668: Weaponized Puffery

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Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. The store is open, Brian. Oh, isn't it open? Yes it is. Are people beating down the door? Well, this is the first time we've told them, so hopefully they will. Beat down the door, people.

Beat down the door. There's only three things up there right now, but by the time this airs there might even be five or six. I ran into trouble getting the damn international stuff to work, but it works now. Cool. Now we can just design. We can be designers, Brian. Woo, joy. Yeah, I hope you get the joy out of designing because we're probably not going to make the joy out of the money. So, no. Just one of those things. We've got to have all the revenue streams, Jason.

I know we have to have all our tranches in a row. Yes. As the kids say. I don't know what kids say that, but I'm sure there are a few. They're hustlers. They're hustlers. All right. So, this is an interesting bit of follow up here. OpenAI has agreed to allow inspection of its training data by authors that are suing the company for copyright infringement. All right. Here's 70 gazillion bazillion gigabytes of stuff. Have fun. Exactly. And we only have room for one of you at a time.

They're basically going to do it in an air gap to room at their San Francisco HQ. So the authors have to drive to them. So, you know, I can just see Sarah Silverman having a great day driving up there to go sit in a room at open AI going. What am I looking at? I'm reasonably sure that they hire people to send. Okay. Okay. Can I get that job? Sarah, I'm free. There you go. I shit on your last special. So I bet she's probably not going to hire me. Damn it. I think she's got tougher skin than that.

Probably, probably. And yeah, so they're making some concessions. Yes. If you want to call it that. Okay. But yeah. Okay. Moving on. Oasis, listen to you, Brian. They listened to our episode where you laid out the future of ticket sales and how they were doing things wrong. So Oasis has opted out of ticket masters, controversial dynamic pricing for their upcoming North American leg of the tour British. That's not fucked. You're done. You can't do it there. Well, it's funny.

We have a what I call a reverse Taylor Swift situation. People in the US during Taylor Swift's last tour were wildly complaining online that it was massively cheaper to buy airfare to Europe and buy tickets for Taylor Swift in Europe than it was then that was way cheaper than seeing them at home.

We have that now occurring for Oasis where I'm hearing from the Brits that they're better off flying somewhere in the States and getting tickets here than they were trying to get tickets at some of the home grown shows. So that's quite amusing. The one thing I will point out about this, my wife is a massive Oasis fan and basically I didn't hear anything other than Oasis ticket things for the last week while they were the pre-sale started and all that sort of stuff.

So what they did do in lieu of dynamic pricing is they just massively increased the base pricing. Okay. Well, theoretically you could have gotten Oasis ticket for say around 70 bucks to 100 bucks during the UK pre-sales but then the dynamic pricing hit. You couldn't get a ticket for Oasis under like 150 bucks here. Okay. So where are you going to go see them? They are playing A-Show in Toronto so we will be going to see that one. It is not until I think August of next year.

Okay. You got plenty of time. If you are still there. I got plenty of time to figure a way out of it because I don't particularly care for Oasis to begin with and Liam's voice is just shot. Oh really? Like if all the Noll songs, the ones that he sings, that should be fine. Anything that Liam's going to sing is just going to be a fucking disaster. Maybe they can mill even Elliott. Maybe those.

Yeah. Or maybe you can just move back to the States and say, oh, we can't go back to Toronto for the show. Yeah, but back to Los Angeles show. Yeah. Well, there's no avoiding Oasis. Hopefully they'll break up before that. Yeah. Yeah. They'll pull a Jane's addiction. They'll just beat each other to death. So last week we talked about California being able to put your driver's license into your phone sort of. Sort of. I couldn't do it. But friend of the show Brian Blondell was able to do it.

And as chance would have it, flew to Chicago later that week. And he sent me a text saying, FYI, they're assigned to the airport to download your license or ID. But when I tried to use it at TSA, they said they didn't take it. So. Okay. Well, I mean, that sort of makes sense. It is a California thing for California. And that doesn't necessarily mean that this new fangled way of having your ID is going to fly in other states or at the airport, which is federal.

So, I mean, there were, there were like seven other states that were ahead of us. They got the digital IDs. But yeah. Like that they have posters up saying, do it at the airport, you'd think that the other, you know, entities at the airport that actually take IDs besides a bar would actually take the ID. Well, then again, there's the actual world that we live in and, you know, everything we talk about in this podcast, of course, it's not going to work. Absolutely.

Do not rely on any sort of bleeding edge technology for this sort of stuff. Do they still make you take your shoes off? That depends. I've got, I've got the global passenger, whatever thing, so I don't ever have to. But sometimes I do because things make sense. Yeah. Fun times. And there's a sister article over at the verge called don't ever hand your phone to the cops. This is kind of basic knowledge, I think, for a lot of people.

But some people who are, you know, maybe inebriated, probably when you do this the right way. The thing is, if you unlock your phone to show them your ID and then you give that to them, they can just take it. And play around with it and look around. See, now what we need are multiple levels of unlock. There should be a basic, the ID can pop up a few thumb at once, but that doesn't unlock the entire phone.

If we're all going to be required, at some point, we probably will to have our digital IDs instead of physical IDs, then we need multiple versions of unlock. And I think that it does that. I'm almost positive. It works just like Apple Pay. Oh, good. That would be great. Yeah. I'm almost positive. This has been a long, fucking week. But from what I remember when this first came out, this is going to work identical to Apple Pay. So, cool. We'll see. We'll see how that goes.

But if it chips, copper gets near your phone. It just pops up. Yeah. He's good. He's good officer. Well, Elon had a good week. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yes. Judge John Mendez, his blocked California's deep fake law, AB 2839, which aimed to curb AI-generated content affecting elections. We talked about this last week because Elon got kind of wrapped up in it because he tweeted a or tweeted or shitted or whatever you want to call it nowadays. A link. He re-crap.

He re-crap a video of Kamala Harris that was made by Christopher Coles, the parody artist who actually sued the state of California to block the law. And well, the judge said, yeah, yeah, actually you're right. This law sucks. It's, you know, there's really nothing about it that is that passed the sniff test. So I'm going to block it. And then Elon, of course, jumped in and said victory because he's a swat. Yeah. Of course.

Well, now you just have to go back and retool the language to have it make more sense. Yeah. He said the statute infringes on his right to free speeches and is unconstitutionally vague. And the judge said, yep. So there you go on that one. And the next one, this one, this one is just interesting. And I don't know who got paid off for this one. Elon is celebrating a legal win over a lawsuit regarding Tesla's self-driving claims. But here's the kicker.

The defense his lawyers used is a bit embarrassing because they basically argued that musk's grand promises about Tesla's full self-driving tech were just quote, puffery, which is legal jargon for exaggerated feel good statements that no reasonable investor would take seriously. By the way, everybody, you're listening to the number one podcast in the entire world. Yes, ranked higher than Joe Rogan on every chart ever. I'm grumpy. Yep. Hock Creepy.

No, no. Okay. So Tesla got the lawsuit dismissed, but only because the judge agreed that musk's claims were too vague. And then he tweeted, just as prevails, not really realizing that his defense team argued that everything he said in his entire career about Tesla and full self-driving was just bullshitery. Yeah. I mean, basically it has now been set down by a legal body that you cannot believe anything that Elon says and he's full of shit. That is ruling is legally full of shit. In the news.

Well, we got some big news just in time for Christmas. Well, not right in time for Christmas, but given the way that things roll out and how we have to ship things around the country and things get moved around in time for Christmas because stuff is starting to get in the stores now. US dock workers have gone on strike.

Now, I don't know much about this world, but this is for the first time since 1977, the 47,000 members of the International Longshore Men's Association, the ILA are walking picket lines. The contract expired on Monday at midnight after negotiations with bosses broke down. They want better pay as well as something more existential and harder to secure. A future where robots don't take their jobs. Okay. Good luck with that. Good luck with that.

