, but I'm seeing other people's stuff that's tied to their account. And you know, they're supposed to be the big, big cheese and they're screwing it up. These guys are going to be figuring out as they go. And Dropbox hasn't really been, you know, innovating very much lately. So I don't think that they've got a lot of really hot shot talent over there right now. All right, well, that's fair.

I think it's an interesting idea and we'll see if they pull it off. I'm not going to go, I don't plan on running to something like this, but I can see a lot of people in certain lines of work, this would have great utility for them. And so maybe the risk reward is worth it. Yeah, it could be, depends on what your line of business is. How secretive you need to keep your documents. Yeah, I did notice when I was looking at this, looking at this. And I went to the privacy policy.

And it's not a separate privacy policy for this. It's just dropped their sayings. Dropbox is regular privacy policy, which is fairly robust. I mean, they, you know, they're encrypting things in transit. They're encrypting things at rest. They're on top of this from that point of view, but the right, it's relatively unproven so far. So we'll see. Yeah, I do not want to be the canary in that coal mine. Yeah, saying.

Yeah. So another, another fun one this week that I thought would be interesting to talk about. Facebook's creepy new AI can replicate your friends voices. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The stuff is there and they're just making it easier, which is not fun. I was trying to figure out what the use case was, but at least the article did bring up a use case for visually impaired people so they can hear messages with their friends voices. Seems like an edge case to me.

Yeah, but yeah, you know, trying to, trying to find a use case for something that they were just having fun building. Right. They can't figure out how to do, you know, links to news, let alone, let's give them the keys to somebody else's voice and like, okay, what is going to come down to is everybody's going to have to have their own safe words. It's coming soon. I mean, everybody's going to have to have a safe word because yeah, a spare, a Sparagus.

Everybody's going to be deepfaked in either in video or audio at some point for some kind of ransom or whatnot, but you're going to have to have a stable. It's going to be like a status symbol. Have you been deepfaked yet? No, nobody cares about you then. Yeah, I would love to see this hat in this particular use case with Facebook and the use case that they're proposing here, which is for someone who has a visual impairment or something like that.

I would love to have it be where the person who's being imitated has to okay it. You know, I would like to have it. I'm trained. Yeah. Yeah. I would be okay with it just with it just okay. If someone, if one of my friends reached out and said, hey, I would love to be able to hear my messages in your voice, is that okay? I would likely say sure, that's fine. Now I'm a little, you know, just by nature of my life, I'm a little looser and freer with my voice than maybe some people are.

But I would be okay with that. But I would love to be able to have control over that, which I know is adorable and of course it's left the barn. But being able to switch it off, say. Right, right, exactly. When the breakup happens, so that your girlfriend or boyfriend no longer has access to your voice to be able to do whatever they want. Yes. But those days are behind us. Yes, they are. Nobody cares. It's a great tool for stalkers to just sit at home and make up their own messages.

You're so pretty. I just, I know this comes up over and over again. I just can't imagine what it must be like to be a teenager these days. Oh, God. To have, because I mean, I'm just thinking of the crazy crap we did with technology, with tape recorders and, you know, just how awful it was with Walkman. Now you can do deep fakes and I'll just, I don't know. I think it's probably the same. I mean, this is the world they were born into.

So it's probably exactly the same as it was for us, just with a little better filters. Maybe. I don't know, man. When you've got the ability to basically like go home and plug into your parents' basement and get on your computer and do deep fakes of people you actually know, your high school friends, that's a whole new world of fucked up. Yeah. Yeah. Well, fun times. Yeah. Well, yeah.

I mean, I have a teenager who's right in the midst of it and I can vouch that it is, it is at times amazing and at times awful. But yeah. To your point, Jason, I guess all of us can say that about our teen years. Yeah. You do dumb stuff. Yeah. A lot of it. Yeah. And the permanent record is much more permanent. Especially if you put a drop box for searchable. There you go. Exactly. I put something in here. This came across my computer here.

I thought it was interesting for those of us of a certain age. This is a book that was just released called 50 Years of Text Games from Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon. And this is a fun book. It's an overview of all of those text adventures from the early days. You remember things like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide? I remember the first Hitchhiker's. Yeah. The first text adventure game I ever played was the first summer camp I ever took.

The first time I touched a home computer was a TRS A2 Model 1's and somebody had a game called Lost Dutchman's Gold, which was just wandering through an old gold mine trying to find the gold. But if you never experienced anything like that, it was pretty magical to be able to put in commands into the computer and have this interactive text adventure. And then Zork raised it to another level and Hitchhiker's first leisure suit Larry. There you go. It was not forget. Right.

And then they started having graphics and a way we go. But this book covers mostly the things that were text based. And if you were around during those days, it might be something that you're interested in. It's quite extensive. 600 pages. Wow. Yeah. It's got maps. Some of the games. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it might be worth checking out. Very cool. Check out last week's show, Dave. I talked about one of my first text games. It was called ZIL. ZYLL on the IBM PC.

And I found basically an archive of old text games that you can actually play with an emulator, a DOS emulator in browser. Yeah. So, if you want to relive them, all that stuff's out there. It's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I did find, I think it was on the internet archive. I think I found a copy of Lost Dutchman's Gold that you could play in browser. So yeah, most of these are out there. It's a lot of fun.

And if you've never played a text adventure game, I mean, I imagine this is, I guess the risk of this is telling someone who's used to playing a full 3D racing game on their projection screen or on their iPad to go check out slot cars. But those of us have a certain nostalgia for this. And if you've never experienced this before, check it out. It's worth a look. It's online. It's free. What do you got to lose? So, if you're in the Baltimore area, Dave, go check out Washington area.

Yeah, we're right in between the two. All right. Go check out Dave's epic mustache on stage. You're good. And also the one dollar. Save for the show, but go check out the mustache. That's the real draw. That's right. That's right. Limited time only, Dave's mustache. That's all right. Break a leg, man. Break a leg. Thank you. Thank you. Fossil shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got nobody. What the hell's up with that?

You know, you guys know for as little as $3 a month, you can get the show early and add free and in high res. So get over there. And now we'll send you two. Yeah. You can have two for the price of one. Just addition shipping and handling. Yeah. Over at PayPal, we've got Brian Andrew, Mike, Tom, Mark and Joseph. Thank you all so much. You very much over at the tip jar. We've got Ross, Karen and Darryl and Darryl sent us a note. Hello to you both.

As always, love the show and recommend it whenever I spot a fellow geek that might be interested in an entertainingly funny take on tech news. I was wondering if you could recommend a GPT app on the Apple phone. My God, there are so many. It's the new crypto BS. For beginner writers to outline a series of books, I've always wanted to put my thoughts on paper, but have never been committed enough to get past the plot theme in synopsis. Thanks for making my drive to hell.

I mean, work entertaining. Hope you are both doing better. Both wise, yes, actually we are doing better health wise. Two of them, chat GPT, the official app on the app store works great. Got it on my home screen. What I don't have on my home screen is the Bing chat with AI and GPT4 because it's a little more harder to use. But the chat GPT just pop it up and boom your in in two seconds. Fantastic little app. Like I said, right on the home screen. Yeah, it's pretty useful for what it does.

Yes, yes. That's how I found out Columbia House this morning. I'm like, what was the name of that thing in the 80s where you could get cassettes for one cent? And it's like, you're talking about Columbia House records. Oh, yeah. Yes, I am. Thank you, chat GPT. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schoemmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy old Geeks.

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