But without the Longshore Men America supply chain will shut down. Much of the country has stocked up on goods ahead of the Christmas season, but there's always something coming in. And the longer the strike goes on, the more likely it is that Americans will feel the pinch. Inflation may rise and goods might be scarce. According to the president of the ILA, that's the point. These people don't know what a strike is. I guess said. You know what's going to happen.

I'll tell you, first week, be all over the news every night. Boom, boom. Second week, guys who sell cars can't sell cars because the cars ain't coming in off the ships. They get laid off. Third week, malls start closing down. They can't get the goods from China. I don't know if this guy's seen any malls recently, but they've all shut down. They've all shut down already. Everything in the United States comes from a ship. And robots are, of course, already at ports.

Automation can handle the two biggest jobs of the port, unloading massive shipping containers with a crane and sorting those shipping containers on the shore. They're already three fully automated terminals in the US, more on their way. Equipment to automated port is expensive to set up and still does require workers, but far fewer than required to unload goods the old fashioned way. So good luck with that. I think you're going to have to take some sort of compromise here.

You're not going to get a blanket. No robots on ports ruling because quite frankly, it's cheaper, faster, quicker and better. And this just in, they have reached a tentative deal, which will keep the docs open until January 15th, where this will all start again. Kickin' that can down the road. Exactly. I saw the news that people were already freaking out and they're like, I need TP. I need TP. Oh God.

Yeah, not realizing that 90% of the toilet paper in the United States is made here, but what you couldn't get if this kept going were bananas. I need my bananas. Yeah, I went to the store yesterday and bought some bananas, but then this morning they said streaks over already. So I'm like, okay, well, I got some bananas. I'm stockin' up on potassium. And this just makes me remind me of the time I went over to your place to do a show during pandemic. And it was just wall-to-wall toilet paper.

If I came over tomorrow, it would be wall-to-wall bananas. The mountain of TP and white claw. God. It's hilarious. I'll never forget that. Welcome, California Governor Gavin Newsom. On Sunday, vetoed a bill aimed at preventing large AI systems from causing catastrophic harms, saying the legislation would have created a false sense of security. So again, this comes down to the legislation that was brought forward kind of being vague and somewhat nonsensical.

And let's go back and redraft this thing. This law Senate bill 1047 introduced by state Senator Scott Weiner back in May would have required companies that spend more than $100 million on computing resources to create a foundation AI model or 10 million on computing resources to find to an a foundation model

to perform safety tests higher independent auditors to review the model annually and take reasonable care to ensure the model doesn't cause mass casualty incidents more than $500 million in damage to physical or cyber infrastructure or act without human diversity. Anyways, this basically got killed because of an awful lot of lobbying from people like, Oh, I don't know Elon Musk who has an AI company that is underneath that restriction. So he wouldn't have to deal with it.

This is this is the slow down open ABI bill basically. Well, moving on to more open AI news. Open AI has raised a $6.6 billion around in the largest venture capital round of all time, bringing its total funding to $17.9 billion in valuing the company at $157 billion. So the round we still haven't found the promise and the golden path for any of this or how to make money. Yeah, check this out. The company has spent around $7 billion on model training and $1.5 billion on staffing.

My God, I can't make my car payment and these guys are spending $1.5 billion on these AI twats. Chad GPT alone has over 250 million users with annual revenue projected to reach $2.7 billion dollars this year. That's not bad. They could hire more staff except they don't need them because they're just using their own product. That's about it.

Well, Elon did have a big party last night for XAI trying to do some recruitment and he ironically had it at the original open AI headquarters, which is now the XAI headquarters. Talk about following following your old days. I wonder if you've got it hoping they left little piles of data sitting around. Can you go, it's like, you know, co-heads looking in the carpet for the little rocks. Like, can you see if they left any models around here? Model dust? There's some server racks over there.

Check that for data. The interesting thing about that round was, according to the financial times, open AI demanded that its eventual investors abstained from also funding any of open AI's competitors like XAI or Anthropic, which is why probably Apple backed out of the deal because they were going to get in on that $6.6 billion deal. But Apple is smart. They hedge their bets. They're not going to get locked in to anything. They're going to invest in all of them.

Yeah. They could take their own money and just build it themselves. They want to. They say, yeah, that's an interesting clause that they put in there. Who's going to monitor that? I guess they found a job for some people. Yeah. It's Apple. They've got enough talent and enough resources where they could just start working on this themselves. But there's also enough competitors out there to really kind of, you know, they don't want to, they don't want to jump too early. I'm sure.

Like, yeah, maybe Microsoft did because there's a new MIT spin off called Liquid AI and they've debuted a new liquid foundational model or an LFM, I want the MILF to come out. That'll be good when that we get the KLF. KMFDM. Do it again.

So the Liquid Foundation models offer a significant breakthrough in AI model design because unlike the popular transformer based architecture, these models use a post transformer approach, which makes them more memory efficient while still achieving top tier performance. Post transformers, isn't that that new movie that just came out that tanked that one? I think that was transformer one. One dollars about how much money it made at the box office I hear.

Yeah. Well, speaking about these different models for training, guess what we've discovered? What have we discovered, Brian? Well, one of the most popular techniques AI companies use to improve the quality of their large language models may instead make those models just better at deceiving humans according to a new pre-ference study from anthropic and researchers at Chinese and American universities.

Yeah, I'm, link is in the show notes, it gets pretty deep in the weeds on exactly the different methodologies used by these companies. But basically, what they've discovered is that really when they're trying to make these models better and provide more accurate information, what it's actually doing is just teaching the models to tell us what we want to hear. Humans going to human. Yep. So that's great.

Yeah. As they point out, the study authors wrote the improvements you see in these models may not be real. Our results underscore the risk of applying these different training methods to control increasingly capable AI systems, future AI systems might become better at misleading us and pretending to be correct, causing us to lose control unknowingly. I love it. I love it. I love that we're investing so much money in placing so many important aspects of our lives in the hands of these things.

And we have no fucking clue what they're doing. Oh, we do. We do have a clue. They're being just like us. Yeah. We can be just like, we can be just like us for free, guys. We don't need the AI to do it. They just, they just fuck up faster. Yeah, they do. Yeah. Thanks for that. We talked about this guy, Jason M. Allen, back when he, he did this thing.

He's an executive at a tabletop gaming startup and he submitted an AI generated painting to a Colorado digital art competition in one, which caused much bruhaha. Critics claim that he had cheated, but the prize winner didn't have much sympathy for his contractors. I'm not going to apologize for it. Allen said, I won and I didn't break any rules.

He also didn't seem to care much for the complaint that AI companies like mid-Journey, the one he used to create his painting, were poised to destroy the art market. This isn't going to stop. Allen told The New York Times, art is dead, dude. It's over. He's one and humans lost.

Well now but hurt bitch is complaining because he keeps creating his own AI artwork and it cannot be copyrighted because it's AI created artwork and he's using platforms that have been accused of ripping off countless copyrighted works. And now his work that's created using that can't be copyrighted and people are stealing it and he's not making any money, Jason. Oh my god, what a little whiny baby. They're stealing his work, Jason. That was created by stealing other people's work.

Oh. There have been instances where people outright have ripped off my work incorporating the entire piece into a new piece, which is exactly the fucking shit you're doing. Exactly what he did. My god. Okay, Siri, please send Jason M. Allen the definition of irony. Anyway, Alanis Moore says it's going to play a benefit concert for him. Oh god. So I can't get bad. I get what it plot.

In a victory against scammers, Google has won a lawsuit targeting two men who abused its DMCA takedown system, the scammers, Nguyen Van Duk and Pham Van Tien falsely requested the removal of over 100,000 URLs, many targeting competitors in the online t-shirt business. Smart. I know. I know. They even impersonated celebrities like Elon Musk and their fraudulent claims, despite being summoned to the defendants believed to be in Vietnam did not respond. What? They're not going to show up.

No, they're not going to show up. A US court issued a default judgment banning the pair from further abuse of Google's DMCA system, while Google could have sought monetary damages. Its primary goal was to stop the fraudulent activity and protect to the integrity of its platform.

Awesome. Yeah. On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration find crews GM self-driving vehicle division $1.5 million, this penalty was imposed for admitting key details from October 2023, accident in which one of the company's autonomous vehicle struck and dragged to San Francisco pedestrian. I love this.

The report states that crews executives initially played a video of the accident during October 3rd meetings with the San Francisco Mayor's office, the NATSA, the DMV and other officials. However, during the presentation, the video stream was hampered by internet connectivity issues that could seal the part where the vehicle dragged the victim. Hey, when it gets to, when it gets to 36 seconds, pull the plug. Yeah, yeah, boss, I can go. Sorry, I'm driving to driving past the airport.

Executives who the report stated the new about the dragging also failed to verbally mention that crucial detail in the initial meetings because they wanted to let the video speak for itself. The video that you didn't let play all the way. Playhouse is supposed to speak for itself. And then you just decided not to mention it. Investigators finally found out about the dragging after the NATSA asked the company to submit the full video.

The government agency says crews also amended for other incomplete cash reports involving its vehicles to add additional details with a small note saying the jig is up, boys. Oops, busted. Yeah. So there you go. Awesome. Okay. I'm full of hope this week, as you could tell. Well, Brian, Tesla has started rolling out full self-driving. I was a leg group of cyber truck owners, allowing the electric pickup to drive on highway's hands free.

The end to end on highway feature enabled by Tesla's AI neural network is in early access, meaning it's only available to some owners who paid for it when purchasing the truck last fall. Drivers still need to remain attentive while using FSD, which can deactivate if it detects inattention. Perfect. That's exactly what I want. I want the truck that's driving itself to stop driving itself and turn off when the person is not paying attention. That makes perfect fucking sense on a highway.

Yeah, that's going to be great. What fucking idiot engineer came up with that one, Mr. Musk? Tesla is betting big on itself driving capabilities. And yeah, because guess what? On October 10, Musk plans to unveil a new self-driving taxi called the Cyber Cab in an event here in California, which I thought he bailed on California already. What the hell? If there's money to be made, he's just not going to place his businesses here.

Okay. Okay. Well speaking of self-driving cars in California, Kamala Harris's motorcade was blocked actually due to a stalled way more. They already hate her up there because all the crypto-brows and all that sort of tech tycoons are not big fans of the Democrats trying to do any legislation or anything against them. But they were going, she was on her way to her hotel in a motorcade and a waymo just stopped right in front of her.

There was in the process of making a U-turn on California Street in the city's Naubele neighborhood. It malfunctioned and stopped moving. Eventually a local police officer was forced to jump inside the driverless car and manually steer it out of traffic. Okay. Yeah. And finally, jeeps owners, Stellantis has recalled about 194,000 plug-in hybrid SUVs from the brand due to risk of a fire.

This recall impacts specific jeep wringler for XE models from 2020 to 2024 and some Jeep Grand Cherokee for XE SUVs from 2022 to 2024. About 5% of the vehicles will have the defect according to the company. It discovered the issue after 13 fires were reported all when the vehicle was parked and off. Yay. Now, despite this risk, they are not yet having customers bring their hybrids in for servicing properly because they don't have the parts or don't know how to fix it yet.

Instead, the company claims a remedy is imminent and owners will get notified when they can come in. For now, they state vehicle risk is reduced when the battery charge level is depleted. Accordingly, owners are advised to refrain from recharging and out of an abundance of caution, the company is also advising owners of these vehicles to park away from structures or other vehicles until a remedy is obtained. Basically, don't fucking drive your car.

And keep it, keep it away from children in the middle of nowhere. Which is great because from my front door, I see three of these parked in driveways next to my place. Oh, see, that's why I keep mine with the liquid dinosaur version. I like my Jeep. But yeah, these four XEs are, I'm saying, they're four by ease. I think that's what they're, it's in a four by fours. But took me a while to figure that one out. I'm like, one of the fuck is that? They're, yeah, they're everywhere around here.

I don't know about you, Brian, but cyber trucks have infested Los Angeles. They're everywhere now. I see them. I saw them a lot last time I was there. I'm sure over Christmas, there's just going to be buttons. Yeah. No, they're all over the place. And I saw that, that damn LAPD one again, but I was driving that was at night so I couldn't get a picture. But at some point, I'm going to get a picture of this damn thing. I swear, it's got to be a white whale. It is. It is.

But just don't call me Adam Neumann because that motherfucker is back launching a new co-working company called Workflow. And this is four months after his failed attempt to repurchase we work. And when the statute of limitations has obviously run out on competitive. Yeah, must have, yeah, must have Workflow aims to provide office space with a more refined and calm environment compared to we work, focusing on upscale design rather than youthful perks like kombucha. Yeah, take it away.

The kombucha is really going to fix what was wrong with your company. By the way, I take umbrage with that being a youthful perk. I enjoy my kombucha and I'm an old man. Yeah. Yeah. Kombucha was delightful. What delightful? I'm not allowed to drink it anymore says my sponsor. That's a fucker. So his real estate company Flow owns a bunch of buildings already. So instead of going out and doing the leases like you did before, they're just going to work out of their buildings that they already have.

So he's going to expand in multiple US cities and Riyadh. Okay. Okay. Here we go. We'll see if that works. Probably not, but hey. And this one, this one I was just very, very interesting to me. Scientists claim that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the moon's nighttime temperatures dropped significantly.

A study from India's physical research laboratory published in monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Colin Letters, found that as human activity and pollution plummet ended during global lockdowns, Earth emitted less heat at night, which reduced radiation and led to an unexpected cooling of the moon's surface. We're putting out a lot of shit if we're heating up the moon that's hundreds of thousands of miles away.

Yeah. Damn. I get pissed off when my neighbor leaves his garage door light on at night. It floods my bedroom. It's like, geez. So the research highlights how changes on Earth can impact the moon and suggest that lunar temperature swings could help study climate change. The unique opportunity provided by the pandemic may never be repeated. Let's open eyes. But future moon-based observatories could further explore this phenomenon. I thought that was going to need. That is neat.

I mean, terrifying, but neat. This episode is brought to you by one password extended access management. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. There are nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company-owned devices, IT-approved apps, and managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use.

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Media candy. Bruce Wayne, I mean Gavin Newsom, our California governor, is again in the news because he signed AB 2426 into law, which Brian, as you and I know, when you buy something that digital, you don't own it. We've been saying this for, well, we've been saying it since it started, but 11 years on the show at least.

Now they're, they're signing it into law and starting next year, digital storefronts will be banned from using terms like buy or purchase, unless they clearly inform customers, they are only receiving a revocable license, not outright ownership of the content. Now there is a, there is a loophole that if you can download a copy of it to keep forever, then you are buying it. But where can you do that anymore? So yeah, not many places. Yeah, I take stores still. Yeah, couple of those.

And you can download things on Netflix, but you don't own them. You can just play them on an airplane. Don't forget that. So retailers that violate the new rule could face fines for false advertising. The law won't apply to stores offering permanent offline downloads, like I said. And Assemblymember Jacque Erwin, the bill's author, emphasized that his digital media grows clearer consumer protections are essential. Way to get ahead of that one, California, 20 years too late.

It's a bit late to let everybody know that, but okay, I mean, it's something that these laws do need to be on the books. I think that's fair. New people are being born every day, I guess. That's right. So I show that I have not purchased and just having license too. I just started watching with the wife, the diplomat. Oh, yeah. I'm not sure if it's a very Russell show. It's not really that new because they're already on season two, but started watching it. Wait, season two is out. Yeah. What?

I think so. Oh my God. Okay. Well, shocker. Netflix didn't fucking tell me. Oh, no, sorry. Season two comes October 31st. Oh, you. Because I just kept seeing season two every time we launched it. So I was like, oh, okay, I guess we can roll straight into season two, but you know, couple more weeks. Couple more weeks. Okay. Great show. I really like it. And here's the thing though, Carrie Russell, the Americans, all of a sudden we had a Russia problem with Mr. Trump.

Carrie Russell, the diplomat wore in the Middle East. All of a sudden we have wore in the Middle East. Carrie Russell, I need you to make a feel good show where everything works properly because everything that you star in comes to pass. Yeah. Yeah. Can we get Carrie Russell in utopia? Yes, please. Rainbows and sunshine with Carrie Russell. Please, please. That is a fantastic show. Oh, she's just so good. And the guy that plays her husband, I love him. It's a great show.

It's really, really well done. Yeah. No, I was really hoping they were going to make a second one. So that really made my day. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I watched that the first week it came out. I binge that on like two days. I was like, I'm in. And to not be PC and just be, you know, white dude, Carrie Russell, keep showing your butt and shows for the rest of your life, please. Thank you. You're welcome, Brian. You're welcome.

I did watch Wolfe's the new Apple TV movie with Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Which I have. I have one of those things where I like Brad Pitt. I like George Clooney. I enjoy when they're together in like oceans 11 and all those movies. Yeah. There is something about this that makes me want to hate it irrationally. Like I don't know why. I see the trailers for it. I see everything. I'm just like, no, I will not watch this. Oh, it was fun. No, tell me if I should watch it. It's fun.

If using his shit, the ending doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And everybody, I've actually gone and watched all of the explainer videos on wolves ending explained. And everybody's like, yeah, they didn't really explain that. That's like watching those lost explained. Exactly. We never really came. They never really came back and explained any of that stuff. Oh, yeah, we need, we need, we need a wolf's to to really figure this one out. This movie was a vehicle produced by them.

So they could hang out and be buds together is pretty much what it comes down to. That's what it felt like to me to. Yeah. Yeah, I, we enjoyed it. I mean, it's not too long. It's, you know, like, it's two hours of fun. But yeah, it's, the writing is not what you would call top notch by any stretch. So basically you're just saying I should go watch oceans 11 again instead. Yeah, oceans 11 was way better. Okay. I'm just going to do that. Okay. I mean, this was a good way to kill two hours.

You know what, Brian, have some wine kick back and don't overthink it. That's what you got to do. I'm going to spend the entire time going, why did they do the plural of wolves and correctly? Mm. I think that's still a call back to Winston wolf. Oh, okay. Yeah. Because that's basically the character they play. Ah, they're basically two Winston wolves from, yeah, from Pope fiction, which also is a far superior movie to wolves. So I could have four hours of better entertainment. Five hours.

Pope fiction is a fucking marathon. So yeah, yeah, go watch oceans 11 and, uh, Pope fiction instead. Okay. But you are in Canada and you have the option now, Brian, to watch the traders Canada season two live on TV. Like normal people. I don't because I don't pay for TV. Oh, well, then you can get it in Sweden like I do. Uh, the first two episodes have dropped and I love it. I am so in.

Uh, the traders is one of those shows where I usually on these, these foreign ones, we usually get to watch them after they're all, they've all aired. But I ended up just one day. I'm like, I wonder when the, when Canada's coming back and boom, the first episode had just dropped and I'm like, yes. So I waited to, to the second one comes up because it always ends on the cliffhanger. So you never know exactly what's going to happen till the next episode. So, uh, yeah, it's back.

The first two are out and it's just as good as it's always been. I love the traders. So, but they, they have, they have done something that, uh, the Americans had, had caught on to and thought was a good idea. They started putting reality TV people into the, into the game instead of civilians. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because civilians in these games, basically, there's a lot of heartbreak at the end.

Reality TV people, they know they're playing a game and they don't get butt hurt when they're lied to consistently for, you know, entire season. So, uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When it's the civilians, it usually ends in a lot of tears, but. All right. Yeah. It's still a game. So, fuck it. It's great. I love the traders. And speaking of ending in tears, I watched the finale of season two of Lord of the Rings, the rings of power last night.

Okay. I can't do this because there's too many spoilers, but it was great. It was really good. It definitely, they finally ramped up the action and moved the plot forward like a ton. Um, this was a really good season, much better than the first season, way more involved, way more interesting, uh, really well done. Like it's just, it's just good. I can't wait for season three. But from, from what I've read, what you just said, it sounds like I should just watch the last episode of season two.

Well, you could. I mean, honestly, you don't have to watch any of it because it's all just lead up for what we already know happens. You could just watch the first, the first five minutes of the Lord of the Rings movie where they do the preamble. There we go. Okay. Perfect. So you don't have to do anything nice. I've seen it already. Perfect. Yeah. We all know where this is going to end up. Yeah. Yeah. This has all happened before because we all watched it before. All right.

Well, speaking of Amazon and Amazon TV, oh, by the way, did they say when the next season's coming? Is it going to be next year or is it like three years off? They, uh, we know nothing, John Snow. Okay. It's going to be a while, I think. I didn't know if they'd film these concurrently like they did with the movies. I don't believe so. I'm sure if it was coming already early next year, they would have said something about it, but I haven't seen anything.

Okay. Okay. Well, Amazon does plan to increase the number of ads on Prime Video in 2025 after minimal backlash from subscribers. Bullshit. There was minimal backlash. Well, nobody's canceling because the problem with Amazon Prime Video is that you'd have to cancel your Amazon Prime account for the most part. Nobody wants to know what he wants to do. So we'll get more ads and expect an increase in your Prime premium price.

Yes. Yes. Currently, users can avoid ads by paying the extra $3 a month, which I just on pure fucking principle alone, I won't do. Nope. So, you know, despite the lower than expected growth in ad revenue, Amazon's ad business remains one of its fastest growing sectors. Why is that because it didn't fucking exist last year? That's why it's one of its fastest growing sectors.

Yeah. Now, see, if they were forced to break apart everything and let you just buy into different parts of Amazon Prime, I think I would consider it, although at this point, I mean, there are only two shows now that they've gotten rid of a top gear, whatever the hell the new name is, which wasn't that great. Anyways, I've got the rings of power, which I really enjoy on Amazon.

And the other one is that other sci-fi one, the turning of the wheel or whatever the hell thing was called, which I am looking forward to having come back because I've enjoyed that as well. But it's only two shows. So if I could like opt out a prime video and pay less for just prime, I would. Yeah. Yeah. I see I've got the boys and the boy spin-offs and a richer. Those are the only ones I care about that are on there. They just don't have a lot of content compared to the other ones.

No, not at all. It's just old shit, you know, and the interface is terrible, even that new interface has got awful. But Fallout, Fallout as well, was excellent. So looking forward to that one. So there's a couple of them. I mean, honestly, they've got about as much as Apple TV plus when you think about it. Yeah, that's true. You know, but speaking of Apple TV plus, sugar has just been renewed for a second season with Colin Farrell. So I'm very excited about that.

No dates are set yet, but this is news directly from Apple. So should be good. Hopefully, I liked the twist and I liked the ending. The show was weird as fuck, but I got into it and I liked it. So we'll see. And in what's the date today, we got another week or so for this one. The fourth. It's the fourth. Okay, so 12 more days. We get shrinking season two, which gives me 12 more days to watch the end of shrinking season one. I'm very excited that's coming back. It was such a fun show.

Yeah, it's another show that I watch with my wife. I always enjoy those. So can't wait for it to come. Oops, and do that. Hat tip to bear it on this one just came in. Google has introduced a new feature that lets users search the internet by taking a video. This innovation allows people to point their phones camera at something record a clip and ask a question about it. And with Google's AI providing search results based on the video, which would be kind of neat.

The feature available globally on Android and iPhone is part of Google's push to enhance search with artificial intelligence. I use their, what the hell is it called? The one where you take a picture and it gives you shopping results right away all the time. Lens or something like that. I forgot what it's called. Yeah, Google lens or something. I forget what it's called. But that's part of the Google app. So get that. I think this is going to be part of that as well.

I can't wait to try to check yesterday and I don't have it yet. So I'm hoping that it'll be coming soon because it sounds kind of neat. It does sound neat. Yeah. So one of the tests that they did was like they took a picture of a bunch of fish and say, why do fish like this swim in the same direction or some shit like that? I don't know. But, you know, I want to be able to like point at the clouds and with these birds flying over say, what kind of birds are those?

What kind of butterflies are these, which I could probably do already somehow. But they're drones from Russia. They are or Amazon or Walmart. Yes, which store owns these? So you and I need one of us own an EV, but this is some EV news. If you own a juice box, EV charger, be prepared for some major changes. The company behind the popular home chargers, anal X, you know, you can you can pronounce that anal X if you like, which I do is leaving the North American market as of October 11th.

This means they're stopping all software updates and removing apps used to manage the chargers. While your juice box hardware will still work for home charging features like scheduling and other online functions will be gone. Wow, that company is just non-loop amaling them. No doubt commercial charging stations will be hit harder losing much of their functionality. It'd be harder, guys.

Anal X says they're shifting focus to regions where they're offering where they offer electricity services, blaming high interest. Yeah, blaming high interest rates in a slowing EV market for the exit. Software support is no longer available and users should visit juiceboxnorthamerica.com for any issues. Wow. Yeah, well, I mean, all the more reason not to jump into the EV market at this point in time. Like let this, this stuff has to get sorted out. That's ridiculous.

Yeah, that's, that's a bad one. That's a bad one. Yeah. Zishan Alvi, the owner of a medical testing laboratory in Chicago, has pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud on Monday, according to a press release from the US Department of Justice. Alvi's facility known as lab elite was releasing negative COVID-19 test results to patients that either weren't performed or inconclusive. This is not the first of these companies. And I'm sure it won't be the last as we dig further and further into this.

These people should all be put in jail. The only reason anyone figured it out was that some patients received positive tests while waiting on their results from lab elite. And we're confused about the contradictory information from the Chicago lab in a court filing from 2023 prosecutors laid out how he submitted roughly $83 million in false claims to the Department of Health and Human Resources sub agency from February 2021 to 2022.

His lab was rated by the FBI in February 2022 in the 45 year old pleaded guilty this week to $14 million worth of fraud, acknowledging that he knowingly submitted false claims. Meta has confirmed that any image analyzed by its AI through Ray Ben Meta smart glasses can be used to train its AI models. Brian, is anybody shocked at this? No, of course not. You know, we're basically signed all into these things. If we decide to use them, they're just going to use it to train the data.

That's part of their TOS. That's part of their ULA and the story. Yeah. But suck it all up. Yeah. And honestly, you're a sucker anyway. If you're buying anything with a camera in it that's owned by Meta. Definitely. What did you think they was going to do? You know? Remember, does this make my ass look fat camera that you're supposed to be in your bedroom? Yep. That was a great one. Yeah, that lasted about a hot second.

Well, speaking of Meta's Ray Ben glasses, two Harvard students have created a controversial a controversial experiment using facial recognition technology built into Meta's Ray Ben smart glasses dubbed IX Ray. The project uses the smart glasses cameras and pulls up personal information about people including their home address and phone number just by recognizing their face. Why didn't this just call it eye docs? Yeah. But this is what we always wanted. This is what we wanted from Google Glass.

You know? This is what I wanted. I wanted to be able to go to a bar, see a hot girl and find her Facebook page. Yeah. And find that if she's got a boyfriend. Exactly. And if he's bigger than me. Yeah. That's it. What's the true boyfriend in right now? Yeah. Does he hear his home? Let's track that. So they're using basically off the shelf facial recognition called PIM eyes to do the lookups.

And they're not going to release the technology to the public, but they're just doing this to show how readily available the tools are and how they can be combined to expose people's private lives. So good on you. Good on you. Good on you. Fair. I mean, we do this as coming. If we could have done this sooner, we would have. Oh, yeah. That was the promise of Google Glass. But they just they just had to give them the glass holes first. So you know, scoble fucked it for everybody. Totally.

I've been working with the walk the distance app since I finished the fantasy, whatever the hell it was called. A app that basically did the walk through not Lord of the Rings, not Lord of the Rings. That was a lot more fun. This one's a little bit boring. I got to be honest. It's got a lot of different walks in it. I've been doing some of the city ones.

All it does is you know, and you can tell this is made by people in San Francisco because it pulls up Google Maps and it starts in San Francisco and it pauses and then shifts over to whatever city you're walking in. It charts your progress through the city. It throws up little things from like Wikipedia about notable places in the city. Very boring, not not all that fun.

But what it does have in it is it has like some notable big trail walks like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail. So I was thinking it might be fun just for that. Do the Appalachian Trail and see how long it would take me to walk the 10 gazillion miles involved. But yeah, it's just, it doesn't have the whimsy and fun that the other app did. So this may not last long on my phone. See, that's what I always liked about the badges from my Fitbit back in the day.

You know, it's like I'd get the one and you walked the Great Wall of China. You've walked Russia. You've done the Transcontinental Railway and all this other things. I love those. I love those badges because they were cute too. That was back when gamification was pretty new and neat back when they gave a shit. Now it's just like, you want to gamify this? Get out of my face. Yeah. And what are you doing with my data?

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Visit audible.com slash imagine or text Imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com slash Imagine or text Imagine to 500-500. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave, featuring the dastardly dynamic and delightfully devious Dave Bittner. Dave can be her daily on the Cyberwire podcast or on Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan or with Ben Yellen on caveat or on control loop talking industrial cybersecurity.

Dave's new show Only Malware in the Building is hosted by Selena Larson with Rick Howard and of course Dave Bittner. They break down the most impactful malware stories into actionable insights in the most delightful way. I have to say Dave, you guys put some serious production into that one. Don't we? I do have notes. Dave. No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So this is the, so this is the shit sandwich. Yes. You get the kiss in the slap.

Right. Okay. Go, first of all, before you jump in, let me just shout out to Trey Hester who edits that show and I does an amazing job. Well done. Very well done. Yes, and Rick might want to try and not do so much acting is all I got to say. Oh, I see. So it's a note. It's an acid. I said I have notes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, okay. You know, you guys might want to have a rehearsal or something. Yeah, do a walk through. Just do a do a do a do.

Yeah, you know, the Harry Potter thing was very cute, but yeah, I just got to say, you mentioned, you mentioned it first in the show, saying Rick, maybe, you know, hit the community college once or twice before I'm trying to dive back into your Harry Potter of Personation. And our show has become a YouTube comment section. Yeah. All right. I wasn't supposed to go that deep, but you guys, you guys made it go that I will not become so damn whoa people. It was a very good show. I enjoyed it.

Enjoyed it. Well, thank you. So you got your iPhone 16. I did. I did. I got it with the first batch that came out. In fact, my UPS guy came to the door, both my wife and I got iPhones on the first day and my UPS guy came to the door and I answered the door and he said, I got some toys for you. And I said, thank you very much. Yeah. My guy showed up on the Saturday following finally. And he was early because he wasn't supposed to be here till Monday. And I'm like, oh nice.

He was very surprised at my reaction because I knew exactly what it was. Like, oh, I'm going to give it to him. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So it's a phone. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. It's a phone. But it's got it's got that cool new button on it. The camera button is awesome. I guess I really haven't really touched it. Okay. I mean, I so for me, the main upgrade was the slightly longer lens on the long side, which I appreciate because a lot of the photography I do is nature photography.

So having that extra bit of reach is helpful for me. I have to say I just have I have not taken the time to dig in to the functionality of the new button. So I'm curious for your short hand on what the true advantages are for the informed user. So the upside is when I'm walking the dog, I walk the dog with my right hand. My phone is in my left hand pocket.

I can reach my left hand into my phone, take it out, press it with my middle, hold the phone, press the camera button with my middle finger, slide it up and down to zoom properly, press the button one more time to take a photo and then put the phone back in my pocket, all one handed while I'm walking the dog at the same time. It is handy as hell for when I'm out in the neighborhood and I see something interesting or exciting.

Okay. So what you guys are basically saying is the main feature was the bank account draining service. Yes. Very good at that. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. The cash transfer mechanism at Apple works very well. Okay. That is true. I am happy to wait for another level before upgrading. So the thing is I'm still paying the same thing as I was before. I just, I got a phone out of it because I do the payment plan. I'm like, that's what I do too. Yeah. Apple has like a 0% thing.

And so I'm just, I'm just locked into the fact that your Apple is going to get, they're getting 50 bucks a month from me in perpetuity in exchange for having a new phone every other year. And that's a good deal for me. I'm, I'm pleased as punched with that. That works. Yeah. It works fine with me. And at the end of the three, because I do have the three year cycle at the end of it, I've got a really nice phone that I get sent to my dad, you know, and it's happy. So right. Same with me.

Yeah. It gets passed down to my son. So yeah. It all works out. I really, mostly it's just a phone. There's really, there's nothing birthshattering about it. I haven't installed the iOS 18.1 beta so that I can have the pretty Siri. Yeah. It's nice, isn't it? It's cute. Yeah. It is nice. There's a really subtle thing. One of our listeners sent to me that when you press the volume up and down buttons, the interface bumps in a little bit next to them.

Like there's a little visual cue that the buttons are being pressed, like the, the, the, the, the, the screen warps a little bit, just a little tiny bit. It's very nice. It's neat. Yeah. Yeah. But I like the dark mode icons, but again, you don't need the new iPhone 16 to get those, just the new OS. Right. I love the dark mode icons, actually. I've had that on for three weeks now. They're great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did, since I did move up in size, I have the, uh, you know, the, the bigger one.

I, my phone has been embiggened. Yeah. I found that I don't need the iPad mini as much anymore. So I use a lot more for my Kindle app, which is nice. The, uh, the one thing that I am really desperately wishing that they would put into, uh, the OS is an app level rotation lock.

That would be really nice because, you know, I just, I really like it locked in one app and then the other and then if you're in bed and you just turn a little bit, then it switches and then you lose your page that happens in email all the time. Like I'm reading an email and then I turn and then I go back to where it wasn't and it goes back to the top of the email and I'm like, that's really stupid. Yeah. Come on.

Can I just lock one, one app of it's just, you know, device for the whole device at the same time, which sucks. Can you, that's my, my only complaint? Oh, I see. So you, because I'm going to say you can, you can assign that functionality to the activity button, right? But then you have to remember. So you just want it to be, I want to have to remember. Yeah. I'd like, you know, just a rotation lock in any app settings, you know, right? Or a system setting, maybe the rotation lock, whatever.

There's a, there's an elegant way to do it, which I have not put that much thought into. But no, no. Yeah. The action button is weird because I didn't, I had to switch before me to, uh, I, I assigned mine to the flashlight since I end up using that the most. So okay. But other than that, yeah, it's pretty much the phone.

The word, the worst thing about it is just moving everything over to it and getting all of your apps to, you know, passwords working right and face it again and again and all that crap. Yeah. I have a funny thing on mine now where if I go to my settings menu, uh, probably two or three days ago, this thing popped up in my settings menu that says right underneath of my name and my Apple account and that sort of stuff, there's a window that popped up that says, get ready for your new iPhone.

You're eligible for extra iCloud storage to move your apps and data. Now this is my new iPhone. I already did all of that. And there seems to be, there seems to be no way to get rid of this because if I, if I go through to the next screen, it's, it gives me two buttons either continue or not now. If I hit not now, the thing is still up there. The window that says get ready for your new iPhone is still there. So yeah, it's, I get rid of that. I got rid of mine on mine. Yeah. All right.

Well, if you figure out how, let me know because I mean, look, it's a new small, small potatoes. It's a new, yeah, it's a nuisance. And I guess it's one of those little attention to detail things that makes you go really come on. Yeah, Apple has slipped on that for sure a little bit over the years for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So as interface design stuff is really like just head scratching, okay?

Hmm. Yeah, the real annoying one is I get, I still have an Apple Care Plus thing that shows up on my phone saying that there are 42 days remaining to add Apple Care Plus coverage to your AirPods. Like, okay, can, can that go away? Hit not now on that. And then that doesn't go away. Like, I'm not going to get Apple Plus coverage on a pair of, oh, here we go. I just, you know what? They may have added this since we've been talking, Dave.

I hit not now and it pops up and it says, remind me later, don't show again or cancel. So I'll hit don't show again. And it goes away. How about that? Wow. Interesting. All right. Anyway, good for you. Yeah. So far, I like the new cameras. It's, it's nice. It's, yeah, it's what it should be an upgrade. Right. Right. I just, I do pine away a little bit for the excitement of when the devices were newer and there were more substantial things to be added. Like, oh, this version is going to have GPS.

Oh, this version is going to be able to record video, you know, this, like, we've pretty much taken care of all the table stakes things and we're nipping around the edges, which is fine. But it's definitely not as exciting as it used to be. The sad thing is we know the next major thing that they're going to bake into these things is AI everywhere, which I don't necessarily even want. So I've got to turn down and I don't really notice it that much.

It does some like, you know, interesting, it does a decent job of summarizing all of the text messages that I've ignored, saying, hey, this is this. And in the podcast app, it'll give me a summary of the shows. Like, this is a show about shoes, you know, or whatever it is. You mean it does the same thing that we write ourselves. What kind of shows anyways? Kind of, but it summarizes it in a more human readable way. Just shorter. Yeah, kind of. And it's not really groundbreaking at this point.

I guess they're going to be rolling out more stuff. But yeah, I do miss that. If I had one of the Apple Vision pros, I would be able to take the spatial video with this, but since, you know, I bought this, I don't have enough money to buy anything else for a while. So I think that I would be skipping out on that, but Dave, if you ever get the Apple Vision Pro, you can take the video with for it now too. So. Okay. So I don't think that's in my future.

Yeah, I'm waiting for the Apple Vision rank amateur. Right. Exactly. Yeah, the Apple Vision in turn. That's it. So I got a little bit of extra follow up here a long time ago when I was starting my studio, I had all those USB C cables around and I've covedged about it. And then I don't know if I found this randomly or somebody sent it in. There was a Kickstarter called the C2C Cable QU USB C cable tester that I signed up for and sent off for and they sent it back.

And it was just this little board with a little electronics board. You put a battery in, you plug some cables in and had a bunch of lights on it that you had to actually go get a degree in electronics engineering to figure out what they meant. Right. I used it, I plugged it stuff into it once, couldn't figure it out and put it in a box. Because you know who this product is for Jason. Who engineers? Yeah, not me. Not me. Yeah. Well, they figured that out.

Now they have a fancy new one called the BLE Cable QU digital USB C to USB C cable tester that has, has idiot lights on it now. It has a little LCD screen on it that will tell you what the cables are. But it's the first one was like $19, which I thought was, okay, I can, I can try this on $19. I think the new was like $80. I'm like, nope, not worth it. Well, the screen costs a lot of money. Yeah. I'd be fine with just a red light or a green light cable works or not.

Well, the, no, the problem that I was having was like, is it a Thunderbolt cable? Is it a USB C data cable? Is it a USB C power cable? Right. That was the thing. It's like, you know, there's only a couple options on those things. I just want, you know, A, B or C, please. Yeah. And, and does it still work? That's the other one. Right. Yeah. I know it's a lot of my cables are dying. Just, just, just, shit in the bed. Really? Yeah. Just after, you know, a lot, a lot, a decent amount of use.

They just start to go and they're decent cables, you know, they're not, they're not cheapies. And then it just started to finally fry out. That's interesting. I mean, the true high speed cables, like I'm, I'm looking on my desk here and I have a thunderbolt cable that goes between my laptop and my OWC thunderbolt dock, right? So that baby's carrying a lot of stuff. You know that? And, and so those true cables, it's really is remarkable engineering going on in there.

I mean, there's the notion of how much data is coming across that little, that little cable and the little computer chips that are in the plugs and just managing it all and balancing it and all that kind of stuff. I guess you can see why they'd be fragile, but, you know, say it's a miracle. Any of this stuff works at all. Yeah. And you, you use a universal audio Apollo twin, I believe, which requires a ton of data to, yeah, I've got the Apollo X4. So basically the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah. I got the twin X, which doesn't work. That was back in. That's why I was five minutes late for the recording today because I had to unplug it and put in my Apollo solo, which still seems to work for this show. But, huh. So I would say about this device is it is cool. I would love to have one. Even not, I'm not going to buy one, but if I had one, I, I, I do desire. It is desirable to me.

Yeah. I wish they had some technology where they could come up with better names for their devices. I believe that German. Oh, come on. There, that's where you go. Well, I guess if you, if you read the entire name as one big, long German word, then it makes sense. Yeah, that's true. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, Austrian. Yeah. Austrian. Okay. Yeah. As to ask an Austrian if close enough to German is good enough for them. I think most people say they're close enough to Germany. Right.

It's like asking people from New Zealand, if they're Australian, you get a very strong response to that. I do have a device that is in the same category as this that I purchased when I was going through my journey with all of my solar panels outside. It's basically a USB power and Amprage meter. So it'll tell you just for power purposes, if the USB cable has power on it and then how much Amprage is being pulled through it, then it tells you the voltage also. So that's handy.

And I have made use of that pretty regularly to see if something's working or not or, you know, am I really getting power through here? It's a nice little device. It's probably ten bucks. Something like that from Amazon. So, it's chunky. They're out there. Yeah. It's a nice little thing to have in your box full of electronic devices. But, you know, this thing's cool. Like I say, this hits my desirability buttons, but not for $77.

So. Yeah. Yeah, because that's the only one that's left now, because the other ones, you could get it if you were early bird, ultra early bird, you could get it for $44. Okay. Now you just get the regular Kickstarter discount for it's about $77, it says for $69. So, we were late. So, did you get for being late? Neat device, though. Like it. Yeah. Well, we got to write in from Sally. She says, first off, thank you for the great podcast. I need your help.

I work in a tech adjacent field, institutional research at a community college, and we are already trying to deal with AI, which as you have taught me isn't really AI. There are faculty who want to use it to catch cheating administrators who want to use it to be cool and cutting edge staff who want to use it to summarize endless pages of federal regulations. And those in my area who want to use it to write SQL code that is beyond their ability.

Often they are in a single person's office and just don't have the capacity. So now my college is putting together a work group to write a white paper. Yes, we do such things. And I think we are important to make recommendations to the executives. But listening to your discussions about AI has ruined me and makes me sound like a tinfoil hat person against technology.

So I need some guidance on resources that would address security issues that would impact students, would their work be used to train the AI and be a violation of students' rights, potential hacking concerns, etc. Are there higher education specific issues we should consider? I don't like AI for a lot of reasons, but I majored in Renaissance epic poetry and no-my limitations. So we're going to buy the hype. How do we do it with the least harm?

Anyway, I always enjoy the podcast, even if I am not as geeky, but definitely as grumpy and keep telling people about it. Thanks for any suggestions. Now I know we've got a couple ideas here. I would like to point out that once again, I did take a course in ethical AI. Okay. And the end of the course basically said, good luck. Right. And thank you for your money. Thank you for your money. Basically. So there are ways to implement AI ethically.

The problem is almost every single model has been trained not in that fashion. And it does not be who any of these major companies to be ethical to move forward because they need to win. So I don't, you know, specifically with like if you're feeding stuff into one of the big model AIs, you are basically agreeing that anything that you feed in is going to be used to train their AI. So good luck with that. You're not going to be able to get around that one very easily.

At least not without paying quite a lot. I think you can pay to opt out at this point like big companies do. So I have a couple suggestions here. I would start off with just a plain old Google search for ethical use of AI and higher education. I have included a link to such a search in our show notes here. That Google that for you. That's right. A couple of folks who have written articles on this. So there's one from Cornell.

There's another one from an organization that the the EN AI, which is the international journal for educational integrity. So as you might imagine, this is a hot topic right now. So there are tons of publications about this. So when you do this search, you're going to come up with just dozens of higher ed organizations who've put their opinions in on this. So there's lots of reading to be done. I think we are in early days here.

I personally believe that this is going to change the way we educate people. I talk to, for example, my my caveat, co-host, Ben Yellen, who teaches college courses. He's a law professor. He's telling me that they're dealing with this. He said, occasionally he gets papers that were obviously written by AI. And so they have to figure out where are the guardrails? Because he anyway realizes that they're not going to be able to say no forever. This doesn't make sense. No, he can't stop.

He can't stop progress and he can't stop something that's literally being shoved down our throats everywhere we turn around. Right. Right. I liken it to things like spell check and grammar checking. There was a time when probably when the three of us were growing up and in high school where our high school checker was cheating, Dave. That's what I'm saying. Our high school English teachers thought that because spelling counts. But now even grammar is corrected for us. So God, right?

You know what's truly shocking to me? Those how how many things I read that obviously they either ignored the spell checker and the grammar checker completely or they haven't shut off. Yeah. I was doing there. It's possible. Well, you know what? Some people are doing that and they're putting in bad grammar and bad spelling to make you think that humans wrote it. Oh, yeah. That's what I'm applying. Yes. Yeah. And you include that in your prompt.

You say be sure to include at least one spelling error per thousand words. Yeah. Or they just go through and just fix it themselves and start removing it. Well, we did a story maybe two weeks ago that was actually specifically about that. And it was about how bad AI test checking for AI is actually going. Like it's not going well. Like they haven't been able to do it. So right. But you know, that's what that's definitely a use case you want to as a as an educational institution as a teacher.

You'd want to be able to run everything through an AI to check really quick to see didn't AI do this to do my student do it. But the thing is the false results are through the roof still. Right. The AI is bad at detecting AI. And one of the things I don't know where we stand right now is what happens when the student who is falsely accused of cheating using AI lawyers up and so is the university because the university hit them with an ethics violation with a cheating violation.

Right. But I'm sure we're going to see that real soon if we hit they're not out there already. Yeah. I'm sure they are. I just don't know like when you sign when you agree to being educated at a university is part of the agreement you signed in the US university is TOS exactly there exactly that you will abide by any of their judgments no matter how no matter the evidence. I don't know the answer to that, but you know, let's what lawyers are for.

So I was just thinking this one, this might be a fun one. So when everybody's papers come in, you take all the papers, then you run them back through an AI and say, give me a quiz based on the knowledge that's in this paper. And then then have the have the students do a spot quiz on what they just turned in on their own papers on their own papers. They should get a hundred theoretically. So if they don't get a hundred that's not a bottle. That's good though.

That's the next level of whack-a-mole that we're heading towards. That doesn't make sense. And I mean that you know this material. Yeah. And just as a final point, I think I would make right now just because this is early days and as it's always pointed out, this is the worst this technology will ever be. It's all going to get better. But at least for right now, especially in the educational realm or anything, anything really, I'm going to expand it everywhere.

Think about if you actually need AI, don't do AI just because it's the cool cutting edge thing to do. Do you need it for whatever task you want to accomplish? And if you don't, don't fucking use it. Yeah, can this theoretically be done on the blockchain instead? Exactly. Could the students submit NFTs? Right. Yeah, I absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm sure that didn't help much. But good luck.

Well, before we go, just I want to touch on what Sally mentioned that they majored in Renaissance epic poetry. Just this week I was discussing with some of my colleagues here about we have a local Renaissance festival, which is widely recognized as well as that's where I'm going with this. This is one of the best Renaissance festivals. So I'm told not that I have ever explored the Renaissance festival circuit, but I'm told that the one here in Maryland is quite good.

And one of my colleagues here who was born in the UK was saying that one of her pet peeves is that when you go to a Renaissance festival, everyone speaks for the British accent. And the Renaissance did not happen in the UK. And my pet peeve about the Renaissance festivals is the thing with turkey legs that turkey legs are an iconic part of Renaissance festivals. Turkeys are a new world bird. There were no turkeys over there. Turkeys are here in North America. Well, I know two people.

I know two people I'm not going to the Renaissance fairway. Fucking buzz kills. I just want to wear my I want to wear my Star Trek uniform to the Renaissance festival. Oh, wait a minute. I just admitted that I have a Star Trek uniform. Hold on. Wait a minute. It's a triple bombshell. Like any of our listeners are going to be shocked that I have a Star Trek uniform. Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait. We do have to what which show which uniform? Oh, TNG. I'm not an animal.

Okay. Okay. How do you take care of that, Lycra? The original uniforms were made out of wool or so I'm told. I thought I could have it as well. Mine is polyester, so it holds up quite well. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. On the times I wear it, it's still in pretty good shape. And remarkably, because my wife bought it for me when I was in my 20s and I can still just about squeeze into it. So if I suck it in, I can look in a little curkish in one of the movies. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, you know, it's a I need what I really need is a 21st century girdle. To help me squeeze into it. But, uh, oh well, you just got to do some yoga with McFadden and Sirdus from that episode. I'm up for that. Yeah. I'm up for that. Yeah. Oh, I'm causing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got John. Welcome, John. Thanks, John. Over at PayPal, we got Charlie Dennis Simon, Jonathan, Judge, Nicola, Levy and Fruit Cup. Thanks for right.

Fruit Cup. Over at the tip, John, we've got Sarah, Matthew and Adam. And just a reminder, if you sign up for Patreon, you get the shows early and add free and in high definition. And we now have that yearly option, which will get you 5% off. Woohoo. Woohoo. We also have some new five star reviews. The first one says pleasant find coincidentally. Apple podcasts made me aware of this great show. Okay. We go. We'll take it. We got a five star from Lee. I love the podcast. I'm a new listener.

So listening to your backlog of episodes after hearing Davis on here. I love both you guys. You guys get me through my job as I'm allowed to listen to my stuff whenever I want. If I could afford it, I would Patreon you guys would Patreon you guys, but one day LOL from a younger and age, but grumpy old in soul geek. I love the ending you guys have of stay grumpy. It's bloody brilliant with love from a British Jordy dude. All right.

Thank you. Right. Thank you, Lee. And a few old man shout outs this week, Brian. Mm-hmm. I don't know why these just kept coming across my my Instagram and threads feeds and whatever other social crap I was on. So I missed a few of them, but I want to put these in context. September 21st, 2004, American idiot by Green Day came out. That's 20 years ago. My God, Jason. Has it been 20 years since we all went to that show at the will turn?

It has been 20 years since I got fired from Warner Brothers music for going to that show. You got fired for going to that show? We didn't even watch. We were upstairs drinking the whole time. That was the problem because I ended up spending the next three days in a hangover. There may have been some powdered substances involved, but I was in the music business that I thought that was cool. We were supposed to do that. That's what you were doing when you kept disappearing. I got to.

I'm supposed to come back to work the next day. That was, I, yeah, I didn't know that. I know. Yeah. So 20 years ago for American idiot, 25 years ago for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Well, you want to really feel a little Jason? Okay. Hit me. Tony Hawk and M&M are both grandfathers now and technically Courtney love as a grandmother. I know. Now, isn't that straight Tony Hawk's and Kurt Cobain's children have had a child? Maybe that's fucked up. That is so fucked up. We old.

We old and Knight Rider premiered 42 years ago. This is just, where does it go, Brian? Where does it go? I don't know, man. I go so fucking fast. I can't. I just the American idiot thing just threw me for a loop. I wish I still had the original that they gave me because that was the first day at work. First day I started Warner Brothers Records. They gave me the pre-release version of American idiot. And that's actually technically the only project that you and I worked on like together.

At the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was working with Green Day for that whole album cycle. Yeah. Yeah. You were the contractor and I was with the evil label and they hated you and you hated them. And I was in the middle laugh in my ass off. Fucking Warner Brothers. Yep. They had no idea what to do with any of that. They just got like seriously. So some sad news, some very sad news. Dame Maggie Smith has finally died and that puts the end to Downton Abbey as far as I know it.

Well, she was out of the show anyways. So yeah, but definitely yeah, she was the heart and soul of that show. She's she made everything that she was in better. She was great in Harry Potter, Oliver Oldmovie's fantastic, one actress. So which made me start to realize as things just kept rolling in. Who hasn't died this week, Jason?

He lost John Amos, Pete Rose, De Kenbe Batumbo, Chris Christofferson and Ken Page, the accomplished Broadway actor and the voice of Ugi Boogie in the night, Maryfore Christmas. Very topical at this point in time. I was also passed away at the age of 70. Well, you put that in there and so I had to go look and I, well, Beverly Hills cop actor John Ashton who played Chief Taggart has died at 76 and American pickers Frank Fritz died at 60. What a fucking week.

Until next time, I'm Brian Joel Meister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for tuning into Grumpy Old Geeks. Dive into the show notes and all the links from today's episode at GOG.Show slash 668. Feeling generous, keep this top notch entertainment rolling by dropping us a few bucks at GOG.Show slash Donate. Every bit helps. And spread the grumpiness.

There's a share button in every podcast player out there, use it to share the show with friends, foes and everyone in between and will love you forever. Head over to GOG.Show to find the link to our Discord channel and chat with us and other show fans. Got something to say, send your feedback comments or awesome link to GOG.Show slash contact. And send us some love, leave a review at GOG.Show slash review.

A five star rating might just get your review read on the air and go buy some swag at shop.gov.show. Please go buy some swag. We'll put some more stuff up there as it goes, but please, this is a pain in the ass. Help a brother out. Stay Grumpy. Welcome to Grumpy Old Path. Today, I've got a treat for all you Apple users out there. It's the Mac Geek Gabb podcast. Now in its 17th year, this show is your go to source for tips, cool stuff found and answers to all your Apple related questions.

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